There’s been a lot of anti-Semitism hovering around the Trump campaign, if not necessarily from Trump himself. So I guess it was no surprise to see weirdness bubbling up from Trump’s house organ, Breitbart.com. But I confess even I surprised by this headline “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew“.
Renegade Jew?
It is of course a fusillade over Kristol’s probably hopeless efforts to organize a third party challenge on the right to carry the conservative banner against Donald Trump. The piece itself doesn’t really get into Kristol’s Judaism or being a Jew at all, though there is some vaguely icky Jew conspiracy type phrasing near the top of the piece. So It’s hard to see what the point of the headline is other than random pumping up anti-Jew volume.
The even weirder thing is that the article is by none other than David Horowitz, someone who I confessed I tangled with in the distant past. Horowitz as you can probably tell by his name is at least Jewish by birth, though I don’t know how he identifies or whether he’s religious in any way. Horowitz, bizarrely, managed to get signed up as a Trump delegate in California. (Possibly the headline is just the work of Breitbart’s feral headline writers or editors.) In any case, Horowitz’s background hardly rules out Breitbart’s getting into the Jew trolling atmosphere which seems to pervade the Trump campaign.
Horowitz is a temperamental extremist who has spent the last half century running the ideological playing field looking for an ideological pose that works for and helps channel his unique mix of aggression and narcissism. He was on the radical left, then the radical right. More lately he’s been on the extreme anti-Muslim right. The one common feature is that Horowitz is always extremely angry at someone. Want to know more about his ideological peregrinations? No problem! He writes a new memoir about it every few years. In any case, it is perhaps just right that toward the end of this febrile career Horowitz ends up as a political commissar for Donald Trump (this is an homage to the type of language he likes to use), a clownish sub-fascist, the great white hope of over 50 white people. Playing the Jew card is far from beneath him.
