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Donald Trump is known for his repeated “accidental” retweets of white supremacists, including one fellow with the lovely Twitter handle @WhiteGenocideTM.
Now he seems to be producing anti-Semitic propaganda in-house. Earlier today, The Donald tweeted — and that’s tweeted, not retweeted — the picture above featuring “Crooked Hillary” Clinton awash in cash next to a Star of David declaring her the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” [UPDATE: According to Mic, the pic appeared earlier on 8chan’s famously anti-Semitic /pol/ board]
After a bit of an outcry, Trump took the tweet down, then tweeted a second version of the Hillary pic with a circle replacing the star.
But if Trump was trying to send a little wink of acknowledgment and approval to his not-so-little army of neo-Nazi fanboys, well, that message was received loud and clear.
On the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin enthusiastically declared that:
Hero Trump has made history yet again by tweeting a meme of Hillary Clinton featuring her image with a Star of David over top hundred dollar bills. Inside the Jew star it reads “Most corrupt candidate ever!”
It is indeed true that she is the most corrupt candidate ever, and it is also indeed true that the overwhelming majority of her corruption money comes from Jew sources.
Anglin saw this as a “dog-whistle” message aimed at Trump’s neo-Nazi fanboys, intended to reassure them that he has their back, despite some recent remarks about Israel that didn’t exactly follow the neo-Nazi party line.
This is, yet again, dog-whistling by The Leader. It comes just after he made some offensive comments about Israel being our friend – he says this for the evangelicals, then he signals to us – his real supporters – that we need not worry, he is just shilling a bit to get into power at which point he will shut down the entire Jew agenda.
As Anglin sees it, Trump has to say positive things about Israel to appease evangelical Christians who have their own somewhat perverse reasons for supporting Israel. (And, no, the link in the last sentence didn’t come from the Daily Stormer post.)
Anglin reassures his readers that:
the evangelicals will listen to [Trump’s] pro-Israel statements, while we will listen to his signals. …
Besides the dog-whistling confirmation that these are just said to appease the evangacucks, Israel is currently the least immediately threatening aspect of the Jew agenda.
As Anglin sees it, it’s far more important that Trump is on the side of the Nazis when it comes to other more important elements of “the Jew agenda” like “[m]ass non-White immigration” and “[i]nsane social engineering programs.”
Trump’s more mainstream supporters can argue that these seeming winks aimed at his neo-Nazi fanbase are just a bit of carelessness on his part. I don’t think that even Trump is capable of this much “carelessness.”
H/T — A number of people alerted me to this story; the screenshot of his Tweet is from The Verge.
@liitleknown
I wonder about Ivanka, surely she should know better than to do this, but who knows what goes on behind closed doors? She has been brought up to smile and be daddy’s little girl. Surely you have seen the worrying picture of them which looks incestuous. The way he talks about her like a bit of meat as well, he sees her in the same way as his beauty pageant girls, as sex objects. Ivana described Heir Trump as sexually violent in her book, maybe this type of thing was so normalised in their house, his daughter grew up with it. If Ivanka defied her father, I think she would have hell to pay. He’s a bully.
@Virgin Mary
It’s possible there could be real abuse there, but regardless, I have to lean on the side of not taking away her agency.
As far as there being hell to pay: I just don’t see it. Not being willing to part with inheriting your father’s fortune, when you are already financially set for life, doesn’t wash for me.
Not that I feel no compassion for her at all. At the very least, he obviously set a terrible example, and it’s hard to rebel against your parents. But she is an adult. And she is actively supporting his misogyny and racism, promoting it as just “speaking his mind” — and isn’t that great that he’s willing to do that?
Most of my compassion goes to those who would suffer the most if her father were to become President.
Some of the stuff in the press makes it looks as if she’s the brains behind the whole outfit – she was apparently the one who got his campaign manager fired. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she gets the VP nod…
@greyskye –
http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/the-presumption-of-innocence-isnt-a-free-pass-for-powerful-men-to-avoid-scrutiny-20160703-gpxp28.html
Just saw this a few minutes after reading your comment.
eta: note to self – don’t read the comments after the article. DO NOT read the comments.
I can’t rule out that Trump assented to the marriage out of the idea that a Jew was good enough to have his leavings.
@HeinzD
Ooh! There’s an absolutely perfect word – ‘shibboleth’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Just…how would someone go about determining The Most Corrupt Candidate Ever? What are the criteria for determining this? And how far back does ‘ever’ go here? If it goes back at least as far as George Washington’s time, how does one adjust for attitudes and culture that were acceptable back then, but are considered repugnant today? So many questions on this that I haven’t even started to think of yet….
(No, I’m not agreeing with this ‘assessment’ of Clinton; she’s no worse than any other recent candidate I can think of. Just wondering what a (relatively) objective test would be to determine who’s the Most Corrupt Candidate Ever would look like.)
BoinkBoinkBoinkBoinkBoinkBoink:
Don’t worry, Iran’s been on that one since like the 1800s. Perfect for the NWO conspiracy theorist shopping for a new secret villain. Actually, don’t they get accused of being “Zionist spies”? …There’s just no escaping it….
@Mish – thanks for the link. Excellent, excellent article. Frankly I find it extremely disturbing that everyone is loosing their minds about Hillary’s emails when Trump may actually have raped children and no one is talking about it.
(I don’t mean no one here specifically, just no one in general in the media).
Considering all the facts of the story (Epstein’s history etc) the case seems extremely plausible.
Nazis and fascists are actually a significant portion of the population. At least a few million people in the U.S. explicitly agree with those beliefs (strong authoritarianism, racism, militarism, a type of “socialism for the middle class” that rejects social justice, etc.). It’s just that those views are completely rejected in mainstream society and most fascists are not a member of any organization. The Daily Stormed gets a lot of regular page views.
I don’t think Trump is as full blown of a fascist, but he’s definitely relying on those people for support.
@Jules
And here I thought it was Islam in Iran that had it out for the Zoroastrians. Never mind Iran was where Zoroastrianism was born lo these many centuries/ millennia ago, details you know.
Nice open letter to Trump’s son-in-law from one of his employees: http://observer.com/2016/07/an-open-letter-to-jared-kushner-from-one-of-your-jewish-employees/
To be honest, when I first saw that image it didn’t immediately strike me as anti-semitic because the focus is Hillary Clinton and she’s not Jewish. So I still see it as a ‘just a star-shape’ rather than the Star of David – that’s my personal reaction – and I tend to focus on the factually incorrect ‘most corrupt candidate’.
But let’s say it was an honest mistake (it wasn’t ) – the fact that both anti-semites and folk more well versed in anti-semitic imagery read something in it that both I and the meme maker didn’t, should have resulted in an apology and a disavowal rather than a shoddy edit and subsequent retweet.
And I do believe that the intent was anti-Semitic – which makes it offensive to me on that level even though the way I read the image doesn’t feel anti-Semitic.
@Banananana dakry
I thought it was the Baha’i Iran had it out for? Zoroastrians were the first group after the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) to be treated as dhimmi, protected religions, by the early Muslims, the Prophet acknowledged them as a major philosophical inspiration to the Abrahamic faiths, and it was around much longer than any of them. I could be wrong, but I’d be honestly surprised.
The Iranian clerical establishment mainly has it out for any religion founded after Islam (for supposedly going against Muhammad’s status as the “Seal of the Prophets”), and since Baha’i was founded just two centuries ago and incorporates Abrahamic mythology…
@rugbyyogi
That open letter is very important.
To add on: the Twitter account, FishBoneHead1, on which it originated on 6/15 tweeted at white nationalist accounts and repeatedly made racist jokes. http://archive.is/GiMRU
The image showed up on 4-chan on 6/22. The neo-Nazis there went crazy for it. A little more than a week later, it makes it through Trump’s “vetting process”, and he tweets it out.
But it’s very important to Jared Kushner and Ivanka that their father/-in-law not be seen as anti-Semitic.
Why should he have to disown the gleefully anti-Semitic neo-Nazis who are his most fervent supporters, and whose know-nothing xenophobia he tweets and retweets constantly?
Any Jewish journalist who writes about it gets a flood of “Haha it’s a Sheriff’s star, you stupid Jew York liberal. Gas the K***s 2016” tweets. Trump himself tweets, “It’s a sheriff’s star, you stupid, corrupt liberal media”.
And Jared and Ivanka are giving him all the cover he needs to do this.