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Julia Ioffe vented on Twitter about receiving anonymous phone calls playing Hitler speeches, and images showing a caricature of a Jew being shot in the head. Some of the messages were more personal: her face superimposed onto an Auschwitz mugshot and a photo of her wearing a World War II- era yellow star.
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For those who would compare Trump’s campaign to Sanders’s campaign, take another look.
They have the link to the GQ article, which isn’t really earth-shattering. Ioffe writes a bit about Melania’s father having an out-of-wedlock son before marrying Melania’s mother, which is maybe 10% of the article, and Melania gets annoyed. Honestly, your husband is running for POTUS and you think that no one will look into your background? It is B-O-R-I-N-G and Melania made more out of it than it really is. Had she just left it alone…
She really is a Trump.
Edited to fix the Knavs’s (Knauss) family tree–apparently, I made it seem that Melania married her father (although he does resemble Trump).
She highlights the blind spot exploited by tolerating Drumpf’s mobilization of hate groups who are ready to intimidate and threaten journalists.
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“This is not a heavily critical article. There is nothing in it that is untrue,” [targeted journalist] Ioffe said. “If this is how Trump supporters swing into action what happens when the press looks into corrupt dealings, for example, or is critical of his policies?”
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Well, that family likes to conflate issues and numbers. A couple of days ago, Trump told the people at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa that there were 31,000 people in attendance. His people then told the non-regional press that there were 18,000 people. Unfortunately, the OC Sheriff’s department and the LA Weekly pointed out that the venue seats only 8,000 (it’s part of the fairgrounds). There is no way that an extra 10,000 people could fit inside.
I think he lies because he knows his reception in CA will only get less hospitable in major urban areas outside of Orange County.
And everyone who hosts him in CA will go the way of Pete Wilson. His presence in CA is destroying what’s left of the GOP so he inflates numbers and puffs that he can win without the GOP.
That’s quite a divisive GOP election message. Drumpf is basically saying, I’m the GOP in CA now, and I don’t need your vote.
Yeah, his handlers kind of screwed the pooch with that Northern meet 'n greet. His best reception in California might be the Central Valley, I’m afraid. I can personally think of several whackadoodles who’d pay to see him. Sigh.
The Labour Party in the UK has been having some troubles with antisemitism of late, eg MPs tweeting offensive crap. I think we’re heading into our regular cyclic upswing in global antisemitism, maybe we should be grateful that it seems to be coming around 20 years later than one might have predicted.
I’ve been thinking about the Central Valley. It’s true that Kern, Tulare, Fresno and other counties in the valley host extreme reactionaries like Orange County does. Drumpf might feel safe to race bait in parts of Visalia or Clovis or Bakersfield.
Isn’t worse if he does? Each of those counties are more than 98% Latino in the rural areas and more than half everywhere else.
The GOP might pay a much higher political price in the cities for its racism that plays well to increasingly minority convervative whites in the valley.
That depends on whether you believe that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion represents the gentler side of antisemitism.
In the UK the lunatic fringe gets a little diluted; their equivalent to Stormfront has UKip to support, and right now they’re obsessed with hating their nearby countries. Without a viable racist party in the US these groups gravitate to Trump, and his reluctance to disavow them is shocking, but I’m not sure what overall lesson to draw from that. I’m fairly confident that Trump believes many stereotypes about Jews, but I suspect mainly ones that he thinks are compliments. For sure I’d rather have him over for blintzes than Ken Livingstone.
Coincidentally, that’s the number of Syrian refugees the State Department says it will accept for this year, and around 4 times the number we’ve accepted altogether since the beginning of the conflict. In other words, maybe the Trump people are right: a “massive” influx of refugees nationwide could, if brought to one location, almost overrun one Trump rally.
