Electoral Extremism: 23 Candidates on the Radical Right
Long article. See link for the rest of this rogue’s gallery, along with mugshots portrait photos.
By Robert Steinback
Americans are generally possessed of an optimism that the democratic electoral process will filter out extremists, radicals and dangerous ideologues. Indeed, there is a temptation to chortle with satisfaction that the number of voters who wrote in neo-Nazi Billy Roper as their 2010 choice for governor of Arkansas wouldn’t fill the seats in an undersized fast-food restaurant.
Still, a 2010 candidate who has argued that private businesses should be free to deny service to black people now sits in the U.S. Senate. A candidate who believes the Southern states should secede again and form a confederacy dominated by white people won a seat in the Arkansas legislature, while an antigovernment “Patriot” who grossly exaggerates the criminality of undocumented immigrants (who studies have shown are on average much less criminal than native-born Americans) captured a California Assembly seat. Even failure energized some right-wing extremists: A white supremacist received one of every three votes cast in his New York congressional district, while another in West Virginia received enough votes for his “party” to boast of a moral victory.
The Intelligence Report has compiled an accounting of 22 men and one woman with extreme right-wing views who sought public office during the 2010 election season — including five who succeeded. Those who won their races are marked “elected.”
Harry Bertram
OFFICE SOUGHT Board of Education, Monongalia, W. Va.
PARTY American Third Position (A3P)
RESULTS General election: Finished last among three candidates, receiving 14.1% (2,582 votes) of the 18,256 votes cast.
EXTREMIST IDEOLOGY White nationalism
Bertram ran openly as an A3P candidate. A3P’s founder, William Daniel Johnson, supports the deportation of all non-white immigrants and U.S. citizens, including anyone with any “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.” Bertram for years personally distributed to white people in Ohio and West Virginia copies of Don Wassall’s Nationalist Times, which promotes white nationalist and anti-Semitic ideologies as well as government conspiracy theories. In a video, Bertram denounced “gay and lesbian studies” as “liberal nonsense.” Bertram received the enthusiastic endorsement of Jamie Kelso, a long-time associate of top Klansmen and now operator of the White News Now website.
Jim Condit Jr.
OFFICE SOUGHT U.S. House of Representatives, Ohio District 8
PARTY Constitution
RESULTS General election: Finished last among four candidates, receiving 1.7% (3,701 votes) of the 217,436 votes cast.
EXTREMIST IDEOLOGY Anti-Semitic, conspiracy-mongering
Condit promotes anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories. He believes the Federal Reserve Bank is engineering a New World Order. He embraces the theories of the late Father Denis Fahey, an Irish Catholic priest who stridently opposed institutions he felt conflicted with Catholic order, including communism, freemasonry and Judaism, all of which he believed were intertwined. Condit in 2007 said he believed that “Zionists” had successfully infiltrated the Vatican II Catholic reform conferences in the 1960s intent on “bending the doctrines of the Catholic Church to accord with the demands of the Zionist interests.” Condit once stated that a “Phase II” of the Sept. 11 attacks, intended to benefit the Israeli government, was imminent.
Tim Donnelly ELECTED
OFFICE SOUGHT California State Assembly, District 59
PARTY Republican
RESULTS Primary: Finished first among six candidates, receiving 30.3% (12,449 votes) of the 41,112 votes cast. General election: Won with 57.3% (82,475 votes) of the 144,007 votes cast.
EXTREMIST IDEOLOGY Anti-immigration, antigovernment “Patriot”
Donnelly in 2005 founded what became the largest anti-immigrant Minuteman chapter in California. He advocates a California version of Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which makes it a state crime to be in this country illegally. Donnelly is prone to exaggeration. In interviews, he claimed to have heard the screams of women being raped in the Mexican desert near the border. According to LA Weekly, Donnelly once wrote that Muslim extremists were proselytizing to “so-called ‘innocent’ illegal aliens” with the aim of destroying the American Southwest. “It is not a stretch,” he wrote, “to picture a revolt in Los Angeles, whose population is comprised of [sic] over 50 percent illegal aliens. At the [current] rate of influx and births, it will be 80 percent illegal alien within a decade.” A more reliable estimate places the number of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles County at about 7.3% of its population of 10.4 million. Donnelly claimed undocumented immigrants accounted for “nearly one-third of our prison space” — a demonizing assertion, once also pushed by CNN’s Lou Dobbs, with no basis in fact.