It All Hangs Together

I'm not going to say you shouldn't read Liel Leibovitz's latest Tablet Mag column "We Are All Racists Now." But maybe you don't have time. You're a busy guy. So I'll do you a favor and summarize the argument. Ready?

The White House just opened a gender-neutral bathroom, probably because it thinks trans-bias is more dangerous than Iran because presidential administrations should only do one thing at a time. And that one thing obviously shouldn't be transgender rights, because gay marriage is becoming more popular. The administration claims it has something to do with "safety", which shares a root with the word "safe", as in "safe spaces", man aren't those ridiculous? Kids these days. Anyway, by announcing support for transgender rights, he's just taking the easy way out by riding the wave of popular support for gay marriage, rather than doing something hard like taking on banks. Or doing a different foreign policy. You see, transgender rights are part of the culture war, and Obama wants to call anyone who disagrees with him a gay basher or a racist. Oppose his Iran plan, and he'll point to his unisex bathroom and say you hate ... gays? What would have happened if congressional Democrats systematically tried to undermine Reagan's foreign policy? We don't know because they didn't try! I guess that settles that.

Yet despite this cunning and perfectly comprehensible retort, some people still think some attacks on Obama are racist. Once upon a time liberals favored open discourse, but now they use that discourse to call things racist that I don't think are racist, and that's offensive triggering silencing censorship for some reason, rather than just counterspeech that makes me sad. All of this will be bad for the Jews, because if there's one group that would benefit from "-ism" claims being preemptively dismissed as a form of censorship, it's the Jews. In conclusion, "we're all racists now." The end.

Seriously, it's like if someone promised Liel that they'd take a shot for every inane trope he was able to string together without a segue. Please, go ahead and read the column and tell me where I'm being remotely unfair.