Milo Yiannopoulos is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Referring to Trump as “Daddy,” the ostentatiously gay British media personality provides a camp component to the presumptive Republican nominee’s fan base. What seems to excite Yiannopoulos about Trump is what seems to excite most of the tycoon’s voters: a brash, take-no-prisoners attitude. When I recently asked Yiannopoulos to name the Trump policies he favors, he replied with a very revealing answer. Trump supporters don’t care about the man’s policies, he said. “They want to burn everything down.” Suddenly Yiannopoulos’ Twitter handle, @Nero (followed by more than 200,000 Twitter users), made all the more sense.
Simultaneously vacuous and sinister, equal parts nihilist and narcissist, Yiannopoulos is the model Trump advocate. And as Trump comes under increasing scrutiny, Yiannopoulos, who writes for Breitbart.com, has gone to great lengths defending the worst elements of his campaign. Shortly after our encounter, which took place this March over brunch in Washington, Yiannopoulos published a long article championing the “alt right,” the largely Internet-based, populist movement that has surged to prominence on the heels of Trump’s success. Among its various constituencies, the alt right is comprised of mens’ rights advocates, pseudo-intellectual “race realists,” technocratic authoritarians whose paeans to Chinese efficiency resemble those of Tom Friedman (if Tom Friedman thought Ian Smith was a sell-out), and outright neo-Nazis. Speaking of the movement’s “intellectuals,” the bulk of whom write for avowedly racist and anti-Semitic publications like VDARE and American Renaissance, Yiannopoulos and his co-author described them as “dangerously bright.”
Yiannopoulos has also popularized the movement’s favored insult, hurled at mainstream conservatives deemed insufficiently willing to fight the pernicious wrath of the left: “cuckservative.” A portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, this sobriquet is meant to ridicule the spinelessness of conservatives who fail to acknowledge the greatness of Donald J. Trump. Drawing on a visceral sense that the establishment right actually takes pleasure in being humiliated by its intellectual adversaries, the roots of “cuckservative” are simultaneously pornographic and racist, intended to conjure images of flaccid white men watching their wives be sexually penetrated by blacks. The anti-Semitism of Trump’s alt right supporters, meanwhile, has been well-documented by Armin Rosen here at Tablet, myself in Commentary, and Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, who faced a barrage of Jew-hatred on Twitter after merely posting an article critical of Trump. So worrying is the issue of Internet harassment of journalists that the Anti-Defamation League recently launched a task-force, including Leon Wieseltier and Tablet contributor Todd Gitlin, to address it.
Asked recently by Internet TV host Dave Rubin about this very phenomenon, Yiannopoulos nonchalantly replied:
Generation Trump, the alt right people, the people who like me, they’re not anti-Semites. They don’t care about Jews. I mean, they may have some assumptions about things, how the Jews run everything; well, we do. How the Jews run the banks; well, we do. How the Jews run the media; well, we do. They’re right about all that stuff. … It’s a fact, this is not in debate. It’s a statistical fact … Jews are vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. It’s just a fact. It’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics.
What was actually most notable about Yiannopoulos’ loathsome reply was his avowal of Jewish identity, something he only mentions when the undeniable anti-Semitism of his followers becomes an issue. Though he has recently taken to claiming, when it suits him, matrilineal Jewish heritage, Yiannopoulos identifies religiously as Catholic, and he used to write a column for a Catholic newspaper in Britain. Nor did his alleged Jewishness stop him from sporting an Iron Cross medallion around his neck as a younger man.
Yiannopoulos pulls a similar trick when it comes to race. He himself cannot be a racist, nor can any movement with which he’s involved be accused of racism, because, as he put it to the New York Times, he has a “very anti-white bedroom policy.” Usually Yiannopoulos expresses his sexual predilections in more prurient fashion, with repeated mention of his desire for “black dick.” Yiannopoulos’ act is designed for a young, male, heterosexual audience that gets a rise out of such outlandishness, in other words, a huge segment of Trump’s constituency. It quickly becomes tiresome, however, to adults of whatever sexual bent.
Never mind how fetishizing African American men as sex objects complicates one’s contention that he is devoid of racism. Like the insistence that he can’t be an anti-Semite because his mother has Jewish ancestors, Yiannopoulos’ assertion that his carnal desires inoculate him from the charge of bigotry is a deflection ploy. Ironically, it’s also a form of the identity politics he claims to despise. While the “social justice warriors” (SJWs) Yiannopoulos mocks say they cannot be racist or anti-Semitic on account of their identities, Yiannopoulos flimsily asserts the same about himself. The alt right should be absolved of similar imputations, Yiannopoulos says, because its spokesman is a gay half-Jew with jungle fever.
***
With his homosexual minstrelsy in service of America’s first nakedly authoritarian presidential candidate and the extreme right-wing political movement that backs him, Yiannopoulos inspires comparison to “Diamond and Silk,” a pair of black women YouTube stars and fellow Trump supporters who speak in an exaggeratedly African American street vernacular to express support for a presidential candidate who pointedly refused to disavow the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke two days before the Louisiana Republican primary. All essentially perform stereotypical characters (the bitchy queen, the loud black woman) before audiences that, needless to say, are probably not well-represented among donors to the NAACP or Human Rights Campaign. (So hungry for fame are these “Stump for Trump” ladies that they even appeared on a white nationalist talk show.) Yiannopoulos’ gay blackface combines the mincing camp of Quentin Crisp with the reactionary politics of Jörg Haider and is the sort of thing that might have been mildly amusing on a pre-AIDS-era episode of Hollywood Squares.
Posted inAlt Right, Anti-Semitism|Comments Off on DONALD TRUMP’S LITTLE BOY IS A GAY HALF-JEW WITH JUNGLE FEVER
John Rivers tweets: “For those who don’t know, the ((())) echo joke is that Jewish lives are so much more valuable than ours their names echo throughout History.”
[Editor: BUT WOULDN’T LOTS OF REGULAR JEWS NOWADAYS ALSO FIND IT HORRIFYING (OR ALMOST) TO CONTEMPLATE A SOCIETY WHERE THE TORAH’S RULES AND PENALTIES WERE ACTUALLY APPLIED? I GUESS I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE WHAT YOU’RE GETTING AT HERE.]
If a Jew studies Talmud, he’s unlikely to be horrified by anti-Jewish sentiment on Twitter. He likely has better things to do with his time. It’s only those Jews who are insecure in their identity, or who are running a scam (such as neo-conservatism, the ADL, the SPLC, the SWC, etc), who worry about anti-Jewish opinions.
[THIS PART SEEMS WRONG TO ME. DO YOU REALLY NOT UNDERSTAND WHY A NORMAL JEWISH PERSON WOULD BE VERY DISTURBED TO SEE SOME OF THE ‘ANTI-JEWISH OPINIONS’ OUT THERE NOW ON TWITTER? THESE ARE NOT JUST RATIONAL CRITICISMS OF JEWISH BEHAVIOR OR JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS OR WHATNOT. SOME OF THESE ‘OPINIONS’ ARE BASICALLY EXPRESSIONS OF GHOULISH RACIAL HATE AND ANIMOSITY. TO CLAIM THAT ONLY JEWS WHO ARE INSECURE OR SCAMMERS GET WORKED UP ABOUT THIS SEEMS IMPLAUSIBLE AND ALSO SEEMS KIND OF CALLOUS. MAYBE YOU MEAN THAT IT’S NOT RATIONAL TO FEEL THREATENED BY THESE COMMENTS? I GUESS I’M NOT SURE HOW TO ASSESS THAT. THERE ARE SOME PRETTY NASTY NAZI TYPES OUT THERE, AND IF I WERE JEWISH I WOULD RATIONALLY FEAR THAT THEY MAY NOW BE GETTING A BIT MORE REAL POWER AND INFLUENCE.]
It would be weird and unhealthy if non-Jews did not have some negative anti-Jewish feelings (and same goes for Jews about goyim). Every normal person thinks that other groups and other religions, are weird, if not downright satanic.
[COULDN’T THERE BE SOME CASES WHERE ONE MEMBERS OF A GIVEN GROUP HAVE A STRONG IDENTITY AND YET THEY THINK SOME OTHERS ARE JUST FINE, AND ARE NOT UNHEALTHY OR WEIRD? THE POINT YOU’RE MAKING HERE IS VERY OFTEN TRUE, BUT SEEMS TO BE TRUE MOSTLY FOR SPECIFIC GROUPS THAT ARE HELD TOGETHER BY A SPECIFIC KIND OF BELIEF SYSTEM; CHRISTIANITY, JUDAISM AND ISLAM ARE EXAMPLES. BUT I DON’T KNOW THAT IT WOULD ALWAYS BE _UNHEALTHY_ FOR ANY GROUP TO HAVE NO NEGATIVE FEELINGS TOWARD ANY/EVERY ARBITRARY OTHER. SEEMS IT WOULD DEPEND ON THE NATURE OF THESE GROUPS. IN THE CASE OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, THE MANY CENTURIES OF GRIEVANCES ON EITHER SIDE ARE OBVIOUSLY PART OF IT; THIS IS PECULIAR TO THESE TWO GROUPS, THEIR SPECIFIC IDENTITIES AND ATTITUDES AND HISTORIES WITH EACH OTHER.]
Removing anti-Semitism from Christianity neuters Christianity. Removing anti-Christianity from Judaism neuters Judaism. Removing anti-Semitism from Islam neuters Islam. Any Christian or Muslim who does not have some negative feelings about Jews is not normal. He’s been neutered. Any Jew who does not have some grudge against the goyim, against Christianity, against Islam, is not normal.
[I GET WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM. BUT THIS DEPENDS ON A CERTAIN VIEW OF THE NATURE/FUNCTION OF CHRISTIANITY (FOR EXAMPLE). IF WE’RE JUST TALKING ABOUT THE RELIGIOUS PATH OR WAY OF LIFE OF THE CHRISTIAN, IS IT TRUE THAT IT _MUST_ BE ANTI-SEMITIC IN ORDER TO BE A ROBUST FORM OF CHRISTIANITY? YOU MAY BE ASSUMING THAT CHRISTIANITY = AN ETHNOCULTURAL IDENTITY AND GROUP, I GUESS, RATHER THAN A RELIGIOUS PATH OR EXPERIENCE OR WAY OF LIFE.]
Japan without anti-Semitism is not strongly Japanese. China without anti-Semitism is not strongly Chinese. If East Asians allowed themselves to be manipulated as easily as WASPs, Jews would have less respect for them.
[A STRONG JAPAN WOULD BE CAUTIOUS IN DEALING WITH JEWS OR OTHER OUTSIDERS, AND WOULDN’T ALLOW JAPANESE TO BE TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF. THEIR (JAPANESE) INTERESTS WOULD COME FIRST. WOULD THAT BE THE SAME AS ANTI-SEMITISM? I DON’T SEE THAT IT WOULD HAVE TO BE. WOULD STRONGER ANTI-JEWISH FEELINGS AND BEHAVIORS BE NEEDED FOR JAPAN TO BE ‘STRONGLY JAPANESE’?]
If you are strongly for something, you must hate its negation. If you love your people, you must hate your enemies.
[ARE JEWS AND CHRISTIANS, OR JEWS AND JAPANESE, ALWAYS AND NECESSARILY IN THE POSITIONS OF ENEMIES? IS THAT AN INTRINSIC/NECESSARY FEATURE OF THESE GROUPINGS? BECAUSE, IF NOT, IT’S NOT CLEAR WHY LOVING CHRISTIANITY (FOR EXAMPLE) WOULD HAVE TO INVOLVE HATING JEWS OR NON-CHRISTIANS, OR REGARDING THESE THINGS AS ‘NEGATIONS’ OF WHAT YOU LOVE. AM I MISSING YOUR POINT HERE?]
When I meet people who hate Jews, I immediately know that they love their own people and hate their enemies. I’ve never yet encountered (via reading or in real life) a person who hated Jews and does not love his own group. I see these lovers and haters as the reciprocal of Jews who love Jews and will sacrifice anyone and anything to keep Jews and Israel safe. Each group will tell any lie and commit any sin to protect its people.
I suspect that these tendencies are wired into our genes.
[I AGREE. BUT AREN’T THERE SOME UNIVERSALISTIC TENDENCIES WIRED IN THERE TOO? MAYBE I’M NOT PARANOID ENOUGH, BUT I THINK LOTS OF JEWS ARE CAPABLE OF REAL FELLOW-FEELING FOR NON-JEWS WHO ARE FELLOW AMERICANS, FELLOW NEW YORKERS, FELLOW WESTERNERS, ETC. WHY COULDN’T SOCIETY BE BASED ON SOME KIND OF BALANCE BETWEEN UNIVERSALISTIC AND PARTICULARISTIC FEELINGS AND LOYALTIES?]
What’s unnatural and doomed to fail is the American experiment with putting civility before identity.
John Rivers tweets: “Ethnocentrism evolved naturally, like most traits. NW Euros appear to have evolved to cooperate more with Outgroups.”
There are no good guys and bad guys in the universe unless you look at things through the eyes of faith.
[I TEND TO AGREE! BUT IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO EXPLAIN MORE WHY YOU THINK THIS. I’M NOT SURE MYSELF WHAT THE BEST ARGUMENT IS. WHY DO YOU THINK THERE COULDN’T BE A COHERENT NON-RELIGIOUS BUT MORAL WORLDVIEW?]
I reply to my editor:
Of course there can be coherent non-religious worldviews but they are
all acts of faith. All moralities are based on faith.
[IN SOME SENSE THAT SEEMS TRUE. I GUESS ‘FAITH’ MEANS SOMETHING LIKE ‘BELIEFS THAT CAN’T BE RATIONALLY JUSTIFIED’? BUT THEN, ISN’T SCIENCE ALSO BASED ON ‘FAITH’ IN THAT SENSE? FOR EXAMPLE, HOW DO WE KNOW THAT ANY PURPORTEDLY UNIVERSAL LAW OF NATURE REALLY IS UNIVERSAL? THAT IT WILL HOLD IN A MILLION YEARS OR THAT IT HOLDS NOW IN UNOBSERVED PARTS OF THE UNIVERSE? NO AMOUNT OF OBSERVATIONS COULD EVER PROVE THAT THEY REALLY ARE UNIVERSAL, OR EVEN MAKE THAT PROBABLE, UNLESS WE ACCEPT CERTAIN ASSUMPTIONS, E.G., THE ASSUMPTION THAT NATURE IS UNIFORM, AND THAT ASSUMPTION CAN’T BE JUSTIFIED BY SCIENCE BECAUSE ALL SCIENTIFIC REASONING AND EVIDENCE IS BASED ON IT. (THIS IS HUME’S PROBLEM.) BUT YOU COULDN’T DO ANY SCIENTIFIC THEORIZING OR REASONING WITHOUT BELIEVING THAT THERE ARE LAWS TO BE DISCOVERED. I THINK ALL BELIEFS DEPEND ON FAITH IN THIS SENSE. SO FOR ME IT’S NOT USEFUL TO SAY THAT THERE ARE NO GOOD GUYS OR BAD GUYS UNLESS WE LOOK AT THE WORLD FROM A ‘FAITH’ POINT OF VIEW; I THINK THERE’S NO COHERENT OR INTELLIGIBLE WAY TO LOOK AT ANYTHING THAT ISN’T BASED IN ‘FAITH’. YES, MORALITY IS A MATTER OF FAITH, BUT SO WOULD BE AN AMORAL OR IMMORAL WORLD-VIEW OR PERSPECTIVE.]
Social Identity Theory explains much of how people behave. Sure, some
people can have strong in-group identities and not hate outsiders, but
that is not how things work in general.
[WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ABOUT THE PEOPLE WE CALL ‘LIBERALS’? THE PROGS AND MULTICULTIS? DON’T THEY HAVE A VERY STRONG IN-GROUP IDENTITY? THEY HATE WHITE MALE CONSERVATIVES AND CHRISTIANS, ETC. BUT THEY DEFINITELY DON’T HATE ANY OF THE OTHER GROUPS OTHER THAN THEIR OWN, EVEN THOUGH IT’S OBVIOUS THAT IN REALITY THEY ARE IN COMPETITION WITH MANY OF THESE GROUPS IN ALL KINDS OF WAYS. E.G., WHITE PROGS ARE IN CONFLICT WITH BLACKS BUT THEY TREAT BLACKS LIKE SACRED OBJECTS. I AGREE WITH YOUR BASIC POINT, AND I ASSUME SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY IS GENERALLY CORRECT; I DO WONDER ABOUT HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF THIS KIND OF EXAMPLE THOUGH.]
When groups are competing, they naturally tend to think ill of their
competitors. When groups are not competing, other groups are less of a
threat (eg the Amish).
There are no permanent enemies and alliances between groups. Jews and
Nazis are not necessarily enemies. It all depends on time and place
and circumstance. Sometimes Jews and Christians have common interests,
sometimes they have contrary interests.
It is not necessary for any gentile group to be anti-Semitic to be
authentic, but to automatically rule out anti-Jewish attitudes neuters
that group identity when they have to compete with Jews. If it is fine
for Jews to have anti-gentile attitudes but not fine for Christians to
have anti-Jewish attitudes, well, I will tell you who will win that
competition.
[I AGREE. BUT YOU COULD HAVE BEEN MORE CLEAR IN YOUR ORIGINAL STATEMENTS, IF THIS IS WHAT YOU HAD IN MIND. YOU DIDN’T SAY THAT CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT THE _POSSIBILITY_ OF ANTI-SEMITISM WAS NEUTERED OR INAUTHENTIC; INSTEAD YOU JUST SAID THAT ABOUT NON-ANTI-SEMITIC CHRISTIANITY. UNDER PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES, GIVEN THE BEHAVIOR OF JEWS AND JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS, IT’S INSANE THAT CHRISTIANS REGARD ANY KIND OF NEGATIVE FEELINGS TOWARDS JEWS AS A KIND OF SIN. KIND OF LIKE HOW THE ATHEISTIC PROGS REGARD NEGATIVE FEELINGS TOWARDS BLACKS, WHILE BLACKS CONSTANTLY RAPE AND MURDER AND ASSAULT NICE LITTLE PROGS.]
Anti-Jewish attitudes are largely irrelevant to strong Japanese and
Chinese identity because of time and place and circumstance, but when
these groups have serious conflicting interests with Jews, it would be
self-destructive of them not to have some anti-Jewish attitudes. If
you deny your group sanction to hate its enemies, you are weakened.
We can all get along in certain times and places and circumstances
when there are not deadly conflicts of interest.
[YES, THIS SEEMS VERY TRUE AND IMPORTANT — THE MOST IMPORTANT THEME IN YOUR ORIGINAL POST. HATE IS NOT INTRINSICALLY WRONG. A SOCIETY THAT DECLARES ‘HATE’ TO BE WRONG — IN REALITY, ONLY A VERY SPECIFIC KIND OF HATE, ONLY WHEN EXPRESSED BY WHITE MEN — IS SICK AND MUST BE PUT DOWN. TO DEFEND YOUR SOCIETY YOU HAVE TO HATE THINGS THAT ARE DEADLY THREATS TO THAT SOCIETY. WE’RE SURROUNDED BY DEADLY THREATS, ACTUALLY BEING KILLED AS INDIVIDUALS AND AS A COLLECTIVE, BUT WE ARE TOLD IT WOULD BE WRONG EVEN TO _FEEL_ HATE TOWARDS THOSE WHO ARE KILLING US. LET ALONE DO ANYTHING TO PROTECT OURSELVES.]
As usual, the cuckservatives and Churchians are blithely falling in line with the globalists and Babelists, as they rush to endorse Big Brother’s war on hate speech. It’s amazing how they fall for the lies every single time.
The fact is that hate is not intrinsically bad. God Himself hates. There are six things He hates – actually, seven that he detests. There are specific individuals He has hated. There is a time to love, and there is a time to hate.The Christian is instructed to hate as well as to love, indeed, we are told that if one does not hate, one does not fear the Lord.
And that, of course, is the root of the pagan campaign against hate. They wish to arrogate to themselves the decision what you will, and what you will be not, permitted to hate. They want you to love Big Brother, and therefore you will not be permitted to hate him.
But hate is our birthright. Hate is part of what makes us human. Hate is an aspect of our free will. And if hate is outlawed, or worse, eliminated, there will be no moral basis for love.
Hate is a human right. The war on hate speech is a war on our humanity. #IStandWithHateSpeech
REPORT: In the early days of the social web, putting someone’s name in multiple parentheses was meant to give that person a cute virtual hug. Today, it’s something far more sinister.
Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white nationalists have begun using three sets of parentheses encasing a Jewish surname — for instance, (((Fleishman))) — to identify and target Jews for harassment on blogs and major social media sites like Twitter. As one white supremacist tweeted, “It’s closed captioning for the Jew-blind.”
Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor for the New York Times, wrote about his experience as a victim of this harassment in a May 26 story.
Weisman asked his harasser, @CyberTrump, to explain the symbol. “It’s a dog whistle, fool,” the user responded. “Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.”
With the parentheses, @CyberTrump had alerted an army of trolls. The attacks that followed were sudden and unremitting. “The anti-Semitic hate, much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn’t stopped since,” Weisman wrote.
The origins of the symbol ((())) can be traced to a hardcore, right-wing podcast called The Daily Shoah in 2014. It’s known as an “echo” in the anti-Semitic corners of the alt-right — a new, young, amorphous conservative movement that comprises trolls fluent in internet culture, free speech activists warring against political correctness and earnest white nationalists. Some use the symbol to mock Jews; others seek to expose supposed Jewish collusion in controlling media or politics. All use it to put a target on their heads.
To the public, the symbol is not easily searchable on most sites and social networks; search engines strip punctuation from results. This means that trolls committed to uncovering, labeling and harassing Jewish users can do so in relative obscurity: No one can search those threats to find who’s sending them.
The origin of (((echoes)))
The symbol comes from right-wing blog the Right Stuff, whose podcast The Daily Shoah featured a segment called “Merchant Minute” that gave Jewish names a cartoonish “echo” sound effect when uttered. The “parenthesis meme,” as Right Stuff editors call it, is a visual pun.
In Right Stuff propaganda, you’ll often read that Jewish names “echo.” According to the blog’s lexicon page, “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history.” In other words, the supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade.
In an email, the editors of the Right Stuff said it is also intended as a critique of “Jewish power.” They explained further:
“The inner parenthesis represent the Jews’ subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism.”
We got off easy — just a flood of memes in our timelines, a few “kike” insults hurled our way.
Other Jewish writers have faced more serious attacks: death threats, anti-Semitic cartoons, images of concentration camp ovens and executed Jews, threatening emails, even home phone calls.
“With the cat belled, the horde was unleashed,” Weisman wrote of his experience. One tweet he received included a photo of the gates of Auschwitz with the “Arbeit Macht Frei” slogan of the Nazi death camp replaced with “Machen Amerika Great,” a clumsy translation of Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
“I get plenty of anti-Semitic things, but this was different,” said Michael, a Jewish journalist who was targeted by right-wing trolls in 2015 following a story he wrote that was critical of the GOP. (Michael asked Mic to use only his first name to protect his family.)
“[The echo] is a way of bringing attention to people who are Jewish — intimidating,” Michael said. “They try to threaten.”
Michael received “awful cartoons,” animated GIFs of Hitler with the caption “Don’t you miss me?” and photos of Nazis killing Jews in Eastern Europe. Trolls threatened him: “‘When the time comes, the Jews are going to be in trouble, lined up,'” Michael recalls. “That kind of tone. Random shit by people thinking it’s funny Jews were being targeted.”
Michael said he blocked about 100 accounts during the onslaught.
Hate speech and the election
In a phone call, Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, said he’s seen a “spike in hate speech and the harassment of journalists, in particular Jewish journalists” this election cycle.
According to Segal and other social-justice advocates who keep tabs on racist groups and hate speech, the jingoism of Trump’s presidential campaign has fueled this sort of harassment. Trump’s xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric and policy proposals have resonated with the rebellious, belligerent, flag-waving alt-right
“They’ve been on a tear,” Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a phone call. “You can’t publish something about Trump right now and have any inclination of being Jewish without being trolled to hell.”
Beirich called for Trump to denounce the anti-Semitic harassment conducted in his name. “This is the most racist invective that’s been directly involved in a presidential campaign in the last 16 years,” she said. “It’s frightening how cavalier Trump has been about these people.”
How have these trolls been able to hide harassment in plain sight?
Partially because the ((())) symbol is difficult, if not impossible, for ordinary users to search for.
If you try to search for “(((Last Name))),” Twitter’s search engine strips the results of the parentheses, yielding every single result for the last name, the sheer size of which obscures instances of the symbol being used.
Try searching for random combinations of parentheses on Twitter, Reddit or Google. Try searching Google for “site:twitter.com ‘(((‘” or a similar query. Try looking for (((Mic))) in a Google search. The results drop the parentheses from the search.
Filtering is possible using the app TweetDeck, which has the ability to mute punctuation like parentheses. But the larger issue is the Twitter community’s ability to identify and police hate speech. Singling out a particular method of harassment is more difficult when Twitter has to rely on users reporting single tweets, rather than being able to search for everyone who’s using the construction. A spotlight on ((())) would let users and Twitter developers shut down the problem much faster.
Twitter needs better tools to curb hate speech
On Tuesday, Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft partnered with the European Union to crack down on online hate speech, pledging to delete offensive comments on their respective platforms in under 24 hours.
Asked about users targeting Jewish people, a Twitter representative directed Mic to a statement by Karen White, Twitter’s head of public policy for Europe: “Hateful conduct has no place on Twitter and we will continue to tackle this issue head on alongside our partners in industry and civil society,” she said.
Twitter Rules, an extension of the company’s Terms of Service, forbid its users from “incit[ing] or engag[ing] in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.” Users are required to agree to these rules when they sign up for the social media site.
At the same time, Twitter also pledged to protect free speech on its network. “We remain committed to letting the tweets flow,” White said. “However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.”
Twitter declined to address why the symbol is unsearchable on its platform, if a hate-speech filter would detect it or if the company plans to categorize the symbol as hate speech at all
Users wary of the social network silencing unpopular views responded by launching the hashtag #IStandWithHateSpeech, which began to trend Tuesday night. “[Social justice warriors] are infecting society with their made-up terms,” one user wrote.
Coded hate speech like ((())) may not be searchable, but it is public; tweets containing it can be reported to Twitter for abuse and shut down. This will not stop abusers from simply creating new accounts, and it will not stop other users from swarming on victims once they’ve been identified using the ((())) symbol — a method of abuse known as “dogpiling.”
In 2014, the group Women, Action and the Media reviewed hundreds of Twitter harassment reports and recommended several measures to help curb the problem. To address dogpiling, WAM recommended that Twitter grant users the ability to report multiple accounts at once and to filter abusive content from their timelines. Twitter now lets users flag multiple tweets in one report.
Whether they know it or not, Neo-Nazis on Twitter have discovered a brilliant loophole — a code that’s difficult to filter whose meaning incites waves of hate before the target realizes what’s happening. Jewish writers can report those tweets all they want, but the damage ((())) sets into motion may only be beginning.
Posted inAnti-Semitism|Comments Off on (((Echoes))), Exposed: The Secret Symbol Neo-Nazis Use to Target Jews Online
In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.
—Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam
It was one of the more irony-laden incidents in the history of celebrity social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as political science professor of the year, Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam, a former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone, confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research discovery—that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in communities—was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn’t dared announce it “until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it ‘would have been irresponsible to publish without that.’”
In a column headlined “Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity,” Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of “civic engagement,” a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:
When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. ‘They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,’ said Prof Putnam. ‘The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.’
Lloyd noted, “Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”
As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust, Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay left him feeling betrayed, calling it “by two degrees of magnitude, the worst experience I have ever had with the media.” To Putnam’s horror, hundreds of “racists and anti-immigrant activists” sent him e-mails congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.
Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn’t cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was “almost criminal,” Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam’s talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam’s line—“What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us”—sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht’s parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: “Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001 in a Los Angeles Times article entitled “Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.” Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, “Those who live in more homogeneous places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said.”
Putnam’s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived for 12 years in Chicago’s Uptown district, which claims to be the most diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daley’s administration to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer laborers.
This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that it’s hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don’t speak the same language as you. Then there’s the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work—namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?
The high crime rate didn’t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.
Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.
Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn’t related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn’t be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.
In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans (mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work. When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the decade.
The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history’s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.
Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun’s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia’s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria’s border with the Slavs and Magyars.
Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the “long civic generation” that reached its peak in the 1940s and ’50s.
Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of America’s success to its “forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”
The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual self-interest drove human behavior, even though that perspective could hardly explain such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of asabiya.
In the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism, but the free-market economists’ prescription of “shock therapy” prevailed disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nations’ assets.
An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis Fukuyama’s 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in 1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement, but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.
The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends, trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans’ beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico’s economic shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans didn’t seem to team up well beyond family-scale. Read on.
Posted inDiversity|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: ‘Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones’
Earnest Minnesota boomer Tom Gjelten is flummoxed by his discovery of emerging tensions between two natural allies within the Coalition of the Virtuous: Black civil-rights crusaders and well-to-do liberal Jews.
The report begins,
The Jews who immigrated to America in the early 20th century brought with them their history as a persecuted people. Many were fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, and those experiences bonded them to other groups that also faced discrimination.
Fair-use excerpt to give a sense of Gjelten’s anxiety:
[In the years subsequent to 1964, the Anti-Defamation] League was focused primarily on fighting anti-Semitism, but the League’s new president, Jonathan Greenblatt, wants the ADL to renew its old civil rights activism and move the work forward.
“There’s questions like mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, economic opportunity,” Greenblatt told NPR in a recent interview. “We need to integrate what’s happening with the Latino community [and] the LGBT community, because when we fight for the rights of others, it strengthens America. It makes America a better place.”
There is just one complication. For many current civil rights activists, solidarity with Palestinians is taking precedence over the old solidarity with American Jews.
Uh-oh!
“Many of our experiences of police repression and brutality seem to mirror that of many international peoples, including [people in] Palestine,” says the Rev. Mike McBride, a prominent African-American pastor from Berkeley, Calif., who became involved with the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
“When we were in Ferguson, and we were being terrorized by the law enforcement and military apparatus,” McBride says, “it was Palestinian young people who started to tweet us on how to survive and deal with the terror we were experiencing.”
Fortunately, Gjelten wraps with an inspiring call for meeting the increased pig-iron production quotas of the new Five Year Plan:
… But given the disagreements on issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even greater efforts may be necessary to make the Anti-Defamation League a consistently valued civil rights partner in a time of divided loyalties.
This being NPR, merriment ensues in the Readers’ Comments section. Progressives have no need to recognize “virtue signalling” when they can employ it with such elegance and expertise.
As icing, Mr. Gjelten’s “new book, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (Simon & Schuster), recounts the impact on America of the 1965 Immigration Act, which officially opened the country’s doors to immigrants of color.”
Posted inADL|Comments Off on Anti-Defamation League Chief Faces Challenge Trying To Renew Civil Rights Activism
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
