(Chuck Muth) – There are now eight announced Republican candidates vying for the GOP nomination in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race next year. Today, the Las Vegas Sun published an interview with one of them: Tony Grady. Grady arrived on the political scene last year as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Did pretty well for the first time out of the chute. Came in second to eventual winner, Stavros Anthony, in the primary, carrying 13 of Nevada’s 17 counties. Grady’s dad was a diplomat in the Foreign Service, so he grew up overseas. “I saw what socialism and communism did to people, namely rendering them in abject poverty,” Grady told the Sun. “So I understand why their system is bad and we shouldn’t be taking on any of those characteristics in this country.” Grady is a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. He graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1977 and spent the next 20 years flying the unfriendly skies. But he wasn’t “just” a pilot. He was a test pilot for the B-2 Stealth Bomber, as well as a test pilot for the T-1A Jayhawk jet, which is used to train students to fly airlift and tanker planes. Upon retiring from the Air Force, Grady went on to fly as a pilot and instructor for FedEx for another 20 years. In addition, he started a biotech company in 2000…so he has lots of successful private sector business experience coupled with his military background. As qualifications go to be a U.S. senator, Grady checks off a lot of boxes his primary opponents can’t touch. Grady said he was running because “absentee leaders” such as Nevada incumbent Democrat U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen “are ill-equipped to provide our country with the course correction it needs to take.” “I spent my career flying into challenges,” Grady said, “not running from them.” Grady went on to say he thinks the greatest challenge to the country today is energy independence “because it’s the basis of the supply chain.” “When you strangle energy,” Grady noted, the cost of “everything increases, and the increase in inflation is strangling families in general, and particularly Nevada working families.” To drive costs down, Grady points out that solar and wind energy are unreliable and argues “we should be focused on using nuclear fuels.” He also noted that the United States “can drill for oil better than anybody, cleaner than anybody else” and warns that the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve is critically low. “If we were to have a countrywide disaster, our ability to deal with that is being threatened,” Grady said. On the economy, Grady rightly pointed out that “anything you tax, you’re going to get less of” and calls on Congress to “decrease taxes and decrease regulations so that entrepreneurs and small business owners who employ the largest number of people in our country can innovate and expand.” “That will start to turn the economy around.” To that end – as of this morning when I checked – Grady’s the only candidate in the race who has signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge promising to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses.” On the Democrat’s favorite issue these days, abortion, Grady notes that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the issue back to the states “where it belongs.” On how he would vote on any proposed national abortion ban in the Senate, Grady said, “My position is that I don’t believe in national legislation on abortion.” He went on to note that Roe v. Wade caused its own problems by nationalizing the issue and believes the states can better deal with it. In Nevada, the abortion issue is a dead issue, so to speak. In the early 1990’s, Nevadans legalized the practice in the state’s Constitution and the ONLY way to change it would be through a voter-approved ballot initiative. When asked if Grady was supporting any of the GOP’s presidential candidates, he said no. “When you’re running a Senate race, all of your energy is focused on running and winning your race,” Grady told the Sun. “I do not want my message to be clouded by whatever a presidential candidate may or may not say.” And, of course, what would a mainstream media interview be without bringing up the question of Donald Trump’s disputed loss to Biden in Nevada by over 33,000 votes? “I believe the 2020 election was rigged,” Grady replied, noting that “laws were changed in the middle of the election cycle.” Grady is referring to the August 2020 special session of the Nevada Legislature in which election laws were dramatically changed, including automatic, universal mail-in balloting.“Things that were illegal before the 2020 election, like ballot harvesting, all of a sudden became legal,” Grady noted. “So when you have things like that, it causes the electorate to be suspect.” Grady also called out the media’s cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, noting that post-election polling “suggests up to 13% of the electorate might have changed their vote if they knew the Hunter Biden story was true.” In an editor’s note, the Sun points to a Media Research Center survey “which found approximately 1 in 6 voters, or about 17%, who cast a ballot for Joe Biden would not have voted for the current president had they known about the details (of the laptop) reported by the New York Post” at the time. Grady will face off against at least seven other GOP candidates for the U.S. Senate nomination next June. Three of them appear viable at this point for various reasons: Sam Brown, Jim Marchant, and Jeff Gunter. This race isn’t over. It’s only just begun. And Tony Grady, with his growing legion of “Grady Bunch” supporters, will absolutely be in the mix.FAMOUS LAST WORDS Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was asked his opinion on the LGBLTQR$+ community by a gay rights activist at the Iowa State Fair last weekend. His response… “I don’t have a negative view of same-sex couples, but I do have a negative view of a tyranny of the minority. So I think that in the name of protecting against the tyranny of the majority, and there are times in this country’s history where we have had a tyranny of the majority. We have now in the name of protecting against tyranny of the majority created a new tyranny of the minority. “And I think that that’s wrong. I don’t think that somebody who’s religious should be forced to officiate a wedding that they disagree with. I don’t think somebody who is a woman who’s worked really hard for her achievements should be forced to compete against a biological man in a swim competition. I don’t think that somebody who’s a woman that respects her bodily autonomy and dignity should be forced to change clothes in a locker room with a man. That’s not freedom. That’s oppression. “And so I believe that we live in a country where free adults should be free to dress how they want, behave how they want and that’s fine, but you don’t oppress you don’t become oppressive by foisting that on others, and that especially includes kids because kids aren’t the same as adults. And so I think adults are free to make whatever choices they want, but do not foist that ideology onto children before children are in a position as adults to make decisions for themselves.” As they say on Family Feud, “Good answer!” Mr. Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, publisher of Nevada News & Views, and founder of CampaignDoctor.com. You can sign up for his conservative, Nevada-focused e-newsletter at MuthsTruths.com. His views are his own.
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