Eleven people were murdered—for being Jewish—as a man shouted “all Jews must die.” Seven of them lived during the time of the holocaust, and subsequently saw the rise and re-emboldening of anti-semites here in the US. “Some very fine people,” I believe the neo-nazis were called in Charlottesville, amidst their chants of “Jews will not replace us.” With a 57% rise in anti Semitic incidents in 2017 alone, the pattern of escalating violence and harassment against Jewish people—and really all otherized groups—continues at a sickening pace.
It’s Trumpism. It’s not direct—and for him, anti-semitism may not be a closely held belief. But it’s mainstreaming anti-intellectualism and embracing conspiracy theories, both old-world and new. It’s a churn of first-family and Fox-family supported conspiracies about George Soros that directly parallel some of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes on the books. It’s dog-whistle political messaging: proudly claiming the title nationalist. It’s a blatantly anti-semitic campaign ad. It’s “America First” as a slogan, the historical roots of which Trump may not understand, but which Bannon almost certainly did, replete with inextricable ties to anti-semitism. It’s snide comments by Trump Jr. about collecting more shekels, intended or not. It’s addressing a room full of Jews as “negotiators” and “dealmakers” while focusing entirely on their money. It’s tepid (but ultimately forced) disavowal of white supremacist David Duke, and silence in the face of a wave of harassment against Jewish journalists aimed at their Jewishness. It’s labeling those running on neo-nazi messaging as alt-right—the same folk employing Nazi salutes and chanting “Heil/Hail Trump” at rallies--including at least one Trump campaign delegate. It results in a massive increase in the amount of white supremacists and neo-nazis on the ballots this year. It just happens to be my people that were killed this time around, but as usual, we aren’t the only ones under the crosshairs. As a response, we’ll see a key group of elected officials offer condolences and prayers to the families of those massacred during prayer. Those same officials will use this as an opportunity to further stigmatize mental illness, while cutting funding for mental health and burnishing their A+ ratings from the NRA.
We find ourselves now dealing with the consequences of Machiavellian political messaging, and this is the point: political messaging matters. It’s not intellectually honest to hold Trump accountable for the individual actions of one of his followers, but he is responsible for the movements he and his party helped create and embolden, and the overall political messaging they oversee. In Viktor Frankl’s descriptions of life in Nazi death camps in “Man’s Search for Meaning”, one of the most important lessons is that while we can’t avoid suffering, we can all control the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis—both in coping with suffering, and living a meaningful, moral life. So we must decide. Every individual must decide whether to be a force against this—or complicit in its advancement. I wish it weren’t so. I wish we could aim for the middle and find “common ground” here—but there is nothing inherently good about the space between Trumpism and anything else. We must decide to reject Trumpism as an aberration; it should be a four-year embarrassment for conservatives, progressives, and humans. We must decide that we’ve given this “philosophy” enough air-time; it’s morally unsound and leads to division and violence. We must decide to forgive those who were misled, but not those who are consciously misleading. We must decide to channel the grief and indignation we feel, not only by voting on Nov. 6th , but each time we have an opportunity to reject this cyclical nastiness. In the end, it comes down to many individual choices. We must decide to reject hatred of difference.