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The Trump administration really cares about stopping anti-semitism. Really! They are! They talk about it all the time, like when Trump issued an executive order with “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” calling for institutions everywhere, especially and including universities, to crack down on all those anti-semites that were protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestine. For instance, these vicious anti-semites harassing a Jewish woman just walking past. Those Hasidic guys are really taking the “self-hating Jew” meme to the extreme, aren’t they?
Obviously, I’m joking. Anti-semitism is real and dangerous and is likely on the rise right now, but as many Jewish people have made very clear over the past several years, it is possible to criticize the actions of Israel without being anti-semitic, just as it’s possible to criticize Iran without being islamophobic, or to criticize the Holy Roman Empire without being anti-Catholic. As Yair Rosenberg wrote for The Atlantic in April, the Trump Administration is merely using anti-semitism as a pretext to enact their tyrannical anti-immigration and anti-free speech policies–“a convenient crowbar to pry open the door for more ambitious aims.”
Sure enough, in March the Trump Administration “canceled ~$400M in federal grants to Columbia (University) over its failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment,” which they announced by saying “SHALOM” on Xitter. The replies are what I find really interesting. It’s no great surprise because Xitter is a Nazi hellhole now, but they’re full of antisemitic Trump supporters crying that Trump must have been “financially funded, disproportionately by JEWS” and vowing that “One day, the US will have a leader who cares about Whites as much as you care about jews.”
They wrote these comments because they were clued in enough to pick up on the bigoted dog whistles Trump and his associates broadcast throughout the election–the wink wink nod nod that reassured White Americans that they were the most special boys who soon would be free of the disgusting minorities threatening to replace them–but they’re too stupid to realize that Trump can’t just drop the mask now that he’s been elected. He still requires the “good” minorities to support him, and that includes Hispanics for Trump, who will keep turning a blind eye to all those deportations so long as they can still believe it’s only the “bad ones” who are being deported, as much as it does Jewish Zionists like Miriam Adelson, who will turn a blind eye to all the anti-semites in Trump’s administration so long as Trump continues to fund Israel’s genocide.
And boy, are there a LOT of anti-semites in and around Trump’s circle. I don’t mean the new kind of “anti-semite,” who suggests that Israel maybe allow a little aid into Gaza, as a treat. I mean the old school kind. I mean the kind who proudly performs a Roman salute or two on a national stage, like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, sure, but you already knew about those. There are many, many more.
As NPR reported in May, Paul Ingrassia is the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, and he’s a huge fan of the antisemitic misogynist rapist Andrew Tate, he attended a speech given by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes last year, and he petitioned Elon Musk to restore the Xitter accounts of Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, who just released an album praising Hitler and also admitting he sucked his cousin’s dick, which isn’t relevant except for that it’s kind of funny that all these stupid white supremacist bigots are buying the album and then sitting through two and a half minutes of incest porn between two black men.
Ingrassia also supported Capitol Hill insurrectionist Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who once “recorded a lengthy antisemitic video rant in which he compared Orthodox Jews to a “plague of locusts.””
Then there’s Rachel Cauley, communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, proving that even women can have it all. By which I mean a high ranking government job and a deep hatred of an oppressed minority: she also defended Hale-Cusanelli, sitting through his trial amongst his supporters and calling it a “miscarriage of justice.” While she was on the board of and handled media requests for the “Patriot Freedom Project,” a group that defended the January 6th insurrectionists, they gave an interview to an explicitly white nationalist website, whose editor-in-chief wrote a book called The White Nationalist Manifesto.
“Reached by phone this week, Cauley told an NPR reporter three times, “You can send me an email,” before hanging up.
She did not respond to subsequent emails.”
Okay to be fair, she said that NPR can send her an email but she didn’t say she would reply.
Then there’s Ed Martin, who Trump appointed to multiple roles at the Department of Justice. In 2024, he called Capitol Hill insurrectionist Hale-Cusanelli an “”extraordinary man” and “extraordinary leader” and gave him an award for promoting “God, family and country.” (Martin also gave Ingrassia an award immediately after Hale-Cusanelli spoke to the gathering.)
Jeanine Pirro speaks during 2022 FOX Nation Patriot Awards in 2022 in Hollywood, Fla.
LAW
Trump names Fox’s Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for D.C. after dropping earlier pick
In podcast interviews, Martin called Hale-Cusanelli an “amazing guy” and “great friend.”
Martin later denounced Hale-Cusanelli’s views, saying he was unaware of his past antisemitic rhetoric.
“I condemn his comments and views in the strongest terms possible,” Martin said in written testimony to the Senate. “I am not close with him.”
Martin’s history of interactions with Hale-Cusanelli, including at several events and in podcast interviews, have raised questions about the truthfulness of that testimony.”
All of that is rookie bigotry, though, compared to the antisemitic lunatic who was just named director of the MAHA Institute, the organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which funded his presidential run and now exists to push his anti-vaccine, anti-science policies now that he heads the Department of Health and Human Services. You know, the policies in the recent “MAHA Report,” which I talked about a few weeks ago because it cited a bunch of studies that don’t even exist to support its bullshit. Those policies.
The man picked to run the MAHA Institute? Leland Lehrman, the subject of a recent profile from the Institute for Research and Education of Human Rights. As always, links to everything I discuss in every video can be found in the transcript, linked in the description box and found at patreon.com/rebecca and skepchick.org, whatever you’d prefer. I recommend you read the profile in detail but let me give you some highlights.
Lehrman is a trust fund kid thanks to his great grandfather, who founded the Rite-Aid pharmacy chain. Back in 2007, he actually ran for the US Senate as a Democrat, with progressive policies like repealing the Patriot Act and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security, which, you know, if that had happened maybe we wouldn’t have a dictator right now. So he sounds okay, right? Well. It turns out that he was also a 9/11 Truther.
As I’ve discussed before, back in the 2000s we had an infestation of “liberal” conspiracy theorists who believed that “9/11 was an inside job,” by which they meant any number of things: the World Trade Center was wired to blow up and the planes weren’t actually the cause of their collapse, or there WERE no planes at all, or there were also lasers, on and on. And the person behind this “inside job” was usually George W. Bush, since he was president at the time, which is why this was seen as a “liberal” conspiracy theory. But even back in the 2000s, there were some pretty obvious rightwing aspects to the “Truther” movement, including a strong undercurrent of antisemitism.
I even commented on this on Skepchick back in 2012. I had previously made note on a podcast that the Truthers were blatantly antisemitic when they blamed the collapse of the WTC 7 building on a money-grubbing Jewish real estate mogul. This inspired a Truther to email me to rebut this point by saying the movement could not possibly be antisemitic because Ed Asner was a 9/11 Truther. The Truther then went on to admit that he, the Truther writing in, was in fact a “proud” anti-semite:
“I wasn’t raised to be; but I became one; because of people like you! I noticed that the Jews in the media called everyone who was against the Federal Reserve an anti-Semite. I also noticed that the Jews in the media also said that anyone that points out the fact that Jews monopolize the media, were also an anti-Semites. So I did my own research and found out that Jews do run the media and the Federal Reserve is basically a worldwide Jewish Mafia. They use their media control to cover up the fact that America is controlled by Jewish Mafia. That made me an anti-Semite.”
I’m not sure why he felt it was “low” of me to say the movement was full of anti-semites when he himself was a “proud” anti-semite but again, bigoted conspiracy theorists are not known for their intelligence.
So yes, the “liberal” 9/11 Truther conspiracy movement was extremely antisemitic, with many claiming that the attacks were actually ordered by Jews, either through wealthy families like the Rothschilds or through the state of Israel, which they saw as being the military arm of Jews worldwide–an image that Israel has promoted itself. Many people, particularly progressive Jewish people, have pointed out for years now that Israel’s continued insistence that criticism of them is inextricable from criticism of Jews worldwide plays right into the hands of antisemites, because any actions taken by Israel are then used to vilify all Jews.
Lehrman is a perfect example of such an antisemite. In 2005 he wrote a lengthy screed for a prominent Truther website about his conjecture that Israeli agents assisted in enacting 9/11, arguing that both Israel and the fundamentalist Christians running the United States wanted a reason to invade and destroy Middle Eastern states. As I discussed in the past, it’s absolutely true that evangelical fundamentalist Christians support Israel in part because they believe that a Holy War involving Israel is necessary to bring about the second coming of Jesus, at which point all the Jews will die and go to hell. It’s fascinating to see Lehrman using that to support his antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel did 9/11 even though many Jews died that day, explaining that it makes sense because Zionist Jews would sacrifice other Jews beneath them on the “pyramid” to enact their plans to get the US to help them wipe out Arab states, and at the top of this pyramid was “Lucifer himself.” Did you follow all that? Well get ready because there’s more.
A month later, Lehrman was promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tract that has been debunked for over a century but which anti-semites claim is a true recounting of a secret meeting of Jews planning to take over the world. It’s been used to justify the genocide of Jews since its publishing, including being used by Hitler. Lehrman, on the radio and in essays published online, falsely claimed that the Protocols are the genuine “template for world domination by a criminal elite (the Jews)” and that their authenticity is the only reason they’re “anathema.” To be clear, they are anathema because since 1921 scholars have known that they are a plagiarized, garbage work of fiction created by Russian anti-semites.
In a radio interview, Lehrman expanded on his thoughts on Lucifer being at the top of the pyramid of Jews:
“As they finally began looking at this, I said to myself, oh my God, like you mentioned with the Lenny Brenner quote, the reality is, is that high-level Jewish Luminists, or Lucifer worshipers, have most certainly collaborated with the Lucifer worshipers in all the other sects like Nazism, like high-level Freemasonry. They have most certainly collaborated in the development of this new world order plan. And the reason why the Protocols of Zion is important is because it is a terrifically well-elucidated encapsulation of all the methods and techniques that are going–that are have, that have been used to bring about the new world order and are being used.”
And further, in another post online:
““The Protocols themselves acknowledge that their plan hinges on their successful manipulation of existing power personages and that only at the absolute death of the host political organism will they reveal themselves and openly impose their absolute power. It is interesting to note in this context that Revelations hints at the same event but further up the change of command. Revelations predicts that at the moment the Jewish Supremacist Cult (Israel) declares its supreme rulership over the world from within a newly constructed Third Temple, Lucifer, the secret parasite within the Jewish Supremacist ideology, will utterly destroy ‘Israel.’ Ultimately, Lucifer is the one who wishes to take the place of God, and he will not abide any mortal Rothschild descendant in that role.”
To lend credence to his blatantly anti-semitic claims, Lehrman claims to be “an American citizen of Jewish heritage.” His mother is Episcopalian and his father was born into a Jewish family but converted to Catholicism forty years ago, when Lehrman was a teenager.
Lehrman is also an anti-vaxxer, obviously, but yeah, I think the Luciferian Jew stuff is somehow even worse. And that’s the guy running the group pushing the policies of RFK, Jr., our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Because this is the worst timeline. Fuck that guy.
Anyway, I’m sure that at some point the Trump Administration will notice all these antisemites hanging out in and around the White House and they’ll do something about it. Promote them, probably.
