A.J. Delgado, a senior adviser to Republican nominee Donald Trump, retweeted a Trump endorsement from an anti-Semitic website that started an online campaign harassing Jewish people.
Members of the “alt-right” and white nationalist movement have been heavily supporting Trump’s campaign, and the candidate and his team have been courting members of the movement, including by appearing in white nationalist media, refusing to denounce them, and retweeting their messages.
On October 11, Delgado retweeted the anti-Semitic website The Right Stuff, which wrote: “At this point anyone not insane enough to want a war with Russia should vote Trump.”
The tweet prior to the message that Delgado retweeted was an anti-Semitic attack on Republican strategist Dan Senor. The site’s Twitter account header image is of Confederate soldiers.
As Media Matters noted, The Right Stuff is a white nationalist blog that frequently leads anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish people.
The Right Stuff started the virulently anti-Semitic “parenthesis meme” in which Jewish names are surrounded by parentheses -- “(((name)))” -- often to target them for online abuse on social media. The Anti-Defamation League has added the symbol to its online database of hate symbols, with CEO Jonathan Greenblatt stating: “The echo symbol is the online equivalent of tagging a building with anti-Semitic graffiti or taunting someone verbally.”
According to The Right Stuff’s editors, they started the parenthesis meme because “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history.” They add: “The inner parenthesis represent the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism."
The site’s leader, Mike Enoch, told The Guardian that the site believes in racial separation:
Other adherents emphasise their desire for racial separatism. Mike Enoch, from the site the Right Stuff, a major hub for the dissemination of alt-right materials, says: “The core principle, in my view, is ethno-nationalism, meaning that nations should be as ethnically and racially homogeneous as possible.”
Enoch wrote in a Reddit AMA on the “Alt Right” subreddit that “if there had been a more stingent [sic] restriction on Jews entering academia and the media and lobbying politically many problems would not have arisen. The country was basically given over to Jews after 1965 and they had lots of power even before that.”
He added: “I think the idea that race is the foundation of a nation is the key. And yeah, I stand by that statement. I don't care if a country has a social healthcare policy or something like that as long as it is white.”