My Facebook feed is lit up with hatred for a person I had not previously heard of: Steve Bannon.
The “Government Official” “U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren” Facebook page contains a denunciation from Ms. Warren:
Donald Trump just made one of his first big decisions as President-Elect: appointing Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. … He told his ex-wife that he didn’t want their daughters going to school with Jewish children … Bannon’s appointment shows that so far President-Elect Trump is embracing the same kind of ugliness and divisiveness as he did throughout his campaign.
Warren, an attorney by training, states as fact that Bannon said this to his plaintiff. Yet the only evidence of this purported anti-Jewish statement seems to be an affidavit filed by the plaintiff herself back in 2007 when seeking custody and associated child support profits (i.e., potentially tens of millions of dollars at stake in California). See New York Daily News story, which also seems to assume as true whatever the cash-seeking plaintiff had to say. Given that there is no practical possibility of a perjury conviction based on a statement in an American family court, the fact that a typical high-$$ child support plaintiff alleges a lot worse (see the Domestic Violence Parallel Track chapter), and that this was apparently never corroborated by anyone else at the time or more recently when reporters sought to interview the plaintiff, this doesn’t seem like credible evidence of Jew-hatred.
[Elizabeth Warren was herself a divorce, custody, and child support plaintiff, having sued Jim Warren, the father of her two children (source), so she has at least some experience with family court.]
A professor friend writes
An avowed white supremacist and antisemite–Stephen Bannon–is now essentially second-in-command. Do what you can to #stopbannon … Call Jared Kushner’s NYC office and you can talk with a real live human being about his father-in-law’s appointment of an anti-semite white supremacist to a White House staff position! It’s fun! 212-527-7000! I think I will call several times!
But where did Mr. Bannon take these vows? The professor didn’t cite any statements by the guy. Her friends commented approvingly and/or with additional ideas for action. They all seemed to accept as true that Mr. Bannon has taken these vows. Certainly nobody asked “How do you know he hates Jews and non-whites?” In a comment on How do MIT students cope with the Trumpenfuhrer? one of our readers here found a couple of Breitbart articles (out of thousands? or tens of thousands?) with sensational headlines, but neither was written by Bannon and one of the Jew-hatred examples was authored by someone who says “I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews.”
Readers: Please help me understand what is wrong with Steve Bannon and whether his hiring signals that it is time for American Jews to escape to Israel (maybe Donald Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law will give us a ride on the family B757?).
[Note that Israel’s corporate tax rate was just reduced to 25 percent. Capital gains tax rates are lower than here in the U.S. due to inflation-adjustment, the lack of a state tax, and the lack of the Obamacare supplemental tax. Thus an entrepreneur might be better off financially following forced expatriation by Steve Bannon.]
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