There have been three terror attacks over the past few days. They all seem to have been sustained and emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric.
In the coming days, you will hear a lot of pieties from Trump, his family and his supporters. Ignore their pretenses. The Trumps, and the Republican party know exactly what they have been doing for three years straight during his presidential campaign and presidency, and for decades before that. He stokes racism and hate to attack those who challenge him.
In 2016, Julia Ioffe published an unflattering article about Melania Trump in GQ.
She began to receive calls from Trump supporters playing Hitler speeches, told that she “should be burned in an oven,” “be shot in the head,” and was sent photoshopped images of her in a concentration camp uniform. When asked about it, both Melania and Donald said the reporter had brought the attacks upon herself.
Melania Trump, the wife of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on Tuesday suggested that journalist Julia Ioffe “provoked” the anti-Semitic abuse she faced from Trump fans after publishing negative profile about her.
“I don’t control my fans,” Melania said in an interview with DuJour. “But I don’t agree with what they’re doing. I understand what you mean, but there are people out there who maybe went too far. She provoked them." [...]
“You hated this article in ‘GQ’ about your wife, Melania. Julia Ioffe wrote it. Since then, some of your supporters have viciously attacked this woman, Julia Ioffe, with anti-Semitic attacks, death threats. What’s your message to these people when something like that happens?” Wolf Blitzer asked the presumptive Republican presidential nominee during an interview on Wednesday. “I’ll tell you, I haven’t read the article, but I hear it was a very inaccurate article and I heard it was a nasty article They shouldn’t be doing that with wives. I mean they shouldn’t be doing that,” he responded. “These death threats that have followed these anti-Semitic,” Blitzer pressed Trump. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t know anything about that,” said Trump. “You’ll have to talk to them about it. I don’t have a message to the fans." — www.haaretz.com/...
This is why you should never accept “both sides” bullshit from handmaidens of the right. This wasn’t the only time Trump trafficked in anti-semitism. The Israeli paper Haaretz listed six other instances where Trump stoked or supported hate directed specifically at Jews:
On April 24, 2013, Trump seems to go out of his way to highlight the “Daily Show” host’s Jewish background, tweeting: “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz — I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow. Who, by the way, is totally overrated.” [...]
In a major speech designed to unveil his prospective foreign policy agenda, Trump declares, “’America First’ will be the overriding theme of my administration.” The theme carries echoes of the America First Committee, which lobbied hard against America’s entry into World War II and whose most prominent spokesman was aviator Charles Lindbergh, an avowed anti-Semite.
William Johnson, leader of the white supremacist American Freedom Party, is among the list of delegates the Trump campaign submitted in California ahead of the state’s May 9 deadline. After news organizations begin reporting about the controversial delegate, the Trump campaign blames Johnson’s inclusion on its list as a “database error.” Johnson then says he is resigning as a delegate and will not attend the convention. — www.haaretz.com/...
It’s not just Trump, other senior Republican leaders are also trafficking in racist conspiracy theories, including anti-semitic ones that seem to have influenced the terrorist who attacked a synagogue today.
Even worse, an actual neo-Nazi, Steve King, is a Republican congressman:
The eight-term congressman, up for re-election next month, talked to Caroline Sommerfeld of the Austrian far-right propaganda site Unzensuriert (which means “uncensored” in English). Sommerfeld is a prominent intellectual in Europe’s neo-fascist identitarian movement, which has deep connections to America’s so-called alt-right.
The interview, published in September, came to HuffPost’s attention this week. In his conversation with Sommerfeld, King discussed his belief in the superiority of European culture over others. He talked fearfully of falling fertility rates in the West and spoke at length about his belief that Europe and America are threatened by Muslim and Latino immigration. [...]
The interview is remarkable, capturing a sitting U.S. congressman completely fluent in modern white nationalist talking points just weeks before an election he is favored to win. — www.huffingtonpost.com/...
You can do something over the next 10 days to put this racist, white supremacist out of office. Help his Democratic opponent, J.D. Scholten.
— @subirgrewal