Black Republican and Trump supporter John James announced this week that he would be challenging incumbent Democrat Sen. Gary Peters in the 202o election.
James is terrible for a number of reasons — he's anti-choice. He supports the Trump tax cuts, which raised taxes on the middle class while cutting them for the wealthy and corporations. He opposes the legalization of medical marijuana. He wants to defund public schools. He displays swastikas in his campaign commercials. In short, he's awful.
But one of the highlights of his failed 2018 campaign against Dem. Sen. Debbie Stabenow came when he accepted a $500 campaign contribution from a white supremacist group.
Metro Times in November reported on Federal Election Commission records that show that the U.S. immigration Reform PAC donated $500 to James' campaign on Sept. 5.
The PAC's founder and president is Petoskey's Mary Lou Tanton, wife of noted white supremacist John Tanton. John Tanton is at the front of the anti-immigration movement and has been labeled a right wing extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Mary Lou Tanton has previously worked with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which is labeled a hate group by the SPLC. One of the group’s main goals is limiting "immigration mostly to northern Europeans," the SPLC states on its site.
John Tanton is FAIR's founder, and through the years he has said things like, "As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?" and “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” according to the SPLC.
Beyond that, he warned of the "Latin onslaught" and hung with eugenicists.
Will James turn to white supremacists to fund his 2020 campaign? He's a Trump guy, so we wouldn't be surprised.
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