This Terrifying Woman Hopes to Run Michigan’s Elections

Endorsed and hand-selected by former president Donald Trump, Kristina Karamo is a Republican candidate gunning for Michigan’s Secretary of State, and she’s got a lot of fucked up beliefs. If Karamo were to win her first state-wide position, she would be responsible for administering the state’s elections as she promotes the baseless lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

Karamo’s podcast, oddly named “Solid Food,” covers Christian theology, pop culture and politics. In a February 2021 episode titled “Ya’ll [sic] and The Silhouette,” Karamo really dove into her anti-sex rhetoric and deeply antiquated beliefs about how women should behave. Here are, uh, some of her thoughts:

There was a reason why society was balanced in a way that it was. God created things a certain way. It wasn’t to subjugate women. It was to protect us. Now you see so many women raising children alone. You see so many women brokenhearted. You see so many kids dysfunctional because daddy over here, mama over there. We know it’s true because of sexual immorality. It’s because men and women no longer honor God. They honor their crotches, people honor their crotch, their crotch is their God, they just let it leave them wherever it goes.

It should deeply worry you that such a quack is endorsed by the former president for the job of Secretary of State in a purple state that helps to decide national elections. The job is to administer elections across the state (as opposed to its federal counterpart), keeping the voting process that powers democracy flowing. Before the chaos following the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, the position only made national headlines a few times: In 2009, the Democratic governor of Arizona left her post for the the Obama cabinet, and an anti-immigrant and anti-woman zealot Republican Secretary of State took helm of the state. In 2018, Brian Kemp refused to step down from the position in Georgia even as he was running for Governor against Stacey Abrams.

“We need to win. We need to keep this office away from Donald Trump,” former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes told Politico. “Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia: These secretary of state races are going to be much more important in the national conversation than many governor races are going to be.”

But to return to Michigan, Karamo is no stranger to the election process. In fact, while stories of ballot counters being accosted and ridiculed at the TCF Center in Detroit in the days following the 2020 election, Karamo was there. According to MLive, Karamo said she “witnessed irregularities in the processing of absentee ballots.” Her subsequent appearances on ultra-conservative media outlets about the experience probably got her on Trump’s radar.

It’s terrifying that this woman who seems to fervently not believe in the outcome of elections could be administering elections, while believing that sex before marriage between a man and a woman (no homosexuals exist!) “upsets the balance of society.”

A good portion of Karamo’s podcast was about a then-relevant TikTok trend called the Silhouette Challenge, where people posted videos of themselves in regular clothing before cutting to a red-filtered naked version of themselves, showcasing their silhouette. All of these sexy silhouettes got under her skin:

“Then the other component of is that so many women I see all the time complaining that men don’t respect us. Because we don’t respect ourselves. You know, someone had said and I believe it, oh, my God, when sex got easy, love got hard. Easy sex has cheapened dating, it has cheapened marriage has cheapened relationships. I saw someone post on Facebook that got so many couples who are fornicating before marriage and then wonder why their marriage is filled with sexual immorality because you guys couldn’t restrain yourself sexually while dating. What makes you think you will be able to restrain yourself sexually while you’re married? You’re not going to be able to.

Elsewhere in this episode, Karamo— a self-proclaimed Christian Apologist—also lets it be known that women should not work. “When you’re a woman and you’re working eight, nine hours a day, do you really feel like coming home, cooking dinner from scratch? And the women who do die young from heart attacks because they’re overworked and overwhelmed.”

Uhhh… sure.

Karamo also suggests that those who support abortion must worship Satan and intimates that accepting trans people will lead society to “keep going and going to the point we get all off the scales into pedophilia.” But, frankly, the weirdest flex of this podcast is her attempt to update the tired “virginity is a flower” metaphor to a McDonald’s hamburger versus a gourmet burger:

You know, a McDonald’s hamburger. I don’t even eat McDonald’s hamburger, that’s thing other people eat. Had a bad experience about five years ago, put too much ketchup on my burger. Anyway, when you get a McDonald’s burger, it’s all smushed up cheap looking, right? You go to some one of these hoity toity nice places where you spend fifteen dollars on your hamburger, the bun and the brioche, but it’s the perfect toppings are delicious. Sauce is immaculate, the whole thing is just wonderful from start to finish. OK. It’s because it costs more to have it. So when it costs more to have something, you value it more, you expect more. When something is cheap, it’s all squished up and terrible.

We’ve just got one wish for Michigan: that literally anyone else wins the Secretary of State race.