NV-SEN

Sharron Angle's Fringe Third Party Sponsored Virulently Anti-Gay Flier In '90s

Justin Elliott | June 24, 2010, 6:01PM

Sharron Angle (R)

The far-right third party that Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle called home in the 1990s supported abolishing "the debt money system" and ran a vitriolic anti-gay insert in state newspapers that portrays LGBT people -- or, as Angle's party called them, "sodomites" -- as child-molesting, HIV-carrying, Hell-bound freaks, according to documents obtained by TPM.

As we reported earlier this month, Angle was a member of Nevada's Independent American Party, a Christian conservative-cum-libertarian third party, for at least six years while she was getting her feet wet in politics in the 1990s. Independent American Party members told us that Angle switched to be a Republican in 1997 out of political expediency as she was preparing to make a run for state-level office.

But the details of her time in the Independent American Party have been somewhat shrouded in mystery -- which brings us to the two documents we obtained from that era.

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Sharron Angle

Third-Party NV-Sen Candidate: I Had To Change My Phone Number After Threats From Angle Supporters

Justin Elliott | June 16, 2010, 3:48PM

NV-Sen candidates Sharron Angle (R) and Tim Fasano of the Independent American Party

Around the day of the primary election last week in which Sharron Angle won the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Nevada, Tim Fasano, a third-party Senate candidate with the right-wing Independent American Party, says he began to get phone calls from Angle supporters warning him to get out of the race, or else.

The callers were upset because they believe Fasano is going to "ensure that Harry Reid is going to be elected" by siphoning conservative votes away from Angle, Fasano tells TPM. In the third call he got last week, the person said "watch your back, we know your live, we got your address," Fasano says. That's when he decided, on the advice of police he spoke with about the incidents, to change his phone number.

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Independent American Party

Sharron Angle Left Far-Right Third Party For Electoral Expedience, Members Say

Justin Elliott | June 15, 2010, 11:45AM

Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada

The key to understanding Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle may be the fact that she has not always been a Republican.

For at least six years in the 1990s before she held state-level elective office, Angle was a member of the little-known Independent American Party, a right-wing party that combines elements of Ron Paul's doctrinaire libertarianism -- pro-gun, anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy, pro-states' rights -- with Christian social conservatism and fear of the "North American Union" and other forms of "global government." The small party attracted considerable controversy in 1994 when it took out a newspaper ad titled "Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation," which suggested HIV could spread through the water.

Three members of the Independent American Party tell TPM that Angle, a Nye County, Nevada, school board member at the time, was an active member of the party in the 1990s. They say she only left the Independent American Party and became a Republican out of political expediency when she decided to seek a seat in the state assembly, to which she was elected in 1998.

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