GOP's newest governor candidate is an anti-vaxxer who once claimed cancer is a 'fungus'

Las Vegas City Council member Michele Fiore announced Tuesday that she will seek the Republican nomination for Nevada governor next year.

She has a long history of making extreme, dangerous, and flat-out false claims.

In a brief campaign kickoff speech, Fiore promised to ban COVID-19 vaccine requirements, block anti-racist public school curricula, and launch an “audit” of Nevada’s 2020 presidential election results, the Nevada Independent reported.

“I moved here because I believed in the West anything was possible if you work hard and have courage,” Fiore said in the campaign speech. “But if we lose it now, we will lose Nevada and what we knew of Nevada and how we grew up here and what we came here for.”

In a new campaign ad, Fiore proposed a “three-shot plan” to “ban vaccine mandates, ban critical race theory, and stop voter fraud.” Fiore then appeared to shoot three beer bottles labeled “vaccine mandates,” “CRT,” and “voter fraud.”

Fiore, who is an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, is the latest candidate to join Nevada’s competitive Republican primary to unseat Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak. Other candidates include former Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, and Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.

Fiore served as a member of the Nevada Assembly from 2012 to 2016 and briefly as the GOP’s majority leader there. She was removed from the leadership position after news came to light that the Internal Revenue Service had filed more than $1 million in federal tax liens against Fiore and her business.

After unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. House in 2010 and 2016, she was elected to the Las Vegas City Council in 2017 and served as mayor pro tempore in 2019 and 2020.

The one-time health care company CEO has previously proven to be an unreliable source of public health information.

In February 2015, Fiore said on her weekly radio show that she would fight to give terminally ill patients access to more non-FDA-approved treatments.

“If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus, and we can put a pic line into your body and we’re flushing, let’s say, saltwater, sodium bicarbonate, through that line, and flushing out the fungus,” she falsely claimed. “These are some procedures that are not FDA-approved in America that are very inexpensive, cost-effective.”

In 2015, Fiore announced she was closing her home health business after losing her license to operate it. She blamed a “never-ending barrage of government red tape and regulations” for the move.

Fiore has made headlines for defending a voter ID law by suggesting that racism was no longer a problem in the United States. She accused Democrats of “dividing by design” and “using the race card” to defend voting rights.

“We’re in 2015 and we have a Black president, in case anyone didn’t notice,” Fiore said at a hearing at the time.

At the same event, Fiore used a racist term in calling a Black colleague the first “colored man to graduate from his high school.”

Fiore has also suggested that “young, hot little girls on campus” should arm themselves to prevent being assaulted.

“The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head,” she said in 2015.

In the past, Fiore has been associated with and publicly defended the family of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada “outlaw rancher” who led an armed standoff against U.S. government agents in 2014.

In 2016, Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, led a group of militant extremists in an armed standoff against the U.S. government while illegally occupying a national wildlife refuge in Oregon.

At the time, Fiore voiced support for the Bundy family taking up arms against the government.

“If the government is going to point a gun at me, I’m going to point one right back,” Fiore told the Las Vegas Sun in 2016. “If you’re going to shoot me, I’m going to shoot you back.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.