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Beasley, a local businessman, said Monday that he defends the essence of his comments.

“Someone was calling for murder and slaughter of innocents and I was extremely upset about that and I make no apology for that,” Beasley said. “I’m not obsessing over Islam, not at all. If you look back through my social media history, I made these posts in that context.”

He said he was speaking for himself at the time, not for anyone else, including the UCP or its members.

“I was angry as heck. Did I maybe go over the line a little bit? Yeah, maybe I did,” Beasley said. “Anybody who paints me as a racist, that’s just ridiculous.”

But Beasley, who was one of three candidates vying for the Brooks-Medicine Hat nomination, along with Michaela Glasgo and Dinah Hiebert, said the cards were stacked against him from the beginning. He said he disclosed the comments to party officials, and that they only became a problem when it was clear he could win the nomination in the days leading up to the vote.

“What I’m really upset about is the obfuscation of this whole event when it happened two days before a vote,” Beasley said. “This election was manipulated from the very beginning. The timing of it was basically called in a rush.”

UCP political operations director Jeff Henwood said Beasley mentioned the posts several months ago during conversations with party officials.

“The specific posts, the posts that caused so much concern, were not shared with us,” Henwood said. “He did mention at a high level that he made some comments and deleted them. At the time he raised that, we said, ‘We don’t know what you said, only you do. If you think it would be problematic, it’s probably problematic. If you don’t, we’ll leave it up to your discretion.’