In August of this year, the residents of Nassau County woke up to find ominous flyers outside of their homes. They were aimed at Long Island’s Jewish community.
“Every single aspect of the media is Jewish,” it blared across the top.
“Every single aspect of gun control is Jewish,” it continued.
“This is a PSA about a Jewish Mafia that has hijacked our country!”
The fliers, according to authorities, were likely distributed by the antisemitic, white nationalist hate group Goyim Defense League.
That group was also thought to be behind the distribution of flyers earlier this year in Colleyville, Texas, the same town where a gunman had taken Jews hostage at a synagogue a month before.
“Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish,” read one part. “Black lives murder white children,” read another.
Grotesque stories of antisemitic harassment all over the country abound. These stories are accompanied by an appalling rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes — including in New York City, where August 2022 saw 24 such crimes, more than double the number in August 2022.
So when Kanye West, a rapper, fashion designer, publicity stunt artist and Trump supporter once attached to the Kardashians, the biggest celebrity family on the planet, tweets out patently antisemitic tropes, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
“I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” he promised in the tweet, claiming, “You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”
That followed a screenshot of a message where he implied that Sean “Diddy” Combs was controlled by Jews. “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.”
That West may well be mentally ill, as has been reported and he once admitted, is no excuse for what is also obvious: that he’s infected with the cancer of antisemitism.
And yet, he continues to be defended — and exploited — by right-wing pundits and politicians simply because he supports Trump and occasionally says things that are adjacent to their agenda.
Tucker Carlson on Fox and Candace Owens on the Daily Wire have both defended and platformed West, with the latter blithely shrugging off his rank antisemitism because, well, it isn’t like it’s “the beginning of a Holocaust.”
“It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset,” Owens complained.
White nationalist personalities on Infowars, the neo-nazi blog The Daily Stormer, Telegram, Gab and elsewhere are also defending West.
Meanwhile, on the same weekend as Kanye’s tweets, Alabama Sen. Tom Tuberville wowed the crowd at a Trump rally in Nevada with a racist riff that would have made Bull Connor proud.
Of the “pro-crime” Democrats he said, “They want crime because they want to take over what you got.” Then, “They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bulls—t! They are not owed that.”
Equating African Americans with criminality isn’t new, and Democrats have done their part of such dirty business over the years. But it’s nothing any political party should embrace. Yet Tuberville’s audience broke out in exhilarated applause.
Not to be outdone, down in Georgia Republicans are lining up behind the scandal-ridden hypocrite to end all hypocrites, Herschel Walker, who’s running for Senate as a family values, anti-abortion candidate.
Despite allegations that he asked the mother of one of his children to terminate that pregnancy and one other — and reportedly paid for her abortion — evangelical leaders like Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins, as well as Republican senators like Rick Scott and Tom Cotton, are defending Walker, and so are his voters.
I’m old enough to remember when we were embarrassed by bad behavior, or at least pretended to be, and even occasionally found it disqualifying in public office.
Now, thanks in part to Trump and the odious bargain Republicans made with him to overlook his considerable flaws, important things like immorality, hypocrisy and dishonesty are swatted away like flies at a picnic, insignificant nuisances not even worth getting up for.
And I remember when we were ashamed of the darkest hours in our nation’s history, the ones in which racism, bigotry, and antisemitism either flourished or were casually ignored.
To see this scourge of hate not only re-emerge but be cheerfully and cravenly repackaged as patriotism and conservatism, or a rejection of “groupthink” and “wokeism,” is deeply disturbing.
Whether it’s Walker’s hypocrisy, Tuberville’s racism, or Kanye’s antisemitism, the right’s morbid embrace of these malignant characters reveals at best an appalling new nadir of moral relativism, and at worst a chilling indifference toward the lessons of history — lessons no one should want to repeat.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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