New York Times staffer tweets out op-ed critical of Trump, faces anti-Semitic avalanche – The Washington Post
On Twitter and other social-media platforms, it can be difficult to determine who supports whom. Yes, several of the people making anti-Semitic statements had references to the presumptive GOP nominee in their Twitter IDs and photos, though those references could mean anything. What has been clear for some time is that criticizing Trump while being Jewish is a hazardous online activity. On Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, a prominent conservative commentator, documented the anti-Semitic backlash that followed his own opinionating about Trump. {…}
Shapiro Wednesday offered a further exploration at National Review under the headline, “Trump’s Anti-Semitic Supporters.” He writes: “I’ve experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump’s candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They’ve blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children to be thrown into a gas chamber.”
Disgusting.Report
This kind of thing is unconscionable. And so unnecessary when there are lots of perfectly legitimate reasons to despise Ben Shapiro.Report
I like to think of myself as reasonably well read, yet I’m actually surprised as how suddenly open overt racism and anti-Semitism have flared up in recent years.
Not the veiled concern trolling of sociological pathologies, not the Atwater-esque coded messages, I mean the real thing, naked and unashamed.
It makes me think of mushrooms that pop up suddenly, from something rotting down under the soil. The spores were always there, just waiting for the right conditions to bring them up.
I honestly never thought Trump would get so far. If you had told me a year an a half ago that a man talking like he does, I would have dismissed it as a fever dream, but here we are, seeing almost half of our electorate coalescing around him.
When Tod talks in the other post about how to fix the GOP, we may be assuming too much, that there isn’t a chance that America could decide that it really does want to round up twelve million people and load them into cattle cars bound for Mexico, or have a secret police draw up a list of seditious foreigners of Islamic faith.Report
@chip-daniels
Some thoughts:
1. These attacks can be coming from anywhere. I am from New York. You are an upper-middle class professional from Los Angeles. These are the two most Jewish areas in the United States. The tweets can be coming from areas that are not that Jewish and where old stereotypes left alive. Or plenty of people still harbored these thoughts and are using this moment to get them out (along with the anonymous nature of Twitter.)
2. There was a moment way back early in the primary season where HRC told BLM supporters, “I don’t think that you change minds. I think that you change laws.” Perhaps anti-Semitism has become so unseemly that most people will not publicly express it but they still harbor the thoughts. They might even have Jewish friends that they are perfectly kind to while muttering about the damned Jews in private.
3. Trump’s campaign is noted for its anti-Hispanic racism and protectionist nativism. This allows all the other bigots to come out of the woodwork.Report
I do think it is something that is based on fear, rising up from that lizard brain that is immune to cultural etiquette and our more generous natures.
It isn’t susceptible to logic or persuasion, and I don’t even think its something that people have consciously hidden.
I think its more like, in times of anxiety and crisis, people change their opinions to find comfort and solace.
Sort of like how even very well educated people who, when they are dying of cancer, latch onto bizarre quack miracle cures, which only a year before they would laugh off.
Fear and rage and desperation does strange things to people, and I see a lot of those today.
I’m a well paid white Christian middle class middle aged male, very high up on the socio-economic pyramid, yet I’m anxious as well.
I know full well that with just a couple small shifts in technology and law and I could become functionally unemployable, my skills automated or offshored, plunging into the financial abyss a decade before retirement age.
Who is to blame? Who should be punished? What secret cabals are plotting all this?
As I’ve noted before, there are two ways to react to fear, one is to lash out, the other is to strive harder to form relationships of trust and interdependence.
I’m placing my hope in the second option.Report
Who is to blame? Who should be punished? What secret cabals are plotting all this?
As I’ve pointed out many times before, the primary difference between the populist leftism of OWS and Bernie Sanders on the one hand, and good old-fashioned antisemitism on the other, is that they answer this question with a different choice of scapegoat.Report
One ascribes behavior based on religion, the other ascribes behavior based on behavior.Report
No, the latter ascribes behavior based on the scapegoat’s income and the ascriber’s total ignorance of economics.Report
@brandon-berg
Do libertarians have a monopoly on what constitutes knowledge or ignorance of economics? Surely not all libertarians can be well-versed in economics.
Yes there are plenty of times when people on the right and left don’t show knowledge of economics or engage in wish thinking around it. See renters who complain about the price of rents but also hate developers even of luxury condos. But there is nothing wrong with critiquing the human behaviors that led to the 2008 fiscal crisis because they were based more on greed and connections than anything else. How is being critical of bro-bankers who think they are the “Masters of the Universe” being ignorant of economics.
So many libertarians seem to use “ignorance of economics” as a sneer at anyone who makes a comment critical of anything that happens in the business world. I am not aware that the laws of economics always match up with whatever a business person does.Report
Citation?Report
The comments section of any mixed ideological blog or Right Libertarian blog is good enough.Report
I’m not inclined to say who is more ignorant than whom about economics, or I might find the ignoramus is me! But I do think the notion that the 2008 crisis was caused “more [by] greed and connections than anything else” does not, at least by itself, address the claim that much of what was done was legal and consistent with the incentives available to bankers, lenders, and homeowners.
People had choices, and those choices were, apparently, conditioned by then existing incentives. The solution, to me, lies more in changing the incentives or changing the rules. I guess we can also punish people who violated then-existing rules, but the instances of violating the law might be less numerous than you think. (Or more numerous than I think….I tend to be so against the notion that a small cabal of malefactors cause our problems that I sometimes naively discount the possibility that a small cabal of malefactors may actually cause at least some of our problems.)
I’m not saying “greed and connections” didn’t play a role. But I am suggesting citing those things doesn’t get us very far. To me, as only an occasional observer, OWS relied way too much on that moralistic claim and way too little on what would actually fix the problems.Report
It is true that searching for simple solutions leads to scapegoating and a rejection of the basic principles of a civil society.
This is my criticism of Bernie’s followers, is that there is this One Great Man, and One Great Enemy thinking running through their rhetoric and actions that functionally isn’t all that different than the Birchers or Glenn Beck.Report
The items posted in the article were pretty tame. I’ve seen much worse. And this: “Jonathan Weisman (((@jonathanweisman))) should apologize for his anti-Gentile hate speech” is called racist?
Please…Report
I learned this weekend that the triple nested parentheses means something – and it’s not nice.Report
Please elaborate as I don’t “twitter”
*recalls the futurama episode of the twitworm”Report
It’s the social media version of a yellow star sown on a jacket.Report
although, that analogy is a little off. If anything, when you see someone using the parentheses symbology it’s a signal to stay the fish away from the person that using it, not the person it’s used on.Report
I…wait, what?
I don’t want to impugn your honesty or anything, but can I see a citation?Report
https://twitter.com/jeffreygoldberg/status/666464284583395329
& this, but like the person who tweeted it said, it’s hella obscure.Report
No love for antisemitism, but much love for nazis and stalinists doing the same thing.Report