Sex Therapist Who Wanted to Put Jews in Concentration Camps Loses TX Race—Because You Can't Go Full Antisemite in America and Win.
Maureen Galindo's loss proves one of my deepest held convictions
Maureen Galindo, the sex therapist most famous for saying that as Congresswoman, she would convert an ICE detention center into an internment camp for Zionists, has lost her Texas primary to the moderate Democrat in the race, Johnny Garcia.
“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote on Instagram. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
Galindo, who was ahead of her opposition in recent polls, lost her race by nearly 30 points. And this despite winning a much larger primary in March with 29% of the vote, beating Garcia, who had 27% and resulting in yesterday’s runoff.
Her views on Jews were not known during the primary, say insiders who followed it closely. “What I can tell from previous candidate forums, she talked about the 1%, she talked about going after Trump and ICE,” Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, told JTA. “None of the stuff on Zionism, from what I could tell, was ever mentioned.”
Yet between the primary in March and the runoff yesterday, Galindo promised to imprison Zionists, blamed Israel for ICE, said Jews control Hollywood and the media, said Israelis were trying to do a genocide in America, and said Johnny Garcia was controlled by Israel or Zionist interests.
Galindo of course claimed she was not antisemitic, only anti-Zionist. Like many anti-Israel Leftists, she insisted she was saving the real Jews from the Zionists.
Yet she was reviled by her own party. AOC called her out as a bigot, and James Talarico refused to campaign with her.
As a result of her antisemitism, she went from being the frontrunner to losing by 30 points.
This is obviously welcome news, and not just for the people of Texas. It proves one of my deepest held convictions: You can’t go full antisemite in America and win elections. And that’s apparently still true in Democratic primaries—at least, in Texas.
The American people have a deep-seated disgust for antisemitism. Despite its proliferation among the elites, average Americans pride themselves on feeling protective of their Jewish neighbors. Judaism consistently ranks at the top of the list when Americans rank their view of religious groups.
That’s not new. We were seen as founding partners by our Christian neighbors for the first 250 years of Jewish life in America, as I discovered while writing by new book, The Jews and the Left, which comes out next week. Even in the short periods of American history when it did crop up among the elites, at country clubs and in universities, antisemitism was rarely mainstream and never state sponsored.
Maureen Galindo is far from the first candidate to be shown the door by American voters for her views on Jews. Henry Ford is another good example: Like Maureen Galindo, he thought he could use antisemitism to win an election. He ended up having to renounce it to even be considered.
Ford, an industrialist and magnate and founder of the Ford Motor Company, was a heroic figure in the American imagination and hero of working-class dignity. He invented the assembly line and standardized auto parts which made cars affordable for millions and millions of Americans.
But Ford was also a rank, outspoken, raging antisemite. He didn’t hire Jews if he could help it, and from 1919 through 1927, he published a weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which was nothing short of a “paper pogrom” as Ford biographer William C. Richards called it, for the outpouring of antisemitism it contained.
Ford was a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite, believing Jews were responsible for all the world’s woes and wars. As far back as 1914, Ford was blaming Jews for WWI. “I know who started this war—the German-Jewish bankers,” he told a Jewish friend, and slapped his coat pocket. “I have the evidence here—facts! I can’t give them out yet because I haven’t got them all. I’ll have them soon!”
Five years later, an executive at Ford’s tractor plant was making a dinner of a candy bar when Ford came into his office and perched on the edge of his desk.
“What’s up that you’re here at this hour?” Ford asked, reaching over and helping himself to a bite of the man’s candy. Ford chewed for a minute and then scowled.
“This stuff isn’t as good as it used to be, is it?” He said, dropping the chocolate back in its foil casing. “The Jews have taken hold of it,” he muttered, standing up. “They’re cheapening it to make more money out of it.” He went red in the face. “I know who makes wars. The International Jewish bankers arrange them so they can make money out of them. We’re going to tell the whole story one of these days and show them up!”
Thus was launched The Dearborn Independent. “The Talmud was translated. European and domestic sources were tapped for information. He came into possession of the Protocols of Zion. Everyone who ever had been done a real or imaginary injustice by a Jew wrote to tell him about it. Articles were brought from special investigators. The ensuing 91 articles were issued in book form, 200,000 words to an edition, and widely distributed. A special printing in leather was prepared for a key list,” Richards reported.
According to the paper’s editor, E. G. Pipp, the whole operation had a sinister cause: Ford wanted to be president and hoped to win votes by attacking the Jews. “When Ford first launched the attack on the Jews he was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, firmly so in his own mind,” Pipp told the New York Times. “He figured that the prejudice in the small communities throughout the United States was so strong against the Jews that he would gain three, four or five votes there for every Jewish vote he would lose.”
But Ford was wrong about small town America. It turned out that the number of non-Jews who would vote for an unrepentant antisemite was even smaller than the number of Jews, and in 1921, Ford ordered a stop to the same anti-Jewish articles he thought would help him win the presidency.
Even in 1921, going full antisemite was political suicide. It’s not that there were enough Jews to tank an electoral bid; there were simply not enough antisemites in America to make up the difference. As soon as Ford was defeated, in 1924, the articles resumed at pace.
Ford’s exuberant publishing of antisemitic articles was finally put to rest by a defamation lawsuit, which settled when Ford issued an apology to the Jewish people and a retraction. Ford blamed his editor, a claim belied by his own lawyer; when informed of Ford’s apology, Ford’s lawyer said, “Harry, I have a feeling someone is spoofing you. I know Mr. Ford’s attitude pretty well.” American Jews apparently thought the whole thing was pretty funny and wrote ditties about it (“I was sad and I was blue, but now I’m just as good as you, since Henry Ford apologized to me, I’ve thrown away my little Chevrolet, and bought myself a Ford Coupe”).
You can’t go full antisemite and win elections in America.
There was another audience for the Dearborn Independent, though. Ford would go on to be a big player in the Third Reich. Hitler himself expressed his admiration for “Heinrich Ford” to a reporter in 1923. “We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian fascist platform,” Hitler went on. “We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany.”
Parts of this have been excerpted from The Left and the Jews. Order here:
Galindo still got around 40% of the vote. That is what the problem is. She may have lost by 20 points, but the percentage that voted for her is not small.
Amen! It's not just being a full on antisemite. You can't espouse overt hateful bigotry against any group and be welcomed in polite society or our mainstream politics. Even in party primaries, it's incredibly rare for somebody to win if they fully drop the mask and the dogwhistle and go full open bigot.
This hate is a violation of our universal moral TABOOS and the vast majority of Americans, outside of the most radical and rabid hyper-partisans, abhor and reject it.
Unfortunately we're seeing this hate normalize on the margins and punch above its weight class, though it's mostly because of a Collective Illusion that makes it seem more tolerated than it actually is. We must keep exposing that only a tiny fringe of people actually hold these eliminationist, taboo views, and only a slightly larger fringe finds them socially acceptable. And we must reimpose a "moral guilt by association", so politicians and pundits can't carefully craft their words while openly mainstreaming and laundering the explicit bigotry espoused by their political allies.
If we can collectively and vocally reject and ostracize this hate, and everyone who espouses and sanitizes it, as we did to marginalize and defeat the KKK, we will #MakeTaboosTabooAgain.