New comments emerge from Jason Lewis’s past as a conservative Minnesota broadcaster.
Before launching his 2020 campaign to become a Minnesota senator, Jason Lewis spent more than two decades as a conservative broadcaster. While in 2016 he parlayed his media perch into a single term as GOP congressman for the state’s second district, covering suburban tracts south of Minneapolis, his true career has been as a “conservative bomb-thrower” rousing and exciting a radio audience. His less-noticed television work centers on his time as the right leaning co-host on a Crossfire-style talk show that aired in the mid-‘90s and early ‘00s. In recently surfaced footage of an episode from 1999, Lewis casts doubt on the need for hate crime statutes in dismissive tones, at one point describing the hypothetical burning of a cross in a Black couple’s lawn as “trespassing.”
During the April 1999 episode of the Sunday morning show, Face to Face, Lewis—who is challenging incumbent Democrat Sen. Tina Smith this November—railed against legislation introduced in the state senate that would expand Minnesota’s existing hate crime statue. At the time of taping, only a few offenses, like assault, were eligible for prosecution in the state as hate crimes. The bill would have widened the pool to include more than a dozen other crimes, including trespassing or interference with religious observance. Richard Cohen, a Democratic state senator who introduced the measure, appeared on the show to promote it.
Lewis’s opposition was forceful. “You’re balkanizing America here, Dick,” he said. Victims of crimes not motivated by hate, Lewis reasoned, would be relegated to second class citizens with less protections than hate crime victims, calling it “un-American.” Continue reading.