What the Cause of Christ has endured in Russia the past eighteen years, surpasses its suffering at the hands of bloody Nero. One of the purposes of the present treatise is to show that this conspiracy is not of recent origin." The book was met with positive reception by many Christians at the time. Winrod would go on to say that he believed Jews were damned to hell, and that Jesus Christ condemned them in the Bible. He expanded upon these views, being quoted, "Will the Church be able to demonstrate sufficient power to triumph over its foes in the present crisis, or has it become so weakened by apostasy and pernicious teachings that it will have to be drenched in its own blood before it can be brought to its senses? Jesus knew better than anyone else the unspeakable crimes of which [the Jews] are capable. The Jesus of the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, is not the quiet, reticent Jesus of modern literature and the fashionable pulpit. The Jesus, whose righteous indignation is here asserted, is a man of words and action, a man in the act of pronouncing eight woes upon the Jewish leaders and finally condemning them to the damnation of hell." Winrod spread these views through his newspaper, The Defender, which by 1937 achieved a 100,000 monthly circulation. Some of the articles reproduced materials from the pro-Nazi and virulently antisemitic international Welt-Dienst/World-Service/Service Mondial news agency founded in 1933 by Ulrich Fleischhauer. Winrod ran for a U.S. Senate seat from Kansas in the 1938 elections, but was defeated in the Republican primary when a popular former governor, Clyde M. Reed, was lured out of retirement by the party establishment to run against him. With 21.4% of the vote, Winrod was a distant third after Reed and Dallas Knapp of Coffeyville, Kansas. Gerald B. Winrod was among the inspirations for the character of Buzz Windrip in the novel It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis in which Windrip becomes the fascist leader of the United States. Winrod developed a strong following among German-speaking Kansas Mennonites who identified with his religious, anti-World War II, and pro-Germany views. The Defender was printed by Mennonite-owned Herald Publishing Company of Newton, Kansas from 1931–42. Winrod found support in Bethel College and Tabor College and from editors of local Mennonite papers, and some Mennonite precincts voted predominantly for Winrod in the 1938 Senate