Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Ca | Page 11

The situation with Jonathan Weisman was somewhat different. After Weisman tweeted out an article by Robert Kagan
on the emergence of fascism in the United States and Donald Trump, he was bombarded by anti-Semitic Tweets and
memes. Anglin attacked Weisman on May 25, 2016, for publicizing the hateful tweets directed at him. But Anglin went
much further. Writing about Weisman and Ioffe, “You’ve all provoked us. You’ve been doing it for decades—and centuries
even—and we’ve finally had enough. Challenge has been accepted.”
A couple of day later, Anglin, echoed by “Marcus Cicero” on Infostormer, urged supporters to Tweet anti-Semitic
questions at Weisman, including, “Why do Jews demand that White Christians go fight and die in wars for them?”
White supremacist Andrew Auernheimer, an associate of Anglin and an Internet hacker also known as “Weev,” also
tweeted at Weisman, “Get used to it you fucking kike. You people will be made to pay for the violence and fraud you’ve
committed against us.”
Weisman was one of the first journalists to publicize another form of harassment – the use of the echo symbol (multiple
parentheses) around names to identify that person as Jewish in an article in the New York Times. In his May 26, 2016
article in the New York Times, Weisman noted that some of the anti-Semitic tweets included his name in parentheses. He
asked one of the tweeters why and that person responded, “It’s a dog whistle, fool. Belling the cat for my fellow goyim.”
A few days later, two journalists at Mic traced the origins of this anti-Semitic typographical symbol to a 2014 podcast
“The Daily Shoah” on The Right Stuff (TRS), a racist and anti-Semitic website. The podcast used an echo sound effect
when someone on the podcast mentioned a Jewish name. According to TRS, “all Jewish surnames echo throughout
history. The echoes repeat the sad tale as they communicate the emotional lessons of our great white sins, imploring us
to Never Forget the 6 GoRillion.” Other anti-Semites translated the audio echo into a typographical symbol used primarily
on social media sites, including Twitter.
TRS was also behind the “Coincidence Detector” app, a Google Chrome plugin (removed on June 2, 2016 by Google)
whose purpose was, according to Mic, “compiling and exposing the identities of Jews and others who are perceived
as ‘anti-white.’” According to the creators of the app, it “can help you detect total coincidences about who has been
involved in certain political movements and political empires.” It was, of course, referring to Jews. Users of the app would
then put the echo around a Jewish name.
The publicity generated by the echo symbol resulted in a more widespread, defiant counter-use of the echo, as
thousands of Twitter users, including Jewish journalists, changed their Twitter screen names to echo themselves.

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