Paul Ryan’s Primary Challenger Hires Widely Recognized Anti-Semite As Spox

A controversial Republican candidate challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced Friday that his campaign hired Kevin MacDonald as its spokesperson, a former professor at California State University, Long Beach who is widely recognized as an anti-Semite.

Paul Nehlen said in a statement that he reached out to MacDonald “after reading some of Dr. MacDonald’s work.”

“We hit it off, and well, here we are,” Nehlen said. “When I broached the subject of Dr. MacDonald’s interest in joining the campaign with my current spokesman, Josh Smith, Josh’s reaction was, ‘The man is a legend. If he wants to help you, tell him yes immediately.'”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, MacDonald was first recognized for his anti-Semitic views when he wrote a series of books arguing that Jews are “a hostile elite” in the U.S. whose goal is to undermine America’s European ties and “destroy Europeans.” He is also the leader of the American Freedom Party, a white supremacist group whose goal is to “to restore and preserve the legitimacy of White identity, White heritage, and expressions of White interests,” according to the ADL.

MacDonald has claimed that Jews are trying to change the “racial hierarchy” in the U.S. by promoting immigration from non-European countries, and he has said that Jewish people lack the “moral idealism” that he claims white people possess. MacDonald has written, appeared on and edited for several openly racist media outlets like the Occidental Observer and The Political Cesspool.

In April 2013 he wrote in the Occidental Observer: “Given the prospect that Jews will continue as an elite hostile toward White America and given the ethnic/racial transformation of the country resulting from importing millions of people who do not identify with the traditional people and culture of the country (presumably the Boston bombers) and often have historical grudges of their own to grind, the future of Whites in America is grim indeed.”

In January 2013, he told the David Duke Show that Jewish people “don’t really have moral principles,” but rather “a set of interests.” In December 2012, he claimed that Jewish people are “opposed to the interests of the traditional people of America.”

“I realize that many good people shy away from saying it, but the reality is that Jews have very aggressively pursued policies that benefit them and are opposed to the interests of the traditional people of America and the West,” he wrote. “And because Jews attained status as an intellectual and media elite, they have been able to have a very large effect on public policy and even on the attitudes of non-Jews.”

MacDonald’s new role with Nehlen’s campaign began Friday, according to a statement from Nehlen’s campaign.

Nehlen himself has a bit of a history of promoting anti-Semitic ideals. When Nehlen challenged Ryan in the 2016 Republican primary in Wisconsin, Breitbart initially endorsed Nehlen, but cut ties after he posted a series of anti-Semitic tweets. At the time he told The Washington Post that “If pro-white is white supremacy, what is pro-Jewish? I reject being called a white supremacist, because clearly pro-white isn’t white supremacy unless pro-Jewish is Jewish supremacy.”

In that primary, he attempted to court Trump voters and lost to Ryan by 68 points.

Correction: This post has been corrected to reflect that Kevin MacDonald is a former professor at California State University, Long Beach.