Robert Ransdell

[Impenitent]

Kentucky Senate candidate Robert Ransdell is running on a blatantly and purely antisemitic slogan: With Jews we lose. His imagery is pure Goebbels, and of course he has all the usual racist suspects supporting him.

He knows he has no hope of winning, but he wants to spread his hateful message far and wide and he's using this electioneering opportunity to do so, knowing he'll garner media attention (and he has).

My question is, do you think the base level antisemitism which has risen due to the Gaza/Israel conflict has spurred him on to do this? I suspect he will be riding on the wave. I wonder whether he would have tossed his hat into the Senate race otherwise?

I'm also taken aback that he can use this type of imagery and racist language. Is this kind of blatant racism permitted under freedom of speech? I would consider it incitement to hate and exclusion, which surely is not constitutional? I don't know, of course, as I've only a bare acquaintance with the US Constitution. I'm speaking from my own ethical sense.

One link (I'm sure you can find many more and better - but the Jewish airwaves are abuzz, I can tell you):
http://www.wlwt.com/news/us-senate-cand ... e/28096066

[Inanna]

oh my goodness.

[Túrin Turambar]

To be honest, I'm not sure if this is any way topical. A bit of Googling established that this bloke is a fringe write-in candidate who posts on a prominent White Supremist website. Such people have always surfaced in the U.S. and other Western democracies, but generally get nowhere (David Duke, with his fairly high profile, was something of an exception). I doubt that Randsell will still be newsworthy come December. Indeed, its hard to find much media on him now, which is probably as it should be.

[axordil]

I doubt it's connected to current events as well. This strain of nastiness is always bubbling away on the fringe of American society. One suspects he's just as much an Islamophobe as an anti-Semite, not that it's any consolation--unfortunately Islamophobia is now relatively mainstream on the right wing of American politics, so I guess he had to figure out a way to stand out from the merely repulsive crowd by going full-on Nazi.

Any speech that falls short of direct and immediate incitement to violence--something along the lines of the Hutu media in Rwanda telling people to go kill their Tutsi neighbors right now--is protected by the First Amendment. It's a high threshold, and the result is that you can legally say some pretty awful things here you can't in other Western democracies (the Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind, and was a recent beneficiary of this protection). Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question, but U.S. case law in interpreting the status of political speech in particular is consistent and clear on this for a half-century.

[Passdagas the Brown]

Unfortunately, such speech can only be classed as an incitement to violence if there's an immediacy (and a plausibility) to it.

For example:

The following is NOT an incitement to violence, under US law:

"Jews are scum, and should be removed from the face of the Earth."

While the following IS an incitement to violence:

"After you leave this room, I want you to kill the first Jew you see."

The key difference is immediacy and plausibility of violence resulting from the speech.

Personally, I believe public language that even implies a desire for genocide should not be protected speech, but that's me...

What a despicable man. These kinds of a$$hats are hopefully inconsequential, and on the wane. But they do need to be watched.