Rep. Sue Myrick Retires, Opening Door for Islamist Intern Cabal To Take Power

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC)Courtesy of the office of Rep. Sue Myrick

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


North Carolina GOP Rep. Sue Myrick told supporters on Tuesday that she will not be seeking re-election next November, making her the third elected representative from the state to announce her retirement in just the last few weeks. On the surface, it’s not an especially big deal, largely because Myrick is hardly a power-broker in Congress and her district is solidly conservative.

But Myrick’s departure will deprive Congress of one of its loudest voices in the fight against the largely nonexistent threat of “stealth jihad”—a congresswoman who once held a press conference to declare that the Capitol had been infiltrated by a secret cabal of radical Islamist interns bent on destroying America from within. (As anyone who’s spent much time in this city knows, the real power in Washington is held by Hill interns; the lobbyists are just there to make sure we don’t run out of cigars.)

Such behavior would become a pattern. When Myrick sat down with Muslim constituents in Charlotte in 2010 to explain herself, the Associated Press noted that Myrick had “proposed fighting Islamic radicalization by cutting off exchange programs and weapons sales with Saudi Arabia, passing legislation that would make it a treasonous offense to call for the death of American citizens and investigating the selection of Arabic translators.” Admittedly, it was an incomplete list. Last August, she held hearings on the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed attempt to take over America through self-jihad (it didn’t go so well). Myrick has also addressed—and been honored by—the anti-Islam activist group ACT! for America. ACT!’s founder, Brigitte Gabriel, believes Muslims should be prohibited from serving in the military and blocked from holding public office.

Last fall, Myrick canceled her planned appearance at a September 11th memorial out of concerns that she had become a target for terrorists, citing an article published by Iranian state media that mentioned her name. Myrick declined to elaborate on the specifics of the threat, except to say that “I live with threats every day; that’s my life.” The Iranian report was actually just a translation of a report on Islamophobia published by the liberal Center for American Progress. And although Myrick alleged that she had been told be intelligence sources that the article put her life at risk, Salon‘s Justin Elliott noted that none of the other Republican members of Congress implicated in the report canceled their public events on 9/11.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate