{"id":97939,"date":"2016-06-02T08:06:45","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T16:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97939"},"modified":"2016-06-02T08:06:57","modified_gmt":"2016-06-02T16:06:57","slug":"understanding-the-alt-rights-jew-parentheses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=97939","title":{"rendered":"Understanding the Alt-Right\u2019s Jew Parentheses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesse Singal writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Two defining characteristics of the alt-right, the loosely organized online coalition of meme-loving racists, are that its members like being weird online and aren\u2019t particularly fond of Jews. Keep those two things in mind, and the following discussion of a punctuation meme might make more <\/span>sense.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, Mic published an article<\/a> in which Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith traced the history of a weird thing some alt-righters do online: They\u2019ll put multiple parentheses around Twitter-targets\u2019 names to indicate that they\u2019re Jewish. It\u2019s never happened to me, but as the New York Times<\/i>\u2019 Jonathan Weisman explained in a recent column<\/a>, he got a tweet which read \u201cHello ((Weisman)).\u201d It seems to be a way of saying something like \u201cHa, look at this Jew!,\u201d and is often followed by a wave of the alt-right\u2019s now-standard meme-drenched <\/span>anti-Semitism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Fleishman and Smith explain, \u201cThe symbol comes from right-wing blog the Right Stuff, whose podcast The Daily Shoah<\/i> featured a segment called \u2018Merchant Minute\u2019 that gave Jewish names a cartoonish \u2018echo\u2019 sound effect when uttered. The \u2018parenthesis meme,\u2019 as Right Stuff editors call it, is a visual pun.\u201d As the Mic authors note, that same blog also explains on one page<\/a> that \u201call Jewish surnames echo through history,\u201d meaning that \u2014 and this is Fleishman and Smith again \u2014 \u201cthe supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade.\u201d The idea is that it\u2019s a \u201csilly\u201d way to make Jewish names sound evil and sinister, in other <\/span>words.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting \u2014 if that\u2019s the right word \u2014 origin story and a good rundown. But Fleishman and Smith end up overanalyzing things a bit when they argue that the parentheses help alt-right folks obscure their online anti-Semitism. \u201cTo the public, the symbol is not easily searchable on most sites and social networks; search engines strip punctuation from results,\u201d they write at one point. \u201cThis 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\u2019s sending them.\u201d In a subheadline farther down in the piece, they ask \u201cHow have these trolls been able to hide harassment in plain sight?,\u201d and then answer their own question by referring back to the parentheses-search issue. Then, toward the end of the article, they write that \u201cWhether they know it or not, Neo-Nazis on Twitter have discovered a brilliant loophole \u2014 a code that\u2019s difficult to filter whose meaning incites waves of hate before the target realizes what\u2019s <\/span>happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this jibes with what we know about how the alt-right operates on Twitter. For one thing, this group loves<\/em> the attention they get from their online anti-Semitism \u2014 its members have no interest in \u201cobscurity,\u201d relative or otherwise. In fact, when Weisman asked the person who tweeted the parentheses at him what it meant, they explained and seemed quite impressed with themselves. For another thing, plenty of the tweets that use the parentheses \u2014 including one embedded in the Mic article itself<\/a> \u2014 are explicitly<\/em> anti-Semitic, or if they aren\u2019t they are quickly followed by tweets which are. Plus, Twitter accounts dedicated to online anti-Semitism don\u2019t tend to hide that fact in their online handles and profiles. All of this renders the parentheses\u2019 mystery a lot less mysterious. (And this is all ignoring the fact that there\u2019s little need to \u201chide\u201d anti-Semitism on Twitter anyway, since Twitter rarely takes any sort of aggressive action against it \u2014 even, anecdotally at least, after it\u2019s been <\/span>reported.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Singal writes: Two defining characteristics of the alt-right, the loosely organized online coalition of meme-loving racists, are that its members like being weird online and aren\u2019t particularly fond of Jews. Keep those two things in mind, and the following … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,605],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-anti-semitism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t