What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
Someone else who has made a career promulgating hatred against the Jewish People was also dining at Mar-A-Lago that night...
Jewish News Syndicate Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin is one of my favorite op-ed writers these days and he had quite the potent piece yesterday in response to Donald Trump choosing to share a friendly meal with the vile antisemites Kanye West - no, I’m not going to indulge him by referring to him as “Ye” - and Nick Fuentes. The headline: “Trump’s Jewish Supporters Must Condemn and Disavow Him.” Read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s one thing for him to gripe about Jews who don’t prioritize Israel’s security voting for Democrats, rather than him or any Republican. It’s quite another to do so while associating with a celebrity who is using his influence with the public to mainstream antisemitism.
Nor do Trump’s excuses about not knowing who Fuentes was excuse his meeting. As pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted, the best way to avoid a meeting with an antisemite whom you don’t know is to avoid contact with one whom you do.
Moreover, it’s not as if Trump is unfamiliar with some of the controversies in which Fuentes and his extremist followers (called “Groypers”) have been involved. Fuentes was the focus of controversy in 2019, when conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s support for the YouTube personality/Holocaust denier led the Young America Foundation—a group founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley—to cut ties with her.
As I wrote at the time, it was imperative for conservatives to make sure that Fuentes and his ilk were not given mainstream platforms to spread their hatred. But Trump continued retweeting Malkin, even when almost everyone else on the right began to ignore her.
Nor is it likely that Trump, who never forgets a slight to himself or his family, had forgotten that Fuentes’s Groypers had heckled his son, Donald, Jr. Yet, he reportedly enjoyed Fuentes’s fawning over him at the Mar-a-Lago dinner.
I’d practically forgotten about Michelle Malkin choosing to embrace Fuentes and his racist crew of “groypers”!
Apparently, though, someone else I wish I could forget all about was also at this infamous dinner. Andrew Bernard reports at The Algemeiner:
Trump has since posted two explanations of the meeting on his Truth Social microblogging platform saying that West had asked for advice and that he didn’t know either Fuentes or Milo Yiannopoulos, another alt-right commentator who attended the dinner and who is serving as West’s campaign manager for his 2024 presidential run.
“We got along great, [West] expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?” Trump said.
Yiannopoulos on Sunday wrote on the messaging and blogging site Telegram that Trump hadn’t discredited himself by meeting with West and Fuentes, but rather by his continued association with Jews. “He did it by continuing to suck the boots of the Jewish powers that be who hate Jesus Christ, hate our country, and see us all as disposable cattle according to their ‘holy’ book,” Yiannopoulos wrote. Yiannopoulos, who is British, resigned from Breitbart in 2017 after making positive comments about pedophilia.
I remember this racist jerk back when he was first on the rise at Breitbart, joining the site in 2014 and, thanks to that multiple-shirt-wearing white nationalist Steve Bannon, becoming an editor in 2015. It’s since been revealed that Yiannopoulos was secretly reaching out to open white nationalists for story ideas during his time at Breitbart.
And now look at him — allying with some of the country’s most prominent antisemites. He also recently served as an intern for Georgia’s antisemitic conspiracist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. When I did a search to verify that fact of his resume, this bizarre story emerged: “Marjorie Taylor Greene Accused of 'Secretly Undermining' Donald Trump.”
Who is making the strange claim? Someone else I wish I could forget:
Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who ran for Florida congress in 2020, posted a number of accusations against Greene on Telegram. She wrote that the Republican is "undermining" Trump with Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart editor and alt-right figurehead, whom the congresswoman hired as a congressional intern in June.
Loomer added that Yiannopoulos is now "openly attacking and sabotaging" Trump while working as campaign manager for West, who legally changed his name to Ye.
…
"It bothers me and should bother all of you that MTG is claiming to be pro-Trump and using Trump to boost her profile, while she and her team are secretly undermining him by using Milo as a political operative to make Trump look bad.
"MTG is a snake and she needs to go. That's why I call her Marjorie TRAITOR Greene," Loomer added.
I’m very familiar with Loomer and her “activism” as over the last decade she injected herself as some sort of pseudo-celebrity into the movement in which I participated, the counter-Islamist cause. I remember seeing her posing for pictures at a protest of Ilhan Omar here in Southern California. And I despised her. Why? Not just because of her Trump-style narcissism but because she’s a straight-up anti-Muslim bigot:
When it was reported in July 2017 that 2,000 migrants had died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe, Loomer rejoiced. "Good," she tweeted. "Here's to 2,000 more.”
Later that year, in November, Loomer went on a daylong tweetstorm, complaining that rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft employ too many Muslim people and saying there should be a Muslim-free alternative service.
"Someone needs to create a non-Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver," she tweeted at the time, prompting both apps to bar her from their services.
This is what “the Right” and “the conservative movement” has become today. With the rise of Trump and his empowerment by a majority of Republicans and the “Evangelical” base, disgusting elements which used to be relegated to “the fringe” are now allied with “the mainstream.”
And how do Republican partisans respond to this? By trying to minimize it. For years I’ve argued with conservative blogger Matt Cover about the significance of the rise of extremism in the GOP. He gave his usual spiel about how white nationalists had no influence and “The Media” should still be the primary concern of all decent Americans:
I responded explaining why we couldn’t ignore an “impotent douchebag” like Fuentes:
It doesn’t matter how many white supremacists, antisemites, neo-Nazis, and anti-Muslim bigots there are in the country. (Though it’s actually way more than most people think: according to research by the ADL the global total of antisemites is 1.09 billion with 24 million of them residing in the United States. That’s 10% of the nation’s population.) All it takes is one Jew-hater with a gun to walk into a synagogue. All it takes is one confederate-flag waving son of a bitch to walk into a black church. All it takes is one Muslim-hating bigot to walk into a mosque. All it takes is one child indoctrinated with a hateful ideology by their parents to decide to beat up the Jewish kid or the black kid on the playground.
Non-violent antisemites like West, Fuentes, Greene, and Yiannapolous cannot be ignored. Their words may be dismissed by the majority of humans on the planet but the violent underbelly of humanity is listening. It only takes so many fiery rants by celebrities and internet-addicted assholes to light a fuse which will result in violence.
I am a Jew who left the US for Israel straight out of university in 1978. I'm reading about what is happening in today's America. I'm happy with my choice, but am saddened with what is happening in the land of my birth. I think of how proudly I stood each morning in elementry school pledging allegiance to the flag, followed by singing God Bless America or the Star-Spangled Banner. Forty-four years ago, I transplanted myself for a greater love, today I would flee.
Glenn Perlman