This Hawaii Republican Is the Most Racist Candidate of 2016

There's not much reason for mainlanders to pay attention to the race in Hawaii's second congressional district, since Democratic incumbent Tulsi Gabbard is a relative lock to win the position. But Angela Aulani Kaaihue, Gabbard's Republican opponent, is making things interesting—by being such a nasty racist that her own party just denounced her and her candidacy.

Kaaihue, an "aspiring Hawaii real estate developer" whose campaign website looks like a MySpace page—complete with autoplaying music—drew headlines for a Facebook post on Firday that state GOP chair Fritz Rohlfing called "vulgar, racially-bigoted, and religiously-intolerant… offensive, shameful, and unacceptable in public discourse."

In a deleted Facebook post—now only available in the heavily censored version you see above—she said Japanese people were "murderous," "lieing" (sic), "stealing," and "conspirators." She told them to go back to Japan and "eat your fucking radiation at Fukushima you fucking low life scum," among other things.

When confronted by local TV News program Hawaii News Now, she walked the statement back but only a tiny bit. "I truly regret posting that about Japanese people. I don't think all Japanese people are bad, I just think that the non-Christian Japanese people […]"

Kaaihue has previously gotten attention for some signs that announced her as "healthy and cancer free" while she was thinking about running for the seat of Representative Mark Takai, who was leaving Congress due to his pancreatic cancer.

Unfortunately for the state's Republican Party, she won a very low-turnout primary and is going to be on the election ballot this November, where she'll almost certainly lose—though she did say that she'd drop out if the governor of the state and "his Japanese constituents" settle some sort of lawsuit she and her family are involved in.

UPDATE 8/23/16: An earlier version of this article referred to the candidate as Hawaiian in the headline. Though she lives in Hawaii, she is not a native Hawaiian.

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