Conservative commentator Bethany Mandel (wife of New York Post op/ed Editor Seth Mandel) writes for the Forward under this headline: “My Trump Tweets Earned Me So Many Anti-Semitic Haters That I Bought a Gun”
Wow, sounds horrible until you think about it. How many Trump supporters could honestly say that they have received so much hate that they had reasons for buying a gun? Thousands I would expect.
Anybody who has spoken out in public on controversial issues has received death threats. It goes with the territory. If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Bethany writes: “As for Breitbart, it’s currently facing major upheaval, with five employees — writers and editors — having quit over the course of a week, with rumors of more to follow. Most reports of their resignations mention the site’s uncomfortably close relationship with Trump as well as its refusal to stand by one of its own reporters, whom Trump’s campaign manager assaulted.”
That doesn’t look like assault to me. Therefore, I can’t take anything she says seriously. She seems like a hysteric.
Bethany Mandel continues: “The most high-profile Breitbart employee to leave, Ben Shapiro, resigned on March 13. In response to Shapiro’s defection from the pro-Trump site, he himself was doxed. Editor-at-large Joel Pollak published a piece mocking Shapiro and linking to his State Bar Association page, which until very recently displayed his home address. Luckily, Shapiro had changed the address listed, protecting his family from the kind of in-person harassment Wilson and Erickson described.”
Linking to somebody’s State Bar Association page is doxxing? Ben Shapiro chose to put his home address on his State Bar page. Nobody forced him to do that. Thousands of California lawyers have chosen not to put their home address on their State Bar page. Ben knew his State Bar page was be public. He chose to make that information public. There’s nothing malicious in linking to somebody’s State Bar page.
Bethany Mandel: “To add insult to injury, the post mocking Shapiro was published under his own father’s pen name on the site, which Shapiro believes was done to force the disclosure of his father’s identity and endanger him as well. The elder Shapiro, David, adopted the pen name to avoid the same death threats his son has experienced in the past, especially as an outspoken Ted Cruz supporter on the pro-Trump site.”
Oh, cry me a river.
After Shapiro’s departure from Breitbart and the ensuing post, which not only mocked him but also made a point of noting that he is an Orthodox Jew, he has been inundated with anti-Semitic tweets — including ones from David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
“There are an outsized set of Trump supporters who will threaten your safety,” Shapiro told me. “I’ve been hit with a number of death threats, and sleep with a shotgun beside the bed. I’ve had my office address and phone number posted on the Internet by my own employer, Breitbart News, via a link to the State Bar website, after resigning from the publication and announcing I did so because of their allegiance to Trump.”
Maybe Ben Shapiro was inundated with anti-Jewish tweets because Ben Shapiro has gone after those with a strong white identity. Ben Shapiro said in an interview this year that we should “ruin their [racists] careers.” Did he expect there would be no blowback? He supports the ruining of lives over something as amorphous and morally empty as “racism.” There’s no such moral crime as racism. It is a made-up moral category. It has no precedence in Judaism and Christianity.
Bethany Mandel:
The conservative Jewish writers who have spoken out against Trump and received death threats in return are almost too many to list. These writers (myself included) have taken a stand at personal risk. We have been outspoken from the start of the Trump campaign. As it gained strength, many of us sacrificed a great deal, including our own family’s safety, to try to stop this wannabe strongman. We laid our bodies across the tracks in an effort to stop the Trump train…
