In leaked audio, Michigan GOP chair laughed off criticism of Holocaust analogy tweet
Kristina Karamo, Michigan GOP chair and former candidate for Michigan secretary of state, on Oct. 1, 2022. Photo by Emily Elconin/Getty Images and screenshot
By Jacob Kornbluh June 23, 2023
The head of the Michigan Republican Party privately mocked outrage over a social media post that compared proposals to tighten gun laws to Nazi laws targeting Jews before the Holocaust, calling it “hilarious.”
In a leaked audio of a May 17 event, first shared on Wednesday by The Daily Beast, Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Michigan GOP, doubled down on a meme the party’s official Twitter and Facebook pages shared in March reading, “Before they collected all these wedding rings, they collected all the guns.” The image showed rings taken from Holocaust victims.
The Anti-Defamation League and the Republican Jewish Coalition condemned the post as offensive and unacceptable.
Speaking at a Montcalm County Lincoln Day Dinner, Karamo rejected the criticism as “completely hilarious” and mentioned “basic things like history” to defend the meme, according to the report.
“They’re still going on and on about that, ‘Are you going to apologize?’” she said. “I’m like, ‘really, are you guys still going on about this?’ I get this mail and it’s about how I’m encouraging white supremacy and xenophobia, all this.”
“I just laugh so hard,” Karamo said.
Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who had urged the local party to take the post down, said of Karamo’s comments, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging,” in a text exchange with the Forward.
In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League accused Karamo, whom former President Donald Trump endorsed after she said there was “overwhelming evidence” of election fraud in the 2020 election, of invoking antisemitic tropes about Jewish power. During her campaign for secretary of state last year, Karamo called Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson a “puppet” controlled by Jewish billionaire George Soros. She also claimed Benson, who is Jewish, and the state’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, were “all part of the Soros minion club.”
Soros, a Hungarian-born Democratic megadonor and Holocaust survivor, has long been the subject of antisemitic attacks from the far right.
Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, is expected to speak on Sunday at another Michigan GOP Lincoln Day Dinner, an annual celebration and fundraising event for the Republican Party, hosted by Oakland County Republicans.
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