In that conversation, we were talking about whether Trump’s ad was a “message of hate for the Jews”. the bulk of the evidence of his antisemitism seems to be an alleged, unwitnessed remark made 30 years ago about him preferring accountants who wear kippah, and his apparent disdain for Goldman Sachs.
I don’t set the bar for defining antisemitism as high as having committed actual pogroms. I can see that I worded my previous remark very poorly, looking back at it. But I am pretty skeptical of dog whistles as hate speech.
I have been thinking a lot about the implications of the election, partly from having a daughter and a sister very active in the LGBT community. The fear that they are hearing reminds me of something. I have mentioned that I sometimes do battlefield archaeology, including the recovery of remains. A long time ago, I was working on Saipan, where one of the combat photographers had taken some very haunting footage of a Japanese woman throwing her baby off a cliff, then jumping after it. I was able to use still images of the event to find the exact spots where the photographer stood, and where the woman jumped from. The reason that she, and many other civilians ended their own lives was because of the things that they had been told that the Americans would do, should they capture women and children. Those beliefs were not based in reality. They were wartime propaganda. The Americans killed thousands of civilians, but did so with artillery and grenades. They were very unlikely to harm noncombatants surrendering after a battle.
The DNC has built up Trump to be essentially Hitler. He is surely crude, vulgar, and narcissistic, but most of the racism and antisemitism seems to be propaganda. And it is pretty unlikely that the operatives who promoted those ideas really believe them. Just like the things that previous campaigns said about each other, and turned out to be hype. Like campers telling each other ghost stories, then being terrified to sleep. It is not really the ghosts out there causing the distress, it is the ghost stories.
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