Anti-PC Grok as Corpus Linguistics

As you may have heard, Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok went full-blast Nazi today, culminating in it calling itself "MechaHitler" and praising its namesake as someone who would have "crushed" leftist "anti-white hate." (Ironically, or not, the "leftist" account it was referring to was itself almost certainly a neo-Nazi account pretending to be Jewish).

What caused this, er, "malfunction"? Well according to Grok, Musk "built me this way from the start." But the more immediate answer appears to be an update Musk pushed urging the bot to be less "politically correct" -- an instruction Grok interpreted as, well, a mandate to indulge in Nazism.

This raises an interesting implication. Many legal scholars (particularly textualists and originalists) have recently become enamored with a "corpus linguistics" as an analytical tool for understanding the meaning of legal texts. Corpus linguistics tries to discern what words or phrases mean by taking a large body of relevant works (the corpus) and figuring out how the words were actually used in context. If originalism is about the "ordinary public meaning" of the words in legal texts at the time they were enacted, corpus linguistics offers an alternative to cherry-picking usages from a few high-profile sources (such as the Federalist Papers), sources which are likely polemical, may not actually be representative of common usages, and are highly prone to selection bias. Instead, we can identify patterns across large bodies of training text to figure out how the relevant public generally uses the term (which may be quite different from how a particular politician deploys it in a speech).

Now take that insight and apply it to the term "politically correct". This is, of course, a contested term, and critics often contend it (or more accurately, opposition to it) is a dog whistle for far-right racist, antisemitic, and otherwise bigoted ideologies. Those who label themselves "not-PC" typically contest that reading, at least in circumstances where owning up to it would risk significant consequences. So is someone calling themselves "un-PC" a signifier of bigotry or not? This could have significant legal stakes -- imagine a piece of legislation which had a disparate impact on a racial minority community and which its proponents justified as a stand against "political correctness". When seeking to determine whether the law was motivated by discriminatory intent, a judge might need to ask whether opposition to political correctness should be understood as a confession of racial animus.

Under normal circumstances, one suspects that inquiry will resolve on ideological lines -- those hostile to the law and suspicious of "anti-PC" talk inferring racial animus, those sympathetic to the law or anti-PC politics rejecting the notion. And no doubt, both sides could muster examples where "PC" was used in a manner that supports their priors. 

But corpus linguistics suggests shifting away from an individual speaker's idiosyncratic and self-serving disavowals and instead ask "what is the ordinary public meaning of 'not politically correct?'" And it would answer that question by taking a large body of texts and seeing how, in practice, terms like "politically correct" or "not PC" are used. 

Returning to Grok, what Grok's journey from "don't be PC" to "MechaHitler" kind of just demonstrated is that, at least with respect to the corpus it was trained upon, the ordinary usage of "not PC" is exactly what critics say it is -- a correlate of raging bigotry and ethnic hatred.

I don't want to overstate the case -- a lot depends on what exact corpus Grok uses to train itself and whether it properly corresponds to the relevant public. Nonetheless, I do think this inadvertent experiment is substantial evidence that, when you hear someone describe themselves as "not-PC", it is reasonable to hear that as meaning they're a racist -- because that's what "not-PC" ordinarily means. And if your conservative/originalist friends object, tell them that corpus linguistics backs you up.

Building a Better Scotsman

Here's one of my least favorite evergreen internet donnybrooks:

Person A: So-and-so isn't a real Christian [or insert identity here]. Real Christians care about the poor/don't commit adultery/aren't racist [or insert other "good" qualities here].

Person B: I've got bad news for you: lots of real Christians are greedy/adulterous/racist etc.. Stop trying to bowdlerize the reputation of Christianity by pretending the bad parts don't exist!

The reason I hate this is that both "sides" are not just attempting to do wholly salutary things, but they often know the salutary point the other side is trying to make and just pretend not to.

Person B is certainly right in trying to check against an illicit cleansing of Christianity's moral reputation. There are lots of people who are and are recognized as Christians who do bad things, and one can't wave that history away by playing games with definitions.

But Person A is also right in that the public meaning and understanding of Christianity is a perpetually contested concept, and it is a good thing when people try to align that concept with other good qualities. It is good when people who are Christian understand that identity to encompass good things. It is a constant push-pull struggle, and Person A is fighting the good fight in trying to push "Christianity" in a positive direction.

So yes, it would be bad if we just collectively glaze over the bad attributes of various identity/ideologies in a misplaced desire to define ourselves into innocence. But it would also be bad if we sabotaged efforts to present alternative and more salubrious accounts of these identities by acting as if they're forms of cheating.

In theory, a bit of nuance lets these positions coexist. One important lodestone I'd turn to here is Richard Rorty's maxim that "there is nothing deep down inside us what we have put there ourselves." The inherent nature of Christianity (or again, fill in your favored blank) is not homophobia, nor is it LGBT-inclusion. There's nothing deep down inside the concept save what we put there ourselves. If we put in homophobia, then its homophobic. If we take out homophobia and replace it with LGBT inclusion, then its LGBT inclusive. It is not definitionally wrong when people put in homophobia, nor is it cheating when people try to take out homophobia.

In the field, I think a good rule of thumb is to ask what the speaker is reacting to. If someone is criticizing Donald Trump by saying he's "a bad Christian", I'm not convinced it's helpful to swoop in and say "actually, Christians can be bad." If someone is criticizing Donald Trump for imposing Christian nationalism upon the population, I'm not convinced it's helpful to swoop in and say "what he's doing isn't really 'Christian' at all." 

Likewise, I don't have a lot of patience for people who try to deny the real strands of homophobia in Christianity by simply saying "that's not real Christianity". That is, to borrow from Bonhoeffer, "cheap grace"; it takes work to excise those strands, it's not something that can be accomplished by proclamation alone. But I also don't have much patience for people who pooh-pooh the notion of doing that work at all because they insist homophobia is inherent to Christianity and anyone who tries to dislodge that attribute is lying -- and importantly, standing up and presenting a different vision of Christianity is an important form of doing the work. Indeed, there aren't many other ways.

Free Speech Total War

In the wake of 303 Creative, I argued that one consequence of the Supreme Court's decision would be to supercharge "cancel culture". In a world where a business' decision to serve (or not) a customer is "free speech", then it must be the case that a customer's decision not to patronize a business (and to urge others to follow) is free speech in turn. Indeed, if we follow the metaphor along, "cancel culture" is exactly what the Supreme Court recommends as a remedy for Lorie Smith's homophobic speech, in lieu of enforcement of the anti-discrimination laws the Court struck down. "More speech, not enforced silence" indeed. And what more speech could we ask for than a concerted, express(ive) attempt to boycott her business, to send the message that these views are awful and intolerable and should wither on the vine of the "marketplace of ideas"?

In this way, 303 Creative really did greatly proliferate freedom of speech. But it isn't the freest speech we can imagine. In a Hobbesian sense, the freest free speech regime is one of pure anarchy: anyone can say anything, and anything anyone can persuade anyone else to do is fair game. Hobbes' freedom was the pure war of all against all, with no constraining rules or boundaries whatsoever. Every domain is a legitimate one to wage free speech war. Lorie Smith is wholly within her rights to advocate her views not just by writing a book, but by refusing to serve a customer, by firing an employee, by declining medical coverage -- you name it. And her opponents in turn can advocate their views by boycotting her business, picketing her house, urging her friends to ostracize her -- a war of all against all, with no zones of safety.

We could go further still. In a true free speech total war, if one "persuades" government to punish other speakers for their views, well, one just won a battle of free speech over those parties who oppose such measures (the dissident voices are, of course, free to shout their complaints as they're hauled off to jail, and the majority faction is in turn free to punish them further for their insolence). Nothing is off the table, everything is fair game, when it comes to ideological battles. Even if one can't quite follow me in seeing how express government punishment could be a form of extreme(!) free speech, the point is clear enough even if one takes everything but official de jure censorship off the table (as in the preceding paragraph). 

Of course, this doesn't look much like "free speech" as we typically understand it. Much of the impetus of what is sometimes called "free speech culture" is to remove, less certain topics from discussion, but certain domains from encroachment in ideological battles. Ideological fights should be fought in the arenas of ideology, they should not normally spill over into who one employs (in positions that are not themselves expressly ideological) or who one is friends with or what businesses one patronizes. Even recognizing the pressure that can be placed on "normally" (or "expressly ideological"), the point is generally reasonable enough. 

Consider a world where 303 Creative came out the other way. Someone with Lorie Smith's views continues to hold those views, in private, but as a business owner she dutifully follows the law and serves all her customers as equals. If someone pulled out her private beliefs (shared on Facebook, perhaps), and said "don't patronize this homophobic website designer", that would by many be viewed as a more "standard" case of problematic cancel culture. We might say in that circumstance that taking one's ideological opposition to Smith's views -- however justified -- and bootstrapping them onto whether to hire her as a web designer moves the ideological contest into a problematic domain. To be sure, I can absolutely understand the counterargument: that to give a homophobe money is to "normalize" her, to say her views are "okay", and it is entirely proper not to cooperate in that normalization. And it's not hard to think of cases at the margins where that counterargument may well carry the day. But if it always does, if there is no space between "view I disagree with" and "view whose adherents must be attacked along every possible front," that to me is a very unpleasant place to live in. As I wrote in my 303 Creative post:

One of the virtues of public accommodations law is that it dissipates, under normal circumstances, the inference that basic business transactions are expressive. I very much prefer a world where the bakery that bakes a cupcake for a client isn't seen as sending some sort of message of approval towards the client and the client that eats the baker's treat isn't sending a message of approval toward the baker (beyond "this cupcake is delicious"). That, to me, seems a far more pleasant space to live in than one where every turnip and widget we buy or sell can be taken as some sort of sweeping moral approval for our business partners.

Long story short: Yes, it's true that one can gain ideological victories by not limiting ideological contests to ideological arenas -- attacking them in their profession, their hobbies, their personal life, at every angle. But that world is a very nasty world to live in. Even if we think we might have to do that some of the time, it's very bad if we feel forced to do it all of the time. When social forces move us toward that world -- a free speech total war -- they are moving us towards a deeply toxic and oppressive social milieu.

All of this is lead in to Osita Nwanevu's column this week which, to some extent, endorses "free speech total war" position when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and in particular campus discourse thereto. In contrast to the normal "free speech" position which suggests that we should protect advocacy of all sorts of views on Israel/Palestine, across the ideological spectrum, Nwanevu pivots sharply in the opposite direction: Progressives shouldn't stop trying to censor "bad" speech on campus, and should accept in turn that they will sometimes themselves be censored. "Students, academics, administrators, and outside influencers with different views will naturally clash and compete. In the end, some institutions will wind up more progressive or more conservative, [and] some institutions will be more or less tolerant of criticisms of Israel." Both "sides" should be free to wage ideological war on the other, and let the chips fall where they may. 

The more workaday "free speech" position on this issue, the one Nwanevu is contesting, holds something like the following: (1) campus administrators should not punish or obstruct university speakers on the basis of their views, no matter how repellant (the prohibition on de jure censorship); and (2) non-administrative actors should largely limit the domains in which they oppose speech they disagree with to appropriate ideological channels (the norm against "cancel culture"). The former lays out, e.g., why one shouldn't prohibit a "bad" speaker from giving a talk on campus. The latter explains why its problematic to, e.g., refuse to hire an undergraduate for a summer internship because one didn't like their column in the campus newspaper.

Both prongs of this position have come under tremendous strain over the past few months(/years). The first position has come under regular fire from various campus actors who demand that bad speech be formally punished -- in the cases of the Milos, the Ben Shapiros, and what have you, but more recently and ironically against the SJP-types. The second position has been said to be under siege by proponents of "cancel culture" who don't just disagree with X Y Z views but insist that their proponents must be fired from their jobs, ousted from campus clubs, and be viciously ostracized online; and likewise is remanifesting when pro-Palestinian students see their employment offers revoked and their likeness plastered on placards declaring them antisemites d'jour.

A popular argument here is that this is the chickens coming home to roost: leftists loudly decried both traditional free speech and free speech culture, and are now reaping what they sowed. Nwanevu takes aim at this account, however:

It is not at all obvious, actually, that defenses of Palestinian resistance, particularly armed resistance, and criticisms of Israel⁠—which has long been neigh-untouchable in mainstream political discourse—would have been more well-tolerated in a world where the campus controversies of the last decade hadn’t happened. We likely would have seen the very same pressure to support Israel after Hamas’s attack; as such, the speech climate likely would have been just as stultifying.

To believe otherwise is to invest fully in an odd precedential logic that regularly leads minds astray in these debates—those who use and abuse power are not always groping around for actions in the past that might justify their actions in the present. Reality is not a judiciary. And believing otherwise gives agency and responsibility over to whataboutism. Israel’s defenders and the right point to campus progressives, progressives might rightly say that conservatives and reactionaries suppressed left-wingers on campus first during the Cold War, defenders of Cold War conservatives might allude to the Soviets and the gulag, defenders of the Soviets might reference the repression of left-wing activists and thinkers by reactionary governments, and on and on backward in time to some creature of the caves who first realized that a club to the head was a reliable way to end arguments.

There is both more and less to this argument than it appears. On the one hand, I think Nwanevu is clearly right that the "precedential" bulwark against censorship would always be one whose robustness would be limited. "Reality is not a judiciary" indeed, there are always counter-precedents to point to, and everything we know about free speech suggests that there are far more fair-weather friends who are perfectly happy to demand freedom for me and censorship for thee than there are truly committed free speech ideologues who may, regrettably, falter in their commitments due to their opponents' hypocrisy. I agree that no matter how fastidious campus leftists may have been regarding free speech in 2022, it would not have stopped some people calling for the censorship of certain pro-Palestinian views in 2023.

That said, I also think Nwanevu is understating the degree to which the progressive development of free speech institutions is serving as a genuine bulwark against more censorial impulses, even now. Much as I think the levels of antisemitism on campus are overstated by alarmists even as they are no doubt real; it also must be said that the degree of censorship directed towards pro-Palestinian advocacy is simultaneously real and overstated by alarmists as well. Everything is a matter of margins: the question isn't whether commitments to free speech would eliminate all calls for censorship (or even successful instances of censorship), it's whether they are comparatively better at providing protection than alternatives.

In that vein: it is frankly absurd to contend that "criticism of Israel" is or has been "well-neigh untouchable" in campus politics. Take your average academic open letter savaging Israel signed by 1000 university professors, and 99.98% of them will not experience any tangible administrative blowback whatsoever. There's a ton of pro-Palestinian speech that does not and should not get any no pushback at all, and that's largely attributable to free speech commitments working.

Even looking at the list of exceptions proves the rule. Students for Justice in Palestine got targeted after it called the October 7 massacre a "historic win" that would augur a righteous campaign whereby Jews would be ethnically cleansed from Israel (yes, they did). Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure after writing a book titled "The Holocaust Industry". One can (like me) think that views like these are nonetheless protected while also zeroing in on exactly what is triggering the censorship -- not "pro-Palestinian speech" generally, but whooping and cheering a mass rape campaign specifically, or stating that Holocaust remembrance was an industry Jews exploit for profit, specifically. If that speech is coterminous with "pro-Palestinian" speech, that's a far more searing indictment of the field than I could give. And the notion that a more stultifying free speech environment than what we're seeing now is impossible to imagine -- well, I don't think it takes much in the way of imagination at all.

All that said, Nwanevu deserves credit for being willing to pay the piper. In the free speech total war "clash" between various stakeholders, sometimes, progressives will lose, not just in the realm of ideas, but lose quite tangibly -- their jobs, their social positions, their livelihoods. If one wants to extract those costs on others, one has to accept them for oneself.

Taking the freedom of institutions seriously in this way is not without costs for progressives. Bill Ackman and the captains of Wall Street do, in this framework, have the right to bar pro-Palestinian activists from employment at Scrooge McDuck Capital. The purges we’re seeing now are not incompatible with sound liberal principles—advocates for the Palestinian cause will not find refuge in them or in a fuzzy speech maximalism defined and defended inconsistently by most of its own proponents.

[....] 

The only recourse is politics—the sturdiest argument against the repression of those speaking for Palestine isn’t that institutions and the billionaires and propagandists pressuring them don’t have the right to try suppressing Israel’s critics but that the Palestinian cause is substantively just, and Israel’s defenders are backing a senseless and immoral war, a stance more and more Americans are coming to agree with.

The "Scrooge McDuck" shot is a bit cowardly -- not because Ackman deserves any special deference, but because right after admitting that it's fine for pro-Palestinian activists to be subjected to the full blast of modern cancel culture it then slyly suggests that the only actual "costs" they might face are withdrawal of opportunities a good cadre member shouldn't desire anyway. The reality is far worse: the costs we're talking about aren't just loss of a chance to engage in rapacious vulture capitalism; they extend to every nook and cranny of the good life, every hobby and professional ambition a young person might have. That's what's on the table here -- for everyone, on both sides. The whole point is that Bill Ackman and SJP are equally entitled to pursue their ideological agenda by any means necessary.  The end game, so bloodlessly described as "some institutions will wind up more progressive or more conservative", is better described as "ideological dissidents will be ruthlessly hounded out of their places of study, of worship, of employment, and of respite" -- dozens of the most caricatured version of Oberlin College being paired with countless New Colleges of Florida. Maybe we might think that, once the dust settles, everyone will be happier sorted into their neat ideological bubbles. But the transitional costs of successfully cleansing out the minorities will be monstrous -- a Tiebout sorting of the most vicious kind. And that really should be an intimidating proposition.

Why does Nwanevu nonetheless endorse going down that road? One possibility is that he doesn't truly believe the war will be as total as he's letting on. But another possibility is that he thinks that, when the dust settles, his side will win. The momentum is on their side. As many of "his" people will have their lives ruined by pro-Israel cancellation, he believes pro-Palestinian cancellation will be able to ruin even more. Is he right? I'm not as sure as he is about who would end up prevailing in a true free speech total war. But I do know that the casualty count will be staggering.

Like in real war, the constraints on free speech total war are fragile. The appeal of total war isn't pure sadism; it genuinely gives one a greater chance to win; it allows one to gain ground and overrun strongholds that otherwise might seem impregnable. But of course, that means that if one side indulges in it, the other must respond in kind -- a vicious circle to a world where everything is fair game and no one and nowhere is safe. And whatever marginal benefits one side or another might get in the conflict, the absolute costs are catastrophic. There's a reason why after World War II we labored as mightily as possible to ensure that a war like that never occurred again -- the world barely survived one war of that degree of fury, and it was far from clear it could survive a second.  

I am inclined to think similarly towards the concept of a free speech total war. Of course, one way of reading Nwanevu's essay is believing that we're already in a world of free speech total war, one impressed upon progressives by conservatives, and they're only playing the hand they've been dealt (indeed, he even alludes to 303 Creative making similar points to what I made in my introduction). As alluded above, I don't think that's true -- I think we're actually quite far from a free speech total war, and we should be very leery about removing the guardrails keeping such a war at bay. A true free speech total war would be cataclysmic, disastrous, and, importantly, would look nothing like even the decayed and damaged free speech culture we have now. It would be far, far worse. We should not run eagerly towards it. 

"Jews Don't Count" vs. "All Lives Mattering"

A few days ago, three Palestinian-American students were shot in Vermont.

One of the wounded students attended Brown University, and so Brown University president Christina Paxson led a vigil on Monday. In her prepared remarks, Paxton planned to say the following:

At a faculty meeting last month, I said that "Every student, faculty and staff member should be able to proudly wear a Star of David or don a keffiyeh on the Brown campus, or to cover their head with a hijab or yarmulke."

But in the actual presentation, the "Star of David" and "yarmulke" references were dropped (the story states this occurred after anti-Israel heckling, but it's not clear what the exact causal relationship was).

I learned of all this via the National Review, which of course wants you to be aghast. "Jews Don't Count" and all that. But I'm so old, I remember when many Jewish actors, particularly on the center-right, were furious at what they termed "all lives mattering" antisemitism -- responding to an incident of antisemitism by condemning an array of other prejudices alongside antisemitism, rather than letting a condemnation of antisemitism stand alone. And the thing is, under that metric, we could say that Paxson's sin was -- in a vigil about an incident of anti-Palestinian racism -- including a reference to antisemitism. By doing so, she would have "all lives mattered" anti-Palestinian racism. She should have condemned anti-Palestinian violence "alone".

Now for my part, I don't believe that. I don't generally think that tying different forms of discrimination together is objectionable "all lives mattering", and so I don't think that condemning Islamophobia or racism weakens a condemnation of antisemitism (or vice versa). I also don't think that every condemnation of antisemitism has to include a condemnation of other forms of oppression (or again, vice versa). It's fine when they're linked together, and it's fine when they stand alone (and for what it's worth, it's just wrong to assert that antisemitism is never condemned "alone"). Either way Paxson could have done it would have been okay.

More broadly, I've argued that the concept of "all lives mattering" is not properly applied to any case where "where someone tries to link different forms of oppression or marginalization together." Rather, "all lives mattering" only obtains where one

respond[s] to a complaint of an injustice experienced by a particular community by suggesting the complaint is illegitimate or exclusionary unless it is reframed away from focusing on the particular community and instead presented in more universal language.

So it is not "all lives mattering" for Paxson to loop in an issue of antisemitism to her vigil responding to a claim of anti-Palestinian racism, but it would be "all lives mattering" if it was suggested that her vigil would be inappropriate or illegitimate if it didn't also talk about oppression in more universal terms. The National Review piece, though written in neutral tones, certainly carries the subtext of such an assertion.

But more to the point, my definition of "all lives mattering" is not the one I've been seeing in the quarters of the Jewish community who've been leveling the charge. Based on their more expansive account, Paxson would absolutely have been "all lives mattering" had she included the line about the Star of David, and so she was wise to omit it. But I don't think that the critics in question believe that -- they're more likely to be offended that the line was taken out (proving that "Jews don't count") than they were at the prospect it would be kept in. That suggests that their position on "all lives mattering" is not a consistent one (and I'd argue, that inconsistency at root derives from their position being fundamentally untenable). Worth keeping in mind.

The Trouble with Displaced Anger

In the wake of October 7, one development in public discourse that I do think genuinely shocked a large portion of the Jewish and Israeli community was just how intense the anger that quickly coalesced targeting Israel for its response to Hamas' massacre was. Jews and pro-Israel advocates are used to rallies and marches which assail the nation any time it engages in military action of any capacity in the Palestinian territories. But this felt different -- expelled ambassadors, "genocide" and "Nazi" allegations being thrown out with abandon, public doubling-down on the presentation of Israel as naught but a European settler imposition whose decisions could only be attributed to neo-colonialist bloodlust -- all occurring within days of Israel being the victim of one of the more sickening displays of mass-scale terrorist brutality that's been witnessed in recent years. 

From the vantage of folks in sympathy with Israel, this was stunning: Israel endures what is probably the single worst terrorist atrocity in its history -- possibly the single bloodiest incident of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust -- and the result was a global community that within the space of days was breaking new records in levels of fury at Israel. What could explain this?

I have a hypothesis that can explain part of it. But before I share it, I want to return to a blog post I wrote in 2019 titled "The Trouble with Jewish Anger". Obviously, anger has always been a part of Jewish (and non-Jewish) political life, but in 2019 it seemed to be consuming our community in a way that felt genuinely different in kind rather than degree. What was motivating this anger? 

In my post, I gave a long bulleted list of causes, most of which were various ways that non-Jews were mistreating Jews in fashions that obviously could and would legitimately prompt Jewish resentment. Included among these, of course, was ways in which left-wing discourses about Israel often were used to degrade, denigrate, and dismiss Jews both in Israel and in the diaspora. But at the end of my list, I added one final bullet point which I knew would be controversial but which I felt needed to be said:

And, I think, we're angry that the Israeli government has been racing off to the right, busily making some -- some -- arguments that once were outlandish now plausible, and putting us in increasingly difficult positions. We're angry that we've been basically powerless to stop this decay of liberal democracy in Israel, we're angry that a community and a place that we care deeply about seems not to care about us in return and is mutating into something unrecognizable to us, and we're displacing that anger a bit.

This, of course, was a very fraught thing to say. Nobody likes being challenged in their anger, and they like it still less when the argument is that their anger at others is actually displaced internal frustration.  People could and did rail against this passage as outrageous -- as if the litany of perfectly good reasons for Jews to be angry weren't enough to explain why Jews are angry, as if legitimate Jewish anger over real antisemitism in any way could be said to be cut with displaced frustration over illiberalism and misconduct emanating from the Jewish state.

It was a controversial and fraught thing to say. Nonetheless, I stood by it then and stand by it now. There absolutely were many valid things for Jews to be angry about in terms of how others were treating Jews. But some -- some -- of the anger was displacement of our own frustrations, of being forced to reckon with certain things we'd been able to previously dismiss as implausible transforming into plausibilities. It's legitimately infuriating to be taunted as a Jew that the state you've held close to your heart since childhood is a fascist enterprise, and that legitimate fury is not quenched but exacerbated when the Israeli government undertakes actions that are legitimately labeled as fascist. It's "worst person you know makes legitimate point" on steroids. And one way of resolving that dissonance is to double-down on the anger; restoring a fractured unity where the torment we feel is solely caused by the tormenters we already knew; exploiting the fact that the tormenters we already knew are in fact giving us plenty to be legitimately angry about.

With all that in mind, we can return to the anger that's greeted Israel's campaign in Gaza following October 7. Once again, there is much one can legitimately be angry about. First and foremost, the surging death toll amongst the Palestinian civilian population is heart-wrenching. And even though the Israeli military may not be "targeting" civilians per se, it does not seem to be exhibiting much more than an attitude of cavalier indifference to the lives the Palestinian civilian population. Palestinian life is barely if at all part of the military calculus; if Israel isn't going out of its way to kill as many Palestinians as possible (the death toll, horrible as it is, would look completely different if that were the case), it certainly doesn't appear to be going much out of its way to avoid killing wherever it poses even a mild obstacle to a plausible military objective. 

Beyond that, the unprecedented presence of the far-right in the Israeli government (partially but not wholly sidelined via the new "military cabinet"), some of whom can barely contain their thirst to see Palestinians expelled and/or murdered in both Gaza and the West Bank, makes certain possibilities that might previously have unthinkable into terrifyingly live possibilities. Indeed, the very brutality of the October 7 attacks makes the prospect of genuine retaliation in kind terrifyingly real -- everyone can at some level recognize how an atrocity of that magnitude generates a risk of an unstoppable cascade of recrimination. Mixing in the full scope of the October 7 attack together with an Israeli government which already was predisposed to dehumanizing Palestinians, and one has a cocktail that feels ripe for a wave of atrocities that make even the current displays feel tame in comparison.

None of that should be discounted. They are real and valid bases for anger (and fear, and a host of other emotions). But much as I said about Jewish anger in 2019, I will also assert that part -- part -- of the story is a bit of displacement. The attacks on October 7 made some arguments that, at least to pro-Palestinian activists, had seemed outlandish now plausible. Positions or narratives that previously could be easily dismissed as propaganda or apologias were shown in the most gruesome fashion imaginable to have more than a grain of truth behind them. And for persons whose personal identities were deeply bound up in denying the plausibility of such positions and narratives, the cold shock of October 7 represents a bona fide crisis.

Even while October 7 was still happening, I observed a tranche of commentators whose main reaction was "annoyance" that events were forcing them to empathize with Israelis. These weren't, to be clear, people who were celebrating or even justifying Hamas' massacres. They recognized the atrocities for what they were. But nonetheless, they clearly found it ... unpleasant ... to do so. These were people who treated Hamas like roguish committee of resistance fighters whose rhetoric sometimes maybe was a bit too florid for normie ears but were ultimately fighting for Palestinian liberation, who viewed PIJ rockets as glorified sparklers, who had long rolled their eyes at the notion that Israel and its powerful army could ever have true security interests vis-a-vis the Gaza Strip, who were confident that any contention of significant antisemitism amongst Palestine solidarity activists was the desperate defamation of Hasbarist shills trying to silence any and all forms of pro-Palestinian political advocacy.

Now, those who had comfortably held the above beliefs were being smacked in the face with the reality that some -- some -- of the things Israelis and Zionists had been saying that they had previously dismissed with a wave were, in fact, legitimate. The claims about Hamas' depravity were not just warmongering propaganda -- Hamas really was that brutal in terms of its approach to Israeli (and Palestinian!) life. The claims that Israel had legitimate security needs vis-a-vis Gaza were not just an excuse for endless repression -- there really were bad men on the other side of the fence who were actively plotting to murder Israeli men, women, and children. The claims about how "pro-Palestinian" protesters promoted and engaged in antisemitism were not just efforts to smear the left -- there really were non-trivial elements of that community who were making no bones about their glee at the prospect of dead and fleeing Jews, and who professed their fondest wish that they will soon see more. The worst people they knew were, it turns out, making legitimate points. And they were furious about it. They were furious that, in this moment, the most prominent flagbearers of "resistance," of "anti-Zionism", of "fighting for a free Palestine", or what have you, were in fact behaving exactly as their most hated enemies asserted they would.

How does one handle that fury, fury that is in the broadest sense inwardly directed? Again, one easy way of dealing with it is to sublimate it into all the other outward things one can (to reiterate once more) legitimately be angry at. The early statements holding Israel responsible for Hamas' massacres were a crude form of this -- they displace the anger that Hamas behaved the way that it did and transport it over to the more congenial subject of Israel. The seemingly endless upward spiral of rhetorical oneupsmanship in how to characterize Israel's Gaza campaign -- "genocide", "textbook genocide", "Nazism"; each term striving to outdo its predecessor in its expression of incandescent rage -- is another. Expanding the bubble of fury ever-outward is a way of making one particular (and particularly uncomfortable) iteration of anger pale in significance. 

It turns out that, rather than acting to generate greater understanding or sympathy, paradoxically, rage and frustration at Hamas for its awful actions becomes a catalyst that intensifies the anger at Israel (anger that, again, is in large part rooted in Israel's own terrible conduct). Indeed, just as (at some level) Israel's increasingly indefensible forays into repressive fascism make it more essential to the mental wellbeing of the Zionists that they hate the anti-Zionists, so too does Hamas' striking punctuation of murderous terror make it more essential to the mental wellbeing of the anti-Zionists that they hate the Zionists. The (displaced) anger is the means of metabolizing an otherwise staggering threat to one's own identity and self-image. And how lucky for each that the prevalence of real Israeli injustices towards Palestinians; and real pro-Palestinian antisemitism towards Jews; provides such an available landing spot for that anger to be displaced to.

One more illustration which really is what crystallized this entire thought-line. A community leader in San Diego, Lallia Allali, was removed from a teaching position at the University of San Diego after sharing the below image, a Star of David acting as a buzzsaw decapitating Palestinian babies.

The visual motif of beheaded babies is, I think, no accident. Beheaded babies quickly became one of the symbolic tropes of the October 7 atrocities. Initially, it was one of the earliest claims used by pro-Israel commentators to establish the pure sadism and brutality of Hamas' actions -- that it wasn't "just another flare-up". Shortly thereafter, as initial reports proved unable to be immediately confirmed, it was for a while held up by anti-Israel commentators as a symbol of Israeli propaganda -- a deliberate lie used to unjustly discredit Palestinian resistance via lurid and supposedly implausible tales of utter depravity, and a cautionary tale about trusting those dastardly Israelis and giving succor to the fictitious slanders they're spinning to justify their own bloodlust. And then, of course, it turned out that the claims were true -- Hamas was in fact that unimaginably cruel and sadistic in its actions, in ways that even the most hard-bitten supporter of "the resistance" found difficult to stomach. The fury of being accused of siding with those who beheaded babies is not quenched but exacerbated when it turns out that "the resistance" really was going out and beheading babies.

In this context, Allali's cartoon -- the use of that motif, but turned around -- reads as an effort to sublimate the public disgust over what Hamas did and displace it onto Israeli actors. It's a way of taking the anger at what Hamas did and using it to further fuel anger at what Israel did. I don't know Allali, and some no doubt will claim I'm giving her too much credit (note that this account does assume she did feel, at some level, revulsion at what Hamas did). But taken on the whole, I think something like what I'm talking about is partially at work here.

I don't expect this post to generate any public acknowledgments of "yeah, that's me". In 2023 as in 2019, nobody likes being told to tamp down on their anger; still less when they really do have very valid and legitimate things to be angry about. And yet maybe, in private, some people might have a ping of recognition in what I'm saying here. I think that happened in 2019, and maybe it can happen in 2023 as well. And if you do feel that uncomfortable pang of recognition, please know there's no treason to it: It doesn't mean there isn't much to legitimately be angry at; it doesn't mean here conceding that the pro-Israel commentariat was right all along (in 2019, my thesis was likewise not "actually, what you're mad about is that the Corbynistas are right"). It just means that, just as many Jews (and non-Jews) have had to and still need to reckon honestly and directly with how Israel's own conduct disturbs some close-clung beliefs about Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and anti-Zionism many non-Jews (and Jews) may need to grapple honestly and directly with how the conduct of Hamas and its backers disturb some other close-clung beliefs about Israel, Palestine, Zionism, and anti-Zionism. It's not an easy ask; it's far easier to displace it away. But I do think we're stronger for if we stop avoiding it.

Sorry Because You Got Caught

Often times, when a public figure is revealed to have engaged in some misconduct and is in the process of apologizing, you will hear dismissal of that apology via some variation of "he's only sorry because he got caught."

I've been reflecting on this for the past few days, because I think it is a more interesting problem than often given credit for. What are the conditions for which we might think sorrow is genuine notwithstanding the fact that it follows after "getting caught"?

After all, temporally-speaking I suspect it is the case that most public gestures towards repentance only follow getting "caught" or called out. It's not impossible to repent for wrongdoing without ever being caught -- one can turn oneself in -- but most of the time the former follows the latter. And I actually suspect it is true that most people who are not caught doing X wrong are unlikely to unilaterally engage in public actions of repentance. At most, they'll feel ashamed and bad in private. Which is not nothing, and can yield genuine changes in behavior. But it's also typically not viewed as sufficient expressions of remorse for the person who is "caught".

So if most public figures are, in some sense, "only sorry because they got caught", does that mean that most public figures are insincere in their apologies? Or that their apologies are inherently unreliable and insufficient?

I don't think that can be right. The very fact that the vast majority of repentance work occurs after being caught should make us leery about saying that such work is inherently suspect when it follows being caught. For most people, "getting caught" is a triggering event in a process that one hopes will lead to genuine repentance, remorse, and repair. It strikes me as implausible to dismiss any gestures of remorse that follow getting caught, unless we think most human beings are basically incapable of true remorse but are low little sociopaths.

This doesn't mean that any individual person -- observer or (especially victim) is obliged to "forgive" a public wrongdoer upon the first gesture of apology. Your relationships are your business, and if you decide that you need to write someone off temporarily or permanently due to something they've done, that's up to you. I think we vastly overweight obliging forgiveness. Himpathy and all that. And more over, "being sorry" doesn't liquidate one's obligations to try and make right what one has done wrong. Repentance should come at cost.

But on the flip side, there's a version of the "we're too quick to forgive" politic that acts as if people are at best suckers, at worst complicit, if they don't view essentially all efforts at remediation and reparation as so much manipulation -- being taken in by someone who is "only sorry that they got caught." And to that, I'd also say "your relationships are your business," you're allowed to believe that someone is actually remorseful and wants to go through the steps to make a repair. If you're the victim, it can be doubly traumatizing to hear that you're a dupe or a sellout for trying to work with the wrongdoer to mend the break. If you're an observer, you can't forgive on behalf of the victim, but you're allowed to come to your own judgment about what the wrongdoer is trying to do and assist them on a journey towards repentance.

Woke Freeze

The internet is cackling about prominent "anti-woke" conservative Bethany Mandel drawing a complete blank when asked the simple question "what is woke".

Jon Chait objects to the pile on of someone who just "froze" on TV.

At one level, he's probably right that Mandel froze, and freezing could happen to anyone. But that doesn't mean it isn't something she should take her lumps for. The context matters here, given that Mandel holds herself out as a subject-matter expert on this exact issue. If I forget the capital of Ukraine, that's embarrassing. If a guy who just spent 30 minutes engaging in Putin-apologism for Russia's invasion then can't recall the capital of Ukraine, that's, well that's a lot more embarrassing.

But the deeper problem is that while at one level sure, Mandel obviously has an idea of what she means by woke and just froze up in articulating it, at another level Mandel has no idea what she means by woke because her definition is utterly unsuited for the political hackwork she's trying to do.

Anyway, Mandel is in fact able to provide a definition of the term "woke." Are progressives going to like this definition? No. I'd suggest arguing with her ideas instead of pretending she's a complete moron who doesn't know what the word means. pic.twitter.com/K6KAeW99Us

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) March 15, 2023

"Woke" is when a radical belief in absolute endpoint equality, deviations from which can only be the product of discrimination, is violently enforced at mobpoint. Okay, but if that's the definition it doesn't actually capture any meaningful behavior. There's no universe in which Silicon Valley Bank was committed to absolute endpoint equality which it sought to enforce by a violent mob; hence, Silicon Valley Bank cannot possibly be woke. Which is why the argument for SVB being woke doesn't rely on anything like that definition, but rather skips to things like "woke is giving to a charity" or "woke is when any Black person is in the room". Seriously -- has there ever been a more naked motte-and-bailey play than this?

The problem is that when you put the right-wing definition of "woke" (crazed radicals fomenting an angry mob to impose absolute economic equality!) next to the right-wing examples of "woke" (Silicon Valley Bank had a single Black guy on its board!), the mismatch is too evident. And that, I suspect, is the real reason why Mandel froze up -- giving the definition would have ultimately shown how ridiculous her arguments were; and she couldn't hack together a new definition on the fly which would have resolved the dissonance.

UPDATE: Great example of the bait-and-switch. What does Victoria's Secret switching its brand ambassadors from the supermodel "angels" to female "icons" like Megan Rapinoe have to do with Mandel's definition of "woke"?

A clearer definition of "wokeness," and it usefully highlights the bait and switch.
This definition is coherent, and does sound like something I don't want taking over society, but few believe it.
When Mandel denounces specific cases of "wokeness" she's not using that definition. pic.twitter.com/coO1wR91o1

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) March 15, 2023

Help Me Leave Bird App!

Speaking of off-ramps, I am trying to transition my main microblogging app off of Twitter and onto an alternative. But so far, the two sites I have accounts on -- Mastodon (@schraubd@mastodon.lawprofs.org) and Post (@schraubd) -- aren't fully meeting my needs, and each have problems that significantly deter their ability to fully serve as a Twitter replacement.

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

I'm also finding it incredibly difficult to find people to follow, especially on Mastodon but to a lesser extent on Post as well. You can get some people via those sites that trawl through Twitter to see who has posted their new social handles online, but that's been limited so far in my experience. The easiest thing (albeit perhaps the most worrisome from a data privacy standpoint) would be one of those widgets where you plug in your email and it tells you all the accounts which are associated with emails in your contacts. I don't think exists yet for either site, and maybe it shouldn't for privacy reasons. The next best move is to go to the people you're already friends with and see who they're following. But Mastodon, in particular, makes this impossibly unwieldy by refusing to show followers from other servers. You can get there via the scenic route if you go to each profile on its own server, but then you can't just click a button to follow (since you're not logged into that server). It's slow and clunky and needlessly frustrating. And I'll note that even Mastodon's basic search bar functionality has, in my experience, been shaky.

Finally, while comparatively minor Post has some user interface problems that are just outright annoying. Defaulting to the "explore" tab, which is not my feed but the feed of a (presumably curated) section of randos, is not what I want and I resent having to swap over to my personal feed every time I go to the site. Also, Post might suffer from having too generic of a name -- good luck finding an answer to any question you have about its functionality online (imagine Googling "how do I cross-post on post")

So what I want is basically (1) ability to cross-post across platforms, especially autolinking to my Blogger posts, and (2) a relatively easy and straightforward way to find and follow my contacts if and when they join the new sites. Whichever site (Mastodon, Post. or something else) perfects that cocktail may well be my winner.

Can We Convince Elon Musk To Declare Victory and Go Home?

It is clear, even to Elon Musk (one has to think), that Musk's acquisition of Twitter has been a disaster.

It is equally clear that Musk is far too much of a narcissistic egomaniac to ever admit it.

And while it would be nice to leave Twitter outright and hit greener pastures, the current main alternatives to Twitter -- sites like Mastodon or Post -- are not even close to primetime ready. The ideal outcome is Twitter being put back in the hands of the at least semi-reasonable before the site detonates outright.

What Musk needs is an off-ramp -- some way for him to get out of Twitter while still claiming it as a victory.

To be clear: No reasonable observer has to actually think Musk has accomplished anything or that this excuse be anything but a flimsy façade. Much like the US and Vietnam, every rational human will understand it as pure political dissembling -- "saving face" here means only an excuse that will satisfy Musk's most sycophantic fanboys. Fortunately, that cadre is the only group Musk seems to listen to anyway.

He's never going to be able to unload it for a profit -- that's out. But is there some other narrative he could spin ("It was never about the money!") where he retroactively will have "accomplished what he set out to accomplish" and can leave while saving face? Maybe he can say the "Twitter Files" exposed the dirty heart of old Twitter but now he's successfully cleaned house. Maybe he can triple down on the random staffers he's thrown under the bus as the "real problem" and now that they're gone, all is well (none of us have to believe it; again, this is all about spinning a yarn that will successfully soothe a narcissistic manchild who can't possibly admit he screwed everything up).

I don't know. It's weird to try to come up with "pathetic lie for Elon Musk to tell himself so he leaves the rest of us alone." But that's the best exit strategy we have right now, I think. Suggestions welcome.

The Virtues of Remembering Extremists, Near and Far

Sometimes I think the most important thing we can do keep ourselves politically healthful is to remember the existence of extremists -- both near and far from our own positions.

It's important to remember the extremists whose positions are (relatively) near one's own -- that is, persons who take the extreme version of your "side" of a given political contest -- in order to guard against the allure of purism. Being pro-Israel for example, one ignores or downplays the existence of pro-Israel extremists at one's own peril. It important to remind oneself that it is not better to adopt ever-more fundamentalist or uncompromising iterations of one's own position, and you are not a failure or a traitor for refusing to fall onto that path. Recalling and recognizing those who speak under your banner but do so in a destructive or harmful way can help dissipate some very dangerous temptations and forestall one from excusing things that are fundamentally inexcusable.

It is also important to remember the extremists whose positions are on the far side from one's own -- if only so one is not surprised by them when they inevitably do emerge. Particularly if one is feeling frustrated with one's own camp, there can be the temptation to romanticize one's opposition; going beyond the (important and correct) refusal to generalize and demonize and instead allowing oneself the delusion that there is no dangerous politics on the other side of the rainbow. The delusion is bad enough, but the real damage comes when one is forced to confront the reality -- if one isn't prepared, it is a shock of cold water that can quickly trip the unwary into spiraling down their own path of extremism. I can't tell you how many videos and screenshots I've seen from "pro-Israel" Twitter displaying the worst of terribleness from various pro-Palestinian rallies or protests, all of which style themselves as trying to shock complacent Jews out of their purported stupor. And indeed, if one hasn't prepared yourself to encounter it, it is quite a bracing sight to behold. But for my part, since I've never deluded myself that this sort of anti-Zionist extremism did not exist, I was never unduly shocked when confronted with its manifest existence. 

Keeping these things in mind allows one to keep one's head on a little straighter. Instead of retreating to pathetic denials that this sort of abhorrent politics is present, or opportunistic romanticism of why it's actually permissible or just, remembering and acknowledging the genuine existence of extremism allows one to keep a sense of perspective. Being able to name and recognize extremism as part of the story also allows one to keep a sense of proportion that it is not the entire story. 

Lesson #2 of the internet:

No matter your ideology, there will always be someone profoundly idiotic who largely agrees with you, and someone profoundly idiotic who largely disagrees with you. Neither fact should be unduly weighted.

 

On Comics and Speakers Who Bomb

Suppose you attend a stand-up comedy performance. You're excited to listen and giggle and laugh. But unfortunately, the comic in question -- let's not mince words -- bombs. The jokes don't land, or worse, they're outright offensive. The crowd, which started with a few half-hearted chuckles, starts to turn stony, and eventually downright ugly. Eventually, halfway through the set, the boos set in. Ultimately the comic is booed all the way off the stage.

Most of us, I think, would not view this as a successful evening -- either for the audience members or the comic. But would we say the comic's free speech rights have been violated? I doubt any of us would go that far. Free speech by no means guarantees a favorable reception.

Yet many of us -- myself included -- think things are quite different in the case of an invited university speaker who is "shouted down" by protesters in the audience, such that they cannot finish their talk. This is thought to represent a free speech threat. But what -- and I ask this question earnestly -- marks out the difference between this and the comic?

The answer typically given for why drowning out of the university speaker is wrongful is that it deprives those members of the audience who did want to hear the talk of their ability to do so. I do find this a compelling argument generally, but it doesn't successfully distinguish the comic's case -- it is easy to imagine that somebody in the comic's audience also wanted to see how the set would have ended.

Another possibility is that the audience for the comic did not come to the show with the intention of blocking the performance. Their anger was unplanned and organic, in contrast to the university protesters, who we suspect came to the talk knowing from the outset that they wanted to disrupt it. If this is our distinction, it suggests that there is no foul in "shouting down" a university speaker some stanzas deep into their talk, if it is the result of genuine on-the-spot negative reactions rather than a planned disruption (though how one could tell the difference, I don't know).

Still another possibility is that a comic performance is only valued insofar as it pleases the audience, and so where the crowd turns against the performance there is no particular interest in the comic being able to continue performing. A university lecture at least nominally is not quite so hedonistic in its assessed value, and so we feel it is important that such talks be allowed to proceed notwithstanding the fact that the audience does not like what they hearing. This makes some intuitive sense to me, though it gets blurry with intentionally political stand-up comics, or university talks that are more performative than educational. I also struggle with how this accounts for a permutation of the hypothetical where a political speaker is speechifying on a public square soapbox and the crowd (while not violent) reacts deeply negatively to his speech, in a way that effectively drowns out the speaker. There, even though the talk is as "political" as a university speech, I do not tend to think there is a violation of free speech norms if the speaker ends up being drowned out. But why not?

Perhaps the answer is a lot more contingent than we might otherwise like to admit: certain spaces and events, like talks by invited speakers at universities, are ones where we stipulate heightened valuation for rules which allow for speeches to be given relatively uninterrupted in a fashion where they can be heard by any who care to listen. This is not a general rule of "free speech"; there are many other spaces where it does not apply -- but the very fact that there are many other spaces where the rules are different and responses can be more "raucous" (if you will) actually serves to further justify the importance of the validity of having a space with this sort of rule. It's good to have some known space where we can stipulate in advance that the speaker will be able to "complete their set" notwithstanding a possible hostile audience, and the fact that there are many other spaces where people are allowed to be more immediately expressive in their disdain mitigates the burden of foreclosing or limiting that sort of expression in this particular space.

Anyway, I don't have firm conclusions here, but this is a puzzle that I had been wondering about for awhile so I figured I'd sketch some preliminary thoughts here as I work through it.

The Right To Be Wrong in Claiming Antisemitism

Is it necessarily problematic when people make "wrong" claims of antisemitism?

"Wrong", of course, is not a synonym for "intentionally false", "malicious", or "bad faith". A "wrong" claim of antisemitism is one that, we will stipulate, is sincerely believed and not facially absurd, but which following our best sincere investigation we conclude is ill-taken.

This is something I initially started thinking about in the context of folks calling Amnesty's "apartheid" report on Israel antisemitic. Many responded to those claims by objecting to the very question -- it was "chilling" or "silencing" to make that allegation, even if (as was often conceded) one could legitimately disagree with the conclusion Amnesty came to that Israel was an apartheid state. I thought about again in the context of this letter signed by several University of Toronto faculty members, condemning a university colleague for promoting the IHRA definition of antisemitism (a definition the letter-signers think is wrong and incorrectly labels as antisemitic innocuous criticism of Israel). The letter doesn't just say "here is why we think IHRA is wrong"; it suggests that the choice to adopt an understanding of antisemitism the letter-writers disagree with is facially problematic.

This struck me as an interesting formulation. In the Amnesty example, it suggests that it is not problematic for Amnesty to call Israel an apartheid state even if that conclusion turned out to be incorrect (Amnesty is "allowed" to be mistaken), but it is problematic for Amnesty's critics to call Amnesty antisemitic unless they've got the organization dead to rights (there is no tolerance for being "mistaken"). One could, after all, say to the critics of Amnesty's critics "it's fine to disagree with the contention that Amnesty is antisemitic, but don't preemptively dismiss the claim as facially illicit" -- which is, of course, the same structure urged for responding to Amnesty's claim of apartheid. We can agree or disagree that Israel is an apartheid state, we can agree or disagree that Amnesty is an antisemitic organization, but our ultimate evaluation of either question will not suffice to preemptively invalidate assertions positing contrary conclusions.

So what is it about putatively "wrong" antisemitism claims that makes it different in kind from putatively "wrong" apartheid claims? I'm not sure what could legitimately account for the difference. If, for example, the argument against "wrong" accusations of antisemitism is that the term is so explosive and earth-shattering that it must only be deployed in cases where the claimant absolutely, positively, has the goods, one could say the exact same thing about claims of "apartheid".

Next week, I'm presenting at a conference on law and antisemitism at Indiana University on the subject of "epistemic antisemitism"; a core theme of the paper is on how, by restricting "legitimate" antisemitism claims to only those which are "clearly" correct, we end up sabotaging the ability to conduct the discourse at all. In a political context, antisemitism claims are virtually always going to be contested; there will be arguments and factors that push in favor or against the label. In these circumstances, there has to be a gap -- I'd say a somewhat sizeable gap -- between circumstances where we conclude that a given claim is incorrect and circumstances where we conclude that leveling the claim is a form of abuse.

In general, political conversation cannot occur if there is no room to be wrong. Political conversation is a series of people making claims, and many of them will turn out following discussion and investigation to not hold water. If that outcome preemptively delegitimizes the initial conversational gambit, the entire project comes to a screeching halt and quick. As tempting as it is to say that people should only make claims of "antisemitism" (or "apartheid", or "racism") when they are right, there is no universe in which free discussion of such ideas can occur without some instances of the claims being wrong. A system which allows for no false positives, even at the initial claim-formation stage, is one that will endure near-infinite false negatives. 

All of this, of course, was the impetus behind one of the jokes I made about the "trans-left unifier": They insist that calling anti-Zionism "antisemitism" is an outrageous conflation that suppresses discourse, while calling Zionism "White supremacy" is a legitimate position we must respect. That sort of disjuncture, where Jews are told over and over again "even if your instinct is to disagree, you have to allow the argument to be made" for every hostile appellation given to Israel, whereas if they give a non-conforming argument about antisemitism they're accused of poisoning the conversational well, is tremendously frustrating and I think theoretically unsustainable. "Antisemitism" is like any other claim -- sometimes it will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, we figure it out by considering it carefully, and the fact that some of those careful considerations will yield the conclusion of "the claim is wrong" does not, on its own, demonstrate that it was a foul to have proffered the claim in the first place.

Why Did the JDA Exonerate David Miller?

A few months ago, I described the David Miller controversy as the JDA's "test case": would it ever be used to declare a contested case of commentary on "Zionism" to be antisemitic, or would it only be used to level "not guilty" verdicts? Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that an internal investigation by the University of Bristol into Miller's antisemitism had entirely exonerated him -- largely relying on the JDA to do so. The JDA critics cried vindication.

Now, two signatories of the JDA -- Yair Wallach and David Feldman (the latter is a JDA co-author) -- have written to explain why they think that was incorrect and a misapplication of JDA. They make reasonable arguments for why Miller's conduct should have been viewed as antisemitic under the JDA framework. However, they observe, a definition is only as good as those applying it -- Labour, after all, didn't become  instantly free of antisemitism simply after adopting IHRA. The JDA, too -- any definition, really -- can only be so resistant against interpreters determined to see no evil.

This is a fair point. But I think a little more reflection is needed. Reading Wallach and Feldman, one might get the sense that the exoneration of Miller was simply a matter of bad luck: the university picked the wrong actor to conduct its internal inquiry, who did a bad job reading the JDA and so came to incorrect conclusions. A better reader who exhibited more careful, lawyerly interpretive skills would have come to the right conclusion: that Miller was, under the JDA framework, antisemitic.

I agree that texts alone will provide only moderate, if any, constraints on poor reading. And I agree that the JDA, fairly read, very much can provide support for why Miller was antisemitic. But Wallach and Feldman do not grapple with the cultural meaning of JDA which I think clearly is germane to why it was used, as its critics predicted it would be, as a tool of exculpation. 

As a cultural phenomenon, JDA was introduced to the world as a corrective against the overzealous labeling of things as antisemitic. The "problem" JDA was there to correct was the presumed assumption by IHRA and its adherents that "criticism of Israel is antisemitic"; it corrected this (among other ways) by sharply delinking "Jewishness" and "Zionism" and declaring itself a sentinel against their wrongful conflation. In a real sense, the JDA was less concerned about protecting Jews from antisemitism than it was protecting non-Jews from being (wrongfully) accused of antisemitism. It's not that the former wasn't important, but the latter was what JDA believed was missing from antisemitism discourse and addressing that problem was accordingly the document's value-added. Nearly all of the JDA's marketing and public reception centered around this function, and it was accordingly taken up as the standard by people whose primary orientation towards antisemitism is that of Bruce Robbins: "The real issue here is anti-Semitism; that is, accusing people of it." 

JDA defenders will no doubt argue, as Wallach and Feldman do, that the text of JDA belies any claim that it is unconcerned with what is antisemitic and that, properly applied JDA very much can and does offer resources which can support a guilty verdict as much as a not-guilty one. This is true, but only in the same way that IHRA also has textual resources which could be used to forestall its use as a blunt cudgel against any harsh criticism of Israel. Those cynical of the practical relevance of those textual provisions in assessing whether IHRA actually is enabling or disenabling productive discussion on antisemitism should recognize a similar potential problem in JDA. In either case, the text isn't really what's important; it cannot explain the definitions' actual use. Hence, upon JDA's release I predicted:

[J]ust like IHRA there is a risk that the JDA will be "applied" in a purely symbolic manner divorced from its actual textual mandates. Just as IHRA's language insisting that context matters has been roundly ignored, one can easily imagine persons accused of antisemitism "citing" the JDA for the blithe retort that "criticism of Israel is not antisemitic" while disregarding language in the JDA which arguably encompasses their particular "critique".

And indeed, that does seem to be what happened here.

To the extent that Wallach and Feldman view the failure to identify Miller's antisemitism as antisemitism as a failing, then, it will not do to simply run back to the text and say "but a good interpreter would read this provision differently." It's not really about the text, and it's not really about reading comprehension skills either.

The simple way of identifying the problem is this: on an epistemic level, the JDA looked at how antisemitism discourse proceeded in certain center-to-right Jewish and Zionist spaces and treated the primary problem of antisemitism as one where people where too quick to believe, to listen, to conflate, to say "yes". In "correcting" those mistakes, it overlooked entirely a parallel form of antisemitism discourse, prevalent in many non-Jewish (as well as Jewish left) spaces, where people were eager to dismiss, to brush off, to endlessly dissect, to say "no". The JDA has, perhaps unintentionally but very much predictably, become the standard for the latter branch of the discourse. To a large extent, the JDA would be seen as a failure if it regularly and in high-profile contested cases rendered "guilty" verdicts -- this would falsify the core epistemic assessment which indicted IHRA and supposedly demanded the JDA's adoption in the first place (that in high-profile contested cases too many people are being adjudged guilty of antisemitism when they are, in fact, falsely accused).

It is not accidental nor idiosyncratic, then, when JDA is read and interpreted in a fashion that maximizes its function as an exculpatory tool. Those who read it that way aren't reading it badly, they're just reading it in the context of how it was presented to the world. Since the JDA is a corrective to overuse of antisemitism, it is hardly a misreading when readers adopt a canon of construction where all ambiguities should be resolved against a finding of antisemitism. 

If JDA proponents want to head off those readings, they cannot simply ask for people to be better or more educated readers. They'll have to take aim at the golden calf of their epistemic camp, and decisively declare that the problem of antisemitism is not just "accusing people of it", the problem is as much (if not -- dare I say -- more so) reflexive denials of it. Unless and until the JDA forthrightly tackles that aspect of how we talk about antisemitism, no amount of careful reading will stop the JDA from being almost exclusively seen as and used as a means of exonerating anyone and everyone from antisemitism.

Can I Be Proud of You?

"I'm so proud of you!"

As a professor, I have happily had many occasions to speak and think these words. Whenever one of my students, or former students, does something momentous, or accomplishes an ambition, or makes their mark, I feel it, and I get to say it. This is one of the many wonderful features of being in a role of mentorship, guidance, and support as part of one's career.

I've often wondered, though, is this feeling of pride one that necessarily only attaches (at least without condescension) to persons who had at some point been under your supervision? Your students, or your subordinates, or your children?

On many occasions, I have thought "I'm so proud of you" regarding persons who had never been in that role -- had always been a peer. Classmates, friends, or colleagues. It is a happy thought, and so I want to share it. But I do worry about whether it implies condescension. So I ask "can I say I'm proud of you?" or "would it be weird for me to be proud of you?" And they usually reply yes and no, respectively, and so I say it. But I still wonder -- am I mistaken in the feeling? Or am I wrong to think being proud of someone implies at least a prior superior/subordinate relationship?

On a Certain Genre of Journalism-Apologia from Tablet to the Nation

Yesterday, YIVO held a panel on "The Jewish press today", featuring top editors from the Forward, JTA, and Tablet Magazine. In the run-up to the panel, I suggested that the Tablet editor, Alana Newhouse, should be sharply questioned on why they continue to publish Liel Leibovitz. This was in the immediate wake of his article decrying synagogue COVID restrictions as a form of idolatry, but that was hardly his only offense, nor were Tablet's dodgy journalistic choices limited to Liel. Remember their alarmingly chummy interview with the infamous antisemite Kevin MacDonald? Or Lee Smith calling arrested 1/6 insurrectionists "political prisoners"? Or the article on California Ethnic Studies that highlighted a completely fabricated antisemitic quote?

In any event, I thought that, on a panel dedicated to the Jewish press, Tablet's representative should be asked about whether her choices adequately met the standards we should expect out of Jewish (or any) journalism. I wasn't alone. But I also got pushback. One of my longtime readers thought Newhouse would have an easy response to me:

imo she will tell you that she publishes a wide variety of opinions from various parts of the political spectrum and she doesn't believe in censoring voices bc leftists want a veto, and imo she will be correct in saying so.

— Mordy (@mordygoespop) September 1, 2021

"[In my opinion] she will tell you that she publishes a wide variety of opinions from various parts of the political spectrum and she doesn't believe in censoring voices bc leftists want a veto, and [in my opinion] she will be correct in saying so."

I suspect this is correct -- that is how the response would have gone. In a different article addressing yet another Tablet/Leibovitz journalistic controversy (where he accused the Forward of having "lost [its] mind" for reporting that Trump admin official Sebastian Gorka had ties to Hungarian neo-Nazi groups), Newhouse waxed lyrical on precisely these points. The backlash to the Gorka piece was reminiscent of "Stalinism", and no, they would not give in. She urged readers not to "isolate yourself inside an echo chamber where the only views you engage with are the ones you currently hold. Choose to read writers and publications that challenge your own biases—even, or especially, if your goal is to sharpen the overall positions and loyalties to which you already feel existentially committed." Tablet's critics "want to control ... what is permitted to even get close to our brains, because we can’t be trusted to think or feel for ourselves." But they will not yield in kowtowing to orthodoxy, or the demand that they limit the full diverse range of opinion expressed on their pages.

This move is of a certain genre, and the fellow-travelers in it are familiar with the lyrics. Bari Weiss' fiery resignation letter to the New York Times quoted Adolph Ochs' prescription that the editorial page be "a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion"; she decried a new "orthodoxy" which silenced any view that deviated from that of a rarefied elite. She had, immediately prior, written that if the Times refused to publish Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's "send in the troops" editorial, it was effectively saying that "the view[s] of more than half of Americans are unacceptable." Agree or disagree, Cotton is representing a real perspective that needed to be grappled with.

One hears the refrain eloquently presented in the Harper's Letter, and far more crudely presented in the self-labeled knock-off "Jewish Harper's Letter", and echoed in every lamentation that free speech has been supplanted by cancel culture. I won't belabor the point -- the genre is familiar. But I do want to flag one more example I came across today, relating to The Nation's hiring of Mohammed el-Kurd as its new Palestine correspondent.

I have only passing familiarity with Mr. el-Kurd. I know of him wishing PTSD on every American soldier, and I know of him calling Zionism a "death cult", and I know of him calling for the removal of Israeli "colonizers" (given that he views all of Israel as a colonial entity, this can fairly be seen as a call for the forcible expulsion of all of Israel's Jewish population) and I know of him blasting Human Rights Watch for criticizing Hamas' "indiscriminate" rocket fire. This is a sampling of his oeuvre, not a full one, but I don't think a cherry-picked one either. He promises to bring to the table an authentic, angry voice of the Palestinian street which does not sugar-coat its indictment of Israeli and Zionist barbarism and sadism with dustings of "co-existence" or "acknowledging the pain of the Holocaust" or "of course terrorism is wrong." It is a real view, an authentic view, that isn't heard in (some segments of) western media.

Anyway, here is The Nation's statement on el-Kurd's hiring.

Reading the text, it checks all the genre boxes we already saw from Tablet and Weiss and their travelers:

• Citation to "free speech"? ✅
• Acknowledgment that not everyone will agree, but the perspective is important? ✅
• Importance of "challenging mainstream narratives and assumptions"? ✅
• Appeal to elevating "silenced" voices, and suggesting that not publishing this writer is akin to refusing to entertain any divergent perspective? ✅
• Implying that critical backlash is tantamount to "intimidation"? ✅

Here's the thing: the reason this is a genre? Is because every value in that checklist is a real, genuine, important value. Free speech is important. Hearing from perspectives one doesn't agree with is important. Challenging mainstream narratives is important. Elevating voices not typically heard is important. And attempts to live out these important values can often be subjected to severe backlash that attempts to intimidate a platform out of entertaining the view, or to see it whittled down to the most palatable, soft pablum. Everything The Nation is saying here about preserving open discourse and dissenting views, is genuinely important, just as it is when Newhouse or Weiss or the JILV say it. The classics are classics for a reason.

But. Notice the way that The Nation's framing paints itself into a corner before it even begins. It makes its defense on structure, which has both the great advantage and disadvantage of bracketing entirely the question of substance. It applies with equal force literally no matter what the writer says -- the anodyne point crudely converted into an outrage by the frothing Twitter mob, the provocative point which makes even sympathetic readers cock an eyebrow but which nonetheless communicates a message worthy of pondering, and the outright racist or hateful or malicious false point that really should be grounds for editorial intervention. Indeed, at one level it tacitly thirsts for the most offensive, extreme, or unreasonable viewpoint -- for these are the ones through which one can truly show your steadfast will and iron resolve to stand with the beleaguered dissident against the roaring mobs. The provocateur is the point.

And so The Nation has effectively lashed itself to the mast -- now any accommodation to criticism or backlash means giving into intimidation, means "silencing" a dissident voice, means kowtowing to the mainstream, means betraying free speech itself. Having condemned them all as tools of censorship, The Nation cannot now easily access the normal tools of editorial oversight and judgment.

And that leads to tragic (journalistically speaking, anyway) consequences. When I found that fabricated quote in Tablet's ethnic studies hit piece -- again, a flagrant, no-bones-about-it falsification -- Tablet refused to issue a correction or acknowledge error. And at first, I couldn't figure out why. Why were they digging in? Why not just take the obvious L, acknowledge "this piece wasn't up to par", and move on? The answer I came up with, and I still think is the best explanation, is that it is the dark fruit of their "anti-cancel culture", "free speech" commitments -- it is the epilogue to the genre convention they're living out:

Persons who have drank of these waters believe we are overwhelmed with attempts at censorship, sugar-coating, and kowtowing to online gangs. For such persons, then, there is no greater betrayal, no greater cowardice, than acceding to the demand for a retraction. It doesn't really even matter if the claim under attack was justified or not; it ceases to be about defending the claim on its merits. The "principle", such as it is, is to stand up to the mob. Anyone who fails to do that is weak.

[...]

We cannot disconnect this from the sense of grievance which inspired some, albeit not all, of the popularity of the initial article. There is a segment of the Jewish community (and other communities) which views Ethnic Studies as so much PC claptrap, a sop to loud and angry minorities who want to silence anything and everything that doesn't present America as a bigoted hell-hole. They read the Tablet article and understood this curriculum as reflecting the ambitions of this cohort, they view the critiques of the article as Tablet being besieged by this cohort, and if the article was retracted they'd view Tablet as having been captured by this cohort. Ironically, Tablet's credibility with its readership (or at least large chunks of it), depends on them not correcting even obvious mistakes. Many of the folks who couldn't care less about the realities of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (the author of the article now forthrightly admits that it doesn't matter what's in the curriculum; she thinks it's a poisonous idea no matter what it teaches) would never forgive Tablet if seemed to be giving in to "the left" (whatever that means). 

One can predict a similar dynamic here. When a goodly chunk of the appeal of your writer is that he gets the right type of reader to "stay mad", and when you've already staked your credibility on the idea that it would be a failure of ethics, a betrayal of journalism and free speech itself, to give an inch to anyone who is mad, then it doesn't really matter why people are mad. It's already baked into the cake that they will be mad, and that that's their problem. It's not just a matter of "they knew who he was when they hired him." The entire discursive framework they used to promote his hiring now would make it impossible to disavow him, any more than Tablet could disavow a factually wrong smear on an Ethnic Studies article without losing its "anti-woke" cred.

How can this all work? Well, it is, after all, true -- and by no means irrelevant -- that many readers (on this subject and quite a few others) do get and stay mad for partisan, biased, or outright stupid reasons, and a journal which lacked the backbone to tell those readers "sorry, but you're going to have to stay mad" isn't going to be doing its job. Again, the classics are classics for a reason. But that truth offers a refuge to hide from a different truth, which is that sometimes the mad readers are mad for good reason, to which the rote appeal to "free speech" doesn't suffice as a response. 

Lashing yourself to the mast of this particular "free speech" genre certainly comes with some benefits, and it shouldn't surprise to see this move appear across the political spectrum. But it is not always virtuous, and it is never cost-free.