This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence) but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.Kagan's op-ed was then tweeted by a New York Times journalist, Jonathan Weisman:
And what was the result? An avalanche of vile antisemitism. All day today he retweeted the offensive antisemitic messages he received. If you want to look for yourself, go to @jonathanweisman."This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots & salutes but with a television huckster." Robert Kagan https://t.co/9C8rBqyLbR— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) May 19, 2016
The Post article then mentions other Jews who received equally grotesque antisemitic messages and threats: Ben Shapiro, a right-wing Jewish commentator who used to write for Breitbart News, Jake Tapper of CNN, Bethany Mandel, John Podhoretz (Commentary), Noah Rothman (also Commentary), and Julia Ioffe.
On Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, a prominent conservative commentator, documented the anti-Semitic backlash that followed his own opinionating about Trump. And cited more from where that came:
It’s not just me, of course. Jake Tapper of CNN now says he’s received anti-Semitic tweets “all day.” My friend Bethany Mandel, another orthodox Jew who opposes Trump, just bought herself a gun out of fear of unhinged Trump supporters. John Podhoretz of Commentary says he receives tweets consistently from “literally neo-Nazi White supremacists, all anonymous…I don’t think I can attribute being a supporter of Trump to being a validator or an expresser of these opinions, but something was let loose by him.” Noah Rothman of Commentary tweets, “It never ends. Blocking doesn’t help either. They have lists, on which I seem to find myself.”Shapiro Wednesday offered a further exploration at National Review under the headline, “Trump’s Anti-Semitic Supporters.” He writes: “I’ve experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump’s candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They’ve blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children to be thrown into a gas chamber.”
As this blog reported, journalist Julia Ioffe filed a police report after receiving anti-Semitic threats stemming from the backlash against her story in GQ about Melania Trump. “The Trumps have a record of kind of whistling their followers into action,” Ioffe said at the time.
