Hateful tweets rise around Trump
Report documents anti-Semitic rhetoric
n Sunday night, Hadas Gold, a Politico media writer, began receiving threats on Twitter.
One image superimposed a yellow star of David on her shirt and a bloody bullet hole in her forehead. Another Photoshopped her face on a corpse in a concentration camp oven. The message: “Don’t mess with our boy Trump, or you will be first in line for the camp.”
Gold, whose grandmother fled Poland with her family weeks before Jews from their neighborhood were deported to concentration camps and whose grandfather lost about half of his extended family in the Holocaust, notified Twitter, which moved quickly to suspend the accounts.
Gold says these incidents have become increasingly common “the more we wrote about Trump, and the more we wrote about his rhetoric.”
A report this week from The Anti-Defamation League documented the rise in anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists who cover the Republican presidential candidate. From August 2015 to July 2016, the ADL found 2.6 million tweets with anti-Semitic language. Of those, nearly 20,000 tweets were directed at 50,000 journalists in the U.S., with more than two-thirds of the tweets sent by 1,600 Twitter accounts. Words that appear frequently in the profiles of these Twitter accounts: Trump, nationalist, conservative, white.
“The report is representative of the bigotry and hatred that we are seeing play out on a broader scale,” said Oren Segal, director of ADL’s Center on Extremism and an author of the report.
During this turbulent election season that has fanned the flames of racism, xenophobia, sexism and bigotry, hate speech that typically resides in the dark recesses of the Internet has bubbled into the mainstream and onto Twitter, a popular online hangout for journalists and politicians such as Trump, who has millions of followers there.
Because people don’t have to use their real names on the service, they can attack people of color, women, Muslims and other groups with very little risk.
“This is only a fraction of what’s happening online right now as a result of the legitimacy (that) various extremist ideologies have been given in this campaign season,” said Ryan Lenz, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog. “We have seen a massive rise of hate speech.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks says the campaign has “no knowledge of this activity” and strongly condemns “any commentary that is
sense of mission like this, you would have to reach back to the media’s de rigueur patriotism during the Second World War, or to how it fell into line during the tensest years of anti-communism, or to the sense of national crisis in the months after 9/11.
In this, Donald Trump, even having garnered a major party nomination and a base of support likely over 40% of the electorate, might fairly see himself as being treated differently from other presidential nominees, and, indeed, being effectively blocked from the possibility of being elected. The system is against him — that is, it’s rigged.
The media response to Trump’s protestations of a great rigging is, largely in concert, and helpful to its case against him, to deride him for suggesting that it is rigged. In fact, to use his claim as further evidence that he is not only not suited to be president, but it is he who is undermining democracy — in a sense a double rigging.
Trump, not especially helping his argument, has conflated voter fraud. It is undoubtedly much easier to understand the concept of voter fraud, however improbable, than it is to understand the actual change in the nature of the media.
Traditionally, the media market likes a horse race — even a generally liberal media favors conflict over liberalism. This tends to flatten the built-in biases, at least in national races, and, in its way, to provide an amount of structural support for the principle of objectivity.
An open contest and uncertain outcome are good for the media. But now the media is engaged in something like a massive selfcorrection. Having promoted Trump, turning him into an unlikely and compelling contender, it now, in remarkable unison, has decided he must be stopped.
Almost all anti-Trump partisans would argue the virtue of this position. Still, it is also hard not to see this as, also, a select group of powerful people and institutions going out of its way to put a brake on popular will.
There is, here, an interesting answer to the hypothetical question of what if there arose in America an authoritarian figure and fascist sort with wide popularity. The answer, at least in this instance, is that the media would represent the norm and, in concert, ridicule, belittle, shame the offending candidate, and in a myriad of other ways prevent the repugnant message from moving mainstream.
In this, the overwhelming power of the media — in which an outsider candidate so appalls the civic standard that even a fragmented media unites in horror — might, not unfairly, seem to represent the exact sort of elite that Trump has been campaigning against. Indeed, his inartful campaign against the biased media has surely had the effect of making the media more determined to do him in.
So he’s right, in his way. Or, at least he has defined a peculiar paradox. Trump is not just an extreme candidate, but an inept one, unable to make the slightest ritual bows to propriety. Indeed, by violating all the norms, Trump has become not just extreme and inept, but absurd. How could any sentient person take him seriously? Pay no attention to the large minority of, by definition, lack of sentient people, who do.
Of course, if you’re going to rig an election, you want to rig it in the direction it might seem plausibly to have gone anyway. Hence, in this rigging, a large majority will surely applaud the outcome — so, in that sense, the voters voted for the rigging. Therefore, ipso facto, it’s not rigged. Except that there is no way under the sun that Donald Trump was ever going to be elected president.