As part of the maelstrom of hate-mail I received after publishing an article on pro-Hamas events in McAllen, Robin Vargas, who is running for Texas Senate District 27 in 2024, under the Green Party’s banner, sent me a message on Instagram asking, “Dude what the fuck is this?” She was responding to my sharing of the article on my page. I told her to read it and find out. Her response was to ask me, in a hostile tone of voice, if I was “a Jew?” This isn’t surprising given that her campaign social media account, robinvargas4texsen, is devoted to publishing antisemitic propaganda.
Are you a Jew? I read it so your okay with the death of 1000s of women and children and elders at the hands of Israel?? All because Hamas doesn’t ca…
The message preview cuts off there, and I did not get a screenshot of her entire message because she, shortly thereafter, “unsent” the messages, so they’re no longer visible in the thread. But I remember her ending it by suggesting that me and Israelis were playing the “victim.” If you doubt my account, you can message her at vargas4txsen on Instagram and ask her what she meant and why she unsent the texts.
Admittedly, being incensed by her gall, I replied by calling her an unflattering term beginning with the letter ‘C,’ attached with a comment on her height, which she reported to Instagram’s speech-police, prompting them to add strikes to my account. I regret my remark. Notwithstanding she had the nerve to snitch on me after sending antisemitic messages. Vargas also had a friend comment on a post of mine, insulting me, and referencing my private message to Vargas. I reported the comment to Instagram, as a test, and sure enough they “found it did not violate” their “community standards.”
Social media companies favoring pro-Hamas propaganda, and unfairly punishing anti-Hamas voices, has been a consistent fact in this current fight, alongside police turning a blind eye to their vandalism and thuggery. Organized social media mobs descended on my various social media pages to report them, as I received multiple “warnings” and “restrictions” on my accounts, which hasn’t happened since I spoke out against UTRGV’s handling of their football referendum. Nevertheless, this campaign was five times larger than the university’s paid trolls, although there is definitely overlap in who’s doing the harassment. Vargas participated in this antisemitic social media mob.
She did not block me from her personal page, but she curiously blocked my accounts from her campaign page. Perhaps because she dedicates it to sharing antisemitic propaganda, couched between the occasional banal, local political event, which is just window dressing for her actual anti-Jewish aims. Circumventing her block on Nov. 29, Vargas uploaded a video clip to her campaign Instagram ‘story’ captioned, “Head of Oxfam DESTROYS Israel” in which Israel is accused of “collective punishment.”
Another video clip uploaded to Vargas’ campaign story mocks the reality pointed to by defenders of Israel, of it being the only democracy in the Middle East (other than Kurdistan, which is never mentioned by fools like Vargas), displaying an educator who was arrested for comments he made on social media. It sarcastically captions the clip, “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” alongside three Israeli flag emojis.
The next clip shows an individual saying, “Folks, while everybody is focused on what’s happening in Israel…” then proceeding to discuss supposed legislation regarding internet use/providers. I’ve noticed many anti-Israel voices have been using this refrain to suggest that one, too much attention is being given to the horrors of Jewish people, and that they must possess undue influence for so much attention to be given them; and two, that people shouldn’t care about these horrors at all.
Next is a series of video clips displaying the corporations that “support the genocide in Palestine,” which is nothing but support for antisemitic boycotts. They include Walmart, KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonalds and others, leaving only I suppose vegan and vegetarian “markets,” movements which if you’ll notice are proving to be quite sinisterly antisemitic amidst this crisis. We’ll see more of it as events intensity.
Vargas’ next story clip shares a call for art and poetry by the staunchly antisemitic, Red Star Tx, announcing an event for people to recite the poetry of Palestinian artists. This was done, curiously, only two days after I published an essay remembering Professor Edward Said, which included excerpts of Mahmoud Darwish’s statements and poetry, the National Poet of Palestine. You guys are welcome for the idea.
A highlight reel on Vargas’ Instagram titled “2023” shares a post by the notorious British Holocaust denier, Jeremy Corbyn. The next in this highlight reel shares the blood libel that led to Jews being killed around the world, that of the Israelis supposedly bombing a hospital, killing 500. This discredited story was retracted but Vargas still has it up, featured in the “2023” highlights. The last clip in the highlight real is of text written by Vargas. It’s captioned, “FREE PALESTINE. P.s. Boycott Black Friday please,” followed by a lame, inauthentic message to “Palestinians.”
Vargas’ vitriol and venom resembled another message I received at around the same time from one, Sandra C. Pratt, who until I revealed her hateful messages publicly had described herself as a “chef” on her public Facebook biography where she also boasted her Instagram page but which she no longer lists. Pratt said,
“Don’t you have something better to do??? Than just bully protestors ? I didn’t see any Hamas flags wtf are you talking about.
Just because you’re a Jew doesn’t mean you can always play the victim.”
Throughout Jewish history, the question, “Are you a Jew?” has held painful associations, which antisemites understand fully well. It was asked in Nazi Germany and throughout Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 40s. It was also asked of Daniel Pearl, a young Washington Post journalist who was beheaded by Al-Qaeda agents, in Pakistan, in 2002. The ghouls released the video of his beheading. Before killing him, they asked him the question. Daniel Pearl’s last words were,
“I am a Jew.”
The question was asked recently by rabid rioters in Dagestan in October who hunted Jewish people at an airport, after learning that an Israeli flight was set to land. Some Jewish passengers aboard a shuttle bus that was broken into lied about their ethnicity in order to survive that day. The question is now asked in hostile tones that suggest violence, at universities and major cities across the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany and Australia, by goons harassing those standing up for the Jewish self-determination and opposing the Jew-hatred underlying open support for Hamas.
Vargas and Pratt’s messages came at a time when such attacks were just beginning to spike in the immediate weeks following Oct. 7. They’re standard of middle-class radicals worldwide which falls right in line with Vargas’ Green Party affiliation. I first met her when I chaired the No Border Wall Coalition in 2019. She was a volunteer for the student group, the Environmental Awareness Club (EAC), based at UTRGV. She possessed no political skills, seeming to be there just for the ride and vanity.
She now apparently runs monthly Vegan potlucks held at the Unitarian Universalist fellowship in San Juan which she falsely claims credit for starting. They were actually initiated by my good friend, Nabi de Angulo, back in 2019. Nabi who is a lovely violinist and singer, also founded a community garden with the help of her sister, Martha, at her former place of employment, H.O.P.E. Family Clinic, where she was a psychoanalyst, as well as starting a garden on the grounds of the U.U., where she and Martha attended, inaugurated in the Spring of 2019.
Later in 2019, Nabi recommended me to the leadership at the U.U., talking them into letting me speak on a Sunday morning, all without my knowledge. She just believed her congregation needed to hear me. When she finally revealed her covert plans to me, she told me to just talk about anything I wanted. I gave a sermon on Dec. 1, 2019, on the history of the denomination and its ties to the American Revolution, which I’ve always admired.
Vargas, who couldn’t utter a single coherent sentence on the history of the U.U., is using its platform to prop-up her laughable candidacy. I would advise the U.U. against this affiliation, or at the very least to revisit it, and robustly debate it.
Vargas is not a serious candidate and has zero chance of beating the incumbent, Morgan La Mantia, nor even La Mantia’s best challenger. La Mantia beat a “progressive” Democrat, Sarah Stapleton Barrera, in the primary, narrowly winning the general by less than one point. Word on the street is that Stapleton’s family is running the RGV Green Party.
If true, Vargas would just be acting as a useful idiot in a revenge play against La Mantia, i.e. to snag enough votes away for her to lose to a Republican. Other than this, Vargas’ candidacy is a joke, as well as a distraction for her, given she’s nothing better to do. Meanwhile, the Green Party will take anybody, as they did with the insane Vanessa Tijerina, just to keep them afloat and “relevant.”
Sheldon Weisfeld Sr. is a defense attorney with more than 50 years of experience. He’s still working, looks great and has given me the privilege of calling him “Unc.” He’s my best friend’s great uncle and he’s accepted me as one of his own. I told Unc about my incident with Vargas. He told me he’d recently been asked to donate to her campaign. Having originally agreed, he said, “She’s not getting a penny from this Jew boy,” using self-deprecating humor to stand up against Vargas’ antisemitism.
At a Green Party candidate event in Brownsville, which took place a couple of weeks ago, Unc asked her about the altercation between us and why she was asking people if they were Jewish. He began by affirming that he himself was Jewish and that as such she surely couldn’t take his money. After hiding behind being affiliated with the U.U., Vargas responded to Unc by saying that I, “put people in danger” with my articles.
Unc brought up the fact that the rallies had violent goons patrolling the events. Vargas responded, “Oh you mean the protectors?” Unc said, “Oh yeah, the protectors,” and got up and left. Uncle Sheldon perfectly illustrates the attitude everybody should have towards Vargas’ “candidacy.”
Don’t give a single cent to the Green Party, who has a long history of running antisemites/lunatics for office, or anybody running under their banner. Donate and support the Socialist Workers Party, a working-class party that is leading the political fight against Jew-hatred as a life and death question for humanity.
The following is an excerpt from an SWP pamphlet on the question of how to respond to fascist and racist attacks against our class. In it, central leader, Farrell Dobbs (1907-1983), educates us on the tactic of countermobilization. He concludes with a warning to the young socialists (who are now the elders and leaders of the SWP) about not confusing crazy, militant right-wing extremists who were trying to speak on college campuses at the time, against leftist cancel attempts, as “the real thing” by which he meant fascism, drawing on the party’s experience of fighting American fascists in the union struggles of the 1930s.
Dobbs anticipates politicians like Vargas and her ilk, right down to the color, and type, of jacket:
“There are two errors you can fall into if you don’t keep this in mind. If you develop tactics based on the expectation that you’re going to be facing this lunatic fringe, you’ll find that you have the wrong strategic and tactical weapons in hand when you face the real thing. You can also obstruct the education of the masses about the threat of fascism because you alert the masses to the wrong creature. You get them on the lookout for monkeys when an elephant is going to charge them.
When the real thing comes along, it’s not going to extend you the courtesy of being obvious like the Nazis in Los Angeles. They’re not going to start by throwing bombs at you so that you can mobilize against them before they have a following. They are going to be more subtle.
They will claim that they are going to lead the masses out of the crisis created by capitalism. They will act in the name of promises that the masses believe will improve their desperate situation. They are going to pin the blame for the crisis on scapegoats [like Jews] . . . By demagogically promising to do things for the people that they have no intention of doing, and by singling out scapegoats, the fascists aim to lead a demoralized and disoriented middle class, segments of the working class, and the lumpenproletariat to crush the organizations of the working class. Their fundamental aim will be to use some of the victims of capitalism to mobilize a force to crush the struggle capacity of the working class and perpetuate capitalist rule.
When you run up against the real thing, they’re not going to start by putting on Nazi uniforms and swastika emblems, and they’re not going to wear sheets, either. They’ll look more like the man [or woman] in the gray flannel suit than the ultraright we see today.”