There was a little seen 2001 film called The Believer starring Ryan Gossling, which I happened to come across recently in my fairly large collection of films on DVD and Blu-ray, and decided to take another look at it. Gossling plays a young man named Danny who despite having a scholarly knowledge of the Jewish faith, is nonetheless consumed with hatred for its adherents. We do not know initially that he is in fact Jewish himself because he has every appearance of being a Nazi skinhead. He keeps having this recurring vision of how Jews meekly submitted to Nazi killers, and it shames him. He encounters a Jewish teenager studying a book on a subway train and starts to taunt him, and instead of fighting back, the boy gets off the train, and Danny follows him. When he catches up to him, Danny starts punching and kicking the boy, all the while begging the boy to hit him back. When the boy refuses to defend himself, this only draws Danny’s disgusted contempt.
Danny joins a fascist group headed by Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane) and his wife. Their concerns are mostly along racial lines, and Curtis is not pleased when Danny insists that Jews are also the enemy. Curtis tells him that Jews are white people too, and being against them doesn’t “work” anymore. Danny persists, asserting that if they want a country like Nazi Germany, then they have to be against Jews as well. Danny then heads to a camp for a neo-Nazi militia gang, eventually planning to help them bomb a synagogue. When they break into a synagogue to plant a bomb, the neo-Nazis start to desecrate items in the cabinet referred to as the "ark of the law," and then start fiddling with the Torah scroll, which “strangely” upsets Danny, which leads to one member of the group suspecting he is actually Jewish because he seemed to know so much about it. They find out later that the bomb was discovered and deactivated. Later a second bomb is planted, but this time Danny is a participant in the service, and at the last moment warns the congregation about the bomb, but remains behind and apparently is the lone victim in the subsequent blast.
While the film received positive reviews, many wondered what ultimately was to be learned from it, because Danny really didn’t experience some great epiphany at the end, since he only acted to save a young woman who he didn’t expect to be in attendance at the service. This film is about hate, but more of a kind of self-hate, shame that he was a member of a religion or group that did not fight back when confronted by adversity and even death. Danny couched his beliefs in typical anti-Semitic terms in order to convince other neo-Nazis that he was a fellow traveler, but by the way he went out it is possible to speculate that he chose to be a Jew who “defended” himself by killing his alter-ego, the Nazi wannabe.
There are, of course, Jewish people like Michael Levin (an avowed “academic” white supremacist) and Mark Levin (an avowed white nationalist commentator) who simply just hate for its own sake. According to the new book Hatemonger by Jean Guerrero, Stephen Miller is also all about hate. Whereas in The Believer the protagonist is someone who becomes a Nazi because he thinks his “own” people don’t deserve to “live” because they won’t defend themselves against the oppressor, Miller has become the very embodiment of a “Nazi” oppressor simply because he is a racist who defines himself by this “whiteness” more than by his religion. He is the kind of Jew that the Billy Zane character (Curtis) did not wish to alienate. Guerrero’s book details how Miller was “educated” by far-right radio hosts and written media that openly espoused race hate, and neither of his parents tried to dissuade him; in fact they were also to a certain extent white nationalists in perspective, and encouraged his extremist beliefs. One family member had written an account of how its ancestors had survived Russian pogroms and the Holocaust, but none of that seemed to have “rubbed-off” on Miller.
Miller seems to have a particular hatred of Hispanics; a recent Vanity Fair article states that some former classmates at Duke wondered if this had something to do with his failed relationship with a Mexican-American female student, who admitted to finding him “creepy” and eventually refused to answer his phone calls. Perhaps she sensed that his “interest” in her had more to do with carnal “lust” rather than “love.” In fact Miller’s hatred of Hispanics goes back to his high school days, and while he may claim that he only “hates” illegal immigrants, the fact that he ended friendships because of matters of race and ethnicity, and he went out of his way to insult and smear Hispanics, immigration is just a pretext to cover his racist and white nationalist proclivities.
Miller, of course, found a perfect running mate in Katie Waldman, also with racist proclivities who like Ivanka Trump has demonstrated zero sensitivity about children in concentration camps and cages. And of course Miller has found the perfect “home” in the White House, where Donald Trump is the hater-in-chief who despite claiming he is the “least racist person on earth,” has done everything humanly possible to prove that even if isn’t the “most racist person on earth,” he shares with a certain other fascist dictator of the past the power to permit his racist underlings to operate with almost no restraint to pursue their racist agendas, which makes Trump no less culpable than they are.
Hate, of course, is what motivates Trump and his familiars. Miller is on record as stating he wants to stop all immigration from “shit-hole” countries from entering the country, legally or not. How else are we to explain this attitude except in terms of hate? There is no real “policy” to speak of, just acting on what comes down to base animalistic instincts. Hate is a more powerful motivator than “love,” and many if not most Trump voters are also motivated by their hate. Do we really want policy that is formulated by hate? Is that the kind of country we want to live in, one where we are defined by hate?
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