A conservative commentator reported on Monday that a prominent Jewish right-winger who actively supports President Donald Trump is being harassed by anti-Semitic far right elements — and embarrassed himself trying to fight back.
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After The Daily Wire head Ben Shapiro recently hired a so-called expert debater named Mat Nuclear, “Shapiro made clear that Nuclear’s main mission was to take down white nationalist Nick Fuentes,” wrote The Bulwark’s Will Sommer on Monday. “And Nuclear seemed all in. In another video last week with Daily Wire hosts, he had said Fuentes was part of an anti-Western civilization coalition with a ‘hyperfixation on Israel.’”
Sommer added that “the longstanding feud between Fuentes and Shapiro is clearly ideological. But some of the motivation here may also be economics. The Daily Wire has been battered by overspending and the loss of personalities like Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, both of whom have since turned on Shapiro. Most importantly, Shapiro has struggled to connect with a Gen Z conservative audience that is increasingly critical of Israel and uninterested in the now-middle-aged white conservatives who make up most of the Daily Wire cast.”
Yet Shapiro’s attempt to go Nuclear on his opponents hit a snag when the supposed intellectual “accidentally leaked a huge swath of his chat history with Grok, the Elon Musk-owned AI, exposing both internal Daily Wire financial information and Nuclear’s own doubts about his career as a young conservative.”
Describing what happened as being “about as dumb as possible,” Sommer reported that “Nuclear’s Grok chats were obtained by staffers at Unf— America Tour, a sort of liberal response to conservative campus tours. During his stream, Nuclear scrolled through his browser history while sharing his screen with viewers and accidentally exposed a link that anyone could follow to the Grok chat.” Among other things, the chat revealed that Nuclear would “be paid $530 per episode, with four debates streams every week. Nuclear would also get bonuses as his Daily Wire show’s YouTube account racked up more subscribers, from $5,000 for 100,000 subscribers to $50,000 for 1 million subscribers.” So far Nuclear has roughly 2,800 subscribers and his most recent stream at the time of Sommer’s article only had 976 views.
After going into more detail about Nuclear’s professional history, the insecurities he shared with Grok and Shapiro’s apparent attempt to cultivate a friendly working relationship with him, Sommer concluded that “Nuclear may have willingly chosen this path—albeit with the gentle encouragement of a friendly AI-bot. And he may be bombing. But Ben Shapiro is to blame.”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Shapiro admitted that many of the conservatives in his movement are anti-Semitic and that he has been harassed and worse as a result.
“You and I have gotten anti-Semitism from some of the same places, obviously,” Shapiro told this journalist at the time. “I mean, I’ve gotten enormous amounts of hatred from the alt-right, and while folks on the far left try to lump me in with the alt-right, that is the height of absurdity on every possible level. I mean, it’s honestly one of the most reprehensible things that I’ve experienced personally, people trying to lump me in with people who have legitimately threatened to kill my children … so that’s always a party.”
He added, “As far as the idea that my supporters are engaging in an outsized amount of anti-Semitism … if anybody who follows me engages in anti-Semitism, then I don’t consider them anybody who I want to be associated with, people I want listening to my show, people I want listening to my content, people who I want sympathizing with me. That’s garbage.”
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Speaking with AlterNet in March Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna — who specializes in American Jewish history — argued that it is important to distinguish between criticisms of the Israeli government and broad prejudice against Jews in general.
“If you go back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ — the great antisemitic forgery of the turn of the last century — that really began this sense that Jews are all-powerful, that they operate behind the scenes, and that whatever happens is ultimately their fault,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Before then, for centuries, the prevailing view was that Jews were persecuted and lowly because they had killed Christ, and that was what they deserved — they were powerless. That was their punishment. But ‘The Protocols’ flipped that.”
Sarna continued “especially as Jews in modernity have begun to succeed economically, it doesn’t much matter what the issue is — whether it is 9/11, which some blame on the Jews, or the crash of 2008, or now the war with Iran. You can predict before it happens that people will blame Jews, because as The Protocols taught people, it’s always the Jews. It’s the great conspiracy theory. And even many people who have never read The Protocols believe many of the things in it — just as many people have never read Darwin, but they know the word ‘evolution.’ This is simply the latest iteration.”
The scholar concluded that “I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American. Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it’s deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself. If you wouldn’t equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”
As both Republicans and Democrats see increasing opposition to the State of Israel, lawmakers in both parties have worked together to combat the rise of anti-Semitism. By contrast to the current rise in hatred for Jewish Americans and Israelis by people who conflate those populations with the actions of the Israeli government or prominent Jewish criminals like the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — a prejudice similar to that held by Islamophobes against all Muslims in America and abroad for the actions of terrorists and/or their governments — this journalist, when speaking to the late Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) for Salon in 2017, heard how Lieberman did not experience anti-Semitism at all when he became the first Jew to run for either president or vice president on a major ticket in 2000. He was the vice presidential running mate to the Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore.
Lieberman recalled that even though Gore had been concerned about bigotry, he told Lieberman “I talked to a group of friends who are Jewish, among them there was high anxiety and uncertainty about whether the country was ready. Then I talked to my Christian friends, really trusted advisers, and every one of them said, ‘No problem.’ ‘So obviously,” Al joked — he had a better sense of humor than some people gave him credit for — ‘since I know that there are so many millions more Christians than Jews in America, I was free to make the choice that I wanted to make!’”
Lieberman concluded that “the Christian reaction reveals a totally different reality than Jews have experienced in any place that they’ve been in the world except when Israel was a Jewish state.”
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