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The Biggest Conspiracy Theories Are All-Consuming
This week’s antisemitism and transphobia—Trump, West, Rowling—is all connected
Reading this week’s headlines about antisemitism and transphobia — Donald Trump, Kanye West, J. K. Rowling — the extremism is clear, and the connections make themselves visible.
Trump’s Antisemitism
Yesterday, Donald Trump bragged that he’d make a good Israeli prime minister because, allegedly, the Jews there appreciate that he has “done more for Israel” than any other U.S. President. (Of course, his sole criterion for whether he’s good at anything is whether he can successfully project the lie that others say he is.) He warned: “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!”
Those last words are a threat, even though the literal meaning isn’t clear. Something bad will happen to Israel? Or to USAmerican Jews? The comment doesn’t need a literal meaning to be understood, since it’s not a sincere prediction but rather a way of stoking antisemitism.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s reading: Trump is warning that Jews should flee the US for Israel because he intends to make the US a very bad place for Jews if he’s ever given the power to do so. Some evangelicals have a whole antisemitic End Times theology that involves the idea of using and exterminating the Jews, which isn’t only religious storytelling since (a) it inevitably influences their politics, and (b) they may believe it’s their Christian duty to bring about the End Times.
Trump is positioning himself to claim, as Jason Stanley explains, that it’s Christian Nationalists in the United States, not Jews themselves, who ought to be consulted about what’s best for Jews or what to do about the Jews.
Yes, the former President’s open antisemitism “should scare” us, says Thomas Lecaque (“a historian who,” per his Twitter bio, “specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence, medieval to now”), just as “the relentless, never ending, vast wave of far right and…
