Maine Senate Candidate Tries to Insult Socialists on Twitter, Gets Owned
Politics Features Democratic Socialism
Somehow, this is not the first time we have featured no-hope Maine Senate candidate Eric Brakey on this site. Last month, we ran a piece on the opponents of Sen. Angus King, the independent incumbent who is 100% going to win his re-election bid in 2018. In it, we profiled his, um, unique opponents. The Democrat was a terrible country music singer, but it was the Republican, current state senator Eric Brakey, who stole our hearts with this video:
Brakey is back today, because you cannot keep an idiot down. Sunday evening, he tweeted out a question to his followers:
There are 3 choices for #Maine people to select from this November in the race for United States #Senate. Which do you choose? #Socialism? #Corporatism? Or #Liberty?
It’s sort of hard to tell because of the way he formatted the question, but I think what he meant was that the Democrat was the socialist, Angus King is the corporatist, and he’s the “liberty” candidate. Whatever the case, the response as of Tuesday afternoon has been hilarious:
Socialism for the win! This sent Brakey into a bit of a Twitter spiral:
A lot of twitter users are choosing Socialism over #Liberty. Are we going to #LetSocialismWin or are we going to #MakeLibertyWin?
Be sure to vote in our poll. https://t.co/cjtNgbGEbK
— Sen. Eric Brakey (@SenatorBrakey) July 30, 2018
#Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production & distribution through a system of voluntary exchange.#Socialism is guys w/ machine guns telling us what to do.
Which parts of private ownership & voluntary exchange do you want to trade for guys w/ machine guns?
— Sen. Eric Brakey (@SenatorBrakey) July 30, 2018
#Capitalism simply means that if you have stuff and I have stuff, we engage in voluntary exchange to get what we want from each other.
What you are calling for is stealing things from people at the barrel of a gun. Why are you so comfortable with using violence against others?
— Sen. Eric Brakey (@SenatorBrakey) July 30, 2018
So when a majority of people vote to take my rights away — that makes it okay? You mean like Jim Crow in the Old South?
When the rights of the minority are up for public vote, I’m not sure majority rule leads to everything you hope it will.
— Sen. Eric Brakey (@SenatorBrakey) July 31, 2018
Finally, we got the inevitable “this is actually good” tweet:
The purpose of the poll is to encourage engagement & discussion. So yes, it’s going very well.
— Sen. Eric Brakey (@SenatorBrakey) July 31, 2018
Now, obviously a Twitter poll is the least meaningful political test of all, and we shouldn’t infer anything about the state of the larger country or even Maine itself from these results. Still, it’s satisfying to see someone who trots out the same old myths about democratic socialism—that it’s inherently violent, or that Venezuela, of all places, negates its value—loses his cool on Twitter after people refuse to fall for his propaganda.