One of the curious sideshows of this election season has been watching right-wing news site Breitbart topple entirely off the cliff of relative sanity into the roiling fecal sea of open support for Donald Trump. On Sunday, they published a particularly nutty headline denouncing neocon pundit and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew” for not supporting Trump.
The story was written by David Horowitz, who made his name complaining that American colleges and universities are biased against conservatives. His last name is also “Horowitz,” which is probably why Breitbart felt safe doing this:
The piece accuses Kristol and a “small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders” of planning to launch a third-party candidate to block Trump. OK! Bill Kristol, like a lot of right-wingers, hates Donald Trump and cannot stop talking about it. He even thinks Mitt Romney could still maybe run and get elected, which is wholly wrong and very dumb. But in any case, let’s get to the Jew stuff, David.
Tacked onto the end of the piece, apropos of nothing much, Horowitz writes:
I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews. I am also an American (and an American first), whose country is threatened with destruction by the same enemies. To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven.
This is.... a strong take. Besides having nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of Horowitz’s piece, it politely ignores the fact that both major American political parties are quite supportive of the Israeli government. It suggests that Jews support Donald Trump or else betray ourselves. But hey, it provides a slim justification for that headline, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile, Breitbart commenters, an astute bunch who know a dog whistle when they hear one, leapt eagerly onto the real issue: are Jews bad or what?
Inevitably, #RenegadeJew is trending on Twitter. It started out as a bunch of jokes from media types and is now being overtaken by Twitter Nazis.
Fun! Just another highlight from this not at all shameful or depressing election cycle.
Bill Kristol. Screenshot via MSNBC