White’s evolution may seem familiar to those who have followed the journey of former progressive icons like Naomi Wolf and Russell Brand into what Naomi Klein called, in her great book “Doppelganger,” the “mirror world” of far right. However, more than anyone, White demonstrates how this mirror world is consuming the Republican Party, as delegates to the Minnesota Republican convention on Saturday vote overwhelmingly to support him for the Senate. Discussing his victory on his podcast “Please Call Me Crazy,” White thanked Jones and his Infowars website. “A lot of Infowars fans were part of the Republican Party delegation Saturday at the convention,” White said.
Bannon, who introduced him to the convention via video, was even more central to White’s triumph. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Bannon urged his listeners to take control of the Republican Party by flooding it at the precinct level, and across the country they responded in droves. “Suddenly, people who had never expressed interest in party politics began calling local GOP headquarters or gathering at county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,” ProPublica reported in 2021. White’s endorsement appears to be the result of this strategy.
“Right now, there is a very motivated core of Alex Jones, Steve Bannon-style Republicans” in Minnesota, said Michael Brodkorb, a former vice chairman of the state Republican Party who despairs of his MAGA transformation. They’re the ones who “show up on nice Saturday afternoons and spend, you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars to attend these conventions.”
On Wednesday evening, I spoke to White for almost an hour and a half. He insisted he was not anti-Semitic because his comments were only about Jewish elites, who he said were exploiting ordinary Jews. He was eager to talk about central banks, the CIA and young black men’s growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party. It was harder to engage him about his political transformation because he insisted he hadn’t changed much. In 2020, he noted, one of the marches he led was the one in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis; he has long viewed the Fed as the source of many ills. During the Black Lives Matter protests, he said, a common refrain was that “the whole system is to blame.” In his view, the MAGA movement represents an equally broad indictment of the status quo. The “populist nationalist movement that has arisen around and with Donald Trump and others like Steve Bannon rejects the way American corporations, the business elite and the permanent political class have operated for several decades,” he said. he declares.
