Clik here to view.
Trump fans offer a sophisticated critique of the work of journalist Julia Ioffe
Julia Ioffe is a political journalist, a regular contributor to Politico and a columnist at Foreign Policy. Last week, GQ published a lengthy profile of Melania Trump by Ioffe, revealing some details of her life that the wife of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee would have probably preferred to have left unrevealed.
Did I mention that Ioffe is Jewish?
Well, she is, which means that shortly after her profile of Melania T. went up the most predictable thing in the world, at least in this current political season, happened.
Can you guess what that is? I’ll give you a hint: I didn’t have any trouble finding horrendous memes to feature for Memeday this week.
Yep. Ioffe was treated to a wave of viciously anti-Semitic abuse from Trump’s Nazi-est fans, unleashed by Trump enthusiast Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, who kicked the whole thing off with a post bearing the lovely title “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian [deleted] Julia Ioffe in GQ!”
Note: the word I’ve deleted there is a not-terribly polite reference to Ioffe’s Jewishness.
Naturally, the Daily Stormer troll army immediately got to work, defending their immigrant “Empress” by sending Ioffe an assortment of wildly anti-Semitic memes, including some they custom-made just for the occasion.
Here, for example, is Ioffe’s face photoshopped into a historical photo.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This one, for some reason, has a Britney Spears theme.
Happy #HolocaustRemembranceDay day to me! pic.twitter.com/Gajo3bMIPA
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) May 5, 2016
This one, posted on the Daily Stormer, offered a lazily photoshopped homage to the notion that the Nazis used the skin of their victims to make lampshades. (It’s not clear if this really happened.)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Ioffe was sent numerous other memes that, while not personalized, were certainly jarring.
From my inbox. Subject line: "They know about you!" pic.twitter.com/zp3v2GjTeI
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) April 28, 2016
At least they're fluent in 80s pop culture? pic.twitter.com/4pTTfa7jhE
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) April 28, 2016
This vicious harassment campaign against Ioffe — which also, she says, included threatening phone calls — has been covered in a number of media outlets. So what has The Donald had to say about this appalling behavior on the part of his “alt-right” fans?
Nothing. Less than nothing, really. When Wolf Blitzer asked him about the harassment on CNN, Trump pointedly refused to condemn it, instead going on about how “nasty” Ioffe’s article allegedly is, even though he claims he hasn’t read it.
Trump doesn't condemn fans threatening reporter @juliaioffe "I don't have a message" to fans https://t.co/95d0SnGj2c https://t.co/MI3lx1xVrD
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) May 4, 2016
By attacking Ioffe instead of condemning the literal Nazis sending her abusive messages and death threats (and pasting her head onto a lampshade), it seems pretty clear that Trump is offering tacit support — a wink and a nod — to the hate campaign against the journalist.
If that was indeed the message Trump meant to send his Nazi fans, it was received loud and clear by the Daily Stormer’s Anglin, who wrote
The Jew Wolf was attempting to Stump the Trump, bringing up stormer attacks on Jew terrorist Julia Ioffe. Trump responded to the request with “I have no message to the fans” which might as well have been “Hail Victory, Comrades!”
Such is the state of politics today.
As I’ve noted before, there are still some out there who who dismiss the vicious racism and anti-Semitism of the alt-right as a big goof, and not the primary motivating factor that it so obviously is. Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been doing his best to cozy up to the alt-right, dismisses the anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish journalists as little more than the work of “mischievous, dissident” trolls who don’t really hate the Jews, as he gamely tried to argue in one recent interview.
When someone sends a picture of a crudely caricatured Jew being shot execution-style to a Jewish journalist, that’s not just a bit of good, old-fashioned fun. That’s hate speech.