The Trumpists using bogus claims of antisemitism as a cudgel for destroying American universities is simply another case of the bully playing "stop hitting yourself" while punching the skinny kid with his own fist. It is petty sadism, but also the destruction of one of the things that truly made America great.
But the MAGAts care more about making the Jews suffer than they care about making America great again. And they know -- as we know -- that the American research university stands pretty high on the list of things that have been Good For The Jews.
So they pretend that Columbia University -- the home of Fritz Stern, Richard Hofstadter, and a thousand other Jewish intellectuals -- must be destroyed in the name of fighting antisemitism. We know they are lying, and they know that we know, but the shamelessness is part of the display of power.
Your mention of how antisemitism can be used to cement an alliance between the masters and the proles makes me think about the attack by Silicon Valley billionaires on "PMCs", i.e. the alleged "professional managerial class." It had not occurred to me that this too might tap into antisemitic currents, but now I suspect there is at least some overlap.
I can see why you struggled with this and got it out later than you wished. But I want to explicitly thank you for your struggles and tell you that at least for my money, it was worth your effort. This is extremely persuasive. I admire the comprehensive way in which you addressed virtually every issue that has come to my mind about these related Topics, and the order in which you lay them out and the way you describe them is very cogent. I will just follow up with a few of my Pet cranky thoughts. First of all, there are the court Jews who are running all over the place like bizarro Woody Allen characters. I think first of all of Alan Dershowitz, who has totally degraded himself And continues to jump at every chance to dive deeper into the cesspool. Also, Steven Miller, who I’m sure thinks of himself as an intellectual. He feels to me most like the Jewish leaders in the early Soviet Secret Service, who were instrumental in getting rid of the Ukrainian Property owners, and then who were in intern purged and murdered by Russian nationals. Another court two before there was a court was Trump‘s attorney during the impeachment, I think his name was David Shane, with an ostentatious wearing of the small yarmulke and well known need to miss Sessions during the Sabbath. These are just a few who come obviously to my mind. I am going to share your post with my friends/victims, and again will urge them to subscribe to your sub stack as I do.
"...the court Jews who are running all over the place ... I think first of all of Alan Dershowitz, .... Also, Steven Miller,..."
Yes, very much so. These individuals have done immense damage.
But, don't forget the Jewish groups claiming to protect Jewish students on campuses who have enabled the destruction of the universities by giving the Trumpists the pretexts that they needed.
Was there any antisemitism on American campuses? Yes; minor and scattered; not much more than an inconvenience in the big scheme. In retrospect, maybe it would have been wiser to continue handling this as an internal matter? Did they really think that they would protect Jewish students by calling in the Cossacks? By calling in the Storm Troopers? Because that's what they did. And the results have been predictable.
If anyone believes Trump attacked universities out of a genuine concern for persecuted Jews, I've got some beautiful oceanfront property in Arizona to sell them.
First, early Italian fascism was not the only brand of pre-war philo-Semitic fascism. I'm thinking of 1930's Japan. The militarists bought into most of the anti-semitic stereotypes, but thought that they were good things, which Japan should emulate. Goodman & Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind. (This only strengthens your thesis.)
Second, I don't think that Christianity has much to do with Christian nationalism. Christianists use the Bible to confirm their prior beliefs, not to form them. The fascists' would have combined Israel-worship and fear of a conspiratorial globalist (((elite))) even if the Book of Revelation never became canon. Israelis are the unapologetic ethnonationalist wog-bashers than American fascists aspire to be.
" Israelis are the unapologetic ethnonationalist wog-bashers than [that?] American fascists aspire to be."
I am not comfortable signing on to the claim that "Israelis" (which ones? how many?) are "unapologetic ethnonationalist wog-bashers". Unless your point is that this is how some American fascists would like to see Israel -- both as monolithic and as racist.
Perhaps your claim could be rephrased, "American fascists imagine that Israel is composed of the kind of un. eth. w-b's that they themselves aspire to be"?
You're quite right--I phrased it sloppily. I should have used some variant of "American fascists perceive …"
But this perception is based on some reality. Israeli domestic politics is pretty gamy these days. My daily dose of Haaretz is as dispiriting as it is necessary.
Seems to me the antisemitic trajectory of the movement is baked into its economic program, on Postonean grounds: the proposal to reconstitute the Fordist lifeworld cannot possibly be delivered on and the vulgar concretist and 'art of the deal' personalist premises of the movement can only metabolise such failures by anthropomorphising the abstract dimension of capital. There's nothing Jews qua Jews can do to fundamentally alter that trajectory.
There was a disturbing observation in one Ross Douthat’s columns on Iran that it was imperative that Trump’s Iran policy succeed because if Trumpism was perceived to be a failure there was a lot worse waiting in the wings of the conservative movement. Great! Thanks!
In the end, where does this leave liberal Jews who care about the well being of both themselves and their co-religionists who only through the accidents of history ended up in Israel rather than the US? Blithe binationalism given the difficulties of such in Europe doesn't seem right. Nor does Ginsberg's suggestion: https://www.independent.org/store/book/the-new-american-anti-semitism/ BTW, I think regardless of what he calls himself Daryl Cooper 100% merits the label of anti-semite.
Yes, as one Jew now receiving the very unwanted fatal embrace of Trump, I concur with this essay. I have long been distressed by Netanyahu's divisively equating whatever he thought was good for Israel with the American Right--and now we have the uproar on college campuses as frightened administrations squash the Jews into the special protection sector previously reserved for people of color and sexual variations (a set-up I have always viewed as problematic and not the best way to offer protection)--all the while serious university research (which many Jews have been involved in) is compromised in the name of Trump's faux crusade against antisemitism. That is all one sort of toxicity--and then there is the other sort of toxicity: the oblique, highly misinformed or twisted, conspiracy-laced bad-mouthing of Jews/Israel by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens--those two, wearing their Christian armor, recently outraged by Israel's bombing of a church in Gaza which attacked their fellow Christians (which angered me as well, for other reasons than theirs)--this by two people who (to my knowledge) never spared a word of concern over the oppression or attacks of Middle Eastern Christians in the Arabo-Turkish-Islamic world.
I am daily distressed by this multifaceted mess--"relieved" only by occasional bouts of surrealism. One such came my way this week as I learned that a group of American White Supremacists are setting up a "settlement" in Arkansas which will be exclusive for Whites only (Jews, too, are not welcome here). The purpose, the "settlers" proclaim, is to protect their race and its way of life in an America they view disintegrating under the influence of the dreaded "Other". They claim that "hundreds more worldwide have paid for membership" (!)--and consider this settlement as only the first of many such. See "‘Return to the Land’: White supremacists building whites-only settlement in Arkansas: Sky News visits 40-member community that claims its classification as a Private Members Association allows it to circumvent civil rights legislation--no Jews, LGBTQ individuals, followers of non-European faiths" (https://www.timesofisrael.com/return-to-the-land-white-supremacists-building-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas/) - and see also this video: "Inside 'Return to the Land': The group making a whites-only community in Arkansas" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBYBwILYTpM ). The reason I find this comic relief of a bitter sort is that these "White settlers", consciously or not, seem to be borrowing the settlement enterprise idea of Jewish Messianic fanatics in Israel's occupied territories--in other words, "hate the Jews (who are always all equated as a homogenous unit)--but take their practice (even where settling is contested by many of world Jewry)".
If I can push some cautious optimism, it seems to me that we are reaching a turning point in "the manipulated enthusiasms of mobs" that social media allowed. Candace Owens is being sued by Brigitte Macron, Blake Lively is doing a good job exposing the inner workings of pop culture manufactured online smear campaigns, the pro-Israel hasbara ecosystem is being forced to reckon with a famine it claimed didn't exist, the MAGA movement is in a major hangover over the Epstein files, Trump's friendship and the fact that Trump *is* now the deep state. Something in the trust many people had for social media figures and for influencers is starting to break - the idea that a lot of it is misleading and manufactured - and that there are merits to traditional media and journalistic ethics is starting to go through.
Now this may not be enough, nor fast enough. And we're in uncharted territory when it comes to knowing what will happen when the ceasefire finally is achieved in Gaza, that the dust settles and that what actually happened can be documented more fully.
I hope you can turn this essay into a publishable article for citation. It hits the nail right on the head of the so-called "Jewish question". I am writing an extended analysis on the historical roots of the present political crisis in the United States, the abstract thesis being that this crisis arises directly out of the State as an ancien régime, rather than from "society".
I had forgotten all about the figure of the "court Jew", despite having, almost by accident, encountering the "King's Jews" in the course of my research into feudal medieval England in the 12th and 13th centuries. At that time Jews could only enter and remain in England with the permission of the Crown, where they were relied upon both to make loans to the lesser nobility and as a conveniently squeezable source of funds for the Crown itself. Jews were effectively captives of the Crown.
Hence the "King's Jews" became an antisemitic sore point in the Baron's Rebellions of the 13th century that gave rise to both Magna Carta and the earliest English Parliaments, while the Crown stubbornly defended "their Jews" until the 1290's, when Edward I finally acquiesced in their expulsion, because he needed his barons for the projected conquest of Wales and Scotland, and also because the enormous growth of feudal commerce in that century rendered the King's Jews as inadequate, especially as they came to be replaced by the far more wealthy "Lombards" of Italy.
Hence the very foundations of "English liberty" have antisemitic roots!
Here in the UK we have seen the realignment, along Naomi Klein’s diagonal axis, of the conservative Jewish establishment and the new hard/far-right populists.
It reminds me of speaking to a Holocaust survivor on why he chose to settle here over taking what was left of his family to what would soon become the state of Israel.
He said that many Zionists had little but contempt for those who had “subjected themselves” to their own annihilation.
We need to think more broadly, like John and others, to see our world for what it is and how it did so.
Gans puts into words, sentences & paragraphs the tangled thoughts spinning in my brain. His analysis should be widely shared, even if a reader doesn’t agree with every word or wants to add to his analysis
I really appreciate this analysis and want to say, up front, that I stopped subscribing a bit ago when you took a break and re-subbed now, in part, due to this piece.
One thought I had that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere in the comments:
“In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic”
^ Many (I am thinking of Ryan Broderick formerly of Gawker now of his Garbage Day newsletter) have pointed out how central “Gamer”/internet culture and the specific Gamergate era was to the formation of misogyny as such a frothing, central component of MAGA.
I think there is much to be said on the topic of how antisemitism is one of many ideas (including also “jocular” misogyny ) that were dismissed as just gutter Internet forum comments or stupid pulp that have come to haunt us in very real ways.
Basically it feels like Internet culture as a pustule that has burst into the real and every day public.
Would love for you and Max to go long on the topic of antisemitism and the internet in a podcast.
"Something must be said about the general crisis of society and the state that’s accelerating with the rise of the Internet and social media. The Internet is not only a perfect vehicle for the dissemination of conspiracy theories and paranoid thought in general, but it also has contributed to the decay of the very institutions that Jews most wholeheartedly embraced in their integration into American society. The Internet’s wholesale destruction of the role of literate cultural mediation threatens all those intellectual professions that Jews have historically held in high esteem and sought out. In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic."
And racist and misogynist and homophobic and Islamaphobic, etc. This is the elephant in the room, everyone knows it, feels it, but what can be done about it? The Internet and social media didn't invent conspiracy theories and bigotry but they are uncanny good at amplifying and operationalizing them into mob political factions and movements. It's a problem, maybe 'the' problem, or at least this confounding Big Tech force field undermining practical solutions to our other problems, climate change, living wage work, global conflict resolution, etc.
Thanks for this ambitious, excellent post. Fascinated though I am by the Ginzberg/ Arendt/ Israel thesis, let me ask about something briefly mentioned early on: "MAGA is splitting into a “vanilla fascist” section that is happy to simply menace political opposition and the darker nations at home and abroad, and a hardcore National Socialist fronde that sees in all things a more sinister, hidden enemy. The fascism question seems to me closed: the question now is whether MAGA will be “merely fascist” or go full Nazi." My obvious followup: could you develop this distinction into a post or article of its own? E.g., at first glance, when I discussed it with a friend, we put the Proud Boys, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen, Stephen Miller, and Pete Hegseth into the National Socialist group, and Marco Rubio and Elaine Stefanik into the Vanilla box - but is that reading you correctly? Gabbard and Noem seem to me National Socialist, while Bondi maybe Vanilla? - but there's no point in MY listing them, as I'm not confident I understand your idea completely. Again a fuller explication/ discussion if you're up for it would be quite welcome. Thanks again!
I agree with this and that’s why I was a lil disappointed at your friendly pod with JVL and the Bulwark types. They have been incorporated into the Dem coalition and they have changed their minds on everything but refused to disavow their Bush era militarism. JVL said he has become even more hawkish. It seems like Bill Kristol and the rest will identify as a non-binary goat as long as we drop bombs abroad. I was shocked recently at their enthusiasm for war with Iran. They love to lecture Dems on being out of touch with cultural issues while espousing a muscular foreign policy that is only popular with elites. Unsubscribed from Bulwark.
Sure. I just find it frustrating and want to pull my hair out how they don’t see the straight line between the cheerleading they did for detaining people without due process/civil rights at Guantanamo Bay and what Trump is able to do today sending people to Gulags without due process. And liberal enthusiasm to welcoming and embracing these people into Dem coalition without requiring them to do any introspection or disavowal of what they supported brings out the inner Glenn Greenwald in me before I remember what he has become.
The Trumpists using bogus claims of antisemitism as a cudgel for destroying American universities is simply another case of the bully playing "stop hitting yourself" while punching the skinny kid with his own fist. It is petty sadism, but also the destruction of one of the things that truly made America great.
But the MAGAts care more about making the Jews suffer than they care about making America great again. And they know -- as we know -- that the American research university stands pretty high on the list of things that have been Good For The Jews.
So they pretend that Columbia University -- the home of Fritz Stern, Richard Hofstadter, and a thousand other Jewish intellectuals -- must be destroyed in the name of fighting antisemitism. We know they are lying, and they know that we know, but the shamelessness is part of the display of power.
Your mention of how antisemitism can be used to cement an alliance between the masters and the proles makes me think about the attack by Silicon Valley billionaires on "PMCs", i.e. the alleged "professional managerial class." It had not occurred to me that this too might tap into antisemitic currents, but now I suspect there is at least some overlap.
I can see why you struggled with this and got it out later than you wished. But I want to explicitly thank you for your struggles and tell you that at least for my money, it was worth your effort. This is extremely persuasive. I admire the comprehensive way in which you addressed virtually every issue that has come to my mind about these related Topics, and the order in which you lay them out and the way you describe them is very cogent. I will just follow up with a few of my Pet cranky thoughts. First of all, there are the court Jews who are running all over the place like bizarro Woody Allen characters. I think first of all of Alan Dershowitz, who has totally degraded himself And continues to jump at every chance to dive deeper into the cesspool. Also, Steven Miller, who I’m sure thinks of himself as an intellectual. He feels to me most like the Jewish leaders in the early Soviet Secret Service, who were instrumental in getting rid of the Ukrainian Property owners, and then who were in intern purged and murdered by Russian nationals. Another court two before there was a court was Trump‘s attorney during the impeachment, I think his name was David Shane, with an ostentatious wearing of the small yarmulke and well known need to miss Sessions during the Sabbath. These are just a few who come obviously to my mind. I am going to share your post with my friends/victims, and again will urge them to subscribe to your sub stack as I do.
"...the court Jews who are running all over the place ... I think first of all of Alan Dershowitz, .... Also, Steven Miller,..."
Yes, very much so. These individuals have done immense damage.
But, don't forget the Jewish groups claiming to protect Jewish students on campuses who have enabled the destruction of the universities by giving the Trumpists the pretexts that they needed.
Was there any antisemitism on American campuses? Yes; minor and scattered; not much more than an inconvenience in the big scheme. In retrospect, maybe it would have been wiser to continue handling this as an internal matter? Did they really think that they would protect Jewish students by calling in the Cossacks? By calling in the Storm Troopers? Because that's what they did. And the results have been predictable.
If anyone believes Trump attacked universities out of a genuine concern for persecuted Jews, I've got some beautiful oceanfront property in Arizona to sell them.
A splendid essay! I'd like to make two points:
First, early Italian fascism was not the only brand of pre-war philo-Semitic fascism. I'm thinking of 1930's Japan. The militarists bought into most of the anti-semitic stereotypes, but thought that they were good things, which Japan should emulate. Goodman & Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind. (This only strengthens your thesis.)
Second, I don't think that Christianity has much to do with Christian nationalism. Christianists use the Bible to confirm their prior beliefs, not to form them. The fascists' would have combined Israel-worship and fear of a conspiratorial globalist (((elite))) even if the Book of Revelation never became canon. Israelis are the unapologetic ethnonationalist wog-bashers than American fascists aspire to be.
" Israelis are the unapologetic ethnonationalist wog-bashers than [that?] American fascists aspire to be."
I am not comfortable signing on to the claim that "Israelis" (which ones? how many?) are "unapologetic ethnonationalist wog-bashers". Unless your point is that this is how some American fascists would like to see Israel -- both as monolithic and as racist.
Perhaps your claim could be rephrased, "American fascists imagine that Israel is composed of the kind of un. eth. w-b's that they themselves aspire to be"?
You're quite right--I phrased it sloppily. I should have used some variant of "American fascists perceive …"
But this perception is based on some reality. Israeli domestic politics is pretty gamy these days. My daily dose of Haaretz is as dispiriting as it is necessary.
"You're quite right--I phrased it sloppily."
No harm done--thanks for clarifying.
Seems to me the antisemitic trajectory of the movement is baked into its economic program, on Postonean grounds: the proposal to reconstitute the Fordist lifeworld cannot possibly be delivered on and the vulgar concretist and 'art of the deal' personalist premises of the movement can only metabolise such failures by anthropomorphising the abstract dimension of capital. There's nothing Jews qua Jews can do to fundamentally alter that trajectory.
There was a disturbing observation in one Ross Douthat’s columns on Iran that it was imperative that Trump’s Iran policy succeed because if Trumpism was perceived to be a failure there was a lot worse waiting in the wings of the conservative movement. Great! Thanks!
In the end, where does this leave liberal Jews who care about the well being of both themselves and their co-religionists who only through the accidents of history ended up in Israel rather than the US? Blithe binationalism given the difficulties of such in Europe doesn't seem right. Nor does Ginsberg's suggestion: https://www.independent.org/store/book/the-new-american-anti-semitism/ BTW, I think regardless of what he calls himself Daryl Cooper 100% merits the label of anti-semite.
Would not argue with that
Yes, as one Jew now receiving the very unwanted fatal embrace of Trump, I concur with this essay. I have long been distressed by Netanyahu's divisively equating whatever he thought was good for Israel with the American Right--and now we have the uproar on college campuses as frightened administrations squash the Jews into the special protection sector previously reserved for people of color and sexual variations (a set-up I have always viewed as problematic and not the best way to offer protection)--all the while serious university research (which many Jews have been involved in) is compromised in the name of Trump's faux crusade against antisemitism. That is all one sort of toxicity--and then there is the other sort of toxicity: the oblique, highly misinformed or twisted, conspiracy-laced bad-mouthing of Jews/Israel by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens--those two, wearing their Christian armor, recently outraged by Israel's bombing of a church in Gaza which attacked their fellow Christians (which angered me as well, for other reasons than theirs)--this by two people who (to my knowledge) never spared a word of concern over the oppression or attacks of Middle Eastern Christians in the Arabo-Turkish-Islamic world.
I am daily distressed by this multifaceted mess--"relieved" only by occasional bouts of surrealism. One such came my way this week as I learned that a group of American White Supremacists are setting up a "settlement" in Arkansas which will be exclusive for Whites only (Jews, too, are not welcome here). The purpose, the "settlers" proclaim, is to protect their race and its way of life in an America they view disintegrating under the influence of the dreaded "Other". They claim that "hundreds more worldwide have paid for membership" (!)--and consider this settlement as only the first of many such. See "‘Return to the Land’: White supremacists building whites-only settlement in Arkansas: Sky News visits 40-member community that claims its classification as a Private Members Association allows it to circumvent civil rights legislation--no Jews, LGBTQ individuals, followers of non-European faiths" (https://www.timesofisrael.com/return-to-the-land-white-supremacists-building-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas/) - and see also this video: "Inside 'Return to the Land': The group making a whites-only community in Arkansas" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBYBwILYTpM ). The reason I find this comic relief of a bitter sort is that these "White settlers", consciously or not, seem to be borrowing the settlement enterprise idea of Jewish Messianic fanatics in Israel's occupied territories--in other words, "hate the Jews (who are always all equated as a homogenous unit)--but take their practice (even where settling is contested by many of world Jewry)".
Where is it all going?
Really good
If I can push some cautious optimism, it seems to me that we are reaching a turning point in "the manipulated enthusiasms of mobs" that social media allowed. Candace Owens is being sued by Brigitte Macron, Blake Lively is doing a good job exposing the inner workings of pop culture manufactured online smear campaigns, the pro-Israel hasbara ecosystem is being forced to reckon with a famine it claimed didn't exist, the MAGA movement is in a major hangover over the Epstein files, Trump's friendship and the fact that Trump *is* now the deep state. Something in the trust many people had for social media figures and for influencers is starting to break - the idea that a lot of it is misleading and manufactured - and that there are merits to traditional media and journalistic ethics is starting to go through.
Now this may not be enough, nor fast enough. And we're in uncharted territory when it comes to knowing what will happen when the ceasefire finally is achieved in Gaza, that the dust settles and that what actually happened can be documented more fully.
I hope you can turn this essay into a publishable article for citation. It hits the nail right on the head of the so-called "Jewish question". I am writing an extended analysis on the historical roots of the present political crisis in the United States, the abstract thesis being that this crisis arises directly out of the State as an ancien régime, rather than from "society".
I had forgotten all about the figure of the "court Jew", despite having, almost by accident, encountering the "King's Jews" in the course of my research into feudal medieval England in the 12th and 13th centuries. At that time Jews could only enter and remain in England with the permission of the Crown, where they were relied upon both to make loans to the lesser nobility and as a conveniently squeezable source of funds for the Crown itself. Jews were effectively captives of the Crown.
Hence the "King's Jews" became an antisemitic sore point in the Baron's Rebellions of the 13th century that gave rise to both Magna Carta and the earliest English Parliaments, while the Crown stubbornly defended "their Jews" until the 1290's, when Edward I finally acquiesced in their expulsion, because he needed his barons for the projected conquest of Wales and Scotland, and also because the enormous growth of feudal commerce in that century rendered the King's Jews as inadequate, especially as they came to be replaced by the far more wealthy "Lombards" of Italy.
Hence the very foundations of "English liberty" have antisemitic roots!
Here in the UK we have seen the realignment, along Naomi Klein’s diagonal axis, of the conservative Jewish establishment and the new hard/far-right populists.
It reminds me of speaking to a Holocaust survivor on why he chose to settle here over taking what was left of his family to what would soon become the state of Israel.
He said that many Zionists had little but contempt for those who had “subjected themselves” to their own annihilation.
We need to think more broadly, like John and others, to see our world for what it is and how it did so.
Gans puts into words, sentences & paragraphs the tangled thoughts spinning in my brain. His analysis should be widely shared, even if a reader doesn’t agree with every word or wants to add to his analysis
I really appreciate this analysis and want to say, up front, that I stopped subscribing a bit ago when you took a break and re-subbed now, in part, due to this piece.
One thought I had that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere in the comments:
“In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic”
^ Many (I am thinking of Ryan Broderick formerly of Gawker now of his Garbage Day newsletter) have pointed out how central “Gamer”/internet culture and the specific Gamergate era was to the formation of misogyny as such a frothing, central component of MAGA.
I think there is much to be said on the topic of how antisemitism is one of many ideas (including also “jocular” misogyny ) that were dismissed as just gutter Internet forum comments or stupid pulp that have come to haunt us in very real ways.
Basically it feels like Internet culture as a pustule that has burst into the real and every day public.
Would love for you and Max to go long on the topic of antisemitism and the internet in a podcast.
"Something must be said about the general crisis of society and the state that’s accelerating with the rise of the Internet and social media. The Internet is not only a perfect vehicle for the dissemination of conspiracy theories and paranoid thought in general, but it also has contributed to the decay of the very institutions that Jews most wholeheartedly embraced in their integration into American society. The Internet’s wholesale destruction of the role of literate cultural mediation threatens all those intellectual professions that Jews have historically held in high esteem and sought out. In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic."
And racist and misogynist and homophobic and Islamaphobic, etc. This is the elephant in the room, everyone knows it, feels it, but what can be done about it? The Internet and social media didn't invent conspiracy theories and bigotry but they are uncanny good at amplifying and operationalizing them into mob political factions and movements. It's a problem, maybe 'the' problem, or at least this confounding Big Tech force field undermining practical solutions to our other problems, climate change, living wage work, global conflict resolution, etc.
Thanks for this ambitious, excellent post. Fascinated though I am by the Ginzberg/ Arendt/ Israel thesis, let me ask about something briefly mentioned early on: "MAGA is splitting into a “vanilla fascist” section that is happy to simply menace political opposition and the darker nations at home and abroad, and a hardcore National Socialist fronde that sees in all things a more sinister, hidden enemy. The fascism question seems to me closed: the question now is whether MAGA will be “merely fascist” or go full Nazi." My obvious followup: could you develop this distinction into a post or article of its own? E.g., at first glance, when I discussed it with a friend, we put the Proud Boys, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen, Stephen Miller, and Pete Hegseth into the National Socialist group, and Marco Rubio and Elaine Stefanik into the Vanilla box - but is that reading you correctly? Gabbard and Noem seem to me National Socialist, while Bondi maybe Vanilla? - but there's no point in MY listing them, as I'm not confident I understand your idea completely. Again a fuller explication/ discussion if you're up for it would be quite welcome. Thanks again!
I agree with this and that’s why I was a lil disappointed at your friendly pod with JVL and the Bulwark types. They have been incorporated into the Dem coalition and they have changed their minds on everything but refused to disavow their Bush era militarism. JVL said he has become even more hawkish. It seems like Bill Kristol and the rest will identify as a non-binary goat as long as we drop bombs abroad. I was shocked recently at their enthusiasm for war with Iran. They love to lecture Dems on being out of touch with cultural issues while espousing a muscular foreign policy that is only popular with elites. Unsubscribed from Bulwark.
Well, in that case they are platforming me, I'm not platforming them
Sure. I just find it frustrating and want to pull my hair out how they don’t see the straight line between the cheerleading they did for detaining people without due process/civil rights at Guantanamo Bay and what Trump is able to do today sending people to Gulags without due process. And liberal enthusiasm to welcoming and embracing these people into Dem coalition without requiring them to do any introspection or disavowal of what they supported brings out the inner Glenn Greenwald in me before I remember what he has become.