Early calls that unacceptable and says Get Tough approaches to addiction have never worked in the past as letters to mass incarceration primarily of brown and black men and women south a Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren agrees and says the proposals in Trump's plan she wants like education and evidence based treatment are just talk with no funding how you can square these proposals with the huge cuts he's proposing in health care is is a mystery Loughlin points to Trump's proposed cuts to the Medicare expansion which she says has been one of the main ways to pay for opioid treatment Peter John Shuler k.q.e.d. News there's more Bay area coverage at our website k.q.e.d. News dot org I mean it can support comes from Stanford children's health nationally recognized care for infants and children with digestive and liver disorders stand for children's dot org Support for n.p.r. Comes from the level some foundation committed to improving lives through invention in the u.s. And in developing countries and working to inspire and enable the next generation of inventors more information is available at Lemelson dot org And by the listeners of k.q.e.d. Increasing clouds tonight here in the Bay Area late tomorrow morning we should see the 1st. 3 days of rain actually a significant storm system is coming in bringing lots of rain and some gusty winds at times tomorrow as high temperatures will be in the fifty's about little bit warmer on Wednesday it's 706. This is Fresh Air I'm Terry Gross after linking to an article about the rise of fascism in America my guest Jonathan Weisman became the target of neo nazi trolls on Twitter barraging him with anti-Semitic insults and threats Weissman is a former congressional correspondent for The New York Times and is now deputy Washington editor handling Times coverage of Congress. As well as some political coverage in his new book he describes his encounters with white nationalists writes about some of their leaders looks at the connections between white nationalists and the tram campaign and administration and examine some of the history of anti-Semitism in America the book is called Semitism being Jewish in America in the age of Trump. Jonathan Weisman Welcome back to Fresh Air tell us how the anti-Semitic attacks against you started what did you 1st tweet out that after the response Well it was May of 2016 it was a time when Donald Trump was actually kind of marauding through the Republican primaries but somehow the Republican establishment still thought there was some way to stop him and Robert Kagan a Brookings Institution scholar had written a an op ed for The Washington Post on how fascism comes to America and I wasn't thinking much I do this a lot I just took a. Quotation from it and put it on Twitter and sent it out there and I got a reply back on Twitter from somebody identifying himself as cyber Trump and all it was was a 2 word missive it said hello Weisman but Weismann was in these 3 parentheses surrounded by 3 parentheses and you know obviously Weisman is a pretty Jewish name so I intuited that this notation my name in brackets had something to do with my Judaism my Jewish background so I answered care to explain and what I got back was this odd response what oh the vaunted Ashkenazi intelligence cyber Trump came back with me he said it's a dog whistle fool belling the cat from my fellow going home and that was it from that moment on I was sort of under an onslaught on Twitter kind of bled into voice mail sometimes an e-mail from anti semites was the viciousness of it really took me aback because of course we do I think of this country as overtly anti Semitic and the old anti semitic tropes the imagery the violence really really shocked me so these triple parentheses bracketing your name. Signifying that you're Jewish is that a marker so that other people who want to attack you for being jewish can figure out get him Well unbeknownst to me and frankly unbeknownst to virtually anyone in the world there was a piece of software that was being offered as a Google plugin it was very. Nondescript in its name it was called the coincidence indicator and what it did was allow people racist bigots anti Semites in the art right to actually search for those 3 parentheses you see on Google Google searches don't pick up punctuation they only pick up letters and if you had plugged in this coincidence indicator you could go hunt out these 3 parentheses so it will literally was battling the cat anybody you have that if somebody on the Internet wanted to go find a marked man or woman he could plug in the coincidence in a gutter and find the mark and I had been marked. So it's it's like the Internet equivalent of wearing. A Jewish star or you know a pink triangle during the Nazi era and a way exactly exactly I would I would part of the exactly that way and in fact a lot of the images that were sent to me were me with a yellow Jewish star so ditto whatever I happen to be wearing in that in that motif so give us a sense of some of the hate tweets that you got from the neo nazi trolls Well so much of it was Trump oriented there's one meme that they sent to a lot of Jewish journalists with journalists face in a gas chamber and a smiling Donald Trump in Nazi uniform flicking the switch for the gas chamber there were images of my face and other journalist faces superimposed on a victim of the Holocaust leaning over and about to be shot in the head by a Nazi There was one of my favorites was the very famous gates of Auschwitz but instead of the German you know make work work makes you free it said mock in America great again a lot of there was a lot of Holocaust imagery. Infused with Make America Great or Donald Trump's name or face it was the 1st real understanding that there were these shock troops of the Trump campaign who were just flagrantly racist bigoted and anti semitic do you think that Donald Trump knew about this kind of truth using his slogan Make America Great using his name in such anti-Semitic ways what one thing very reluctant to do is put. Anything into Donald Trump's head I don't know what's in Donald Trump's head we do know a couple of things we know that when Trump was confronted once by Wolf Blitzer on c.n.n. During the campaign he didn't exactly renounce it he said I can't control my followers and a similar thing happened to with Malani a trump a Jewish journalist named Joy Yoffie who was at that time a freelancer had written a freelance piece profiling Monica Trump and her family back in Croatia and the Trump supporters did not like this piece struck me as a perfectly fair piece it wasn't very very negative but it was denounced and then the all right bigot started attacking joy often really viciously and again in an interview Monnier was confronted with that and she said you know I was a very negative story I can't control my followers so there were many and she also said he said she do you after the journalist said she provoked them that's right and that provocation line actually was echoed in some ways by Donald Trump himself there were ample times when they could have renounced you know false of manner they are their followers and they seemed absolutely unwilling to lose a single vote Well let's get back to you so you get all these and. Tyson medic tweets. How did you decide whether to or not to engage with them now this is a very sensitive question because how to engage the all right is an argument that is still going on at that time I was so blown away by the very ill and ugliness of these attacks that I decided I wanted people to see it and know I'm no I'm no Donald Trump I don't have millions of followers but I had at the time I think 50000 followers so I thought I want people to see this and so I would reach them I would send them out into the world and I think in some ways I only invited more attacks because hey somebody who has 500 followers were was being rebroadcast by some somebody who had 50000 followers so in some ways I was empowering these people but I also really did want people to see how ugly it was out there so I may have done a bad thing may have done a good thing I still don't know but I certainly wanted to get the point across and I think I did. So looking back in retrospect what were the reactions you got from the anti Semites who were trolling you kind of reaction did you get from other people who were unaware of this wave of anti-Semitism on the Internet I think the anti Semites who were trolling me really enjoyed this process I think they actually liked to get the publicity and I didn't really understand how organized it was at the time it actually was an organized process organized by the leaders of the leading neo Nazi website The Daily storm or Andrew angle and who is the editor of that had actually he was the one that bell the cat and he was the one that was trite prying to sic his stormtroopers on me so it was so they enjoyed it no I at the same time I got a lot of feedback from people saying oh my gosh look at what is happening to this editor at The New York Times and people were shocked and the fact is at that point there became kind of this crusade to get Twitter to start. In forcing its own Terms of Service this really isn't a free speech matter when you sign up for Facebook or Twitter or any social media platform you actually sign or agree to a term of service and the Terms of Service that Twitter offers says you are not to attack anyone based on race religion sexual orientation etc So it wasn't that Twitter or we were asking Twitter to suppress free speech here we were asking Twitter to simply inforce its own Terms of Service and ultimately I think that's what happened I think we did raise awareness we also surface the fact that there was this coincidence indicator and these 3 brackets it was because of my efforts that an online magazine kind of a techie magazine called Mike actually figured out what this thing was so it had an impact. So did Twitter shut down any of the accounts absolutely you know at 1st they didn't at 1st I would report these accounts and I get back this notion this note saying hey we looked at this and we didn't see any violation of our Terms of Service which were frankly flabbergasting at one point a New York Times public relations person kind of compiled the worst of these attacks on me and sent it in a more formal way to Twitter and again got a note back saying we don't see a violation of our Terms of Service but as people started getting angrier about it they started clamping down and you don't really see it as very lonely anymore and you can you certainly see anti-Semitism and racism on Twitter and on Facebook but I think that the anti Semites in the races are more careful not to make them personal attacks because they know that people are working now so once you kind of did a deep dive into anti-Semitism on Twitter and on the Internet and just in the world in America. Where some of the people who you learned about who are lead your leaders of the most anti-Semitic roots the most neo nazi kind of groups that you hadn't been aware of before well one of the guys I really focused on is Andrew Anglin Andrew angle and is one of the swashbuckling editor of The Daily Stormer which is a neo Nazi website. What interests me about Andrew Anglin is his savvy on the Internet and his ability to organize attacks that go from the internet off the Internet he is very good at finding a target and really trying to destroy that Target's life and it's not just by helping that person who with direct messages or notifications on. Sure but also getting attacks over voice mails and e-mails and then eventually doc saying which is putting the personal information of somebody on line so anybody could go find that social security number or that address and go harass the person or even swotting I love these terms swanning is when you call a local police person with the address and you say hey I saw a shooter at this address and lo and behold a swat team lands on somebody's doorstep and these things can be very dangerous and extra obviously strongly destructive and disruptive you write that you hadn't known that varial and anti-Semitism still existed in America but that after these attacks on you you couldn't avoid at. So what kind of a wake up call was that for you what impact did that have on you seeing all the anti-Semitism that does exist in America I mean just hearing you say that makes me feel so naive but the fact of the matter is I mean obviously I grew up in the south I grew up in Atlanta and some people don't say that South anymore but when I was a kid it was the South and you know we had obvious racial issues but I I didn't feel the target of anti-Semitism my Jewish education was almost like a tour of all the evils that have been inflicted on my people but it all seemed the past and I warned about these bizarre anti semitic tropes that the Jew is at once a left wing radical and a rip Aisha's banker at once a week and sniffling human being but also all powerful and the owner of the media and the poor of all the puppet strings and I weren't all these things because of course those were the images that we saw in Czarist Russia in Poland and then obviously in Nazi Germany and to see those same images come across my computer screen aimed at me was so disheartening the idea that these that this kind of hatred is so difficult to dislodge and it really jarred me because in part I am in some ways so typical Jew of my generation I'm not particularly religious I don't think of myself as a Jew 1st therefore most Anyway I just think of myself as an American. Ok we should take a break here and then we'll talk some more if you're just joining us my guest is Jonathan Weisman He's a New York Times deputy Washington editor he formally covered Congress for the New York Times and now he has a new book out Semitism being Jewish in America in the age of Trump We'll be right back this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air and if you're just joining us my guest is Jonathan Weisman He's a former congressional correspondent for The New York Times and is now deputy Washington editor and his job includes editing congressional courage he's the author of the new book Semitism being Jewish in America and the age of Trump and it's about the anti-Semitic attacks that he got on Twitter after linking to an article called This is how fascism comes to America and the book takes off from that to talk about this new wave of Internet anti-Semitism and other hate groups on the Internet there's also a lot about the history of anti-Semitism in the book. So you write that the far right has tried with some success to seize the Free Speech Movement What do you mean. Yeah I think that this effort on cut especially on college campuses where somebody like Richard Spencer one of the all right leaders will go on tour to these to these campuses and try to provoke melees riots just basic mayhem and then say we're the arbiters of free speech you know I have this as I said earlier in the show I wrestle with this notion of how to respond to the right because in some ways I think everybody needs to know what's out there but I also think that when college students give Richard Spencer exactly what he wants by rioting when he shows up on his campus on your campus I think now please just ignore the guy I mean the worst thing for for a Richard Spencer is if he showed up at Michigan State University and nobody paid any attention to him but that gets back to the fact that like you responded to the tweets when you were a hate tweeted by a white nationalist right and I guess this is my ambivalence You know I talked to Jonathan Green about who is the current head of the Anti-Defamation League and he said look I appreciate what you did but I wish you wouldn't do it any more so it's not black and white thing and I wrestled with this a lot in fact it's one of the themes that comes up repeatedly in my book because I talked to one rabbi Sonny Schnitzer at the Bethesda Jewish congregation who said you know we really should just ignore these people they're not that powerful they should just be denied the oxygen that they seek but then I talked to another rabbi guy named Daniel and he quoted Torah to me he said the Jew has to confront injustice wherever injustice is and I remember when he said it I was so taken aback because here I was thinking about tactics and he came back at me with spirituality with a sense of of what is religious or Jewish law and it was a sense to me of how far I have drifted away from religion that I never thought maybe the answer is in my religion but how do you interpret that answer. I think the answer is you can sit and argue over tactics but if you believe that an injustice is rearing its head you have an obligation to fight it so the idea that we will just bury our heads in the sand and hope it goes away that's not Jewish and we need to confront injustice. So your book is kind of opinionated which is unusual in the sense that I if you're a New York Times editor and a former congressional correspondent and you know the New York Times likes to separate analysis from opinion and everything is that Ok for you to be this opinionated in your book well one thing I really want to emphasize and I'll say this a 1000 times as I promote this book is that I believe that. Promote embracing American institutions and standing up for democratic pluralism the Constitution the rule of law is not liberal or conservative you know some of the most articulate voices for democratic poor as I'm in the era of Trump are coming from Jewish conservatives and I I don't believe that saying I want this country to remain open to black and Jewish and Hispanic and Muslim voices is a liberal position I believe that is an American position and I hope that other people come to that conclusion because yes I can be pretty hard on Jews in this book and particularly hard on Republican Jews who have stuck their heads in the sand and just decided that the rise of white nationalism isn't happening but I also really do believe that the voices of Conservative Jews for democratic Paulism have been a real revelation and a real positive response to the last year or 2. My guest is Jonathan Weisman deputy editor at The New York Times deputy Washington editor after a break Well we'll talk more about his new book Semitism being Jewish in America in the age of Trump I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air 6. I knew about our Family Foundation supports w.h.y. Was fresh air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation support for n.p.r. Comes from this station and from Progressive Insurance offering a way to buy home insurance with their home quote Explorer tool custom quotes and rates are available online learn more at progressive dot com or 1800 progressive Now that's progressive. And from Amazon music where users can listen to music from a catalog of millions of songs. Curated play lists including today's new releases and music from yesteryear learn more at Amazon Music dot com. Support for k.q.e.d. Comes from brilliant earth ethical origin fine jewelry conflict free diamond engagement rings and other fine jewelry are available at brilliant earth dot com And in the downtown San Francisco show room and host analytics and enterprise performance management platform helping to drive peak performance for finance teams by automating accelerating and aligning financial processes. Learn more at host analytics dot com world affairs comes up tonight at 8 and in tonight's program a look at critical areas of conflict around the world and how once wealthy or oil rich nation of Venezuela devoted in devolved into its current state of economic chaos 1st under President Hugo Chavez and now under President Nicolas Maduro world affairs Venezuela and the global hot spots to watch in 2018 it's coming up tonight at 8. This is Fresh Air