It’s an election year, 2024, and there’s not much we can do about it.
Election campaigns in the United States are interminable and expensive affairs, and the commercials by candidates and dark money outfits will soon fill the TV airwaves.
Hopefully, elected officials and candidates will also put some campaign cash into print — and we’re ready. The Jewish World will feature its first elections-related special section, “Elections 2024: The Primaries,” in the July issue. Those running for elective office in Minnesota should know that our Jewish readers take politics seriously — and they vote. The deadline for ad space reservations for the July issue is 12 p.m. Wednesday, June 26. If you have a favorite candidate, please contact their campaign manager about advertising in the Jewish World. (The primary election in Minnesota will take place Tuesday, Aug. 13. Early voting has started.)
I’m of advanced age now and have been keenly interested in politics for the past 60 years. Over many decades, a contender for elective office might lose an election, concede to their opponent, then prepare for the next joust. That was then.
In recent years, we have witnessed the spectacle of a losing candidate complaining that they lost an election because it was “rigged and stolen.” Of course, I’m referring to the antics of former president Donald J. Trump, the recently convicted felon. Being a sore loser is one thing; inciting a mob of supporters to lay siege to the U.S. Capitol when Congress is certifying the Electoral College votes is quite another. Trump, a true menace to society and to our democratic republic, is now raising the possibility of mob violence ensuing if he is sent to prison. He will be sentenced in New York state court on July 11 — four days before the gavel bangs open the Republican National Convention.
You would think that a conviction on 34 felony charges would merit a stretch in the hoosegow.
The 2024 election cycle is developing in strange ways. Many of our readers likely have forgotten the antics of Minnesota Republican candidates in 2022.
For example, Kim Crockett, the GOP-endorsed candidate for Minnesota Secretary of State, decided to vilify the incumbent Jewish secretary of state as a puppet of billionaire financier George Soros. JTA reported, in May 2022: “In a promotional video for her campaign, a Republican candidate for Minnesota’s secretary of state depicted the Jewish Democratic incumbent and another Jewish elections lawyer as being controlled by puppet strings held by Jewish philanthropist George Soros.
“The Anti-Defamation League has called the frequent use of puppet-master imagery by conservatives to depict Soros antisemitic.
“Kim Crockett’s campaign played the video at the state’s GOP convention last weekend, where Crockett, a former executive at a conservative think tank, also received her party’s endorsement. The video’s messaging played into popular right-wing conspiracy theories claiming that the 2020 election was fraudulent [which] have collectively fueled several secretary of state races in purple states. Republicans have endorsed candidates who vow to implement tighter voting restrictions.
“The video, which convention attendees posted to social media, depicts the state’s current secretary of state, Steve Simon, and prominent national Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias. Both are Jewish. Their heads are superimposed on the bodies of the twins from the movie The Shining, with a caption reading, “Let’s wreck elections forever and ever.” Simon and Elias are then shown to be attached to puppet strings controlled by Soros.”
Not to be outdone by Crockett’s antisemitic tropes, Dr. Scott Jensen, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Minnesota governor, compared government actions to stop the spread of COVID-19 to Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Jews, Jewish businesses and synagogues in Germany and Austria.
“If you look at the 1930s and you look at it carefully, we could see something’s happening,” Jensen said in a speech to a group called Mask Off Minnesota. “Little things that people chose to push aside. ‘It’s going to be okay.’ And then the little things grew into something bigger. Then there was a night called Kristallnacht. The night of the breaking glass.”
Jensen continued, “Then there was the book burning, and it kept growing and growing, and a guy named Hitler kept growing in power, and World War II came about.”
Jensen wasn’t the only far-right Republican to characterize public health efforts to stem the pandemic as government tyranny. Thankfully, Jensen lost his race.
And now the Republican Party of Minnesota has nominated an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Royce White, to run for U.S. Senate. (Andrew Lapin’s JTA story about White was published in the AJW’s June edition.)
White, who ran in the 2022 GOP primary for Minnesota’s Fifth District seat in Congress and lost, continues to propound a variety of crackpot conspiracy theories. He has been given a platform by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and by Alex Jones, of InfoWars, who defamed the parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and was found liable for $1.5 billion in damages.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg interviewed White and wrote a column about him in the newspaper’s May 24 edition:
“By 2023, White was not just appearing on Jones’s show but also guest-hosting it. Bannon, Trump’s first chief strategist, had become a mentor to him, delighting in his unvarnished machismo. ‘Women have become too mouthy,’ White said on Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast. ‘As the Black man in the room, I’ll say that.’ Elsewhere, White denounced the ‘Jewish lobby’ and the ‘Jewish elite’ and called Israel ‘the linchpin of the new world order.’ He described the L.G.B.T.Q. movement as ‘Luciferian’ and wrote that it’s ‘the brainchild of radical feminists and their cucked men.’”
Apparently, White is not interested in the votes of “mouthy” women voters in the Fifth District.
Goldberg also wrote, “I spoke to White for almost an hour and a half. He insisted that he was not antisemitic because his comments were only about Jewish elites, who he said exploited ordinary Jews.”
So, he’s only unhappy with the rich Jews, not the rest of us. It’s good to know.
In any case, the Minnesota Republicans seem set on a course to oblivion by nominating candidates who like to root around in the garbage dumpster of history. Apart from the protests focused on Israel’s prosecution of its war in Gaza and complaints of antisemitism in domestic pro-Palestinian protests, we have a major party nominating a candidate who propounds various nutty and antisemitic canards. This augurs ill for the Jews of Minnesota.
I called the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas in 2022, when I caught the scent of White’s campaign for Congress. I wondered if they would issue a statement of condemnation and was told that they would not. I’m not aware that the JCRC has issued a statement about Royce White in this election cycle.
I’ve washed my hands of the craven Trumpite Republicans. They have lost their minds.
Mordecai Specktor / editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, June 2024)
