Senate Candidate Endorsed by Minnesota Republican Party Sure Has Some Opinions About Jews
During the recent Republican-led congressional hearings about arguably antisemitic slogans used by college students protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza, some cynics questioned whether the party’s concern for Jewish Americans would persist in other situations. In the hearings’ context, after all, hate-speech allegations were leveled against other minority groups (campus radicals, American Muslims, Palestinian civilians) in a way that created conflicts within the Democratic Party while strengthening the GOP’s right-wing nationalist allies in the Israeli government.
Was the Republican stand against antisemitism a matter of political opportunism rather than sincere commitment to the values of liberal pluralism? Initial returns, sadly, support the more pessimistic reading.
In Minnesota, for instance, a vote held at the state’s Republican convention on Saturday to determine whom the party would endorse as its preferred nominee in the state’s Aug. 13 Senate primary was won decisively by former basketball player Royce White. White, a college star at Iowa State, played only three games in the NBA, amid what he described as mental health struggles and a fear of flying on airplanes. In 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, he first gained some notoriety outside basketball as a leader of Black Lives Matter marches. But in 2021 he took a sharp turn, becoming involved in right-wing activism in his native Minnesota, and in 2022 he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s district. During that race, he posted a long message on Substack in which he asserted that Omar is a “National Security State asset” and “globalist” who wears a hijab as a sort of religious disguise to “throw off the passive citizen who doesn’t pay attention.” That same message also includes some thoughts about Jews:
The memory of the Holocaust hangs on the Jewish people like a shroud, and the persecution of them during World War II was but the climax of many centuries of antisemitism. In response, many of the Jewish people have lost their faith in a loving God. That faith once lost, was quickly replaced by the scientific method and materialism. This kind of intergenerational trauma creates a survivalist impulse that can give birth to the darkest of intentions and most grandiose effort for world control.
A group of Jews with dark intentions seeking “world control,” you say? Would you believe that White’s post also includes the phrase “puppet masters” and that he has complained on Twitter about a “Jewish elite” that is seeking to make Israel the “lynchpin” of a “New World Order”?
This kind of rhetoric isn’t completely unusual for a 2024 Republican nominee; as I wrote recently in a piece that focused on Michigan, a number of state Republican parties have been taken over by conspiracy theorists who were energized by COVID vaccine mandates and Trump’s claims about vast, systemic voter fraud in 2020. White’s entry into right-wing circles, according to a 2022 piece in Mother Jones, was brokered by former Trump adviser and Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, who played an essential role in building Republican support among white supremacists and neo-Nazis online. (At one point in 2017, when he was a senior White House adviser, I found the text of a book that Bannon recommended on a Nazi website that had a section called “The Jewish Problem.”) White, at that, met Bannon in 2021 through a 3-on-3 basketball league owned in part by Ice Cube, who had recently made news for posting an image of cartoonishly evil Jews playing Monopoly on the backs of Black men. Last December, Axios reported that Bannon may return to the White House if Trump is elected again.
As for White, even if he were to win the Aug. 13 primary, he’d face incumbent Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who won her most recent race by 24 points, in the general election. Which means that this is enough of a low-stakes race that other Republicans might criticize or disavow him for saying that greedy, godless Jews are working behind the scenes to control world events. But then again, they might not—because they might agree!
