'We know where this leads': How Trump’s crackdown puts Jewish people in peril
White nationalists have uniformly cheered the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan asylum seekers through the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
But among influencers who steer opinion in the white nationalist wing of the MAGA coalition, there are cracks in the consensus when it comes to the other major front in the administration’s deportation dragnet — removing students protesting Israel on U.S. college campuses.
The restless mood among white nationalists does not bode well for Jews at a time when actual antisemitism — apart from criticism of Israel — is on the rise.
While the administration threatens to withhold federal funding from universities and targets campus protesters for deportation, some Jewish leaders and scholars of fascism argue that the crackdown makes Jews less, not more, safe.
“History has made clear that our safety as Jews is inextricably linked with inclusive, pluralistic democracy and with the rights and safety of all people,” Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told Raw Story. “Antisemitism is often used as a tool to sow distrust in democracy, threatening Jews and all communities — and so too, when the rule of law and democratic norms are threatened, antisemitism invariably increases and Jews — and all communities — are made less safe.”
Spitalnick led the successful effort to obtain a civil judgement against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally, when white supremacist groups converged in Charlottesville, Va., where they assaulted students during a torch march and clashed in the streets with antifascist counter-protesters, culminating in a car attack that resulted in the murder of an antiracist activist.
Among white nationalists whose ideology is anchored in antisemitic conspiracy theories, there are two schools of thought on the administration’s efforts to target pro-Palestine activists.
One school of thought, exemplified by Jason Kessler — the lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally — holds that white nationalists should set aside who ostensibly benefits from the campaign and get behind the effort because its targets are “foreigners.” The other view, represented by Nicholas Fuentes, who attended Unite the Right as an 18-year-old, holds that Israel is somehow orchestrating the deportations, and the same tools of repression will eventually be turned against white nationalists.
“I don’t think Mahmoud Khalil should be in the United States and I don’t think foreigners should have Constitutional rights,” Kessler posted on the social media platform Telegram following the Columbia University and pro-Palestine activist’s arrest. Speaking on his podcast on Wednesday night, Kessler argued that aligning with right-wing Jews "might mean support for Israel, but it also means being an immigration restrictionist and being against DEI stuff. And that is the most important to me."
Fuentes, who once distinguished himself in the white nationalist movement for his slavish devotion to Trump, in contrast, called the campaign against pro-Palestine activism a “nightmare” in a recent podcast. He lamented that almost 10 years after descending the elevator at Trump Tower and inaugurating what appeared to be “a 1,000-year Trumpian reich,” the president is now deporting critics of Israel.
“We’re going to set the precedent that if you criticize Israel, it’s effectively illegal,” Fuentes complained. “We’re going to break the backs of the university over Israel — nothing else. You don’t think that’s a problem? Of course it’s a problem! It’s obviously a problem. It’s obviously Jewish tyranny.”
Jason Stanley, a scholar on fascism who recently announced his decision to resign from the faculty at Yale University for a position at the University of Toronto due to what he considers the United States’ rapid transition into authoritarianism, argues that the Trump administration’s fusillade against universities is setting up Jews as a scapegoat.
“They’re targeting intellectuals in the name of — supposedly in the name of Jewish people,” Stanley told NPR’s A Martinez on Tuesday. Similar to the repression Jews experienced in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Stanley argued that the Trump administration’s effort is “setting up large groups of people for popular rage.”
Stanley, who is Jewish, added: “And Jewish people who are complicit or actively participating in this are setting American Jews up. We’ve never been at the center of U.S. politics like this, and this is never good for the Jews.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to strip funding from universities and deport pro-Palestine activists come at a time when antisemitic conspiracy theories are flourishing on the right, fueled in part by the president’s orders to release once-classified files.
“At least what we’re told are the JFK files have been released,” said Frankie Stockes, a fill-in host on “The Stew Peters Show,” last month. “And very, very quickly, people have started to zero in on some main culprits, you could say, including, of course, Israel.” (There is simply no evidence that Israel was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.)
Meanwhile, Ian Carroll, a former Uber Eats driver and podcaster flagged for frequently spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, claimed during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s massively popular podcast last month that sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein “very clearly was a Jewish organization of Jewish people working on behalf of Israel and other groups. And so that’s a dark stain on Israel and on the Jewish people, if you own it.”
One commonly accepted example of antisemitism is accusing Jewish people as a whole of being responsible for the wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person.
While the most prominent white nationalist podcasters, writers, and social-media influencers have expressed support or at least remained silent on the Trump administration’s deportation of pro-Palestine activists, some have complained that Trump is acting on behalf of Jews instead of non-Jewish white people.
Lauren Witzke, a former U.S. Senate candidate who has retweeted the white nationalist publication VDARE, complained on X following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil: “So we can deport any foreigners any time we want… // But, of course, that power is reserved for critics of the Jewish state. // Not anti-white/Christian campus activists, rapists, murderers, gang bangers, and foreigners eating pets.”
Greyson Arnold, a Nazi sympathizer who was investigated for threatening the Washington state governor, wrote on Telegram: “The president would never do this for white people.”
The following day, he railed: “The Trump administration is currently investigating over 60 universities for antisemitism while ignoring the decades of anti-white racism on college campuses, systemic anti-white discrimination in our laws, and anti-white discrimination in the private sector. America is a Zionist Occupied Government.”
Those grievances have been echoed by Charlie Kirk, a close ally of Trump who has spent years visiting college campuses to challenge leftist thinking. Targeted by followers of Nicholas Fuentes in 2019 for being too moderate, Kirk’s positions have gradually migrated towards white nationalism, and he now frequently invokes a so-called “war on white people.”
Only one day after Arnold and Witzke complained about a supposed “anti-white” bias, Kirk extracted support from Department of Justice lawyer Leo Terrell, who leads Trump’s antisemitism task force, for the idea of setting up “a similar task force to go after the anti-white bias that we’re seeing on our college campuses across the country.”
“Oh, yes,” Terrell responded. “Let me be clear: Anti-white bias, this whole DEI nonsense, the attack on Christians. Charlie, let me tell you right now, all the president wants to do is make sure everyone is treated fairly.”
Terrell invited Kirk to accompany him on a “campus tour” of the “10 worst schools.”
Kirk has said that Christians “have an obligation to the Jews.”
But he has also made it clear that he believes that the United States should be a Christian nation, and that religious pluralism is incompatible with democracy.
“The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord,” Kirk said. “One of the reasons we’re living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they’re incompatible. You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.”
Hardline Zionists who take a nationalist approach to combating antisemitism have consciously aligned with MAGA and the Christian right in the effort to root out left-wing activism that is critical of Israel from college campuses.
Among them is Betar, a group that claims to be funneling the identities of pro-Palestine activists to the Trump administration so they can be deported.
In February, the group posted a video of Steve Bannon, a political strategist who is a close ally to Trump, responding to a question about support for Israel.
“MAGA and the evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel’s back; they have the Jews’ back,” said Bannon, who came under fire in February for giving a Nazi salute at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “The biggest enemy of the Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire: progressive Jewish billionaires that are funding all this stuff.”
Meanwhile, if Trump’s supporters in the United States tire of the war in the Middle East — especially if it expands — Fuentes is seeding a grievance narrative primed to fuel a white nationalist backlash.
“The Trump movement is being used to fight Israel’s wars,” Fuentes said, deflecting responsibility from the president for using antisemitism to consolidate his own power. “You suckers were used to install Trump so that Trump would bomb Iran, so that Trump would go to war against Israel’s critics in America.”
Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told Raw Story that the Trump administration is “exploiting legitimate concerns about antisemitism to undermine civil liberties, the rule of law and due process, education institutions, and our democracy itself.
“We will continue to stand up against antisemitism, hate and extremism, and attacks on our democracy,” she said, “because we know where this leads, and because our safety and our values demand no less.”
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A comment by William Beals in the White Lives Tennessee Telegram chat in May 2023.Telegram screengrab