Erin Schrode, 25, is hoping to become the Democratic candidate for Congress from California’s second district after the state’s Democratic primary this week.
Schrode is also Jewish.
This week, she says, she has seen a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse hurled at her online in a coordinated campaign on a neo-Nazi blog that has backed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The attacks reflect “more and more anti-Semitism this election cycle,” Schrode told BuzzFeed.
Late Saturday, she posted on Facebook some of the vitriol she has received.
“Everyone knows it’s TIME for America’s first evil retarded teen cunt Congress kike!”
“Fire up the oven!”
“All would laugh with glee as they gang raped her and then bashed her bagel eating brains in.”
Another comment, quoted by BuzzFeed, reads, “Get out of my country, kike. Get to Israel where you belong. That or the oven. Take your pick.”
Her personal email, social media handles and cellphone number were posted to the Daily Stormer website, one of the most influential Neo-Nazi websites in the US, run by Trump backer Andrew Anglin.
The result: “I woke up yesterday and today to hundreds of such vile messages,” Schrode said.
“This unspeakable vitriol goes far beyond anti-Semitism. It is not merely an attack on me or on one people,” she wrote on Facebook, “but rather an attack on any individual or group who is targeted because of faith, race, nationality, gender, ability, orientation or other arbitrary classification.”
She has reported the harassment to law enforcement agencies. “The FBI was contacted by multiple people on our behalf…. The local police will do extra patrols in the area. And they are well aware, should anything occur here,” she said.
Schrode is not the only prominent American Jew to face a torrent of online abuse by racists claiming to support Donald Trump.
The Anti-Defamation League established a task force last month to study the issue after large numbers of Jewish journalists faced abuse after criticizing Trump.
The group is seeing “white supremacists coming out of the cracks in ways that are really quite frightening,” its director Jonathan Greenblatt told The Times of Israel in March.
“I don’t know what’s in his head or in his heart,” said Greenblatt of Trump. “But I do know that he’s certainly pushing buttons that have been pushed before — whether he’s doing it with deliberate intention, or kind of slouching toward those things. Either way, the outcome is the same.”
Trump has won the support of central figures in American white supremacist circles, including former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
