Journalist Jonathan Weisman bravely describes being “belled” and mobbed by anti-semite Trump supporters.
He describes a digital tag used to mark his Twitter account. From his account, Twitter sounds unaware or unwilling to respond to directly to the practice of “belling” digital victims by perpetrators.
The first tweet arrived as cryptic code, a signal to the army of the “alt-right” that I barely knew existed:
“Hello Mr. Weisman’s name enclosed in double parens.” CyberTrump was responding to my recent tweet of an essay by Robert Kagan on the emergence of fascism in the United States.
“Care to explain?” I answered, intuiting that my last name in brackets denoted my Jewish faith.
“What, ho, the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence, hahaha!” CyberTrump came back.
“It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.” With the cat belled, the horde was unleashed.
…
An official at Twitter encouraged me to block the anti-Semites and report them to Twitter, but I have chosen to preserve my Twitter timeline as a research tool of sorts, a database of hate, and a shrine to 2016.
The only response I blocked and forwarded to Twitter was a photo of my disembodied head held aloft, long Orthodox hair locks called payot photoshopped on my sideburns and a skullcap placed as a crown. I let stand the image of a smiling Mr. Trump in Nazi uniform flicking the switch on a gas chamber containing my Photoshopped face.
“Thanks to Mr. Weisman’s Twitter handle for redpilling at least 1.5k normies today by retweeting premium content. Epitome of useful idiot,” responded one tormentor whose Twitter handle is too vulgar to repeat, even if I wanted to.
Maybe he was right. And still, we have heard nothing from Mr. Trump, no denunciation, no broad renouncing of racist, anti-Semitic support, no expressions of sympathy for its victims.
The Republican Jewish Coalition on Tuesday released what can only be described as equivocation as an art form: “We abhor any abuse of journalists, commentators and writers, whether it be from Sanders, Clinton or Trump supporters. There is no room for any of this in any campaign.”
…
In The New Yorker this week, Adam Gopnik, quoting Alexander Pope, asks, “Is there no black or white?
”His answer: “The pain of not seeing that black is black soon enough will be ours, and the time to recognize this is now.”
The bolded text was not in the original nytimes article.
