by: Marilyn Mayo
June 24, 2016
A billboard in Tennessee has gotten a lot of attention due to its controversial slogan, “Make America White Again.” The billboard belongs to Rick Tyler, an independent candidate running for a seat in Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District. Tyler, who has ties to both anti-government extremism and white supremacy, is one of a number of extremists in recent years who has had no chance of winning but has used a political campaign to promote racist and anti-Semitic views.
Tyler has run for office a number of times—for Congressional seats in South Carolina in 1983 and in Georgia in 1996, and for a U.S. Senate seat in Florida in 2010. On his current campaign website, he openly promotes white supremacy:
What liberalized, effeminized utopianists simply cannot comprehend is the problem presented by the harsh reality of abject refusal on the part of non-whites to conform to historical understanding that casts them in the light of subservience and inequality. In the real world, someone inevitably emerges as a dominant force…and much to the chagrin and displeasure of non-whites, it has always tended to be the Caucasians who rise to the most influential and powerful position.
On the website, he posted a poem called “The Saddest Story Ever Told,” about “when a white girl marries a negro,” and commits “racial suicide.” He also asserts that the “browning of America has been underway for half a century and we are now overwhelmed with alien hordes who share little in common with the original European stock who carved this once great nation from the rugged wilderness.”
Rick Tyler
His campaign website includes anti-Semitic statements as well as racist ones. In 2010, Tyler posted a letter on his senate campaign website in which he argued that Jews were a product of Satan, writing, “It is quite logical that Satan would have a counterfeit ‘chosen people.’” He repeated this assertion on his current campaign site, making reference to “a counterfeit chosen people…who are in truth the synagogue of Satan.” These statements are in line with Christian Identity beliefs, which assert that Jews are Satanic in nature.
Tyler is not the only extremist candidate to run for office this year. Jim Condit, Jr., a virulent anti-Semite, ran in a June 7th special election for the Congressional seat in Ohio vacated by John Boehner. Condit may also run for the U.S. Congress in Ohio in November.
Condit ran at least one anti-Semitic ad on a mainstream radio station in February, which advertised his radio show. The ad focused on Jews, saying, “Who’s behind the all-out war to make white people a minority in the U.S.A and Europe? You won’t be able to believe in the 6 million figure used for the World War II Holocaust anymore.”
On his campaign website, Condit promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, asserting that “Talmudic Jews run the International banks.” He alleges that “international Jewish Banksters basically hired Hitler and the Nazis to first incentivize Jews to go from Europe to Palestine, and then later to round up primarily Jews and put them in concentration camps with a goal of getting as many Jews as possible to Palestine for the Rothschild-Bankster directed takeover of Palestine by ‘Israel’.”
Jim Condit, Jr.
Condit’s real purpose is likely to to run these ads to promote anti-Semitism and he has done so repeatedly. In the year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Condit ran 13 different radio ads, many of them blaming Jews for the attacks, when running for the U.S. Congress in Ohio. He was able run the ads by arguing that federal law guaranteed federal candidates the right to run any ads they wanted on FCC-licensed television or radio stations.
Other candidates have also exploited elections to showcase their bigoted views. In September 2014, neo-Nazi Robert Ransdell promoted his write-in campaign for U.S. Senate in Kentucky with the slogan, “With Jews We Lose.” He reportedly had plans to purchase air time on a mainstream radio station in Cincinnati for seven hour-long radio programs/political ads to publicize his views. According to a white supremacist source, the station refused to run the ads.
Frazier Glenn Miller, a white supremacist who received a death sentence for killing three people at Jewish sites in Overland Park, Kansas, in April 2014, also ran for office a number of times. In 2010, he was a write-in candidate for U.S. Senator in Missouri.
After filing his candidacy, Miller bought air time on a Kansas City radio station and ran advertisements attacking Jews and minorities, while calling on white people to “take their country back.” He later expanded this campaign to other stations across Missouri. However, Missouri broadcasters protested this tactic and reached out to the Federal Communications Commission with their concerns. In June 2010, the FCC ruled that Miller was not a “bona fide” candidate and thus not entitled to mandatory access. This ruling allowed radio stations to reject Miller’s racist and anti-Semitic ads, thus ruining Miller’s attempt to spread white supremacist propaganda on the airwaves.
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