A Kentucky state legislator went on a bizarre tirade about various Jewish connections to RU-486 (popularly known as "the abortion bill"). It really is impossible to summarize -- it features alleged connections to Zyklon B, musings about Jewish women's sexual practices, complaints about the Nobel Prize awards process ... really, just click through the link.
Anyway, the conclusion of the story informs the reader that "A spokeswoman for the state’s Senate Republicans told the [Louisville] Courier-Journal that the leadership will add training on antisemitism to the annual training senators receive."
Put aside whether any amount of training could anticipate ... this. And put aside whether we trust the Kentucky Republican Party to be even halfway competent in picking antisemitism training. My question is, even if Kentucky Republicans were being earnest here, what major counter-antisemitism training initiatives right now are primarily focused on the sort of antisemitism Kentucky Republicans are most likely to indulge in (see also: "Jew them down")?
Regardless of your views on the nexus between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, I don't think Kentucky Republican politicos are especially likely to start endorsing BDS in an antisemitic fashion. And while I don't want to suggest, falsely, that the programs attacking contemporary antisemitism do not care about or cover more right-wing varieties, I do feel as if much of the new energy and material on the subject tends to focus on alleged left-wing iterations. The relevant curriculum and research on right-wing practices, in other words, perhaps hasn't been updated -- particularly with an eye towards moving past overt KKK style right-wing antisemitism and into the more "insidious" (to borrow a term) forms that are penetrating mainstream conservative politics.
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