​​Steven Meiner’s tenure as Miami Beach’s Orthodox Jewish mayor reveals his mission to make South Florida a secure redoubt for organized Jewry, leveraging police visits on dissenters and public outrage over Nazi anthems to consolidate ethno-religious power. In January 2026, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner faced two incidents that showcased his commitment to upholding Jewish interests no matter the context.

At Vendôme nightclub, right-wing influencers such as Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Sneako celebrated while Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler” blared through speakers during a VIP bottle parade. Meiner, whose grandparents’ families died during World War II, sharply criticized the incident. A few days before, Miami Beach police detectives appeared at veteran Raquel Pacheco’s home, questioning her about a Facebook comment criticizing the mayor’s support for Israel.

What connected these incidents was the application of Jewish power at the municipal level. The woman visited by police had accused Meiner of calling for Palestinian deaths and censoring a documentary about Israeli occupation. For the Orthodox Jewish mayor who has transformed Miami Beach governance into an expression of his religious identity and Zionist convictions, these moments revealed his willingness to use state power and informal pressure mechanisms to intimidate individuals critical of Jewish endeavors.

Steven Meiner’s story begins in Brooklyn, where he was born around 1970 to Sheldon Meiner, a career IRS agent, and Dorothy Weiss Meiner, a public school teacher and guidance counselor. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in Brooklyn and later Staten Island, he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, a flagship Modern Orthodox day school that would shape his religious identity for life.

Meiner excelled academically. He graduated summa cum laude from Brooklyn College, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and majored in political science. On top of that, he earned his J.D. cum laude from Brooklyn Law School.

After law school, Meiner joined the upper echelons of New York corporate law. Between 1998 and 2002, he worked at Dewey Ballantine, focusing on complex financial litigation. From 2002 to 2007, he continued at Mayer Brown, handling large scale financial and securities disputes.

In 2007, Meiner made a pivotal move in relocating to Miami Beach and joining the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a civil enforcement attorney in its Miami office. Over roughly 17 years, he remained at the SEC while simultaneously building a profile in Miami Beach civic life.

Before holding elected office, Meiner served on Miami Beach advisory panels and was active in local charitable organizations. In 2012, he was recognized as Man of the Year by a local civic group, placing him within the city’s professional Orthodox Jewish and civic networks well before his first campaign.

In November 2019, Meiner ran for Miami Beach City Commission Group IV and won a runoff against former commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez in what local press described as an upset. Orthodox outlets highlighted that he was, by their account, the first Orthodox Jew ever to sit on the Miami Beach commission.

As commissioner from 2019 to 2023, Meiner’s brand coalesced around public safety, pushing to expand the city’s misdemeanor prosecution program and increase successful prosecutions for quality of life offenses.

When term limits forced out Mayor Dan Gelber—also of Jewish confession—in 2023, Meiner ran for mayor as a No Party Affiliation candidate, though he had been a registered Republican until switching to NPA in 2018. In a four-way race including Michael Góngora, Mike Grieco and Bill Roedy, Meiner advanced to a runoff with Góngora and won with roughly 54% of about 10,000 votes, becoming the 39th Mayor of Miami Beach.

He branded himself as tough on crime by vowing to clamp down on Spring Break chaos, jail homeless people who refused shelter, expand city prosecutor powers, and restrain overdevelopment. In 2023, he eschewed political committees, and raised $86,600 through his campaign committee, with the vast majority coming from personal checks.

Beyond tackling local issues, Meiner used his mayoral position to assert the Jewish community’s racial will to power. In early 2024, after pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place near Art Basel and at Jewish sites, Meiner sponsored and secured passage of an ordinance making it a crime to obstruct streets or sidewalks after being ordered to clear them, while requiring that an adequate and available alternative forum be offered for protests.

Meiner justified the ordinance by citing an incident in which he said pro-Palestinian protesters harassed elderly Jewish residents leaving their synagogue, drawing parallels to National Socialist Germany. At the city commission hearing, he repeatedly cut off and yelled at speakers, who criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza or mentioned Gaza in relation to the ordinance.

He told one speaker he would not allow her to “debase and lie about the Israeli government” and cut her microphone. Civil liberties advocates argued that despite formal First Amendment carve outs, the law and Meiner’s conduct signaled that pro-Palestinian speech would be policed much more harshly in Miami Beach than pro-Israel speech. For his steadfast defense of the Jewish community in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation sent a formal letter to Meiner and the city commission praising the Miami Beach Police Department for its unwavering commitment to protecting synagogues, Jewish schools, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Jewish Community Center.

One of Meiner’s most nationally visible conflicts emerged in early 2025 over O Cinema, a non-profit art house theater leasing space in a city-owned historic building. After O Cinema scheduled screenings of No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about Palestinian dispossession in the West Bank, Meiner sent the theater a letter demanding cancellation of the showings.

He characterized the film as a “one-sided propaganda” attack on the Jewish people that is inconsistent with the values of the city and its residents. He introduced a resolution to terminate O Cinema’s lease, revoke at least $40,000 in previously approved city grant funding, and cut off future subsidies, explicitly tying this to the decision to show No Other Land.

O Cinema initially considered canceling but reversed course within hours, asserting that compliance would betray their mission and the First Amendment. Civil liberties groups including PEN America and Artists at Risk Connection condemned Meiner’s move as “beyond the pale,” warning that terminating a lease in retaliation for film content would constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

At a March 2025 commission meeting, it became clear Meiner lacked support from his colleagues. Under pressure, he withdrew the lease termination resolution and tabled a related measure urging O Cinema to screen films reflecting the perspective of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Nonetheless, he continued publicly describing No Other Land as a false attack on the Jewish people and a public safety threat.

By his 2025 re-election bid, Meiner had moved from his earlier anti-PAC posture to soliciting funds for Miami Beach First, a political committee backing his campaign. According to an investigation by The Real Deal, while Meiner touts a tough line against overdevelopment, Miami Beach First had been heavily funded by major real estate and hospitality figures of Jewish extraction.

Stuart Miller, the Jewish co-CEO of home construction company Lennar, contributed $50,000. Michael Simkins and Marc Roberts, co-owners of E11even nightclub, gave $35,000 combined. David Grutman of Groot Hospitality contributed $20,000. In addition, New York’s Naftali Group pitched in $10,000.

Backed by Jewish donors and the local Jewish community, Meiner pressed forward with his campaign to turn Miami Beach into a safe space for organized Jewry. In January 2026, Meiner’s approach to dissent drew intense national scrutiny when Miami Beach police visited Raquel Pacheco’s home over a Facebook comment she posted criticizing him. Pacheco had replied to an official mayoral Facebook post in which Meiner described Miami Beach as a sanctuary for everyone and one of the most tolerant cities in the country.

Her response accused him of consistently calling for the death of all Palestinians and trying to shut down a theater for showing a movie that hurt his feelings. About six days later, two detectives from the Miami Beach Police Intelligence Unit arrived at her home, showed her the comment, and questioned whether she had written it.

On video, they stated they were concerned her words could spur somebody to commit an extreme act and advised her to refrain from posting similar content. Pacheco refused to answer questions without a lawyer present.

Axios and local reports initially cited police sources saying Meiner’s office had flagged the Facebook post. The Miami Beach Police Chief later issued a statement claiming he alone ordered the visit, while affirming that the mayor had no role in directing enforcement.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called the visit an “egregious abuse of power” that suppresses protected political speech, observing that Pacheco’s post neither endorsed violence nor met the legal bar for incitement. The subsequent Vendôme nightclub further highlighted the uncomfortable nexus between Meiner’s public postures and his private financing. Videos circulating online showed right-wing influencers including media personality Nick Fuentes, Andrew and Tristan Tate, and social media provocateurs Sneako, Clavicular, and Myron Gaines, celebrating at the South Beach nightclub while Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler” played during a VIP bottle parade.

The track, which includes repeated chants of the National Socialist salute, has been banned in Germany and restricted on major U.S. music platforms. In the song, West raps about becoming a National Socialist and includes audio of a 1935 speech by Adolf Hitler.

Meiner issued a forceful public statement condemning the incident. He declared on Twitter, “I am deeply disturbed and disgusted by these videos of twisted individuals glorifying Hitler and the murder of millions.” He added that “these ‘influencers’ who spread hate should never have been welcomed into this club or allowed to play a song with Heil Hitler lyrics.”

Vendôme issued its own apology, calling the song’s playing at the club “hate speech.” According to multiple reports, David Grutman, who owns Vendôme through his Groot Hospitality empire and has previously bankrolled Meiner’s mayoral efforts, immediately banned the influencers from all his properties.

Looking at his track record, Meiner is on a mission to make Miami Beach safe for Jewish supremacy. Meiner’s mayoralty thus stands as a stark case study in Jewish political overreach, successfully molding South Florida’s premier beachfront city into a bespoke safe space for his people, insulated from the critiques and provocations that unsettle them elsewhere.

Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Two Lawyers Conversing

Despite the commendable efforts of President Donald Trump and Secretary Marco Rubio to alert the American public to the rising tide of free-speech suppression in the EU, Soviet-style legal practices in certain segments of the EU judiciary remain very much alive and kicking. Let us be clear: The Second World War has never really ended; it has merely entered a prolonged verbal conflict, potentially on track to assume again violent and war-like dimensions.

The latest case is that of Martin Pfeiffer, former Austrian editor of the now defunct literary magazine Die Aula, who was sentenced on December 3 of this year to four years in prison for “re-engagement in National Socialist activities” under Paragraph 3g of the Prohibition Act (Verbotsgesetz).

The prosecution had listed approximately 300 articles from the now-defunct magazine, which allegedly propagated, among other things, racial ideology and antisemitism. These articles were discussed individually with the jury during sometimes lengthy trial days. Pfeiffer, who was editor-in-chief at the time, was also a district politician for the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Graz and has consistently denied all charges. The prosecution alleges that he provided a platform in “Aula” for racism, master race and ethnic nationalism, a biologically racist concept of “the people,” and National Socialist racial theories.

The magazine  rarely dealt with ideological subjects, focusing instead on cultural themes and the idea of empire—topics closely associated with the conservative party in Austria, the FPÖ.

What is striking is that the laws under which Pfeiffer was indicted—particularly Paragraph 3g of the Prohibition Act (Verbotsgesetz), enacted in 1947—date from the period when Austria was still under the joint occupation of the four Allied powers: the Soviet Union, United States, United Kingdom, and France. Moreover, Pfeiffer was prosecuted retroactively for articles he had published between 2005 and 2018—in some cases more than fifteen years earlier. The judiciary in the city  of Graz  simply brushed aside both the statute of limitations and the principle of nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (“no crime, no punishment without prior law”). The highly abstract, almost untranslatable compound nouns of German/Austrian legal jargon—Wiederbetätigung (“re-engagement”), Volksverhetzung (“incitement to hatred of the people”), etc., defy precise rendering into English, which only adds to their opacity when viewed through the lens of an American lawyer.

Pfeiffer’s case demonstrates that any dissident author—regardless of his political persuasion or nationality—can be subjected to ex post facto prosecution if the ruling class deems him a nuisance. This tactic of selectively targeting “enemies of the people” was a standard tool of the judiciary throughout former communist Eastern Europe.

In passing, it is worth noting that Pfeiffer’s trial bears a striking resemblance to the many show trials of communist Yugoslavia. In 1984, my late father, a Catholic conservative and former attorney, was sentenced to four years in prison for “hostile propaganda” under Article 133 of the Yugoslav Criminal Code (neprijateljska propaganda, YU-KZ). He had written anonymous critical articles for the London-based Croatian émigré bi-weekly Nova Hrvatska, exposing the communist regime’s harsh repression of the Croatian Catholic Church and culture. He was subsequently adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and championed by U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos, Senator Bob Dole, and several other conservative politicians and journalists, among them Pat Buchanan.

There is a far more scarry dimension to the Pfeiffer’s story. After 1945, both the United States and the nations of Europe were compelled to adopt the model of the “proposition nation”—an abstract political community defined not by historical continuity, race or shared culture, but by universalist, immigrant-welcoming, open-entry-for-all principles. The mass influx of non-European migrants into the EU over the past decade was therefore entirely predictable: it was the logical, even deliberate, outcome of the post-war Allied strategy to suppress Europe’s historic interethnic tensions by diluting the cultural and racial homogeneity of its peoples. Likewise, the introduction of the Schengen open-border regime in 1985 (fully implemented in the 1990s) was perfectly in accordance  with the liberal-capitalist dogma of the “free movement of people and capital.”

Germany was particularly affected by these capitalist open-border policies. As the late German legal scholar Günther Maschke observed, “The German people had to adapt to the constitution, instead of the constitution being adapted to the German people.” German constitutionalism, he continued, has become a kind of “civil religion” in which multiculturalism has replaced traditional national identity with a purely legal construct—what Maschke called an imaginary “Basic Law country.” When this is combined with the quasi-sacralized, unquestionable historical narrative of the Holocaust, the result is a birth of a political entity that should be seen as a “secular theocracy.” Within this framework, the only form of patriotism still tolerated in Germany and Austria is Verfassungspatriotismus—constitutional patriotism.(1)

Victimhood Inversion

Today, core elements of the German and Austrian Criminal Code function in some ways reminiscent of former Soviet criminal law. Germany and Austria must demonstrate, daily, that they can meet their “self-re-education tasks” even more rigorously than its post-WWII mentors. Comparable dynamics exist in other EU member states, where semantic drifts have turned the charges of fascism into an all-purpose label of the ultimate cosmic evil.

Despite the phenomenal rise of right-wing parties across the EU, many judicial institutions—both in Europe and in the United States—remain largely staffed by judges and prosecutors from the post-1968 Marxist-inspired “boomer” generation, along with various former left-wing Antifa activists, modern SJWs and virtue-signalers (2). These judges and prosecutors make little effort to conceal their hatred (and fear) of Trump, while also displaying open hostility toward right-wing populist movements and parties such as the growing AfD in Germany or the FPÖ in Austria. In addition, a network of influential and wealthy non-governmental organizations across Europe, such as the CRIF and LICRA in France, the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung in Germany, and the hard-left DÖW in Austria—operate in a manner comparable to U.S. advocacy groups such as the  ADL or the SPLC. Their primary function, very similar to that of the old Soviet people’s commissariats, is to monitor academics, journalists, and public figures suspected of non-liberal ideological transgressions. German nationalists derisively label such snitching NGO outfits Gutmenschen (“do-gooders”); their French counterparts are called bien-pensants. In plain English, these so-called NGOs represent the academic thought police.

Most worrisome, however, is the climate of fear-induced self-censorship among European academics. Many believe that by remaining apolitical, silent and not rocking the boat they will best safeguard their careers and perks—a grave illusion long disproven by dissidents in the former communist countries of East Europe.  Sooner or later the thought police will show up on their doorstep regardless of how mute they were in their former political activities.

In the contemporary West, there is no need for gulags or firing squads given that more sophisticated methods of repression have become far more effective: deplatforming, debanking, or even worse, what the French call l’inversion accusatoire—the “reversal of the accusation.” Broadly speaking, this means “victimhood inversion”, a technique once common in the communist judiciary of East Europe: to cover up one’s own mega crimes, one accuses the opposing side of even greater crimes. The dynamic of mutual victimhood inversion is visible today in the conflict between the Hamas and IDF with many more to come shortly.

Many of the legal and rhetorical tactics recently deployed against President Trump were pioneered decades ago in the multi-ethnic Soviet Union and throughout the formerly communist Eastern Europe. Consequently, European prosecutors and media outlets eagerly reach for the same communist shut-up nouns—“Nazi,” “Ustasha,” “antisemite,” “white supremacist,” “racist”—in order to dehumanize political dissenters, while almost never mentioning the millions who perished under communist regimes between 1945 and 1950. President Trump is surely well aware of these legal and semantic shifts having himself endured similar “lawfare” waged and  staged by his domestic enemies. The long-term outcome of this judicial parody in both the EU and the United States is entirely predictable: growing mutual distrust, escalating interracial and interethnic conflict, institutional breakdown, and, ultimately, the collapse of the System.

Notes:

1. Günther Maschke, Das bewaffnete Wort (Wien und Leipzig: Karolinger Verlag, 1997), p.74.
2. Alain de Benoist, “Die Methoden der Neuen Inquisition,” in Schöne vernetzte Welt (Tübingen: Hohenrain Verlag, 2001), p. 190–205.