Overt antisemitism among online influencers — the folks who often make a very comfortable living from podcasting, live streaming and clip farming — has started to break into the real world.

A notable recent example comes via Tyler Oliveira, a YouTuber who rose to fame with stunts like trying to absorb a swimming pool’s worth of water with paper towels before pivoting to “documentaries” that often purport to expose conservative bugaboos — and who has filmed two recent videos focused on Jews.

The two videos — about Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic enclave in New York, and Lakewood, a heavily Orthodox town in New Jersey — fit a mold gaining increasing traction in the second Trump era.
“How do you combat a group of people chosen by God, practicing rampant ethno-nationalism,” he asked Mike Caldarise, an independent journalist from a town near Lakewood.

“You think moving capital and charging interest is something more valuable than what I do or what?” Oliveira asks a random Jewish man in Lakewood who had questioned his profession as a YouTuber.

The danger, though, is real.

Racist online content is making its way into the real world. Federal agencies are sharing white supremacist memes on social media at the same time that immigration agents have been documented arresting American citizens based on foreign accents.

Oliveira seems to be pushing to extend the same kind of racist dragnet that spurred the federal crackdown in Minneapolis to capture Jewish communities, even if he recognizes this approach may not catch on for the time being.

https://forward.com/news/antisemitism-decoded/808060/tyler-oliveira-kiryas-joel-lakewood/