HE ONCE HAD HAL TURNER AS A CAMPAIGN MGR. HAS DOUBTS ABOUT THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT, AND NOW HE WANTS TO UNSEAT NJ'S 1ST BLACK SENATOR

Some of us have dealt with Murray Sabrin well before One People’s Project started. He will not win.

One People’s Project

A libertarian college professor who once had a white supremacist as his campaign manager when he ran for Governor, is now mounting his third run for the U.S. Senate this year, vying for the Republican nomination to run against incumbent Senator Cory Booker.

According to NJ.com, Sabrin sent an email to supporters Wednesday, saying he is running because he wants “to begin a serious, mature discussion about America’s future.”

Sabrin, a native of Germany and the son of Holocaust survivors, is a faculty member at a Ramapo College and has been involved in New Jersey politics since 1997. He made history that year when as a Libertarian Party candidate for New Jersey Governor, became the first third party candidate to appear in official debates with the other two major party candidates. He has also run in two Republican primary campaigns for the U.S. Senate, the first in 2000 and the second in 2008, ultimately losing to other GOP candidates.

But his runs come with controversy. His campaign manager for his 1997 gubernatorial run was white supremacist Hal Turner, who will later go on to host an internet radio show where he would routinely call for the murders of those he was against politically. Turner would eventually serve almost three years in prison for soliciting the murders of  three federal judges in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Sabrin, who was the subject of a protest during an appearance in New Brunswick, NJ in 1999, during a prior Senate run while ironically Turner was making a run for Congress, has maintained that he was unaware of Turner’s activity at the time he worked with him.

Sabrin, however does maintain some questionable views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a defense of Rand Paul who during his 2010 run for the US Senate expressed opposition to private businesses being subject to the Act’s non-discrimination clause, Sabrin suggested that the Act actually discriminates against minority groups and enriches racists by not noting that minorities can simply avoid businesses that discriminate against them. “Just because a business is “open to the public” it does not mean that the federal government may force owners to welcome anyone who wants to be a customer,” he wrote. “Moreover, as a youngster when I watched the news about the civil rights movement on television during the 1950s and 1960s I wondered why black people wanted to patronize racist business owners.”

Cory Booker, who won his seat in October in a special election to finish the term of Frank Lautenberg who died in June, is the first African-American U.S. Senator for the State of New Jersey and one of two African-Americans in the Senate.