———–Updated at 12:55 PM on 20 May 2016———-
I’ve gone back in and replaced the crude copy and paste of Jonathan Weisman’s twitter timeline from yesterday with a screen grab saved as a pdf. This will make it easier on the site and on the eyes, but if you haven’t looked and want to, or want an easy way to save this for posterity, there are 14 pages in a pdf file below the fold.
———————————————————————–
Earlier today The Washington Post published a very thoughtful essay by Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Robert Kagan. The New York Times Deputy Washington Editor, Jonathon Weisman, tweeted about it. A short time later all hell broke lose on his twitter timeline. While several mainstream news outlets have picked up the story, the majority of them in Israel, I think its important to capture some of this stuff. While it is impossible to prove much about people using nyms on the Internet and Twitter, many of the folks sending this stuff to Weisman are also claiming to be Trump supporters. Regardless of whether Donald Trump and his campaign want this type of support and supporters, this is more evidence of a very disturbing trend that has been developing through the 2016 presidential primary season. I’ve copied and pasted/screen grabbed all of the offensive material, which is after the page break.
And you are all warned, some of it is very, very vile. But it goes right to our past discussions about destroying the Grey Zone/the civil space that we all live in as citizens regardless of our ethnicities, religions, places of origin, etc. These types of expressions are an attempt to draw hard and fast lines around what is an American and who can be one. Moreover, they seek to push others into either choosing sides or to shake their heads and go along to get along out of fear of losing whatever safety, security, and prosperity they have. In many ways the response that Mr. Weisman received on twitter is a perfect example of what Dr. Kagan wrote about in his op-ed.
It also goes to the core theme of the Trump campaign: “I, we, America will be treated well… (Or else!)” The Trump campaign, and specifically Donald Trump’s on the stump, at debates, and during interviews rhetoric is setting the conditions to fully transform the Republican Party from the Grand Old Party to the Herrenvolk Party whether he intends to do so or not. Herrenvolk democracy is a populist, using Seymour Martin Lipset’s four typology description of political/civil society, form of government and governance. In a herrenvolk democracy one party, usually the majority party, but not always so, defined by ethnic or racial categorization dominates the state, society, economy, and usually religion too, over all other parties, movements, groups, and sub-cultures. The latter are tolerated at best and actively persecuted at worst. What Weisman’s twitter feed demonstrates is that those with the impulse towards herrenvolkism are feeling especially confident right now. And the potential danger that poses to America should be taken very, very seriously.
(If anyone can get a better/proper screen grab, which I’m having trouble with in Chrome, please grab all of it and email it to me and I’ll update it.)
chopper
that’s putting it lightly. ugh.
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: At least I warned you.
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2CPHKh4Dgk
Omnes Omnibus
Thank you, Adam.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: No worries.
cokane
Sadly the right in this country made the charge of anti-semitism meaningless throughout the past years, by putting that label on any Israel critics. Even some lefties have been guilty of this. For all the sound and fury about Islamophobia, FBI hate crime stats show that anti-semitism is still the most likely form of hate crime (relative to a group’s size).
NotMax
You forgot Jingoistic.
Betty Cracker
This is why Trump needs to not only lose, but be beaten soundly.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I thought that would be piling on.//
burnspbesq
Holy moly.
Adam L Silverman
@burnspbesq: Like going for a walk through a sewer.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam: You repeat ‘is’ in ‘Herrenvolk democracy is is a…’ above. I say in the interests of posterity, not grammar-correctyness.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Fixed, thanks. Editing this was a pain. All the copy and paste caused the post tool to get really slow and kludgey.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Thanks to you (and OO) for helping to give this vile behavior greater visibility. I agree that it’s dangerous and needs to be countered.
Maybe run your post through a quick spellcheck and edit before it (deservedly) gets reposted everywhere though?
Thanks, and good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
AdamK
The depth and seeming immortality of the racism in this country is just heartbreaking. Nothing ever seems to get better.
The Blog Dahlia
When you’re younger and the alter kockers take you aside and deliver some crazy story from the old days in the shtetl and end it with a reminder that “You’re jewish, you’re never really safe. They can still come for you”. You nervously laugh it off. Okay, Zaydeh, the old days are gone. They’re not rounding us up anymore.
Then this sort of garbage happens. And suddenly the old guys had a point.
Fair Economist
I’m really stunned that stuff like this would get posted to Twitter. And where does it come from? Southern racism (and even that isn’t normally this vile) needs elaborate institutional/propagandistic support from places like Lost Causism, segregated churches, and Gone with the Wind. What system is pushing all this?
Adam L Silverman
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I think I’ve gotten them all. As I indicated, the verdammt copy and paste material made the post tool very hard to work with – including editing.
bluehill
That this exists is not a surprise. And social media certainly provides a megaphone. What is alarming is that these people now feel empowered to express their true sentiments.
burnspbesq
@Adam L Silverman:
“Sewer” seems inadequate. That’s a Superfund site.
chopper
@The Blog Dahlia:
these assholes were always there. but in the last decade or so, thanks to the omnipresence of facebook and twitter, their opinions have gone public in a major way. it used to be these shitheads and their bullshit opinions stayed indoors.
oy gotenyu.
Matt McIrvin
Check it out–in one of those cartoons, Trump is protecting America from the Irish.
Their xenophobia is going straight back to 1845. And catching some people who are probably Trump supporters.
chopper
@Fair Economist:
there’s something crazy about antisemitism. if the romans had twitter, this is basically the same bullshit they’d be seeing.
SiubhanDuinne
Jesus.
I use that name/epithet advisedly
chopper
@Matt McIrvin:
the irish and like two different types of native americans. the hell is that shit?
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: The one with the little girl holding the picture actually expands and has a legend about protecting him (the Soldier in the picture) from having to sacrifice his life for Israel. The funny thing is, as constricted and conflicted as Democratic politicians are regarding Israel and providing it support, its been GOP candidates in the last two cycles who have made it clear that whatever Israel tells them to do, should they be elected president, is what they would do.
Matt McIrvin
@cokane:
That’s partly because a little tiny bit of it was always true: specifically, when it was aimed at the Pat Buchanan-style paleocons. It always bothered me when the antiwar left talked about how much sense Buchanan was making, because they heard him say things that sounded reasonable but they didn’t realize where it was coming from.
PatrickG
I had to stop reading by the 6,000,000 menorah.
I got nothing else. So vile.
pseudonymous in nc
Adam, just use Storify or ExquisiteTweets to assemble all that shite into a single page.
And yes, this is why El Trumpador needs to be beaten soundly, well beyond the margin of error. And this is also why I pine for an online social environment that was admittedly narrower and less diverse, but fuck me, it had less outright shithead filth. Not that it didn’t exist, but it stayed mostly confined to places like Bigotsville, KY and White Supremacist Shithole, ID.
Dog Dawg Damn
@chopper: yes and they make up an extremely small percentage of the population. Which is why they are ecstatic one of their own just won the GOP nomination–because they have become so exceedingly rare.
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker: Beaten into the dirt, kicked to the curb, flushed down the toilet.
Ian
Well that was fucked up. Whats the green slug thing supposed to be?
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: Most of the people that are now considered white in the US, were not originally thought of as white. This includes the Irish, Jews, Spaniards, the Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, most Eastern and Southeastern Europeans. They weren’t exactly black, because we had people of African descent who were, but they weren’t white. Its only over time – and in some cases this was well into the 20th Century, that whiteness was bestowed on those groups and their members. African Americans can, of course, never escape their skin color and achieve this accommodation. Neither can Native Americans, though I know many who now clearly can pass, or Asian Americans. Those from Central and South America and the Caribbean fit into different places depending on skin color and place of origin.
scav
Well, golly, I knew the neighbors were dodgy, but still. I hope I have enough food in house for a week or more.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: The sort of xenophobia that a century ago would have surrounded Trump’s ancestors, because they came from the wrong country…Germany.
nastybrutishntall
Wow. Things feel just a tad more bleak now, again.
Gotta meditate now.
Adam L Silverman
@pseudonymous in nc: I don’t have twitter, so I have no idea how to use those two programs as I have no need of them.
NotMax
Bircherites, minus the charm.
;)
Adam L Silverman
@Ian: I have no idea. Creepy neo-Fascist frog?
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Neo?
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Splotch of Zyklon-B?
Mike
4chan /pol/ memes and image macros
@Ian:
anyone flustered over pepe the frog on twitter is getting trolled and needs to rethink their use of the internet
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike: and?
nastybrutishntall
Smug frog meme. Fascist now only because popular with 4chan sociopaths, like Trump is. Or Bernie.
Bill_D
@NotMax: That only deserves a semi-wink. Never thought I’d be saying that.
amk
1st amendment and social media. The worst possible toxic combo.
Mai.naem.mobile
Jeezus. What is wrong with these people? There’s some real deep sickness there.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: The term used in the scholarly literature is to refer to contemporary fascists and fascists movements (the real ones, not the ones in Jonah Goldberg’s head…), as neo-Fascists to distinguish them from the ones during WW II in Europe and their equivalents in the US from the 1920s-1940s. And since that’s where I learned the term, by engaging with the scholarly literature in grad school, that’s what I use.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: Ben Franklin once wrote about the disturbing alien swarthiness of Swedes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Tracking.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt McIrvin: As highly as I think of Dr. Franklin, methinks he needed to have his eyeglass prescription checked on that one.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: http://www.amazon.com/New-Fascists-PAUL-WILKINSON/dp/0330269534/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
The author was one of my professors in Scotland.
chopper
@Adam L Silverman:
that’s the one thing i always knew about being jewish – you still have something going for you cause you can still pass for a regular white person if you need to. fucked up, isn’t it. more white privilege in action.
NobodySpecial
It’s pretty goddamned sad that these racist fucks are so bad that they make unapologetic warmongers like the Kagans into sympathetic figures.
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper: I know this is true, but I still don’t understand it.
Frankensteinbeck
It’s possible that the reference was derived from an older, legitimate piece, but that first poster with the cringing ethnic groups? That’s a slight photoshop of a poster in the game Bioshock: Infinite, whose major philosophical theme is the ugliness of early-1900s jingoism and racism, with implied links to the Tea Party.
Anne Laurie
Someone on Adam’s last thread posted a link to David Neiwirt’s “Exultant Extremists Hail The Ascension Of ‘Emperor Trump’ As GOP Nominee”.
Further reading — Julia Ioffe wrote an article about Melania Trump that Donald decided was insulting:
NotMax
@chopper
Loads of swarthy Jews. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
There still exist Jewish enclaves in parts of Africa and also in China.
(Ignoring the “regular white person” designation as unfortunate verbiage.)
Mike J
@Ian:
Pepe. Originally a 4chan thing.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: I actually talked about it in a briefing I gave last week, about how long it took for many ethnic/religious groups in the US to be considered white, not that they were black per se, and that this was part of state and societal formation and consolidation. So expecting things to happen in under a decade in a place like Iraq, which has none of the advantages that the US did, places an unrealistic burden on Iraqis. Its not that they can’t, or necessarily won’t, get there. But the process has to play out and that process is iterative and usually quite violent.
The example I like to use, especially in regard to Jews and Catholics, was Klan activity. The Second Klan period was marked by virulent anti-Catholic animus and it didn’t matter if one’s ancestors had been Catholics from England or Belgium or France or Germany. And the the Third Klan period had a huge anti-Semitic component, largely because of Jewish American support for the Civil Rights movement. A great popular culture example is from Driving Miss Daisy. When Miss Daisy can’t get to the Atlanta Temple, which was a very, very large and very old Reformed Jewish congregation, because it had been firebombed. And she can’t understand when Hoke explains to her what happened why anyone would blow up the synagogue.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: Ah. Probably should have recognized it. (“19th-century America was really fucking racist” is pretty much the main theme of the game, but I imagine it has fans who are just enjoying the racism.)
Adam L Silverman
@NobodySpecial: I don’t agree with the Kagans on much, but the op-ed from yesterday was particularly well done. It is also amazingly un-self aware given what created the conditions for this to happen.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: I mentioned the Julia Ioffe Issue on the previous thread.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: How did you do that with the tweets so that 1) you were able to embed them in the comment and 2) how does that work for a post? Also, I linked to Neiwert in my post at the end and I’m well aware of the Julia Ioffe stuff.
Mike J
@Omnes Omnibus: I believe the other Mike is making the fairly common argument that 12 year old white boys should be the ultimate arbiters of what is and isn’t worth being upset over. Saying the holocaust should be repeated? Not something to get upset over. Remaking a movie with girls in it? Worth burning things down.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Screencaps are safer for archiving, but if you just want to post individual tweets like I do (too often)…
At the bottom of each individual tweet, there’s a line of icons, last of which is three dots (…). Click on that icon, and you’ll get a little pop-up with two lines, the second of which is ’embed this tweet’. Click on that line, and you’ll get a bigger pop-up, with a string of code you can copy & paste, plus a picture of what that c&p will look like on the screen. Paste the string into your ‘Add Post’ block on the dashboard, you’re good to go!
You don’t have to join Twitter to use this infinitely creative tool. Can’t remember if someone here clued me in, or if I stumbled over it on my own…
Miss Bianca
Somehow it’s even worse the second time around.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I will let you all fight it out. The Weisman and Ioffe situations should be triggers.
hitchhiker
First time I’d seen that Eric Clapton was talking racist trash. Couldn’t quite believe it, but the quote is out there — long and explicit and just. so. fucked. up.
Yeah, him drunk in 1976 is not him sober and 71 years old. Still … I wish there were a clear and cold I can’t believe I ever thought that, much less said it from him. I couldn’t find anything of the sort. :(
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: I couldn’t even get the stuff to screen cap for some reason.
M. Bouffant
@Adam L Silverman: Click on the three dots on the tweet & use the embed function.
After reading: Ohhh, never mind!
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: No fight here. And not to diminish what Ms. Ioffe went through, but the Weisman thing gave me enough material to work with for tonight’s post.
NobodySpecial
@Adam L Silverman: Eh, maybe Trump will make it all better by appearing in an appropriately bulged out flight suit. Kagan likes his machismo in a Mae West.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Try using Alt-Print Screen.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m feeling a little guilty about not including those tweets-to-Ioffe when I posted about her GQ Melania profile.
Adam’s a braver person than I am, or at least one who hasn’t made as many enemies… yet.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I know,
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
My paternal aunts still vividly remember being taunted as “dagoes” and “wops” when they were kids in the 1940s and 1950s. They’re second-generation immigrants, all born here.
Ian
@Mike J:
That is hillarious. I enjoy Pepe the frog as Bain.
Prescott Cactus
@nastybrutishntall: Breaking out my singing bowl. Padded side of mallet.
Mary G
I have tried to read them all three times now and can’t do it. Horrifying. I wonder if the Trumpster will denounce them at all. Probably not or with some weak sauce like Bernie’s statement on Nevada.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus: If you were alerted to this by the ex-commentor I’m thinking of, tell them they’re missed here (even though I understand why they left).
Miss Bianca
I dunno. Seeing this shit makes the thought of squabbling with Bernie-or-busters seem shamefully petty. And yet I know it’s going to make me even crazier if someone starts talking about how they’re going to sit this one out, because Reasons – whatever those reasons may be, or – even worse – that a President Trump is somehow going to Haste the Revolution, baby, and that’s going to be a net gain for the country somehow. Maybe we should just leave this post on the front page for a while. As an aid to remembrance.
And on that note, I’m going to try to sleep.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Does clicking-on-the-dots work for you?
Anne Laurie
@Mary G: The Stormfronter social-media-assault on Julie Ioffe was over a month ago. Trump’s only ‘apology’ was that he had a great base of many supporters who were very, very angry about the bad things ‘that woman’ had written.
He may actually have to walk it back a little on this latest filth-tsunami, because Weisman is not a woman.
Villago Delenda Est
@Miss Bianca: It’s the “Nach Hitler, Uns” meme of the German Communists. Once Hitler had been in power, and was overthrown, the glorious German worker’s revolution would happen.
Well, it sort of did…a Soviet imposed Communist regime that collapsed under its own inherent totalitarian contradictions.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: That worked, but the post tool is giving me a hard time in deleting what’s there and replacing it, so I’m going to leave it alone for now.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’m just going to leave it as is for now. Its late, I’m going to crash out, and its just too much work to make the adjustments at this hour.
piratedan
and the sad part is…. we all have someone in our lives who thinks that Trump is just what the country needs because someone like Hillary Clinton can’t be trusted when you look at who really wants Trump to be elected. I’m not saying that Trump is anywhere as vile as these folks are, but these folks are part of the pool that he plays in. If Obama can somehow be tainted by an old association with his reverend, I find it strange that the GOP remains essentially teflon for having these folks on the porch.
If anything needs to be burned down to the ground, it’s most likely 85% of the media folks of today, because they do fuck-all when it comes to reporting and informing anyone about this. I don’t mind doing some work on my own, but for fucks sake, this is supposedly their job, or at least it used to be. They’ve all taken that crappy James Bond movie plot (Tomorrow Never Dies) and decided that it’s the go-to business plan of today.
Steeplejack
@chopper:
As I said downstairs, the Internet is a frictionless medium that allows the faintest signal to travel far and wide. When I worked on a mid-sized city newspaper in the the ’70s we would get crank letters to the editorial page and regular phone calls from various bigots and nut cases. I remember one guy who was always ranting that the League of Nations—not the United Nations, the League of Nations—was behind all sorts of heinous shit. Nowadays all those idiots are just a tweet away. It’s not that there are more of them now; they’re just so much more accessible. (And the flip side of this is that there were more of them back then than we thought there were.)
Plantsmantx
@Anne Laurie:
Melania Trump Blames Jewish Reporter For ‘Provoking’ Neo-Nazis
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Twitter has its own weird coding systems, is I suspect why.
If someone deletes one of their own tweets, it ‘disappears’ from the search functions tech-semi-literates like I use. And all that will be left when such a tweet is embedded here is a quote-box with the text portion — the graphics & ‘media’ disappear. That’s why I said screencaps would be ‘safer’, as an archiving tool; although I’m not competent to save screencaps I though you might have done it that way on purpose.
(Not as though many of those gif-originators are liable to have second thoughts about their filth, unfortunately.)
Yutsano
We always knew some of Trump’s support was from known white supremacists. Now they are (more or less) out in the open about their hate because the Weaseled One has officially taken the lid off the covert racism of the Republican party. They are who we thought they were. They just have bullhorns instead of dogwhistles now.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: Don’t blame you a bit. Sweet dreams!
divF
@Mnemosyne:
This view of Italian immigrants is documented in the portrayal of the Martini family in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Mr. Potter refers to them as “garlic-eaters”, a common ethnic slur of the period.
ETA: I caught this when I first saw the movie because it is my heritage through my father – son of Italian immigrants, raised in NYC during the 1930’s, and his mother only spoke Italian.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: Well as I said downstairs,
Damien
I can’t believe that we had a Day of Rage from Bernie supporters when this is what we’re up against.
This isn’t a game. This isn’t about you, or me, or Bernie; this is a battle between the outright election of the neo-Nazis’ favorite candidate and Hillary Clinton. To be honest, at this point I don’t care about Bernie’s taxes or his FEC violation; fuck Jane Sanders’ issue with Burlington College, and I don’t care if Hillary Clinton literally gave Goldman Sachs a tongue-bath, because this is terrifying.
Terrifying.
AxelFoley
I don’t know why some of ya’ll are so surprised at this shit. The media has enabled this kinda bullshit for the last 7 years (Hmm…I wonder what happened those last 7 years?), and POC have been telling you this fuckery is going on, but many of you acted brand new. Oh, now some of you are alarmed.
piratedan
@AxelFoley: Axel… I’m not so much surprised as I think most of us in the Obama coalition (be we black, white, hispanic, female) could see the racism flying full flag, I don’t think that everyone understood that it didn’t matter what color we were, what deity we chose to worship (if any) or any kind of defining characteristic you could name, essentially, if you’re not one of them, they fucking hate you and consider you a best a traitor and at worst not worthy of consideration as a person. The base vitriol and hatred on display is kind of shocking for a lot of folks who have always thought that there was a reasonable opposition or a way of working together (and to be sure, there may actually be a few GOP faithful out there who behave like that and even believe it) but the whole ID of the GOP has come untethered and is able to use the social media to be seen and NOT be afraid of being seen. The advent of Trump and years of pandering to the fear have allowed these folks (who I fervently hope are still a minority) to come out of the woodwork and be seen in the light of day and somehow find acceptance over there.
Yes, they scare me, but no, I won’t submit to that fear but I will happy admit to recognizing that those people are fucking scary.
seaboogie
@AxelFoley: Check that.
Also, what happened to the end-times, pro-Israel “here comes the Tribulation” voices? Seems like they are drowned out by the the nativist voices these days – or perhaps they were always the same.
Villago Delenda Est
@AxelFoley: The MSM has been enabling this shit since the time of the shitty grade Z movie star, and it’s only gotten more intense and overt since the near sheriff won the election 7 and a half years ago.
RK
Kagan pinpoints perfectly what’s driving the Trump train.
Mike
@Omnes Omnibus:
why would you think there’s anything else to it?
NR
@Betty Cracker:
Unfortunately that ship sailed when we decided to nominate Hillary Clinton.
We’ll have to fight tooth and nail for a razor-thin victory now, and there’s probably a better than 50-50 chance that Trump wins in November.
redshirt
@NR: What do you base your prediction on?
Patricia Kayden
@Betty Cracker: He has brought the racists out of the woodwork – at his rallies and on social media. There is no doubt what will happen to this country should he win in November. When he wins, bigotry wins.
NR
@redshirt: Trump has caught up to her in the polls, in head-to-head matchups and favorability rating. His favorability is rising while Hillary’s is still dropping.
And today, Trump showed how he’s going to neutralize the sexism issue for the general election. He stopped just short of accusing Bill Clinton of rape in an interview with Hannity. Trump has shown that he’ll say absolutely anything, and the media will cover it because he’s the Republican nominee. He’s going to be talking about Bill’s treatment of women and Hillary’s tacit enabling of it. Even if you don’t believe the allegations of rape, Bill Clinton used his power and his position to seduce women who were in positions subordinate to him. Trump will, successfully I think, turn every claim about his sexism into a discussion about Bill’s unseemly sexual history. That will neutralize Hillary’s biggest trump (no pun intended) card and she’ll have to run on her record. Which is not, shall we say, especially impressive.
Jewish Steel
My favorite is the text blocks with highlighted passages. So helpful!
Damien
@NR: Shut. the fuck. up.
Trump has been this close before, if not closer, and he fell back; according to RCP averages, Clinton’s favorables are rising; national polls are borderline irrelevant, and in state polling, she has almost a hundred more prospective EC votes than Trump. Not to mention that national polling at this stage is stupid, as literally everyone has tried to tell you, and she’s still having to deal with friendly fire while Trump gets to sew up his party.
But more than anything, you are honestly just fucking poison. Every thread you’re in is like a dark, stinking cloud of pointless negativity. You are the void that people shout into, and you are an absolutely worthless commenter. If you’re so unhappy that Clinton is the nominee, get in a goddamn time machine, fly back to 2015 and pick a better candidate, because according to your precious polling, Hillary is leading Bernie in primary voter preference by over 6 points, plus almost 300 pledged delegates and millions of votes. Bernie failed, and he lost. Suck it the fuck up and get your Eeyor ass suited up for the real battle, because I don’t know if you noticed the content of the post you decided to mope all over, but it’s time to battle the Klan’s preferred president.
Or would you like some Skittles and a buck up under the chin?
Christ already.
SRW1
Bert Brecht was right in Arturo Ui:
“The womb he crawled from is still going strong. .”
Cermet
This is also what too many in the religious right of the thug party often think – not by any means the majority relative to antisemitism but a significant minority; that said, the majority of the religious right that supports the thug party are either racist (even though many would never think they are) or anti-woman or just unthinking. These traits are, and will remain, the core values in religion – all of them. Even when some aspects of a religion supports tolerance the end result is the opposite because far too much of religion is tied up in economic control and that leads to both racism, intolerance, anti-intellect, and one of the greatest wrongs – anti-woman by the economic elite; or the far larger economic won’t-a-be’s (and yes, I spelled it as I mean it; these losers may want to be elite but they won’t ever be and deep down know it and that brings out their real nature) that share the same sex/skin colour as the real elite. Its in our genes, unfortunately.
Villago Delenda Est
@RK: They’re like Jon Snow. They know nothing. They have no clue as to what makes this nation strong. Out of many, one.
Taylor
@Damien: Well said, sir.
Davebo
The media covered every idiotic thing Trump said long before it looked like he had a prayer to be the nominee. But if you think Clinton is damaged because of something Trump said on Sean Freaking Hannity’s show you should probably just move to Canada (or Vermont) now.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
You built this.
Don’t act shocked now, gop.
You’ve been riding the back of the tiger since the civil rights act was passed. It was only a matter of time until the tiger you nurtured and fed turned on you.
Patricia Kayden
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I don’t think Republicans care that anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism and racism have led to Trump. They will fall in line to support Trump against Secretary Clinton by the time we get around to November. In their minds, minorities and women are going to get what they deserve during a Trump Presidency and that’s alright with them.
I just hope our side figures this out and rallies around Secretary Clinton even if she’s not their candidate of choice.
LAO
Thanks for the post, Adam. I’ve been following this for weeks, the overwhelming vileness of it all has actually rendered me speechless. No small feat.
Aimai
@Damien: i love you.
Balconesfault
From Kagan:.
All the bile aside … this assertion shouldn’t go unchallenged.
LAO
@Balconesfault: You don’t have to agree with Kagen to be outraged by the anti-Semitic reaction his piece engendered.
bmoak
@divF:
I once read a reprint of an old magazine feature on a young Joe Dimaggio. It praised him as an all-American fella who didn’t “reek of garlic”, used water to slick back his hair instead of using olive oil or grease, and preferred eating steak over spaghetti.
evodevo
@bluehill: Welcome to flyover country. These sentiments are expressed quietly at the flea markets and bars, along with regular racism and rightwinger Xtian xenophobia, but with the rise of Drumpf they are coming out from under the rocks, just like the increase in right wing militia membership when Obama was elected Good luck making them scuttle back into the dark once they’re loose.
cleek
@Damien:
someone should front page this, in 48 point bold red text.
sherparick
@Adam L Silverman: this is stuff that could have come out of Julius Streicher’s “Der Sturmer” is it not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Streicher
Of course, the Republicans have been on the road to the Party of White Resentment, of the Party of the Neo-Confederacy since Richard Nixon, Pat Buchannan, and Kevin Phillips embarked on the “Southern Strategy” in 1966. Now all those devils are coming home to roost. Reading this George Packer article from 2008, reviewing Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/26/the-fall-of-conservatism, it is striking to observe Packer’s naivete about the American right & sadly a majority of the white population as he disparages Perlstein’s observation that large numbers of Americans fantasize about killing and slaughtering their fellow citizens who they don’t consider “true Americans.” Trump speaks for them he won’t be bound by any law or limit if made President, and that is what his followers want, someone who will smash and destroy their enemies and give them the green light to do so as well. .
Betty Cracker
@Damien: Bravo and huzzah!
Emma
Christ have mercy. I want to crawl back in bed and not come out for a long while.
Ryan
Well, wasn’t that special. Glad to see the Real Americans standing up for JUDEO-Christian values there.
sherparick
@sherparick: Packer is suddenly aware that the “culture wars” are not over, and are as fierce as ever. This little essay opens promisingly about the post-cold war collapse of American institutions, but then goes on off on a “both sides” riff about the Democrats neglecting the “white working class,” rather than holding himself and his media infotainment industrial complex that has a large in responsiblity for the toxic politics that gives Trump a real chance of becoming President of the United States. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/how-donald-trump-appeals-to-the-white-working-class (He is also somewhat off in his analysis in that although Trump strongest appeal is to whites with a high school degree or less, the income level of Trump votes is significantly higher than the national median income.) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/how-donald-trump-appeals-to-the-white-working-class
One reason I an furious Sanders and his campaign right now is that “let’s hurt Hilary” and “the Democratic Establishment” is that when you do and say such things, you are actively assisting in making Donald Trump President. And that is morally unforgivable.
sherparick
@Damien: Hurrah! Until the last week I had been neutral (actually made small donations to both candidates), but Sanders campaign and its worst supporters have put me all in for Hilary. I hope she slaughters him in California, New Mexico, and New Jersey.
Tom
@piratedan: Actually, piratedan, Trump is exactly as vile as these folks are.
rikyrah
@AxelFoley:
tell that truth, Axel.
TELL IT.!!
Soprano2
@Adam L Silverman:
That’s an insult to good, honest sewers everywhere. They only transport the shit, they don’t generate it. I can’t think of a description vile enough for what this is. What’s WRONG with those people? They are sick in the head and the heart.
Applejinx
This is just 4chan /pol/. If I hunted, I could probably find the thread where they got together a shitbrigade, at least a third of which is ironic lulz. The Pepe is a dead giveaway, but quite a few of those Jewish caricatures are also 4chan image memes that turn up waaay outside political (or even antisemitic) contexts, much like rickrolling isn’t a commentary on 80s music or endorsement of Rick Astley.
I didn’t spot that thread, but I’m strictly /mlp/ and have nothing to do with /pol/ (or /b/) as a rule. And when I post it’s not trip(thing)ing.
Panic less, continue doing normal political work. Just this morning my brother was posting on facebook, Noam Chomsky saying Democrats are moderate Republicans. First of all, remember those? Secondly, I posted the Facebook (interesting, spell correct wants it capitalized. hmm. god God hmmm! Spell correct works for the glorification of facebook, but gives God a pass ;) )…
Anyway, I posted the facebook topic on that House vote with Democrats yelling ‘SHAME!’. And I said, which republicans would you like more of, for now? These ones or the ones fighting against LGBT rights?
Especially those of you who are into the Clintonian incrementalism thing, this is what it looks like. Toughen up and don’t panic, we are in this for the long haul.
A Ghost To Most
I wish I was surprised, but this shit would be casual conversation if I were to spend a weekend with my family in WNY.
I haven’t been back in 9 years. Life is too short to spend with fascist assholes.
Thanks, Adam.
P.S. I see one-trick pony NR (Nihilist Ratfucker?) is still performing its one trick.
Betty Cracker
@Applejinx: Who is panicking? Aside from BernieBro NR, who is always pissing down his own leg? I see disgust and a determination to beat back the fascist cockroaches, which are appropriate responses. And if you’re naive enough to think the antisemitism on display in that Twitter feed is wholly due to moronic 4chan people on a lark, you’re too fucking dumb to presume to lecture the rest of us.
hedgehog mobile
@Damien: Thank you.
Miss Bianca
@Damien: What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed. What I can’t figure out, about these nattering nabobs of negativity, who are evidently ardent Sanders supporters, is a) how they can look at HRC and see what they see – and b), how they can NOT imagine what the unload on Senator Sanders would look like from the sort of vile Schweinhunden who follow Trump, if he won the nomination. The thought of that should chill us all to the heart.
A Ghost To Most
@Damien:
This.
Miss Bianca
@Ryan: Got a problem with that, Bub?
chopper
@Applejinx:
uh…yeah. just gonna leave this one out there.
cleek
@Miss Bianca:
i’m about convinced they’re nothing more than trolls who have figured out that taking the most absurd anti-Clinton stance possible guarantees them hours and hours of delicious attention.
A Ghost To Most
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Reap the whirlwind, motherfuckers
Miss Bianca
@cleek: Yes, and I’ve hardly helped in that regard. Fuck ’em – too much real work to do.
gogol's wife
@Balconesfault:
That jumped out at me too.
NCSteve
And of course it happens. Give validation to anyone who harbors any kind of racial, ethnic or sectarian prejudice and and sooner or later they’ll reveal themselves as an anti-Semite as well. Always, every time.
dr. bloor
@Fair Economist:
If you think this is coming from a specific region or socioeconomic class or some such, think again. I’ll bet all fifty states and most of Europe are represented in that tweet feed, and no, they’re not isolated one-off nuts confined to their mothers’ basements.
It’s not that they’re back. They never went away.
Marmot
Hey Adam, the intro could’ve used some context. All I got was “a guy wrote a thing in a newspaper, and now a guy is retweeting all these antisemitic messages.”
I mean, what was the column about?
Kristine Smith
@Adam L Silverman: Depending on your browser and whether you have an adblocker activated, some social media bells and whistles just don’t work. I use Safari primarily, and after the last update the tweetstream and some social media buttons vanished from my website; when I deactivated AdBlocker, everything went back to normal. In FF and Chrome, all remained good.
Kristine Smith
@Damien: ::applause::
Barbara
@chopper: They obviously find comfort and the courage to disseminate their “message” more widely when they know they aren’t alone. It’s a constant reminder that things can get worse.
coin operated
@Damien:
De-lurking to say Bravo, Sir! Bravo!!!
Barbara
@Adam L Silverman: The logic of racial hatred is buried very deep, and in this case, I would surmise, the true hatred is for the liberal not the conservative voting Jews — that it’s the latter that have adopted a more aggressive foreign policy stance in favor of Israel does not negate that most Jews vote for liberal candidates.
Barbara
@Villago Delenda Est: That would be my ancestors as well, but really, Germans have never been a true minority in most places where they have settled in the U.S. So even when and where anti-German sentiment was high, actions tended to be limited to things like renaming foods (Liederkaesen became cottage cheese) and banning the teaching of German in public schools. No one every seriously considered rounding up Germans and interning them, as happened to the Japanese. Before the latest immigration wave that began in the late 60s, there were more Americans with German speaking ancestors than any other group, including the English and Irish.
gex
@Fair Economist: What system is pushing this? The same one pushing all the rest of it. Cishet Christian white male supremacy.
Major Major Major Major
@Applejinx: Oh, the glorification of the Holocaust and advocacy for genocide are just jokes? Good thing that things like this aren’t in any way indicative of underlying social norms!
Where do you live? You must have some other great graveyards for whistling past, over there.
gorram
@Frankensteinbeck: Edited/cropped/captioned versions of that went viral within Tea Party and related groups, so, I suspect, there’s a level of genuine agreement in its use by awful people like above.
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: My father bore life long feelings of inadequacy over the fact that his last name was often mispronounced and his father had no education and mined coal. He told me that he was denied his spot as the rightful valedictorian based on his grades in favor of someone with more suitable parents. He was a good guy who was emotionally burdened by this and the net result is that he was intensely sympathetic with the civil rights movement and hated most of our neighbors for their racism. Kind of an outlier.
Barbara
@Miss Bianca: Brandishing the word revolution around drives me nuts. If Trump foments a revolution it is unlikely to be the one that Susan Sarandon has been waiting for. Any basic history of the French or Russian Revolution should make one seriously contemplate the adage of being careful what you wish for. Mostly, however, it just marks people as being deeply unserious and not at all concerned about their own material circumstances, and I don’t just mean Sanders supporters, but anyone who casually states the need for one kind of revolution or another.
chopper
@Major Major Major Major:
totally. i don’t understand the “oh it’s just basically 4chan” argument. Adam didn’t go cherry pick some forum at 4chan where dudes are competing to post a macro more offensive than the next guy. these dudes tweeted this shit to a real live Jewish guy with the intention of harassing him.
how the fuck anyone can rationalize or hand wave this shit away is completely beyond me.
Miss Bianca
@Barbara: Yeah, I’m way past my just-post-adolescent taste for “revolution”. Nothing like realizing how likely I would be to be one of its victims, rather than its victors to make me lose my appetite for that kind of rhetoric.
different-church-lady
Is anyone still convinced that Twitter is a useful tool for anything good?
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, probably.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: Which would serve to prove my point.
SuperHrefna
@Marmot: It doesn’t need context. There is absolutely no context that would have made that rotting sewer of antisemitism more appropriate, or less awful. The context is irrelevant: a guy wrote something and troglodytes popped up to tell him what they think of Jews like him.
dr. bloor
@Applejinx:
If you think your second paragraph here makes you look more sophisticated or “insider” or knowledgeable about what’s going on in that thread, you’re wrong. Mostly because the first paragraph reveals an ahistorical cluelessness that makes it clear you should never be taken seriously in adult conversations.
SuperHrefna
@hitchhiker: Eric Clapton is well known ( in Britain, at least) to be a racist little weevil who admires Enoch Powell, an especially odious pro-ethnic cleansing Ulster Unionist. He still admires Powell, even now, and he’s still a racist little weevil. You can read more about him here in this article about Rock Against Racism which was founded in part as a response to Clapton’s racism: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/apr/20/popandrock.race
Bitter Scribe
Wow, these guys are doing nothing to combat the stereotype of “Criticism of Israel” = “Antisemitism.” How weird that they’re apparently going to vote for the Republican nominee.
I guess support for Israel is one more mainstream Republican policy that the mouthbreather “base” truly didn’t give a shit about.
Ridnik Chrome
@Damien: Thank you.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@gex:
Bingo. Any talk of revolution that doesn’t involve this understanding at the center of it, is just pure pointless bullshit. Until enough straight white male Christian men check their privilege and set it aside to share power with the rest of us, the rest of us will always be fighting rear guard actions against their enforcing and asserting their white male supremacy. Most straight white men don’t even accept the reality of their privileged status, so, there’s a long row to hoe.
Adam L Silverman
@AxelFoley: No, we’ve been paying attention, have been concerned all along, and many of us have noted it for others.
gogol's wife
@Damien:
Thank you.
We have to bond together: women, men, white, black, hispanic, Christian, Jewish
and CRUSH TRUMP
I have never been so frightened in my life. He is too close.
Applejinx
I stand behind my take on the trolling. A third of it is /pol/ trolling. Given that it’s done in the full knowledge that 2/3 of it is NOT in the least joking, I’m not calling it a joke, and there’s a reason I’m no fan of /pol/, but you might consider that I see Balloon Juice as very similar to 4chan (in general, not /pol/ exclusively).
You’ve got the same mixed seriousness and weapons-grade trolling, the same shit-stirring and kayfabe, and almost exactly the same tone. When I get upset with this place it’s never because I got too extreme, it’s always because I get too civilized and lose my stomach for this sort of thing.
Weird to be lecturing Balloon Juice on trolling when we make most political blogs look like fainting violets on the strength of our troll-streak. Life is strange.
I’ll happily correct myself if anyone thought ‘just’ /pol/ meant only /pol/ and not 2/3 the real deal. I never meant that, what I meant was it’s instigated by trolls, not serious political actors.
gogol's wife
@gogol’s wife:
and everyone on every point of the gender spectrum, I should have said
Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace: “If bad people can bond together and constitute a force, then good people have to do the same. It’s as simple as that.”
Seanly
@Matt McIrvin:
The post with the head of Trump on a colonial body holding the 10 Commandments & the Liberty Bell is from the game BioShock Infinite. The antagonists are over-the-top religious xenophobe racists. The image is one of the in-game propaganda.
It’s kind of an inverse (or maybe twist would be better) of Poe’s Law. Any parody of an extremist view can be used as a sincere expression of that extremist view.
Adam L Silverman
@sherparick: Yes and yes.
singfoom
Well, I need a shower and some eye bleach. Definitely some 4chan leaking with pepe and troll faced ISIS members, but regardless that’s a shitshow of inhumanity.
Things like this make one remember the things that bind us all together. We need to stand together to defeat this kind of shit.
CaseyL
@Damien: Thank you! I feel like your whole comment should be stored as a macro and brought out as needed.
Applejinx
Also, try being a feminist game developer or a game journalist who sides with ’em, or an ‘out’ transgender person doing much of anything of consequence. I hope nobody is suggesting this behavior is somehow special to anti-Semites.
joel hanes
@different-church-lady:
Is anyone still convinced that Twitter is a useful tool for anything good?
Every Feb 2 I use it to wish happy birthday to my college girlfriend.
It’s pretty much perfect for that.
Other than that, I’ve never logged on.
It seems to drive people mad, and convert formerly brilliant and articulate long-form writers like billmon first into wiseacres, and then into bitter [can’t choose a noun]
I wouldn’t describe its palpable effects on Cole or Kevin Drum as positive, either.
Of course, I could just be an aging luddite who misses The Poor Man and Fafblog and wishes the golden days of blogging would return.
Frankensteinbeck
@AxelFoley: and @Adam L Silverman:
If it helps, when Obama was elected and ‘White America’ lost its collective shit, that opened my eyes. I was the classic white bubble ‘racism is just a subtle background thing now’ liberal, but holy shit. I have been smacked too many times in the face since to not realize not only that racism is the major driver of Republican politics, but that the media will twist themselves in any pretzel necessary to pretend racism is limited to a tiny, ignorable fringe.
Adam L Silverman
@Marmot: Other than you could have clicked the link, Dr. Kagan’s column focused on what he saw as the fascistic tendencies among Trump’s supporters and how Trump’s rhetoric encourages them. And that these are not just a threat to, but have largely subsumed the Republican Party and if we are not careful may do the same thing to the Republic.
Adam L Silverman
@Kristine Smith: I’m not running Adblocker on my laptop. I don’t spend enough time online on it – almost all my online browsing is done on my iPad. The only site I spend any significant time on from my laptop is this one. As its easier to post and comment with a regular keyboard.
Adam L Silverman
@Barbara: Very true. A number of the tweet replies in Weisman’s timeline were directed to the Republican Jewish Coaltion (RJC) and Sheldon Adelson telling them to look and see what their support was enabling. I doubt it will do any good.
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: I don’t think Applejinx was trying to hand wave it away. I think he was trying to explain, using the language used by the people that inhabit 4Chan and boards like it, what the imagery was and where on those boards it was usually confined to.
Adam L Silverman
@different-church-lady: I’ve never been convinced it was useful for anything other than, perhaps, advertising or drawing attention to a longer more in depth report or analysis of something. A lot of leadership programs and courses, however, think its at the crest of a transformational wave of communication.
nutella
@Barbara:
I’ve been reminded lately of the Anschluss in Austria, when Nazi Germany invaded Austria. They were met with parades and flowers in Vienna and started right out with applying Nazi laws there. Vienna had a small but well-assimilated Jewish population at the time. Their friends, families, and neighbors immediately turned on them and beat, murdered, and tortured the Jewish Austrians. To give you an idea of how quick the change was, there was a story about a Christian woman who went out to do her normal shopping on the day of the Anschluss and when seen in a Jewish-run store, was dragged out, beaten, tied to a post with a sign that said ‘Jew-lover’, and left to the attentions of the mob.
I’ve been thinking of that a lot lately when reading news stories about cops and civilians violently policing rest rooms in N Carolina and elsewhere, and people with nonstandard gender presentation getting beat up by strangers.
HB2 passing and Trump becoming an actual candidate have removed the social and legal restraints on a cauldron of existing hatred. It’s going to be a long time before we can put a lid on it again.
Adam L Silverman
@Seanly: I think this is the second or third one of these that someone has done of him from that game’s in game propaganda.
chopper
@Adam L Silverman:
given that he said this:
we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one. rickrolling? “ironic lulz”? no fuckin way.
Adam L Silverman
@nutella: The Goldhagen thesis:
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463762598&sr=1-1&keywords=goldhagen
dr. bloor
@Applejinx:
If the distinction between garden-variety blog trolling and hate speech is lost on you, you’re the one that’s strange, not life.
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: I don’t think he or she was trying to say its okay, just provide the context for how it was used.
Miss Bianca
What does it mean that I dreamed early this morning, as the radio was coming on to wake me up, that it was telling me that Trump had picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate?
Other than the fact that my subconscious must be a dark and twisted place.
ETA: I read that Goldhagen book while I was doing graduate research. That was the hardest read besides Bloodlands that I can remember.
gogol's wife
@Miss Bianca:
My husband dreamed that DJT was standing at the foot of the bed and explaining that he needed to do headstands for his health. He hasn’t showed up in my dreams/nightmares yet, but I expect him soon.
dr. bloor
@Miss Bianca:
Either Joe Lieberman has mastered the art of thought insertion, or you hate your father.
Miss Bianca
@dr. bloor: Well, it certainly would make anti-Semitic wingnut heads explode like rotten melons all over the country. That in itself would be a gratifying sound.
Adam L Silverman
I’ve gone back in and replaced the crude copy and paste of Jonathan Weisman’s twitter timeline from yesterday with a screen grab saved as a pdf. This will make it easier on the site and on the eyes, but if you haven’t looked and want to, or want an easy way to save this for posterity, there are 14 pages in a pdf file below the fold.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: thanks…I think. Im still reeling a little from the sick.
chopper
@dr. bloor:
indeed. i don’t understand the minimizing.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: No worries. I didn’t feel like messing with it last night as all the copy and paste stuff was really slowing down the post tool interface and making it hard to work with. It was 2 AM and I was ready to go to bed.
Captain C
@redshirt: I’m guessing Bernie disappointment mixed with heighten-the-contradictions (on someone else) fantasies.
Anonymous patient
This stuff is why I got a CCW permit and work on my shooting skills – to defend myself, my family, my country from racist fascist monsters disguised as normal people. They can obviously creep up behind one, or sucker punch first, but at least an armed individual might be able to defend against an attack if prepared and with good situational awareness.
Monsters walk among us, undetectable until they open the mouths and spew hatred. I pray to Dog I never have to use a weapon, and that if I do I’m not so hesitant as to get wacked before I’m ready.
I also contribute to Hillary, and will work into the fall when I can on GOTV.
NR
@Damien: Cute rant. Doesn’t change the fact that Hillary is a horrible candidate who has squandered whatever advantage she might have had over Trump.
And if it’s so important to keep the Klan’s preferred president out of office, the Democrats probably shouldn’t nominate the only candidate in the country who could possibly lose to him.
Captain C
@NR: This sounds like Right To Brinks Trucks on a meth-Mad Dog 20/20-Rush Limbaugh bender.
Marmot
@SuperHrefna: What? If you’re looking for someone who wants to downplay this thing, look elsewhere. When I read Adam’s explanation, I still didn’t understand. I’m just asking for more information next time, oh holy moral superior.
Miss Bianca
@SRW1: Actually, youve made me think about that play for the first time in a long time, and it would be a perfect one for this election season. Im tempted to court disaster within my community by directing a production!
chopper
@Damien:
not gonna happen. cynical political hipsters prefer to stand on the sidelines and pout.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
Sometimes, it’s a good idea to quit while you’re ahead. Or at least, not too far behind.
Adam L Silverman
@Marmot: No worries on this end, I went back and looked and see where I lost you in the intro to the piece. In my defense: 1) it was late and 2) my focus was on Weisman’s twitter timeline. But I get what you’re saying and will keep it in mind going forward.
Elie
This is a reminder that diversity by itself is just a label. Without the commitment asserted in political action and responsibility — it is just a slogan. Our work is cut out for us. We thought maybe that just being diverse was enough of a guarantee that equality and justice would follow as an immediate result. It takes more work than that — more awareness of each other and respect — yes respect. As easy as it is to hate the people who do this, we had better figure out a way to assert our positive perspective while also engaging them without the same anger and hostility that reflects their own. We will just have war with that. We have to “get under” this — unbalance it — but that will be with our strength — not our weakness – which is anger and fear…
SFAW
@NR:
If you think Bernie’s numbers would stay anywhere near where they currently are, once Trump and the RNC do a little oppo, then you might want to consider asking someone to donate about 30 IQ points to you, thus bringing you up to X-bar. Then you might stand a chance of understanding political realities.
gvg
You know, before Obama’s election, I was not only sure of how much racism had been pushed back, I though antisemitism had retreated even further. I can’t explain why Obama’s election has triggered more of that on display too, but it’s stunning. Not only is it a surprise to me, it’s so stupid. I mean the stuff they say about Jews don’t even make any bad guy sense. I guess it’s been massaged so many centuries that it is even more of a special language than American racist dog whistle.
I still think the majority are OK because they did elect Obama twice. Plus I could see the people around me and how they behaved. As best I can understand, racists and bigots had convinced themselves that everyone agreed with them and were just being polite and pretending about civil rights. They were really shocked their side lost and still don’t really believe it.
I also don’t understand how Trump can be the leader of the antisemitics when his daughter is married and converted to one and supposedly another daughter practices too. Yet I would say from his own words and actions he really is antisemitic too. Why are they following him and does he understand what he is doing? The risk to his own family?
gvg
@Applejinx: Kid, you seem really young tonight. You are mistaken about jokes and hijinks. People don’t make that kind of joke unless they really have some of that in them, Those people who do that are not nice. Maybe you have done that yourself and think that proves that others can be playing and not serious about it. If you have, take another look at your insides because that is not a good sign. You don’t have to continue, and you can change if that is the case but don’t enable that behavior. If you can’t change those friends you need to leave that forum style because it will erode your values you want to have. Those “joke” are mean. People who make them are mean. People can be lead into bad evil by getting used to behavior like that. You may get mad and think this is presumptuous, but really, those weaponized words are not excusable.
Miss Bianca
@chopper: You know, I dont understand some people. If someone can look at the horrorshow on parade here of what the real opposition looks like and have their takeaway be hor hor, sux 2B Hillary, oh well, too bad – then I have to say that that is one crappy little creature. Must be nice to be steeped in the kind of privilege. Oh, well – I am comforted by the knowledge that *some* of us are going to be working our asses off for a Democratic victory in the fall. Whoever isnt….well, Sux2BU, bro.
Marmot
@Adam L Silverman: It was just a request for next time, Adam. Getting out of the boat, then back in the boat, just so I can figure out what a bunch of idiots, racists, and idiot-racists are doing on Twitter (!) — it’s two steps too many.
Besides, you just described the situation in fewer words than your original first paragraph. Thanks!
Technocrat
I saw this comment on a Progressive blog today:
There you go. Clearly The Oligarchy has manipulated these poor dupes into tweeting pictures of concentration camps and trails of dollar bills leading to ovens. More proof that inequality is the real issue.
LAO
@gvg: About 15 years ago, in a professional setting a (non-jewish) attorney was telling me a story about a negotiation in which he used the phrase “jewed me down” I was so shocked that I didn’t respond to it — but I will tell you this, I have never looked at him the same way.
IMO, antisemitism is strange — I’m just as offended by the notion that Jewish people are good with money as I am by the tar that we are greedy. To me, it’s the same slur.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Well, this is why I’ve been buying firearms for the last twenty years. I think every liberal in this country ought to be armed up but good.
When these people show up in your driveway with a cross, gasoline and chains, you’re not going to be able to give them a convincing argument as to why lynching is wrong and send them away, or shame them into behaving better.
Yutsano
@Betty Cracker: I’m not panicked. I’m scared. I am faced with the idea of having to leave the country of my birth if this nation is stupid enough to elect this moron Trump as President. I’m vulnerable to his machinations on several fronts, not to mention his followers. It’s too damn disturbing and I honestly have no idea what to do beyond fight with every bit of my being to make sure he never gets elected. I will fight to see this country elects our first woman President. I just know Dubya got it twice and the general electorate can be REALLY stupid sometimes.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@gvg: Hitler’s doctor, quite a few of his inner circle, and at least one of his girlfriends were Jewish, part or full. The guy on top never has to worry about that kind of shit.
Adam L Silverman
@Marmot: No worries. All good on this end.
Marmot
@Adam L Silverman: Oops! Just got to this reply. Cool. Thanks, Adam. In my own defense, I was reading this while hurrying to get ready this morn.
Miss Bianca
@LAO: My mother used to use that phrase – not often, but often enough – until I finally yelled at her about it. We fought about it – she insisting that it did no harm, and anyway she wasnt nearly as anti-Semitic as *her* mother had been, which I thought was a really bizarre justification – because we fought about everything, but I noticed she never did it again afterwards in my hearing.
Ive also been shocked by how casually some acquaintance will sometimes use racially-charged expression and seem completely oblivious to how it sounds. Youre right – it does make me look differently at them afterwards. Unlike with my mom, however, Ive usually been too much of a coward to call them on it, particularly if its in a social situation.
dr. bloor
@CONGRATULATIONS!: OTOH, history is littered with corpses that thought they were clever enough to control the mobs.
Elie
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
This is a very sad vision… I guess I think its just matching what we see on the other side.. that will lead us to nothing but destruction. You see of course, that you are allowing them to set the tone, the nature of the response etc just by thinking the scenario you give… We are better than that! We are more than a mirror of THEIR fear….
I know it sounds like I’m just talking bullshit, but I am following the thinking behind much Eastern martial arts… Our energy is very important and we have to make it real in not only what we do, but how we think about ourselves and what our goals are.
LAO
@Miss Bianca: Your mom is your mom. My maternal grandmother, who played a huge role in my childhood, used the yiddish work for black — WHICH I WILL NOT WRITE OUT — that was the functional equivalent to the N word. We begged her to stop using it, but she never did stop. Family, all we can do is better than the generation that precedes us.
Psych1
@NR: You are right but they aren’t listening.
Adam L Silverman
@LAO: Just remember Einstein’s Extra Special Theory of Relativity: the longer you spend with your relatives, the slower time seems to pass.
chopper
@LAO:
my grandfather used that word all the time according to my mom. ugh.
SFAW
@Psych1:
Not only do we hear and listen, but we also give comments like NR’s (and yours) all the consideration they merit.
SFAW
@LAO:
I haven’t experienced that particular Yiddish word with the same sentiment. To me, it’s not dissimilar to the difference between “Jews” and “kikes.” Neither is “polite,” so to speak, but “Jews” generally has not carried the same level of hatred/anti-semitism that “kikes” (or any of the other slurs) has.
Of course, whether I’m an outlier (in terms of my experience) is unknown to me at this time. Your experience may be far more common than mine.
LAO
@SFAW: The yiddish word for black? or the phrase “jew(ed) me down”? I don’t have a problem with the word “jew,” per se — it what it means in the context of the phrase. But I haven’t had my afternoon coffee yet, so I may have lost the plot.
Sophie
Not seeing any pdf.
SFAW
@LAO:
is what I wrote. Meaning the one that starts with “schv/schw.” (I don’t have a problem with writing it out, but I’m trying to respect your obviously-strong feelings on the matter. I hope this last sentence (re: respect) doesn’t induce a coronary in Omnes.)
Interestingly (so to speak), the first time I heard someone use the phrase “don’t jew me” was a Jewish friend repeating what he had said to his (Jewish) professor, who (I think) was trying to screw my friend out of some TA money. I think he used the phrase for effect — trying to issue a verbal face-slap to the professor — because he’s not the kind of guy who would use any kind of slur.
chopper
@SFAW:
the phrase ‘shande fur die goyem’ would have worked well also.
LAO
@SFAW: It’s pretty slurry.
And you don’t have to be polite on my behalf, this is balloon juice. ?
SFAW
@LAO:
We are nothing if not polite and welcoming here.
Stupid git. [muttered after the door shuts]
Adam L Silverman
@Sophie: Its the link below the fold at the bottom of the post. Right below the parenthetical.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: The feed for the escaped Bronx Zoo cobra was pretty entertaining. Sample: “Holding very still in the snake exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. This is gonna be hilarious!”
@Yutsano: Sounds like resolve to me. I’m with you!
jefft
My objection is not that they want herrenvolk democracy
My objection is that WE are the “volk”, not them
The American People elected Obama twice, and unlike most Presidents in their 8th year he has positive approval numbers – they think he is the worst President in history
The American People support restrictions on gun ownership – they think Bundy has a “Konstahtootional Rite” to overthrow the government
The American People want the Senate to vote on SCOTUS nominees – they want the seat left vacant until they get to fill it
Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera
On issue after issue they are out of touch with the American People
The want to “take my country back”, the problem with that is that it isn’t “their” country, it’s the American People’s country
Truth, Justice and the American Way, baby
Love it or leave it
Citizen_X
@Adam L Silverman: There’s no pdf there.
Adam L Silverman
Do you see this at the bottom of the post?
Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) | Twitter
It’s underlined and active in the post. If you click on it it gives you the pdf.