Tabletmag: “Examining the identity politics that drive Trump backers to harrass Jewish writers online.”
I am a public Orthodox Jew who’s in touch with all parts of the Alt-Right. I wear a yarmulke and my tzitzit out when I meet with members of the Dissident Right. Everybody treats me very nicely. I don’t get any harassment from Trump backers. Maybe it is Jewish writers who demean Trump and his supporters and the whole idea of white identity who get a backlash?
Other Jewish supporters of Donald Trump, to the best of my knowledge, don’t get harassed either by the alt-Right.
Maybe Jewish writers should stop demeaning white nationalism and then perhaps white nationalists won’t put them in their crosshairs.
White nationalism is just another nationalism akin to black nationalism and Japanese nationalism and Tibetan nationalism and Jewish nationalism.
The net effect of Jews in America in political terms is to drive the spectrum to the left. Neo-cons took over the conservative movement.
In cultural terms, Jews pushed WASPs from the top of the heap and more than any other group, Jews set the Overton Window in the West.
Why is Zionism wonderful but the desire for a white Christian country is horrible? How come the Japanese get to have their own country but whites can’t?
Armin Rosen writes for Tabletmag:
Like the candidate himself, Donald Trump’s alt-right supporters have a long record of dabbling in racially and politically divisive rhetoric. Do they have a specific anti-Semitism problem, to go along with their anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and old-school isolationist views? If so, does their anti-Semitism spring from, yet operate independently of, their larger morass of prejudices?
One way of answering that question is by looking at the alt-right’s attitude toward Jews who the movement’s adherents are most likely to have read or interacted with online, specifically on Twitter: anti-Trump Jewish conservatives, writers who fall vaguely within the political and ideological camp that the alt-right is trying to transform.
The Trump supporters’ attitudes towards right-leaning Jewish commentators who oppose their candidate is a vivid illustration of why the real estate mogul has galvanized right-wingers who, until a few months ago, appeared to be well outside the conservative mainstream. For Trump’s alt-right fans, Jewish conservatives who oppose Trump epitomize much of what the movement around their candidate is supposed to be cleansing from the right wing and the American political scene more generally. From their perspective, writers like the former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro, Commentary‘s John Podhoretz, or The New York Post’s Seth Mandel are bought-and-sold traitors to their ideology, their country, and perhaps even their own people.
Would have been nice for journos to take notice of what we Jewish conservative anti-Trumpers have been fending off.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) May 2, 2016
The alt-right is not the first fringe political movement, nor probably the last, to see some collection of Jews as the avatar of broader social and political ailments, or as a prominent obstacle to fixing them. As Shapiro, a frequent target of Trumpist attention explains, “Trump trolls are intent on harassing anti-Trump Jews because they think that Trump represents a white supremacism heretofore missing from the Republican Party, and they think that the evil ‘neocons’ are trying to thwart them.” Shapiro believes “[t]hese aren’t Republicans who suddenly turned anti-Semitic,” but people who see Trump as a champion of white identity emerging out of the multicultural trauma of the Obama years.
The actual extent of that anti-Semitism is hard to measure among Trump’s supporters on Twitter, never mind among the 10.6 million people who voted for him during the Republican primaries and caucuses. But some fairly prominent pro-Trump accounts have shown a predilection for anti-Semitic imagery and rhetoric. Take, for example, @Ricky_Vaughn99 (an alias inspired by the movie Major League), one of the worst offenders, according to several Jewish writers contacted for this post. @Ricky_Vaughn99 has 27,000 followers, sees this election as “the most tremendous opportunity to name the jew and fight the money power,” and once referred to me as a “cloistered media-American” who “doesn’t get out much, beyond the synagogue.” When reached over Twitter direct message, Vaughn speculated that “The Trump presidency will probably be bad for neocon jews, bad for liberal jews, but good for jews who are believers in the nation-state and American nationalism.”
Or consider @Genophilia, an account followed by 26,000 Twitter users that rage against “anti-white Jewish activists” in the media and retweets things like this:
The jew is a sadist. He takes pleasure in the thought of defiling our women and torturing our children. This is not exaggeration.
— Mandrake (@vicmandrake) May 3, 2016
Other, non-anonymous accounts are less outwardly hostile. California lawyer Mike Cernovich has repeatedly tweets nasty things at Ben Shapiro, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and has accused anti-Trump Commentary writer Noah Rothman of being a “puppet” of super-PAC donors. There are more obscure accounts that are dedicated harassers of anti-Trump Jews, too, such as @Jewish_Marksman, whose feed reflects something of an obsession with them.
Many accounts rapidly appear and disappear. “Part of the problem is that they sign up new accounts with anti-Semitic names and just pop up and start harassing people,” said Mandel. “Like roaches.”
Predictably, Trump supporters quickly disavow any accusations of anti-Semitism. “There is no anti-Semitism problem among Trump supporters,” Cernovich claimed during our direct message (DM) conversation over Twitter. Then again, Cernovich believes that at least some of what’s normally construed as “anti-Semitism” falls within the realm of rational analysis. “My take on a lot of the “anti-Semitism” stuff is this: Jews criticize whites, and no one has a problem. When Whites criticize Jews, it’s immediately labelled anti-Semitic. Are Jews off limits from criticism? Are whites the only group of people open to criticism? That never made much sense to me.”
Online attacks on anti-Trump Jewish conservatives might stem from a sense that they’re sold out their own community’s actual interests. Both Cernovich and Loren Feldman, a pro-Trump Twitter user and film producer, raised the issue of Commentary editor John Podhoretz’s comfortable non-profit salary, as if Commentary writers are tools of an unseen cabal of donors. Both Cernovich and Feldman believe that a Trump presidency would be good for Jews in the U.S., largely for reasons having to do with the supposed benefit of improved race relations under a future president Trump. “By adopting the same immigration strategy as Europe, the U.S. would become less hospitable to Jews in general, and only Trump opposes the open flow of migrants from Syria into the U.S,” Cernovich said.
Feldman, who identifies as both a “nationalist” and a Zionist, believes that Jews and Trump supporters have a common interest in fighting the left. “We are united in our fight against black lives matter the far left and radical Islam which are far bigger problems for both Jews and white nationalists,” Feldman said during a DM conversation. On May 3rd, the day of the Indiana primary, he tweeted:
To my fellow 17 Jews in Indiana. Its a mitzva to get out and vote for Trump. We'll see Ivanka light candles in the Whitehouse. #JewsForTrump
— Loren Feldman (@1938loren) May 3, 2016
For some supporters of Trump, anti-Trump Jewish conservatives are guilty of a bevy of other, even weightier betrayals. “I can’t speak for others,” Kevin MacDonald, editor of the white nationalist Occidental Observer wrote via email when asked about Trump supporters’ antipathy towards Jewish conservatives. “But historically Jewish neocons have not been true conservatives, and their main interest has been to support Israel.” MacDonald, who accuses “Jewish neocons” of working towards “the demographic transformation of the US (sic) via immigration,” detects among some right-wingers “a general attitude that these people are faux conservatives at best—hostility motivated by the feeling that these Jewish conservatives are hypocrites and Jewish ethnonationalists parading as principled, limited government conservatives for an American audience.”
Trump’s online supporters assume the worst about the loyalty and the motives of the conservative Jews who oppose his candidacy, and their focus has implications beyond that relatively small cohort. The identity politics of the “alt-right” understand the American polity and the broader world through narrow criteria of racial and national allegiance. Opponents from groups that stand to benefit from a Trump presidency—Jews, whites, men, etc—represent a special case because they are pushing against what they surely must know to be in their particular group’s best interest. Opposition to Trump is construed as a reflection of the opponents’ corrupted character, rather than the result of honest disagreement. For instance, the now-familiar slur “cuckservative” is specifically a dig at the deficient masculinity of American conservative men who oppose the alt-right. It’s not that these critics disagree with, say, mass deportations or punitive import taxes on China: They all know Trump’s right; they’re just not man enough to actually back him.
As their treatment of anti-Trump Jews demonstrates, Trump’s alt-right supporters see the American political scene as a wasteland of venality and calculated self-betrayal–and that’s just among the demographic groups the alt-right believes to be its natural allies. Now that Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we’ll get to spend the next several months finding out what their vitriol will look like when it’s focused on their natural enemies as well.
Armin Rosen writes: “Like the candidate himself, Donald Trump’s alt-right supporters have a long record of dabbling in racially and politically divisive rhetoric. ”
But Barack Obama doesn’t? Democrats don’t? Judaism doesn’t believe in dividing people? To live as a traditional Jew is to continually separate yourself from non-Jews. Has Armin Rosen ever studied Torah? It more than “dabbles” in divisive rhetoric. The whole paradigm of Torah is that the Jews are a people who should dwell alone. In the Havdalah ceremony at the end of the Sabbath, the Jew blesses God for, among other things, separating Jews from non-Jews. Is that divisive?
“Do they have a specific anti-Semitism problem, to go along with their anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, and old-school isolationist views? If so, does their anti-Semitism spring from, yet operate independently of, their larger morass of prejudices?”
What the ruling class calls “prejudices” are simple facts of life — that different groups have different interests. Because I am a Dallas Cowboy fan, I don’t like the other teams in the NFC East. Am I prejudiced?
As Maj. Jong put it: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”
White people who want a white America are going to hate organized Jewry because all of the major Jewish organizations in the West are pushing a pro-diversity agenda. Most ordinary Jews in America do not seek more Muslim and more Mexican and more African immigrants, but all the big Jewish organizations push for this.
If you found your bedroom was filled with poisonous snakes, would you hate the snakes or the people who put them there?
“The alt-right is not the first fringe political movement, nor probably the last, to see some collection of Jews as the avatar of broader social and political ailments, or as a prominent obstacle to fixing them.”
Gee, how crazy. Why would they think that?
Steve Sailer wrote: "Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms."
To quantify the statement that "Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration," in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.
Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.
This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.
John Derbyshire wrote: "I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT—not ever again—be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently."
Ben Shapiro: “Trump trolls are intent on harassing anti-Trump Jews because they think that Trump represents a white supremacism heretofore missing from the Republican Party, and they think that the evil ‘neocons’ are trying to thwart them.”
Is Judaism Jewish supremacism? Judaism holds that Jews are the Chosen People of God. That sounds supremacist to me.
Is the Tibetan desire to keep Tibet Tibetan a form of Tibetan supremacy? What exactly do “white supremacists” believe that whites are supreme at? Everything?
In a 2006 lecture, Tom Wolfe said: “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world – so ordained by some almighty force – would make not that individual but his group…the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”
Armin Rosen writes: “The actual extent of that anti-Semitism is hard to measure among Trump’s supporters on Twitter…”
Yeah, and the actual extent of anti-Gentile attitudes among Jews is hard to measure. All groups are in competition. The more you identify with your group, the more likely you are to have negative views of out-groups. In nature, you don’t find two subspecies in the same place. It’s not natural. The different races are different subspecies. It’s not natural for them to live together in peace and harmony.
“But some fairly prominent pro-Trump accounts have shown a predilection for anti-Semitic imagery and rhetoric.”
What’s the proper term for anti-Gentile rhetoric?
“Part of the problem is that they sign up new accounts with anti-Semitic names and just pop up and start harassing people,” said [Seth] Mandel. “Like roaches.”
Wow. That’s not very nice. Didn’t the Nazis refer to Jews as “roaches.” Is Seth Mandel a Nazi? Surely this dehumanizing rhetoric has no place in our discourse.
Tablet must have run 100 negative articles about Trump. I don’t recall one positive article.
Shapiro believes “[t]hese aren’t Republicans who suddenly turned anti-Semitic,” but people who see Trump as a champion of white identity emerging out of the multicultural trauma of the Obama years.
Anti-Semitism and anti-gentilism are not mysterious afflictions. These sentiments arise out of a genuine conflict of interest. For instance, from a left-wing perspective, race, ethnicity and religion are not important dividers of people and they are not legitimate bases for countries. So a Jew who’s more of a leftist than a Jew, will not like Israel because it is an ethnostate. Such a Jew is liable to a genuine conflict of interest between his ethnicity and religion and his leftist beliefs. A left-wing Jew who is fine with Israel as an ethno-state is more Jewish than leftist.
Jewish attorney Mike Cernovich makes smart points to Tablet: “My take on a lot of the “anti-Semitism” stuff is this: Jews criticize whites, and no one has a problem. When Whites criticize Jews, it’s immediately labelled anti-Semitic. Are Jews off limits from criticism? Are whites the only group of people open to criticism? That never made much sense to me.”
“By adopting the same immigration strategy as Europe, the U.S. would become less hospitable to Jews in general, and only Trump opposes the open flow of migrants from Syria into the U.S.”
Loren Feldman told Tablet: “We are united in our fight against black lives matter the far left and radical Islam which are far bigger problems for both Jews and white nationalists.”
For some supporters of Trump, anti-Trump Jewish conservatives are guilty of a bevy of other, even weightier betrayals. “I can’t speak for others,” Kevin MacDonald, editor of the white nationalist Occidental Observer wrote via email when asked about Trump supporters’ antipathy towards Jewish conservatives. “But historically Jewish neocons have not been true conservatives, and their main interest has been to support Israel.” MacDonald, who accuses “Jewish neocons” of working towards “the demographic transformation of the US (sic) via immigration,” detects among some right-wingers “a general attitude that these people are faux conservatives at best—hostility motivated by the feeling that these Jewish conservatives are hypocrites and Jewish ethnonationalists parading as principled, limited government conservatives for an American audience.”
Tablet: “The identity politics of the “alt-right” understand the American polity and the broader world through narrow criteria of racial and national allegiance.”
Unlike Judaism, of course, where allegiances of peoplehood hold no sway.
It’s a bit rich when an identifying Jew such as this author dismisses the Alt-Right as seeing the world “through narrow criteria of racial and national allegiance.” Has he ever heard of the expressions, “But is it good for the Jews?”, or, “What have they done for Israel?”
It’s unseemly for tribal Jews to criticize non-Jews for thinking equally tribally. Jews have interests, Muslims have interests, Japanese have interests, Tibetans have interests, and white gentile Americans have interests that Donald Trump upholds more than any presidential candidate in 60 years.
For instance, the now-familiar slur “cuckservative” is specifically a dig at the deficient masculinity of American conservative men who oppose the alt-right. It’s not that these critics disagree with, say, mass deportations or punitive import taxes on China: They all know Trump’s right; they’re just not man enough to actually back him.
A cuckservative is a non-Jewish white who is not racially aware. Jews cannot be cucks because identifying Jews are racially aware of their distinctiveness as Jews, a people who dwell apart.
Why does Armin Rosen throw in an unnecessary “sic” into Kevin MacDonald’s quote? To status signal that he is superior. Sad!
