In the midst of Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed crackdown on antisemitism, one key fact seems to have been overlooked: the antisemitism is coming from inside the house — the White House, to be specific.
The Trump administration has gone to extraordinary lengths in what it has sold to the public as a battle against antisemitism and those who spread it. It has asserted the right to strip permanent residency from people over their speech and deport them for writing op-eds, to defund universities for not cracking down harder on protests and speech, to treat student protesters like terrorists, including by raiding their homes, and is threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits over their political views, among other things.
But strangely, this crackdown has often fallen on individuals who don’t have any actual record of antisemitic behavior, no small number of them being Jewish themselves. It’s all enough to make you suspect that the actual goal here isn’t to rid American society of very real, poisonous bigotry toward Jews, and is more to lazily use them as an excuse to stifle political speech that Trump officials don’t like.
Something else that adds to those suspicions? The fact that the Trump administration is filled with people who have proudly associated with actual, unvarnished antisemites, or engaged in antisemitism of their own.
For instance, there are at least three separate administration officials who have associated with or praised (or both) notorious antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, the latter of whom has lately supplemented his sex trafficking and misogyny with shocking, open antisemitism. One of these officials, the White House’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, served not just on Tate’s legal defense team but worked as his publicist (while also enthusiastically attending one of Fuentes’s rallies where the influencer said calling Trump “a racist only makes me…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
