Senate candidate creates firestorm with anti-Semitic campaign
"With Jews we lose."
That's the signature slogan of Kentucky write-in Senate candidate Robert Ransdell, an avowed white supremacist who's created a firestorm with his racist campaign advertisements.
After posters bearing the slogan began appearing in Florence, a small town in Northern Kentucky, local residents complained.
"It's ignorance. Complete ignorance and hate," Kentucky resident Drea, who asked to keep her surname private, told WLWT-TV. "I could drive by it and act like oh whatever it's just some idiot. But when does one idiot become 20?"
Randall offered no apologies.
"I believe there is no such thing as racial equality," he told the station. "You see that in our cities every day."
He added that he'd received a lot of "positive feedback" on the Internet. "Like I said, we're going to find out what kind of feedback we get once we go out and take it to the people here in the state of Kentucky," he said.
Ransdell doesn't stand a chance of winning Kentucky's competitive Senate race, which pits Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.
But with his anti-Semitic message, he's certainly managed to stir the pot. And it's a message he's had plenty of practice delivering.
According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, Ransdell has been active for years in groups like the National Alliance, a hate group based in West Virginia, and Stormfront, dubbed the "largest racist web form in the world" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In 2012, according to the Anti-Defamation League, Ransdell posted flyers at the University of Cincinnati offering a reward to anyone who could who could get Holocaust survivior and author Elie Wiesel, who was visiting Cincinnati at the time, to show the tattoo he received at Auschwitz as proof of his ordeal.
His campaign website, www.whiteguard.us, says Ransdell "seeks to show White people the facts regarding the Jewish role in America's decline as well as highlight the destructive effects that multiculturalism, diversity, and political correctness have had on this country."
The website expands on Ransdell's anti-semitic message, warning that American media are "almost completely" owned and controlled by Jews. It also details Ransdell's thoughts on gay people, undocumented immigrants, black people, HIV-positive people, and others. (Spoiler alert: they're quite offensive.)
On Wednesday, Ransdell delivered a racist, anti-semitic tirade at an event that brought high school journalism students to the University of Kentucky. After holding forth for a few minutes, Ransdell's microphone was cut and he left the stage.
Kathy Johnson, a spokeswoman for the university, said the school "was not aware of the content of his remarks prior to him speaking and does not condone or endorse any political platform or agenda," according to the Herald-Leader.