Last month, journalist Julia Ioffe was subjected to a barrage of anti-Semitic tweets and emails—including a photoshopped image of herself in concentration-camp garb and a drawing of a Jewish man on his knees being shot in the head—as well as threatening phone calls after her GQ profile of Melania Trump incurred the would-be First Lady’s displeasure. When Donald Trump was asked about it on CNN, he carped on how “nasty” and “inaccurate” the article was—despite admitting he hadn’t read it—and on the media’s general bias against him; pressed about the attacks on Ioffe, he said he had “no message for the fans.” And now, Melania Trump has come under fire for remarks that many felt blamed Ioffe herself for the harassment.
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The would-be First Lady addressed the controversy in an interview to DuJour. Mostly, she too complained about Ioffe’s article, calling it “a little bit mean” for delving into her family background; but she did address her supporters’ behavior when asked about it by writer Mickey Rapkin:
“I don’t control my fans,” Melania says, “but I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them.”
For one, that pretty weak-sauce condemnation for acts like taunting a Jewish person with Nazi and Holocaust imagery, much of it personalized with her face (“maybe” went too far? what would it take for Melania to be sure?). But that aside, the “she was asking for it” implication is hard to miss: sure, the overzealous “fans” were wrong, but there’s blame on both sides.
This cavalier attitude from House Trump toward the anti-Semitic harassment of a journalist by some of its followers is particularly troubling since Ioffe’s experience is far from an isolated example. Ben Shapiro, editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, who quit as editor-at-large at Breitbart News over that site’s transformation into a Trump propaganda outlet, was bombarded with vile tweets after the birth of his son earlier this month, invoking lampshades and gas chambers and referring to the baby as a “cockroach.” Commentary editor John Podhoretz gets a steady stream of tweets such as “Go home kike,” “I’ve never met a Jew who wasn’t completely disgusting, inside and out. #DeportJewsNow #Back2Israel,” and “Are you gonna flee to Israel after TRUMP is elected president?! LMAO KIKE!!” with a photoshopped image that shows a grinning Trump about to push a button activating a gas chamber. (All these are from people whose profiles identify them as Trump supporters.)
Blogger and writer Bethany Mandel wrote last March that she bought a gun after her criticism of Trump on Twitter was met with “terrifying and profound anti-Semitism”—not only tweets calling her a “slimy Jewess” but death threats sent to her private mailbox and attempts to dig up and disclose her personal information.
In recent weeks, I myself have been a frequent target of anti-Semitic invective after writing about the “alt-right”—a loosely connected, overwhelmingly pro-Trump group that includes many overt white nationalists—and criticizing Trump cheerleader Ann Coulter for her flirtations with anti-Semitism. I won’t include any embedded tweets or screenshots, since I believe giving exposure to vicious trolls tends to encourage them. It’s the usual fare: exhortations to go back to Russia (where I was born) or to Israel, photos of Nazi death camps, straight-up anti-Semitic slurs, heavy-handed jokes about ovens, lampshades, and Anne Frank, rants about Jews controlling the media and starting wars, comments blaming the historical persecution of Jews on Jewish malfeasance, and so forth. “Too bad the Holocaust is a lie,” wrote one person with a “Make America Great Again” hat in his avatar. After being slammed by Breitbart News, which some have accused of directing “hate mobs” at Trump critics, I even received a tweet from former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard “Dr.” David Duke, which should probably make me feel very special. (Duke called me “a sycophant for Jewish Supremacist Israel and a hater of European-Americans.”)
I’m not mentioning this to ask for sympathy. As a 20-year Internet veteran, I have a pretty thick skin, and I’ve often cringed at how liberally some people use the term “harassment” to refer to mean words or even blunt disagreement. While dealing with the alt-right hordes on Twitter is not particularly pleasant, the block or mute buttons always come in handy, and in a way it’s perversely gratifying to see your opponents fall over each other demonstrating what a vile bunch they are. But there are several reasons this behavior deserves attention.
First, while comments such as “Palestine or the oven, choose quickly” are pretty clearly not serious threats, they can still be intimidating, especially when multiplied. And some people, including Ioffe and Mandel, have clearly been on the receiving end of messages intended not just to annoy but to frighten. Will some journalists, particularly those who are Jewish (or have a partly Jewish background), hold back in writing about Trump and his followers out of fear of being targeted?
Second, this pattern tells us something about the Trump phenomenon. Having repeatedly criticized the “misogynist hate mob” caricature of GamerGate, the revolt against “social justice” politics in the videogame community, I am well aware that no movement should be judged by its worst followers, and I am certainly not saying that all Trump supporters (some of whom are Jewish) are rabid anti-Semites. But while most GamerGaters took pains to disavow harassment and argue that it came mostly from unaffiliated trolls—and even made mostly unrecognized efforts to report abusive posts—I have have yet to see any pro-Trump social media users try to curb the haters on their side. Instead, pro-Trump commentators like Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos have shrugged off anti-Semitic slurs and memes as little more than hijinks from a “mischievous, dissident, trolly generation” fed up with “language policing.”
More recently, Breitbart fanned the flames of anti-Semitism with its infamous headline denouncing Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew” for his #NeverTrump stance. While the article was penned by fellow Jewish conservative David Horowitz and accused Kristol of betraying Israel’s interests with his stance, the “Renegade Jew” in literal scarlet letters at the top of the page was obvious red meat—as it were—for the site’s alt-right fans.
While many of the Trump trolls almost certainly aren’t old enough to vote, the racists and anti-Semites of the alt-right are not just a bunch of kids having mischievous fun. If they’re not dedicated white supremacists, they certainly put a lot effort into playing ones on the Internet. And some of them are prominent figures in Trump’s online army. A Twitter user who goes by “Ricky Vaughn” describes himself in his profile as an “MIT-certified Top 150 2016 Election Influencer.” Indeed, Vaughn, who has over 30,000 followers on Twitter, is No. 107 on the MIT Media Lab’s “2016 Election Influencers” list—above The Drudge Report, Bill Maher, and Glenn Beck. While Vaughn acknowledges the few “good Jews” who support Trump’s “America First” message, such as The Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, his Twitter timeline offers such gems as:
https://twitter.com/Ricky_Vaughn99/status/702642099297058816
https://twitter.com/Ricky_Vaughn99/status/682592456458768386
https://twitter.com/Ricky_Vaughn99/status/673560954542641152
No, you can’t fault Trump for things said by his fans, even the “MIT-certified election influencers” among them. But Trump has never minced words when it comes to things and people he finds offensive. So far, he has yet to deploy his vaunted straight talk against the people who make his fans look like bigots and bullies. (“Losers” and “disgusting” are two favorite words from the Trump lexicon that come to mind.)
Will Trump address this issue as we get closer to November? Will his daughter Ivanka, a convert to Judaism who is married to a Jewish man? Will Sheldon Adelson, the major Republican Party backer who is Jewish and who has pledged $100 million to Trump? Or will Camp Trump continue to abet and normalize the kind of odious rhetoric that we thought had long been banished from civilized discourse?
