American anti-Semitism Is Getting Worse

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Most white Americans are clueless when it comes to know what it is like to be a member of a targeted minority.  They are rarely targeted for violence or murder simply because of who they are and do not grasp the latent fear that can linger in the back of one's mind. Blacks, Hispanics, gays and Jews know only too well the dangers they face in Trump's America almost daily.  When an attack does happen, any false sense of security one may develop quickly evaporates.  The Pulse massacre in Orlando hit me and many in the LGBT community hard since it reminded us all to well that many hate us for merely existing.  Yesterday's horrific mass shooting in a synagogue  reminded American Jews that they are deemed "other" and/or a threat by white Christian extremists - even those who rarely attend church services. In the growing atmosphere of hate being generated by the White House, Republicans at many levels of government and propaganda outlets like Fox News, the likelihood that rhetoric will urn to violence is growing as made all too clear yesterday.  A column by a conservative  - and former Republican - columnist looks at the growing anti-Semiticism in America which goes hand in hand with the right's normalizing of the reprehensible.  Here are highlights:

Mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Shabbat appears to be an especially horrific hate crime. Yet we should not think this is an isolated incident, unrelated to other events in the country. The United States is among the least anti-Semitic countries in the Diaspora, a far cry from much of Western Europe and the Middle East. But anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States, as we know from statistical and anecdotal evidence.

In February, the Anti-Defamation League released its annual report, finding that “the number of anti-Semitic incidents was nearly 60 percent higher in 2017 than 2016, the largest single-year increase on record and the second highest number reported since ADL started tracking incident data in the 1970s.” The report continued: “The sharp rise, reported in ADL’s Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, was in part due to a significant increase in incidents in schools and on college campuses, which nearly doubled for the second year in a row.” The ADL tabulated “1,015 incidents of harassment, including 163 bomb threats against Jewish institutions, up 41 percent from 2016; 952 incidents of vandalism, up 86 percent from 2016; and 19 physical assaults, down 47 percent from 2016.”

In Fairfax County, Va., where I reside, the Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia was vandalized this month by 19 swastikas painted on the building. It was the second such incident in less than two years.

Social media has become a cesspool of anti-Semitic messages and symbols. I can say from personal experience that social media companies are less than responsive in addressing complaints and disabling accounts that traffic in such material.

Neo-Nazis marched in 2017 in Charlottesville, chanting, “Jews will not replace them.” The synagogue in Charlottesville was forced to remove its Torah scrolls for safekeeping as neo-Nazis shouted slogans across the street.

For several years now, alt-right and neo-Nazi groups have targeted college campuses to spread their hateful ideologies and recruit young people for their movements. The ADL found that white supremacist propaganda on college campuses nearly doubled in the 2017-18 school year from the year prior.”

There is, however, one particular way in which anti-Semitism is being mainstreamed in the United States and in Europe: the propagation of “blood and soil” right-wing nationalism that by definition excludes Jews (whom many nationalists do not consider white). A country defined as white and Christian, one in which foreigners and different ethnic groups are seen as “infesting” the country and diluting its true heritage, by definition casts Jews as a fifth column, as outsiders, as “the other.” Right-wing nationalism in Europe goes hand in hand with overt anti-Semitism.

Defining Jews out of the body politic — by defining “real” citizens in racial, ethnic and/or religious terms — is perhaps the most common tactic.

The Pittsburgh gunman reportedly focused his ire on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), accusing it of funding the Central American caravan of refugees, which he dubbed “invaders.” Recently, Trump supporters and Fox News programming, following the president’s lead, have obsessed with escalating hysteria over the caravan — which is hundreds of miles from our southern border — and Trumpites have even claimed it is funded by Soros, whose name figures prominently in their conspiratorial rhetoric.

So when American politicians blame Soros for opposition to the administration, or celebrate “nationalism,” or declare the United States is a “Christian nation” (as opposed to a country in which a majority of people are Christian), they are consciously or unconsciously channeling and amplifying anti-Semitism.

No one other than the shooter is responsible for the mass murder in Pittsburgh, but there are many people — including those in public office and in digital media — contributing to the rise of the anti-Semitic sentiments the shooter allegedly shouted. If you think words — especially [Trump's] an American president’s words — don’t matter, think again.

O course, the other role the GOP played in yesterday's massacre was the continued blocking of meaningful gun controls. Statements of "thoughts and prayers" are utter bullshit.  Comprehensive gun control legislation is what would really make a difference.

Kaine Calls Out Stewart's Praise and Encouragement of White Supremacists

Republicans faced a moment of truth in 2016 as to whether or not the party retained any shred of morality when they nominated Donald Trump as their presidential candidate.  Some 70,000 voters spread across three states failed the test of morality when they gave Trump an Electoral College victory - sadly, the Electors failed the test of morality when they rejected their constitutional duty to protect the nation from an unfit demagogue.  Now, in 2018, Virginia faces a test of the morality in the U.S. Senate contest between Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican extremist and white supremacist Corey Stewart. Stewart embodies everything morally deficient in today's Republican Party as he bases his campaign on racial hatred and pandering to religious extremists who make the biblical Pharisees look to be the height of moral decency.  Over the weekend, Tim Kaine blasted Stewart for the ugliness that under-girds his campaign and his connections to racists and anti-Semites.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post:

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) attacked Republican challenger Corey A. Stewart for his ties to white supremacists in a speech to more than 1,000 cheering Democrats on Saturday, unloading on the brash defender of Confederate symbols who won the GOP nomination last week.

“My opponent likes to praise and encourage white supremacists, those who organize hate-filled rallies like the tragedy in Charlottesville and perpetrate online filth and anti-Semitism,” Kaine said. “This week the American press was filled with stories about his bizarre connections to spreaders of hate. And Israeli newspapers were filled with articles about his ties to notorious anti-Semites. Is this who Virginia is in 2018? Is this what the Senate needs?”

Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors since 2006, leads Virginia’s second-largest jurisdiction with a swaggering style that he touts as “more Trump than Trump.” His efforts to crack down on undocumented immigrants in the county stretch back more than a decade. He [Stewrt] embraced the Confederate flag and monuments in a bid for governor last year, a strategy that startled many establishment Republicans but nearly propelled him to victory in a primary battle with former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. Gillespie, who went on to ape some of Stewart’s hard-edge messaging, lost in a landslide to Democrat Ralph Northam in November.

During the gubernatorial primary race, Stewart twice appeared with Jason Kessler, founder of Unity and Security for America (USA), a fledgling group that calls for “defending Western Civilization.” Kessler went on to organize the Unite the Right rally, which sparked deadly unrest in Charlottesville last summer.

Stewart also called Paul Nehlen, a self-professed “pro-white” candidate for Congress in Wisconsin, “one of my personal heroes” for challenging House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

In his speech Saturday, Kaine also took aim at the Trump administration for separating hundreds of migrant children from their parents on the nation’s southern border — a practice that Kaine suggested was rooted in racism. . . . . “On the night before Father’s Day, that’s what this nation has come to with this president. . . . Is there any doubt that if these children had light skin and were speaking English that they wouldn’t be loaded into cells and rooms in a windowless Walmart in the hundreds and the thousands on the southern border of this country?”

Kaine laid out what he called his “positive vision” for the country, including “health care for all,” affordable college and criminal justice reform. He eventually pivoted to a full-throated condemnation of Stewart, starting with the county board chairman’s record on taxes, education, climate change and abortion.

[E]ven the Koch brothers — refused to support him,” Kaine said, referring to the founders of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group that has announced that it will not back Stewart.

It goes without saying that The Family Foundation - Virginia's faux "family values" organization and leading hate group - supports Stewart.

Corey Stewart Could Endanger Other Virginia Republicans

As a former Republican and activist within the Republican Party of Virginia, the selection of Corey Stewart as the party senate nominee underscores the sad reality that the Virginia GOP has become as insane as a rabid dog. As recently as 15-20 years ago, Stewart would have been hard put to be elected to a a city or county committee.  Back then, of course, moderates were still the norm within the Party.  Now, with evangelical Christian extremists and white supremacists (the two groups are difficult to differentiate) controlling the base, insanity and bigotry are the norm.  One can only hope that Stewart goes down to a horrific defeat and kills the delusional myth that Republicans have not won statewide office in Virginia for nearly a decade because their candidates were "too liberal."  Two pieces look at the likely consequences of Stewart's selection.  One is found in Bearing Drift, a conservative site, which argues there is no conservative case for supporting Stewart and refers to Stewart as the "Gauleiter of Prince William County" (for Fox News viewers, "gauleiter" is a political official governing a district under Nazi rule), and the other is in the New York Times.  First highlights from Bearing Drift:

Back in February 2014, I penned a piece warning about the rise of the nativist alt-right in Republican politics. . . . The Republican Party of Virginia . . . . has descended into a parody of itself, finally lifting from the dust the battle standard of Massive Resistance and waving it proudly in the hands of one man: Corey Stewart.

Let us be clear where things stand.  Our chairman, John Whitbeck, is best known for his jokes about Jewish people at party gatherings.  For an unprecedented 11 times, Whitbeck defended Fredy Burgos, a man whose anti-Semtism and fondness for Augusto Pinochet were abundantly clear, but never worthy of countenance until this publication forced his hand.  Yet while removed by State Central Committee by a margin so close as to be an embarrassment unto itself, Burgos was in fact rewarded for his troubles, earning a role as vice chairman of the Fairfax GOP, a full 1/8th of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The litany of stupid and the obtuse only becomes worse.  The current executive director proudly boasts of how Governor Northam has betrayed his “heritage” on social media and openly shares material from known alt-right operatives.  . . . members and activists have abandoned the party in droves.

It gets worse.  Proudly, the alt-right brags about electing two Republican congressmen (Brat and Garrett), proudly they take photos next to our candidates pledging themselves to their cause (Stewart), and the mewling from erstwhile conservatives in protest is barely audible — protecting access to power over their own conscience, excusing weakness for prudence.  It’s folly.

In 1993 nearly 25 years ago.  Back then, the Republican Party was the party of free minds, free ideas, and a free society.  Free speech was sacrosanct; free trade was the pillar that destroyed Soviet communism.  Around it all was a wholesale commitment to family and the American entrepreneurial spirit — that equality of outcome could never be guaranteed, but equality of opportunity was our first and foremost responsibility as a polity. So when is it enough? Was it enough when in 2014 Dave Brat abased himself before the likes of Breitbart.com — the self-declared mouthpiece of the alt-right?  Was it enough when the alt-right spiked the football in 2016 with cries of “Hail Trump!” as they celebrated their election night win?  Was it enough when in 2017 they earned invitations to town halls in Charlottesville?  Was it enough when three people — two of whom were Virginia State Troopers — died during the August 2017 alt-right rallies in Charlottesville?

Is it enough now when their groomed and chosen candidate — financed by the likes of Chris Ekstrom and run by Rick Shaftan — rides the wave of white nationalism?  To a party nomination contest?  And wins?

Let’s be clear about what happened.  The future of the Republican Party of Virginia fought the past, and lost. 

For 25 years, I have believed — perhaps erroneously — that the Republican Party was the best home for my beliefs as a conservative, as a Virginian, and as a Catholic. With the nomination of Corey Stewart?  That is now an impossibility.

[W]hatever the threat political socialism presents to the American republic, the answer cannot, is not, and never will be white nationalism.  My children deserve a better future than this; their children deserve a better future.  If the great story of America is to be abruptly ended in a syrup of debt and moral relativism, I would much rather go down standing athwart history yelling STOP! rather than participate in the moral contagion of a once great party. [W]e are watching in real time as the party of freedom descends into a party of rank and bitter nationalism. . . . So unless you stand up and do something now? Get used to this sound and become comfortable with its grip.  It will have you and the people you love by the throat soon enough.

The sound referred to is a clip of a Hitler Youth singing "The World Belongs to Me."  I suspect many more will be exiting from the Republican Party of Virginia.

The piece in the New York Times looks at Stewart's ugly history and the possible reverberations for others on the GOP ticket in November.  Here are excerpts:

He [Corey Stewart] once stood proudly before a Confederate flag, declaring it was not a symbol of hatred, but “about our heritage.” After the march of torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville last year, which led to the death of a counterprotester, he criticized “weak Republicans” who “couldn’t apologize fast enough.”

As officials around Virginia have grappled with whether to remove Confederate statues, he has compared those politicians to leaders of the Islamic State. Now Corey Stewart, a county official who for years has played to the hard-right fringe, captured the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia.

He did so in a low-turnout primary on Tuesday when many centrist Republicans apparently stayed home, unhappy with a three-way race among candidates all professing strong loyalty to President Trump and given to fiery culture war pronouncements.

[Stewart] received a congratulatory overnight tweet from the president, who called Mr. Stewart’s Democratic opponent, Senator Tim Kaine, “a total stiff.”

Tellingly, though, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm, said it would not support Mr. Stewart, who lags far behind Mr. Kaine in fund-raising and has a history of cozying up to white supremacists and anti-Semites that threatens to make him an albatross for down-ballot Republicans. . . . The real worry for national Republicans — and the hope for Democrats — is that Mr. Stewart’s nomination may cost some incumbent Republicans in Virginia their seats in Congress.

“For the G.O.P. candidates in the down-ballot House races in Virginia, having Stewart on the ticket is going to be a very tough challenge,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “Somehow they will need to separate themselves from the more extreme elements of his message, while at the same time not alienating the Trump Republicans whose votes will be needed.”

Virginia Democrats quickly moved to join Mr. Stewart at the hip to other Republicans in competitive House races.  “There is no place to hide — you are either running with Corey Stewart and you condone his vile politics, or you don’t,” said Susan Swecker, the state Democratic chairwoman.

Mr. Stewart could especially hurt Representative Barbara Comstock, a Republican defending a seat in affluent Northern Virginia that is emblematic of how the state has been shifted from its once-fixed Republican moorings by an influx of immigrants and college-educated professionals.

The center of gravity for the Republican Party in the state has shifted “from the country club to the country,” as one Republican strategist, Tom Davis, put it.  “Every candidate will be asked if they support Stewart,” said Mr. Davis, a former congressman from Virginia. “This is more nuanced than the media would have you believe, but in high-education areas, it is a killer.”
 If the turnout pattern repeats in November, at least two other Republican House members besides Ms. Comstock could also be in trouble: Dave Brat and Scott Taylor. “Stewart’s fearmongering and division-sowing campaign will turn many Virginians to the Democratic ticket,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democratic state legislator who lives in Mr. Brat’s district, the Seventh.

Mr. Taylor, a former Navy SEAL who represents the Second District, centered on Virginia Beach, will face Elaine Luria, a former Navy commander.  “My opponent will either embrace Corey Stewart, be silent or distance himself from him,” Ms. Luria said in an interview. “Virginia favors equality, diversity and economic opportunity for all. Corey Stewart’s race-baiting rhetoric is offensive to everybody in Virginia.”

In January 2017, Mr. Stewart met with and praised Paul Nehlen, an outspoken anti-Semite who is now making his second run for Congress in Wisconsin. Mr. Stewart was also endorsed last year by the white nationalist Jason Kessler, who later helped organize the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

It is pitiful - and frightening - what the Republican Party of Virginia has become.

Rosanne Barr's Much Deserved Firing and Banishment to the Fringe

Racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic bigot Roseanne Barr.

I will admit that I have never liked Roseanne Barr and made a point of not watching her show even during its first run.  I found her crude, bigoted, at times wilfully ignorant of facts, and the antithesis to what one would want as a role model for one's children or grandchildren.  With the revival of the show and Barr's outspoken support of Trump and his agenda of racism and bigotry and bullying, I would have preferred to have my fingernails pulled out with pliers rather than add to the viewership of Barr's show.   To me, Barr is emblematic of what is wrong with today's so called "conservatism" and the Republican Party base in general. As for my "friends" who voted for Trump,  if they have not recanted from their vote and have not vowed to vote Democrat in November, 2018, they are sadly little better than Roseanne Barr, just less outspoken.  Deadline Hollywood looks at Barr's rapid  lesson in the fact that actions - or in this case tweets - have consequences.   Here are highlights: 

The fallout from Roseanne Barr’s racially-charged tweets this morning continues. Following the cancellation of her hit ABC comedy series, Barr has been dropped by her agency, ICM Partners.

“We are all greatly distressed by the disgraceful and unacceptable tweet from Roseanne Barr this morning,” the agency’s leadership said in an internal memo to company employees. “What she wrote is antithetical to our core values, both as individuals and as an agency.  Consequently, we have notified her that we will not represent her.  Effective immediately, Roseanne Barr is no longer a client.”

The agency’s decision to drop Barr followed a morning of racist tweets in which Barr described Valerie Jarrett, a former key adviser to President Obama, as an offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” . . . . . The announcement by ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey that the network was canceling the revival series soon followed. Disney CEO Bob Iger weighed in shortly afterward, supporting the cancellation decision, tweeting “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing.”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tweeted: “There is no apology she can make that justifies @ABC turning a blind eye to this bigotry by airing another second of her show. Even in the Age of Trump, there are red lines that can never be crossed. This is one.”

Adding to Barr's problem is the added fact that networks that had been running reruns of the Roseanne show have dumped the show. Sadly, many people on the cast and production staff for the show will be losing their jobs. Unfortunately, a self-centered bigot like Barr will likely have no thought of the harm she has done to others.  Hollywood Reporter looks at this added fallout:

After a racist tweet by Roseanne Barr that created an outcry online, reruns of the Roseanne revival scheduled to air on Viacom networks Paramount Network, TV Land and CMT will be pulled from their respective schedules.

Roseanne reruns will be canceled on the three channels starting Wednesday, a Viacom spokesperson said.

Later on Tuesday a Hulu spokesperson also confirmed that the streaming platform would be dropping the show, writing, "We support ABC’s decision and are removing the show from Hulu."

The Laff broadcast network Tuesday announced that it would be dropping reruns of the original series, which ran from 1988-97 on ABC. "While we believe viewers have always distinguished the personal behavior of the actress Roseanne Barr from the television character Roseanne Connor, we are disgusted by Barr’s comments this week.

Therefore, we are removing the original Roseanne series from the Laff schedule for the time being, effective immediately," Laff said in a statement.

Neo-Nazi Site Argues Anti-Jewish "Troll Storm" Is Free Speech

As a previous post noted, a ruling for the Christofascist plaintiff in Masterpiece Cakeshop could embolden white nationalists to make similar "religious freedom" arguments to support their active discrimination against minorities.  Already, one neo-Nazi site is claiming that a so-called "troll storm" that was unleashed against a Jewish target is protected "free speech."  Welcome to Trump/Pence's America.  It's an American where whites/Christian extremists are above the law and can abuse anyone who doesn't conform with their racial and/or religious views.  And the separation between right wing, evangelical Christians and white supremacists is much smaller than many want to believe.  It is no coincidence that the head of Family Research Council - an anti-gay hate group - has ties to white supremacy organizations.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the insidious "free speech" argument being made by neo-Nazis.  Here are excerpts:

The founder of a popular neo-Nazi website who was sued after he called on his readers and followers to “troll storm” a Jewish Realtor from Montana is arguing that his actions are protected by free speech.

Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, has asked a federal court in Montana to dismiss a lawsuit that Tanya Gersh filed against him last spring. In court records filed last week, Anglin’s attorneys said that the First Amendment “is blind to viewpoint” and that the Constitution protects Anglin’s right to express his views about Gersh, “no matter how many people find those views intolerable.”

“If a local business were polluting the environment, any editor could rally his readers to write to that business in protest,” his legal team, led by First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza, wrote in court briefs asking for the dismissal of the lawsuit. “If a local business were discriminating against black customers, the NAACP can exhort its members to send correspondence to it. And, conversely, the KKK can ask its members to send letters of protest to an establishment that treats all races equally.”

Gersh, of Whitefish, Mont., sued Anglin in April in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana. The complaintdetails many of the more than 700 anti-Semitic and hateful messages, including death threats, to Gersh, her family, friends and colleagues.

The deluge of messages began after Gersh, who was involved with a local organization called “Love Lives Here,” spoke with Sherry Spencer, the mother of white nationalist and alt-right leader Richard Spencer.

“There are only 6,000 Jews in the entire state of Montana, yet they’re 100% of the people trying to silence Richard Spencer by harassing his mother. So Then — Let’s Hit Em Up. Are ya’ll ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm?” Anglin wrote.

Anglin’s attorneys argued that his articles do not constitute a “true threat” of violence against Gersh. Although there have been death threats, they said those did not come directly from Anglin, but rather, from third parties. The attorneys added that Anglin included disclaimers urging his readers to avoid threats of violence.

“Political hyperbole is not a threat. . . . The third parties’ statements are generally recognized anti-Semitic tropes, without actual harm reasonably construed,” the attorneys wrote. “And, even Nazi expression, no matter the psychic harm on Jewish residents, is nonetheless protected speech.”

The attorneys further argued that although the speech in question is unpopular, banning it would create a dangerous precedent for the First Amendment rights of advocacy organizations.

Gersh’s lawsuit, which is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, alleged invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress and violation of Montana’s anti-intimidation act. Gersh is represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Last summer, Anglin’s site was evicted from its home on the Internet after a violent white nationalist rally drew fresh attention to hate speech in the United States. The web hosting company GoDaddy announced in August that it will no longer host the site, after Anglin disparaged a protester who was killed in the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Anglin characterized Heather Heyer as a “drain on society” and insulted her appearance. Heyer, 32, was killed after a car allegedly driven by a Nazi sympathizer plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters.

A White Nationalist Anti-Semite Will Be Trump's Senior Counselor

While Donald Trump temporarily played nice with the LGBT community during a 60 Minutes interview by saying that he is "fine" with marriage equality because "it was already settled," he said nothing about his promise to sign a "First Amendment Defense Act" already pending in Congress that would exempt Christofascists from obeying non-discrimination laws if motivated by their religious beliefs.  He also admonished protesters in various cities to "stop it" but said nothing to condemn the threats and intimidating acts being done by his supporters against minority groups and Clinton supporters. (I blocked four nasty comments to posts on this blog from a aggressive Trumpkin.)   And for further proof that we are headed down an ugly road, today it was confirmed that Trump has name alt-right provocateur Steve Bannon as his senior White House counselor.  For those not aware of it, Bannon supports an alt-right, white nationalist agenda and is an anti-Semite based on various published reports.  Media Matters looks at the development.  Here are highlights:

President-elect Donald Trump’s first White House hire tells you everything you need to know about his commitment to his campaign’s bigoted message. Stephen Bannon, an anti-Semite who ran the white nationalist “alt-right” website Breitbart News before taking a leave of absence to become the Trump campaign CEO, will be Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor.

On November 13, Trump released a statement announcing Bannon’s hiring. The same statement noted that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus would become Trump’s chief of staff. While White House chief of staff is typically the most senior position in the White House, the press release named Bannon first and described the two as “equal partners” in the Trump administration.

Bannon has been a key figure in leveraging this bigotry to aid Trump’s rise to power. Bannon bragged during the Republican Convention to nominate Trump that Breitbart News had become home to the “alt-right” -- which is just a racist code word for white nationalists. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News has featured racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric. The site recently made a “noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas -- all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right’” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Before he died, Andrew Breitbart himself reportedly called Bannon “the Leni Riefenstahl of the tea party movement.”

Bannon’s Breitbart News especially has come under fire for its rampant anti-Semitism. . . . As CNN’s Jake Tapper noted on Twitter after today’s announcement, Bannon’s ex-wife swore in court that “he said he doesn’t like Jews” and didn’t want his children to go to school with Jews. Indeed, Esquire politics contributor Charles Pierce even compared Bannon with David Duke.

As note before, it may not be easy for them, but many of those who voted for Trump need to take a good look at what they have helped set in motion. Like it or not, they own what is happening because of their vote. They cannot duck responsibility.  They are just as responsible as Trump because them put him in the position to mainstream hate and extremism. 

Anti-Semitism in the Time of Trump

Much has been made of the open racism towards non-whites that energizes many Donald Trump supporters, but the bigotry that defines Trump and his movement, if you will, also extends to other groups.  Muslims needless to say are hated by Trump's base.  But so too are those of Jewish descent and, of course, LGBT Americans, particularly among the Christofascists who have flocked to Trump's message of hate.  Having just attended an amazing wedding whee the bride is half Chinese and half Italian and the groom is Jewish, I could not help but think about Trump supporters who hold anyone who is not a white, conservative Christian in open contempt.  A lengthy piece in Politico Magazine looks at the reality check being experienced by Jewish members of the Millennial generation faced with Trump and all he stands for.  Here are excerpts:

Like many Jewish families in America, the Reizes household has been deliberating in recent months what Donald Trump really thinks of them. As they celebrate the Jewish New Year this weekend in their suburban Cleveland home, the topic of discussion will once again be anti-Semitism, and whether it’s surging in the United States thanks to the Trump campaign. Like others representing America’s aging Jewish Gen-X’ers and boomers, Joelle Reizes, 48, remembers experiencing some anti-Semitism as a girl—occasional sideways glances and untoward comments. But millennial Jews and their juniors are another matter. Joelle’s children—ages 19, 14, and 12—have grown up during an unprecedented era of prosperity and assimilation for Jews in America, one in which the struggles endured by an earlier generation is understood as something closer to historical lore than present fact. For younger Jews in the United States, that era has suddenly passed. The early months of 2016 brought in a strange tide of online hate speech aimed largely at Jewish journalists who had published articles critical of Trump or his campaign, with all the old ugly epithets on display. Then in July Trump’s Twitter account posted an image of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with a pile of money in the background. Though he deleted the tweet, afterward Trump walked up to a brightly lit podium and defended the image, bellowing that the Jewish star was not a Jewish star. A dim reality descended on American Jews. Yes: Trump had broadcast the message of a neo-Nazi without apology. Then: Weeks of quiet, lasting into August. But the issue roared back into view in September, when the ex-wife of Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, said that Bannon had kept his daughters out of a school because he there were too many “whiny” Jewish brats there; the candidate’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted someone described as the neo-Nazis’ “favorite academic”; and a Trump advisor was accused of discriminating against Jewish employees (and denying the Holocaust).

[T]he Reizes family of Cleveland has been deliberating how to process such events—and the return of an age-old enmity that the Trump campaign has somehow reawakened. How soon is too soon to brush the cobwebs away from an ancient alarm bell? 

[W]hile his parents deliberate, it’s 19-year-old Zach Reizes who is most firm in his views. “What Trump has brought to the surface is, in many ways, the first blatant anti-Semitic experience for the vast majority of American millennials,” says Zach, an angular and handsome sophomore at Ohio University. 

Trump’s success—and a white nationalist subculture blooming like algae in the Internet’s unlighted depths—has turned millennial Jews into the new expositors of anti-Semitism at the dinner table: Quietly explaining Pepe the Frog, opaque Twitter memes and dyspeptic forums like Stormfront to frozen audiences of parents and grandparents. It’s thrust young Jews into long-buried questions of assimilation and political position, whiteness and privilege. And it’s heightened a divide between young and old, left and right: Progressive young Jews learning to form the words “anti-Semitism,” often for the first time—even while they take umbrage at their right-leaning scolds who, now into October, have kept up a deafening silence on the topic of Trump. This year, Reizes and his peers have watched the situation deteriorate: Headshots of journalists superimposed in concentration camps; calls to Jewish reporters in the middle of the night playing Hitler’s voice; white supremacists who appended parentheses around the names of Jews online.

To some young Jews, this election season has felt like a cold shower. “Whether you experienced no anti-Semitism growing up, or a watered-down version of it, I think most young people felt like anti-Semitism was dying,” says Debbie Rabbinovich, 19, a sophomore and Hillel member at the University of Pennsylvania. Other young activists were reconsidering what they had heard for years from an older generation. “For a long time we were told that anti-Semitism was everywhere, and we rolled our eyes at that,” says Morriah Kaplan, 24, a leader in the left-leaning activist group If Not Now. But, she acknowledged, “This feels like the closest thing to the type of anti-Semitism that my grandparents talk about experiencing in Poland.”

It’s impossible, as American Jewish families go, to gauge how widespread these dinner table conversations are—but the scope and scale was hinted at when the discord touched the family of Haman himself. When Donald Trump’s star tweet sufficiently embarrassed Jared Kushner, Trump’s Orthodox son-in-law, Kushner published an op-ed in his paper, the New York Observer, defending Trump and invoking the plight of his ancestors in the Holocaust. Immediately, Kushner’s extended family fired back, launching an internecine war of words: “Please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night,” seethed one Kushner cousin. “It is self-serving and disgusting.”

Kushner was also blasted by a young member of his staff at the New York Observer, 23-year-old writer Dana Schwartz, who is Jewish. Her provocation was an open letter, and like Zach’s, it was scathing. “When you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law,” she wrote to her boss, “you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.”

Trump's Alt-Right Army Hates ‘Faggots’ Too

Michelangelo Signorile heads up Huffington Post's "Gay Voices" page and is a radio show host.  He writes on and discusses politics frequently.  He's a Facebook friend and we've spoken on the telephone before concerning closeted Republicans (for newer readers, I helped out former Virginia 2nd District Congressman Ed Schrock), so I take Michelangelo's word at face value.  As a result, his description of his recent online encounters with Donald Trump's Alt-Right followers is all the more unsettling. Here are excerpts from his recent post at Huffington Post (be sure to read the entire post to see all of the hate and ugliness of trump supporters):

Last week I tweeted my opinion of Jimmy Fallon having Donald Trump on his show, where Fallon failed to ask a tough question while he played with Trump’s hair.  The tweet was widely shared. A lot of people clearly agreed.

But not Trump’s online armies on the alt-right, energetic hordes of nativists, white supremacists, anti-Semites and, yes, homophobes whom Trump has emboldened.

Within a matter of minutes I was under full-blown assault from a stream of haters tweeting their anger, often with homophobic, racist and misogynistic slurs. At first I blocked them, but the effort became futile as they poured in every few seconds. This was similar to the anti-semitic attacks on Twitter that New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman, journalist Julia Ioffe and others have experienced from Trump’s alt-right warriors.

Many of those tweeting me had images of Trump or his campaign’s logo as their avatars or as the banner of their pages. A large number had renamed themselves with the word “deplorable” – “Deplorable Garrett,” “Mr. Deplorable” and so on – taking Hillary Clinton’s accurate criticism of the bigots Trump has brought into his campaign and turning it into a badge of honor.

One of several threats of violence and death streamed in, including from “Boss Zogg,” who suggested, “One solution for freaks like u,” above an image of a man being thrown from a rooftop, in what looked like photos that have been identified as depictions of ISIS executioners killing gay men.

“Shitlord,” who identifies himself as a member of the #AltReich, asked, “Are you a Jew?” Hours later, he asked again, “Are you a pig-faced boy?” The next day he wrote to say, “Jew detected.” (I’m happy to be Jewish on Twitter, but I think my name very clearly shows I’m as Italian as they come, revealing how the hate even defies basic logic.) Shitlord’s bio also says, “I identify as an “#AttackHelicopter.” This is a now well-known meme meant to mock sexual and gender identity.

Their own egos, like Trump’s, are so fragile, their own sense of masculinity so threatened, that they engage in acts of domination to be big again. They’re feeling completely empowered to do so by the bully-in-chief, Trump. And that was just the men. The few women who wrote aped the guys, sometimes sending out even nastier barbs, as if they’re trying to prove they can be just as ugly.

The anger and animus toward LGBT people from these Trump supporters – many of them young – belies the idiotic and dangerous media narrative that posits Trump as “more accepting on gay issues” than other Republicans. (To these Trump supporters, any mention Trump makes of “LGBTQ people” is acceptable, laughablepandering to win the election, as he wink-winks and nudge-nudges to them, as he has on other issues, from deportation to birtherism.) 

There is no question that many of the people who may very well elect Donald Trump ― particularly if third party candidates siphon off enough votes of millions of young people ― are as hellbent on rolling back LGBT rights as they are about rolling back much else. To them, making America great again also means shoving LGBT people back into the closet. And they’ll make sure Trump includes that in his radical, frightening realignment of the nation.

These "patriots" and "real Americans" bear a frightening similarity to the thugs and haters in Germany who rallied to Hitler's calls for discrimination and ultimately violence and war.   Like Kathleen Parker, I do not understand how decent and moral people can support Donald Trump. 

Trump Fuels Resistance of Whites in Decline

With Donald Trump's strongest support coming from working class white males with a high school education or less, it quickly becomes obvious that Trump is preying on these citizens who have lost out to the forces of globalization and the growing requirement of a college degree for meaningful long term employment.  Hence Trump's targeting of immigrants, minorities and non-Christians who are easy targets of the angst and hatred that are the core of Trump's base.   Make no mistake, by "Make America Great Again," Trump means the reinstatement of unchallenged white privilege.   A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's pandering to these voters and the manner in which he has mainstreamed hate and bigotry and won the cheers of white supremacist organizations.  Here are article highlights which I find very disturbing.  Here are article excerpts:

In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race.

Mr. Trump has attacked Mexicans as criminals. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. He has wondered aloud why the United States is not “letting people in from Europe.”

His rallies vibrate with grievances that might otherwise be expressed in private: about “political correctness,” about the ranch house down the street overcrowded with day laborers, and about who is really to blame for the death of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. In a country where the wealthiest and most influential citizens are still mostly white, Mr. Trump is voicing the bewilderment and anger of whites who do not feel at all powerful or privileged.

But in doing so, Mr. Trump has also opened the door to assertions of white identity and resentment in a way not seen so broadly in American culture in over half a century, according to those who track patterns of racial tension and antagonism in American life.

On the internet, Mr. Trump is invoked by anonymous followers brandishing stark expressions of hate and anti-Semitism, surprisingly amplified this month when Mr. Trump tweeted a graphic depicting Hillary Clinton’s face with piles of cash and a six-pointed star that many viewed as a Star of David.

“I think what we really find troubling is the mainstreaming of these really offensive ideas,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate groups. “It’s allowed some of the worst ideas into the public conversation in ways we haven’t seen anything like in recent memory.”

The resentment among whites feels both old and distinctly of this moment. It is shaped by the reality of demographic change, by a decade and a half of war in the Middle East, and by unease with the newly confident and confrontational activism of young blacks furious over police violence. It is mingled with patriotism, pride, fear and a sense that an America without them at its center is not really America anymore.

In making the explicit assertion of white identity and grievance more widespread, Mr. Trump has galvanized the otherwise marginal world of avowed white nationalists and self-described “race realists.” They hail him as a fellow traveler who has driven millions of white Americans toward an intuitive embrace of their ideals: that race should matter as much to white people as it does to everyone else. He has freed Americans, those activists say, to say what they really believe.

Demographers began to speak of a not-too-distant future when non-Hispanic whites would be a minority of the American population. In states like Texas and California, and in hundreds of cities and counties around the country, that future has arrived.  It is the changes that are taking place that have created the national constituency for Donald Trump,” Mr. Buchanan said.

For many Americans, President Obama’s election, made possible in part by the rising strength of nonwhite voters, signaled a transcendent moment in the country’s knotty racial history. But for some whites, the election of the country’s first black president was also a powerful symbol of their declining pre-eminence in American society.

Few politicians were better prepared than Mr. Trump to harness these shifts. While open racism against blacks remains among the most powerful taboos in American politics, Americans feel more free expressing worries about illegal immigrants and dislike of Islam, survey research shows. In Mr. Trump’s hands, the two ideas merged: During Mr. Obama’s presidency, he has become America’s most prominent “birther,” loudly questioning Mr. Obama’s American citizenship and suggesting he could be Muslim.

In June 2015, two weeks after Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, he received an endorsement that would end most campaigns: The Daily Stormer embraced his candidacy.

Founded in 2013 by a 32-year-old neo-Nazi named Andrew Anglin, The Daily Stormer is among the most prominent online gathering places for white nationalists and anti-Semites, with sections devoted to “The Jewish Problem” and “Race War.” Mr. Anglin explained that although he had some disagreements with him, Mr. Trump was the only candidate willing to speak the truth about Mexicans. . . . across this spectrum, in Mr. Trump’s descriptions of immigrants as vectors of disease, violent crime and social decay, they heard their own dialect.

Mr. Taylor, who has written that blacks “left entirely to their own devices” are incapable of civilization, and whose magazine, American Renaissance, once published an essay arguing that blacks were genetically more prone to crime, wrote on his blog that Mr. Trump had handled the attacks on him “in the nicest way.”

[O]n the flatlands of social media, the border between Mr. Trump and white supremacists easily blurs. He has retweeted supportive messages from racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his nine million followers. Last fall, he retweeted a graphic with fictitious crime statistics claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims in 2015 were killed by blacks. (No such statistic was available for 2015 at the time; the actual figure for 2014 was 15 percent, according to the F.B.I.)

In January and February he retweeted messages from a user with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, whose profile picture is of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. A couple of days later, in quick succession, he retweeted two more accounts featuring white nationalist or Nazi themes.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. 

All of which makes me re-post this image in challenge to Trump supporters:

Donald Trump's Rallying Cry - “Make America Racist Again”

For decades now the Republican Party has been sending subtle, dog whistle messages to its base and those in the South in particular, that racism is acceptable.  With the rise of Donald Trump, all pretense of keeping the party base's raging racism behind a smoke screen is gone.  A piece in Politicususa.com notes this reality.  And just to that there can be no doubt about the matter, Trump's campaign has once again be caught using imagery from a white supremacist website that also maligns Jews through it use of a Star of David in the hit piece on Hillary Clinton. Here are some highlights:

When did it become “okay” to be a racist?  I think the date is around 15 June 2015.  That was when Donald J. Trump declared his intention to run for President of the United States with his now iconic speech in which he put down Mexican people, saying “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”  Somehow, at that moment in time, at the point where he said it and Americans cheered rather than jeered, it became “okay” to be a racist and to speak with a forked tongue.

During the little over a year since Trump’s official candidacy announcement, he has yet to give a speech whereby he doesn’t mock or put down some group of people:  Muslims, Hispanics, women, Asians, disabled people, and the list goes on.  And because Donald Trump can stand in front of a crowd of hundreds and spew his racist, bigoted hate-filled speech with little or no consequence, all those closet-racists who have been biting their tongues are now coming out of the woodwork in droves, turning our nation into one where there is no courtesy, no respect, and no tolerance for others.  It is this very attitude that has made it seem “okay” to some that a man running for the U.S. Congress puts up billboards urging citizens to “make America white again.” It is the attitude that has given rise to discrimination in venues across the nation, from workplaces to schools, from state governments to churches.

When did it become “okay” to be a racist?  Let me tell you a little secret … it didn’t.  It has never been okay, it isn’t okay now, and it will never be okay.  It was not okay when we interned American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.  It was not okay when we made black people sit in the back of the bus.  It was not okay when we burned crosses on the yards of African-Americans.  And it is not okay when a pastor contends that “racism, misogyny, homophobia are ‘biblical truths we stand for’.”

Trump is merely the catalyst that has brought it back out into the open, stirring the dual pots of fear and hatred in the process.  Trump did not create racism and hatred, he simply told Americans that it is “okay” to speak out loudly against those who are different, who are non-Caucasian, who are non-Christian, who are disabled or female or transgender or homosexual.  He merely gave the green light, the thumbs-up . . .

I now believe that these individuals, whether they will admit it or not, never truly moved on from the days of Jim Crow laws, of lynchings, of cross-burnings and murders by the Klan, of strict segregation.  They never came to understand that their white skin, their European ancestry, and their Christianity does not make them superior, but that their attitudes make them, in fact, inferior.  Attitudes which might have lain fallow for decades longer had not Donald Trump told them that it was “okay” to be a racist.  No, my friends, it is NOT okay.  It never was and it never will be.

As for the anti-Semitic imaging, the Washington Post notes as follows:

But the image that Trump chose to illustrate his point, which portrayed a red Star of David shape slapped onto a bed of $100 bills, had origins in the online white-supremacist movement. For at least the fifth time, Trump’s Twitter account had shared a meme from the racist “alt-right” and offered no explanation why.

On white-supremacist forums, Trump was cheered for apparently declaring his solidarity through not-so-subtle code.

“The evangelicals will listen to his pro-Israel statements, while we will listen to his signals,” Andrew Anglin wrote in the Daily Stormer, a racist site named after Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher’s notorious tabloid. “By pushing this into the media, the Jews bring to the public the fact that yes, the majority of Hilary’s [sic] donors are filthy Jew terrorists.”