A version of this news analysis originally appeared in the Inside Politics newsletter, out Fridays. Sign up here to get it first to your inbox.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Republican Women are holding an event this week in SouthPark to raise awareness about human trafficking, featuring a speaker who has courted controversy — to put it mildly.
Californian Leigh Dundas’ biography says she is “a human rights attorney and abolitionist dedicated to preserving basic freedoms, while also combating global injustices like child slavery and the peddling of medical tyranny disguised as progress.”
Her website says she started working more than a decade ago for a Christian nonprofit that fought child sex slavery and human trafficking — and that she spent years in southeast Asia working to expose child brothels.
Dundas also has received national attention for her inflammatory statements on things like COVID-19, the 2020 election, the QAnon conspiracy theory and pedophilia.
With her scheduled appearance in south Charlotte, she’s a sign of how the GOP extremism isn’t so extreme inside the party.
The Washington Post noted that Dundas was filmed outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 shouting “Traitor! Traitor!” toward the police. The story noted that the day before, Dundas “posted a video of herself telling a crowd that ‘we would be well within our rights’ to take traitorous Americans ‘out back and shoot ‘em or hang ‘em.’ ”
There’s no documentation that she entered the Capitol or engaged in actual violence.
Dundas also opposed COVID-19 restrictions in California, which were among the most stringent in the nation (and which Dundas compared to the Holocaust).
Fighting pandemic restrictions wasn’t a particularly extremist position, but Dundas’s tactics certainly were.
The Los Angeles Times reported that when Orange County imposed a mask mandate, she publicized the home address of the county health officer. Then she showed up at the person’s home “with a large U-Haul, a banner strapped to the side depicting the doctor as Adolf Hitler.”
The newspaper wrote that a similar banner depicting Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom was pulled by an airplane over the state Capitol in Sacramento while Dundas spoke at a rally. The banner “ended up in Dundas’ Santa Ana yard just before Christmas, surrounded by razor wire and illuminated by floodlights.”
And on social media, she amplified postings from attorney Lin Wood, a North Carolina native who was one of the leading proponents of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In one post, Wood wrote that people will be “shocked” at who has been in the White House … and “shocked by the level of pedophilia.”
In another post, Dundas highlighted a post from Wood that accused U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts of illegal adoption, pedophilia, being associated with Jeffrey Epstein and having prior knowledge of Antonin Scalia’s death.
She then wrote that “if Chief Justice John Roberts sues him for defamation, Lin Wood gets to introduce evidence proving what he said about Roberts is true ... i.e., evidence that would conclusively show that Roberts was involved in pedophilia, and with Epstein.
Perhaps that's why no lawsuit is forthcoming from the Chief Justice ... ”
Inside Politics reached out to Dundas through her booking agent, but didn’t hear back. The newsletter also emailed the Charlotte Mecklenburg Republican Women, but didn’t receive a response.
In one interview with the Los Angeles Times after the 2020 election, Dundas appeared to dial back her comments, at least when compared to her social media feed.
According to the newspaper, she was “not advocating for revolution.”
Sharing the bill with Dundas is Kristi Wells, leader of the Safe House Project, and Jason Simmons, the new chair of the state Republican Party.
Simmons recently won the state chairmanship — with former President Donald Trump’s support — after Michael Whatley left the position to become co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
