While the people of Pennsylvania still don’t know which Republican’s name will be on the official ballot when they cast their vote for a new senator in November, they do know is that it won’t be Kathy Barnette’s. While the QAnon conspiracy theory-spouting candidate saw a last-minute surge in popularity that had the MAGA World sweating, ultimately the race has come down to TV quack Dr. Oz and David McCormick, who served as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs for George W. Bush. But Barnette, whose only real political experience is getting squashed in a 2020 run for a House seat that she has yet to concede, is not about to go quietly—or believe for one second that she had anything to do with coming in third in PA’s primaries. Nope, Barnette is blaming her loss on Sean Hannity—and the Fox News host is not having it.
Last week, Hannity spent almost the entirety of one show talking about Barnette’s meteoric, last-minute rise—then promptly trashing her.
On Wednesday, Barnette posted a video to Twitter in which she thanked her supporters—then claimed that it was Hannity’s fault that she didn’t win. “Never forget what Sean Hannity did in this race,” Barnette said. “Almost single-handedly Sean Hannity sowed deep seeds of disinformation, flat out lies every night for the past five days and that was just extremely hard to overcome.”
I want to thank each and every one of my supporters in Pennsylvania and all around America.
The past thirteen months have been some of the most incredible in my life.
Our journey together is only beginning. We now must focus on winning back our nation from the radical Left! pic.twitter.com/bgtr066AOh
— Kathy Barnette (@Kathy4Truth) May 18, 2022
But Hannity wasn’t about to let the so-called “Ultra-MAGA” get away with trashing him. As Mediaite reports, he addressed Barnette’s accusations on Wednesday night, saying:
Third-place finisher Kathy Barnette is now attacking yours truly on Twitter. She’s putting out videos blaming me for her loss. Kathy, my first instinct was to put up all of your incendiary tweets again, and there’s a ton of them, but I really don’t need to defend myself.
You’re the one that really needs to answer the questions about all of your comments, and all of your tweets that are there. You can lash out at me all you want. You’re not the first person. But everything that we revealed is true. Prior to the election, we attempted to reach out to you and your campaign for comment over and over and over again. You and your team refused to get back to us to give us answers.
Now, maybe you stand by your past comments, maybe you don’t. But you refused to answer our questions. In fact, you only responded to me publicly on Twitter, and then I tweeted you back and said I would invite you on for a debate the day before election day with all the other candidates. I’m on 675 stations nationwide. You never got back to me. That, unfortunately would be on you.
Ouch!
Hannity did admit, however, that he likes Barnette. But that until she addresses the pile of controversial comments she has made in the past, which include anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, or the fact that she marched with the Proud Boys on January 6, she would be “unelectable in Pennsylvania and a general election.”
(Via Mediaite)