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Kentucky Senate Candidate: With Jews, We Lose

Anti-Semitic write-in candidate affiliated with white supremacist group

by
Yair Rosenberg
September 19, 2014
(WLWT TV)
(WLWT TV)

A Kentucky man is running a write-in campaign for Senate, plastering the area with signs proclaiming, “With Jews, we lose.” The aspiring anti-Semitic senator is Robert Ransdell, a longtime white supremacist who has spoken at KKK-type rallies and is affiliated with the National Alliance, an organization whose web site bills itself as “your single source for pro-White news.”

USA Today reports that Ransdell has vowed to raise his profile, and is currently actively campaigning in the state. “I am absolutely chomping at the bit going forward with my campaign,” he wrote last month at the white supremacist forum Stormfront. “Only about a month until I am on the air, mainstream radio, primed to start a legitimate ‘conversation’ about race, as in a racially conscious White man letting loose on the problems we face, that so many of our people are beginning to wake up to.”

Openly anti-Semitic candidates are not as uncommon in the U.S. as one might think, though they are thankfully relegated to the fringes of the discourse. Back in 2012, Arthur Jones, a Holocaust-denying former member of the Nationalist Socialist Party, sought the Republican nomination for Illinois’s third district. At the time, JTA reported that in addition to his more traditional activism in racist circles, Jones was known for “regularly organiz[ing] family-friendly neo-Nazi events scheduled to coincide with Adolf Hitler’s birthday.” Jones failed to capture the nomination, but his campaign will be forever remembered as the one that put “family-friendly” and “neo-Nazi” in the same sentence.

Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Subscribe to his newsletter, listen to his music, and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.