Politics Fuels Conspiracies, Anti-Semitism And Fears Of Drag Queens Launching Nuclear Missiles
As the 2024 political races heat, so does the anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic and homophobic hateful rhetoric, raising the specter of such ignominious MAGA heroes as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.
In recent days, a Democratic candidate for president said COVID-19 was explicitly created so Jews and Chinese would not be infected; a trump campaign e-mail uses imagery right out of the Third Reich; and a southern senator says white supremacists are not necessarily racists.
Then there was the Montana lawmaker who worries that drag queens will launch nuclear missiles; a right wing talk show host said were it not for affirmative action, former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would never have gone to college; and a fake photo is making the far right rounds purportedly showing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and trump walking side-by-side with a caption, “Two of our nation’s greatest advocates for Civil Rights: MLK and DJT.”
And an Arizona lawmaker speaks in the hallowed halls of congress and refers to African Americans as “colored.”
It’s enough for the MAGA crowd to swoon for the old days when former Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry had a hunting preserve called, “Niggers’s Head;” one time Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox’s restaurant refused to serve African Americans; the late Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who was in favor of segregation and once called the University of North Carolina “The University of Negroes and Communists”; the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who stood on the steps of the University of Alabama to block its first two African American students from entering; President Woodrow Wilson who reinstituted racial segregation in government offices; and who could forget the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., who was a segregationist supreme while he fathered a child with an African American girl.
The rhetoric is heating up despite or perhaps because of an increase in racial and ethnic diversity in Congress. In the 118th Congress, 60 senators and representatives are Black, 54 are Hispanic, 18 are Asian American and 5 are American Indian or Alaska Native.
Overall, 133 senators and representatives today identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian or Alaska Native, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Congressional Research Service. This number has nearly doubled in the two decades since the 108th Congress of 2003–05, which had 67 minority members.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 69, repeated one of his numerous conspiracy theories that the coronavirus could have been a bioweapon “deliberately targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while disproportionately attacking White and Black people.
“There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said during a dinner on New York’s Upper East Side on Tuesday. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Kennedy’s comments were in step with those made by former president trump, who repeatedly stirred up anti-Asian hatred by referring to COVID-19 as “the China virus” and the “kung flu.”
Kennedy’s remarks echo an alarmingly common anti-Semitic claim that blames Jews for the emergence and spread of coronavirus. A 2020 Oxford University study found nearly 1 in 5 British people believed Jews created the coronavirus pandemic for financial gain.
Kennedy was simply being true to form as one of the most rabid proponents of various conspiracy theories. The son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy has spread conspiracy theories about the pandemic, infectious disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and the AIDS epidemic. He has compared mask mandates and vaccination efforts to the Holocaust and once criticized the government’s response to the pandemic with “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
Kennedy has in the past met with the Nation of Islam leader and notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan who regularly claims that Jews control media and government. In 2020, Kennedy met with Nation of Islam leaders and told them that the COVID vaccine had been “genetically modified to attack black and Latino boys.”
Last week, Kennedy said he had met with the rapper Ice Cube, a fellow conspiracy theorist who has a long history of anti-Semitic tweets and song lyrics. In 2020, the rapper posted an anti-Semitic dog whistle to his 5.3 million Twitter followers. The posting was a Star of David enveloping a black cube, known to some as the “Black Cube of Saturn.” Placing the Star of David on the cube implied that Jews are stoking the flames of the occult and chaos.
This week Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., known derisively as “Senator Redneck” and Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz. sparked controversy with separate bigoted statements.
Tuberville said that white nationalists are not inherently racist, contradicting the accepted definition of them as “militant white people who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation.”
He found no disagreement from Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, who said “What is white nationalism? I don’t even know what that means.”
Stewart said the Democrats are stirring up racially-charged controversies for political reasons.
“The narrative that the Republican Party’s racist is absolute nonsense,” Stewart said.
Stewart, 63, an Air Force veteran, does not believe that climate change is caused by human activity. He is one of trump’s strongest defenders and was reportedly under consideration to serve as trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, but Richard Grenell was chosen instead.
At a Nevada trump rally last October, Tuberville, a freshman lawmaker, complained that Democrats are soft on crime because of African Americans. Tuberville equated Black people to criminals.
“They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit! They are not owed that,” said Tuberville.
Crane, meanwhile, stirred the racist pot when he referred to African Americans as “colored people” while promoting an “anti-woke” proposal during a long debate about Republican opposition to diversity programs included in a major defense policy bill.
Crane argued that his amendment “has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or Black people or anybody can serve. It has nothing to do with color of your skin.”
Crane later said he “misspoke” but some lawmakers refused to accept his belated explanation for using racist language.
Crane, 43, is a freshman congressman who served in the Navy SEALs program and co-founded Bottle Breacher, a company that manufactures bottle openers made of 50-caliber shell casings.
During his 2022 campaign for congress, Crane was endorsed by trump and far-right state senator Wendy Rogers. Crane promoted the false conspiracy theory that there were “massive amounts of fraud” in the 2020 presidential election. He called upon the Arizona State Legislature to decertify Biden’s victory in the state, and for the Arizona Attorney General to launch a criminal investigation into alleged voter fraud.
Fortunately, the latest caustic racist comments by lawmakers pale in comparison to those of Steve King, who was formerly known as the most racist man in Congress. In 2020, the nine-term Iowa Republican congressman, was stripped of his committee assignments by his own party after defending white nationalism. King later lost a bid for reelection.
And the comments don’t fall to the level of those made in 2010 by South Carolina State Sen. Jake Knotts who referred to President Barack Obama and then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley, and now presidential candidate, as “ragheads” during an internet political radio show. Haley is a Christian of Sikh descent, while Obama was falsely accused of being Muslim and not born in the U.S.
For his part, right wing conspiracist and commentator Charlie Kirk praised the end of affirmative action and ranted against various Black women in power. Kirk said that noted African American women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson are “only here because of affirmative action” and that they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”
Late last month, the Supreme Court declared affirmative action programs at public and private colleges and universities unconstitutional.
Kirk leads the nationwide right wing organization of student Republicans, Turning Point USA.
Anti-Semitism was all over recent trump campaign materials. A fundraising email depicted Biden as being controlled by a puppet master, George Soros, a Democratic megadonor, Jewish philanthropist and a frequent bogeyman of the right for his support of liberal causes and candidates and a common target of right wing conspiracy theories.
The trump campaign depictions of Jewish control of political, financial and media sectors date back to anti-Semitic literature published in the early 20th century that was important in the rise of Germany’s Nazi regime.
In 2020, Facebook removed a targeted advertisement from the trump campaign that included a red triangle once used to designate political prisoners in concentration camps. The trump campaign used the “puppet master” trope in an advertisement implying that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who is Jewish, controlled Biden.
Bernice King, the daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., also rebuked the use of a fake photo image of her father standing alongside trump. The fake photo was tweeted by conservative commentator Brigitte Gabriel with the caption, “Two of our nation’s greatest advocates for Civil Rights: MLK and DJT.”
Republicans have made the outrageous claim that King would have been a trump supporter, despite trump’s far right, racist actions.
“I find President Trump’s use of my father’s image in his political ad beyond insulting and not reflective of #MLK’s commitment to creating the #BelovedCommunity. My father should not be used in ways strongly misaligned with his vision and values, @realDonaldTrump,” Ms. King tweeted in October 2020.
Homophobia and anti-LGBTQ sentiment were behind fears expressed by a Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana that drag performers will control missiles at an Air Force base in Montana. Rosendale brought up his bizarre concerns while speaking against funding gender reassignment surgeries for military personnel during a U.S. House session
“We have drag shows taking place at Malmstrom Air Force Base. There are 150 ICBM missiles that are being controlled by that Air Force Base and by these individuals. I do not want someone who doesn’t know if they are a man or a woman with their hand on a missile button,” Rosendale said.
Rosendale, 63, lost a bid for U.S. Senate in 2018 after he was endorsed by trump. He was elected to Congress in 2020. He served as head of his local Catholic parish council and based on his voting record, Rosendale earned a 100 percent on the Montana Family Foundation’s scorecard. He was among 14 House Republicans to vote against legislation to establish June 19, or Juneteenth, as a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery. He voted against U.S. aid to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion and also voted to eliminate birthright citizenship.
On March 1, 2023, Rosendale posed for a photo in front of the Capitol with Ryan Sanchez, a former member of the white supremacist gang “Rise Above Movement” and Greyson Arnold, a Nazi sympathizer and podcaster who was at the January 6 Capitol attack by trump supporters.
Rosendale later said he was against hate groups and violence and that he “was asked for a photo while walking between hearings, accommodating as I do for all photo requests, and was not aware of the individuals’ identity or affiliation with these hate groups that stand in stark contrast to my personal beliefs.”