Rats Flee Floating Ship

You might have heard the story break that the Heritage Foundation, America's leading right wing "think tank", has just been hit with a rush of high-level resignations across several key programs. The resignations were precipitated by Heritage's president, Kevin Roberts, legitimizing the rise in antisemitism explicit antisemitism even more explicit antisemitism on the mainstream right by ostentatiously defending Tucker Carlson friendly interview with neo-Nazi extremist Nick Fuentes.

(Among those resigning is Josh Blackman, and I have to say, caring about other Jews makes a nice change of pace for him).

The scope of the resignations has understandably led folks to frame the events as "turmoil" at Heritage, and there's no doubt they're losing a lot of big names who have decided that Heritage's increasingly open embrace of open nativism and ethnic supremacy is too much for them. And the natural thing to conclude in the wake of such turmoil and disarray is that Roberts has made a major strategic error; failing to recognize that even now there are some things that are still "too far" for even the most hardened conservative loyalist.

But l disagree with that take. To the contrary, I think Roberts is right. This was no blunder, this was strategy, and Roberts is absolutely going to be vindicated in the end.

Now, obviously, when I say Roberts is right -- he's not morally right. He's morally abominable; his positions, reprehensible. But that goes without saying; if he was morally upstanding, he wouldn't be leading the Heritage Foundation.

No, what I mean is, Roberts is right in his assessment of where the conservative movement is going and what it wants. No matter how august their titles and pedigrees, the people departing are not going to cripple Heritage; they will not dim its star in the least. Heritage will be able to replenish it ranks just fine (it helps that mediocrity is not a barrier to success there), and its influence in the halls of conservative power will not wane.

Roberts has calculated that open embrace of White nationalism and nativism is the ticket to success in the contemporary conservative movement. I think he is right in that wager. It is the same calculation made by J.D. Vance -- a man whose completely venal lack of principles makes him, if nothing else, a useful barometer of how the right-wing winds are blowing -- when he jumps all in on White supremacist bullhorns. Roberts knows full well what young Republicans truly think, and what they truly think is that they hate Jews, think Hitler is underrated, revel in being called racist, believe women should get back in the kitchen, and think anyone who isn't a "heritage American" has no rights the white man is bound to respect. These people -- the new GOP base -- will not follow their elders in fleeing Heritage. To the contrary, they will be even more excited to join forces with it.

This is the Republican Party's present and future, and Roberts is making a calculated decision to get out in front of it. It's not surprise that one of the staffers rising to fill the power vacuum after all this is E.J. Antoni, he of the creepy love affair for an iconic Nazi battleship. Antoni's Nazi fascination is exactly what Roberts is looking for, because it's exactly what contemporary conservatism is looking for. The people who don't like it? They're yesterday's conservatives. Their departures mean nothing.

So I suspect that the Heritage refugees will find that, their years of slavish service to the conservative cause notwithstanding, they are now functional irrelevancies. They're not going to pull a Bill Kristol and have a late-stage redemption arc. They're not going to have meaningful influence or clout in contemporary conservative circles either, as they no doubt fantasize. They'll be nobodies. Some will rage impotently against the dying of the light, some will quietly choose to fade away. Some number will, if past history is any guide, come sheepishly crawling back into the fold -- the fate of many a "NeverTrumper" whose "principled" opposition was actually pure opportunism that sadly misread the prevailing political winds. None of them will do much of anything to alter or even ameliorate the tsunami of racist, nativist, antisemitic, and misogynist antagonism that is the sole driving force of the modern conservative movement.

So yeah -- don't see this as the Heritage Foundation being torn asunder. This is the Heritage Foundation perceiving the new conservative normal -- a normal of unapologetic authoritarianism, atavistic ethnic hatred, gutter racism, smirking antisemitism, and vicious nativism -- and deciding it wants to be at the vanguard.

Solidarity Shouldn't Look Like This

Like many of you, I woke up this morning to the horrible news of a mass shooting at a Channukah celebration in Sydney, Australia.

Like many of you, I also quickly saw footage of a man who threw himself at one of the gunmen and successfully disarmed him, saving countless lives.

I've seen countless posts lauding this man, Ahmed al Ahmed, as a hero and a model for what solidarity should look like between Jews and Muslims or Arabs.

Ahmed is absolutely a hero. But he is most certainly not my model for what solidarity should look like.

Solidarity should not look like men throwing themselves at active shooters.

Solidarity should not look like people putting their bodies in front of government thugs trying to impose a racist ban on a minority religion or ethnicity.

Solidarity should not look like synagogues and mosques swapping strategies regarding how to "harden the target".

Solidarity should not look like a taxi driver evacuating terrified survivors from the scene of an ongoing massacre.

Solidarity should not look like desperately working the phones to try and rescue a family buried under the rubble of their own house after it was hit by a tank shell.

Solidarity shouldn't look like that, because none of those things should happen.

You want to know what my model of solidarity is?

It's a new arrival in town asking where they can find Halal food, and being pointed to the excellent Kosher market down the street.

It's two neighbors snickering over the well-meaning lady next door who somehow gives a different wrong pronunciation of both of their names, every time.

It's the synagogue and the mosque sharing a parking lot.

It's bonding over the common elements of shared cuisine, and bonding over trying unfamiliar elements of different cuisine.

I understand why, in the wake of unfathomable tragedy, a story like Ahmed's provides a flicker of hope in a dark time. And make no mistake - he is a hero. But I don't want more Ahmed al Ahmeds because I don't want more situations where that sort of heroism is required. It is a tragedy that our vision of solidarity -- of ideal solidarity -- is tempered through atrocities that never should happen in the first place. That should be a depressing thought. The subtext -- elevating Ahmed's story and the narrative of solidarity as a hedge against those who wish to inspire an Islamophobic and racist backlash -- is also depressing. I'm not saying it isn't necessary or it's wrong -- I'm saying it's depressing, and our model of solidarity should envision something that is greater precisely because it is more mundane.

The solidarity we should aspire to is not the extraordinary work of extraordinary individuals in times of crisis. It is rather the ordinary, everyday work of making friends, creating love, building connections, being neighborly. No crisis, just communities enmeshed in bonds of caring.

That's what solidarity should look like.

Anti-DEI's "What About the Men!" Problem

There's a WaPo article going around titled "Trump’s attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men" The basic thrust of it is that women are considerably more likely to apply to (elite) colleges than men, and moreover women have for some time now outperformed men on the "traditional" metrics of collegiate qualification (grades and standardized test scores). Anybody in the know knows that colleges seeking to maintain some measure of gender parity in their admitted classes have put their thumbs on the scale in pursuit of qualified men. But the Trump anti-DEI initiatives nominally prohibit such behavior, meaning that if "meritocratic" admissions policies yield overwhelmingly female classes, well, that's the way it'll have to be.

This headline, unsurprisingly, has yielded no small amount of schadenfreude among liberal observers -- once again, Trump's leopards eat the faces of his loyal supporters. But to that there's been another response from more conservative voices challenging the framing: if Trump's anti-DEI measures "hurt men", then it must mean that the prior pro-DEI measures "hurt women". As a colleague at another school put it after making this point: "Everyone fine with that?"

That was a rhetorical question, of course. But I think answering it earnestly might yield some insight.

Assume we buy the basic premise here: DEI helps men and hurts women; anti-DEI hurts men and helps women. The punch of the Post's article stems, I think, from two following observations:

1. Many conservative initiatives aimed at propping up men who are underperforming on traditional metrics do not, on face, comport with "anti-DEI" principles (and their conservative proponents don't seem to realize this); and
2. Many feminists and women who support DEI initiatives do so notwithstanding the fact that men may be among their primary beneficiaries.

Both of these observations deserve a deeper dive.

Start with the first. Again, it is an open secret that colleges have been putting their thumbs on the scale to help bring in more male applicants and matriculants. Sometimes their rationales are pure sexism -- Chris Rufo, for instance, admitted that many of his "reforms" at the New College were expressly designed to reduce the number of women who enrolled (comments which, I'll repeat, really should be smoking gun evidence of sex discrimination in the event of a lawsuit). More broadly, there is a cottage industry of conservative pundits pushing the line that society discriminates against men, is structured to disadvantage men, does not adequately value the contributions of men, and these injustices are what explains men's seeming underperformance. The "thumb on the scale" is actually a mechanism to compensate for these deeper inequalities. 

Now, sometimes these accounts are, as in the Rufo case, simple misogyny. But I don't want to say it's always wrong to look at gendered barriers men might face and think of ways to counteract or ameliorate them. The problem, though, is that these narratives of male disenfranchisement and the earnest efforts to reverse them are no different in form from the "DEI" logic conservatives claim to abhor -- problematizing disparities in outcomes that, on a superficial level, appear explainable by "merit" and instead treating the disparity itself as a problem needing remediation. A few weeks ago, I saw a Facebook post where the University of Chicago announced that all the EiCs of its law journals were women. An alum replied angrily that this outcome must be the product of DEI and "wokeness", because statistically what are the odds that women would occupy all the top journal roles? I snickered at this, because her jeremiad was actually a cry for proportional representation; the hitherto conservative boogeyman roundly mocked when it is used to demonstrate bias against women or minorities. But of course when it's men who fall on the wrong side of the line, then statistical underrepresentation is smoking gun proof of a Capital-P Problem. The inconsistency is glaring.

So the first observation really does just boil down to sexism -- though sometimes with a few extra steps. What of the second? The logic that, if you're giving a leg up to men for scarce admissions slots there are some marginal women who would be admitted but now will not be, certainly has purchase. And so one could understand if women, or feminist advocates, reacted strongly against such programs as tantamount to sex discrimination against women. Yet observationally, this doesn't seem to be the case. Some women, no doubt, oppose these initiatives, but it does not seem like women or feminists by and large are opposed to collegiate initiatives aimed at propping up the number of male students in attendance. What do we derive from that?

It seems that, contra the bald assertion that DEI programs must inherently be understood as injuring the class that is not the direct beneficiary, in at least some cases the overrepresented group does not perceive such programs as harmful or injurious to their interests. Perhaps they, too, take on a broader view of how colleges ought to assess "merit" than just grades and test scores. Perhaps they think the various programs targeted at men genuinely are ameliorating gendered blind spots in who and what we value as a society. Or perhaps they simply don't prefer to attend colleges that are overwhelmingly homogenous, even (or especially) when they're the in-group (one can certainly understand why at least some women -- at least those enrolling in coeducational institutions -- might not prefer a university student body that's 66%+ female). Whatever the reason, it seems that many women do not see the issue the way conservatives believe they should (or must).

Here, I'm reminded of a post I wrote in 2018 about Gail Heriot, who was arguing that feminists should oppose the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Heriot's contention was that feminists support many sex-conscious programs, but the ERA -- if interpreted in parallel with the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to demand a "sex-blind" constitution -- would strike most of these programs down. From this, she saw only two possibilities: either feminists don't actually support the ERA, or they don't actually care if these sex-conscious programs survive. I pointed out that Heriot seemed to entirely miss Door #3: feminists don't understand the meaning of "equality" in the ERA's text to preclude all sex-conscious programs. If the same people who support the ERA also support sex-conscious initiatives, that's strong evidence that the apparent public meaning of the ERA's "equality" language is not sex-blindness. Yet Heriot seemingly just could not process that the people might understand "equality" different from the prevailing conservative ideological predilections -- a pretty searing indictment of originalism in practice, when you think about it.

So to answer my colleague's question earnestly: while no, not everyone is "fine" with colleges making conscious efforts to try and bring in more men, many people are, including many women and many feminist advocates. They are fine with it for many reasons, ranging from their own desire to attend schools that are relatively sex-balanced, to an earnest belief that there might be certain gendered barriers to men (or certain men) pursuing higher education that a college can justly try to mitigate. I'm not saying this view is necessarily correct, but we have to take seriously that it seems to be one many people hold, even if it doesn't comport with a particular, conservative vision of how we all "should" understand equality, meritocracy, and the virtues or vices of "DEI" programs.

Defeating Your Baby By Submission

I've sometimes joked that parenting a baby is basically a cargo cult. They take one extra-long nap with their arms grasping the crib bars and forevermore you're putting their arms against the crib bars because "that's how they sleep".

But lately, I've been analogizing parenting Nathaniel more to an MMA match.

It's not as bad as it sounds. Nathaniel has always been a great sleeper, but lately he's been going through what I'd term his first real sleep regression. Whereas until recently Nathaniel easily fall asleep on his own at around 7 PM and stay down straight on till morning, over the past few days he's been waking up several times each evening, pulling himself standing on the side of the crib and wailing (typically earlier in the evening -- once he's asleep past midnight, he tends to stay down). That may not sound too terrible, and I expect no pity, but I cannot stress enough how abnormal it is for him to be struggling here. Indeed, arguably "regression" does Nathaniel dirty because it implies reverting to a previous state, but this is actually the first time that he's had substantial trouble sleeping at night since he was a newborn.

Having not had to deal with this before, we never actually did any "sleep training". So we're playing this whole thing by ear. We already had a steady pre-sleep routine, and we've adjusted his bedtime to be later in order to respond to his sleep cues. We also do try to let him cry for a little bit because we don't want to develop bad habits and we know he's capable of putting himself to sleep. That said, precisely because we know he can normally settle himself, it feels like when he won't stop crying its indicative of a genuine need for parental intervention. So what do we do when we do step in?

Sometimes, we pick him up and rock him for awhile. There's no doubt he is tired -- he falls asleep instantly in our arms -- but the problem is it often doesn't take: even as he's asleep in our arms, the moment we put him down in the crib he immediately rolls over, pulls himself back standing, and starts crying again.

So that brings us to strategy number two: holding him down in the crib. Much of this regression started around when he could start pulling himself up. I hypothesize that before when Nathaniel stirred or woke up, he couldn't actually get up, and since he was stuck lying down anyway he was able to get himself back to sleep without too much trouble. Now, though, he can stand, and it's much harder for him to fall back asleep once he's gotten himself on his feet. You'd think that, given that it brings him nothing but sadness, he might try just not standing in the crib post-bedtime, but as Jill puts it "it's like a demon possesses him" -- he doesn't even look happy standing up, he acts like some malign force is compelling him to do it in spite of how immiserating it is.

But I digress. If standing up is what keeps him up, and what happens if you just put a hand on his stomach or back and prevent him from standing? He has to fall asleep eventually if you just keep him roughly horizontal, right? And it turns out that's ... basically true: for awhile he struggles against you as the stand-up demon exerts itself, but eventually he (usually) gives up and passes out. It is a literal victory by submission, and I'll take it. (The main risk is that he is absolutely willing to play possum -- sedately lying with his eyes closed, and then the instant I remove my hand from his torso rolling to the end of the crib and making a grab for the bars).

Anyway, tonight was another tough one for Nathaniel, and we've employed all of the above strategies. We had the regular bedtime routine, after which he slept for an hour before the crying jag began. Then Jill rocked him to sleep, which bought us another hour of sleep. Then I tried the submission technique, which gave us another hour. And then in the most recent run (about a half hour ago as of this writing), he cried but managed to get himself back to sleep (hurray!).

The Tomb of the Unknown Slur

 

There is a Yiddish word, "shvartze", that literally translates to "black" but is generally understood as a derogatory slur for Black people. In terms of offensiveness, it's not the n-word, but it's definitely completely inappropriate. Fun fact: if you encounter a person who tries to argue "but it just means 'black'!", congratulations! You've found a racist!

Anyway, I was thinking about this word earlier today, and particularly was thinking about the degree to which it is known and by whom. My sense is that even among Jews, it is fading outside of Orthodox communities that speak Yiddish.  Beyond that, it's something your racist grandpa might say, but for my generation, to say nothing of the next, it isn't part of our lexicon (even our racists have assimilated in their use of derogatory language). Given that, it wouldn't surprise me (though I don't know this) if it is not an especially well-known term among American Blacks, particularly those who live in locations where there are not many Jews.

And assuming that's true (and again, I might be off-base even on the premise here), it made me wonder if there are other examples of slurring language that is not widely known among the targeted population. Is there a derogatory term Black people have for Jews that most Jews don't know about? I can imagine this sort of situation being either incredibly common or incredibly rare, and I'm honestly not sure which I'd find more likely.

Two Queens

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump met today, and it went ... well? For all of Trump's prior bloviating about Mamdani being a communist, he seemed quite taken with Mamdani's charisma and was pretty much all praise during the meeting.

Obviously, there is an angle on this that goes "can you imagine if Hakeem Jeffries ....!?!" Trump is (as Mamdani described him on the campaign trail) a despot and an autocrat. If pretty much any other Democrat did an Oval Office meeting with Trump and made nice-y nice, the left would have gone ballistic.

For my part, I take the opposite lesson. One does, indeed, have to recognize that Trump is a despot and an autocrat. Yet even holding that recognition, that doesn't mean the right play is always the one that most performs "resistance". There is space for maneuvering, and we should recognize that savvy actors sometimes have maneuver. Of course, that does not mean that any "maneuver" is always savvy, and sometimes one does need to dig in one's heels. But it is a good thing to give good Democrats some latitude on this -- we don't truly know what the best strategy is going to be.

So no, one does not have to go full Ryan Grim and decide that actually Trump has now revealed himself as a champion of the working class. That remains as gullible as all get out.

But one also does not have to view Mamdani as some sort of traitor for taking this meeting. The true moral here is to not treat the mere fact of a meeting like this as sufficient evidence on its own that a Democratic politician is a traitor.

Shocked To Find Antisemitism in this Establishment

The decision of the Heritage Foundation to defend platforming an unabashed and unrepentant antisemite like Nick Fuentes has caused a burbling unease over the presence of antisemitism in conservative spaces to crash into the mainstream. It is evident that what might once have been labeled "far-right" antisemitism no longer is especially "far" at all; it is wholly mainstream and incorporated into the most prominent factions of contemporary American conservatism.

We are already seeing evidence of a crackup. Heritage's leadership is thus far standing by its position, perhaps cognizant of the substantial following Fuentes and his band of neo-Nazis have amongst younger GOP apparatchiks (one conservative commentator estimated that "30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers."). And they've gotten backup from none other than Donald Trump himself. But others prominent conservatives have dissented, announcing their resignation from Heritage or delivering impassioned speeches criticizing the growth of antisemitism in conservative spaces.

I don't want to denigrate the persons in the latter camp. Truly, I don't. They're speaking up, and that's good. But I do wish they would recognize how the overt antisemitism they're critiquing now is downstream from the slightly more covert antisemitism these same actors had been pushing if not justifying for years.

Consider today's big news story about a wild dissent from Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith in the Texas gerrymandering case, where Judge Smith delivered lurid and histrionic conspiracy theories claiming that the entire litigation is being done at the behest of and to the benefit of George Soros. This sort of raving is simultaneously a clear antecedent of Groyper-ism and also effectively unremarkable in conservative circles save that one rarely sees it emanate from a federal judge. You push the "shadowy Jewish financiers are responsible for everything unholy and wrong in society" as your conservative-mobilization button often enough, and it just can't surprise you when the next generation of conservatives mobilizes around viewing Jews as the problem.

This isn't even the first brush the Fifth Circuit has had with antisemitic allusions in recent years -- I flagged in my "Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty" article an opinion where Judge James Ho complained that corporations have been so overtaken by "woke" ideology that they no longer care about the bottom-line, and concluded by asserting that we live in the era of "the Goldman Rule  .... The guys with the gold get to make the rules." As I noted in my article, several Jewish commentators "flagged this passage—substituting the Jewish-coded name 'Goldman' for 'Golden' to speak of wealthy elites' ability to manipulate and control the rules to the detriment of ordinary Americans—as at least raising the specter of antisemitism."

Judge Smith's opinion is, I think, far more explicitly problematic than Judge Ho's was. But the broader point is that, when I read stories about FedSoc organizing a panel of federal judges to speak out on the growing scourge of antisemitism, I need them to realize that the call is coming from inside the house.

Life is a Metaphor for Life

I had one of those deep/dumb epiphanies the other day. Raising a baby is really a commentary on the human existence and how we relate to the independent existence of other people!

Nathaniel's latest milestones are, in rapid succession, crawling and pulling himself into a standing position. And every time he hits one of these milestones, I am beside myself with joy. That's for his sake, of course -- he's learning and growing -- but also mine. He can move on his own! If he wants a toy, he can just crawl to it. If he's bored with his current vantage point, he can maneuver himself to look at something new.

And yet.

Every one of Nathaniel's new milestones carries with it new opportunities to defy my will. It was, admittedly, very nice when I could set Nathaniel down and I'd know he'd stay where I put him. If I didn't want him to move, he didn't move. Now? Things aren't so simple. I might want him to play quietly in the living room; he might have an alternative idea of booking it at top speed towards the nearest stairway. As much as I love and cherish these milestones it was, I find myself ruefully admitting, a lot easier when I could basically control his every move.

Right now (as in, over the past day or two), Nathaniel is at that lovely stage where he can pull himself into a standing position ... but can't quite sit back down. This is a problem since the standing up part is very exciting and far preferable to, say, a nap, but the standing up indefinitely part is infuriating and demanding of a response from mom or dad. One might think that after being laid back down in these circumstances -- apparently baby's most heartfelt desire -- one would not immediately roll over and pull oneself back up again, but you are not a ten month old. Nathaniel has (and objectively still is) a great sleeper, but this has been a rare moment where I've had to spend hours coaxing him down for a nap that, ironically enough, he absolutely does want to take but keeps on self-sabotaging by standing up along the crib instead.*

Anyway, much like with humans, generally, on net I'm happy that this human is learning and growing and becoming more independent (I reserve the right to change that assessment during the teenage years). But yeah, I do have newfound appreciation for why those developments sometimes engender resentment.

* Jill once spotted him on the monitor crying before he pulled himself into the standing position but nonetheless proceeding to finish standing up anyway, as if he was possessed by some infernal demon forcing him to stand against his will.

Flying Solo

I'm back from my giant transatlantic trip. The schedule was:

• Depart Portland on Monday
• Arrive in Stockholm on Tuesday
• Deliver lecture on Wednesday (read a write-up on it here!)
• Leave Stockholm and arrive in Chicago on Thursday
• Give talk in Chicago on Friday
• Attend remainder of conference on Saturday
• Fly home Monday.

Woof! That's a lot! But it was all good.

The Chicago leg of the trip was relatively normal -- my wife and baby met us there (my mother traveled with them from Portland to make it easier), and after the conference we caught up with various friends and had a nice vegetative Sunday.

The Sweden leg, by contrast, represented my first international trip by myself. Actually, I'm not a big international traveler at all -- this was just my fourth time out of the country. Of those, the first was a cruise with my family through northern Europe when I was in high school (that included Stockholm as a port of call, as it happens) and the second was a college Model UN tournament at McGill in Montreal. After that, I didn't go abroad again for almost twenty years until this summer's England trip (where my whole family came along).

This trip, by contrast, was just me, and I had plenty of time to myself. I landed at around 1 PM local time and I knew I needed to force myself to stay awake until dinner Tuesday to stay on any kind of schedule (even though that would mean having stayed up well over 24 hours). So I went to the Moderna Museet, then took a leisurely walk through Stockholm until I got back to my hotel. On Wednesday, a similar situation -- I delivered my lecture in the morning (I woke up around 4 AM), but the remainder of the conference was in Swedish, so I spent the day walking around town visiting various art galleries until dinner time.

This may seem cheesy, but I'm actually pretty proud of myself. To be sure, "took a solo trip to a foreign country" feels like a milestone one is supposed to hit at around 23, not once one is nearly 40. But I have a strange relationship with travel -- as a young person, I was a great traveler (I jet-setted across the country in high school going to debate tournaments without a care in the world), and then starting around when I graduated college I grew to become an incredibly anxious traveler. I've gotten a little better, but even today I greatly, greatly prefer to travel with my wife.

Unfortunately, with a nine month old baby, it really wasn't feasible for her to come all the way out to Sweden with me (success of our England trip notwithstanding). And ... I did fine! I managed jet lag well, I was able to get around town and see the sights fine, I even was able to navigate the train at Arlanda airport when my taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong terminal. Does it help that everyone in Sweden speaks English perfectly? Of course -- but it's still a big deal to me.

Lingua Angla

Everyone in Sweden speaks English.

This is not an exaggeration -- English is part of the school curriculum in Sweden, so essentially everyone learns English (and can speak it flawlessly).

As an American tourist, this is actually a little awkward, because it feels like the height of entitled American-ness to be in a country where English is not the primary language and just assume everyone speaks English. But I'm here for a conference, and that was exactly what I was instructed to do! Cab driver, hotel receptionist, shopkeeper -- just start speaking in English! The keynote lecture I'm giving? Also in English. No translation, no nothing. Just straight English.

Sweden is an extreme case. But I don't think Americans quite realize just what a ridiculous privilege it is that English is the closest thing to a global lingua franca right now. I was walking through the Amsterdam airport for my connection to Stockholm, and the signs were all in English, and the various airport employees just naturally spoke to people in English. It's incredible, and utterly taken for granted.

I wonder, as American hegemony recedes (due to our own stupidity, mostly) whether this will stop being the case in my lifetime. If so, it will be a tremendous loss for Americans and other English speakers (obviously, there is no injustice in something replacing English as the global common language, but from a purely selfish standpoint it's still a loss).

Anyway, Sweden is quite lovely, even though my travel schedule is brutal -- I left for Stockholm on Monday, did not arrive until Tuesday afternoon, had my conference today, then leave for Chicago tomorrow morning for another conference Friday and Saturday before finally going home on Monday. But crippling jet lag has not dimmed my appreciation for this city or its wonderful people one bit. Yay Sweden!

The Enthusiasm of a Man Child

As I approach forty years old, it is natural to reflect on what one gains, and loses, by aging. It is, of course, cliche for a forty-something to look back longingly on their bygone youth, and I'm not immune to the impulse. Luckily, my nostalgia doesn't really take the form of wanting a fast car and/or a ponytail. In general, I remain quite comfortable in my own skin.

But there is one thing recently that struck me as a genuine loss and that I genuinely mourn -- enthusiasm. Not having it, but how it is received.

I like liking things. And I like getting excited about things. It is fun to discover a new thing, and to be excited about it, and for people "in the know" on that thing to respond positively to that excitement. As a kid, if you're excited to -- to pick a random example -- learn about airplanes, and you project that excitement next to a pilot, they'll be delighted and they'll usually gladly take you aside and explain some neat facts or give you an opportunity to check out a cockpit. If you're excited about cooking, and you meet a chef, they might let you watch them in the kitchen or give you some pointers on how to prep a meal. Enthusiasm is met with enthusiasm. It's nice.

As an adult, unbridled enthusiasm isn't met the same way. It's not (usually) looked down upon. But it isn't (usually) met with the same reflection back. To be clear, I don't begrudge anyone for this. The sort of investment we might give a single child as a reward for their enthusiasm isn't scalable; we couldn't give it to everyone.

Nonetheless, I can say with full honesty that I genuinely miss this response, because I actually do still try to relate to things that excite me with a sort of unguarded, exuberant, childish enthusiasm. Why wouldn't I? It's joyous, and why would I want to train myself to feel less joy just because I'm older and greyer? But this sort of enthusiasm, from a middle-aged man, understandably isn't met with the same affective glee from those in its path as it did when I was a kid. And I miss that, because it would still be cool to get the equivalent of the tour of the cockpit, and for the most part the days of getting that just because I'm excited about something are pretty well behind me.

Again, this isn't a claim of injustice or a call for something in the world to change. It is just a reflection, thinking about my own personality and my own (I'm realizing this more and more) determination not to let go of the things and practices that bring me joy just because I've gotten older.

What Penalty For the Judicial Intern Who Used Generative AI?

The contagion of AI-generated hallucinations in law has reached the federal judiciary. Two district court judges have admitted that opinions released from their chambers have included cases hallucinated by generative AI. One of the two judges specifically said that a legal intern (i.e., a current law student working in his chambers) used ChatGPT "without authorization, without disclosure, and contrary to not only chambers policy but also the relevant law school policy."

A judge is ultimately responsible for anything that goes out from their chambers, and I don't want to be misread into thinking that the judges here shouldn't be held responsible for this egregious failure. But certainly the intern who used generative AI has to be held responsible too -- a supervisor's failure to oversee and catch an abuse like this is serious, but the person who actually did the thing remains the primary wrongdoer. And so I'm curious what people's intuitions are regarding what the sanction on the intern should be.

For me, I admit, my instincts here are extremely punitive -- punitive to an extent that's surprising myself. I'm normally a pretty tolerant guy, recognizing that people make mistakes, and that we should give wrongdoers (where they take responsibility and otherwise demonstrate a credible willingness to change course) the opportunity to grow and move forward.

Yet in this case -- boy howdy. My gut instinct thoughts were, right off the bat, that of course they get fired, immediately, from the internship, and get zero credit for it. But it didn't stop there. Should they also be expelled? I'd consider it. Should they be admitted to the bar if they do graduate? I'm not sure they should be. To be blunt, I kind of think this person's legal career should be over, period, full stop, after this.

Part of my reflected rage here is that the person who uses generative AI in this way isn't just hurting themselves, they're wrecking the reputation of someone else -- the judge, someone who gave them a rare and privileged opportunity by having them work in their chambers. How dare they? Nobody will know or remember who this intern is. But the damage to the judge's reputation will follow them forever. 

And the degree to which this falls upon the head of the judge, who trusted them and gave them this opportunity, doesn't really have a parallel in other domains of law. Even in the case of an attorney whose GenAI misconduct leads to sanctions that cripple their client's case, at least the client might be able to sue for malpractice. There's nothing the judge can do to recover from the intern.

I also fail to see any serious excuse or mitigation. I flatly do not believe any law student today does not know of the risk of AI hallucination, and in any event there was in this case a clear policy against AI use that the intern apparently flouted. Were they overworked? Did they panic? Well, what's going to happen the next time they're overworked and panicked? How can anyone trust them again? How can anyone imagine handing over a client to them?

One of my stalwart beliefs about legal education, and why it must be rigorous and hold to high standards even where it's hard or stressful or puts a heavy load on students, is that bad lawyering destroys lives. Law being one's dream or passion or family expectation or ticket to financial stability is not as important as good representation of client interests, and someone who can't be relied upon to provide that should not be a lawyer, period.

But again, I'm surprised at how strong I'm feeling about this. So I invite comments that walk me off the ledge (or which vindicate my instincts).

The First Circuit's (Mostly) Correct Dismissal of the MIT Antisemitism Suit

Today, the First Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision affirming the dismissal of a Title VI lawsuit brought by Jewish students alleging an antisemitic hostile environment at MIT. The court concluded first that the incidents pleaded by the plaintiffs were by and large not instances of actionable discrimination but rather were protected speech, and that what pleaded incidents were plausibly antisemitic were too isolated to meet the "severe" and "pervasive" threshold necessary to assign legal liability. Second, it concluded that even if the first part of the analysis was untrue, the claim failed for the independent reason that MIT could not be demonstrated to have been deliberately indifferent to the antisemitism.

Overall, I think the opinion is strong and reached the correct result. I was particularly happy to see it acknowledge the extraordinarily difficult position academic administrators are in when trying to mediate between cross-cutting speech/discrimination complaints, as this of course reflects my own position in contrast to the many Monday-morning-quarterbacks who think that these questions are perfectly straightforward and the only reason it looks hard is because of instincts towards censorship and/or bigotry.

I also think this decision illustrates a danger in how many Jewish groups are treating law and litigation as a primary mechanism for policing allegedly antisemitic speech. The litigation approach, to my eyes, is very much tied to a broader misapprehension of the legal landscape regarding discrimination that believes, quite wrongly, that Every Group But the Jews gets immediate and unconditional legal protection the instant they feel a twinge of discomfort on campus or in the workforce. Back in 2020, when Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times while alleging that the conditions she endured at the paper were tantamount to constructive discharge, I made the following observation (after observing that, in fact, the conduct she identified in her letter came nowhere close to that which would support a successful discrimination lawsuit):

Weiss' confusion is in line with something I've noticed from many conservative observers of anti-discrimination law. They wildly underestimate how high the barriers are to winning a discrimination claim -- probably because they're ideologically committed to the notion that minorities get their discrimination claims rubber-stamped (when the reality is such claims are overwhelmingly rejected by the courts, often before reaching a jury). So when they experience something that is in the family of discrimination, they assume that (a) it must be illegal ("if these whiny minorities are winning, surely my very real pain and trauma must present a winning case too!") and (b) if it isn't treated as illegal, that must be because of some latent anti-conservative(/white/male/whatever) bias, rather than the normal functioning of a legal system they generally endorse.

So too here. The misshapen "us too-ism" morphs what is objectively a very precarious strategy (legal discrimination claims are hard to win, especially when the conduct they are challenging is primarily speech!) into something that appears viable. Law very intentionally and in my very appropriately does not purport to capture everything that could be reasonably called antisemitic -- here, the court agrees that there are certain pleaded incidents which were (if the pleaded facts were true) antisemitic (they were just too isolated to support liability), and particularly in the speech domain there may be speech that can be called antisemitic (or at least debated as such) but which cannot have legal liability attached. But the headline that everyone reads when one files a suit and loses is "antisemitism claims found to be meritless," and there is little hope to then reignite the conversation in the more expansive and forgiving domain of discourse and dialogue.

On that note, if there was one area of the opinion where I have a bit of hesitation, it was in how it treats the plaintiffs' arguments for how anti-Zionism is antisemitic (at least in some forms). The opinion somewhat oscillates between two positions here. Sometimes, it suggests that there remains open debate on the contours of when and whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and that our legal system "resolves through discourse, not judicial fiat" (30). "Plaintiffs are entitled to their own interpretive lens equating anti-Zionism (as they define it) and antisemitism. But it is another matter altogether to insist that others must be bound by plaintiffs' view" (28). This I think gets it right. But at other points, the opinion shifts away from the lens of "it is inappropriate for judges to resolve this contested ideological question" and instead delivers a flat judgment that the challenged conduct was simply not antisemitic ("The disruptive political protests sympathetic to Palestinian views of the conflict with Israel were not, by and large, antisemitic." (41)). This I think is unnecessary and flouts the prior, careful choice to abstain from making that judgment one way or another.

One last point: I think the way the First Circuit dispenses with the Jewish plaintiffs' sincere belief that anti-Zionism is antisemitic is at odds with the Second Circuit decision I flagged last month regarding a Christian school's stated belief that forcing its girls' basketball team to play against teams that fielded transgender athletes would violate its religion. In the latter case, the Second Circuit treated disagreement with the Christian school's own articulation of what its religious beliefs required as tantamount to religious animus. In this case, by contrast, the First Circuit had little trouble telling the Jewish plaintiffs that they were (at least as far as the law was concerned) incorrect about what sort of conduct does or doesn't target their religious values. To be clear: I think the First Circuit is closer to the mark here than the Second: disagreement with a religious person's views, so long as that disagreement is not itself motivated by religious hostility, should not suffice to make out a claim of religious discrimination. The Second Circuit's opinion was far too expansive and, if applied consistently, almost certainly unworkable. But it goes to illustrate, once again, that these expansive new religious liberty principles being introduced by the judiciary almost certainly are not going to extend to Jewish litigants -- in part because they have to have limits, and Jews are not part of the in-group meant to be protected but not bound.

If I Am Only For Myself, Who Will Be For Me?

The first two lines of Hillel's famous maxim read as follows:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, who am I?

It's obviously famous for a reason. The first line endorses some measure of self-regard or at least self-reliance -- we have to advocate for ourselves. The second cabins the first -- if we only care about our personal self-interest, who are we? As in so many things, the best path lies somewhere in the middle.

Hillel's line came to mind for me when I was reading reports of a prominent New York City Rabbi urging his congregants to oppose Zohran Mamdani for mayor. His call was framed in terms of urging Jews to "prioritize their Jewish selves" -- to self-consciously elevate "ahavat yisrael ... over other loves." They should not vote on "affordability, food instability, education, policing, sanitation, taxes – the everyday issues that shape our great city’s life." They must vote in a way that first and foremost "safeguards the Jewish people." Everything else is secondary.

I don't think Mamdani represents the sort of existential threat to the Jewish people that warrants this sort of reaction. This is not the same thing as saying Jews aren't allowed to have concerns over some part of his record. But sermons like this strike me as more than a little histrionic, except for the fact that to me they read like a desperate attempt to spur on a Jewish community which by and large is not reacting hysterically to Mamdani. Again, it isn't so much that Mamdani is being greeted with gushing support (the most recent polling shows that among Jews Cuomo is ahead of Mamdani, but just barely). They're just not converting their various concerns and misgivings into the all-out existential panic this Rabbi would like to see.

But leave all of that aside. My actual quarrel with the Rabbi's sermon is that, as a prescription for political action, it presents an incredibly short-sighted political vision for Jews. For if Jews can legitimately say to various other groups and communities "we hear your concerns (about affordability or policing or Islamophobia or what have you), but we ultimately have to look out for ourselves first"; well, those other communities are equally entitled to reply "and we hear your concerns (about antisemitism), but we ultimately have to look out for ourselves first." And even in New York City, there are a lot more of them than there are of us. So remind me how exactly this will redound to the benefit of Jews?

I raised this same argument six years ago in the context of British elections, where Jews were pleading with non-Jews to not vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party given Corbyn's rank antisemitism (and Corbyn, to be clear, is on his best day far more antisemitic than Mamdani is on his worst). Many of these Jewish figures harbored no illusions about the Tories, including that party's own sordid involvement in racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia (and, for that matter, antisemitism). But, they argued, as terrible as Boris Johnson may be, "stopping Corbyn has to be the number one priority for British Jews. And a vote for anyone but the Tory candidates is, ultimately, a vote for Jeremy Corbyn."

Jewish voters who act under this logic, they would say, are by no means endorsing Brexit, which they detest, or xenophobia, which they abhor. They hate these things, genuinely and sincerely. But their hand has been forced. In this moment, they have to look out for Number One. 

I understand this logic. I understand why some Jews might believe that in this moment, we cannot spare the luxury of thinking of others.

I understand it. But it is, ultimately, spectacularly short-sighted. 

To begin, if we accept that British Jews are justified in voting Tory because we are justified looking out for our own existential self-preservation, then we have to accept that non-Jewish minorities are similarly justified in voting Labour in pursuit of their own communal security and safety. We cannot simultaneously say that our vote for the Tories cannot be construed as an endorsement of Conservative xenophobia but their vote for Labour represents tacit approval of Corbynista antisemitism. Maybe both groups feel their hands are tied; trapped between a bad option and a disastrous one. And so we get one letter from the Chief Rabbi, excoriating Jeremy Corbyn as an “unfit” leader, and another competing letter from the Muslim Council of Britain, bemoaning Conservatives open tolerance of Islamophobia. 

But if the Jews reluctantly vote Conservative “in our self-interest” and BAME citizens reluctantly vote Labour “in their self-interest”—well, there are a lot more BAME voters in Britain than there are Jewish voters. So the result would be a massive net gain for Labour. Some pursuit of self-interest. 

Meanwhile, those Brits who are neither Jewish nor members of any other minority group are given no guidance by this approach. There is no particular reason, after all, for why they should favor ameliorating Jewish fears of antisemitism over BAME fears of xenophobia. From their vantage point, these issues effectively cancel out, and they are freed to vote without regard to caring about either antisemitism or Islamophobia. At the very moment where these issues have been foregrounded in the British public imagination in an unprecedented way, insisting upon the primacy of pure self-interest would ensure that this attention would be squandered and rendered moot. 

Of course, all this does not even contemplate the horrible dilemma imposed upon those persons who are both Jewish and BAME—the Afro-Caribbean Jew, for instance. They are truly being torn asunder, told that no matter how they vote they will be betraying a part of their whole self.

And so too here. The argument from self-interest -- aside from ignoring those whose intersecting identities may make them acutely perceive a threat from both Mamdani and Cuomo -- ultimately licenses every other group to not care about Jewish concerns. After all, they have the same license to prioritize their own communal needs and values as we do.

So much of contemporary Jewish discourse is a plea for solidarity, against the pain of feeling dismissed or viewed as extraneous whenever a peer says something to effect of "I'm not happy with how he's alienating Jews, but X Y Z matters more to me." Yet here we see that exact same argument run, and it is a logic that effectively endorses (for the non-Jewish majority) ignoring Jewish concerns.

Indeed, I might daresay that Hillel was, if not wrong, then at least incomplete: If I am only for myself, who will be for me? Aside from me, nobody. And that is a very lonely place to be.

"Pro-Palestine" is a "They", Not An "It"

There is no doubt that one major development in American politics over Israel/Palestine over the last two years has been a dramatic expansion and mainstreaming of pro-Palestine political advocacy. It's no longer a given that all or nearly all politicians will ritualistically intone "I am pro-Israel." It's no longer the case that self-identified "pro-Palestine" actors are confined to a tiny fringe leafleting outside UC-Berkeley.

One upshot of this growth is pluralism. As a movement gets larger, it encompasses a wider range of perspectives. Social movements, I've long argued, "moderate as they mainstream", and this moderation effect often frustrates the original "hardcore" of the movement, who may view the newcomers as engaging in coopting or even selling out. The moderates, for their part, may well view the old guard as hidebound, extremists, or simply unrealistic. It's a common pattern, and it's pretty clear it's being replicated here as well.

That said, there are a lot of people with strong incentives to downplay this pluralism and instead treat pro-Palestine as a monolithic thing.

Consider the reports that, in the wake of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, Hamas has launched a bloody crackdown on dissidents and rivals, including public executions of those they are accusing of being "collaborators". Given that this by all appearances is an extra-legal terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, one would expect it to be condemned, and one need not search far to find various pro-Israel voices running lines to the effect of "now that Israel isn't involved, 'pro-Palestine' groups are silent -- or even support it!" On the latter point, they're not making things up: the National Students for Justice in Palestine organization, following these reports of Hamas' killings, called for "death to collaborators" in apparent endorsement. As awful as it is to see, it appears there are prominent, non-fringe elements of the pro-Palestinian movement who more or less support Hamas engaging in violent terror not just against Israel (we knew that) but against Palestinians as well.

Yet, on another level, the pro-Israel voices I mentioned above are making something up, because the NSJP is by no means the only "pro-Palestine" organization out there, and in fact it is not at all difficult to find pro-Palestinian voices who are horrified by Hamas' rampage of terror. The Palestinian Authority lambasted Hamas' killings as "heinous crimes"; a Palestinian human rights NGO similarly accused Hamas of "extrajudicial executions" which "constitute a legal and moral crime that requires immediate condemnation and accountability."

In the abstract, there isn't anything especially odd or complicated here. "Pro-Palestine" is a "they", not an "it"; it contains a wide range of different groups and outlooks. Under that broad umbrella, why would it be hard to grasp that there might be some people who flatly support Hamas and others who find them risible?

But it's also not hard to see why many players in this drama are so enthusiastic on sweeping that pluralism under the rug. The pro-Israel commentators want the NSJP's pro-murder posts to be the paradigm example of what the pro-Palestinian movement stands for. "This is what this movement really is." In doing so, they can discredit all of the other members -- including those who are rightfully horrified by Hamas' brutality -- by association. And on the other side, obviously groups like NSJP have an incentive to present themselves as the sole and authentic representation of what "pro-Palestine" means. They want the broad, inchoate energy behind "pro-Palestine" to be channeled through them. Groups which take a softer or moderate tone are not allies, they are threats. And with strength in numbers and in unity, there is a lot of tacit pressure to defer to the leadership of established organizations and not disturb their decrees regarding what views "count" as pro-Palestine and what do not -- even if those decrees are often based more on internal political considerations than any healthy respect for pluralism and disagreement.

Yet incentives aside, we would all do better not to indulge in this game. One theme I've been returning to over the past several months is that many pro-Palestinian activists are speedrunning a realization many pro-Israel activists have also had to start grappling with: the reality that many -- not all or even potentially most, but many -- of the people who march under your flag really are exactly as extreme and nasty and blood-thirsty as your worst enemies describe them as. We like to think of these attacks as smears, and often they are insofar as they present sweeping and general guilt across the whole movement. But on the pro-Israel side, it actually is the case that there are many non-negligible figures whose outlook towards Palestinians is one of simple, naked racism; who do not remotely "just want peace"; who absolutely openly endorse human rights violations of the most vicious kind in the name of "security" or "greater Israel". And likewise, on the pro-Palestine side, it actually is the case that there are many non-negligible figures whose outlooks towards Israelis and Jews is one of simple, naked antisemitism; who do not remotely "just want peace"; who absolutely endorse human rights violations of the most vicious kind in the name of "decolonization" or "freeing Palestine." I and many other Jews who identified with Israel had to work through that reality, and so too must the pro-Palestine community work through the reality that it is not a slur or a slander or a bad-faith attack: groups like the NSJP really are right now endorsing Hamas' murder spree targeting Palestinian civilians.

However, this realization is not an accuse to swing all the way in the other direction. Those who endorse Hamas' murder spree are not an inauthentic, fringe, or fake part of "pro-Palestine", but neither are they the authentic, true, or sole representative of it either. The notion that every person who sat at a pro-Palestine campus encampment is now elated to see Hamas executing Palestinians in the streets is simply not credible. Pro-Palestine is a they, not an it. It is irresponsible to deny the presence of this particular faction; it is equally irresponsible to cede it the status of being the only relevant faction.

Overcoming Hardship versus Flourishing with Support

One of the interesting things about "equality of opportunity", as a concept, is that while it's often used as a conservative talking point ("equality of opportunity, not equality of result"), if one actually takes it seriously, it would require a pretty radical reordering of our social structures from top to bottom. Do you know how hard it is to actually establish equality of opportunity? For example, one would have to either eliminate economic inequalities altogether or (this is no easier) eliminate their impact in terms of how they affect the starting positions of young people. Whatever world that looks like, it's very distant from our own.

In the meantime, though, those of us who do take "equality of opportunity" with a modicum of seriousness try to accommodate the actually extant inequalities with some imaginative guesswork. We see two candidates, one with perhaps slightly lower test scores but who has overcome significant adversity, the other with higher numbers but no such disadvantages, and try to ask ourselves the counterfactual: "How would the first candidate have performed had they started on equal footing with the second?" It's an imprecise art and that leaves a lot of room for subjectivity (and complaints), but it at least tries to answer the question nominally posed by "equality of opportunity" in a realistic manner.

Yet there's another dimension of equality of opportunity that I think sometimes gets overlooked, which is that even where starting points are equal, results may differ depending on what the starting point is. Let me explain:

Imagine we were trying to rank the "merit" of 100 people, and assume for sake of argument it is possible to do this in an objective way (we can rank everyone from 1 to 100). The equality of opportunity issue noted above concerns how we make "adjustments" to the ranking based on differences in starting points -- some faced significant hardships and adversity, others were provided substantial mentoring and support for them to flourish -- and the problem is that this is all counterfactual. 

But suppose we could do the social scientist's dream and send all 100 people to an alternate reality where they start off in exactly the same position -- they all face (the same) significant hardships and adversity which they need to overcome. If they all faced the same hardships, we might say that that the resulting 1 - 100 ranking was an objective determinant of merit.

However, now suppose we send those same 100 to a different alternate reality. Here, too, they all start off in exactly the same position. But this time, instead of all facing (the same) hardships and adversity, here they all are provided the same support and nurturing (they start of equivalently advantaged, rather than disadvantaged). Once again, at the end of the experiment we rank everyone 1 - 100. But my guess is that the rank order in Alternate Reality #1 would be different from that produced in Alternate Reality #2. The skillset that yields high performance under conditions of adversity is not the same as the skillset that yields high performance under conditions of support and nurturing.

All of this is a long-winded way of asking: which do we care about more? Again, note that this isn't the easy in theory/hard in practice question of comparing one candidate who faced adversity against another who was given support. In our hypothetical, all candidates are both equally supported and equally disadvantaged (in the two realities). So the question here is whether our vision for the "best" candidate -- the ideal we are trying to approximate via our guesswork adjustments -- is the person who thrives under conditions of adversity or the person who outperforms in ideal circumstances.

Of course, the actual answer is "it depends". Some jobs or social roles we know demand significant resilience in the face of hardship, and so we want the person who can perform best in those circumstances. More broadly, I think we find intuitively attractive the idea that this sort of scrapper is particularly praise-worthy compared to those who "had it easy". Yet there is another frame where we would want that everyone would get the support, resources, and nurturing that would best position them to thrive. We don't want to haze people for its own sake; we should hope to construct social roles in such a way that their occupants are not having to scrape and scrap for traction but are put in the best position for success. Yet the fact that different people would be (even under a genuine "equality of opportunity" ideal) the "best" performers under these two frames is interesting to me; it underscores how there is an inescapable element of normative choice even in the best case scenarios of what a meritocracy might be.

There's no big moral here, just another meditation on the complexities of equality.

First They Came For Tylenol, Now Circumcisions

The latest stop in the RFK/Trump team's conspiracy-addled rampage against science was an assertion that "circumcisions" may be a cause of autism. This drew an accusation from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) that RFK was trafficking in antisemitism (a small but vocal cadre of antisemitic activists have centered their hatred of Jews on circumcision, which they present as tantamount to child abuse).

What I find most interesting about this latest foray in RFK nuttiness, though, is how it in many ways diverges from the more typical linkage antisemites tend to draw when it comes to Jews and public health. In general, the conspiracy claim historically has been that some mainstream medical practice is actually dangerous, but Jews avoid the risks via some secret Jewish handshake. On vaccines, for instance, the antisemite I feature in my "Things People Blame the Jews For" series alleged the following:

Go to Wal-Mart and look at the children in the check out line.... They usually all have blank stares now .... Walk the check outs until you see a kid who is totally engaged with people, smiling, bright and acting intelligently. Ask the mom if she vaccinated her baby, and if hse says yes, ask if she is Jewish.... I never figured out the method, but I can definitely state that somehow, "they" do not get the same shots.

Vaccines are bad, except the Jewish vaccines, which are fine. RFK himself has tapped into similar logic when he contended that the COVID virus was "engineered" to not target Ashkenazi Jews -- again, Jews presented as getting some secret healthcare privilege denied to the victimized masses.

But the circumcision argument cuts in the opposite direction: Jews are far more likely to be circumcised, and so if circumcision causes autism (and again, I cannot stress enough that the medical evidence here is "no, it doesn't, you idiot"), then Jews would be disproportionate victims. How nice of RFK to be looking out for our wellbeing (/sarcasm)!

The Frog Prince

A few days ago, a viral video circulated of a neo-Nazi agitator interrupting a psychology class at the University of Washington ... and then being chased out of the room and across campus by basically all the students in the class (as well as the professor). At the end of the video the guy trips and is held down by some of the students (you can hear him pathetically mewling "I thought you were the party of peace!") until campus security arrived to arrest him; those students also prevented anyone from enacting any violence on the man.

On the reddits, I saw a lot of praise for the students' solidarity and discipline, and in particular their decisive action to assume that the Nazi scumbag they had on the ground was not physically attacked or injured. But I remember reading one commentator who was a bit confused by that angle of praise. Aren't we all fans of punching Nazis? Don't we understand that violence is sometimes necessary to defeat fascism? Why was everyone so insistent that this Nazi, who very clearly brought it upon himself, be left unharmed?

My response to that was simple: if you're not a pacifist, then yes, you accept that sometimes violence is necessary to achieve important political ends. But if you're at all a liberal, then violence should never be your preferred choice. If there is a nonviolent way to accomplish your goals, then that's what one should do -- violence is not a good for its own sake (in fact, it's quite bad "for its own sake"). In this circumstance, the students were able to neutralize the Nazi without resort to meaningful violence. Violence wasn't necessary, so it was good that they didn't resort to unnecessary violence.

I was thinking about this with respect to the anti-ICE protests in Portland, and in particular, the comical site of inflatable frogs, chickens, and other absurd animals that have taken center stage in these protests. This being Portland, the worry when Trump announced his invasion plan for our city was that some group of rabble-rousers or agents provocateurs would take it upon themselves to enact violence, which Trump would then use to bolster his lies about Portland being a wartorn hellscape. But instead, they've been met with these ridiculous animal outfits, which have been incredibly effective at making the fascists look ridiculous. Kristi Noem trying to play tough gal while overwatching an "army of antifa" comprised of about a dozen peaceful protesters, one in a chicken suit? Comedy gold. But also, political gold: it highlighted in brilliant and excruciating detail how profoundly unserious Noem and her gang of fascists are. They are playacting a crisis of their own creation so that they can present themselves as action stars; countering that absurdism with humor and whimsy and comedy does more to resist their agenda than any masked stone thrower could accomplish.

In saying this, I'm in no way downplaying the seriousness of the moment we are in. Nothing could be more serious than the specter of one's own government invading your city in order to enact an explicit agenda of ideological terror and suppression. But it is that very seriousness that compels serious thought about what would constitute the most effective countermeasure to that attempt.

The violent/non-violent protest debate, too often, is presented in ethical and philosophical terms -- (when) is violence justified? But this skips past the more immediately practical question of (when) is violence useful? Often times, one can (or should) leave aside the question of justification because the utility just isn't there. And often times, it seems like those who grimly intone the need for violent action because "power cedes nothing without a demand" or some such cliche are very self-evidently excited at the opportunity for violence. It is something they revel in, and desire for its own sake -- the move of first resort, not the last. As much as that instinct presents itself as rising to the demands of the moment -- "by any means necessary" -- it more often than not represents an abdication of the need to actually respond to the demands of the moment in favor of personal indulgence.

So once again, kudos to Portland for resisting that impulse. The point of activism is not to provide an outlet for one's personal rage (however warranted it may be). The point is to figure out effective strategies for undermining one's opposition, and seize on those weak points. Fascists are weak wherever the people show joy. The Portland protests, which show our city in all of its joyful weirdness, represent the best possible response to Trump's pathetic efforts to slander our city as something it isn't.

AI Über Adderall

Another day, another AI hallucination story -- this time involving mega-consulting firm Deloitte, which just refunded a big chunk of change to the Australian government after a report they did was found to contain inaccurate and likely hallucinated citations.

Every time I see one of these stories, I always am left asking "Why? Why did you do it?" The risks have to be well-known at this point. And getting caught seems like it's close to career suicide. What's happening?

404 Media did an interesting interview with attorneys who had been caught using AI (and who failed to catch AI hallucinations), and the general theme (aside from "a subordinate did it and I didn't check") was some variation on being overworked and under a ton of pressure.

Now, perhaps I'm overthinking this. But I am wondering if there's some interplay between the historic hard-charging atmosphere of the big consulting firms and use of AI. Companies like Deloitte have a bit of a reputation vis-a-vis their work culture, which basically boils down to "if you are willing to be worked to death, we'll make you richer than God." Younger hires, in particular, are hit with truly unfathomable workloads and time pressures (with sometimes predictably tragic consequences). The historic implicit expectation, if one was in such a situation, was basically to wink at "drink your coffee, take an Adderall, stay up all night, bang it out." I have to assume the work product generated in such circumstances was not always outstanding, but it was at least a human employee's substandard, bleary-eyed work product.

But imagine it's 2025 and you're in that impossible Kobayashi Maru situation. Instead of using Adderall as your crutch, doesn't AI feel a lot more attractive? If we throw out any sort of professional concern about putting out good work product -- and in the imagined situation, there's no way not to; actually performing to expectation is functionally impossible -- then why not roll the dice with AI? The work is going to be bad either way, but at least you can (literally) sleep at night. 

I don't know -- it's just a theory, and I have no evidence that this is going on. But it doesn't seem implausible, no? Maybe another sector AI is disrupting is the ability to "rely" on overcaffeinated and drugged up twenty-somethings to kill themselves on consulting assignments to squeeze a few more dollars out of the bottom line.

Perceiving the Hierarchy

As you may have seen, there was antisemitic stabbing/car ramming attack on a UK synagogue on Yom Kippur yesterday. Two Jews were killed (one, apparently, by the police in the course of their response); the attacker was also killed on site.

In the wake of the attack, the New York Times quoted a recently-released report by the Runnymede Trust on the subject of antisemitism in the UK, making the case that the "current approaches designed to tackle the problem [of antisemitism] are not working." Specifically, the report critiques how "The significant funding given by governments to protect Jewish people specifically makes Jewish communities feel safer in the short term but has given rise to perceptions that there is a hierarchy of racisms in the U.K.."

[W]hen the state and political parties put significant energy into combating antisemitic ideas but fail to act with similar force against Islamophobia or structural racism, it confirms the perception of a hierarchy of racism. While this type of state-led opposition to antisemitism can make many Jewish people feel safer in the short-term, it gives life to a competitive victimhood that further pulls apart the horizontal alliances and broad political coalitions required to confront all racisms.

A couple things about this formulation that jumped out at me, but the main one is the acceptance of the narrative that Jews are "anti-discrimination" winners -- winning so much, and so hard, that it's generating understandable resentment that fractures the possibility of cross-group solidarity. The reason this "jumped out" is that one of my earliest public writings on antisemitism specifically addressed this phenomenon in the context of the UK, pointing out that the public perception of Jews being very well- (perhaps over-)protected by anti-discrimination law coexisted with a reality that Jews weren't actually receiving much protection at all.

I won't claim to be an expert on the UK. But the Runnymede report, as far as I can see, does not actually provide much evidence that Jews in reality receive enhanced material support for their security compared to other groups. The only concrete example they provide is the proliferation of Holocaust memorials in contrast to the lack of such memorials for other atrocities suffered by other groups (including ones that the UK is more directly implicated in, like the slave trade). 

I do think there is something to be said about making Holocaust remembrance the be-all-end-all of what "reckoning with past racism looks like". But this has little to do with funding initiatives meant to provide security for Jewish institutions from violent attack.

In the United States, at least, funds meant to bolster security at religious institutions have been made available to applicants of all faiths. Jewish organizations have received a large chunk of the funds (perhaps because Jews are by far the most common targets of religious-based hate crimes), but it would be wrong to say there is a "hierarchy" here. But that doesn't seem to change the fact that there is a perception of a hierarchy; and where perception is not matching reality we need to interrogate more deeply what's driving the perception.

Put simply: it is a common feature of antisemitism to present Jews as "the outgroup that's in" -- the paradigm of protection (perhaps over-protection) to the point where they are seen as hoarding the bounty of public sympathy from groups who need it more. This perception is itself inextricably linked to antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish hyperpower and influence (obviously, Jews can't really be marginalized when it's so clear that they control Congress/the media/the banks/the world), and it is I think a category mistake to assume that the perception is substantially related to an actual, objective assessment of how much protection Jews are or are not receiving. 

Just like with fears of "voter fraud" or anti-vaxx conspiracies, where the underlying complaints about Jews being over-protected are grounded not in rationality but in resentment, a "rational" response will never assuage and the conspiracists will never be accommodated. Eventually, the only "move" in this politics is for Jews to self-abnegate -- to performatively lose, over and over again, even in circumstances where they are being genuinely wronged and deserved genuine protection under well-established and universally-applied principles, so as to "reassure" their neighbors that they aren't winning too much and aren't being given special favors. This is not sustainable, and it is not actually a productive strategy for fighting antisemitism.

I absolutely agree that -- whether in the UK or the US -- the government and other social actors need to take all forms of racism and discrimination with the seriousness they deserve, and direct concrete and tangible resources and proposals to combatting it. But I do not think reinforcing the narrative of "hierarchy" is helpful in this respect. I will keep on tapping the sign: they'd say it about Jews, they'd say it about other groups too. It is not the case that "only the Jews receive such solicitude", it is not the case that "everyone but the Jews receives such solicitude." We should reassess both narratives that assert a clear "hierarchy of racism" that likely is not present and which is itself built upon unhelpful and unproductive resentments.