First it was the rapper Kanye West, with his anti-Semitic statements. Then, the basketball player Kyrie Irving, for advertising a film that denies the Holocaust on his networks. On the eve of Thanksgiving, a Donald Trump dinner at his Florida residence served to discover to Nick Fuentes, for some the most blatant anti-Semite in the country, who sat at the mogul’s table along with West to the scandal of even the Republican establishment. Those same days the police in New York dismantled a plot to attack several synagogues. This weekend, the Big Apple, one of the Democratic strongholds in the US and with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, will host a meeting of ultras. Anti-Semitic incidents have increased 125% in the last year in the city, according to police.
In the program of the annual gala of the veteran Republican Youth Club of New York, in a place in Manhattan not disclosed for security reasons, Steve Bannon, former Trump adviser and ideologue of the populist international; Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (whom the program introduces as “wife, mother and Christian nationalist patriot”) and Rudolph Giuliani, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, among many other representatives of the most ultra faction of the Republican Party. He too intoxicator Jack Posobiec, close to white supremacism and neo-Nazi groups, as well as politicians in the orbit of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO, in its German acronym), including Gerald Grosz, as well as other European guests.
Posobiec, an ex-Navy officer turned conspiracy theorist, is one of the most prolific disinformation disseminators in the country, trailing behind Alex Jones, convicted of denying the truth of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 and who is In the same week, he filed for bankruptcy to avoid a fine of nearly a billion dollars for his lie. The president of the Youth Club, Gavin Wax, has publicly supported the Proud Boys group in the past, which played a key role in the assault on the Capitol in January 2021.
“White supremacists and people associated with neo-Nazis should not be legitimized, period,” says Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “This is a toxic environment that is normalizing anti-Semitism. It is outrageous that the New York Republican Youth Club is fueling this,” underlines the Democratic politician, who never tires of denouncing the growing number of anti-Semitic incidents in the city: 45 attacks in November alone. In one of them, a father and his son, wearing kippahs, were shot last week in Staten Island. Sources from the City Council assure that they will closely monitor the act, in coordination with the Police Department and its security service, in case of possible protests.
The presence of Fuentes, together with the rapper West, in the Trump mansion provoked an angry reaction from the Republican senior staff, distancing themselves from such dangerous friendships and urging the tycoon to distance himself, since, for the moment, he is the only declared Republican candidate to the presidency in 2024. “Trump was wrong to sit at his table a white nationalist, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier,” criticized whoever was his number two in the White House, Mike Pence. But the proliferation of hate messages on the networks against African-Americans, Jews, Asians and the LGTBIQ community, especially since the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, seems to have approved – at least among the loudest public opinion – the conservative pack.
“Extremists sit down for dinner with the former president. QAnon, the Proud Boys and others are emerging from the shadows after Elon Musk eased the rules on Twitter. yes [nombre actual de Kanye West] appears on the show Infowars of Alex Jones, who spreads conspiracies, to praise Hitler and the Nazis and question the existence of the Holocaust,” denounced Jonathan Greenblatt, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL, in its English acronym), on Monday. when submitting a report about the increasing visibility of extremists on Twitter since the change of ownership. In the list of names reviewed in the study appear the usual spokespersons for disinformation in a country that is increasingly polarized and in an open electoral campaign.
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A campaign that will surely talk about the twenty-something Fuentes, a white supremacist and rabid misogynist who participated in the demonstration unite the right on August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, in which a young man plowed into anti-fascist protesters with his car, killing a woman and injuring a dozen others. Fuentes has repeatedly spread racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Due to his credentials and his growing public role, he leads the generational replacement of the movement that emerged from the Tea Party, and definitively consecrated by the presidency of Donald Trump. Barely a decade older than Fuentes is Posobiec, with almost two million followers on Twitter and who these days has criticized the release of Russian arms dealer Viktor Tout in exchange for basketball player Brittney Griner. Several sources, including the civil rights observatory Southern Poverty Law Center, link Posobiec to two individuals linked according to the FBI to the massacre perpetrated in 2018 against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, with 11 fatalities. It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in US history.
Ye, who announced his candidacy for president two days after having dinner with Trump, has been embroiled in controversy for weeks over his numerous inflammatory comments. His activity on his networks was briefly blocked and he lost million-dollar advertising contracts with Gap, Adidas and Balenciaga. Irving, for his part, has returned to play with the Brooklyn Nets after a precautionary suspension for several games after sharing a link to a denialist film on his networks and, most seriously in the opinion of his team, refusing to retract.
The call of the Republican club could have passed without pain or glory as one of the hundreds of events that are held every day in New York. If it draws attention, it is because it represents the growing centrality in the republican discourse of formerly marginal voices and because it is also celebrated in the city with the second largest Jewish population in the world. A threatening discourse that threatens to engulf the standard and a population, the Jews, but also that of many other groups, including the LGTBIQ, with palpable fear of violence that spreads like an oil stain. As Greenblatt, from the ADL, recalled this Monday, “Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the deadly Charlottesville rally, has used his recently verified Twitter status to advocate that Ku Klux Klan member David Duke also return [a la red social]. And the Proud Boys have opened Twitter accounts for their New York chapter.” The Proud Boys are particularly active in networks against the LGTBIQ population, Greenblatt recalled. the atrabiliaria joint venture of Trump and Musk threatens to die of success, and New York, to be the scene of it.
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