Another, (Mostly) Unrelated Way Life Sucks Now

A few days ago, I was chatting with my mom (who's retired down in Florida). After our usual pleasantries about the doomed world we live in, she told me about a weird thing that happened at her house while she was out (she has a Ring doorbell and so saw the recording).

Basically, two people, a woman and a man came up and knocked on her door for awhile. Since nobody was home, obviously no one answered (though my mom said that if she was home alone, she'd be disinclined to talk to strangers banging on her door anyway). Eventually, the woman left a card and then they drove off. The card identified the woman as a U.S. Marshal, with a name, telephone, and email; on the back she wrote a note asking to please contact her ASAP about a "subpoena".

My mom thought, and I agreed, that this seemed pretty suspicious. My parents are law-abiding folk and aren't otherwise involved in any litigation; mom couldn't think of any reason that federal marshals would be delivering a subpoena. The note wasn't addressed to anyone in particular (it didn't have either of my parents' names, for instance). She was already on edge from the election, and living in DeSantis-land added to her fears that there might be some sort of political thuggery or intimidation at work. I googled the name on the card, which didn't reveal anything; on the other hand the phone number did match that of the local United States Courthouse. I asked my mom if she and dad had a lawyer and stressed that they should not let anyone pressure them into signing or paying or doing anything. Fortunately, my dad is a retired attorney and we know many people in the legal world, so they had plenty of resources to figure out if things were legitimate or not.

Anyway, the next day rolls around and it turns out that the card and the note and everything ... was entirely legitimate. An old case of my dad's from before he retired, that he thought had long fizzled out, had burbled back to life without warning (the reasons why this resulted in a federal subpoena are frankly too stupid to go into, but that's not my story to tell anyway). It'll be a quick bit of work for an old client in a few weeks, but everything was basically above board. No one was trying to steal their kidneys after all.

I told this story to a colleague of mine at work, and he relayed a similar situation he had been in a few months ago: he got a call from a man identifying himself as a police officer who claimed to have found a check under my colleague's name. The number from the call was a personal cell number; it was not that of the local police department. So my colleague called the department directly to ask if the man who called was really one of theirs, and the answer was ... yes. Apparently, some of his checks had been stolen out of the mail and recovered, and they really were calling to inform him of the situation. Again, everything was exactly as it was stated to be. No scam here.

In both cases, growing experience with spam and scams and hoaxes made people (quite reasonably) suspicious of genuine, legitimate interactions with authority figures. And hearing the outcome of these two stories, I thought back on something that happened to me a few weeks earlier, when I got a call from a man identifying himself as a county sheriff who asked me "why I missed my grand jury summons." I hadn't received any such summons and this is a scam I'm familiar with, so I told him something along the lines of "I'm pretty sure you're a scammer, otherwise contact my attorney" and hung up on him. Of course now, since the above two cases both turned out to be legitimate, I'm wondering if I just told an actual county sheriff to go fuck himself.

I haven't heard anything about this since, and again the "you missed your jury duty" bit is a common scam, so I'm pretty sure my instincts were right the first time. But again, it goes to a broader toxification in our informational ecosystem -- all these scams and hoaxes mean nobody knows who to trust at all: we risk falling for the fake, and we also risk ignoring what's real, and it's increasingly difficult to know how to ameliorate either of those risks. It is an exhausting and anxiety-laden way to live life, and it sucks.

And while I said this this particular suck is mostly unrelated to the main way life is terrible right now, there is a connection. Authoritarianism, Arendt teaches us, doesn't demand that people believe fictions. It flourishes best when people either do not care about, or lose confidence in their ability to distinguish, fact and fiction. 

One way this occurs is by a faux-worldly cynicism, where one congratulates oneself for recognizing that all politicians lie, are scoundrels, are in the bag for "the elites", etc., and so there are no differences worth sussing out. But another mechanism, that can afflict the more diligent and virtuous, is where institutions of authority and trust become so degraded or jumbled that it just becomes impossible to sort anything out. This is the risk of, for example, deep fakes -- one can entirely recognize that not everybody is lying while being helplessly unable to distinguish between an actual video of a political event and a manipulated or concocted one. 

Trusted institutions with reputations for vetting can help alleviate this problem. But as public confidence in those institutions fade -- or they simply become easier to spoof -- we're left with an endless sea of slop content, none of which can even in concept contain any markers of reliability or trustworthiness. And one thing we're seeing in 2024 is that this sort of toxified informational ecosystem is apocalyptically dangerous to a functioning democracy. It is not an accident that high on Trump's target list is leveraging government power to sabotage any effort -- public or private -- at combatting "misinformation". A world in which nobody can trust anything, where lies and truth become a single indistinguishable mass, is a world favorable to his brand of fascism.

One thing that I think "acab" sort of misses is that, even if it is correct to say things like "never trust the police", it is in fact bad to not be able to trust the police or other authority figures. Wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just Nigerian scammers, and wondering if "the police" calling your house are really just looking to harass you for lining up against the dominant governing faction, are two sides of the same coin. If I get subpoenaed, I want to know that without dialing up my entire legal network to figure out if it's a hoax! If I did accidentally miss a jury summons, I want someone to tell me so I can work things out!  More alarmingly, if an authority figure knocks on my door and says "there's a dangerous fugitive on the loose, have you seen anything," I want to be able to help out without wondering if the fugitive is a woman who had an abortion or an immigrant avoiding the deportation camps. When that trust fractures, it is a terrible way to live. The atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that it cultivates, even -- maybe especially -- when it is well-warranted, is toxic to a free society. But in so many ways, this is the direction we're moving.

What Will Trump 2.0 Mean for the Jews?

Short answer: It will be terrible.

But of course, that's the short answer for a lot of people.

Nonetheless, I know more about the Jewish situation, so here's my best assessment of what the near-future will look like for Jews. I'll start with Israel (since, contrary to what some would have you believe, Israel contains many Jews and its future is relevant to discussions about Jews), and then shift over to the American Jewish community.

With Israel, the chalk pick has always been that Trump will allow Israel to do absolutely whatever it wants to Palestinians with gleeful abandon. And, to be sure, there are a lot of good reasons to lay money on that bet. But I think the range of plausible, if not necessarily probable, outcomes are wider than many people realize.

To begin, I think there is a good chance that upon Trump's inauguration Israel does end its war in Gaza (or at least transitions to something that it can say with a half-straight face constitutes ending the war). Trump wants it, and getting it might (fairly or not) instantly solidify the significant inroads Trump made amongst Muslim voters this election.

The real question is whether Bibi will give it to him. The answer to that question, as to literally every decision Israel has made for the past several years, depends entirely on Bibi's craven assessment of his personal self-interest. To that point though, I genuinely believe that Bibi does not care about Gaza. I mean that in the most bloodless way possible -- he does not care if Gaza rebuilds or is razed to the ground, he obviously does not care about Palestinian life, he does not care about some significant security posture, and he certainly does not care about the hostages. If Bibi wanted to, he could declare victory right now. He's not "doing" anything in Gaza anymore (other than killing and immiserating thousands upon thousands of people, of course), there's nothing he's trying to accomplish other than whatever he thinks will save his political skin.

So the question is whether he thinks giving Trump something to crow about will be in his interest. Obviously, I think Bibi benefits in many ways from sucking up to Trump. And because Bibi's supporters (in Israel and abroad) are hacks, dupes, or sycophants, they'll happily agree to any declaration of victory (whereas if something similar occurred under a Biden or Harris administration, they'd be raging about how Israel was "forced" to "surrender" before "the job was completed").

Beyond that, though, things get murkier. Again, the most likely scenario is that Trump lets Israel run riot for four years. But unlike some I never thought this was guaranteed. Trump is a mercurial sort; past alliances are no guarantee of future loyalty. He has certainly noticed that Jews have continued to oppose him despite what he's done for, er, "our country". And he also noticed the spike in support from prominent Arab and Muslim politicians -- there's a reason why Arabs and Muslims, and not Jews, got a positive shoutout in his victory speech. More broadly, the isolationist, nativist, and flat-out antisemitic branch of the Trumpist movement has always been present and continues to grow in influence. J.D. Vance tried to disaggregate abandoning Ukraine from abandoning Israel, but the underlying logic from an isolationist "America First" standpoint is the same. And while obviously there is an ideological affinity between the right-wing authoritarians running Israel and the right-wing authoritarians taking power here, when it comes down to brass tacks doesn't Trump have just as much in common with the murderous religious fanatics in Hamas, or the incompetent kleptocrats of Fatah?

All of which is to say, while I'm skeptical that Trump would go flat-out "pro-Palestine", it is not absolutely inconceivable that if the going ever gets tough he'll leave Israel to twist. It goes without saying, of course, that he'd make this decision for all of the worst reasons -- a mix of antisemitism, isolationism, xenophobia, and good-old-fashioned pettiness. Still, right-wing Jews who voted for Trump because he's "good for Israel" may well be wise to look out for leopards.

So that's my Israel story. What about American Jews? Unsurprisingly, it's going to be if anything even grimmer.

First and foremost, we will continue to see the rise of antisemitic harassment and targeting by a far-right that correctly sees Trump as an avatar and legitimator of their ideology. Antisemitic conspiracies -- regarding "globalists", "cultural Marxists", Soros money, and more -- will gain even more traction in the center of American public life. Bomb threats, vandalism, assaults, and more will remain facts of life for Jews nationwide. Christian dominionism will continue to crest and will continue to isolate and marginalize Jews in public spaces, and the nominal "religious liberty" turn of the Supreme Court will not deign to protect us or even recognize us as real Jews. Orthodox Jews, who have increasingly de facto seceded from the broader American Jewish community, will greet these developments with apathy at best and enthusiasm at worst -- they will happily sacrifice religious equality in the public schools most Jews (but not them) attend if it means more public money funneling into their private religious academies. More and more blatant public antisemitism will be tolerated, mainstreamed, and incorporated into centers of power. Indeed, "far-right antisemitism" will increasingly become an anachronistic term, because it won't be "far" from anything -- it will be near-and-dear to the epicenter of the Republican Party.

In terms of the left, at one level I think we will for better or worse see a partial ebbing of the centrality of anti-Israel protest as attentions shift and people's priorities turn inward. That said, I think we will still see significant targeting of Jews in "left" spaces -- such as college campuses -- for the simple reason that they are convenient and available targets. A lot of people are very angry, and the actors and institutions they really want to hurt are largely immune and out of reach. Jews are considerably more proximate and considerably more vulnerable, and punching a Jew (metaphorically or occasionally literally) is a lot more satisfying than punching your pillow. Indeed, while various campus protests and movements relating to Israel have had, let's say, a range of approaches towards how they oriented towards their mainline Jewish peers (i.e., those who are by no means Israel über alles but still have significant care and concern for Israel's future and believe in its legitimacy as a Jewish state), I expect over the next several years the center of gravity will shift further away from effective and nuanced organizing that at least conceptually could include mainstream but Israel-critical Jews, and more towards inchoate, exclusionary lashing out. This will be bad, and it will further isolate and alienate young Jews especially at a time when they desperately need solidarity and allyship.

Finally, there is the question of how the Jewish community is positioned to respond to all of this. Here I daresay Jews have never been weaker in our ability to effectively mobilize and defend ourselves in the public square. And on that point my story is one that can largely be told around the current status of the ADL.

In recent years, I've taken to analogizing the ADL to Hobbes' Leviathan: It is the giant, overbearing sovereign that we must nonetheless offer allegiance to because the anarchic alternative is too terrifying. 

Agree or disagree with the normative prescription, we may be about to test my prediction about what the alternative looks like. Because right now, the hegemon is crumbling.

In 2017, the ADL was able to position itself as a central pillar in the resistance to Trumpist predations, a focal point of mobilizing the political agency and priorities of Jews rightly terrified about what Trumpism meant for us and for our friends and neighbors. It certainly cannot do so now, not the least because it suffers from a terminal case of Washington Post syndrome. Jonathan Greenblatt has spent quite a bit of time cozying up to Trump and his cronies, and the effusive welcome he gave to Trump's victory (that saccharine congratulatory message was the last email I got from the ADL before I unsubscribed from their listserv) shows he is ready and eager to comply in advance. Even if it were welcome in the progressive organizing spaces that are going to try to rally against Trump, it's far from clear the ADL is even interested in participating this time. I can't imagine it's going to see a repeat of the donation wave it received after 2016.

Some have chalked up the ADL's position to the increasingly untenable position of the Jewish "center" (in quotes because "center" for Jews is still left-of-center for Americans). Certainly, increased polarization (inside and outside the Jewish world) has placed pressure on legacy mainline institutions. But I think this story gives the ADL too much credit -- it could have pivoted to stick with the Jewish center-of-gravity, it just decided not to. Nothing -- not campus protests, not BDS activism, not "drop the ADL" chants -- forced the ADL to call Elon Musk a modern-day Henry Ford (as a compliment!), and nothing forced them to just be okay with Donald Trump treating Hitler as a fount of inspiration. Its missteps and mistakes are choices, not compulsions.

But here's the thing: if the ADL no longer can serve as the focal point for Jewish self-advocacy, none of its competitors -- from J Street to JFREJ, IfNotNow to Ameinu, JVP to DMFI -- are anywhere close to being able to replace it.

For starters, none of them are comparably resourced. None have the penetration and influence at all levels of American political life that the ADL does (even after everything I said above, if my kid experienced antisemitism at a Portland school, I still have no idea who I'd reach out to other than the local ADL branch). When it comes to the security threats faced by synagogues contemplating another Colleyville, nobody out there can replace what the ADL offers -- and I'm sorry, but if you think the "safety through solidarity" chants are right now an adequate substitute you are divorced from reality.

And even if we could get past that, no other group can come close to claiming to be a comprehensive or umbrella representative of the American Jewish community writ large. An increasingly common critique of the ADL was that it is not truly "representative" of the entirety of the Jewish community because its staunch pro-Israel attitudes necessarily didn't include the anti-Zionist Jewish minority. I'm dubious that any group can truly be uniformly representative; I do think that for many years the ADL was sufficiently tied to the median American Jewish position that it could credibly claim the label. But however far that criticism applies to the ADL (now or throughout history), it applies tenfold to its leftward alternatives, all of which occupy even more partisan, provincial, and particularistic lanes of American Jewish life. That's not a criticism -- it's fine to have a point of view -- it's only to say that these groups necessarily cannot replace the ADL's role as a sufficiently unified voice of the Jewish community writ large. The ADL may or may not at any given point failed to satisfy its mandate of being a broad tent, but there's no disputing that essentially every alternative out there is self-consciously narrower, not broader, in who it purports to speak for.

So what we are looking at over the next several years is an American Jewish community that simultaneously is under unprecedented threat and is wracked by unprecedented internal division. What I expect to see, then, is that a depressingly large proportion of Jewish political action will take the form of fratricidal squabbling and internal jockeying for position. If the suzerain is falling, the border lord upstarts are going to race to annex as much territory as possible.

In fact, not only will Jewish organizations largely end up concentrating on fighting internal political battles, I also expect to see a crabs-in-a-bucket effect where different Jewish factions actively try to sabotage the ability of others to garner external influence. I noticed this a bit in the whirlwind attempt to kneecap Josh Shapiro as a Vice Presidential contender -- an anti-campaign that in its initial manifestation was largely pushed forward by other Jews. This endeavor was nominally justified by  Shapiro's Israel positions, but I don't think that really is the full explanation (in part because Shapiro's record on Israel is, if anything, arguably to the left of Tim Walz's). Rather, the problem was that if Shapiro became the VP nominee, he would immediately be positioned as perhaps the highest-profile emblem of what “Jews” (and Jewish liberals) are, and what they believe, in the public imagination. In a world of identity capitalism, where significant power flows from who is seen as "representing" a group, that possibility threatened the influence of competing factions of Jewish progressives whose views don’t align with Shapiro’s in a way that Walz could not replicate even if Walz’s substantive positions on Israel were materially indistinguishable from Shapiro’s. In short, while a VP candidate with Josh Shapiro's views on Israel would be acceptable to left-wing Jews (and indeed, more or less, that's what we got), a Jewish VP candidate with Josh Shapiro's would be a disaster because those Jews (correctly) understood that Shapiro's elevation would solidify the power of a rival faction internal to the Jewish community.

I expect to see this dynamic to be replicated and proliferated across all areas of Jewish political action. One faction's attempt to document campus antisemitism will be met with another's counter-letter decrying the initiative. Adopting one group's definition of antisemitism will lead to others' furious denouncements and demands to select an alternative. Even as external threats grow ever grimmer, Jews will relentless concentrate on our own internal power plays -- trying to grab space for ourselves and prevent the growth of our rivals.

Now again, maybe you think that the status quo hegemony of the ADL-type organizations was sufficiently awful that this transition is necessary and salutary, notwithstanding the growing pains. I won't argue the point here. But necessary or no, during the anarchic interregnum it's hard to imagine Jews being able to leverage much in the way of political influence. We are weak externally, and we are weak internally, and that is a very scary position to be in no matter how you slice it.

UPDATE: This post was already so long, I forgot one more point that's probably pretty obvious -- the Democratic Party is going to have a nasty fight over Israel in the near future. To some extent it will be about policy, but I think much of it will rhetorically take the form of debates over a tactical blame-game regarding who is responsible for losing the 2024 election. On one side there will be those who say that blind, lockstep support for Bibi's war on Gaza cost Democrats key voting blocs and possibly the election, and that we need to purge the party of people who thought defending genocide was a higher priority than keeping the presidency. On the other side will be those who believe that radical performative edgelording about refusing to commit to opposing an existential threat to American democracy was recklessly irresponsible, and that anybody who indulged in such antics should be shot into the sun as de facto Trumpist collaborators. I don't know who will (or should) win that fight, but it's going to be terrible too.

And precisely because the fight will focus on electoral tactics and not policy, it also is going to primarily end up being about securing factional gains rather than trying to recraft an Israel/Palestine policy that is sensible, broad-based, and genuinely attentive to and protective of the valid interests, fears, and aspirations of Jews/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians alike. So even to the extent Democrats very much could use a genuine rethinking of our approach to Israel/Palestine -- one that recognizes that we're not going to snuggle Bibi into accepting Palestinian equality without swinging over into treating Jews and Israeli as inhuman invaders who need to be wiped off the map -- I think such efforts will be swamped by factional knife-fighting within the party.

We Failed

We failed.

Part of being in a democratic society is that we have a collective responsibility towards our fellows, and to the greater health of our democracy. "A republic, if you can keep it." And we failed. We encountered the most basic test of democracy imaginable since the Civil War -- how to respond to an outright insurrectionist force in the center of our political life -- and we failed.

The "we" is both broad and narrow -- it includes the American citizenry as a a whole, but also the more particular institutions that had more specified tasks centered around militating against and responding to the rise of fascism in this country. The media. The judiciary. The legal community. Law enforcement.  Some of these institutions I'm a part of, and so I include myself in all levels of the "we" who failed. But I'm not interested in assigning blame, I am just stating fact: We specifically failed, and then we, generally, failed.

There are so many who were failed yesterday, and I am wracked with guilt that we failed them. It's no good to say it is not my fault -- I know it mostly isn't -- but collective responsibility is the burden we share as members of a democratic polity, and that means that this failure lands on me as much as everyone. Part of the politics that won yesterday were that of "I got mine, so fuck you", and at the very least I refuse to indulge in that abandonment of responsibility. We should feel bad about those we've abandoned, left vulnerable, marginalized, and excluded. We did a bad thing.

Not that any of us should have any confidence as to which side of the line we'll find ourselves. The cruelties that are coming may not be distributed evenly, but they also won't track perfectly predictable patterns either. Certainly, I have little optimism that "Jewish professor who works on antisemitism" is going to be a fun social position to occupy for the next four years. Maybe I'll skate by unfazed, or maybe a hate campaign will drive me out of my job. Maybe my kid will enjoy his local preschool, or maybe my kid will get sick from avoidable illness because he wasn't allowed to get a vaccination. Who knows! Anything can happen, to any of us. And if it does, we can be absolutely assured that the Trump administration and the coalition that brought him to power will not care. They will not care if you thought yourself one of them, and they certainly won't care if you thought yourself one of us.

We will soon see (it's no doubt already starting) various stories and narratives explaining why exactly we failed, and who exactly is responsible for the failings. I mostly don't want to partake at this time (90% of them will be variations on "if only we did the things I was already urging us to do!"), but if I were to explain this outcome, it is the story reflected in this post: people were just tired of fighting against fascism, and decided to give in. They hope that if they just align themselves with the authoritarianism, they'll be left alone. They can live a boring, normal life under authoritarian rule. Even among the populations that seem most obviously targeted, there's a tendency to say "he ain't talkin' about me!" Why would he? I'm not a criminal, I'm not a threat, I'm just here living my life. The real risk is poking my head up, so better to keep it down and comply in advance.

That's part of the story, but I do want to echo the point made by others: that at root many, many Americans wanted this. They want the cruelty, they want the viciousness, they want the lawlessness, they want the insurrectionism. It may be (likely is) the product of a sort of naivete -- surely the leopards won't eat my face -- but we should take it seriously: the hurt and pain that is about to rain down on so many Americans (and so many others around the world) is desired. 

This is a self-imposed puzzle the media was never able to resolve: it insisted that we had to understand Trump voters, but then refused to actually understand them because doing so felt impolite, instead concocting a series of "respectable" stories about them ("economic anxiety") so as to avoid reckoning with what they actually want. The complaints of "media bias" against Trump voters is laughable: I'm never more sympathetic to Trumpers than when I'm reading about them in the New York Times, where all their grievances and hostility and hate are laundered through gentle cycles and explained as a rough-edged byproduct of the most understandable human needs and frailties. When that filter is removed and I encounter Trump backers directly, it is immediately obvious that this story of them somehow being coerced into hatred is nonsense. They want detention camps, they want to obliterate public health programs, they want schools to be ideological indoctrination centers, they want to be fed lurid conspiracies about the Jews and the Blacks and the Immigrants and the Communists, they want their charismatic leaders to break the law with impunity and they want their enemies to be harassed and thrown outside the protections of the constitutional order.  There isn't some alchemical process where "economic anxiety" explains and apologizes for this. This is what they want, and we should have enough respect for them and us to describe it honestly.

And it will be resilient -- far more resilient than I think even now we can comprehend.  They will laugh as the leopard eats their neighbor's face, and then some number of them will be stunned, not just that the leopard turns on them, but that the people they were laughing with a moment early keep on laughing as it eats their face. There is no actual solidarity here, just an enjoyment of the cruelty and enjoyment of finding oneself on the right side of the cruelty, and there is perverse power in that -- your buddy next to you might get betrayed in an instant and it won't move the needle an inch. They will keep laughing even when their fellows are being hurt, so certainly they will keep laughing straight through our marches and protests and rage. It is so, so hard to dislodge this cancer once it gets its claws into power, and it is so much worse when it obtains power the second time. From Hugo Chavez to Viktor Orban, "the second time is worse."

Because this time, there will be no guardrails. This time, the institutions are already in place to smash the dissidents. This time, losing is not an option. And this time, the Republican Party has already reeducated itself to comply utterly and without hesitation. I doubt Susan Collins will even bother to furrow her brow. There is not a single Republican at any elected office anywhere in America I trust to impose any check or limit on any Trump policy that does not personally affect them -- and I mean that with zero limitations. No matter how extreme, no matter how norm- or rule-breaking, no matter how cataclysmic, the Republican Party is poised to march in jack-booted lockstep. And again, in those rare moments where one single Republican does have a personal stake and a personal connection that prompts them to idiosyncratically step out, they will find themselves utterly and entirely alone. Nobody will join them, just as they will not join the next colleague down the row when that one finds their one issue they wish to speak out on. Every element of the governmental and political apparatus will have one and only one objective: to promote the interests of the authoritarian. That's what we are facing down.

It hurts to fail, when the price of failure is so steep. It hurts to have a vision of a better future, and witness it disintegrate with no clear plan of how to win it back. It hurts to care this deeply about the future of our democracy, and watch everything unravel. It hurts so much, I can almost sympathize with deciding ... not to care -- to keep one's head down, and just acquiesce to what is happening, in the hope of being left alone in contented apathy and ignorance.

But to be a responsible citizen means to resist that impulse. And on this day of catastrophic failure, that is one failure I will not accept from myself.

Resilient Fascism

I still haven't decided if I'm going to do my traditional liveblog of the election. It may just be too stressful. Plus, I have to teach an early-morning class tomorrow, and it would be bad if I stayed up all night tracking election returns (lol, like I have a choice).

While we're waiting for results to come in, I want to briefly comment on news abroad -- namely, that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has fired his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. It is yet another incident of capricious chaos meant to appease Netanyahu's furthest-right base, and is being greeted with yet another round of mass protests throughout Israel. And I can't help but think it is a premonition of what America will be like if Trump wins another term.

When I look at what's happening over there, what stands out to me is the resilience of the Israeli government -- and not in a good way. What's been striking about the current Israeli government is not just the blundering into crisis after crisis that has typified its time in office, but how it has managed to survive and endure them while barely budging. It has survived near-constant protests, brutally sagging popularity, a seemingly endless (now two-front!) war, complete abandonment of hostages, regular evidence of widespread corruption, and increasing international isolation, and has through all of it only deepened its commitment to the furthest-right fringes of its governing coalition. 

It's not that it's been able to accomplish all its heart's desires (the judicial coup continues to tread water), but it has hunkered itself down and proven nearly impossible to dislodge. Why isn't widespread public rage and scandal enough to bring down the government? Simple: because the people in government know that the minute they dismount the tiger they've been riding, they'll get devoured. So they bound about from desperate move to desperate move, breaking this rule, smashing that norm, all in complete defiance of the popular will, hoping to find a magic bullet that will forestall the inevitable day of reckoning. Chaos, dysfunction, unpopularity, public rage -- even in extreme doses none of it has proven enough to dislodge the authoritarian nightmare once it took root.

This isn't an Israel-only story -- I saw someone else making a similar observation about India -- but it is a grim harbinger of what will happen if Trump re-enters office. It was hard enough getting him out of office the first time. The second time around, he'll be even worse. It is beyond obvious he will take extreme, authoritarian measures to protect himself and to hurt his enemies, ones that will prove ruinously unpopular and will prompt widespread public protest. And it won't matter -- even leaving aside the myriad ways our "democratic" institutions do not reflect the democratic will, every incentive of Trump's ruling coalition will be to not respond to popular outrage, to not give an inch, to double-down at every moment. And the evidence from Israel suggests that this is a workable strategy -- when the fascists take power, their power is alarmingly resilient to public fury and terrifyingly immune to public outrage.

The first results should start appearing momentarily. I've spent all day on a "doom and bloom" cycle, but at this point we can only watch. I'm praying that America makes the right call, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Which Nuts Crack?

I like to keep a half eye on Senate, House, and gubernatorial polling trends at The Downballot (formerly Daily Kos Elections). There are quite a few swing state races that are certainly close, but seem to have mild Democratic advantages -- these include the Michigan and Pennsylvania Senate races, for instance. But there are also some swing state races where Democrats are running away with it -- Ruben Gallego looks set to smoke Kari Lake in Arizona, for instance; same with Josh Stein over Mark Robinson in the race for North Carolina Governor.

All of these races are occurring in tightly contested swing states. If anything, Arizona and North Carolina are more red leaning than are Michigan and Pennsylvania. So why are Lake and Robinson doing so poorly?

Obviously, the most straightforward answer is "they're both certified nutjobs." But the same statewide polls that have Lake and Robinson down by double-digits have Trump either tied or ahead. And I truly, honestly, cannot figure out what sort of person recognizes the nuttiness of a Kari Lake or a Mark Robinson but doesn't see it in Trump. What's the difference? What makes Trump's lunacy different from Lake's or Robinson's? What characterizes the voter who sees Lake or Robinson as different-in-kind from Trump?

Going Dark

The Washington Post has announced it will not be issuing an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, overruling a decision by the editorial board planning to endorse Vice President Harris. This follows a similar decision by the LA Times, both justified under the auspices of maintaining "neutrality", both actually made at the behest of billionaire owners who have significant financial stakes in staying in the good graces of the once- and potential-future president.

For the Post, it is a stunning abdication of duty and role by an outlet that operated under the mantra "democracy dies in darkness."

(The LA Times case has a slight wrinkle, in that the billionaire owner's daughter suggested in her own tweets that the non-endorsement was actually a commentary on the "genocide" in Gaza. While I suspect the owner's more pecuniary motives were driving the show, I'll just say that it should surprise no one that these "different" politics lead to the exact same place, and are profound exercises in cowardice in the exact same ways).

I remember the week Trump was elected, I was in a pedagogy class where new collegiate instructors were discussing how we should respond to the shocking news in our classroom. On this point, our professor was quite decisive: we had a job to do, and we should respond by doing our jobs. Since we were in a political scientist department, this didn't mean we necessarily ignored the events in the outside world -- politics were part of our ambit, after all. But we were not to pout, or cancel class, or anything of the sort. We had jobs to do, and we should do them.

The Post's choice today is the climax of a broader failure in our mainline news media to simply do its job in the face of shocking news. When Trump initially rose to power, the media's job was to report on him accurately. It instead viewed him as a fun little joke that could spike some ratings and inject some entertainment into the staid and boring world of politics. They saw their job as goosing readership, not informing the public. As the 2016 election approached, they chose to develop a truly unhealthy obsession with the absolute non-scandal of EMAILZ, to the exclusion of virtually every other issue. They saw their job as getting out in front of the candidate who "of course" was going to win, or of carrying out their own personal vendettas against Hillary Clinton.

This time around, we're going through the same thing. It is the media's job to accurately report on the frightening descent of Trump into a mix of babbling incoherence and unapologetic fascism. Instead, we get sanewashing -- express efforts to misreport what Trump actually says and does because rendering the copy accurately would make him look, well, look exactly as he is.

And that brings us to the non-endorsement developments. The media -- or the business "leaders" who own the relevant papers -- no longer sees Trump as a joke. They are scared of him. They know full well that his next term in office will be replete with recrimination against all he deems his enemies, and they do not want to fall on the wrong side of the naughty/nice list. I agree with those who say that the Post's decision is anticipatory compliance, but more than that I agree that it is a terrifying sign of the Putinization of American politics -- a billionaire class that knows the security of its position is entirely at the whim of dictator, and makes sure to cozy up to him lest their portfolio (or other things) start plummeting from great height.

All of this is no more complicated than a simple refusal by the media to do its job, in the most basic form imaginable. Some institutions are, as a matter of role, forbidden from wading into political controversies, but newspaper editorial pages are not one of them. The contention that a newspaper violates some precept of neutrality by having its editorial board issue an endorsement is beneath contempt; editorials are opinions by definition, they necessarily take a point of a view. When the media, in its professional judgment as observers of the political scene, decide that candidate A is a better pick for the position than candidate B, communicating that choice is doing one's job. Where the evidence shows that candidate B would be a disaster for democracy, rule of law, and the very continuation of the American project, all the more so.

Not every newspaper is failing in its job. But some are. The Washington Post was my hometown paper, it is the one I grew up with. It is bitterly disappointing to see it stoop to such a pathetic low.

Pictured: The entirety of the presidential endorsement by the Willamette Week

Do Republicans Care That Trump Admires Hitler?

The Atlantic's bombshell story this week was that Donald Trump expressed an admiration for Hitler, saying "I need the kind of generals Hitler had." This had been reported before, but the confirmation by former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly gave an extra boost of confirmation from Trump's inner-most circle.

How are Republicans responding to the news? In a variety of ways. Door #1, from the Trump campaign itself, is just to declare it all a lie:

Trump’s campaign categorically denied The Atlantic’s reporting and blamed Harris for encouraging Trump’s assassination. Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said Harris “continues to peddle outright lies and falsehoods that are easily disproven. The fact is that Kamala’s dangerous rhetoric is directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump and she continues to stoke the flames of violence all in the name of politics.”

I actually respect this response the most, since it at least concedes the premise that Trump being pro-Hitler is a bad development that should be shunned. 

Not every Republican agrees. Behind Door #2 is New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who said that Trump supporting Hitler is "baked-in to the vote at this point." In other words, Republicans already had figured Trump was a Hitler supporter and were fine with it. No surprises here.

And then finally, there's Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, who's response was to say "actually, Trump was making a good point!"

On Fox News, anchor Brian Kilmeade said Trump was justifiably frustrated by aides who refused to carry out orders they deemed illegal.

Kilmeade said, “I can absolutely see him go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever.”

"...or whatever," indeed. What sort of president wouldn't want generals who blindly follow executive orders to commit the most horrific atrocities humanity has ever witnessed? (Answer: the sort of president who isn't interested in replicating the most horrific atrocities humanity has ever witnessed).

Meanwhile, yesterday on Bluesky I snarked that I couldn't wait for the inevitable "Jonathan Greenblatt response that contains three paragraphs of effusive praise for Trump’s allyship towards the Jewish community sandwiching a vague gesture that 'this sort of rhetoric isn’t helpful.'" That drew off of this post which observed how Greenblatt's recent treatment of Trump has been defined by a fundamental trust in Trump as a true "ally of the Jews," the commitment to which he regrettably occasionally falls short of realizing.

So was my prediction on Greenblatt's response correct? Answer: We don't know, because as far as I can tell the ADL hasn't issued a statement on this news at all! What a sterling performance by America's preeminent antisemitism watchdog.

We Don't Know What a Fast Garland World Would've Looked Like

It is almost certain that Donald Trump is going to run out the clock on facing real legal consequences for his myriad 2020 election related crimes before the 2024 election occurs. Consequently, many are blaming Attorney General Merrick Garland for being too slow and cautious in his prosecution of Trump. By taking so much time before bringing his case, Garland enabled Trump's various delaying tactics -- aided, of course, by loyalist judges at both the trial level and Supreme Court -- to stretch the cases out until after election day. Had he moved faster and more aggressively, things would have been different.

Maybe. But the thing about alternate futures is that we can't live there; and if we did live there, we wouldn't know here. Suppose that Garland did move fast and aggressive on Trump right at the outset of Biden's term. And suppose that right-wing judges such as the current Supreme Court majority, or Judge Cannon, issued the same rulings that they did in our timeline -- providing broad immunity to Trump designed to shield him from legal accountability. I suspect that, in that timeline, there would be a lot blame cast at Garland for moving too quickly -- he rushed things, he let political expediency get in the way of methodically building a case, and so he gave the courts an excuse to slow things down or even to cast his investigation as a witch-hunt rather than a genuinely legalistic inquiry. Had he been more temperate, things would've gone differently

Now, since we live in our timeline, we know that a more temperate and methodical approach would not have led to a success story. But the point is not just that it's always easy to speak with the benefit of hindsight. It is that we actually don't know what alternative paths-not-taken would look like, and if we did know we wouldn't know what was happening in our path. This is a ubiquitous problem, and while it is entirely reasonable given what we know now to say that Garland made the wrong judgment, it is not hard to imagine a very plausible timeline where Garland made the judgment we (in the prime timeline) say is clearly "right" and it is widely viewed (in the alternate timeline) as a terrible and eminently avoidable miscalculation.

Jonathan Greenblatt Trusts Donald Trump

Yesterday, I flagged one of the scarier entries in my "Things People Blame the Jews For" series when Donald Trump baldly asserted that if he lost, it would be the Jews' fault. It was a clear foundation for a "stabbed in the back" narrative that puts Jews at tremendous risk in an environment where far-right antisemitism increasingly isn't all that "far", but has penetrated every nook and cranny of the modern conservative movement.

Unsurprisingly, these comments were met with outrage by many Jewish institutions and leaders. That's appropriate and well-earned. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads is a menace to the American Jewish community, and Jews have never hesitated to identify it as exactly what it is. But in that context, I have to flag the particular statement by ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt, which stood out for its unimaginable fecklessness, particularly from the putative leading voice against antisemitic hate. Here's what Greenblatt wrote:

Here we go again.

I appreciate that former President Trump called out antisemitism and recognized its historic surge. 

He's right on that. 

But the effect is undermined by then employing numerous antisemitic tropes and anti-Jewish stereotypes — including rampant accusations of dual loyalty.

Preemptively blaming American Jews for your potential election loss does zero to help American Jews. It increases their sense of alienation in a moment of vulnerability when right-wing extremists and left-wing antizionists continually demonize and slander Jews. This is happening on college campuses, in public places, everywhere. There are threats on all sides, period.

Let’s be clear, this speech likely will spark more hostility and further inflame an already bad situation. Calling out hate is important, but I can’t overstate how the message is diluted and damaged when you employ hate to make your point.

What is striking about this is how it bends over backwards to assume Trump is actually an ally of the Jews. He's a good guy! He's our friend! It opens, incredibly enough, by lauding Trump for having "called out antisemitism", and closes by praising him for "calling out hate". The framing is entirely centered around a premise that Trump is trying his level best to help the Jews, but is sadly undercutting his own best efforts by ill-chosen rhetoric or misplaced blame.

This is the theme. His efforts against antisemitism are "undermined" by his antisemitic tropes -- not that his antisemitic tropes are promoting exactly the sort of antisemitism he intends to promote. His setting up Jews to take the blame "does zero to help American Jews" -- again, assuming the goal is to help American Jews and he's failing, not that he's trying to threaten American Jews and succeeding. There's the de rigueur (for Greenblatt) pivot to taking a shot at left-wing antizionists who, whatever their sins, have nothing to do with this conversation. And finally, he concludes by saying that Trump's efforts are "diluted" and "damaged" by his forays into hate -- again, a framing that takes as a given that Trump is intending to be a friend of the Jews but is inexplicably hurting his own cause.

This is a framing I've seen regularly in how Greenblatt talks about Trump's antisemitism (and Elon Musk, for that matter). And it stands in obvious contrast to how he speaks of perceived antisemitism on the left -- say, from campus pro-Palestine encampments -- whom, it should be said, also frame their actions as in pursuit of a broader paradigm of opposing bigotry and inequality, antisemitism included. Needless to say, antizionist protesters accused of antisemitism are not given Trump's courtesy treatment of a compliment sandwich. One cannot imagine Greenblatt opening his remarks about antisemitic invective in collegiate encampments by frontloading his appreciation that they "called out antisemitism." One can scarcely fathom him framing his criticisms of antisemitic tropes or actions in terms of the protesters "undermining" their attempts at showing solidarity with Jews, or "doing zero to help" the Jews on campus, or "diluting" their anti-racist message, or anything else that suggests that the protesters' antisemitism is some sort of accidental stumble at odds with their true intention of being allies of the Jews.

Now one could say that the reason Greenblatt doesn't speak of the campus protesters in those terms is that he does not see any basis to credit their self-avowed bona fides as opponents of antisemitism. They have not earned such trust in the face of their actions. Leave aside whether that's a fair dismissal; leave aside whether he's right in what he adjudges antisemitic at all. The point is that if the defense of Greenblatt not giving the anti-Zionist left praise and gratitude before criticizing their usage of antisemitic tropes is that he does not believe they have earned Jews' trust, then it follows the reason he's so gentle with Donald Trump is that Greenblatt believes Trump is fundamentally trustworthy. I can think of no more damning indictment of his judgment, as a putative leader in the fight against antisemitism, than that. And that colossal failure of judgment is ultimately why Greenblatt has proven himself utterly incapable of effectively rallying against the rapidly rising tide of antisemitism overtaking the American right. 

As an organization, the ADL, I have to reemphasize, has many people doing absolutely invaluable work on antisemitism. They have some incredible staff who are doing amazing things. I still do not see any other group in the American Jewish space capable of replacing what the ADL does for us.

But as the ADL's head, Greenblatt has proven, time and time again, that when it comes to Donald Trump and mainstream conservative antisemitism he cannot rise to the demands of the moment. Ultimately, despite all the evidence, despite all the history, despite all the hatred, Jonathan Greenblatt fundamentally trusts Donald Trump to be a friend of the Jews. So long as he cleaves to that nightmarish delusion, he will never oppose Trump's bigotry with the moral clarity and decisiveness the Jewish people need.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXXI: Trump Losing

Back in 2020, I suggested that Jews needed -- in the event that Trump lost his re-election bid -- to prepare for a "stabbed in the back" narrative. The fact that Jews consistently vote Democratic, I observed, would assuredly not make Republicans reconsider their arrogant assumption that they're the best friends of the Jews. The fact that Jews consistently vote Democratic would instead make Republicans fly into paroxysms of rage at the fact that the ungrateful Jews don't recognize what wonderful friends Republicans are.

Well, it took a little longer, but come 2024 Donald Trump is expressly laying this gauntlet down:

Speaking at antisemitism event on Thursday, Donald Trump doubled down on attacks on American Jews — those who do not vote for him.

He suggested that Jews would be to blame if he loses in November. He also said American Jews who vote for Democrats harm American interests, in an escalation of his standard rhetoric.

[....]

“I will put it to you very simply and gently. I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right, because you’re putting yourself in great danger, and the United States hasn’t been treated right,” he said. “The Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss if I’m at 40%. I mean, think of it, that means 60% voting for Kamala.”

Obviously, this sort of "the Jews betrayed us" narrative is extraordinarily dangerous, -- the stabbed-in-the-back narrative was central to how the Nazis whipped up an antisemitic frenzy that ultimately led to the Holocaust. And it's particularly scary given a MAGA base that's already primed towards White supremacism and extreme right-wing nationalism, and has been increasingly open in accepting and promoting antisemites of all stripes (oh hi, NC GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson, I didn't see you I totally did see you there, because the revelation that you called yourself a "Black Nazi" was only the latest iteration of an antisemitic record that was already widely known when you were nominated!).

The comments came at an event titled "Fighting Antisemitism". This might seem ironic, but I believe observers were missing the point: It's "Fighting Antisemitism" like "Fighting Irish" -- the promise of a more pugnacious, in-your-face style of antisemitism. Not limp-wristed Genteel Antisemitism or bookish and wordy Academic Antisemitism, but Fighting Antisemitism. That's the MAGA way.

Going Fishing

The wave of terror Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have unleashed upon the Haitian community in Ohio continues to crest. I am by no means the first to observe the similarities between how they are talking about Haitians and how Nazis spoke of Jews at the outset of their rise to power. That's strong language, and yet it is terrifyingly warranted. We are seeing something that is, in fact, not at all unprecedented.

But there is a particular aspect of the racism we're seeing here that particularly resonated with me as a Jew -- the frenetic scouring to find anything and everything that "proves" the conspiracies right, or at least justified. In the Ohio case, this reached a comical (if anything about this could be comical) apex when Christopher Rufo offered a bounty to prove the "Haitians in Springfield are eating cats" conspiracy correct and then started crowing over a video of not-Haitians in Toledo Dayton grilling chicken. But other examples abound (although at least J.D. Vance had the "decency" to admit he was simply making things up). Far, far too many Republicans response to blatant acts of hatred is to cast far and wide for something that makes the hatred feel palatable.

As a reasonably public-facing Jewish professor, I frequently idly wonder if I'll be targeted by some sort of antisemitic attack. Mostly, it doesn't happen. Occasionally, it does; though in my case never in such a fashion that would explode into the public view. But if an "incident" did happen -- someone graffitied my office door, for instance -- I am absolutely sure that a certain cadre of online folk would immediately begin pouring over my collection of writings to find anything they possibly could to explain why I'm a legitimate target. That knowledge -- less that something could happen, and more that if it did I'd be the one scrutinized to hell and back, with the most gimlet eye and uncharitable gaze -- is perhaps what stresses me the most. I do not think I am alone amongst Jews in feeling this way; hyperpoliced at every turn to justify ex post facto a judgment that has been handed down in advance.

By all objective accounts, the Haitian community in Springfield has been a boon to an erstwhile struggling city. But they are not universal saints, any more than anyone else is -- if one places them under a powerful enough lens, one will of course be able to find something or someone butting up against the social compact (though not, I'd wager, stealing and eating pets). No group can maintain a perfect record under that sort of scrutiny. And the knowledge that one is under that microscope is just exhausting. It's exhausting right alongside the more direct anxiety and misery of being directly subjected to acts of hate and bigotry.

The people responsible for this have no shame, so I won't bother to say they should be ashamed. But no good person should feel anything other than contempt for this latest dose of bigotry.

Couch Fucking is not the Same as Cat Eating

Try explaining that headline in 2019!

Despite it featuring in Donald Trump's disastrous debate performance on Tuesday, Republicans appear to be committing to "immigrants are eating your pets!" as a central part of their campaign message. What a wild time to live in.

One thing I've heard in response to this is that "cat eating" is just the GOP version of the "J.D. Vance fucks couches" meme that bounced around the liberal blogosphere a few weeks ago. In either case, the argument went, it was a "humorous" falsehood that speaks to an overall decay in our informational climate, and so if you're uncomfortable with the one, you have no grounds to justify the other.

This comparison seems too cute. For starters, as others have noted, one extremely important difference between the two memes is that nobody is worried about extremists deciding to go out and terrorize Ikea shoppers based on misinformation about sofa sex acts occurring therein. That alone is enough to work as a distinction.

But also, the more fundamental difference is that nobody -- left, right, or center -- ever purported to believe J.D. Vance actually had sex with couches. It was self-conscious absurdism from the get-go. If there was a progressive out there who earnestly, genuinely believed J.D. Vance copulated with a couch, that person would be viewed with contempt by everyone else sharing the meme -- it was not meant to be believed, and there was no effort to make it something that would be believed.

By contrast, conservatives can't quite decide whether they believe the "cat eating" stories are real or not. The neo-Nazis who initially promulgated the claim certainly hoped and expected people would believe it. And Vance himself described the potential truth of the claim in deliberately waffling fashion "It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false" -- a formulation which indicates a comparably strong possibility that these "rumors" are in fact true. Comparing the two "stories" is like saying an Onion article and 2024 election trutherism are both examples of "misinformation".

What we're seeing from the right here isn't self-conscious absurdism but rather a sort of empirical edgelording -- dancing around the edge of "do I believe it/am I joking" to try and get the best of all worlds. If the listener is shocked, then they're just messing around; if the listener buys in, well, then they're being totally serious. People often cite Sartre's remarks on the way Nazis like to "play" with words, but the comparison that immediately jumped to my mind is Nelly suggesting to a female friend that he has a "pole in the basement". The shocked "what?" from said friend is met with "I'm just kiddin' ... Unless you're gon' do it." It's not a serious statement, except for those who take it seriously. 

The irony, though, is that precisely because Republicans can't fully commit to "cat eating" being obviously made up, it can't serve the function they want from it -- which is to be the counter to the "Republicans are weird" narrative Democrats have been so effectively impressing upon them (and of which couch fucking was a satirical encapsulation of). They're hoping for "you think we're weird -- well you eat cats!" The problem, though, is that the sort of person who actually thinks (or even is unsure) whether gangs of immigrants are abducting and devouring household pets in Ohio is ... a weird person! That is a weird thing to think, and it comes off as a weird thing to think. When Donald Trump publicly promotes cat-eating conspiracies in a debate, the response isn't "ooh, what a great zinger", it's "what on earth is he babbling about?" If you're not already in the fever swamp, it's a line that just reinforces that Trump is profoundly abnormal. He actually seems to believe too many things that regular Americans, at a gut-level, view as ridiculous.

Today's Republicans may be alarmingly good at stoking hate and fear and xenophobia. But they are very bad at avoiding being weird. Their commitment to spreading absurd nonsense about immigrants eating pets, more than anything else, just accentuates that weirdness.

There But For the Grace of God

Over at the bad place, Batya Ungar-Sargon is mainlining copium to explain Donald Trump's debate performance.

My take on the debate is that Harris did well because she's a factory settings Democratic apparatchik, and the main skill for doing that well is one she's good at: acting, pretending the neoliberal (or now neoconservative!) agenda of the Democratic elite is your own,…

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 11, 2024

Ah yes, that explains it. Donald Trump is just too pure authentic for this world. His raw untamable independent streak just couldn't be corralled to please "the elites" ("on either side"!). Harris gets "if anything, she was too prepared" version 2.0. It's amazing how hard one has to work to avoid the Occam's Razor explanation* that Trump sounded like a madman because he is one; that Trump's inability to articulate a concept of a plan for America beyond crude xenophobic nativism is because he lacks one.

Batya's descent into utter madness brain worms territory (which has been ongoing for years, including being a key player making Newsweek the house journal for the alt-right and antisemitic White supremacists and parroting the crudest Putinist propaganda about how funding of "Zelensky's War" is why Americans don't have manufacturing jobs) legitimately frightens me, because I don't know what zombie bit her and so I don't know how to ensure it doesn't bite me too. My main inference right now is "don't become opinion editor for a Jewish media outlet", because it was her experience at the Forward that seemed to drive her into the arms of madness, but I'm terrified that if exposed to the wrong trauma I too might go from being a reasonable intelligent and thoughtful commentator to a true believer in every fever swamp inanity imaginable.

I'm not really exposed to Batya these days, since she's not on BlueSky. There's a line on BlueSky that it's an echo chamber, and that's something I worry about too -- isn't it important that I be exposed to more views like Batya's, to ensure that I'm not cocooning myself in an epistemic bubble? The problem, though, is that while when I expose myself to the Batya's of the world I may pat myself on the back for being a good, virtuous epistemic citizen willing to challenge myself with views-not-my-own, in reality exposing myself to the likes of Batya feels less challenging than it is confirmatory. Reading her takes only makes me feel incredibly relieved that I don't have her takes. She is anti-persuasive. 

If the point of reading diverse views is to have that "huh, I never thought of it that way" moment, reading these people makes me go "huh, turns out that the caricatured mental model I have of brain-rotted right-wingers isn't a caricature at all." They're saying exactly what I expect them to say; there are no surprises. I'm unconvinced that confirming that instinct is actually healthier, even along the axis of remaining open-minded to divergent opinions.

* Of course, this circle also struggles mightily to understand what an "Occam's Razor" explanation is.

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi got bit as well.

UPDATE 2x: The Taibbi piece, in particular, reminded me of an exchange I had with an old high school buddy of mine who sadly has also gone off the deep end. He posted a collage of various media outlets all reporting on the travails of Twitter/X under Elon Musk -- that it had cratered in value and become a haven for bigots and extremists. He decided that the fact that similar reporting was appearing across many different media outlets could only mean one thing: a conspiracy by the legacy media to collude in order to slander Elon Musk's reputation. I sarcastically wondered if he saw a similar conspiracy in the fact that every Atlas will tell you the capital of Norway is Oslo, or every science textbook will inform you that the Earth rotates around the Sun. 

He said "I bet you think you're so smart." I assured him that I never dreamed that my observation required any intelligence whatsoever.

Does the NYT Know What a "Progressive" Is?

The NYT reports on the integration of Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. into the Trump campaign. This is news, though its essentially news that "conservative cranks support the supreme conservative crank." But instead, the NYT frames it this way:

Donald J. Trump plans to name his former rival, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, a onetime Democrat, as honorary co-chairs of a presidential transition team that will help him select the policies and personnel of any second Trump administration, according to a campaign senior adviser.

Mr. Kennedy ended his independent campaign for president and endorsed Mr. Trump on Friday. Both he and Ms. Gabbard spent most of their public life as progressive Democrats, and Mr. Kennedy had started his presidential run as a Democrat, before renouncing his party and running as an independent instead. Ms. Gabbard left the Democratic Party after her 2020 presidential run and has rebranded herself as a celebrity among Trump’s base of support.

Excuse me?

Until recently, RFK Jr. was known for two things (aside from his name). First, water-related environmental causes; second, being an anti-vaxx nut. The former I'll agree is a progressive issue. The latter ... well, I guess there was a time when anti-vaxxers were partially associated with the crunchy granola left (you know, before it stopped being funny and started being a Serious Issue of Principle We All Must Respect). But this isn't exactly the profile of a progressive champion.

Yet Gabbard is even worse -- she's been widely recognized as a conservative for years! Anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, a friend of dictators and authoritarians the world over ... what, exactly, is supposed to be her "progressive" rep? The answer is that there continues to be a small number of "progressives" (and, I guess, NYT writers) who are absurdly easy to dupe by anyone who makes some vague "anti-establishment" (especially "anti-war") rumblings. But aside from that, nobody actually ever thought that Tulsi Gabbard was any kind of progressive -- she has always been in a class of her own.

And the thing is -- Democratic voters have made this conclusion very obvious, by emphatically rejecting both Gabbard and RFK Jr. every time they tried to hop onto the national stage. Their defeats were not situations where the "progressive" faction of the party happened to get outvoted by more moderate or establishment cadres (compare, say, Bernie Sanders). RFK and Gabbard both failed to get any discernable support from any substantial wing of the Democratic electorate -- left, right, or center. Progressive Democrats didn't see either as progressive choices, they saw them for what they were -- conspiratorial right-wing cranks. And now they've found their natural home alongside Trump. No news there.

Antisemitism in Oregon, Minnesota, and Beyond

I'm heading to Eugene tomorrow to do two events on antisemitism and Islamophobia at the University of Oregon (one Wednesday evening, one Thursday morning). Both events will be with Hussein Ibish, someone who I've long admired and am thrilled to collaborate with on this endeavor.

So what's going on in the antisemitic America this week? Well, the Minnesota GOP is trying to nominate Royce White to take Amy Klobuchar's Senate seat, in spite (or because) of him criticizing "the Jewish elite" and claiming that Jews use the Holocaust "to provide a victimhood cover for their own corrupt practices." It will shock no one to learn he is a Kanye West defender ("They called Kanye West antisemitic because he was pushing a Black Republican or Conservative message wrapped in the gospel."). And while sometimes the story of these far-right antisemitic GOP pols is that they decide to merge hating Jews with loving Israel, White is very much a hater of both: Israel is, he says, "the lynchpin of the New World Order."

In general, while there's a lot more antisemitism in today's GOP than many give it, er, credit for, Minnesota really does seem to stand out from the pack for the regularity with which antisemites emerge as top-level Republican politicos.

That said, while I think White is DOA against Klobuchar (who has throttled far more serious opponents than he), I am very idly curious to see whether he makes inroads amongst the "uncommitted" cadre that (unlike in some states) did seem to perform disproportionately well against Biden in Minnesota. I think the lefty complaint "Biden is worse than Trump on Israel" (or even "Biden and Trump are the same on Israel") is wildly off-base, it is actually arguable that if your only criteria is "who hates Israel the most", White is "better" than Klobuchar. For people looking for a permission structure, White's status as an African-American man who led racial justice protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder certainly helps. Moreover, the Muslim community in America is not as liberal as people sometimes think, and if there is a contingent of, say, the Somali Muslim community in Minnesota that is really committed to Palestine uber alles, well, this race arguably presents a genuinely interesting choice.

Again, I think that Klobuchar will win quite handily. But it wouldn't surprise me if there were some inroads in communities where Republicans historically have struggled. As I've said before, antisemitism is a major growth opportunity for the GOP in minority communities (not because minorities are especially antisemitic, but because minorities most likely to defect to the GOP are in fact disproportionately prone to be antisemitic), and by accident or intentionally they're starting to realize it.

Oh, and Donald Trump is promising a "unified Reich" if he's elected. So there's that too.

What To Make of Trumpist "Genocide Joe" Chants

Yesterday, political observers witnessed the seemingly-odd phenomenon of a bunch of Trump supporters at one of his rallies chanting "genocide Joe" as the former President spoke on current goings-on with Israel, Palestine, and Iran. "Genocide Joe" is a term used generally by pro-Palestinian leftists who think President Biden is complicit in what they deem a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. So why were Trumpists echoing the chant, given the widespread view that Trump would be an even more full-throated and brutal backer of Israeli policies towards Palestinians?

First, I'll give the obvious answer and the one that I think is right: Trump and Trumpists relate to "genocide Joe" on no deeper of a level than "this is an anti-Biden chant by people who hate Biden, and which seems to tweak off Biden supporters." There's no substance here, no evidence of some important policy shift. The instinctual "let's go Brandon"-ness of it all, and that alone, is enough to make it appealing to Trumpists whose politics run no deeper than Cleek's Law.

That being said, there is something to be said here about the possible injection points of pro-Palestinian politics into the modern conservative movement in general and Trumpism in particular.  There's a superficial consilience, of course, between the claims by more normie libs that the "genocide Joe" leftists are functionally pro-Trump, and the imagery of actual Trump rally-goers adopting the chant. And I also think that the growth of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian sentiments coming out of the hard right (which comprises, of course, an influential segment of Trump's base) is still being underestimated -- it is a burbling movement that will stay largely under the surface right up until the moment it isn't. 

But it's also worth highlighting something more basic: Trump is really impressionable. Like, almost comically so. He is so devoid of substance that his politics are basically that of a Skinner box rat: he just gravitates towards whatever he feels garners him adulation and/or that which feels painful to his enemies. To that end, it's often occurred to me that one could probably exert an unreasonable amount of influence over Trump's political trajectory just by priming him with the right leading interview questions: "The people sure do love you when you do X!" "Isn't it terrible how Biden and the Democrats are doing Y?" Fill in any X and Y, and I'm pretty confident you could elicit public responses from Trump talking about the greatness of X and the horrors of Y. 

It's no wonder that Trump heard his adoring fans chant "genocide Joe" and immediately agreed with them: "They’re not wrong, they’re not wrong. He’s done everything wrong." Everything can found in that simple passage: the people who love him are right, Biden's done everything wrong. "Genocide Joe" is being chanted by the people who love him; it is a chant that communicates that Biden is doing wrong; and that's all it takes to earn an endorsement.

It's one reason why I think even relatively conservative Jews are idiots if they think Trump is a reliable friend. He's not a reliable friend to anyone, he's far too mercurial for that. And likewise, it does make me think that if the right people manage to whisper the right things into his ear at the right time -- give him the relevant positive feedback loops, make that lizard-brain develop the right set of associations -- one really could see Trump adopt a very different tone on Israel and Palestine than what we've seen so far.

Art Maven Roundup

All of the sudden, I've been on an art kick. The below image is a silkscreen I recently purchased from DC-based artist Halim Flowers. Flowers was convicted of felony murder as a juvenile and sentenced to two life terms. He was released after serving 22 years following statutory reforms aimed a juvenile offenders who had received life sentences, and now is showing in galleries around the world.

Pictured: "Audacity to Love (IP) (Blue)" by Halim Flowers. The colors are meant to be reminiscent of the Israeli and Palestinian flags (blue and white, and red, white, and green).

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Trump continues to show his contempt for American Jews, saying any Jew who doesn't support him "hates their religion" (and Israel).

An in-depth story about a White supremacist who was elected to city council in Enid, Oklahoma, and the recall campaign to try and remove him.

Given the well-covered softness in Biden's support in the Muslim community, it seems suicidal to me for Democrats to give into the repulsive Islamophobic attacks holding up the confirmation of Third Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Adeel Mangi (the story indicates that Biden has remained rock-solid in backing his confirmation, but there may be some misgivings in the Senate Democratic caucus).

Writing on the sudden "heterodox" support for revisionist accounts justifying George Floyd's murder, Radley Balko flags what has been obvious for a long time: as much as this cadre likes to bleat about respecting truth, free-thinking, and rationality, it is as if not more beholden to ideologically-convenient narratives at the expense of reality. Pretty much everyone on the internet has been sharing this with their own story of the alt-center blowing past truth in order to push conservative grievance politics; mine was watching them stand in unblinking support of a hit piece on California's Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum even after it was revealed the author completely fabricated the inclusion of a seemingly-damning antisemitic quote.

Interesting retrospective on the Israeli Black Panthers in JTA.

The Supreme Court's frosty reception to the contention that government officials privately lobbying social media companies to take down misinformation is a First Amendment violation is the latest suggestion that the Court is finally losing patience with the regular drumbeat of insane legal theories emanating out of hyper-conservative Fifth Circuit.