Luke Ford

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’t particularly fond of Jews. Keep those two things in mind, and the following discussion of a punctuation meme might make more sense.

Yesterday, Mic published an article in which Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith traced the history of a weird thing some alt-righters do online: They’ll put multiple parentheses around Twitter-targets’ names to indicate that they’re Jewish. It’s never happened to me, but as the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman explained in a recent column, he got a tweet which read “Hello ((Weisman)).” It seems to be a way of saying something like “Ha, look at this Jew!,” and is often followed by a wave of the alt-right’s now-standard meme-drenched anti-Semitism.

As Fleishman and Smith explain, “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.” As the Mic authors note, that same blog also explains on one page that “all Jewish surnames echo through history,” meaning that — and this is Fleishman and Smith again — “the supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade.” The idea is that it’s a “silly” way to make Jewish names sound evil and sinister, in other words.

It’s an interesting — if that’s the right word — 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. “To the public, the symbol is not easily searchable on most sites and social networks; search engines strip punctuation from results,” they write at one point. “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.” In a subheadline farther down in the piece, they ask “How have these trolls been able to hide harassment in plain sight?,” and then answer their own question by referring back to the parentheses-search issue. Then, toward the end of the article, they write that “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.”

None of this jibes with what we know about how the alt-right operates on Twitter. For one thing, this group loves the attention they get from their online anti-Semitism — its members have no interest in “obscurity,” 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 — including one embedded in the Mic article itself — are explicitly anti-Semitic, or if they aren’t they are quickly followed by tweets which are. Plus, Twitter accounts dedicated to online anti-Semitism don’t tend to hide that fact in their online handles and profiles. All of this renders the parentheses’ mystery a lot less mysterious. (And this is all ignoring the fact that there’s little need to “hide” anti-Semitism on Twitter anyway, since Twitter rarely takes any sort of aggressive action against it — even, anecdotally at least, after it’s been reported.)

Many Jews such as homosexual activist James Kirchick are horrified to find themselves described as “oven-worthy” on Twitter but the Torah has no problem listing off crimes, such as homosexuality, that make a Jew worthy of death.

James Kirchick writes:

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.

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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.