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That GOP Candidate's 'Deportation Bus' Broke Down on the Side of the Highway

And the campaign for the Georgia gubernatorial hopeful weirdly blamed Antifa.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Screengrab via YouTube

Earlier this week, a Republican running for governor in Georgia announced he'd be touring the state in a "deportation bus," a hulking monstrosity of a vehicle ostensibly aimed at collecting "illegals to send them back to where they came from," according to his YouTube video. Michael Williams, a Georgia state senator and Trump supporter, planned to drive his bus emblazoned with the words "murderers, rapists, kidnappers, child molestors [sic], and other criminals on board" into liberal Georgia enclaves, but it looks like things onboard the "bigot bus" haven't been running too smoothly.

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On Thursday, the converted school bus broke down on the side of the highway, the Associated Press reports. Apparently water seeped into the fuel tank while it was tooling through North Georgia, shutting down the engine and getting stranded in the small, rural city of Calhoun.

In response to the car trouble, Williams's campaign spokesman Seth Weathers put out a weird, passive-aggressive statement implying the school bus had somehow been sabotaged by Antifa.

"We certainly would not blame this on ANTIFA or others who are openly plotting to damage or destroy the bus," Weathers told the Hill. "We know the left would never stoop to such a pathetic low."

Eventually the deportation bus made it back on the road, tearing down the highway with a "follow me to Mexico" decal slapped on its rear windshield. But even with its engine troubles taken care of, Williams's roving piece of propaganda isn't exactly looking at a smooth road ahead.

It's been met with protests nearly everywhere it stops, with those against Williams tending to outnumber his supporters—leading his campaign to cancel a planned stop in Athens, Georgia. The campaign had scheduled about ten stops at Cracker Barrels across the state, only to be told the restaurant didn't want them in its parking lots.

Williams's deportation bus sure has made a scene, but it probably hasn't made much of a difference as far as the Republican primary is concerned. The latest poll still shows him pulling a mere 3 percent of the vote, leaving him in dead last behind four other candidates.

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