In Michigan, a weatherman fired from QAnon becomes a “moderate” Republican

MAGA republicanism has a pretty simple recipe for success: untested political newcomers with celebrity appeal plus right-wing populism result in election victories.

Herschel Walker. Dr. Oz. Lake Kari. Donald Trump. Even Mark Robinson, the embattled GOP candidate for governor in North Carolina, is the product of a viral video that gave him political relevance.

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the local Republican Party hopes this strategy will lead to a long-awaited victory and drive Democrats out of the region entirely. Her target: Jenn Hill, House representative for the 109th District and the last Democrat to represent the Upper Peninsula in Lansing, where her party is defending a rare bicameral majority this fall.

Enter Karl Bohnak, MAGA’s latest and greatest attempt to take over the district. He fits the bill perfectly – a former weatherman described as a “veteran of multiple marriages” who was fired in 2021 after refusing to get a Covid vaccination in breach of Gray Television company policy. Bohnak is something of a weather buff who became famous regionally both for his obsession with Michigan’s weather patterns, which he shared on air, and for his televised frustration with the station’s technical problems. A memorable video from his WLUC days can still be found on Google in which Bohnak, clearly overwhelmed with technical knowledge, mutters a series of curses while trying to run a Facebook Live.

But it was his firing that garnered national attention, including: Washington Post Profile. Bohnak, described at the time by a local newspaper based in the area as “perhaps…the most famous” living resident of the Upper Peninsula, was suddenly unemployed after more than 30 years in front of the camera. And he followed it up with his employers on social media, criticizing Gray Television for contributing to the “abolition of our freedom and bondage under the guise of a pandemic.”

“I think we are hit with fear to control ourselves,” Bohnak explained.

He was far from alone in this belief, particularly among the conservatives who dominate much of Upper Peninsula politics. Covid “lockdowns” and state laws requiring social distancing and the closure of some businesses have been a huge political battleground in Michigan’s 2022 statewide elections, including the hotly contested gubernatorial race between incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and her Republican challenger in the MAGA race. Style, Tudor Dixon. Whitmer’s re-election victory was a brutal rebuke to Covid deniers and opponents of public health measures put in place during the pandemic to protect vulnerable Americans.

Two years later, Karl Bohnak, with a very similar message, attempts to eradicate the last refuge of Democratic representation in the Upper Peninsula, centered around the college town of Marquette. The message has evolved – slightly – but the roots are still the same: a huge dose of skepticism about any kind of government oversight or regulation and disdain for Lansing lawmakers in general. A moderately successful attempt to get back on the air followed – Bohnak no longer provided weather reports and was picked up by local station WZMQ in 2022 to provide historical weather analysis, a job he left in early 2024 when he announced his bid for the State House .

And like so many other MAGA Republicans both currently and in past cycles, Bohnak is an example of the kind of inexperienced political firebrand that GOP primary voters love but can’t translate so well to voters in the general election. This phenomenon was blamed quite directly in 2022 by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for his party’s inability to capture the upper chamber of Congress, when Republicans also performed worse in the House elections than their members publicly did had predicted.

Bohnak’s team did not respond to an interview request for this article. Instead, he has given a handful of interviews to local state media in which he spoke candidly about his denial of climate change and, in a discussion with a local news reporter, described how he eventually entered the race after hearing about plans to turn the Upper Peninsula into something he called “the Saudi Arabia of wind and solar energy.” [energy]“.

Still, Bohnak has portrayed himself as a mediocre candidate in some appearances, apparently aware of the number of Democrats still voting in Marquette. On Facebook, he has adopted a decidedly centrist hashtag: #PeninsulaOverParty.

“I’m the alternative because I’m a moderate and a centrist at heart,” Bohnak said at his campaign kickoff event, according to Upper Michigan Source. “I believe in the Upper Peninsula and that’s what I’m really going to work towards. It’s time to restore balance to Lansing, and it’s also time for UP state officials to work together again.”

But his campaign launch in January 2024 was just the beginning of the development of a new character. This image of a “centrist” candidate who just wants government to work better is a far cry from the rhetoric Bohnak put forward in 2021 after being fired by Gray. At the time, the former journalist—who apparently harbored some resentment toward his downfall—held a QAnon-affiliated, hyper-online libertarian view of the supposed world powers that he saw coming for his freedom and the freedoms of his fellow Americans.

“It’s just unbelievable how our reputation in the world has fallen. I don’t think this is just incompetence. I believe this is a coordinated attack aimed at weakening America’s standing in the world. Which will then lead to the “Great Reset”. “This will then lead to a global technocracy and we will become digital slaves,” Bohnak seriously complained to the host The somewhat serious show on Facebook in 2021.

“This is the endgame,” he continued. With some confidence he continued: “And of course I can address that now [on your show]but tomorrow, for example, I’m going to do a local PBS television interview…If I bring something like that up, those people are going to think I’m running around in a tinfoil hat.”

He’s right: It’s the kind of theory you’d be more likely to hear on InfoWars or one of the many shows hosted by right-wing conspiracy peddlers who have taken over, and in some ways overlap with, the online far-right side of American political discourse “Manosphere” world by Joe Rogan and others like Dan Bilzerian.

In the same interview, Bohnak expressed confidence that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election through “massive fraud.” There was also an indirect hint that vaccines were linked to Nazi experiments when Bohnak commented on how notorious war criminal Josef Mengele “injected poison” into his subjects while claiming that the state’s vaccination mandate was “a violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947”. These beliefs date back at least to the early Trump era in 2018, when he also posted comments on a political website accusing the Obama family of wanting to bring about a “new world order.”

“Karl Bohnak is the embodiment of MAGA chaos, spreading extremist conspiracy theories left and right with no connection to reality. He has become an embarrassment to the UP, which is no longer capable of being a weatherman, much less capable of representing Michigan residents in the state House of Representatives,” commented the state Democratic Party chairwoman , Lavora Barnes The Independent.

Jenn Hill, his incumbent opponent, added that Upper Peninsula residents deserve better than being “dragged by extremist conspiracy theories, chaos and lies.”

The problem with Bohnak is also just a question of verification. While he has publicly expressed a desire to go to Lansing to work with his fellow lawmakers – even Democrats – his Facebook campaign account had several replies to a post that explicitly endorsed the Upper Peninsula secession movement liked, and one that had long been unliked existing attempt to transform Michigan’s upper part into the 51st state: “Superior”. Although the secessionist ideal was largely abandoned as a serious movement decades ago, it still has its own webpage on the website of the Michigan Libertarian Party, whose policies Bohner said in 2014 he aligned with.

“We must be the 51st state,” reads a Facebook response liked by Bohnak’s official campaign account. Another read: “Another reason UP is the new State of Superior.”

Marquette’s House seat hasn’t gone to a Republican in decades. It looks like that trend will continue: Jenn Hill’s primary vote total was several thousand higher than Bohnak’s, roughly the same margin by which Hill won her 2022 election. If Bohnak wants to win, he will likely need to secure about 3,000 votes in the next 30 days.

And it’s hard to see how he does it. The dirty secret of MAGA Republicanism is that it only really worked for one candidate: Donald J. Trump. With the exception of Florida, where the rise of Ron DeSantis coincided with the complete collapse of the state’s Democratic Party, candidates who emulate the celebrity image often fail when their less-tested political instincts are exposed to sunlight.

They themselves occasionally admit this – in Bohnak’s case, it’s a foray into “tinfoil hat” views, which he readily admits are unpalatable to normal people. Yet they can’t seem to help themselves from continuing to try it as a strategy.