Hung Cao is Addicted to Right-Wing Nonsense
Sometimes I forget who U.S. Senate candidate Hung Cao is running against during my watching of hours of his interviews and speeches. Certainly, Cao will tell you how awful he thinks his opponent Tim Kaine is, but Cao acts like his opponent on Election Day is Communism. For months, Cao began all of his stump speeches with him pounding on his lectern, tell the audience that knocking is the scariest thing in a communist country. Cao pounded on the podium at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukie and produced a dramatic campaign ad.
As a side note, why are the communists knocking on the doors? Shouldn’t the big scary monsters in Cao’s imagination be breaking down the doors instead of waiting for him to put on his bathrobe and answer the door?
If you never heard of Hung Cao, he was born in Vietnam and has a career as a Naval officer after moving to the United States as a refugee. Cao has never lived in a communist country; his father tenured with the Ministry of Agriculture for the South Vietnam until his family fled before the Fall of Saigon.
In November of 2022, Republican Hung Cao lost his campaign for Congress. He ran in Virginia’s 10th district which went under 40% for Trump in 2020 but in 2022, Cao received over 46% of the votes in the Northern Virginia district. Riding off the losing momentum, Cao is now on a campaign in an attempt to unseat Senator Tim Kaine.
Cao launched his Senate campaign in Washington DC in July of 2023, appearing with self-described Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht as the conservation moved over to the topic of witches in Virginia. Feucht is a ridiculous figure in the evangelist movement, but this article is not about Feucht, it is about how Cao is focuses himself on catering to people like Feucht who want to scare viewers about witches and communism, instead of talking about the responsibilities of a U.S. Senator.
Set the stage for the debate between Tim Kaine and Hung Cao which felt like a joke. Cao came prepared to do another stump speech. I made a bet with myself if Cao would knock on his podium at the introduction of the debate. I lost the bet and forced myself to watch the rest of the debate. Cao opened with the line “are you better off than you were four years ago?” … “the only people better off today than four years ago are illegal aliens.” A week earlier, Cao said something similar in an interview, but I don’t think it landed because the moderator reminded him that he was asked about the port worker strike.
Something truly unhinged was his rant about a proposed tax on unrealized gains when asked about addressing a housing supply shortage, Cao quipped “My fear with what Kamala Harris wants to do with unrealized gains is if my house goes up on Zillow, but then I don’t have that money in my pocket, and she wants to tax that.”
If you never heard about a tax on unrealized gains, that’s fine because you are probably not a tax code nerd or addicted to right-wing media funded by billionaires. An example would be if an investor is holding something like stocks and that value increases which would be counted as taxable income. The proposal would tax an individual before the stock was sold. What Cao is not mentioning is that the proposed taxpayer must have minimum net worth of $100 million dollars. Maybe this tax would affect the common homeowner if they found oil in their backyard like The Beverly Hillbillies, but it is otherwise a tax on billionaires.
Cao probably feels like he “won” the debate ranting about drag queens in the military when asked about low recruitment numbers. That’s going to sound great to Sean Feucht, Steve Bannon, and The Libs of TikTok. If Cao was campaigning to get a job at Fox News, then he is doing great. To right-wing influencers, taking jabs at the LGBTQ military members is a big business. I can’t wait for this election to be over. It’s not about winning for Cao; it’s about whining for attention.
