Objective political observation: Donald Trump has drawn a lot of support from Americans happy to express their anti-Semitic views online.
Let's observe the most recent evidence.
Last week, GQ reporter Julia Ioffe filed a report with the D.C. police department over the anti-Semitic threats that she received online and on her voicemail after writing a profile of Trump's wife. This week, Melania Trump essentially shrugged off the abuse from her husband's supporters with old-fashioned victim blaming.
She provoked them,” Trump told Du Jour magazine.
On Wednesday, right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro made a stunning admission in the National Review.
"I was wrong," Shapiro wrote, explaining that before Trump's candidacy he incorrectly assumed claims of anti-Semitism in America to be overblown:
I’ve spent most of my career arguing that anti-Semitism in the United States is almost entirely a product of the political Left. I’ve traveled across the country from Iowa to Texas; I’ve rarely seen an iota of true anti-Semitism. I’ve sensed far more anti-Jewish animus from leftist college students at the University of California, Los Angeles, than from churches in Valencia. As an observer of President Obama’s thoroughgoing anti-Israel administration, I could easily link the anti-Semitism of the Left to its disdain for both Biblical morality and Israeli success over its primary Islamist adversaries. The anti-Semitism I’d heard about from my grandparents — the country-club anti-Semitism, the alleged white-supremacist leanings of rednecks from the backwoods — was a figment of the imagination, I figured.
I figured wrong.
Donald Trump’s nomination has drawn anti-Semites from the woodwork.
Finally this week, New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman attempted to call out anti-Semitism among Trump supporters on Twitter, only to immediately be flooded with anti-Semitism by Trump supporters on Twitter. Go figure.
On Thursday, Weisman alluded to Melania's dismissal of the anti-Semitism surrounding her husband's campaign while pointing out that, bizarrely, in this Year of Trump, billionaire Jewish American businessmen Sheldon Adelson and former KKK head David Duke are cheering for the same candidate:
Weisman also tweeted out an opinion piece from The Washington Post by Robert Kagan, titled, "This is how fascism comes to America.” Here is a relevant excerpt:
This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him
Trump's anti-Semitic supporters swarmed shortly thereafter:
This story does end with a bit of good news (besides Shapiro's belated mea culpa), the The Southern Poverty Law Center indicated that they've been monitoring the rise of online anti-Semitism as it tracks with Trump's campaign:
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