Homeless in Vancouver: Decoding Donald Trump’s anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton tweet

On July 2, Donald Trump’s official Twitter account tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton against a background of cash and titled “History Made”. Superimposed over the image of Clinton was a conspicuous red six-pointed star containing the words: “Most corrupt candidate ever!”

The dominoes fell quickly.

• Donald Trump was accused of using anti-Semitic symbolism.
• The original tweet was deleted and replaced with a version using a red circle.
• The original image was traced back to a white supremacist message board.
• Trump declared that the star was really a sheriff’s badge.

On July 4, the Trump campaign issued a statement that read, in part:

“These false attacks by Hillary Clinton trying to link the Star of David with a basic star, often used by sheriffs who deal with criminals and criminal behavior, showing an inscription that says ‘Crooked Hillary is the most corrupt candidate ever’ with anti-Semitism is ridiculous.”

Trump’s statement was answered later the same day by a tweet from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which read in part:

“This isn’t a liberal or conservative issue. It’s just common sense. Donald Trump should stop playing the blame game and accept that his campaign tweeted an image with obvious anti-Semitic overtones and that, reportedly, was lifted from a white supremacist website.”

On July 5, Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director, posted a rather confused statement on Trump’s Facebook account. He wrote that the Hillary Clinton graphic had not been sourced from an anti-Semitic site but had come from an unidentified “anti-Hillary Twitter user”.

No Word of a lie—it was, uh, Microsoft’s fault!

After saying that the Hillary Star of David graphic “was not created by the [Trump] campaign”, Scavino went on to directly contradict himself and say that he had created it using Windows clipart:

“The sheriff’s badge—which is available under Microsoft’s ‘shapes’—fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it.”

In fact, already on July 3, the news website Mic had traced the image of Hillary back to the notorious 8chan website. The “History Made” graphic appeared in 8chan’s /pol/ message board—frequented by neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white supremacists—as early as June 22 and identical in every way to the image tweeted by the Trump campaign 10 days later.

The Daily Beast news site somewhat backed up Scavino by tracking the earliest instance of the graphic back to June 15, when it was tweeted by a racist—and admittedly anti-Hillary Clinton—Twitter user.

Hate to break it but the Trump campaign is courting racists

In March of this year, Fortune mapped out the depth of Trump’s white supremacist following and showed how the Trump campaign uses so-called dog-whistle techniques to covertly flirt with and court racist white voters. Fortune noted, in one instance, how Trump’s Twitter account deliberately retweeted references to “white genocide” three times in the space of a month, beginning in late January.

Dog-whistle politics refers to the use of messages that are tailored to go over the heads of a majority of voters while being heard loud and clear by a select special interest group. “White genocide”, for example,  is just a slightly weird phrase to the majority of American voters but it refers to a specific white nationalist conspiracy theory commonly believed by white supremacists in the United States and elsewhere.

The red six-pointed star used so prominently in the Hillary Clinton image is also a dog-whistle message. Basically it’s telling those who know the code that the presumptive Democratic U.S. presidential candidate is a tool of the international Zionist banking interests.

But like all good dog-whistle messages, its meaning is clear to those in the know but plausibly deniable to everyone else.

“It’s not a Star of David. It’s a sheriff’s badge!”

The ones worn by sheriffs stereotypically have little circles blunting each point but they are six-pointed stars.

See how that works?

It only remains to explain what specific message the red six-pointed star stuck over Hillary’s face is meant to convey to its intended audience.

The far right is still scared witless by the red menace

The six-pointed star, or hexagram, has been and remains many things to many people. Because it’s such a fundamental form, composed simply of two equilateral triangles, it’s been independently arrived at and used by unrelated groups for thousands of years. Both in occultism and in Islam it also goes by the name of the Seal of Solomon (there are 44 different seals apparently).

In outline form especially, the six-pointed star is seen as the Star of David, the universal symbol of Jewish identity and Judaism.

To the morass of the extreme right wing in the United States—made up of Christian fundamentalism, social conservatism, white nationalism, neo-Nazism and endless resentments and hatred—the six-pointed star represents the common enemy.

It is the un-Christian, un-American symbol of international Jewry, global banking, one-world government, secularism, Freemasonry, fluoridation, forced vaccinations, and everything namby-pamby about the modern, political correct world.

Much of that comes together in the Hillary  Clinton image tweeted by the Trump campaign and others.

The intent was not simply to brand Hillary Clinton with the Jewish star, or Judenstern, as the Nazis referred to the yellow badge that they forced European Jews to wear as a mark of shame and exclusion.

The Nazi six-pointed star was yellow. The six-pointed star used in the image tweeted by Donald Trump’s campaign is red and not by accident, I would argue.

Among anti-Semites, white supremacists, Jew-haters and the like, the red six-pointed star is seen as especially symbolic of the international Zionist banking conspiracy.

A book called The Six Pointed Star, by a Dr. O.J. Graham, is endlessly quoted on the Internet as the authority here:

“Mayer Amschel Bauer, who, in the 17th century, changed his name to depict the red six-pointed star (or shield) which he had hung on his door in Germany, and thus began the family of 'Red Shield' or Rothschild.”

Through his five sons, Mayer Rothschild established the Rothschild family international banking empire which continues to this day. Conspiracy theorists also credit Mayer and his descendants with creating and furthering the international Zionist movement, which, they say, explains why it uses the Rothschild six-sided star as its emblem.

Never mind that the Rothschild coat of arms, or shield, has never included any kind of star, six-pointed or otherwise. Or that other conspiracy theorists, such as Brad Olsen, in his Illuminati book, Modern Esoteric: Beyond Our Senses, say instead that Mayer’s red shield was adorned with an eagle (basically it’s anyone guess).

The racism you don’t know and can’t see can still hurt you

All the bad old bigotry and racism seems newly fashionable. I can’t say if this is on account of that swinging pendulum that people frequently referred to when I was a kid or the beginning of the end of civilization, or something in-between.

I just know that dozens of kinds of hatred and intolerance are now openly jostling for  attention in the public spaces of the media, the Internet, and real life. And even when they’re not hogging the limelight and the news agenda, they’re quietly hiding in plain sight.

Consider the adorable striped pajama shirt made in 2014 by the Spanish company Zara for baby boys 9 to 12 months old—a navy striped white jersey featuring a big sunny yellow sheriff’s badge silkscreened in soft flocking over the heart. Cute, if a bit incongruous. I mean, mixing sailor stripes with a sheriff’s badge?

Now notice how terribly similar the overall effect of Zara’s baby top is to a Nazi concentration camp uniform. This was an especially unfortunate coincidence considering that seven years earlier Zara put swastikas all over a handbag.

Of course the company pulled the top off the market as soon as enough people saw the similarity.

“But it’s not a Star of David. It’s a sheriff’s badge!”

It’s time to start taking Trump’s shenanigans seriously

Trump, the presumptive Republican U.S. presidential candidate, has clearly been courting the most antidemocratic elements of his society.

Why Trump has been doing this isn’t clear. Does he really share the fascistic, antidemocratic goals espoused by these groups or is he just recklessly pandering?

It’s not so important at this point whether he’s a crypto-white nationalist or an opportunist demagogue, or just a rich geezer getting an ego high running for the highest office in the land.

What is important is that as much as any thing else that has happened during his candidacy, this small episode with the tweet about Hillary Clinton (“stargate” if you will) illustrates in a nutshell, just how unfit Trump is for high political office.

It shows that he’s willing to traffic in anti-Semitic hate speech and to make common cause with and pander to antidemocratic hate groups. Nearly as bad, it shows how, during even a small crisis, he hunkers down and stonewalls. Even when he’s caught red-handed.

Trump is acting like a 10-year-old version of Nixon for goodness sake!

Imagine what a nightmare he could be on the international stage, not to mention during a real crisis.

Everything that Trump has done since July 2 should serve to disqualify him for political office in the eyes of American voters.

At the very least though, it’s time for Americans to take Trump seriously—as seriously as they take the office of the presidency—to be aware of the tricks that he’s trying to pull on them and to hold him accountable.

It’s far too late in the U.S. presidential race to keep treating the Trump candidacy like a laugh-a-minute reality TV show.

Seriously. It stopped being funny ages ago.

The Trump snow job continues

July 7 update: Donald Trump's Twitter account tweeted photos of a six-pointed star featured on the cover of a Disney colouring book. The 2016 tie-in to the popular 2013 animated musical comedy Frozen  is titled “Disney Frozen Ice-Cool Coloring” and strangely, the cover features a large magenta six-pointed star containing the words: “With 50 stickers!”

Why only six points? Typically advertising starbursts contain a random number of points in excess of six (the more points the more area inside the burst for copy).

No mystery here though. A quick perusal of Frozen merchandise shows that the “star” on the cover of the colouring book is actually an oversimplified version of one of the Snow Princess’ ever-present six-sided snowflakes.