GOP Candidate's Book About Anne Frank Loving Jesus Is Most Antisemitic Thing We've Heard Since Yesterday
Things are pretty bad, y'all.
On her 1997 double-live album Living In Clip , Ani DiFranco and her drummer Andy Stochansky tell a road story of hearing live some weirdo overly evangelical Christian musician couple, who played an utterly bizarre song DiFranco and Stochansky quickly realized was about whether Anne Frank found Jesus before she died. You know, in the Holocaust. For DiFranco it was clearly a weirdass experience, an "Are you kidding me, is this really happening?" moment.
We only bring this up to note that disturbed white evangelicals have been bandying this idea around for a while now. So in the year 2022, as we watch conservative white MAGA Republicans become more and more openly antisemitic, it's not shocking that a Texas Republican running for Congress apparently wrote a book about that very same subject.
His name is Johnny Teague, and he's running in Texas's 7th Congressional District, which is in the Houston area. His book is called The Lost Diary Of Anne Frank . Yes, really. It's about Frank's time in the concentration camps. Where she becomes a Christian.
Listen to this "Choose Your Own Adventure" shit:
Published by Las Vegas-based publisher Histria Books, the speculative book attempts to faithfully extend the writing style of Frank’s “original” diary entries into her experiences in the camps: it “picks up where her original journey left off,” according to the promotional summary. [...]
“I would love to learn more about Jesus and all He faced in His dear life as a Jewish teacher,” Teague’s Anne Frank character muses at one point, saying that her dad had tried to get her a copy of the New Testament. Anne’s father Otto Frank, who in real life did survive the Holocaust, seems to have been spared a tragic fate in Teague’s telling because of his interest in learning about Jesus. [...]
By book’s end, Anne is firm in her belief that “every Jewish man or woman should ask” questions like “Where is the Messiah? … Did He come already, and we didn’t recognize Him?”
Yeah, it's just as demented as you imagined.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency explains that this brain-wizard's website features such important issues as "Close the Border" and his religious belief that fossil fuels come from Jesus. Not the brightest guy.
You might wonder what would possess a person to write something like this, but trust us when we say it's just the sick white conservative evangelical mindset.
Consider that while this story is circulating, Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano's wife is out there saying that she and her husband — the vilest kind of brainwashed white conservative fundamentalists — "probably love Israel more than a lot of Jews do." That came in response to questions about her husband's ties to the social network Gab and its disgusting antisemitic CEO Andrew Torba. You know, Gab, where the Tree of Life synagogue mass murderer liked to hang out.
Meanwhile, here's one of Mastriano's daftest and most bigoted advisers, weighing in on Mastriano's Jewish opponent Josh Shapiro:
“Headlines like this are so disingenuous. Josh Shapiro is at best a secular Jew in the same way Joe Biden is a secular Catholic — both are extremists for gender transition surgeries on minors and no limits on abortion. Doug Mastriano is for wholesome family values and freedom.”
— Jenna Ellis 🍊🦅 (@Jenna Ellis 🍊🦅) 1666374972
Oh yes, love it when white evangelical Christians, who absolutely 100 percent are taught from a young age that they are superior to all others, deign to tell Jewish people whether or not they're Jewish. The only response necessary is "Oh go fuck yourself," but if you want an excellent look at this phenomenon and how many decades it's been going on, Noah Berlatsky wrote about it on Aaron Rupar's newsletter Public Notice.
These people think most Jewish people are bad Jews. They think they, as white conservative Christians, are better Jews than Jewish people. Hey, remember how Rudy Giuliani thinks he is personally a better Jew than George Soros? We had almost repressed the memory for a second there. And as Berlatsky reminds us, such people are bolstered in their beliefs by Jewish conservatives like Ben Shapiro, who is in Berlatsky's words an "orthodox Jew who has dedicated his career to advancing christofascism." It's kind of his thing.
Politico Playbook reports this morning that in Nevada, Republican Senate nominee Adam Laxalt's campaign is having to say it's sorry for "antisemitic tweets linked to a recently fired staffer who said Jews are part of a 'cult' rather than religion." Herschel Walker is fine with Kanye's support, and we all know about Kanye's delusional antisemitism.
And last night the Washington Post had an entire thing about how Jewish leaders are calling on GOP leaders to reject antisemitic comments, just in general, because there are so fucking many of them, including Donald Trump's recent disgusting attack on American Jewish people, threatening that they should start loving him "before it's too late." People are specifically calling on Mehmet Oz to distance himself from Mastriano, but apparently so far he can't be bothered.
This is the context in which we're learning that some hick candidate in Texas wrote a book about Anne Frank accepting Jesus as her personal lord and savior in the concentration camp.
Things are not great, y'all.
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I guess that's never crossed their minds even once. If they don't believe it, just go ahead and remind them they're fascists too. Of course none of that works since their minds will remain as unruffled as a lake at dawn.
As if Anne Frank didn't have enough on her plate in those last days when she was so ill and having to sleep on the top bunk.