May 29, 2018: Why Do Bigots like Roseanne Barr Gravitate toward Trump?

 

5/29/18: It’s a sad day for the president. His favorite TV show has been canceled after Roseanne Barr goes on a Twitter rampage every bit as unhinged as any of his own. 

Barr’s meltdown begins when she responds to a comment about Valerie Jarrett, who worked for President Obama. Barr describes Jarrett’s looks: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj.” That’s the first nail in Barr’s coffin, a racist twofer, combining a spritz of anti-Muslim hate with 1870s-style denigration of African Americans. 

 

We all make mistakes – but not anti-Semitic mistakes. 

Suddenly aware that her “joke” might have been poorly received, Barr apologizes. Still, apologizing can be hard if you have sawdust for brains. Barr decides the best way to fight fire is to pour gasoline on it and hold her Twitter fingers in the flames. The second nail in her career coffin is an anti-Semitic tweet. First, Barr labels Chelsea Clinton as “Chelsea Soros Clinton.” Then she claims she is married to a nephew of George Soros, a liberal Jewish financier. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: See 11/3/19 and 8/20/20, for examples of QAnon anti-Semitism infecting the party of Trump.

 

Ms. Clinton gets wind and politely points out, via Twitter, that while the nephews of Mr. Soros may be fine individuals she cannot say. She is not married to any of them or all of them. 

Barr picks up a third nail and tries to hammer it home. Before she can stop herself Barr’s nimble fingers are tapping away again. “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me!” she faux apologizes. “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” 

That is true. We all make mistakes. We just don’t all make anti-Semitic mistakes. I once ran into the back of a car driven by one of my former students. It was the only wreck I’ve caused in fifty years. It was a mistake. 

It was not an anti-Semitic mistake.

 

A large part of Barr’s problem boils down to the same kind of profound ignorance we see in the president. A bare minimum of fact-checking shows Soros was born in Hungary on August 12, 1930. This would make him eight years old when World War II began, fourteen when Germany surrendered. 

In other words, Ms. Barr was falling for and spreading the kind of misinformation that circulates regularly on the internet. In November 2016, for example, Snopes, the fact-checking site, debunked a rumor that Soros had once been an officer in the dreaded SS, the military arm of the Nazi regime. 

That would have been quite a trick for a boy of fourteen.

Nope: Not George Soros.

 

Oskar Groening worked at Auschwitz but was not found out for seventy years.

Suppose Barr wanted to look under a few rocks and find some actual Nazis to tweet-worry about? She need look no further than Richard B. Spencer, a really big fan of President Trump. (See also: 5/31/18.) 

Or she might consider the stirring words of Rocky Suhayda, leader of the American Nazi Party. That would be an obvious place to start. Back in 2016, he had this to say: 

Now, if Trump does win, OK, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that. You know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, OK.

 

It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate.

 

What Suhayda was saying was this: “We are bigots. We all know that. We’re members of the American Nazi Party! But if we’re smart about how we act we can make it hard for people who aren’t bigots to prove that we are. Are we? Sure. And Trump is our kind of guy.”

For some reason American Nazis gravitate toward Trump.