The rise of antisemitism in the Democrat party

On Tuesday morning, “Fox & Friends” did a segment on this newest faux-movement, which in turn led the President of the United States, a huge fan of that TV show’s chipper racism, to tweet about it at length. Jexodus was embodied by the doe-eyed Elizabeth Pipko, a 23-year-old former Trump campaign staffer, Jexodus’s “national spokesperson.” She has excellent eyebrows and two self-published books of poetry (“Just the thought of failure brings me to tears/And the thought of someone witnessing it, brings out my biggest fears,” reads one poem from her first collection, “Sweet Sixteen”).

...Per conservative news site the Daily Wire, Jexodus is the brainchild of 56-year-old Republican strategist Jeff Ballabon, a longtime operative who, among other dubious achievements, lobbied the RNC to include language in its 2016 platform that dropped support for a two-state solution and rejected “the false notion that Israel is an occupier.” (On the website for his firm, B2 Strategic, Ballabon quotes none other than Watergate-burglary mastermind G. Gordon Liddy to cast himself as a samurai for Israel: “If Akira Kurosawa did a movie about Israel, Jeff would play one of the leading roles.”)

Jeff (Jeffrey) Ballabon is an American media executive, lobbyist for Israel, political advisor, and consultant.

...During law school, he interned at the State of Israel's Ministry of Justice,

...Ballabon was heavily involved with the election campaigns of George W. Bush and with the Bush administration. He has been involved as well in a number of House and Senate election campaigns, including John Ashcroft, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, and Bob Turner, and was a surrogate for the Mitt Romney campaign. As a fund-raiser for the 2004 Bush campaign, he co-chaired a dinner that reportedly "raked in $4 million".

Ballabon was a prominent supporter of Donald Trump's candidacy.[5][6] He led the 2016 initiative to change the Republican Party's platform language on Israel[7][8][9] and worked closely with the Trump campaign on its Israel policy.[10] Since the election, Ballabon has been an advisor to Donald J Trump for President and appears on media as a Trump surrogate.[11]

Violent Far-Right White Radicalism
We’re digging into the details of this horrific massacre that unfolded overnight (US time) in New Zealand. There is a 74 page manifesto in which the alleged killer described his aims, motivations, etc. There are some oddities to the document in that it combines explicit declarations of support for some of the most notorious racist, anti-immigrant murderers of the early 21st century. It is also filled with some of what we might commonly on social media call trolling, sarcastically or provocatively overstated comments. We shouldn’t see this as in conflict. It’s a mode of expression deeply rooted in the subculture. But I want to take some time to describe how deeply tied this killer’s worldview, politics and aims are rooted in the rightist anti-immigrant politics which are now mainstreamed in the United States

This shooter is someone who is immersed in the great arc of anti-immigrant, racist hyper-nationalist discourse and paramilitary violence ranging from the rightist parties of Europe, various mass murderers like Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik to the white supremacist and neo-Nazi subculture we have come to know so well in the US. Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Charleston. Dylann Roof’s massacre gets explicit reference as an inspiration and antecedent for this massacre.

The language of ‘replacement’ is the centerpiece – the idea that white Christians with low birthrates are being replaced by non-white immigrants with higher birthrates. This is literally the language of Steve King. He’s alluded to it and discussed it numerous times, both explicitly and implicitly. He discussed it at length in this interview with a far-right newspaper in Austria. Other far-right Republican officeholders do the same.

If you look at the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre shooter, he was of course attacking Jews. But his actual theory (not his alone of course but the one he embraced) was that Jews were a non-Christian force organizing the importation of non-white immigrants into the United States. He focused in the immediate sense on the caravans the right wing media was then whipping up hysteria about and conspiracy theories about George Soros funding them. But the concept is widespread. Jews want to destroy “white civilization” and they are doing so by importing immigrants of color to overwhelm native whites with higher birthrates.

Anti-Semitic attacks were a major part of the Charlottesville ‘Unite The Right’ march. But we should remember that it was anti-Semitism interwoven with ‘Great Replacementism’. Remember the chant at Charlottesville: “Jews will not replace us“.

I could cite numerous other examples of the pervasiveness of the idea. What is more significant is how the general ‘replacementist’ ideology without the explicit anti-Semitism and with the racism slightly more muted is the common language of the far right across Europe and North America and is core to Trump political movement here in the United States.

How white identity politics will shape the GOP’s future

The manifesto left by the alleged shooter in the horrific mosque attack in New Zealand contained one mention of Donald Trump, in which the man expresses mixed support for our president. “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no."

We don’t know what policies he was referring to, but for the moment I want to consider that “white identity” part, as it applies to both the present and the future of American politics.

Let’s add in this fascinating report by Astead Herndon in the New York Times, about how the Trumpian politics of polarization and racial grievance has come to define Republicans even in the most local races

Trump and the GOP are trying to make ‘Jexodus’ happen, but most Jews still vote Democratic

...But polling data and experts interviewed by The Washington Post do not show a Jewish exodus from the Democratic Party in the Trump years. They show a demographic group that continues to vote at exceedingly high rates for Democrats — as it has for decades. That number actually ticked up when Trump was elected, with 71 percent voting for Hillary Clinton and only 24 percent voting for him in 2016.

Your values are mis-aligned.

I'm not the one pitting one group against another. You are.

Just as I hold YOU responsible for attacking one political party of the U.S.