LOGAN – Following a calm, well-reasoned and almost scholarly lecture about domestic current affairs and politics during a town hall on Aug. 26, Democratic candidate Peter Crosby took a hard left turn on the topic of foreign affairs.
The challenger running for U.S. Rep. Blake Moore’s 2nd District seat in Congress branded Israel as “a bad ally” and blamed the embattled Jewish state for involving the United States in a misguided war with Iran.
Moreover, he described the ongoing Israeli military action against terrorist factions in Gaza as “genocide.”
“When you target civilians directly and consistently, while doing so with the intent to either wipe out or remove that population from the geographic area in which they live, that’s genocide,” Crosby declared, drawing applause from the like-minded audience.
The Crosby town hall gathering drew a standing-room-only crowd to Community Room B in the Logan Library in the early evening hours of Aug. 26.
In addition to the usual merely curious attendees, the audience included Patrick Belmont, an Independent candidate for Utah House District 3; Utah State University historian F. Ross Peterson; perennial Logan City watcher Gail Yost; and former local Democratic candidates Nancy Huntly and Mary DaSilva.
Giving due credit to the challenger, after promising to admit to any question from the audience to which he didn’t know the answer,
Crosby quickly demonstrated that he had extensive knowledge of facts and figures about federal spending at his fingertips.
The Democratic candidate said that his primary motivations in running for Congress were addressing the dual crises in costs of living and affordable housing; restoring accountability and transparency in the federal government; and protecting the Great Salt Lake.
All of those are a non-partisan issues that should be important to all Utahns, he added.
The candidate wasn’t shy about listing things he opposes, but Cosby’s remarks sometimes came up short in terms of specifics about ways to implement things he favors.
Heading the list of things Crosby is opposed to was President Donald Trump – who he blames for $11 trillion of the current $40 trillion of U.S. national debt – and incumbent U.S. Rep. Blake Moore (R-2nd Dist.), who Crosby said is responsible for about $4 trillion of that amount.
Crosby also spoke out against Trump’s grandstanding on the issue of international tariffs. For example, he said that the current tariff tiff with Canada threatens northern Utah’s $4 to $5 million trade interests with that neighboring nation.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to levy tariffs, but lawmakers have abrogated that power to the executive branch in recent years. Given the narrow margin of the Republican majority in Congress, Cosby said that even a single lawmaker – like Moore, for example – could have made a difference by standing up to Trump on the issue of tariffs.
Things that Crosby favors include implementing a “single payer” universal healthcare system in the United States; removing the payroll tax cap to make Social Security solvent again; reducing college tuition costs by reforming high education; getting corporate money out of politics by banning political action committee contributions; banning insider trading by members of Congress; and eliminating tariffs which have cost every America family an estimated $4,000 to $5,000 out-of-pocket.
In the final moments of the town hall, Crosby addressed the controversial subject of Israel, a “bad ally” whose war policies he alleged are directly responsible for America’s current engagement in Iran.
“You’ve got to call a spade a spade,” he emphasized. “When any nation focuses on the systematic destruction of a civilian population, what would we call it if that nation didn’t happen to be Israel?
“It was genocide when it happened to Armenians (in Turkey in the early 20th Century) and when it happened again in World War II.
“It’s genocide now,” he added. “I am adamantly opposed to American tax dollars being spent on bombs that kill kids.”