Donald Trump and maga Republicans are AGAIN creating a false narrative about how horrible political violence is an American epedemic

With appreciation to the opinion writer Benamin Wallace-Wells, I must say some of the graphics described are difficult to read but important nonetheless.  

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence
After a shooting with obvious political resonance, news about the perpetrator’s motives rarely brings clarity.  Opinion published in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.  

Full disclosre, I knew nothing about Charlie Kirk until after his brutal assassinaation in Utah, in broad daylight, while hewas speaking to a group of students.  His short bio: Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co-founded the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and was its executive director. He published a range of books and hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, a talk radio program. Kirk was a prominent voice of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, and was considered to have become an icon of modern American conservatism. Kirk was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, briefly attending Harper College before dropping out after one semester to pursue political activism full-time.

UTAH- Three thousand people attended the conservative Turning Point USA event at which Charlie Kirk spoke on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, on an outdoor green at Utah Valley University. The sheer size of that crowd—in the morning, at a school in a suburb of Provo, and even if some were there to protest—is just another piece of evidence that Kirk, in his years-long campaign to inspire a hard-right turn among people in their teens and twenties, had built a formidable movement. There was a Q&A portion, and someone asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the past decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” The person next asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk said, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Then, in videos, there is a single, audible crack, and Kirk’s body jerks and then goes limp. In the audience, heads turn: someone had shot him, apparently from an elevated position about a hundred and fifty yards away. Soon, Kirk’s spokesman announced that he had been killed. He was thirty-one, and left behind a wife and two young children. Donald Trump, a close ally, ordered all flags flown at half-staff until Sunday evening.

Kirk’s death was brutal, and tragic. It also had the effect that terrorists aim for, of spreading political panic. In the immediate aftermath of a killing with obvious political resonance, there is a period of nervous foreboding, as the public waits for news of the perpetrator’s identity and for any hints of what might have motivated the terrible act, and braces for the recriminations to come. But, as often as not, information brings no clarity. 

We have a fairly good sense of the politics that motivated Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., and James Fields, who sped his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, killing a young woman.

But attempts to define the political motives of Thomas Crooks (who tried to kill Trump last summer, in Butler, Pennsylvania), or of Cody Balmer (who has been charged with firebombing Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in April), or even of Vance Boelter (the longtime anti-abortion activist who, in June, allegedly killed one Minnesota state lawmaker, along with her husband, and tried to kill another) quickly become ensnared in the problems of their apparent mental illness or a more basic incoherence. Robin Westman, who stands accused of shooting and killing two children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis last month (and whose transgender identity was the focus of many right-wing media reports), had written “Kill Donald Trump” on some weapons, and neo-Nazi slogans (“Jew gas” and “6 million wasn’t enough”) on others, and expressed alignment with the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza. The motives were strange and idiosyncratic enough that they couldn’t easily be blamed on any one partisan side.

The effect of these violent acts on politics has been easier to track. Shortly after the news of Kirk’s shooting, the former Obama Administration official and liberal pundit Tommy Vietor echoed a common sentiment when he wrote on social media, “Political violence is evil and indefensible. It’s a cancer that will feed off itself and spread.” If that is right—if violence is contagious—then that is because each act generates its own responsive pattern of fear. The news itself in recent years has been a catalogue of the ubiquity of political aggression and anticipatory dread. In 2022, a man arrived at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and padded boots; later that year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. 

Unfortunately, the threats against members of Congress have also escalated significantly in the past decade. The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said at a conference this summer, “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” After the shootings of lawmakers in Minnesota, the Democratic congressman Greg Landsman told the Times that every time he went out on the campaign trail he was haunted by a vision of himself lying murdered. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said.

What politicians can control is how they respond. Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Unlike Barack Obama, who sang “Amazing Grace” at a funeral after the mass shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned. The man sitting at the Resolute desk and blaming his enemies for political demonization—for acting “in the most hateful and despicable way”—had earlier in the week promoted a new campaign of ICE raids in Chicago with a social-media post featuring himself as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now” and the tag line “ ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning . . .’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” That aggression, combined with Kirk’s shooting, seemed to be literalizing the culture war, in real time.

The footage of Kirk’s murder is horrifying. His head flops; blood gushes from his neck. At a press conference afterward, the university’s police chief, who had just six officers to protect the crowd of three thousand, said, “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, today, we didn’t.” It is hard to blame him. The ubiquity of weapons and the ease with which just about anyone can get them has made the protection of human lives increasingly difficult. That the threat of political violence is so endemic is one reason that what was once true of Trump’s movement is increasingly true of the country: it is distrustful, and feeling imperilled. In Utah, the people closest to the stage threw themselves to the ground quickly, and then so did hundreds of others, as they realized what was happening, in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading. ♦

Israeli war in Gaza is attracting dangerous white supremacists

Neo-Nazi groups are popping up at pro-Palestinian rallies:
White supremacist groups see an opportunity to further mainstream antisemitic tropes — and create new opportunities for extremist violence.

Echo essay published on MSNBC.com by Karen Dunn, co-lead counsel in Sines v. Kessler.

Why are white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups popping up at pro-Palestinian rallies across America, including most recently in Washington, D.C.; Orlando, Florida; Boston; and Missoula, Montana? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because they care particularly about the situation in Gaza. No, for these groups, the large-scale protests across America present a golden opportunity to mainstream the same antisemitic tropes they have been pushing for years and, if they get their way, create new opportunities for extremist violence.

As one of the lawyers who sued the white supremacists responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, I checked in on those defendants to see what they have said about recent events. Jason Kessler, the lead organizer, wrote that Palestinians have a right to declare that “Jews will not replace us.” Richard Spencer, a longtime leader of the alt-right (an expression he coined), posted that lighting the Roman Arch of Titus in blue and white in solidarity with Israel was “a reversal and subversion of Titus’ achievement” (the arch commemorated the Roman Empire’s defeat of a Jewish rebellion in A.D. 81). Nathan Damigo, founder of the white supremacist organization Identity Europa, posted on October 7: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” The next day, white supremacist Matthew Parrott, a co-founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, praised Hamas’ attack, stating that “every military act by the Palestinian forces is an act of freedom fighters” and comparing the massacre of families to “breaking out of a concentration camp to attack your guards.”

And the National Justice Party, founded by white supremacists involved in Charlottesville, responded to the October 7 attacks by marching in front of the White House with signs that said “No White Lives for Israel” and “Zionism=Terrorism,” expressly calling for the “destruction of Israel.” NJP’s website now encourages people to “begin to imagine a world where Israel no longer exists” in an article titled “Four Ways The Destruction of Israel Can Benefit The West.”

While white supremacists target all nonwhite groups and their allies, the unifying animus is a hatred of Jews. One of the organizers of Charlottesville had a day job as an exterminator; he told his girlfriend he would rather be killing Jews than cockroaches. 

Another organizer said that when his newborn son opened his eyes for the first time, his first thought was of Adolf Hitler. And on the day before James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful counter protesters, he responded to his mother’s texting “be careful” with a picture of Hitler saying, “We are not the ones who need to be careful.” White supremacist leaders know the power of antisemitism, and they use it tactically to fuel the movement.

As one of the lawyers who sued the white supremacists responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, I checked in on those defendants to see what they have said about recent events. Jason Kessler, the lead organizer, wrote that Palestinians have a right to declare that “Jews will not replace us.” 

Richard Spencer, a longtime leader of the alt-right (an expression he coined), posted that lighting the Roman Arch of Titus in blue and white in solidarity with Israel was “a reversal and subversion of Titus’ achievement” (the arch commemorated the Roman Empire’s defeat of a Jewish rebellion in A.D. 81). Nathan Damigo, founder of the white supremacist organization Identity Europa, posted on October 7: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” The next day, white supremacist Matthew Parrott, a co-founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, praised Hamas’ attack, stating that “every military act by the Palestinian forces is an act of freedom fighters” and comparing the massacre of families to “breaking out of a concentration camp to attack your guards.”

And the National Justice Party, founded by white supremacists involved in Charlottesville, responded to the October 7 attacks by marching in front of the White House with signs that said “No White Lives for Israel” and “Zionism=Terrorism,” expressly calling for the “destruction of Israel.” NJP’s website now encourages people to “begin to imagine a world where Israel no longer exists” in an article titled “Four Ways The Destruction of Israel Can Benefit The West.”

While white supremacists target all nonwhite groups and their allies, the unifying animus is a hatred of Jews. One of the organizers of Charlottesville had a day job as an exterminator; he told his girlfriend he would rather be killing Jews than cockroaches. 

Another organizer said that when his newborn son opened his eyes for the first time, his first thought was of Adolf Hitler. 

And on the day before James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, he responded to his mother’s texting “be careful” with a picture of Hitler saying, “We are not the ones who need to be careful.” 

White supremacist leaders know the power of antisemitism, and they use it tactically to fuel the movement.

White supremacists may be looking specifically to exploit division on college campuses and provoke violence between protesters and counter protesters, just as they did in 2017. What was publicly called “Unite the Right” was privately called the “Battle of Charlottesville,” and it was inspired by an earlier violent event that year called the “Battle of Berkeley.” This was because the ultimate goal of these groups is an all-white ethno-state, which, the theory goes, can be achieved only after a race war.

To have a “race war,” you have to have battles, conflict and violence. White supremacists want antisemitism to be the match that starts the fire (or lights the tiki torch). 

In Charlottesville, that’s what happened. It started with hundreds of people carrying torches and chanting anti-semitic slogans and ended in violence against all races and ethnicities, terrorizing an entire town, killing a woman and grievously injuring many other people.

It is important that our college campuses, cities and town squares be places for speech, debate and protest — all rightfully protected under our Constitution. But we should not tolerate antisemitism anywhere, not only because it is morally wrong, but also because for a growing white supremacist movement, it is a mechanism to rally the troops against all nonwhite groups and usher in what Spencer once called “a new world of political violence.” The leaders of that movement are reveling in this moment, hoping that antisemitism becomes normalized, is allowed to flourish and creates a more acceptable gateway to racial hatred and violence.

If Charlottesville taught us anything, it is that accepting the normalization of antisemitism carries with it tremendous costs for Jews and non-Jews alike. 

We allow antisemitism to surge at our own peril. And make no mistake, the violence that ensues will affect all of us.

Guess who came to dinner at Mar-a-Lago? Now you see him but then you don't!

So, was Fuentes at the "white's only" racist Trump dinner or not? By Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu, an echo essay published in Axios:

Trump talks with evil white nationalist Nick Fuentes at his (insane) Mar-a-Lago dinner.

Cliché truism: "Those that deny history are doomed to repeat it." Stop white supremacy and Holocaust denial now! 

Unbelievably, former President Trump dined and conversed with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper "Ye", formerly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday night, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

(Pundit Donna Brazile said on the ABC news This Week with Martha Radditz, "If I were advising Trump, I'd have given Ye a gift certificate to MacDonald's before inviting him to Mar-a-Lago". In fact, the disgusting optics about the dinner are revolting for everyone and for the Mar-a-Lago marketing image, where the Trumpster hides out but lives in luxury, with tax payer subsidies, just because the #FormerGuy lives there.)  

Why it matters? Trump's direct engagement with a man labeled a "white supremacist" by the Justice Department, one week after declaring his 2024, candidacy, is likely to draw renewed outrage over the former president's embrace of extremists.

Fuentes, who frequently promotes racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had been spotted with Ye at Mar-a-Lago, but reports erroneously suggested he did not have dinner with the former president. ❓

What they're saying? "Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about," Trump said in a fake news statement.

A Trump spokesman did not provide comment on additional reporting about the dinner. Fuentes did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America - including at Mar-A-Lago," White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said Saturday, in a statement.

"Holocaust denial is repugnant and dangerous, and it must be forcefully condemned,” the statement added.

Holocaust deniers eating at Mar-a-Lago with the former guy because they - ie., Ye and Fuentes- are collaborating on a 2024, campaign to run for president❓❓  Ye and Trump? 💀 OMG!

Behind the scenes: A source familiar with the dinner conversation told Axios that Trump "seemed very taken" with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016, campaign.

Paraphrasing the conversation, the source said Fuentes told the president he preferred him to be "authentic," and that Trump seemed scripted and unlike himself during his recent 2024 campaign announcement speech.

Trump responded, “You like it better when I just speak off the cuff," the source said. Fuentes replied that he did, calling Trump an "amazing" president when he was unrestrained. "There was a lot of fawning back and forth," the source added.

Fuentes told Trump that he represented a side of Trump's base that was disappointed with his newly cautious approach, especially with what some far-right activists view as a lack of support for those charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.Trump didn't disagree with Fuentes, but said he has advisers who want him to read off teleprompters and be more "presidential." Notably, Trump referred to himself as a politician, which he has been loathe to do in the past.
Fuentes also told Trump that he would crush potential 2024 Republican rivals in a primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump asked for Fuentes' opinion on other candidates as well.

Trump at one point turned to Ye and said, "I really like this guy. He gets me," according to the source."To be honest, I don't believe the president knew who the hell [Fuentes] was," the source added.

Trump asked if Fuentes was on social media such as Truth Social, the former president's alternative to Twitter. Fuentes told Trump that he was on Truth Social, but had been banned from the social media platform Gettr because Trump adviser Jason Miller, the CEO of the company, wasn't a fan of his.  (Maine Writer's two cents "Yuk!" Miller is a bottom feeder sleeze!)

Trump asked whether it was because Fuentes was on the "fringe" of his supporter base, the source said. Fuentes acknowledged that he was, saying he's "one of those people who got banned from everything." (Ya' think?) 

Duh!

Driving the news: Ye, whose Twitter account was recently restored by Elon Musk (OMG!) after being restricted for anti-Semitic comments, posted a video on Thursday night titled "Mar-a-Lago debrief.

"Ye claims in the video that Trump was "really impressed" with Fuentes because "unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020, campaign, he's actually a loyalist."

A source familiar with the conversation told Axios that Trump took a phone call during the dinner, and his demeanor toward Ye seemed to change when he got off the call. 

Trump made some nasty comments about Ye's ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, and told the rapper to pass them on.

Ye, who has lost major sponsorships over his anti-Semitism and recent far-right associations, has said he wants to run for president in 2024. 

"Ye" in 2024 ❓❓

Moreover, the (dumpster!) rapper claimed that Trump started "screaming" at him at the dinner and told him he would lose — "most perturbed" by Ye asking Trump to be his running mate.

(Maine Writer- Donna Brazile should charge the Trumpster's failured advisors for her good advice, at an hourly rate of the high cost of one entrée on the Mar-a-Lago menu.)

Between the lines: The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Fuentes was not present at the Mar-a-Lago dinner with Ye, citing a source familiar with the matter.

Ye tweeted out a screenshot of a group text with Fuentes on Thursday night, in which a censored participant accuses a Trump adviser of being the source for the Daily Beast story.

Disgraced far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, who appears with Ye in his "Mar-a-Lago debrief" video, is also in the "YE24" group chat.

Flashback: Truth Social, Trump's dumpy social media platform, sparked backlash by verifying Fuentes' social media account in February.

Fuentes first gained notoriety after attending the white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Trump was heavily criticized at the time for his response to the racist violence.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional reporting and a statement from Trump and the White House.

Evil antisemitism has infected the Republican Party

The GOP’s Surrender to the cult Anti-semites

Echo essay published in the Intellingencer , in The New York Times Magazine. By Jonathan Chait

On September 3, Cynthia Hughes, founder of the Patriot Freedom project, regaled the crowd at Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with the plight of her nephew, Tim Hale-Cusanelli. Poor Tim, who once served in the Navy, had been convicted for his role in the January 6th insurrection. The story of his “mistreatment” drew moans from the sympathetic audience.

Hughes did not mention that Navy investigators found 34 former colleagues who reported that Hale-Cusanelli had expressed “extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities, and women.” One recollected Hale-Cusanelli’s practice of asking new colleagues if they were Jewish. Another remembered him saying Jews “are ruining everything and did not belong here,” and yet another recalled him saying, “Hitler should have finished the job.” Hale-Cusanelli has been photographed wearing a distinctive Hitlerian mustache. His passion for genocidal antisemitism developed into a passion for a right-wing putsch attempt, and now he has become essentially a martyr figure championed by the Republican Party’s leader.

Trump’s (radical!) rise has reshaped the GOP, driving out some of its constituent elements while bringing in previously excluded factions, the ranks of which include virulent anti-semites. The lessons of Hitler’s Germany have been badly overapplied, so it is important to contextualize these events carefully. 

Although the GOP may not be an anti-semitic party, the right wingers have coopted salient NAZI symbols. 

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican in Missouri, gives the Nazi salute to insurrection crowds on January 6th 

Indeed, at one time in the recent past,  the GOP tried to maintain a big tent that included both Jewish ultrahawks like Miriam Adelson and their most paranoid enemies. Nevertheless, now the GOP has become a party in which antisemitism has gained a foothold. No recent development in American life has done more to throw American Jews’ safety and civic equality into doubt.

In the early-20th century, contempt for Jewish immigrants was an important tributary in the stream of reactionary politics. Antisemitism reached a peak during the Great Depression, when right-wing populists like Charles Lindbergh depicted the Roosevelt administration as beholden to the Jews. The aviator’s “America First” movement characterized Jewish support for hawkish measures against Nazi Germany as evidence of disloyalty.

The war and the Holocaust discredited antisemitism, and it largely disappeared from mainstream circulation. When Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1992, and 1996, he revived both the slogan and many of the ideas of the “America First” movement and produced an enthusiastic reception. But his anti-semitic innuendo and creepy enthusiasm for the procedural rights of elderly former Nazi camp guards made him toxic to the party Establishment. (“I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to antisemitism,” concluded William F. Buckley.) 

Subsequently, Buchanan was forced out of the party altogether. By the first decade of the 21st century, anti-semitic theories were more likely to be used against the Bush administration — whose more conspiratorial critics saw the hidden hand of international Jewry behind its bungled Iraq invasion — than on behalf of any Republican cause.

Trump resurrected Buchanan’s strain of populist nationalism. He’s always nurtured business relations and personal ties with Jewish people, but his revival of “America First” — both the slogan and the ideas surrounding it — inevitably excited antisemites. In 2016, he tweeted out an image using a Star of David to symbolize Hillary Clinton’s “corruption.” The Trump campaign tweeted an altered version after an outcry but then ran an ad in the campaign’s closing days decrying “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities” coupled with images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein — all of whom are financial figures who happen to be Jewish.

Trump attacked his critics as a cabal of “globalists” and fixated on the secret powers exerted by Soros, who has displaced (or in some cases joined) the Rothschilds in the imagined role of secret Jewish financier orchestrating a series of catastrophes for profit. The explosion of militant paranoia that followed Trump’s rise — from the Oath Keepers to QAnon — has appeared both online and in the real world with occasionally deadly consequences in places like Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. Although much of this activity has taken place outside the party system, the energies on the right have crept into the Republican Party.

Two years before her 2020, election to Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video claiming “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.” More famously, she wondered whether the Rothschilds had used space lasers to start a series of forest fires in California to clear public land for a rail network.

Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis, linked a decision by the nation of Georgia to join several European countries in implementing COVID passes to what she viewed as a suspiciously timed visit by a Rothschild: “Immediately after that the Rothschilds show up to discuss the attractive investment environment in Georgia (lol),” she noted.

In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor, paid the ultraright-wing social-media site Gab to promote his candidacy, which has articulated Christian-nationalist themes. Gab’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, is an explicit anti-semite who has promoted Mastriano as a fellow enemy of the Jews. 

“We don’t want people who are Jewish,” Torba explained. 😡

After reporters questioned their relationship, Mastriano released a statement that renounced antisemitism and said Torba does not speak on his behalf but failed to call him an anti-semite or to forgo his support. And while a handful of Pennsylvania Republicans have endorsed Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, the vast majority of the party apparatus has either supported Mastriano or stayed quiet. Conservative media has ignored the issue. Meanwhile, the Wyoming Republican Party recently encouraged people to follow it on Gab, calling it “an awesome platform.”

Before Trump came along, anti-semites had little investment in American politics. His rhetoric articulates themes they recognize as compatible with their own, and he has given them a reason to marshal their energies on behalf of one side in a two-party system from which they had been excluded.

There is a simple test to measure their influence. If anti-semites were too marginal to pose any danger, it would be easy enough for the party to cut them off. (If you want to know what it looks like when Republicans decide to really throw somebody out of their party, look at their treatment of Liz Cheney.) Instead, they vacillate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to comment on Gosar’s attendance at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s conference. McCarthy has likewise promised to restore Greene’s committee privileges if Republicans regain the majority.

Prosecutors have found that Trump’s January 6 rally attracted a significant number of people who share Hitler quotes, hold membership in neo-Nazi organizations, have a fixation with “white genocide,” and the like, making the party leadership’s desire to sweep the whole thing under the rug all the more dangerous. Whatever misgivings the remaining old-line Republicans may have toward the militant cadres Trump inspired, Republicans fear their political and even terroristic power. They no longer imagine they have the gatekeeping force to exclude the anti-semites, less still to steer the party away from the kind of paranoid rhetoric that invites their participation.

The GOP’s overriding goal is to win, and it has decided this means accepting the support of anybody who will provide it. For three-quarters of a century, anti-semites were locked out of major American politics or at least had to keep their bigotry quiet. Now the door is open.

Jewish echo opinion from California- Donald Trump fuels Antisemitism

Echo opinion letter published in the Los Angeles Times and article by Jeffrey Fleishman

Trump’s Jewish comments play on anti-Semitism in culture, film and art*

I am a Jew. My vote has always gone to a person who has a strong moral compass. In the world of politics, sometimes it is the lesser of two not-quite-moral people. Trump would never get my vote. Trump’s constant debasing of others, the encouragement of hate, the lack of dignity and composure, the weakening of environmental regulations, the weakening of regulations regarding discrimination — all these leave me in a state of utter disbelief.

His statements about Jews who voted for Democrats showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty” match all the tropes for anti-Semitism.

From Sue Robin, Los Angeles

*Los Angeles Times article by Jeffrey Fleishman 

Trump's 'Disloyalty' Claim About Jewish Democrats Shows He Doesn't Get How They Vote

Nazi caricatures of Jews as conniving, scurrilous schemers — a people of hooked noses and sinister motives — infused the art, literature, film and propaganda that led to the Holocaust. Jews had been stereotyped for centuries across Europe as devious and untrustworthy. They hoarded money, killed Jesus, betrayed the French, brought vermin and disease.

President Trump’s comments Wednesday that Jews who voted for Democrats would be “very disloyal” to Israel were certainly not as potent as Nazi-era iconography. But to many they echoed with a veiled anti-Semitism that has lingered through his administration, from his refusal to condemn neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 — who marched to the cry of “Jews will not replace us” — to not explicitly rebuking white supremacist David Duke during the 2016 campaign.

A former reality TV star, Trump knows the power of an image, the sting and resonance of a word. (Maine Writer- Trump should be "fired" because of his racist rhetoric!) His comments about Jewish political loyalty conjure the aura of pejorative cultural depictions stretching from Charles Dickens’ pickpocket ringleader Fagin in “Oliver Twist” to Nazi-era posters of furtive, double-dealing rabbis to swastikas and racist cartoons posted on alt-right websites and chat rooms.

“The charge of disloyalty has been used to harass, marginalize, and persecute the Jewish people for centuries,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement. “Sometimes referred to as the ‘dual loyalty’ charge, it alleges that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens because their true allegiance is to their coreligionists around the world or to a secret and immoral Jewish agenda.”

Long cast as outsiders and scapegoats, Jews have often been portrayed with derogatory characteristics: The greedy, if complicated, moneylender Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”; the cunning Jew who tricks German royalty in “Jud Süss,” a 1940 film ordered up by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; and the 16th century painting “Christ Among the Doctors” by Albrecht Durer, which portrays a glowing, innocent Renaissance Jesus surrounded by craven and disfigured Jewish scholars.

In his 19th century novel “The Marble Faun,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that Jews were reminiscent of “maggots when they overpopulate a decaying cheese.” In the 1930s, radio priest Father Charles Coughlin had a fervent following in America for his virulently anti-Semitic sermons. Charges that Jews control Hollywood and the media are still prevalent today on alt-right social media.

Many such renderings sprang from a culture controlled by Christian leaders, including the Vatican in Rome, which did not until 1965, disavow the notion — written in the Gospel of John — that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion. Such religious beliefs were politicized in the 20th century when Jews were stereotyped as devoted to the Marxist and Communist ideologies that defined the Cold War.

“To my fellow American Jews, particularly those who support @realDonaldTrump: When he uses a trope that’s been used against the Jewish people for centuries with dire consequences, he is encouraging — wittingly or unwittingly — anti-semites throughout the country and world,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, posted this week on Twitter. “Enough.”

Trump’s statements about Jews being disloyal if they vote for Democrats came as the president was facing criticism in the U.S. and Israel for urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to allow two Muslim congresswomen — Democrats Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — to enter his country. Omar has been accused of anti-Semitic remarks in criticizing Israeli policy.

The atmosphere grew more surreal this week when Trump was (ugh!) praised by conservative commentator and conspiracy theorist (evil!) Wayne Allyn Root for being “the greatest president for Jews.” Root likened Trump to “the king of Israel.” Trump tweeted the remarks.

Asked Wednesday whether his remarks could be construed as being anti-Semitic, Trump — who called himself “the chosen one” — insisted, “No, no, no. It’s only in your head,” before leaving Washington to address military veterans in Kentucky. “It’s only anti-Semitic in your head.”

By Jeffrey Fleishman - A senior writer on film, art and culture for the Los Angeles Times. A 2002 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. A longtime foreign correspondent, he served as bureau chief for The Times in Cairo and Berlin, and was previously based in Rome for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Washington Post wrote this headline:  Trump, amid claims of anti-Semitism, invoked Henry Ford. Hitler called the automaker his ‘inspiration.’

American values under attack by extremism ~ antisemitism

The Pittsburgh killings targeted Jews — and America's soul

Echo analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN)The mass killing at a Pittsburgh synagogue, likely the worst anti-Semitic incident in US history, has Jewish Americans questioning whether they are now fated to live with the fear and threats at home that their community has long endured around the world.

The attack represents a flagrant challenge to America's core values — that people of every race or religion are endowed with the same inalienable rights. 

Suddenly, these fundamental beliefs are being tested in a divisive new political era that targets a shadowy concept of The Other: Muslims, Mexicans, Middle Easterners.

On Saturday morning -- the Jewish Sabbath -- a gunman shattered the sense of belonging for Jews in America, too.

This cannot be a coincidence: A heavily armed man burst in on a Jewish religious ceremony and killed 11 people before telling a law enforcement officer "I just want to kill Jews" after a week that was heavy with other acts of extremist violence motivated by politics.

Throughout history, anti-Semitism has often been an early indicator that extremist thought is gathering momentum inside a society or is being used as a political tool by those keen to exploit resentment or radical sentiment.

It is an increasingly urgent question whether President Donald Trump's deliberately divisive politics may be giving license to extremists.

He cannot be accused of being directly to blame for horrific incidents like the one this weekend. And on Saturday, he delivered a welcome and passionate condemnation of the attack in Pittsburgh, calling anti-Semitism a "vile hate-filled poison" and "one of the ugliest and darkest features of human history."

Yet,  he consciously stoked national divides, adopting a brand of politics that uses racial, nationalist rhetoric, rails against immigrants and refugees and equivocates about extremism — including after violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which white supremacist marchers chanted anti-Jewish slogans and a woman protesting their presence was killed.

Donald Trump used tropes and language known to appeal to a tiny minority of extremists who might contemplate violence. Trump has recently taken to proclaiming he is a "nationalist" and berated "globalists" -- two designations that have innocent connotations in some contexts but are also recognized as code words by anti-Semites.

Events of the last week have called into question the President's warnings in a jarring closing argument to his midterm campaign that the greatest threat to Americans comes from a migrant caravan 1,000 miles to the south of the US border in Mexico.

Apart from the Pittsburgh mass shooting, a man who identified himself as a Trump supporter last week mailed bombs to two former presidents, senior Democratic politicians and CNN. All have been targets of the Donald Trump hate rhetoric. In Kentucky, a white man shot and killed two people, both African American, in what was allegedly a racist attack.

Hatred of Jews and refugees

Social media posts suggest that Robert Bowers, the alleged gunman in Pittsburgh, claimed that Jews were helping transport members of the migrant caravan in Mexico. For the last two weeks, Trump has been arguing that the column contains "bad people" and Middle Easterners -- a code word for terrorists.

Bowers also condemned the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which brings refugees to the US. His attack bears the hallmarks of an outrage motivated by hatred of Jews and refugees.
But it did not occur in isolation.

Recent years have seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the country and the use of coded anti-Semitic imagery in material by right-wing politicians, including some prominent members of the Republican Party.

Yet most top political leaders have not yet felt the need to go out of their way to comprehensively condemn this new wave of extremist thought, despite evidence the problem is worsening.

The Anti-Defamation League found a 57% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017 compared to the previous year, including hate speech in schools and colleges, vandalism and bomb threats.
Such figures suggest that while the United States has been seen as largely immune from anti-Semitic feelings that have long simmered in politics in some European nations, things could be changing.

Anti-Semitic themes have also been increasingly cropping up in political campaigns, raising the possibility that some leaders see advantage in using such imagery to connect to radical voters while preserving deniability.

In 2016, a closing Trump campaign advertisement blasting a global establishment elite portrayed three people as villains alongside Hillary Clinton: billionaire liberal financier George Soros, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs. All are Jewish.

Trump's own daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are practicing Jews. Many of Trump's past business associates and lawyers are Jewish. So it's not credible to argue he is an anti-Semite. Yet, he still sometimes attacks Soros, despite knowing that the Hungarian-born philanthropist is a hate figure and Jewish stereotype for anti-Semites and extremists on the far right fringes.

Trump: 'There is no blame'

Hints of anti-Semitism are also evident in some other GOP messaging.

Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy this week deleted a tweet accusing Soros,former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer of trying to buy the midterm elections for Democrats, after a bomb was mailed by a Trump supporter to Soros. All three men are Jewish or of Jewish descent.

Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King recently endorsed Faith Goldy, a nationalist running for mayor in Toronto, who claims Canada is facing a "white genocide" and who has promoted anti-Jewish material.

The recent incidents in Pittsburgh and elsewhere raise urgent questions about whether inflammatory rhetoric that appeals to extremists translates into violence.

Vice President Mike Pence denies any such link.

"Everyone has their own style, and frankly, people on both sides of the aisle use strong language about our political differences," Pence told NBC News in an interview Saturday. "But I just don't think you can connect it to acts or threats of violence."

Trump was asked on Friday whether he bore any responsibility after a Florida man, Cesar Sayoc, allegedly sent the mail bombs.
"There is no blame. There's no anything," he told reporters on Friday.

But Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, said that there is a growing acceptance of rhetoric that can endanger lives and that America's leaders must take a stand.
"The problem here is hate. The problem is there is a growing space in this country for hate speech and hate speech always turns into hate action," he told CNN on Saturday night.

"We cannot stand by as individuals or organizations or as governments when people spew hatred against, Jews, refugees, Latinos, against any group that some see as the other," Hetfield said.

Trump, who this week plans a major speech on securing the border, has used the idea that Americans are under threat from outsiders as an organizing principle of his campaigns.

He has stigmatized some Mexicans, refugees, Muslims and Africans — contributing to fervor on the right — all while accusing Democrats of trying to whip up "mob rule."

So while his fervent condemnation of anti-Semitism sent a strong message, the President is on less firm ground on the question of whether his rhetoric is providing space and encouragement to extremist views.

"All politicians and public figures are role models and none more so than the American President," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who has written extensively about the common characteristics of strongmen leaders.

"The problem is that Trump has made it clear since the campaign that the public he is speaking to, the public he wants to impress, that he cares about, is a public that is not interested in human rights, in democracy and in loving one's neighbor."

Donald Trump - words have consequences

Frankly, it's depressing to realize how un-inspiring are the words (unquotable quotes) from Donald Trump's incendiary vocabulary. 

Donald Trump uses incendiary words- an "unquotable" vocabulary, with consequences

Now, as the world witnesses the consequences of his miserable behavior, we are more fearful about what crazy people are out there, reacting with violence, to his endless rants against his political enemies list. This echo opinion was published on October 25, 2018, in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, in Nevada.

Although it wasn’t immediately known (at the time this editorial was published) who was responsible for the bomb delivered to the home of George Soros, or the suspicious packages addressed to former President Barack Obama, the Clintons and CNN’s New York offices- one thing was clear: The terror that has played out this week is an inevitable outcome of President Donald Trump’s vicious rhetoric. Twelves bomb threat packages were mailed by an individual (now apparently arrested according to CNN news).

Words have consequences, and we’re seeing them now. 

Trump, by demonizing his political opponents and the media, has emboldened extremists to take action and spread fear.
In the three-plus years since he announced his candidacy in June 2015, Trump has repeatedly encouraged violence. 

Unfortunately, the most recent instance came just last week, when at a rally in Montana he referenced Rep. Greg Gianforte’s 2017, attack on a reporter by saying that “any guy who can do a body slam, he is my type!” The next day, Trump said he did not regret making the remark.

No surprise there. Trump has expressed no remorse for a string of similar remarks he’s made, including when he said he’d like to punch a heckler at a rally in Las Vegas and encouraged a group of police officers to rough up suspects in their custody.

Meanwhile, his incendiary attacks on Hillary Clinton, Obama and others he perceives as threats have made prominent Democrats targets for extremists. That list now also includes New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former CIA director John Brennan and Obama-era attorney general Eric Holder, whose names were on suspicious packages delivered.

Trump and his loyalists will deny that he has any influence over any of these cowardly attacks, of course. But they also will go to any lengths to convince Americans that Trump’s continuous stoking of violence hasn’t happened.

“The president does not support violence against anyone or anything,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in August.

That’s a lie worthy of an Iron Curtain apparatchik.

What’s really happening is that Trump is turning Americans against each other and doing his best to obliterate our standards of civility and mutual respect, which in turn has given rise to the ugliness we’re seeing this week.

Keep in mind that while the White House issued a statement condemning the rash of terrorism this week, Trump has been vilifying Democrats on the campaign trail in recent weeks with his “Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs” message.

This comes despite Charlottesville. Despite Christine Blasey Ford being forced from her home by death threats from Trump’s followers. Despite Nancy Pelosi nearly being trapped in an alley entering an event in Miami when members of the alt-right group Proud Boys threatened her.

And now comes this week, when less than 48 hours after the device sent to Soros was detonated in the woods near his home, more Americans were targeted in what appeared to be a coordinated attack.

This must stop.
And voters have the power to do something about it.
Although no one can cure Trump’s moral bankruptcy or force him to become a leader for all Americans and not just his supporters, we can elect moderate leaders who will work to hold him accountable and provide a check on his authority.

Election Day is a week from this coming Tuesday. Meanwhile, early voting centers are open throughout the Las Vegas Valley. To see a list of those sites, click here.

Please vote. Send a message to Trump that Americans won’t allow him to make enemies of each other.