Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rae Hung received the maximum $1,800 campaign contribution from Michael Beyer, who was suspended from the livestreaming platform Twitch last year after comments surfaced of him referring to Jews as a “demonic ethnicity.”
“Jewish is not an ethnicity,” Beyer, who goes by the online moniker “Mike from PA,” said during a 2024 livestream. “This constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity, wholly invented.”
Beyer later apologized for his remarks, saying he misspoke and that he meant to speak about Zionist identity, not Jewish identity.
Huang is a minister, community organizer and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She has no plans to return the contribution, campaign spokesperson Emel Shaikh said.
Huang and Beyer have met twice, Shaikh said, including at a Los Angeles chapter meeting of the DSA.
“Mike has been working to uplift progressive candidates across the country and Rae is among the other folks he’s donated to or platformed,” Shaikh said.
In her endorsement questionnaire response when she was seeking the DSA’s backing, Huang outlined her support for Palestinians, saying she lived with a Palestinian family in the West Bank nearly 20 years ago.
“We are not free until Palestinian lives are freed,” she said in her response.
Beyer, who streams on Twitch under the username Central_Committee, is from Pennsylvania and recently moved to Los Angeles. He was suspended for a week for his comments.
He said his comments that led to the ban were misconstrued and taken out of context.
“I meant to say the Zionist conception of Israeli identity would be a settler colonial identity,” he said. “I would never support antisemitism in any way.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which had commended Twitch for suspending Beyer, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Huang’s decision to accept the Beyer donation.
Like Huang, Beyer is a member of the DSA’s L.A. chapter, an explicitly anti-Zionist organization committed to Palestinian liberation.
The group has a “Palestine Solidarity Committee” and has written that Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
A United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians last year, a finding that was rejected by the Israeli and U.S. governments.
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