Donald Trump’s anti-Semitic troll army

At least in my world, it seemed the hackneyed Jewish conspiracy theories of yesteryear had finally died an undignified and well-deserved death.

That was, until I found my Twitter feed full of them last week.

It started with Donald Trump. Last week’s Jewish Journal included an article I wrote about a resurgence of anti-Semitism, mostly online, linked to pro-Trump activism and the so-called Alternative Right, or alt-right movement, a loosely defined set of far-right and ultra-nationalist ideologues.

The article was posted online on June 2 at 11:17 a.m. At 1:22 p.m., a Twitter user who goes by The Current Year tweeted at me in response to the question posed in the headline: Will Donald Trump Make America Hate Again? 

“(((@Eitan_Arom))) Yes. Nothing wrong w/ whites advocating for their own interests. #AltRight”

The triple parentheses — (((@Eitan_Arom))) — is the newest inside joke of the alt-right. The idea is that Jewish names echo through history — the parentheses are styled as “echoes” — since Jews are, as per the oldest motif in the racist’s handbook, the puppet-masters of the banks, the media, the government, etc.

So when The Current Year put my name in echoes, he was saying, in effect, “Hey, look at this uppity Jew; let’s troll him,” and the response was predictable.

The several dozen tweets that followed ran the gamut from the tired to the bizarre, but their basic premise is that Jews control the media, Jews control the government, Jews invented the Holocaust, Jews, Jews, Jews.

Perhaps the only new feature of anti-Semitism in the internet age is its application to today’s news cycle — members of the alt-right connect Jews with what they see as a globalist agenda of open borders and free trade.

“Did you really think your ppl could advocate open borders everywhere but israel and noone would notice?” Spencer asked me via Twitter.

It is the Jews, in the alt-right imagination, who are the cause of white marginalization.

As Twitter user Julius Ebola wrote me, “Pretty sure America has been hating whites for decades thanks your (((media))) and (((academia)))”

Based on my feed, the alt-right is not all, as Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, writing in Breitbart News called them recently, a “fearsomely intelligent group of thinkers.”

Instead, I encountered a battalion of armchair theorists struggling painfully to summon up “white” as a nationality, even a cultural identity, and filling it with bigotry and hate.

With death rates and substance abuse on the rise in white America, it’s clear that hurt and loss are part of what has pushed people online in search of community. Too often, they have encountered instead a hateful parody of one.

For our idiosyncratic ways, Jews are now, as we have long been, an easy target. So what to do with the haters and their new vogue?

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic last week offered an answer by encasing his own username on Twitter in a set of echoes, inspiring a number of others, including the Jewish Journal, to do the same.

“Thanks to everyone participating in this act of (((cultural appropriation))),” he tweeted on June 3. “Since the culture in question is Nazi, it’s permissible.”

For some on the alt-right, the sudden proliferation of Jewish Twitter users “echoing” their own names was proof in the pudding.

In the words of The Emboldening, a Twitter user whose avatar riffs on the Nazi storm trooper insignia: “The sheer volume of handles in parentheses proves the point: Jews are wildly over represented everywhere.”

The path that Goldberg set out is, of course, fraught.

When we roll around with trolls, don’t we dirty ourselves, and on top of it give them the fight they’re spoiling for?

Perhaps reversing their game runs the risk of emboldening them. But they are already pretty bold.

The haters seem to be multiplying.

Sure enough, their numbers have swelled to a disproportionate bloat on the internet, thanks to bored teenagers exploring a moral-free space, alongside the true, dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites. But the web provides a mask for racists no less effective than a Ku Klux Klan hood.

Not only is the mongering of Jewish conspiracies alive, it has a new home and an online vernacular retrofitted to an old hatred.

The emboldening is underway, folks. Can’t say you weren’t warned.

Eitan Arom is a staff writer at the Jewish Journal. He can be reached at eitana@jewishjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Eitan_Arom.