On this comparatively progressive site a substantial fraction of posts about Antisemitism are complaints about misuse or abuse of the concept of Antisemitism, rather than concern about the phenomenon itself. That alone is alienating.

Look how this turbo-charged racist imbecile turns his gun sideways like Easy E circa 1992, someone he might not like to emulate.

“Fat general” is the new “short king.”

It should be lost on no one that the ICE racist paramilitary who is being held to account, reluctantly and only because of a viral video, was unmasked. That’s why he’s in trouble, unlike many of his colleagues over the past months who have similarly abused people.

I guess I’m happy that we’re still in the phase where these people can be embarrassed by bad press.

Indeed. Imagine having Bob Iger’s money and not being able to afford peanut-sized balls.

Yes. There has never been lower-hanging fruit than that provided by this administration. If you can’t exploit it, you don’t deserve to be in politics.

There’s no logic to any of it. Just arcs of bigotry discharging into cruelty and loss.

That was my initial thought, but it’s actually more sinister and aligned with fascism to think about it as euthanasia. Animals don’t consent to euthanasia. bsky.app/profile/elon...

I’m old enough to remember when it was regarded as hyperbolic to call this politics “fascist.”

Re Charlie Kirk, @nytimes.com runs an op-ed by Hasan Piker, an influencer with a history of Jew-baiting, which argues that America’s “culture of violence” is “most evident” in its support for Israel’s “genocide”— the type of rhetoric that fosters political murder. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/o...

The debates about Antisemitism being distinct from anti-Zionism are sterile. Today solidarity with Palestine and opposition to Israel are prevalent symbolic language used to express Antisemitism.

Valhalla. You never go full Valhalla.

It does. This one scares me more than the others. I’m not confident that it will even matter if the motive isn’t what it appears.

I am deeply relieved that Elizabeth Tsurkov has been freed. These stories rarely end well. We could use good news and this is extraordinary. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/w...

Conspiracism kills. (I didn’t know Central Casting did locations too.) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

RFK, Jr. is a spellbound bigot with the scientific understanding of a medieval magician.

“Vaccine skeptic” is an editorial confection that embodies the worst of euphemism: the phrase leeches the negativity from something that urgently requires attention while obscuring what it is. RFK, Jr. is a conspiracy theorist who fixates on vaccines.

Are you kidding? The clearest analog in the Trump admin to 20th Century fascism is rule by “medieval peasant superstitions.” The question, “Could it happen here?” is definitively answered by RFK, Jr., who epitomizes the cocktail of fanaticism & spellbound bigotry that made the Holocaust possible.

RFK Jr. taps his top deputy, Jim O’Neill, to be the new CDC director. Both men appear to wear skinny ties from Otaa. Otaa's ties are made in China from microfiber, a kind of plastic that, under the right conditions, can migrate to your balls.

And while poorly evaluated prescription of psych meds happens, much of that 10% relies on those drugs to attain and maintain a level of function that they can call a life. The canard of frivolous SSRIs serves the cause of anti-corporate paranoids and is part of the anti-science oeuvre.

Our decline is an autoimmune disease.

RIP Jerry Adler. He was a hit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sSI...

Conspiracism kills. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/u...

The great thing about this meltdown will go unremarked: it transposes the identitarian shutdown rhetoric at the core of "Wokeness" onto a context of Trumpian hackery, where its thuggishness and vapidity can't be missed.

Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet remains for me one of the most profoundly beautiful works of art, especially its second movement—which is the best symbolic expression of chaos and suffering I’ve heard.

One reason Gen Z Americans are so demented about Communism is much of what they know about it focuses on McCarthyism, which alternately made communists seem less harmful, like moral peers, or even sympathetic characters. Trump's cynical "fight" against Antisemitism will do that for Antisemites.

People lose sight of the dimension of the evolving disaster among Israel and the Palestinians that is attributable to Netanyahu's full-bodied commitment to contemporary Right-wing populism. Exuberant expressions like this, which emerge from total estrangement from reality, are not rooted in Zionism.

This is a great post. Popular awareness of conspiracism is really only a few years old and media have not learned to cover it. That’s a major problem.

What won’t the Swedes think of?

The debate whether anti-Zionism is Antisemitism is held urgently, as if great ethical harm is done routinely to good faith critics who can't abide what Israel is doing. But mostly what it does is provide "Israel" as a safe word to manufacture uncertainty about clear acts of Antisemitism.

There's a third aspect: somewhere between Oedipus and Freud, there is the postcolonial project to expropriate the ultimate victimhood from the Jews through a sacrificial rite of moral revision, in which they're reborn (yet again) as history's greatest monsters.

The Gawker guys were always a special breed.

Today's reminder that the debate about whether anti-Zionism equals Antisemitism is dumb. Anti-Zionism--or at least "criticism of Israel," or support for Palestine--is now the primary way that Antisemites express themselves. combatantisemitism.org/cam-news/jew...

Conspiracism kills.

Our country is crawling with masked thugs of an extra-Constitutional paramilitary who tackle people on the basis of revenge tips and the crudest racial profiling, and shrug stupidly when they have to let someone go. Read the whole thread.

And I don’t ever again want to hear about a “vaccine skeptic.”

On the hellsite X, it’s filled with Antisemitism. On the progressive alternative BlueSky, it’s filled with discussion of how phony Antisemitism is.

There’s Jewish Currents, which represents the Everything But Jewish Left, for whom progressive principles are to be applied to every group on earth before the Jews. And there’s Mondoweiss, the clearinghouse for Jewish self-hatred that ventriloquizes Antisemitism.

Racism is a system of symbols. Antisemitism assigns symbolic meanings to the Jew—such as his conspiratorial nature. That’s why Antisemites justify their bigotry by shouting that Jewish concern about Antisemitism is really a smokescreen for malign intentions. The Trump admin has done Jews great harm.

Love how this Intercept-trained college radical thinks that Holocaust-supersession (“unprecedented genocide”) by the Mayor of Athens—Greece is Europe’s most Antisemitic country by far—is a moral victory.

Someone—at a more academic remove—should also ask why extremists of all stripes reflect themselves so precisely in their accusations, as we see here in a man who is essentially a brain stem attached to a tangerine penis, judging an entire people stupid.

Marvel at the malicious idiocy of this prevalent take. Because Hamas is, at best, an irrelevance to these people—if not admirable—they can’t fathom that Israelis might think it’s in their interests to defeat and remove them from power.

One thing this demonstrates is the poverty of the “It’s not complicated” rhetoric, blasted into orbit most forcefully by Ta-Nehisi Coates. If the moral import of carnage and starvation were so straightforward, people would explode over this. But they don’t care. The conflict is… complicated.

‪Great thread. May be worth mentioning Naked & Famous, which makes creative and high quality jeans. There are others, but I’ll keep it to one and N&F aren’t priced very high, like The Flat Head/Iron Heart/Momotaro. ‬

The viscous fluidity with which Trump is able to detach countless people from their integrity to shill for his transparently false and malicious agenda is a marvel of physics.

Reminds me of Ben Edelman, the psychotically egotistical Harvard Business School professor who threatened to sue a local Chinese restaurant into oblivion over $4.

Yes, there is a lucrative “anti-Woke” grift, whose most racist faction has a brain plug into the White House. AND on Oct 7 “postcolonial” jubilees at racist violence against Jews spread across elite and NY&CA state universities. The people who emerge from the latter milieu will own the future.

Regardless of how squalid the Netanyahu government gets, no matter how far Israel falls short of liberal-democratic ideals, the truth--that Jews with the slightest apprehension of history know--is that worrying about optics is a fool's game. Large swaths of people are just begging for an excuse.

This is absolutely correct. It should be in the center of everyone’s awareness that besides (now-defunct) Musk and Trump himself, by far the most potentially destructive force in power is the spellbound bigot, RFK, Jr.