click to enlarge A Northeast Kingdom brewery has come under fire this week for promoting an upcoming night of music with a Facebook post that included the valediction: "All Americans Welcome, No Globalists Please."
The
Saint J Brewery, located in St. Johnsbury's Green Mountain Mall, has since deleted the April 21 post, which garnered more than 200 comments while it was still active.
Many expressed anger at the brewery for using a term that has come to be associated with anti-Semitism and far-right conspiracies. One of the musicians mentioned in the post, Lefty Yunger, wrote that he would no longer be playing at the April 30 show. A Facebook event for the evening was later canceled.
Scott Salmonsen, the brewery's owner, did not respond to interview requests.
The definition of globalism can depend on who's asked, with some using it as a synonym for globalization, or the world's increasingly interconnected system of economics.
But for the far right, globalism often represents a conspiratorial worldview embedded with racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracies, according to analysts who track extremist groups. That's why many expressed alarm when Donald J. Trump made globalism an important theme in his 2016 presidential campaign.
“Globalism is a principle driver for the fears that animate the radical right in the United States,” Ryan Lenz, the editor of Hatewatch, a blog published by the Southern Poverty Law Center,
told the New York Times in 2016. “It is the enemy, ultimately.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the
Anti-Defamation League, said
in a 2018 video that the term "globalist" originated as a reference to Jewish people who were seen to have allegiances "not to their countries of origin like the United States, but to some global conspiracy."
The ADL says that while the term "globalist" is not inherently anti-Semitic, it quickly assumes that connotation when applied to individual Jews, groups of Jews or places where they are known to live. An examination of more than 4 million anti-Semitic tweets
conducted by the ADL in 2018 found it was widely used as a code word for Jews.
It's hard to know exactly whom the Saint J Brewery considers to be a globalist, and since no one signed the now-deleted post, it's unclear who even wrote it.
Either way, Salmonsen, the owner, seems to agree with the sentiment: Sprinkled among a wide range of conspiratorial posts on his personal Facebook page are several disparaging references to “globalists.”
In one post, he invites his friends to a Fourth of July party he’s planning and says that while “we Love America, God and Our Constitution,” attendees who do not feel the same are still welcome. “At the end of the day we are all Americans,” he wrote. He added: "ps, No Globalists please."
Another post describes an "eternal battle for our soul" and says there are three types of people: "Those that knowing do evil and or worship the Devil(Globalists to name one) those that try to do good, help their fellow man and follow God's plan the best they can(Christians & others of Faith) and those in-between."