Adam Maida.
THE first tweet arrived as cryptic code, a signal to the army of the “alt-right” that I barely knew existed: “Hello ((Weisman)).” @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.
The anti-Semitic hate, much of it from self-identified Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn’t stopped since. Trump God Emperor sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless, hooknosed Jew. I was served an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” replaced without irony with “Machen Amerika Great.” Holocaust taunts, like a path of dollar bills leading into an oven, were followed by Holocaust denial. The Jew as leftist puppet master from @DonaldTrumpLA was joined by the Jew as conservative fifth columnist, orchestrating war for Israel. That one came from someone who tagged himself a proud future member of the Trump Deportation Squad.
The full article is here. I had a look at Mr. Weisman’s twitter stream. There was an astonishing amount of ugly, gleeful hate on display, replete with violence and threats. If you’re easily queased, don’t go looking. This is one of the lighter things posted, where I see I am included in the icky foreigner category:
Someone needs to photoshop Trump out of the bottom one and substitute Geronimo in.
How exactly does the Native American caricatured qualify as “foreign”? I know these people aren’t big on logical consistency, but where exactly does he think they came from?
Sandykat:
Because we aren’t all dead. To these types of people, the only good Indian is a dead one.
You all should know that the large image here with the racist caricatures is a modification of a picture from a video game. In “Bioshock Infinite”, the player opposes the forces of a flying city in the early 20th century. The people of that white “utopia” literally worship the American Founding Fathers, and the image above features George Washington. Interestingly, the icons on the side of the image have been cut off here, probably for being too religious. You can see the whole image on Wikipedia’s article about the game.
It goes to show that even media that mocks racism can be twisted to promote racism.
Wait, that image is serious? Not satire? Also, is the guy with the beer supposed to be Irish? Seriously, guys, what is this 1816? The images themselves are so stereotypical that they’ve gone all the way past offensive to me and come out as ridiculous propaganda failures.
@4: Ah, that makes more sense. The images are supposed to be over the top caricatures that no one would take seriously. Perhaps the meme generator didn’t have the artistic ability to make his own images and so stole them from Bioshock?