We Who Are About To Die

The Romans loved their gladiator games.

I actually have no idea if that's true. Most of what I know about gladiators comes from how they're portrayed in Ridley Scott movies. For all I know, Romans did not actually enjoy seeing innocent people torn apart in the arena by wild animals or what have you.

But, to quote Philip J. Fry, "it's a widely-believed fact!", so we'll run with it.

It seems clear that a huge part of the second Trump administration will be vindictive political prosecution of his "enemies". This was a recurrent campaign theme of his, from proposing "military tribunals" for the likes of Liz Cheney to alleging "COVID crimes" by Anthony Fauci. Willingness -- implicit or explicit -- to engage in such thuggery has been a theme of his early announced appointees, from Kash Patel to Brendan Carr to Pete Hegseth. Concern over such tactics was expressly raised by Joe Biden in his pardon announcement for his son, Hunter. How deep down the list will he go? Unclear, though normalcy will not save you. The hammerfist coming to smash American rule of law is something unprecedented in my lifetime.

These prosecutions will be lawless along every possible dimension. The people driving them won't care about the law. The venues will be selected based on political convenience (I bet one will be amazed at how many of the "crimes" in question will center on the Western District of Texas). The "crimes" themselves either will be frivolous or nakedly selective. It will be undisguised authoritarian thuggery: the apparatus of law enforcement entirely perverted to immunize the president's allies while harassing his enemies (the almost-assured pardon of the January 6 insurrectionists is also part of this story).

I won't here venture a prediction as to how the judiciary will respond to these endeavors. It's possible they'll hold the line, as they largely did in 2020. But it's also the case that in 2024 the conservative legal movement has embraced and assimilated into full-blown MAGAism to a far greater degree than in 2020; even if they don't actively embrace the conspiracism (which they might), one can very easily imagine them hiding behind rules of deference to enable Trump to run wild.

The open question I want to consider, though, is how the public will respond to all of this. Of course, Trump's base will love it -- they've been baying for blood since 2016. And equally obviously, people like me will hate it. But I have a bad feeling -- maybe doom-mongering, maybe not -- that these spectacles of prosecution will go over better than one would think with low-information independents.

The reason isn't because they necessarily have strong opinions that Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or various military general actually are criminals. Rather, it is a more inchoate desire to see "the powerful" get their comeuppance. It almost doesn't matter whether they're guilty or not; the mere practice of seeing people one is accustomed to thinking of as "above you" laid low, ripped apart by the animals in the arena, is desired in of itself.

Consider what is for me one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump's victory: that he will not be held accountable for his many, many blatant crimes. No sentencing for the New York felony convictions, no consequences for the attempted 2020 insurrection, no pursuit of the document theft case, no nothing. It is maddening, to see such naked abuses of power result in nothing simply because Trump is powerful enough to evade responsibility for anything. If you take that indignant sensation and shear it from any substantive political knowledge, you're just left with the boiling resentment that a vague "they" keep "getting away with it". And the mere performance of going after a "they" can appeal to those resentments -- a fascist essence where the struggle is valuable in of itself, to show oneself to be the tribune of the people.

This suggests that Democrats could have leveraged this same atavistic desire to get at a powerful "them" by, for example, a fast Garland or prosecuting big bankers for the financial crisis or going after Elon Musk. And much like with echo chambers, I'm of two minds on this: torn between thinking that (for better or for worse) this is the strategy that works, versus thinking that it is a bad thing to encourage this sort of political climate (to be clear: I have no quarrel with "going after" big bankers or whoever when they commit crimes, but performatively going after an "enemy" class -- no matter who it is -- untethered by normal rule of law constraints strikes me as bad both morally and also conducive to a political environment that ultimately helps the right).

So once again, I'm at a bit of a loss here. But if we're relying on a natural popular revulsion to politicized sham prosecutions by the Trump administration, I'm not sure we're going to get it. We are going to be entering a very, very dark time.

Did Bluesky Win or Did X Lose?

"She only won because I lost. That's not a winner."

"Network effects" refer to situations where a product becomes more valuable to individual users the more total users there are. It's commonly applied to social media platforms -- one wants to be on, for example, Facebook because that's where the people are; a Facebook that had a small user base wouldn't be a lot of fun even if its features and product functionality were vastly superior. On a darker level, network effects are often cited as a reason why it's so difficult to leave even bad or malfunctioning social media platforms -- we're "stuck" there, even if there's widespread agreement that another platform would be better, because of the collective action problem of coordinating a mass decamping to an alternative.

For a long time, Twitter was held out as the epitome of a network effect in action -- because everyone was there, everyone had to be there; leaving Twitter for a competing platform was the equivalent of leaving a bustling party and deciding to shout into a boundless void. This sense of Twitter as a de facto monopoly gave at least some measure of credence at efforts to regulate it as a "common carrier" or "public square" -- the idea being that if Twitter "censored" (banned, throttled, or deprioritized) certain people or views, it was tantamount to blocking them from the premier domain of public conversation.

Now, of course, we are seeing Bluesky ascend as a truly viable alternative to Twitter X. For my part, I've been exclusively on Bluesky for several months (I joined in July 2023, but like many for a long time I straddled both platforms). By now, I'm close to my peak follower account on Twitter, and my engagement on Bluesky is at least as robust (if not better) than it was on Twitter. And while Bluesky isn't wholly immune to some of the worst elements of "old" Twitter, it is generally in my experience a nicer and more humane place (arguably compared to the Twitter of yore, certainly compared to the cesspool its devolved into as of late).

From my vantage point, seeing Bluesky challenge and, in certain domains, topple Twitter is unprecedented territory. The closest analogue I can think of is Facebook dislodging Myspace, but I don't know (genuinely, I don't) if Myspace was as ubiquitous and dominant in its domain as Twitter was. Outside of that, it's hard to think of a titan that's fallen as far, from as high, as Twitter did. How did this happen? How did Bluesky overcome the network effect hurdle to emerge as a viable alternative? 

I have two stories, and I'm genuinely unsure which is more persuasive.

Story #1 is that Bluesky's emergence shows that the network effect, while certainly real, isn't as big of a hurdle to change as people thought. We're not actually stuck with incumbent social media providers come hell or high water. There's inertia militating against change, but it's not insurmountable. Bluesky is winning because it is fundamentally better than X is right now, as well as better than the other X competitors (Threads, Mastodon, Post) that emerged over the last few years. It's making better choices about the use (or not) of algorithms, it's making better choices about doing content moderation, it made better choices about growing responsibly, and it's reaping the fruits of making those better choices that appeal to more people.

Overall, the moral of this story is that the concerns about Twitter as a functional monopoly that could singlehandedly manipulate the public square without any possibility of public recourse or accountability have been falsified. And that, of course, has implications for the rest of the social media space -- many of our worries about undislodgeable tech monopolies maybe seem overblown. What a relief!

Story #2, which is probably less hopeful but might generate more primal glee inside of me, is that the basic narrative of network effects creating entrenched monopolies is still true, but Elon Musk so epically and catastrophically mismanaged Twitter that he managed to destroy it anyway. Keeping in mind that Musk didn't actually want to buy Twitter in the first place (he made his offer as a troll, only to be forced into a sale when Twitter's leadership realized this was their best chance to cashout at inflated prices), every choice he's made since assuming ownership has been a disaster borne out of his own infinite depth of arrogance and boundless need for public affirmation. 

He had a company with universal brand recognition; he renamed it for no reason. He complained about Twitter allegedly censoring speech to put its thumb on the political scales; he converted X into an explicit megaphone for Donald Trump and far-right MAGA politics. He whined about bots taking over the platform; bots are even more ubiquitous than they were before. Ad sales are down because advertisers don't like their brands being associated with neo-Nazis, to the point where Musk is suing on the theory that it's illegal for people not to give him money. Neutering the utility of the block function served mostly to make harassment and brigading easier. Changing "verified" accounts into paid promotional material nuked the ability of Twitter to serve as a trusted outlet for anyone. 

It's been an utter, unmitigated, arguably unparalleled trainwreck -- and that's why Bluesky was able to overcome the network effect headwinds and establish itself as a competitor. It's not so much "popular discontent can overcome anything," and more "even the biggest ship can sink if its drunken captain insists on ramming it into an iceberg". I don't want to say that's never going to be replicable, but we won't always be so "lucky" as to have someone this incompetent at the helm of our big tech outfits. To take one example, there is plenty of negative things to be said on how Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook as of late, but as bad as his choices have been and as aggravating as Facebook often is as a platform, nothing Facebook has done has come anywhere close to the abyss of incompetence that characterized how Elon Musk ran Twitter into the ground -- and for that reason, we haven't seen a true competitor emerge to Facebook in a manner akin to Bluesky.

So which story is right? I don't know (and of course, it's more of a spectrum than a binary). I do think Bluesky made some smart choices that it deserves credit for -- there's a reason it is the main competitor (and not Threads or Mastodon). But there's little doubt it got a huge assist from the dizzying array of unfathomably boneheaded choices Elon Musk has made at the helm of X -- a unicorn event that to my eyes stands out even amongst a sea of overconfident, underperforming tech bros.

Fictional Character Ideological Turing Test

If you're a Democrat, which fictional television character do you think most "embodies" contemporary Republicans? And if you're a Republican, which television character do you think Democrats would pick to answer the above question?

(Then do it vice versa -- what character do Republicans think embodies Democrats, and what character do Democrats think Republicans would pick to embody Democrats?).

I'm weirdly obsessed with thinking about this thought exercise. Unfortunately, I think it isn't really doable, if for no other reason than it presupposes a shared media culture that doesn't really exist, and in particular in my head it involves everyone sharing my particular Peak TV cast of potential characters, which definitely doesn't exist.

But nonetheless, the concept is interesting to me. Under conditions of negative polarization, I think we can assume that the selected character would be one who embodies the perceived vices of the "other side". And so one thing we'd be measuring is to what degree people have a handle on what the "other side" perceives as their most salient and emblematic vice.

For example, I've written that for me the character that most embodies the contemporary MAGA right is Jerry from Rick & Morty. But I doubt that most Republicans would guess that Jerry would be my pick. I'd guess that they'd guess I'd choose someone like Homer Simpson ("they think we're oafish idiots"), or Boss Hogg ("they think we're racists"). I don't think they think that I think (boy, that's a mouthful) that their emblematic vice is whiny entitlement and crippling beta male insecurity, which is crystallized into the character of Jerry Smith.

Who do I think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats? I'm thinking one of the characters from Lena Dunham's "Girls" (again, bracketing the fact that most Republicans have never seen that show -- and in fact, I haven't seen it either -- the point is to identify an archetype). I think they think of us as self-obsessed and self-absorbed, performatively "woke" (but massively hypocritical about it), and generally unproductive leeches who wouldn't know a "real job" if it chafed our uncalloused, manicured hands. But maybe I'm wrong, and their emblematic Democrat is epitomized by a completely different set of vices! And again, it would be interesting to learn the mismatch.

Anyway, as I said, it's an exercise that -- even just as a thought experiment -- I've always found fun to ponder. And I'm curious at people's thought processes here -- so feel free to play in the comments (i.e., if you're a Democrat say which character most embodies Republicans, and also give guesses as to which character you think Republicans would choose to embody Democrats as well as which character you imagine Republicans would guess Democrats think embodies Republicans)!

What If Echo Chambers Work?

A few days after the election, I remember seeing a Washington Post column that said something like "You can't win an election if you're going to shun or denigrate half the electorate." And I remember wishing I could ask the author, in all earnestness: Why not?

After all, hadn't we just seen someone win an election while shunning and denigrating half the electorate? Clearly it's possible! The Post's hypothesis had been decisively falsified less than a week before!

This came up again today with the ongoing "echo chamber" discourse about BlueSky, paired against the fact that Republicans did in fact manage to win an election while generating an almost entirely cloistered epistemic bubble for themselves. The belief that echo chambers are antipathic to good electoral strategy is a comforting belief for people of a certain political persuasion (myself included!), but it just seems not to be true.

So the real question, and I think harder question, for Democrats is -- what if echo chambers work? What if one can win an election by constructing an epistemic fortress and just mainlining as many conspiracy theories and wild accusations about the other sides as humanly (or AI-ing-ly) possible?

It's a harder question because, at least for someone like me, this would be a very sad reality to come to grips with. I very fervently don't think democracy should be about scratching your way to the thinnest possible plurality and then steamrolling the other side. If you asked me what I would hope to happen to MAGA Republicans in rural Idaho or whatever after a Kamala Harris win, I'd have answered "I hope they get good healthcare, decent jobs, and well-funded schools." I have no desire to unleash recriminations upon "enemies", and I hate the idea of politics as a lawless bloodsport where all is fair if it wins you an election.

But maybe people like me are naive, and the lesson that has to be learned from 2024 (and 2016) is that brutal, no quarter, snarling attacks are an electorally winning play, and that for Democrats to win they need to harness their inner demonization machine and find some people to vilify. Of course, one could respond to this by saying that even if such a strategy is electorally superior at the margins, it's just plain wrong. That's always a valid response, and one might notice that it's the same response given to arguments that Democrats need to throw trans persons under the bus for electoral wins. There, of course, the retort is "well, enjoy feeling morally pure as you lose the Senate for the next decade" -- it's of course fascinating that the Post would never apply a similar retort to those who demand foreswearing scorched-earth electoral tactics against the GOP ("have fun patting yourselves on the back for your moral purity!"). It goes to show which moral commitments are truly seen as sacrosanct by the mainstream media, and which aren't.

But if we leave the moral objection aside, there remains one circle I cannot quite square. I've never been one to think, contra some narratives, that Democrats have just preemptively surrendered at every turn (e.g., as far as I know I'm the only person who thinks Chuck Schumer has done a pretty good job keeping a very thin majority dependent on some very unreliable actors relatively unified over the course of his tenure). Nonetheless, I am, with great reluctance, coming to believe that Democrats cannot win elections solely by taking the high road and demonstrating sober commitment to good governance and rule of law, when pitted against the emotional fever-dream populist pitch that characterizes the modern GOP. Again -- this is not a conclusion I'm happy to accede to. There probably are some people whose every instinct is to destroy the opposition at all costs and have to be persuaded to stay within the lines; but as noted above that's not me. My sensibilities are extremely wedded towards sober technocracy and good governance, and I reflexively recoil at the sort of hardball, "crush the enemy" tactics we're talking about here.

But here's my problem: if over the short term I think Democrats need to compete with the GOP on the level of back-alley brawl politics, over the long term I think that a politics that takes that form is inherently slanted towards the right. We will never be able to out-hate the GOP. We'll never be better than them at conjuring up some shadowy enemy to put people into a frenzy. There are absolutely ways to pitch distrust towards established institutions and a belief that "They" are out to get "Us" in a left-ish manner, but ultimately those narratives are going to benefit the right more (and we're already seeing how that pipeline flows from left-to-right in the form of folks like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard). So even if I may believe that my fighting faith of good governance liberalism just isn't winning elections, I'm also very concerned that the punchier left-wing populist alternatives will generate a political environment that is even more systematically slanted towards the right. Conspiratorial populism is home turf advantage for the right -- if that's the field we're playing on, we're always going to be starting from behind.

As I said, I don't have a way to square this circle. I'm not a political strategist, and I'm trying to avoid the temptation of "just agree with me and of course we'll win elections." But it's something I'm feeling very glum about.

The Media is (Really!) Not Part of the Liberal Family

When I think of what I, as a liberal, want the media to do, it's really quite simple: just tell me what's happening -- without varnish, horserace hypothesizing, or "sanewashing". I don't need them to lie to me. I don't need them to confirm my priors. I don't need to have "bad" news hidden from me. I don't need or want a liberal version of Fox News. Just tell me what's going on! 

For example, immediately after the election and Trump's victory, the stock market went way up. It seems the market was happy with Trump's victory (alongside, I'm guessing, general happiness that the outcome was decisive). As a Democrat, that's not pleasant to see -- but still, I didn't need anyone to hide that fact. I didn't need to construct some Potemkin coverage where it didn't happen. I didn't even need some side-eye slant about how it turns out "the elites" seem rather elated at Trump's triumph (I can make that inference on my own). Just tell me the truth. It will suffice.

Now, I fully admit that this "simple" request isn't so simple. Nonetheless, even accounting for its easier-said-than-done character, there's little doubt that the media has been abjectly terrible at this. And while the reasons behind it are myriad, one answer I keep returning to is an argument I made back in 2018: namely, that the media thinks of itself as part of the liberal "family".

It may be counterintuitive why that leads to conservative media bias. But the idea is that, to the extent journalists fundamentally see themselves as liberals talking to liberals, then there isn't much need to report on various dangers and predations of conservatives. "We" already know that. There's nothing new here. If anything, the job of a journalist is to disturb "our" preexisting narratives. And since the "we" and the "our" are all imagined to be liberals, we get an endless stream of apologetics, explainers, and sanewashing of conservative extremism.oooo

But I said in 2018 and I'll say it now: regardless of the personal politics of any particular editor or journalist, the media is not part of the liberal family. They should not presume their only audience is liberals, they should not assume that their job is to give liberals "the other side of the story", because they should view conservatives (or liberals) as "the other side" to begin with. This is related to something Jamelle Bouie wrote recently: the political media has a bad habit of thinking its job is to play amateur political strategist for Democrats, instead of just trying to accurately report on what's happening in the world. When we're talking about Biden's alleged mental decline or Trump's rambling political speeches, we don't need hypothesizing about how this is playing out in swing states. Just -- tell us what's happening. Report Trump's speech. Report Biden's speech. The audience can decide for itself whether this reality is "good news" or not for Democrats or Republicans.

I admit, there is a small part of me that harbors hope that the surrenderist policy taken by many journalistic "elites" towards Trump -- exemplified by the owners of the Washington Post and LA Times craven non-endorsement decisions -- might disabuse some other members of the legacy journalist community of the naive notion that "everyone" (who counts) already knows how dangerous Trump and his cronies are. The increasingly evident truth that this assessment is not universally-held (obviously it's not!) should, in an ideal world, dissipate the notion that straightforward, accurate recounting of what's going on in Trumpland is in some way preaching to the choir or superfluous repetition of obvious truths. And likewise, it should be obvious right now that the main "bias" the media needs to combat within itself is not a propensity to overtell liberal narratives, it's an instinct to self-censor truths inconvenient to conservatives because it's viewed as gilding the lily.

On this score, the early returns are not good -- the media is already racing to sanewash RFK Jr.'s anti-vaxx positions on the apparent premise that "we all" know why vaccines are healthful, and need to understand the argument for why they're dangerous. The reality, though, is that we don't all know that vaccines are healthful, and lots of people need to be educated on why avoiding or tamping down on vaccines is what's dangerous.

This, ultimately, is what it actually means to speak to an audience of conservatives and liberals alike. It's not about being evermore coddling and accommodating of conservative conspiracism -- that's never going to work. Ultimately, it means remembering that not "everyone" knows and accepts truths inconvenient for contemporary conservatism, and when reality poses facts troublesome to a conservative reader, it is the media's job to report those facts without varnish or sugarcoating. To borrow from Harry Truman: you're not giving your conservative readers hell -- you just telling them the truth, and they're calling it hell.

Will Matt Gaetz Finally Cause the Senate GOP To Stand Up To Trump? My Money's On No!

I really thought I'd laid the bar on the floor, but somehow Donald Trump has already burrowed under it by announcing (former*) Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general. I had the pleasure of sharing this news with several of my law school colleagues, where it literally provoked a laugh-out-loud howl of incredulity.

It wasn't just my people though. Senate Republicans also seem rather blindsided by the pick:

The selection of Mr. Gaetz blindsided many of Mr. Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill. The announcement was met with immediate and unvarnished skepticism by Republicans in the Senate who will vote on his nomination. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she was “shocked” by the pick — and predicted a difficult confirmation process.

[....]

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, when asked about Mr. Gaetz’s selection, said, “I don’t know the man other than his public persona.”

Mr. Cornyn said he could not comment on the chances that Mr. Gaetz, or Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, would be confirmed: “I don’t know — we’ll find out.”

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said as other senators dodged questions from reporters.

Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, told reporters that many members of the G.O.P. conference were shocked at the choice of Mr. Gaetz for attorney general, but mostly thrilled at the prospect that he might no longer be a member of the chamber.

The House, Mr. Miller added, would be a more functional place without Mr. Gaetz.

He predicted a bruising confirmation fight, adding that if the process revealed evidence to corroborate the allegations of sex trafficking against Mr. Gaetz, he would not be surprised if the House moved to expel him, as it did with Representative George Santos. Mr. Santos lost his seat after the Ethics Committee documented violations of the chamber’s rules and evidence of extensive campaign fraud.  

But things aren't all bad. You'll never guessed who raced ahead of the pack to greet Trump's failson pick with open arms:

One of the few lawmakers to offer a positive assessment was a staunch Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who called Mr. Gaetz “smart” and “clever” but predicted tough confirmation hearings.

So, how long will it take for the Senate GOP caucus to fall in line? I'm guessing it'll happen before the first confirmation hearing. (That is, if we have confirmation hearings).

Oh, and speaking of organizations that have put their dignity in a lockbox, we did finally learn what bridge is too far for the ADL, which blistered the Gaetz selection because of his "long history of trafficking in antisemitism," including "defending the Great Replacement Theory." How he's distinguished from the ADL's glowingly-praised Elise Stefanik, who also promoted Great Replacement Theory, was left unsaid.

* Gaetz hastily resigned his seat following the announcement, also getting ahead of a planned House Ethics Committee report that was set to issue findings on Gaetz's myriad, er, "controversies" -- including allegations of sex trafficking minors. Score one for QAnon!

The Shrapnel Marked "Occupant"

There's an old saying passed around by soldiers, that goes something like: "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it. Worry about the piece of shrapnel marked 'occupant'."

The point of the story is to impress the fundamental impersonality of war. Who lives, who dies -- there's nothing special about it. The bullet or bomb or rocket doesn't care about you; the person firing it doesn't care about you either. In 99.9% of cases, it has nothing to do with you in any meaningful sense. We have for ourselves a thick understanding of our own choices and values and importance, but none of that really plays any role in who gets hurt. The bullet that comes for us almost certainly will not have our "name on it".

At one level, this outlook is a corrective to main character syndrome, where we all imagine ourselves to be very special indeed, and so the reasons good or bad things happen to us relate to our specialness and our special choices. The bullet is inscribed with my name because I made distinctive choices which made someone take notice of me and decide to specifically take me out. 

But at another level, this saying is also about undermining a sense of security based around our own ordinariness. In many respects, most of us I think don't imagine ourselves as "special". We don't stand out, we don't see ourselves as making some sort of radical or impactful choice that would cause someone else to go to the trouble of crafting a bullet specially for us. I'm just a regular guy, doing ordinary things. There's nothing special about me, so why would anyone bother to target me, of all the people in the world? And the answer is that maybe they wouldn't -- but the shrapnel marked "occupant" is distinguished precisely because it doesn't bother to target at all. Your mundanity will not save you.

I've been thinking about all of this in relation to my own coping mechanisms as I envision what the future might hold over the next four years. One mode of "reassurance" is to tell oneself that Trump and Trumpists aren't really going to go after me; they are targeting other, more distinctive communities (such an immigrants, or trans individuals). Of course, this cope might not even be right on its own terms (it's entirely plausible he will target, e.g., Jewish college professors). And to the extent it is right, even thinking this way wracks me with guilt -- "I feel better knowing it's others who will be hurt".

But there's a more fundamental problem at work here. Finding reassurance in terms of who is likely to be "targeted" tries to find security in normalcy and ordinariness. It's that notion of "I'm just a regular guy, I'm doing nothing special or out of the ordinary -- why would anyone bother to come after me?" And again, I think that self-conception is incredibly common. Some of you might have seen interviews with undocumented immigrants who claimed that, if they could vote, they would have backed Trump. This feels inconceivable -- how could they do that, when Trump says he wants to enforce their deportation en masse? The answer they give is basically: "he's not talking about me." Why would he be? I'm just trying to work hard and build a better life for my family. He must be talking about the criminals and the rapists and the predators. I'm just a normal guy, doing normal things. There's no reason why someone would go through so much trouble just to hurt me.

This in-depth story from a few months ago, about a trans girl in Florida who was on her middle school's volleyball team. The reassurance her mother tried to draw on was entirely centered around her daughter's ordinary mundaneness -- she's just a regular tween, going through normal adolescent experiences, who wants to play a sport. She's not even an especially good volleyball player! Who could be bothered to care about something so fundamentally normal?

Of course, it doesn't work. Her normalcy doesn't save her. Now certainly, in the Florida case one could say that this kid absolutely was personally targeted (the article suggests there were only two trans female athletes in the entire state at the time). The school board, the police, and so on -- they very much went after her when they found out she was trans and participating in public school athletics. But in a truer sense, I don't think it's accurate to say that what happened had anything to do with "her" at all. She is better described as the victim of the GOP's saturation bombing directed at the trans community, broadly; a campaign that self-consciously does not care about any of its victims as individuals. It's not about her. She's simply the occupant.

If one wants to catastrophize further, I sometimes think about what would happen if our newly-elected overlords got us into a global hot war (Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense is a Fox News personality who openly promoted the idea of a first strike attack on North Korea). It feels, and some sense is, cosmically unfair that such a war would effect me. What do I have to do with anything? I didn't vote for this! I think this whole thing is stupid! But what's true for soldiers is even more true for civilians caught in war zones -- we're all just regular people, and our regularity simply does not matter (this insight applies to other civilians who are actually, and not just hypothetically, stuck in actual war zones right now). If the rockets start raining down on Portland, it will do me no good to call out to them and say "I had nothing to do with us -- go over there!" They in no way will have my name on them, and they will  nonetheless be implacably indifferent to me.

Perhaps the moral of the story, then, is to not be afraid to stand up. Your normalcy, your ordinariness won't save you. Maybe it should, but it won't. It may or may not surprise you to know that this conclusion is very hard for me to grasp onto. I actually don't have any desire to stand out, I'm not looking to present a visage one cannot look away from. I'm fine doing "ordinary" politics and writing and participation, but I have no desire to be special beyond that. My fondest wish is that the world leave me alone and I leave it alone in turn.

But that probably isn't going to be an option. Someone like me may or may not be directly targeted for abuse and oppression -- as a Jew, as an academic, or as a Democrat. But targeted or no, there's always the chance that some shrapnel will find me as an "occupant". I don't think of myself as particularly special or distinct, I have no illusions that I represent some critical node in the Resistance to Trumpist oppression. I'm just a regular, normal guy. But normalcy will not keep me safe.

Yet More Trumpist Humiliation of the ADL

I really don't intend for my post-election coverage to be so ADL-centric. But I can't help but be struck at the degree to which Trump's Jewish and Israel-related decision-making might as well be solely based on how to personally humiliate the ADL, and prompt them into embarrassing and degrading acts of submission and hypocrisy, to the greatest extent possible.

For example, Trump's announced pick for UN Ambassador is New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. One of my basic rules of 2024 political observation was that "one does not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Elise Stefanik," who defined the term bad-faith grandstanding when it came to her supposed objections to campus antisemitism even as she was directly promoting dangerous antisemitic conspiracy theories on her own. 

But alas, the ADL eagerly jumped in with praise for the selection, allowing us to juxtapose this:

next to this:

Like I said -- just abject, humiliating supplication. It couldn't be more pathetic.

Or consider the position of United States Ambassador to Israel. If ever past was prologue, this is it. The first time Donald Trump was elected, he appointed an ambassador to Israel who referred to liberal Jews as "kapos". The ADL maintained a studious silence, a choice which I maintained "sold out" a substantial swath of the Jewish community that it purportedly was tasked to protect.

This time around, the nominee is going to be former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has an even more illustrative history with the ADL. You see, back in 2011, the following sequence occurred:

1. Huckabee made spurious and offensive analogies to the Holocaust (comparing it to, of all things, the national debt).
2. The ADL publicly took exception.
3. Huckabee threatened the ADL.
4. The ADL scampered backwards and issued a groveling apology.

So here, at least, the ADL already got ahead of schedule, and I look forward to some embarrassingly effusive praise directed towards Huckabee to emerge forthwith.

What we saw in 2016, is only going to be worse in 2024. That's true on many levels, but for the ADL in particular it is evidently apparent -- they will sell us out. They will take vulnerable American Jews, who are rightfully terrified about emergent Christian nationalism and White supremacy and violent extremism and, yes, left-wing campus antisemitism too*, and they will leave us to twist. They will do it regularly, and repeatedly, and without hesitation, and for an embarrassingly cheap payoff.

* I include this because, by cuddling up to the far-right powers that be, the ADL will necessarily kneecap any ability to effectively fight campus antisemitism, though they certainly will retain the capacity to yell about it. The sorts of tactics which actually might tamp down on and respond to campus antisemitism, versus the sorts of tactics which yield good Fox News ragebait and can justify blowing up the Department of Education, are not compatible with one another, and the ADL is going to lash itself to the latter at the expense of the former. While there still may be utility in what the ADL can do for someone like me on the local level, in terms of a cohesive, national strategy I do not have any more confidence in the ADL's ability to effectively protect me from campus antisemitism than I have confidence in its ability to protect me from conservative antisemitism.