Holocaust denier Vaughn Klingenberg. Photo: Screenshot

Minnesota’s Attorney General pledged on Tuesday to keep a close eye on a Holocaust denier running for a local school board election, warning that the authorities may be compelled to “draw the line” in the event of provocative behavior.

“He has our attention,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in reference to the candidate, Vaughn Klingenberg. “He’s clearly tried to get the attention of the public by spewing hateful, antisemitic rhetoric, which is obviously untrue but is also dangerous.”

Klingenberg is one of seven candidates running for three vacant seats on the Roseville, Minn., school board, which serves nearly 7,400 students. A Holocaust denier and virulent antisemite, Klingenberg is the author of “The Big Lie,” a book that describes the Holocaust as “the greatest fraud of the 20th century.”

Klingenberg also runs a blog titled “A Zionist Movement,” which carries posts advocating the forcible sterilization of Jewish people. He has also turned up outside two synagogues, one in Minneapolis and one in St. Paul, since announcing his candidacy.

“Minnesota has no place for hate, and we’re not going to tolerate it,” Ellison told CBS News. “And he can think whatever he wants to think, he can even blog about it. But when he starts showing up at peoples’ houses of worship and trying to inspire others to commit acts of hatred, that’s where we have to draw the line.”

Steve Hunegs, a former director of the Jewish Community Relations Council for Minnesota and the Dakotas, told CBS that Klingenberg’s “beliefs are so awful and heinous. Here he is publicly posting that people should brand Jews, sterilize Jews, segregate Jews, impoverish Jews.”

Referring to Klingenberg’s synagogue appearances, Hunegs noted that by “invading the sacred space of the synagogue during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the man is escalating his behavior.”

“He’s running for school board in Roseville, he needs to be thoroughly repudiated,” said Hunegs. “It’s hard to imagine anything more contrary to education than a Holocaust denier.”

In his Holocaust-denying tome, Klingenberg claims that “‘Big Jews’ conspired with the Allied leadership, both before and during World War II, to once and for all silence criticism of both the Jewish community as well as the Zionist movement.  They did this by orchestrating having ‘Little Jews’ murdered in the Holocaust in order to foment Jewish emigration to Palestine and found a Zionist state after the war. After World War II the flourishing anti-Zionist movement was effectively dead. Virtually all Jews are Zionists now.”

The book is dedicated to “the ‘Little Jews,’ but also to the Germans, the Nazis, and Hitler — the real victims of the Holocaust.”

Klingenberg claims to have degrees in English and philosophy and that he previously taught logic in the philosophy department of Marquette University. His resume posted to LinkedIn details nearly a decade of employment in the insurance industry.

In addition to promoting himself on LinkedIn, Klingenberg also uses the platform to express his political views. In one post, he asked, “How can I show my support for Russian Ukrainians who have been treated as second class citizens in Zelinsky’s [sic] proto-fascist Ukraine?” —  a reference to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky.