Donald Trump has expressed no interest in opening up death camps for Jews should he win the presidency, but his ardent supporters on the racist right have their hopes.
If there’s one thing I hate more than Illinois Nazis, it’s Twitter Nazis.
Correction. I don’t hate them. Mainly I pity them, because their souls are so corroded, and because they are so pathetically frightened by Jews and blacks and Mexicans and gays and change and their own confused sexual identities (they are obsessed with “cucks,” “cocks,” and “faggots”) and pluralism and, by the way, Hillary Clinton.
But I also feel pity for them because they’re so bad at anti-Semitism. I recognize high-quality, handcrafted Jew-hatred when I see it, and the far-right, which has lately been gaining attention for supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy for president (and for trolling Jews such as yours truly), is so over-the-top obvious in its deployment of anti-Semitic memes; so uncreative in the manufacturing of Judeophobic tropes (call this the banality of oven jokes); so bad at Photoshop; and so awful at spelling, that I find them as pathetic as I find them offensive.
A few days ago, I decided to co-opt one of their Twitter memes, the so-called echo-parentheses they place around Jewish names, for reasons explained here. I’ve always admired what LGBT activists did with the word “queer”—seize it from haters, and make it their own—but I did this on a whim. It caught on (this Haaretz story explains how) , and the phenomenon was met by Nazi howling, and a doubling-down on oven jokes, about which more in a minute.
….
….A number of quick observations, though, before we begin:
1. In a hopeful sign, few Nazi-style trolls use their own names. When they are bold enough to discard their anonymity, it might be time to worry more.
2. These far-right social media accounts seem to have small followings, generally, on Twitter.
3. Twitter is not the real world, and not representative of the world as a whole. Though I would note that I also receive a large amount of anti-Semitic invective via e-mail (and, charmingly, through the U.S. Postal Service).
4. Many of these trolls will adopt Jewish-seeming names as their Twitter handles. They find this amusing.
5. A very large portion of these accounts associate themselves with Trump in some way, though it should be pointed out—I find it hard to believe I’m writing this sentence—that Donald Trump himself has expressed absolutely no interest in opening concentration camps for Jews, should he win the presidency. The white nationalist far-right has decided, though, that Trump will advance its interests.
….
This drawing, which I’ve received a number of times, holds that Donald Trump is bringing about a 4th Reich, and vampire Jews such as myself are doomed. Please take note of the “Happy Kristallnacht” message in the lower right corner.
Again, the common belief, or hope, is that Trump will initiate a new Holocaust. The Nazi-leaning Trump extremists never appear to address the fact that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, and grandchildren, are Jewish, or that Trump spends essentially no time talking about Jews, and a great deal of time talking about Muslims and Mexicans.
….
- Discussion
-
In which I find myself in total agreement with @JeffreyGoldberg https://t.co/TUIpJe2nI4
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 9, 2016
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.