Dan Cox: Deleter of Words
Cox and his campaign are about to learn a hard lesson; that the Internet is forever
Dan Cox won the Republican primary for Governor of Maryland in no small part to being a radical, pro-Trump, pro-coup, anti-vax outlier. Now that he has won the primary, he’s trying to cover his tracks as the Post reports:
Maryland Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox has deleted his account on Gab, a social media platform known as an online hub for hate speech and white nationalists, and his campaign website no longer notes his fight against certifying the 2020 presidential election results.
Cox deleted more than 1,000 posts in striking his profile from the site, which welcomes users banned from other platforms. A web archive page of his activity did not preserve any of the posts themselves, and the Cox campaign would not discuss them.
The scrubbing of his Gab account and website appears to be an attempt by the campaign — which recently brought in out-of-state staff — to reset after its primary contest against a moderate Republican in a race seen by many as a proxy war between Gov. Larry Hogan, who endorsed Kelly Schulz, and former president Donald Trump, who backed Cox.
The Cox campaign deleted and revamped other elements of its website after winning the July primary, including references to “a natural right” to gun ownership, and promises to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports and conduct an audit of the 2020 presidential election, which he has called “stolen.”
Dan Cox is trying to put the genie back into the bottle. After all of the radical nonsense that he has said during the campaign, he is trying to pretend that it never really happened.
Cox is far from the only candidate to try to remake their image after a primary. And it’s not something that Cox hasn’t already done considering his work freeing a child sexual offender so he could live in a school zone, accusing Larry Hogan of being a Chinese Spy, asserting Larry Hogan was part of a shadow government or his support for mask mandates during the COVID pandemic.
Deleting the evidence doesn’t change the fact that Cox went to a QAnon convention. Or attended the Church Militant convention. Nor the fact that Cox wants to weaponize the state government to battle the federal government. Or the fact that he organized busses to send to the January 6th rally. Or that he called Mike Pence a traitor.
Cox can try to cover up whatever he wants to cover up. The public has receipts of what he said and what he stands for. Trying to delete the evidence after it already happened doesn’t do much other than draw attention to the fact that Cox is trying to cover his tracks.
The internet, after all, is forever.
The question that voters should ask themselves is this: is Dan Cox lying now that he has abandoned so many of his perceived principles? Or was Dan Cox just lying to Republiacn primary voters (and to Donald Trump) then when he was courting their support?