Tim Kaine's GOP Challenger Ready To Go Witch Hunting, For Actual Witches, So They Don't Take Over Virginia

Hung Cao is far more concerned about witches than he is about health care.

There’s been so much talk about “weird” Republicans lately that it’s refreshing to encounter a normal Republican with normal, reality-based concerns. Rather than doing that, however, we thought we’d talk a little bit about Hung Cao, the Virginia Republican challenging Tim Kaine for his US Senate seat.

Now, Senator Tim Kaine, for better or for worse, is a normal, middle-of-the-road guy. He’s a serviceable Democrat, but is he going to set the world on fire any time soon? Probably not. That’s just fine, though, because you know what else he’s not going to set on fire? Women. For being witches.

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In an interview from last year that was recently resurfaced by social media user The Intellectualist, Hung Cao told Christian Nationalist and noted COVID superspreader Sean Feucht that one of his top concerns when he is elected will be … preventing the witches from taking over Virginia as they have taken over Monterey, California.

Yup … that is a thing he is very concerned about.

"There's a place in Monterey, California, called 'Lover's Point,'" Cao told Feucht. "The original name was 'Lovers of Christ Point,’ but now it's become — they took out the Christ, it's 'Lover's Point,' and it's really — Monterey's a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft, and the Wiccan community has really taken over there. We can't let that happen in Virginia.”

Actually, it was Lovers of Jesus Point — and it was never officially called that. The site he’s referring to is in the town of Pacific Grove, where a gated Methodist retreat existed from 1875 to 1913, and they supposedly called the place Lovers of Jesus Point. The Methodists bought the land from wealthy landowner David Jacks, (supposedly) the namesake of Monterey Jack cheese, and not a very popular guy from what I have been able to glean. After that, it was just a regular tourist area. Wicca didn’t really even become a “thing” until the 1950s, so it seems highly unlikely that it was witches what named it Lover’s Point. (Unless they were time-traveling witches.)

All of that aside, Hung Cao’s issue was clearly with the idea of Virginia being taken over by witches. This has been a longtime concern in the Commonwealth! Massachusetts gets all the credit but Virginia was the first to have an official accusation of witchcraft and the first to have an actual witch trial. They also went on for much, much longer. Salem’s shit lasted a year, but Virginia’s went on for a little over a century — although, in their defense, none of those accused were killed.

It is not clear how Cao intends to manage this problem once he becomes a senator. Is he going to bar people from practicing Wicca? Is he going to force them to either move or to convert to Christianity? Is he going to appoint a witchfinder general? Does he have feelings about the fact that, when Tim Kaine was governor, he pardoned Grace “The Witch of Pungo” Sherwood, the only woman to have been convicted of witchcraft in the state, even though her neighbors were very sure that she “bewitched their pigs to death and bewitched their cotton”?

Perhaps he should make an attack ad!

Honestly I’m not entirely clear on how this would work in practice, especially considering that he is running for the US Senate. We have reached out to Cao for clarity on the logistics and will update if we should get a statement.

While he is very concerned about witches in Virginia, Hung Cao is not very concerned at all about people having health care and is pretty sure no one else is, either! In an interview this past May (also recently shared by The Intellectualist), he told TNT News that “No one in the United States is like ‘Oh my gosh, I will die if I don’t have healthcare!’”

Yes, except of course for all of the people who would, in fact, die without healthcare.

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Whimsical though he may be, he’s not doing terribly well in the polls — even with the endorsements of both Donald Trump and, um, Oliver North — and it’s not even close. Kaine has him beat by double digits in every poll but one, so either he’s not too popular or the witches have already taken over Virginia.