Gary Emineth, a Republican candidate for US Senate in North Dakota, defended in a radio interview Friday sharing an image on Twitter that said no more mosques should be built in the United States.
Emineth, who is running in the GOP primary in hopes of challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, appeared on the local North Dakota radio program Rob (re)Port show on WDAY AM970 and discussed a report CNN’s KFile published Thursday that revealed that Emineth had shared several inflammatory posts on social media.
One of those posts was in 2016, when Emineth retweeted an image that called on users to “like and share” if they thought no more mosques should be built in America.
“If you look at the context of some of these posts, I just retweeted it. I never made a comment on it, right? And so the bottom line is, a lot of the radicalization that’s turned on in the country and around the world has come out of these mosques,” Emineth said.
“So I just made a statement, I’m a Christian that believes we ought to propagate our Christian faith. So I see an article and I retweet, ‘no more mosques in America,’ you know, and like, and share. So I retweeted it. So yeah. So what? I believe in Christian — I believe in liberties, freedom, free speech, and Christian values is kind of my base. And so yeah, I posted it, so no big deal. I’m not that stressed out over it.”
Emineth later said that Muslims should “absolutely” be allowed to build mosques in the US.
Emineth also defended other posts revealed by CNN’s KFile, including calling former President Barack Obama a “POS” when sharing an article. Emineth claimed he did not know “POS” was a common acronym for “piece of shit.”
“You know what POS stands for in my world? I’m in the grocery business — point of sale. It’s the cash register,” Emineth said.
He continued, “I’m dead serious, I went back and looked at the blog that they posted and if you read what I said, I meant to type POTUS, and it came out POS.”
Emineth also defended a an image he shared that compared people on government assistance to animals dependent on food.
“The point of the post was about forest rangers, Park Service people talking about not feeding the animals because they become dependent on handouts and they’ll never learn to take care of themselves,” Emineth said. “The point of it isn’t about comparing humans to animals, it’s about a welfare system that needs to be reformed. It’s about the Democrats’ policy that are wanting to be pushed by professional politicians that we have to be protected from ourselves and we’ve got to provide for every need. They want people to be dependent upon the government. And that was the point of that post.”
