The Democratic incumbent, Steve Simon, running for re-election, and prominent national Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias – both Jewish – were depicted in a promotional video for Crockett’s campaign.
The footage portrayed the two politicians as the Grady Twins from the horror movie “The Shining”, based on a novel by Stephen King, and being controlled with puppet strings held by notorious billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is of Jewish heritage.
A caption on the image read, “let’s wreck elections for ever and ever and ever”.
Kim Crockett’s team played the video at the state’s GOP convention last weekend, where the former general counsel for the Center for the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based conservative think tank, also received her party’s endorsement. The state’s Republican primary will be held on 9 August.
‘Jewish Puppet Master’
The imagery fed into popular conspiracy theories claiming that “rich and powerful Jews”, like Soros, “work behind the scenes, plotting to control countries and manipulate global events”, the Anti-Defamation League stated.
“The ‘Jewish puppet master’ is a longstanding and deeply anti-Semitic trope. The stereotypes Crockett is using to fuel her campaign are centuries old and have caused incredible harm to the Jewish community both here in the United States and across the world”, the Minnesota DFL said in a statement.
At the convention, Crockett also recalled the US Civil War, as she made reference to the November 2020 general election, saying, “Can we as the party of Lincoln unite to defeat the party of slavery and tyranny?”
Regarding voting in the 2020 presidential election, which saw Democrat Joe Biden beat Republican Donald Trump, running for re-election, Crockett echoed previous GOP criticism of Simon.
According to the Republicans, he took advantage of the coronavirus public health crisis to change election laws, loosening voting regulations to make it easier to vote absentee. This is one of the aspects of the 2020 election that Trump and the GOP claim opened the door to increased instances of “voting irregularities”.
“Simon used COVID as cover to change how we vote and then changed how the roll was counted. We need to return to the civic traditions that unite us, like voting in person and rejecting the insecure chaotic absentee balloting system and vulnerable wireless equipment connected to the Internet”, Kim Crockett stated.
Elias, ex-lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, is known for having spearheaded several Democratic legal challenges to new Republican-led voting restrictions in swing states like Georgia and Wisconsin. In Minnesota, residents voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election by seven percentage points, with the state’s Supreme Court tossing a GOP challenge to the results.
After the 2020 election, which Trump claimed was “rigged” to favour his Democratic opponent, Republicans denounced last-minute changes to state election rules. They also launched a series of measures through GOP-led legislatures to shore up ID rules, poll watchers' powers, and other "election integrity" provisions, while endorsing candidates who vow to implement tighter voting restrictions.
As for George Soros, the Hungarian-born hedge fund boss who is said to have funnelled over $125 million into a Democratic super PAC in 2020, he is routinely depicted in conspiracy theories as secretly controlling numerous aspects of society. The prolific activity of Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF), which spent decades funding “civil society initiatives” in dozens of countries in the Third World and the post-Soviet space, has since been denounced as a form of unwanted interference in their internal affairs by some nations.
Russia banned the OSF’s operations in 2015. In 2018, his native Hungary booted the Soros-backed Central European University out of the country.