This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated December 9, 2022
Just one week after announcing his 2024 presidential rum, former President Trump had a Thanksgiving feast at his Mar a Lago club with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, two men who have garnered attention for their virulent anti-Semitism.
West’s recent, repeated anti-Jewish statements, like when he tweeted he was going to “go Death Con 3 on the Jews,” have resulted in all of his business partners ending their relationships with him and permanent bans from social media platforms. Fuentes, who has been banned from social media sites for some time, is a proud anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who in ranting about “the Jewish media” controlling America, has said, “That’s why we need a dictatorship… We need to take control of the media, take control of the government, and force the people to believe what we believe.”
“I like Hitler… the Holocaust is not what happened. Let’s look at the facts of that. Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities… I don’t like the word ‘evil’ next to Nazis... We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time... The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world... There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things... I want to say there’s a lot of good Nazis.”
Excerpts from Kanye West’s December 1, 2022 appearance on Alex Jones’ InfoWars podcast
Fuentes added that “We have one more election where white people can make the decision… Trump’s gotta get in there and then never leave.” Fuentes’s “pathway,” as he referred to it, is “Elect Trump one more time and then stop having elections.” He said that this will allow “us to build a society based on our distinct worldview,” at which point he listed what that would look like: “women don’t have the right to vote… boys and girls get married as teenagers and start having kids… women not being in the workforce… banning gay marriage… banning contraceptives,” a society he describes as “Taliban rule in America.”
This is who the Republican Party’s leading candidate to be their nominee for President in 2024 decided to have dinner and a two-hour-long discussion with during Thanksgiving week. A couple of anti-Semites, one of which believes that Trump should be installed as a dictator for life and America should then stop having elections and institute Taliban-like rule that grants full rights only to straight, white men.
Significant public figures cozying up to white supremacists and anti-Semites emboldens them and expands their reach among the masses. That inevitably extends to people who are prepared to further hate speech and some who will ultimately become violent.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, two men were arrested at Penn Station and arraigned on charges that included making terroristic charges against the Jewish community. The men had made online threats to attack a city synagogue and were found with a military-style knife, a firearm, a high-capacity magazine, a bulletproof vest, a ski mask, and a swastika armband.
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s tracker of anti-Semitic incidents, there were seven such incidents in Brooklyn this November. These incidents included hateful speech, such as anti-Jewish protests at the Barclays Center and anti-Semitic propaganda being mailed to a Jewish-owned pizzeria, but also physical assaults, such as water and garbage being thrown at an elderly Jewish man, members of the Hassidic community being shot with gel pellets from a passing car over several nights, and an Orthodox Jewish man being attacked by four individuals.
The ADL, which has been keeping these records for four decades, show that anti-Semitic incidents began to rise during the presidential campaign cycle for the 2016 election and continued to increase each year throughout Trump’s one term in the White House.
Among images seen in the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection were Confederate flags and clothing with anti-Semitic messages, such as a man wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt. Late that afternoon, hours after violent mobs had laid siege to the Capitol in his name, Trump made his first remarks addressing the attack, in which he said to those who took part, “We love you, you’re very special.”
Following the 2017 events in Charlottesville that included white nationalists marching through the streets chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” Trump’s words, as Republican Senator Lyndesy Graham said, suggested a “moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally, and people like Ms. Heyer.” Heather Heyer was among those counterprotesting the racist, anti-Semitic groups, one of which killed her when he intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
This cannot be acceptable. One party cannot line up behind a man who previously equivocated on questions of white supremacy and anti-Semitism but now openly embraces purveyors of hate. Unfortunately, recent years have given no indication that the GOP will hold Trump accountable for anything, no matter how abhorrent or unAmerican.
