For centuries, antisemitic tropes have been used to portray Jews as loathsome individuals, typically depicting them with physically exaggerated facial features, while accusing them of controlling everything.
Once popular, those cartoon caricatures began to fade following the end of the Second World War, when it was no longer socially acceptable to openly show blatant bigotry or racial intolerance. The hope was that we’d advanced, as a species, no longer able to see others as despicable solely based on ethnicity.
That’s why it’s particularly off-putting to see the re-emergence of what resembles these kinds of visual reminders that ugly Jews rule. Because, that is the image that comes to mind when looking at a recent X post by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
The cartoon shows White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, sporting an excessively large nose while holding a leash on President Trump - two antisemitic tropes rolled up into one nasty cartoon.
In this particularly anti-Jewish charged atmosphere, where Jews are already feeling vulnerable in so many places throughout the world, does Newsom not know that Miller is a Jew and what impact such a disgraceful depiction could engender?
Have political considerations become so important to Newsom that he is willing to stoop to that kind of low ethnic portrayal, just to score a few points with the progressive anti-Israel segment of the Democratic party?
Already having called Stephen Miller a fascist, on X just a week or two ago, that post received 31 million views, a deliberate act which could easily place a target on Miller’s back, causing yet another crazed individual to try to take him out, as we saw with Charlie Kirk.
t’s hard to comprehend what goes through the mind of a state leader, who is supposed to serve as an example, to his constituents, when he has no problem publishing the basest of insults, by way of two antisemitic stereotypes which are neither accurate nor prudent.
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