Luke Ford

Forward.com: As a Jewish immigrant from the Former Soviet Union whose family came to the United States in 1980, I’ve been dismayed to see so many liberals looking down their noses at Russian Jews who support Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Writing in the Forward, Margarita Gokun Silver recently asked, “How Can Russian Jews Be So Naively in Love With Donald Trump?” She suggests that we’re naïve, but her own view is ill-informed. Worse, it’s condescending.

In her essay, Gokun Silver asks this question about Russian Jewish supporters of Trump: “How can people who left their homeland to escape anti-Semitism — and whose families include victims of both the Holocaust and the Gulag — not see the signs?”

Maybe I can provide some answers.

It was because my family stuck to our Jewish roots and followed our traditions while we lived in the FSU that, in 1949, my maternal grandfather was sentenced to 10 years of Gulag camps. Later, in the mid-1950s, he was released with “full rehabilitation.” But in the ’60’s and ’70s, my father received repeated rebukes for hiring Jewish professionals, my uncle received continuous pressure from the KGB (he was a computer scientist and they wanted him to become an informer), my sister received a rejection letter from university (despite stellar grades), and my cousins and I received several physical assaults over our ethnicity. All this prompted my family to seek a better life in the U.S.

And what happened when Jews from the Soviet Union arrived in the U.S.? They received an immense amount of invaluable help from the members of the American Jewish community — and faced a major cultural misunderstanding. The majority of immigrants from the FSU were not, as many American Jews expected, the simpleton Tevyes and backward Goldes who needed to be shown how to turn on the lights or how to use toilet paper. The people who immigrated were mostly professionals, with college degrees and good (although skewed) knowledge of history, arts, geography and politics. We were, and are, educated Jews.

Most important, we had — and have — enough reason and good sense to evaluate political options and make informed choices out of our own preferences. Expecting us to follow a liberal agenda that’s been highlighted for us is as absurd as expecting us to follow Lenin’s raised hand toward the glorious Communist future.

Forward.com has apparently turned off its comments for its Alt-Right articles.

Forward.com:

1. Breitbart.com

The conservative news site Breitbart has quickly become recognized as the leading publication in the push to take the views of the “alt-right” into the mainstream. Andrew Breitbart, one of the founding editors of the Huffington Post, created the site in 2007. Its latest chairman, Steve Bannon, was just hired to be the manager of the Trump campaign.

2. American Renaissance

Jared Taylor founded AR in 1990 as part of his New Century Foundation, an early center of pseudoscientific ideas about race. It has been both a print magazine and an online publication. It claims to promote a free flow of ideas about segregation, education and immigration, but “regardless of its calm tone and academic look and feel, the magazine openly peddles white nationalism,” according to the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center.

AR hosts conferences that bring in many white supremacist speakers, many of whom hide behind euphemistic terms like “racialism,” “white advocacy” and the “alt-right.”

AR is unique among the movement’s publications in that it has demurred on the subject of Jewish inclusion. In a 2006 op-ed, Taylor wrote defended his decision to publish articles by Jewish writers as a way to broaden the movement.

“AR has taken an implicit position on Jews by publishing Jewish authors and inviting Jewish speakers to AR conferences,” he wrote. “It should be clear to anyone that Jews have, from the outset, been welcome and equal participants in our efforts.”

3. Radix Journal

Richard Spencer, the leading voice of the “alt-right,” founded Radix Journal in 2012. It is a publication of the National Policy Institute, the Washington think tank that is the center of the movement’s push into mainstream politics. Spencer is the chairman of NPI, and contributes regularly to Radix.

Biannually in print and in several posts a day online, Radix posts long format, personal essay-style pieces promoting white racial heritage, decrying the tragedy of multiculturalism and attacking mainstream conservatives as “cuckservatives” — a Republican who makes a concession of any kind to the Democrats.

4. Daily Stormer

Billing itself as “The World’s Most Visited Alt-Right Site,” the Daily Stormer is the most openly neo-Nazi media outlet of the “alt-right.” Andrew Anglin, an avowed neo-Nazi, started the site in 2013 after shuttering his year-old site, TotalFascism.com. Total Fascism published long-format articles promoting white supremacy, while Daily Stormer’s articles look a lot like classic Buzzfeed articles in style: lots of GIFs, snarky comments and embedded Tweets and Youtube videos.

5. VDARE

Named for the first white person born in North America (Virginia Dare), VDARE is a white supremacist website that the SPLC has described as “an anti-immigration hate website.” Both Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer have contributed to VDARE.

Peter Brimelow, a self-described “paleoconservative,” founded VDARE in 1999. Brimelow believes that immigration is to blame for the September 11 attacks.

6. The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff is an anti-Semitic blog run by Mike Enoch, who has been a speaker at National Policy Institute events. A virulent anti-Semite, Enoch has said that the movement is one based around “ethno-nationalism, meaning that nations should be as ethnically and racially homogeneous as possible.”

The Right Stuff also runs the podcast The Daily Shoah, which created the parentheses, or (((echoes))) meme, in a 2014 podcast. The meme was created because “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history,” an allusion to the age-old conspiracy that Jews run the world through a secret network of power.

After the (((echoes))) meme came to widespread media attention in May the Anti-Defamation League added it to their list of recognized hate symbols.

Forward: The basic tenets combine white supremacy and white victimhood. In the former category fall bloggers like Steve Sailer, who lends the “alt-right” a pseudoscientific vibe with “human biodiversity,” a benign-sounding neologism that uses the language of genetics to explain perceived racial differences. Likewise, the anti-establishment conservative movement adopted the epithet “cuckservative” to call into question the toughness or strength of any conservative who makes concessions to the left.

At the same time, members and fellow travelers of the movement consider whites to be under attack and even facing extinction in an ongoing “white genocide,” which refers to the supposed conspiracy to destroy the white race through multiculturalism.

Some leaders see Jewish and other out-group allies as a way to protect whites. Richard Spencer is one of them. The chairman of the innocuously-named National Policy Institute (NPI), a white supremacist think tank begun in 2005, he created Radix Journal, one of the movement’s primary publications, in 2012. Since 2011, the NPI has held multiple conferences in Washington, as well as an aborted conference in Hungary, which resulted in Spencer being banned from 26 European countries, according to Radix.

But before his tenure as chairman of the NPI, Spencer helped run the H. L. Mencken Club, founded by Paul Gottfried, a Jewish academic who coined the term “alternative right.” Its conferences have become a gathering place for white nationalists who, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, use it to “legitimize racism under the glossy veneer of academia.”

…“I don’t think directly associating ourselves with movements of the past like Nazism is the best way to go about changing the culture,” Richard Spencer wrote online in an “Ask Me Anything” session, or AMA, on Reddit. “We need to be a new cultural movement … Historical reenactment is not good politics.”

At the October 2015 NPI conference, Spencer made sure that at least one major anti-LGBT voice — Matthew Heimbach — was disinvited, and Jack Donovan, the openly gay “masculinist” writer, was a keynote speaker.

Jared Taylor, another figurehead of the “alt-right,” has been running the racist American Renaissance magazine since 1990, which has published articles by Jewish writers and hosted Jewish speakers at its conferences, drawing the ire of die-hard anti-Semites like former KKK leader David Duke, who is running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Spencer and Taylor say the ends justify the means when explaining the inclusion of Jewish and LGBT voices — and even the voices of so-called alt-righties of color.

“I don’t think it is a good idea to drive away potential allies by declaring war on all Jews,” Taylor wrote in a July 26 Reddit AMA to defend Jewish inclusion in his response to a long anti-Semitic post by the user “Lothar_von_Trotha.”. “To be sure, there are many elite Jews who work against the interests of whites, but other Jews see themselves as men of the West who will fight to preserve European civilization.”

To Taylor, white is white is white.

“White Jews are white,” he said in a phone interview. Even white Muslims are welcome.

“I suppose if you had a Bosnian European Muslim who had a consciousness as a white person and wanted to defend Western civilization, then yes such a person would be hypothetically welcome in the ‘alt-right.’ But I’ve never met such a person.”

For Taylor, the endgame of the alt-right is create an “ethno-state” for people of European heritage.

“If there is no territory that white Americans can call their own, we will ultimately be shoved aside,” he said. “If that is not done, are what point are white Americans allowed to say it has gone too far? When we’re 20 percent of the population? When we’re five percent of the population?”

He feels that this goal has been misrepresented by the media – and that it is a peaceful movement. He said it is a fundamentally different ethos than white supremacy.

“I’m not even sure what white supremacy means,” he said. “If it means anything it means whites are supposed to be ruling over other races. I don’t think anyone in the ‘alt-right’ wants that.”

“It’s really the equivalent of the N-word in how you could refer to a white person,” he said of the term ‘white supremacist.’

But though people like Jared Taylor are willing to welcome white people of all background – at least for now – for many in the “alt-right” their hatred of Jews remains stubbornly common.

Anti-Semites like Kevin MacDonald — who has written books about the invention of anti-Semitism by Jews — are still regular guests at NPI conferences. And though he sometimes praises Israel for being an “ethno-state,” Spencer harbors deep anti-Semitism as well. He tends to pass it off as an intellectual interest in the racial and cultural distinction of Jews from white people.

“I think someone like Kevin MacDonald, he has covered the question of Jews very carefully,” Jared Taylor said. “I think he is correct on the activity of many elite Jews.”

“Dissident whites benefit from the efforts of all — Jew or gentile — who understand the crisis we face,” Taylor wrote in his Reddit AMA. “Anyone who tries to chase Jews out of a white consciousness movement is chasing away valuable allies and also raising doubts in the minds of gentiles about the legitimacy of white racial consciousness.”