Pro-Trump Trolls Target ‘Infamous’ Dan Goldstein After JetBlue Face-Off With Ivanka
Image by Getty Images
By Sam Kestenbaum December 22, 2016
Just hours after a Brooklyn lawyer confronted Ivanka Trump on a JetBlue flight, online supporters rallied around the future first daughter — and vowed to make the man accused of harassing her “infamous.”
“The 2 men who verbally assaulted Ivanka Trump both live in Brooklyn. Make them infamous!” a user with the name Yekaterina Edrich Shkolnikova posted on Facebook, alongside an image of the couple.
She was referring to Daniel Jennings Goldstein, who accosted Trump as he boarded a plane at John F. Kennedy airport, and his husband, Matthew Lasner.
Goldstein told the future first daughter, “Your father is ruining the country.”
Image by Flickr
Lasner, an urban planning professor at Hunter College, posted a photo of the interaction to Twitter. The two men were escorted off the plan, JetBlue confirmed in a statement, and put on the next flight.
The online outrage machine kicked into gear quickly and memes of the two men spread quickly on pro-Donald Trump Reddit threads and on Facebook and Twitter.
Pro-Trump accounts, mostly anonymous, have descended on critics of the president-elect in past months. When journalist Julia Ioffe wrote a profile of Trump’s wife which was seen as negative, online trolls bombarded the former Politico reporter with threats.
Lasner deleted his tweets about the interaction and also removed his account altogether. Neither he nor his husband Goldstein are now on any social media platform.
Some experimented with hashtags.
“Do we have to #boycottJetBlue now?,” @Crazy_commuter wrote on Twitter.
“#MattLasner and #DanGoldstein should be immediately placed on the Homeland Security #NoFlyList,” wrote the Twitter user DeplorableBear.
Many of the online critics saw the interaction as part of a fraught culture war.
“This is the true nature of the #Democrat party, evil and irrational. This is the ‘tolerance’ #liberal ideology believes in, narrow minded and fanatic,” Shkolnikova wrote.
“Two liberal thugs harassing Ivanka and her kids on JetBlue,” a Twitter Bertha#MAGA asessed.
On Facebook, a user with the name Yekaterina Edrich Shkolnikova posted an image of the two men with the text: “The 2 men who verbally assaulted Ivanka Trump both live in Brooklyn. Make them infamous!!!”
“Attacking Ivanka Trump,” DeployableNY4Trump posted on Facebook in a hastily assembled meme of the two men. “What is wrong with you?”
On the “alt-right” Reddit thread, users called the two men a “Jewish gay couple,” and debated the genetics and typical “Jewish traits.” “Lmao, a Jewish gay couple, it doesn’t get more degenerate,” the user Pict455 wrote.
But the same user also pointed out that Trump herself is Jewish and married a Jewish man.
“Still interesting story showing that despite being converted Jew, Ivanka is not anything part of the Jewish side, despite what she might hope for,” the user wrote.
Posting an image of one of the men involved, the user wrote: “Look at that face, these people are ‘White’ lmao?”
Email Sam Kestenbaum at Kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum
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