In late June, the Minnesota Republican Party quietly adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism to the party platform at its state convention.
The adoption was started by Louis Fine, a 32-year-old filmmaker, who got onto the party’s platform committee as his resolution began working its way through the process.
“There’s a system of checks and balances that winnows resolutions all the way up until they get to the state platform committee,” said Fine.
The multi-step process started at the precinct caucus level in the winter, and the resolution worked its way through the process as it was adopted by the appropriate levels along the way.
“This process is done in this way to make sure that a million resolutions don’t get all the way to the end of the pipeline,” Fine said. “It’s a kind of constant filtration that happens.”
Fine was so invested in the resolution getting adopted as part of the platform that he became part of the platform committee as the 5th Congressional District representative.
“This just feels like an existential issue for our community, and so I just did whatever it took to make sure that this got through,” he said. “That required taking on responsibility, not just for this resolution, but for basically everyone’s resolutions in my area and then statewide. But it was worth it to me to get it done because it was important to have this.”
Although the resolution passed, Fine said that it’s non-binding. The resolution won’t prevent Republicans or candidates running as Republicans from holding and sharing antisemitic views, but it offers a party-backed definition of what antisemitism is.
“I think there’s a lot of really good people who need tools to plainly demonstrate what values they actually align with and don’t,” Fine said. “That’s one of the most important utilities of this resolution on the Republican Party side is that, with this specificity, comes a stick for all the conservatives who are not antisemitic to draw a line in the sand.
“Because when Royce White goes out and blames me for controlling the banks, the media, Hollywood, entertainment, music, sports, law, the president, war, weather, space lasers, when they want to cast him as a shadow over the whole party, now everyone from the delegation to the everyday voter to party leadership can hold up the party platform and say, ‘Actually, that’s Royce’s views. He does not represent us.’”