Last week, Donald Trump was back in the news again — OK, so he never really left, but you know what we mean — after the news broke that he broke bread with neo-Nazi punklet Nick Fuentes and increasingly vocal antisemite Kanye West.
And now, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg is sounding the alarm about antisemitism becoming a part of mainstream culture:
"That’s what Trump does: By violating the norms holding together liberal democratic society with impunity, he renders those norms inoperable. If it were just Trump doing this, that would be bad enough. But other narcissistic celebrities are joining him"https://t.co/kdHtxpi0Sm
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) November 29, 2022
Here’s how Goldberg’s piece concludes:
Ye is launching a vanity presidential campaign run by the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently wrote on Telegram, “We’re done putting Jewish interests first.” After buying Twitter, Elon Musk enthusiastically welcomed both Trump and Ye back to the platform, and has been tiptoing up to the edge of antisemitism himself. On Sunday, he tweeted that Alexander Vindman, the Jewish retired Army officer who testified about Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine’s president, is both “puppet & puppeteer,” echoing an old antisemitic trope about Jews pulling the strings behind world events. On Monday, Musk tweeted an image of the alt-right symbol Pepe the Frog.
For most of my adult life, antisemites — with exceptions like Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson — have lacked status in America. The most virulent antisemites tended to hate Jews from below, blaming them for their own failures and disappointments. Now, however, anti-Jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-Jewish bigotry, is coming from people with serious power: the leader of a major political party, a famous pop star, and the world’s richest man.
Such antisemitism still feels, at least to me, less like an immediate source of terror than an ominous force offstage, just as it was for the comfortable fin-de-siècle Austrian Jews in [Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt”]. Maybe this time, for the first time, it won’t get worse.
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If you were to just read Goldberg’s piece and take it at face value, you might come away with the impression that Donald Trump’s reign effectively opened the floodgates to mainstream antisemitism. And you, like Goldberg, would be deluding yourself.
Dems refused to censure Ilhan Omar. I don’t want to hear it from them
— KBB (@kenyonbburner) November 29, 2022
Ilhan Omar (along with the rest of The Squad) is demonstrably and repeatedly antisemitic, and she gets invited on late-night shows and has no shortage of celebrity admirers.
Laughs in Louis Farrakhan
— Slender Mandalorian (@SlenderMando) November 29, 2022
Snoop Dogg (or whatever he goes by now) and Ice Cube have both publicly professed their love for Louis Farrakhan, and they’re pretty mainstream.
Laughs along jovially with you in Al Sharpton
— SCW (@steveAKAslick) November 29, 2022
Ah, of course. Al “Tell Them to Pin Their Yarmulkes Back” Sharpton, who has had his own show on MSNBC for years.
Ah yeah. Good stuff. https://t.co/4DvGhONkxG pic.twitter.com/AtBrqBCEli
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 29, 2022
Oh, and of course:
NYT speaking from a lot of experience when it comes to the mainstreaming of antisemitism.
— Ian Kingsbury (@iskingsb) November 29, 2022
They’re quite familiar with it.
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