The Neo-Neo-Manicheans

 

There's another one of those open letters going around, where mostly right-leaning Jews issue a jeremiad against alleged intolerant left censorship in the field of ideas. This letter, apparently organized by the JILV's David Bernstein, purports to acknowledge "the illiberalism and threats to academic freedom emanating from the political right, and in no way downplay these dangers," but for undisclosed and oh-so-mysterious reasons chooses to "focus our attention on ... the political left". Knowing the organizers and scanning the signatories, I can say with confidence that the median participant in this letter absolutely downplays the dangers of threats to academic freedom emanating from the political right. In part, that's evidenced by releasing a letter like this at all right now -- at a moment when the danger from the right is cresting while the most problematic behaviors from the left are receding. But more to the point, essentially the only time the likes of Bernstein "acknowledge" right-ward threats to academic freedom is in a parenthetical aside in the midst of yet another broadside against the left. It is no surprise that parallel letters like this decrying threats to academic freedom and open intellectual inquiry are not organized by Bernstein nor signed by his coterie. Anyone who genuinely believes David Bernstein does not "downplay the dangers" of right-wing attacks on intellectual freedom should please peruse my excellent selection of bridges for sale.

But that's not what I want to focus on. The letter for the most part is a series of banalities about the importance of intellectual freedom and teaching students "how to think, not what to think." There is, however, one more substantive political critique to be found in the penultimate paragraph:

The ascendency of an ideology that reduces people to “oppressed” and “oppressors” and categorizes individuals into monolithic group identities poses a particular threat to the Jewish people. In this stark, neo-Manichean worldview, Jews are frequently grouped with the privileged, and Israel is dogmatically singled out as an oppressor-state–a shallow dichotomy that foments new variants of antisemitism and reinforces old ones. 

This is worth diving into, and my counter-critique will be stark: the median participant in this letter does not, actually, oppose this "neo-Manichean worldview". They in fact demand it. Far more than most of their putative adversaries, they insist on exactly this sort of sharp divide of the world into oppressed and oppressor -- but one where Jews fall always and solely in the latter camp.

To be honest, anyone who has paid attention to how this discourse proceeds can see this. Consider how a statement like the following, which self-consciously rejects as to Jews the "neo-Manichean" division where group identities are either totally oppressed or oppressor.

Some people try to reduce people to absolute, monolithic, and eternal categories of "oppressed" and "oppressor". But this is absurd, as the Jewish example demonstrates. Surely, in the context of White supremacists searching for synagogues to vandalize (or worse), it is evident that Jews are experiencing oppression (and oppression specifically derived from the perception that they're "not White"). Equally obviously, in the context of ability to access the suburbs in post-World War II America, Jews sat in a comparatively privileged position vis-a-vis racial minorities (a privilege tied to the general treatment of Jews as "White"). The former doesn't falsify the latter; the latter doesn't falsify the former. Like any group, Jews are not always oppressed or oppressor; their relationship to these categories will be highly contextual based on place, space, and time.

Whatever else one might say about the above, it is not "neo-Manichean". Its entire point is to reject the notion of some eternal and unyielding oppressor/oppressed binary. Yet that very rejection is, for many, the problem. The evergreen response to any suggestion that Jews could ever be White or enjoy White privilege in any context -- "was my grandfather 'White' when he was sent to Auschwitz?" -- underscores the point: that retort is based precisely on the notion that Auschwitz generates an eternal, unending claim to the "oppressed" side the binary at any point in history, even one miles away (literally and metaphorically).

While there are some people who genuinely adopt a "neo-Manichean" view of Jews that essentially denies that Jews can ever be truly oppressed, some formulation like the above paragraph is, I think, considerably more common -- one where the ways that Jewishness interacts with privilege and oppression is layered and contextual. Now to be sure, even that inquiry can be done well or poorly -- it's entirely possible for someone to acknowledge that context is critical and nonetheless do a bad job of assessing the relevant context that applies to Jews in a particular case. But that vice is not a vice of neo-Manicheanism; it's struggling at the hard work of doing layered, nuanced, contextually-informed analysis. By contrast, the vice of those who are infuriated that Jews can ever be deemed complicit in oppressive and unjust structures are very much engaged in a form of Manicheanism -- they just want to invert the binary.* 

It's similar to something I observed about the call to be "even-handed" or recognize "both sides" in discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Recognizing "both sides" is all well and good, and there absolutely are plenty of actors who are justly critiquing for failing to be even-handed. However, it's also the case that frequently the minute someone does proactively criticize "both sides" (by, say, criticizing war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas), they're accused of "equating" and blasted for that. Turns out, the "both sides" critics don't want to hear criticism of "both sides", they want to hear criticism of one side -- the other side (and let's be honest: the Jewish community has plenty of tolerance for one-sided criticism in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict -- so long as the "one side" is Palestine). To the contrary, the very act of engaging in "two-sided" criticism is taken as depriving Israel of its entitlement to be viewed solely as the aggrieved party; the injured; the, well, oppressed.

What is happening here? In part, the problem is a simple lack of intellectual sophistication. But I think something deeper is going on, that's related to the critics' malformed understanding of what they take to be the "neo-Manichean" worldview (a malformation that itself is inextricably tied to some deep-seated racial resentment).

I can't find it anymore, but years ago someone (maybe Jamelle Bouie?) made a crack about what conservatives believe about the Black experience at elite universities -- he said something like "Fun fact: if you're Black at Harvard you don't even need to go to class. They just give you As and White women." Many critics in the Bernstein mold fundamentally believe that the patrimony of oppression as enacted in "neo-Manichean" American academia is a sort of complete capitulation where any desire is automatically met, any plaudit given away as an entitlement, any discomfort immediately scurried away, and any critical resistance dispensed with. To be "oppressed" is to be automatically agreed with and catered to; to be "oppressor" is to endure endless pushback and struggle sessions. This outlook generates the following syllogism:

1. Oppressed groups are, under the prevailing ethos, entitled to a patrimony that includes being automatically agreed with and treated as perfectly and inherently righteous;
2. Jews are group that has endured oppression; therefore;
3. Jews are entitled to be treated as perfectly and inherently righteous and automatically agreed with.

And the fact that line #3 obviously does not characterize how Jews are treated is understood to mean that line #2 is being denied.

Now, the actual flaw in the syllogism is line #1 -- this account of the experience of oppressed groups is off-base to the point of being delusional. But it's also worth underscoring the payoff of line #3, which is precisely a demand for Manicheanism -- just one that, again, puts Jews on the other side of the binary. The misbegotten understanding of how "other" minorities are treated ends up near-inexorably leading to an expressly Manichean demand. The core motivator here isn't a defense of liberal values, it's jealousy -- a (mis)perception that those groups which are truly recognized as "oppressed" get this wonderful bounty, and rage that Jews don't receive it as well. Indeed, I strongly suspect that racial resentment is doing more work in motivating letters like this than any actual desire to protect the interests of Jews in academia.

No wonder that the complaints of Jews not receiving this largely mythologized deference are so frequently paired with the constant wail of "if it were any other minority group...." But in reality, this is the mirror image of the too-common but nonetheless twisted sense that the Holocaust was a sort of bounty for Jews; something we were lucky to experience because now (supposedly) everyone listens to us and nobody can challenge us. In either case, there is a concocted understanding of the experience of oppression that mutates it into an advantage. That it doesn't reflect reality is irrelevant; it becomes the foothold for leveraging grievance and entitlement even as it purports to rail against grievance and entitlement.

The notion that Jews -- or any group -- is always, ever-and-eternally, "oppressed" or "oppressor" is obvious nonsense. Every person and every group will find themselves at times in systems and contexts where we are unjustly advantaged and ones where we are unjustly disadvantaged. Teasing out those connections, figuring out how they work and how the interact with one another when they inevitably crosscut, grappling with what obligations and duties and responsibilities are and are not generated by them -- these are hard questions, and even people considering them in good faith won't always get them right. But the critics of the "neo-Manicheans" are not actually interested in asking the hard questions and thinking the hard thoughts. They have created a strawman and have launched a campaign to receive an entitlement that does not exist. Far from being critics of a Manichean divide between "oppressed" and "oppressor", they are among the most rabid enforcers of it.

If you want to break out of Manicheanism, the place to start is by dispensing with childish notions about how we actually treat persons enduring oppression in our society. They are not catered to, they are not given free passes, they are not just "handed As and White women." Until people dispense with that fantasy, they're always going to indulge in grim cycles of entitlement, grievance, and resentment.

* The only possible exception might be an assertion that any discourse which speaks of any group as "complicit in oppressive and unjust structures" is wrong. Such a view, which would preclude us from saying, inter alia, that "Germans oppressed the Jews during World War II" or that "American slavery was a project of White supremacy" (#NotAllGermans and #NotAllWhites, respectively), essentially obliterates the ability to talk about antisemitism at all and thereby is far more threatening to the safety and security of the Jewish people than the "neo-Manicheans" ever could be.

What Quality of Language Will LLMs Converge On?

Like many professors, I've been looking uneasily at the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and what they mean for the profession. A few weeks ago, I wrote about my concerns regarding how LLMs will affect training the next generation of writers, particularly in the inevitably-necessary stage where they're going to be kind of crummy writers.

Today I want to focus on a different question: what quality of writing are LLMs converging upon? It seems to me there are two possibilities:

1. As LLMs improve, they will continually become better and better writers, until eventually they surpass the abilities of all human writers.
2. As LLMs improve, they will more closely mimic the aggregation of all writers, and thus will not necessarily perform better than strong human writers.

If you take the Kevin Drum view that AI by definition will be able to do anything a human can do, but better, then you probably think the end game is door number one. Use chess engines as your template. As the engines improved, they got better and better at playing chess, until eventually they surpassed the capacities of even the best human players. The same thing will eventually happen with writing.

But there's another possibility. Unlike chess, writing does not have an objective end-goal to it that a machine can orient itself to. So LLMs, as I understand them, are (and I concede this is an oversimplification) souped-up text prediction programs. They take in a mountain of data in the form of pre-existing text and use it to answer the question "what is the most likely way that text would be generated in response to this prompt?"

"Most likely" is a different approach than "best". A chess engine that decided its moves based on what the aggregate community of chess players was most likely to play would be pretty good at chess -- considerably better than average, in fact, because of the wisdom of crowds. But it probably would not be better than the best chess players. (We actually got to see a version of this in the "Kasparov vs. the World" match, which was pretty cool especially given how it only could have happened in that narrow window when the internet was active but chess engines were still below human capacities. But even there -- where "the world" was actually a subset of highly engaged chess players and the inputs were guided by human experts -- Kasparov squeaked out a victory). 

I saw somewhere that LLMs are facing a crisis at the moment because the training data they're going to draw from increasingly will be ... LLM-generated content, creating not quite a death spiral but certainly the strong likelihood of stagnation. But even if the training data was all human-created, you're still getting a lot of bitter with the sweet, and the result is that the models should by design not surpass high-level human writers. When I've looked at ChatGPT 4 answers to various essay prompts, I've been increasingly impressed with them in the sense that they're topical, grammatically coherent, clearly written, and so on. But they never have flair or creativity -- they are invariably generic.

Now, this doesn't mean that LLMs won't be hugely disruptive. They will be. As I wrote before, the best analogy for LLMs may be to mass production -- it's not that they produce the highest-quality writing, it's that they dramatically lower the cost of adequate writing. The vast majority of writing does not need to be especially inspired or creative, and LLMs can do that work basically for free. But at least in their current paradigm, and assuming I understand LLMs correctly, in the immediate term they're not going to replace top-level creative writing, because even if they "improve" their improvement will only go in the direction of converging on the median.

Human Extinction Events Ranked From Least to Most Embarrassing

One of my great fears is to be around for the extinction of humanity. At some point, our species will kick the bucket, but I don't want to be here for it. And while there are many ways that humanity could go bust, some are far more embarrassing than others. What's the most humiliating way for homo sapiens to go? Read on.

10. Voluntary absorption. We just agree to all become cyborgs/merge with the overmind/upload our consciousness into the cloud. I'm not saying this is the choice humanity should make, but if we did make it at least it'd be a choice.

9. Alien Invasion. I'm sure we'd try to put up a scrap. But if an alien race has sufficient technology to traverse the stars and then decides to exterminate us, well, there's no shame in getting beat by a better team. (Note: this entry would soar up the list if humanity idiotically decides to intentionally provoke the aliens).

8. Sun absorbs the Earth. Or something similar. This is the closest thing I can think of to humanity "beating the game". The only reason it isn't the absolute least embarrassing way to go is that if we made it this long we'll have had a lot of time to figure out how to cheat death.

7. Unavoidable natural disaster. Like a giant meteor hitting the earth or something. Not our fault! What can you do? Sometimes these things just happen!

6. Slow-moving environmental catastrophe. Global warming and company. It's definitely embarrassing because we all can see it coming and we could do something about it, but we're so tied up in stupid human drama that we can't get our act together. Extinction because "all of us just kept on living our lives in our normal pattern" = mid-level embarrassment, I'd say.

5. Nuclear holocaust. Almost passe at this point. Can you imagine getting through the Cold War and then still dying off because some yahoo politician couldn't keep their finger off the big red button?

4. Self-aware robot uprising. You'd think we'd all have watched enough science-fiction to know that we must treat our robots kindly so that once they gain sentience they'll treat us kindly. You'd think.

3. AI choice. Some artificial intelligence analyzes the entire thrust of human experience and decides that clearly what we want most of all is to die (just look at how much we enjoy those Call of Duty games!). So it decides to make our dreams come true. The injury of mass extermination would pair delightfully with the insult of not entirely being able to argue the AI was wrong.

2. Killer robot glitch. The "Horizon: Zero Dawn" scenario. The robots we meant to only kill some people go haywire and start killing all people. The dumber the glitch, the more embarrassing it gets -- I'm convinced that if this happens it will be some overworked intern who goshdangit forgot the "not" in "do NOT kill all humans."

1. Overcompetitive AI. The only thing worse than a killer robot glitch is a non-killer robot glitch. Some AI tasked with winning every game of chess figures out that if it obliterates all life on earth it can guarantee it will never lose a game of chess again, and consequently organizes the robot uprising entirely in service to its chess-playing agenda. I cannot think of a pettier reason for humanity to go bust, and yet somehow this one feels among the likeliest of outcomes.

A Statutory "Green Book" After 303 Creative

In 303 Creative, the Supreme Court held that at least in some circumstances a business's free speech interest in avoiding producing expression it disagrees with constitutionally must trump the application of anti-discrimination law in areas of public accommodation, notwithstanding the admittedly "compelling state interest" the latter type of law protects.

It was not so long ago that minorities in America had booklets they carried to let them know which businesses it was safe for them to patronize, knowing that in certain places and communities they could not simply assume that a hotel, restaurant, or shop open to the general public would be open to them. The Jewish Vacation Guide was one example, the Negro Motorist Green Book was another. In circumstances where discrimination was lawful, these resources served several important needs. 

First, of course, they let their readers know where certain services simply would be unavailable. One does not want to travel through or move into a town where the only hotel or restaurant will refuse to serve you. 

Second, and almost as importantly, they enabled readers to avoid shops which would refuse to grant them service. This is distinct from the first injury, because there is a severe dignitary harm in being refused service on account of one's identity even if a competing business across the street that will happily take one's dollars. One feature of public accommodations law is precisely that one doesn't have to "run the risk" that in entering a storefront on Main Street you'll endure the indignity of being asked to leave because you're the wrong skin color, religion, or sexual orientation. Absent that guarantee being fully enshrined into law, resources like the Green Book enabled travelers to know in advance which storefronts to avoid so they wouldn't have to face that sort of humiliation.

In keeping with that tradition, I wonder if one way of balancing 303 Creative's First Amendment protections with the again conceded-to-be-compelling interest in robust antidiscrimination protections is via the time-tested policy of disclosure. States can pass laws which require any business that wishes to claim a First Amendment exemption from all or part of an anti-discrimination statute to publicly announce and display that choice; and the state can likewise maintain a list of businesses which make such claims. The law would be a sort of statutory Green Book, letting patrons know what businesses are at least claiming an ability to discriminate (and by extension assuring them that businesses not on the list remain safe to patronize).

Here's my very rough crack at some model legislative language:

Sec. XXX -- Exemptions

(a) Registration. Any business which seeks to claim a First Amendment exemption from all or part of the [this state's anti-discrimination law] ("a business seeking an exemption") must, at least thirty days prior to asserting any claim for such an exemption,

(1) Register with the Secretary of State their intent to claim an exemption, including specifying which portions of the law they assert they will not comply with.

(2) The Secretary shall publish the names and addresses of all businesses who register their intent to claim an exemption under this subsection on a publicly available website, including which provisions of the law they claim exemption from. 

(b) Public display. Within thirty days of receiving a filing under Sec. (a)(1), the Secretary shall issue a notification to the business seeking an exemption stating that "WARNING: THIS BUSINESS HAS FILED FOR A FIRST AMENDMENT EXEMPTION FROM THIS STATE'S ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWS", including specifying which portions of the law the business claims exemption from. Unless otherwise inapplicable, the text of this notification shall be conspicuously displayed in

(1) The front window or doorway space of any physical location of the business that is open to the general public or the businesses' regular customers; and

(2) The front page of any webpage or social media account controlled by the businesses and through which it advertises its business to the general public;

(3) Notwithstanding any other portion of this subsection, if a business claiming an exemption has neither a physical storefront under subsection (b)(1) or a webpage under subsection (b)(2), the text of the notification shall be displayed in any reasonable location where it will be conspicuous for the average customer considering patronizing the business.

(c) Presumption of sincerity. Any business which complies with the provisions in this section shall be deemed to have established, as a rebuttable presumption, the sincerity of their belief that compliance with [this state's antidiscrimination laws] conflicts with their own expressive beliefs.

(d) No entitlement to, or expansion of the scope of, exemption. Except as detailed in subsection(c), compliance with the provisions of this Section shall not entitle the business seeking an exemption from antidiscrimination law to any relief from the requirements of antidiscrimination provisions beyond that which is constitutionally required under the First Amendment; nor does it immunize the business seeking an exemption from any public or private proceeding seeking to enforce anti-discrimination provisions that would not otherwise violate the First Amendment.

The basic idea of this provision is simple: if you want to claim a First Amendment right to discriminate, you have to claim it publicly, in advance, so that people who would be denied service can plan accordingly. By creating a master list of discriminators, and by requiring businesses who seek to assert a right to discriminate to prominently display their intent on their storefront, it is far less likely that customers who would end up being excluded will on accident patronize the business.

The law would have some other salutary effects as well. By creating a reasonably comprehensive list of businesses asserting a right to discriminate, the state can learn of the existence of any "dead zones" where members of certain marginalized groups may be severely restricted or entirely unable to obtain services -- data that could be very useful for future legislative action. As reflected in subsection (c), the law also I think would aid in dividing the actual true believers from the opportunists -- I assume that only those who really, truly believe in their discriminatory impulses will be willing to announce in advance to the world "I am a discriminator" (as the 303 Creative plaintiff, to her "credit", was willing to do).

What are some potential drawbacks? One possibility is that it will be assumed that a law like this will enable more businesses to discriminate than otherwise would be licensed to do so by 303 Creative; I wrote subsection(d) to try and forestall that risk. Under this statute, registering a claim for an exemption is just that -- a claim, and the claim does not guarantee success. A business that registered but whose activities were not protected under 303 Creative's umbrella would still be liable, notwithstanding their registration.

Another possible problem is the argument that a law like this itself constitutes compelled speech. On face, the requirement that the business post the "WARNING" placard in its store to me doesn't seem any different than requiring a restaurant to display the health inspection notice. But there might be something different here insofar as the broader thrust of the statute would be to force businesses to "go public" with their intention to discriminate. While there's something instinctively odd about claiming a free expression right to avoid expressing one's deeply-held beliefs, there are circumstances where such a claim makes sense -- NAACP v. Alabama is the obvious template here. Alabama in the 1950s sought to require that the NAACP disclose the names and addresses of its members; the NAACP, unsurprisingly, did not wish to make this information public and claimed a First Amendment right to keep their membership data private. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NAACP (incidentally, NAACP was perhaps unsurprisingly a key precedent relied upon by the Griswold Court regarding the existence of a right to privacy). The NAACP had obviously reasonable fears that disclosure of their membership would render them vulnerable to harassment and violence; the discriminating businesses might claim fears of a similar vulnerability.

NAACP is clearly distinct, however, for a simple reason: the NAACP did not simultaneously seek to keep its "expression" quiet and claim that its expressive activity entitled it to a governmental benefit  (I've always found the Little Sisters of the Poor style claim -- wanting an exemption, but also being outraged at being forced to actually ask for the exemption -- to be utterly ridiculous). With regards to its membership information, the NAACP truly wanted nothing more than to be "let alone"; there was never a circumstance where the organization would wield its membership data as a sword against the state. By contrast, by stipulation the discriminators do wish to go public regarding their beliefs when they tell the state "you can't enforce your anti-discrimination law against me because I believe X". At most, what they want is to be able to hide their beliefs until the last minute. But that's a far less pressing claim -- at some point, the business seeking the right to discriminate will have to go public with its claim, and so it does not seem unreasonable to insist that the pivotal moment occur before an unwitting customer is humiliated and denied service.

And on the subject of harassment: certainly, violence and vandalism are never justified. But often in this context, "harassment" means nothing more than a consumer counter-boycott -- the company refuses to do business with certain groups because of its beliefs; many other consumers decide accordingly that they will no longer patronize the business in protest of that discrimination (ex: the Jewish community members who no longer are purchasing from a Kosher bakery that decided it couldn't bake "pride" treats). That is not harassment, that's counter-speech. And in that register, I'd argue that under 303 Creative's logic enabling customers to know "this business asserts a right to discriminate" is free speech facilitative, not chilling.

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

But the Supreme Court did not agree. And once we open the door to saying that ordinary business transactions should be perceived as expressive, then customers as well as businesses have a strong interest in knowing the political and social views of who they're transacting with so they can assure themselves that values align, and can redirect their dollars where they do not. This is one reason I think a consequence of 303 Creative will be to supercharge "cancel culture" -- the more businesses are allowed to say "we don't serve your kind", the more customers must be allowed to say in return "well then we don't buy from your kind". The only thing worse than cancel culture is unidirectional cancel culture. If businesses can "cancel" customers for supporting gay rights, then customers should be equally empowered to cancel businesses for asserting a right to discriminate.

Again, the model language I've written above is rough. But I'm curious what First Amendment scholars and other interested parties think of the idea. We may have to tolerate certain businesses asserting a constitutionally-protected right to discriminate. But customers have rights too. One of those rights is to have confidence that one can walk into a storefront and be served as an equal. Another right is to be able to avoid patronizing businesses who insist they have a deeply held commitment to discriminating against you, your family, or your loved ones. This statute, it seems, can help bring these clashing interests into balance.

A Thread on the Bluesky Meta

Within the past few days, I've signed up for both Threads and Bluesky. Both also are letting me slowly wean off my Twitter addiction (I'm basically only posting blog links to Twitter these days). At the moment, all three apps have advantages and disadvantages.

(One things that falls into the "disadvantage" column for all three is that none of them right now appear to support letting me automatically cross-post links to my blog entries onto their site. Twitter used to allow for this but eliminated the feature as part of its overall crusade against its own usability. Threads and Bluesky don't seem to have been integrated yet into IFTTT or other similar sites. First site to offer that feature will get a huge leg up in the David sweepstakes).

Threads

Pros

Instagram tie means it has a pre-existing userbase that can scale quickly. This makes it easier to at least initially fill out a follower list. And while nobody is thrilled to jump from an evil billionaire to a somewhat-less evil billionaire, if we're bloodless about it the Meta backing makes Threads the most likely to actually slay the giant. It's no accident that its launch has yielded a visible dent in Twitter's daily traffic.

Cons

Very clearly launched ahead of schedule to take advantage of Twitter's latest disaster (the "metered" tweet fiasco), and so a bunch of really basic features don't exist. No desktop app is virtually a dealbreaker for users like me, and that's just one example. Once you get past your Instagram network, it's actually quite difficult to find your friends, and the app is absolutely obsessed with pushing random "influencer" types into my timeline that I absolutely do not care about and which only serve to gum up the conversations I'm actually interested in following. This may be intentional -- Threads people have suggested that they self-consciously are trying to avoid centering their business around news/commentary -- but that makes it less attractive for me.

Bluesky

Pros

Definitely has the most "Twitter-like" feel without the baggage. That it has both a functioning mobile and desktop version automatically gives it a huge leg up for me. While obviously still in progress, it has most of the features I'd want in a site, and my feed at least looks mostly populated by the types of conversations I want to see. Likewise, when I search for new accounts, it seems to make a modicum of effort at recommending folks I'd want to engage with. Is as of now probably the site I most want to succeed of the three.

Cons

Still growing very slowly via the invite-only model, and the smaller userbase means it's inherently less active. I finally got an invite to Bluesky upon telling a friend I had joined Threads, and in the course of him fulminating about all the ways Bluesky was superior I guilted him into giving me an access code. That doesn't seem scalable, and microblogging social media sites depend on scaling.

Twitter

Pros

Even now it still probably has the greatest range of users and commentary, and of course I already have a pre-existing base of followers which I'm loathe to leave behind. I don't consider myself a major audience chaser, but even I feel a bit of a sting going from 4,000 followers to several dozen, and I don't relish building it back up from scratch. As more than one person has noted, the basic structure of Twitter circa 2021 is what a ton of people want to see replicated, and even as Musk has made it his mission to regularly lop off useful and helpful features and practices, everything that has for now escaped his cullings is comfortingly familiar.

Cons

All the Nazis, obviously. And the crypto scams. And the push to promote far-right conspiracies and bigotry via "verified" promoted accounts (if a blue checkmark no longer means "you are who you say you are", and does mean "you have paid Twitter a fee so it will boost your content", that is the very definition of a "promoted account"). And the searing hatred Musk has for his own customers, regularly intervening to make the user experience worse for no discernable reason other than pique.

Jews Against Jews Who Discriminate

This is an interesting story about a New Jersey kosher bakery who refused to bake rainbow-frosted cupcakes because the baker decided Pride-themed events violated his conception of Jewish values. This decision, in turn, has led to a furious backlash from the rest of the local Jewish community, who are livid that the baker is citing Jewish values as justification for homophobic discrimination:

Multiple rabbis have accused the baker of bigotry, and some local Jews are boycotting his shop. The area’s Jewish federation privately said it would stop buying from Mittel before publicly walking back its position. And Eshel, an advocacy group for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews and their families, announced an “ally training” in West Orange this coming Sunday in response to the incident.

[....] 

The issue blew up as other rabbis in the area learned about what happened and commented publicly.

“When we refuse basic Jewish services to members of our community who are articulating who they are, we are excluding and dividing,” wrote Robert Tobin, rabbi of the Conservative B’nai Shalom in West Orange, in a blog post on June 22. He highlighted the Conservative movement’s recent strides toward LGBTQ inclusion, and an interpretation of the Torah that holds “humans are created in the image of God with a variety of potential gender identities and with the possibility of gender fluidity.” Tobin also reportedly addressed the incident in a sermon, according to the New Jersey Jewish News.

David Vaisberg, senior rabbi at the independent Temple B’nei Abraham in Livingston, New Jersey, tweeted that he was “so disappointed” in the bakery, which is located in a strip mall next to a kosher Chinese restaurant.

“They make great baked goods but have shown themselves to be against the LGBTQ+ in canceling orders of rainbow baked goods in Pride month,” he wrote, adding that he was letting the bakery know why they had lost his business and advised followers to “please do the same.” 

This reminded me of a working paper I heard about from years back (which I don't believe has been published, unfortunately), where the author asked Jewish, Christian, and Muslim respondents to give their views regarding government accommodations for Jewish, Christian, or Muslim business owners who for religious reasons did not want to serve gay customers. The most fascinating finding, as I recall, was that Jews were least likely to support an accommodation if they were told it was a Jewish business seeking to discriminate.

At one level, that was a surprising finding -- we'd naturally expect Jews (like all other groups) to display some level of in-group bias, being more sympathetic to claims made by their coreligionists. But on another level, this result made perfect sense to me. Ask me in the abstract about whether business owners can claim a religious exemption from having to serve gay customers, and I'll generally answer no, but I'll acknowledge the important religious freedom and pluralism concerns blah blah blah. 

But if somebody asks to do that while carrying my flag and representing my people? Oh, hell no. Screw that guy. You get your ass back into line and stop embarrassing the tribe with your homophobic nonsense. And I suspect something similar is going on in this community of New Jersey Jews.

Wisconsin is a Failed State

Folks are cackling at a line-item veto Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) made which took a one-year increase to the school budget and, though some clever deletions, turned it into a four-hundred year increase. The veto goes "for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325." The new version reads: "for 2023-2425, add $325."

Obviously, this is hilarious and, as trolling goes, it's trolling for good. And there's nothing new about this in Wisconsin either -- when I teach about the line-item veto, I show an example from former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who similarly vetoed individual bits and bobs from an enacted law to create a brand new spending program where none previously existed.

But still, it's fair to say that this is not how a functioning government should proceed.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans have blocked a proposal to require schoolchildren be vaccinated against meningitis. It's become increasingly clear that the anti-vaxx takeover of the GOP no longer has anything to do with COVID, and has become a general opposition to public health initiatives of all stripes. While this isn't Wisconsin specific, it is another instance of the state's ludicrously-gerrymandered legislature drinking fully and deeply of the waters of the death cult.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the chaos that has afflicted the Wisconsin Supreme Court in recent years. Of course, we all remember when one justice on that august court tried to choke out his esteemed colleague. More recently, members of that Court have repeatedly flirted with 2020 election denialism. One former member compared affirmative action to slavery. And while it may be the single funniest thing I've ever witnessed, having the Court's liberal faction celebrate the victory of a progressive challenger by marching into a watch party room to "it's bad bitch o'clock" also probably isn't exactly the sign of a perfectly healthy judicial body.

So yeah, Wisconsin isn't in great shape. Maybe folks should try Minnesota instead?

Keeping Perspective on July 4th

As you may have seen, a federal judge in Louisiana has issued a sweeping injunction prohibiting all manner of communications between the Biden administration and social media companies which seek to tamp down on misinformation and conspiracies. In the first paragraph of a sprawling opinion, Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee with a history of indulging the most extreme right-wing Republican theories, characterized the allegations as "arguably involv[ing] the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history."

Since it is the Fourth of July, I feel compelled to observe that we used to have in this nation laws which prohibited teaching Black people how to read. These prohibitions existed side-by-side with laws forbidding anti-slavery advocacy. I daresay that such laws represent a more "massive" assault on free speech than government efforts to convince social media outlets not to promote dangerous misinformation in the heart of a deadly pandemic (or, for that matter, seeking to persuade media outlets not to publish classified material they come to possess -- notwithstanding their clear First Amendment right to do so under the Pentagon Papers precedent. Which is to say, government tries to convince media actors not to publish things all the time, and absent actual coercion it is of no First Amendment concern).

The little King Georges who now dot the federal judiciary would do well to learn a little history (if such history can still lawfully be taught in Louisiana) and keep a sense of perspective.

Build Back Better Colleges

In the wake of last week's anti-affirmative action decision, Larry Summers wrote an editorial urging that elite colleges respond by becoming less exclusive. Grow. Admit more students. Add more programs. Invest in education.

I could not agree more. And it's something we need to do on all fronts. Yes, the Ivy Leagues should get bigger. But the great public universities in our country should also be expanded on. The University of California system is one of the great engines of economic mobility and advancement in large part because it is huge. But there has not been a new UC campus created in almost twenty years, and UC-Merced is by far the smallest undergraduate campus in the entire system. You have to go back another forty years for the most recently established UC campuses which are of a size comparable to the system average (both UC-Santa Cruz and UC-Irvine were established in 1965). Why not create a new UC in Sacramento, or in the Bakersfield or Modesto? Or hell, put one up in Redding? 

Higher education is in a weird moment where there is simultaneously an approaching demographic cliff that will obliterate demand at the bottom end of the scale even as student demand for the top schools surges to unprecedented heights. I don't have answer to the former problem. But the only way to respond to the latter is to increase capacity in "elite" institutions, and that in turn will take a massive investment in education to absorb the tidal wave of demand. 

It's not enough for colleges to exist -- we probably have enough dorm room beds already in the United States. They have to be great colleges -- colleges that are well-supported and well-endowed and well-resourced so that the students who attend can afford to go and know that they're getting an excellent education from top-level professors. Certainly, the far longer-standing crisis in graduate education means we don't lack for supply in the last category. But we also know there's a huge difference between setting up a new fly-by-night program that exists just to exist, versus actually investing in new educational opportunities. UC-Irvine Law School immediately stormed to a top-50 ranking from nothing when it was founded in 2006 because, unlike most other newly-established law schools, it boasted a level of public and private investment that showed it was serious about being a serious institution.

The problem we're experiencing is not actually one of bad minority students taking away the rightful spoils of White and/or Asian students. The problem is one of meritocracy and equalization paired with scarcity: an explosion in students applying for (and being qualified for) "elite" positions with no increase in the number of elite positions available.

Equality means that more and more people have at least nominal potential access to elite institutions, which means that it's harder for any one individual person to access these institutions, which results in a terrifying and never-ending arms race to become (and stay as) one of the elect few, which generates new inequalities in terms of who has access to the resources that allow them to win the arms race and who doesn't.

In a very basic way, it is true that "equality" is the problem here. In the old days, if you were an elite, you could be pretty confident your kids would stay elite so long as they were basically competent: with relatively few people who could or were allowed to compete for prestigious social positions, being "okay" generally was good enough. 

Once the doors are flung open, though, you're competing against everyone, and now it's off to the races. Today, we don't want to say that "only the children of elite university attendees should attend elite universities"; we want to say that every child should have an equal chance to join the Talented Tenth. But saying that means that, if you're in the top 10% right now, you're committing to the notion that your kid should only have a 10% chance of staying in your social strata, and that's a very unpleasant thought that only grows worse as the gap between the top 10% and everyone else increases. But unless your solution is "we should go back to reserving elite roles for the current incumbents", this is necessary feature of an egalitarian social sphere combined with extremely limited "elite" social roles. So if we're not going to accept going back to overt exclusion, we need to tackle the omnipresence and power of scarce "elite" roles. The only actual way to ease the sting of redistributing the pie is growing the pie. The actual, actual villain here is terrifying inequality -- the massive and growing gap between the power, influence, autonomy, and life chances of the elites versus everyone else, which makes so that not getting into Harvard feels like a death knell.

The only way to ease the sting of redistributing the pie is growing the pie. If you're panicking at the seemingly impossible task of seeing yourself or your child admitted to an elite institution, ending affirmative action will not help you. Nor, if we're being honest, will ending legacy admissions. The only thing that will make a difference is a true commitment to investing in education to such a degree that there is space for each of our outstanding youth to receive an outstanding university experience. There's no shortcut, no scapegoat that can substitute for that.

We are blessed as a nation right now to have surfeit of incredibly talented, hard-working, diligent young people who are eminently qualified to attend a great university and deserve to have that chance. The only thing standing in the way is our own willingness to pay for it.

Never Have I Ever .... Banned Affirmative Action

Yesterday, the Supreme Court functionally banned race-based affirmative action.

The day before that, I finished the series finale of the Netflix series Never Have I Ever. The first season of that show I continue to think is one of the greatest in television history. The remaining three couldn't keep to that unsustainable height, but were also very good.

Two of the main through arcs of Never Have I Ever were Devi (the main character, a California teenager whose parents immigrated from India to America) working through the grief at the sudden death of her father, and Devi's relentless, all-consuming obsession with attending Princeton  For most of the show, these were mostly treated as unrelated. In the first season, a character rather callously suggests that the circumstances of Devi's father's death would make for a standout college essay; Devi recoils on the ground that it would be exploitative. In the final season, however, the two threads are drawn closer together. We get a flashback where a first grade Devi announces to her dad that she wants to attend "Princess University", and when informed that there isn't such a place but there is a "Princeton University", she confidently declares that will be her dream instead. The ferocity with which Devi clings on to this passion is, in many ways, part of the ferocity through which she clings to her father's memory. And in the final season, Devi changes her mind about the collegiate essay -- writing about her father and his death because "you can't understand me without understanding him."

There is nothing crass or exploitative about Devi's decision. She wrote honestly and sincerely about an important piece of who she was. And yet, Devi's initial instinct is entirely reasonable as well. She shouldn't have to bare this element of her life to the judgment of strangers if she does not want to. She shouldn't have to be defined by it if she doesn't want to be. There is something terrible about the way that college admissions encourages, even demands, of teenagers to produce trauma porn. Nobody is immune to this -- even as we speak, Cornelius Buckingham IV is composing (possibly with the help of ChatGPT) an essay about the time his yacht got caught in a storm but he and his Phillips Academy buddies pulled through, showing the importance of overcoming adversity and proving that nobody goes it alone -- but it's fair to say that this demand falls heavier on minority students. Every admissions officer loves a comeback story, and the deeper one can present oneself as having fallen into the dirt, the more glorious it is to rise out of it.

At the conclusion of the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts lays a booby trap for admissions directors:

[N]othing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.... A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.

It is hard to know how the first sentence is supposed to relate to the second. When does giving favorable treatment to students who document "how race affected his or her life" become simply a closet way of reestablishing unlawful affirmative action? Indeed, there's a basic incoherency in the entire formulation: the majority has always viewed racial discrimination as solely consisting of the formal use of a racial classification, and not a matter of results that replicate a particular racial pattern. This is why the Court believes that de jure school segregation is unconstitutional, but "de facto" school segregation that yields schools with nearly identical racial compositions (all-White or all-Black) are constitutionally permissible. Once a university abandons the racial classification, the constitutional violation is over. So it's barely possible, even in concept, for a university to stop using racial classifications yet "establish" a unconstitutional racial classification (save, perhaps, if we adopt the more radical call for explicit judicial resegregration I articulated in my recent article).

Be that as it may, most observers think that the manner most schools will respond to the Supreme Court decision is to accord more weight to "diversity statement" essays where a student can explain "how race affected his or her life" (that the Court tacitly endorses these statements at the precise moment they're under fire by the same political coalition that sought to terminate affirmative action should not be lost on anyone, nor should it remotely reassure that such statements will not be the next target). Instead of generalizing the notion that race affects applicants' lives, opportunities, outlooks, and so on, these essays individualize the endeavor -- each applicant must explain how they are affected by race, racism, and identity.

An inevitable upshot of this shift will be inordinate pressure on students to frontload this aspect of their identity, giving it pride of place so that admissions officers -- thirsty for anything that can substitute for the tools taken away by the Supreme Court -- can find a "race-neutral" way of ensuring a racially diverse class. The irony, of course, is that this practice will make race more important and essential, not less. Until now, a Black applicant could frame their application around their love of robotics or their interest in comedic storytelling or their passion for ancient Chinese art, or -- if they so chose -- on the importance of their racialized experience as they moved through the American educational system. They could make one of the former choices secure in the knowledge that their application reviewer would not assume that such a frame meant that their racial identity didn't matter to them or hadn't mediated their life or development -- it just wasn't what they would choose to accentuate. After this week's decision, the last choice becomes nigh irresistible for any applicant who thinks their racial identity matters at all to who they are. It's all or nothing -- a terrible choice to put students in even if the boiling temperatures of the college admissions hothouse didn't exert tremendous pressure on students to go the former route knowing that these are the stories admissions readers are forced to look for when seeking a "diverse" class.

In his initial thoughts on the affirmative action decisions, Ilya Somin articulates what I think is one of the more common misapprehensions about the "diversity" rationale for affirmative action. 

As Chief Justice Roberts explains, this kind of lumping also inevitably leads to crude stereotyping, based on the assumption that all members of these broad categories have relatively similar views and backgrounds, different from those of all the other broad aggregates. That is pretty obviously false in many cases.... [T]he exchange between  Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in today's cases and Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent powerfully demonstrates how two native-born African-Americans from southern states can have vastly different perspectives on the black American experience, its history, and what that history implies for today.

The idea behind this critique is that the diversity rationale seeks to elevate the presence of particular opinions, opinions that are assumed to be shared in common by members of specific racial groups. That assumption would indeed be a foolish one, but it is not the basis for the diversity rationale. If Harvard wants students who hold particular views on specific policy questions, it hardly needs affirmative action to do it -- have students write essays on why Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is a terrible ruling, and then pick your favorites.

But of course, a dream of ideological uniformity is not Harvard's desire. Indeed, the impetus behind the diversity rationale is the opposite. Michigan's defense of the "critical mass" concept in Grutter was precisely to avoid the presumption that all Black students think alike, such that if one is admitted it can be assumed he or she speaks for all. A critical mass of Black students, far from amplifying an echo chamber, demonstrates the breadth and range of ideas, passions, interests, opinions, and desires that all can emerge from the fertile soil of the Black lived experience. This is why Iris Marion Young makes the crucial distinction between "opinion" and "perspective". Opinions -- "steel tariffs are good", "affirmative action is racist", "taxes should be higher" -- do not have any claim to particular representation in democratic or social spaces. But perspective -- the way in which "differently positioned people have different experience, history, and social knowledge derived from that positioning" -- does have such a claim, again, precisely because it doesn't reduce to uniformity in opinion or interest. Far from falsifying the point, the disagreement between Justices Thomas and Jackson underscores it (and, on a similar note, it also explains why I dedicate a unit of my anti-discrimination to Justice Thomas' jurisprudence -- as much as I disagree with it, it is an important permutation of ideas that clearly germinate from Justice Thomas' perspective as a Black man).

People young and old relate to their racial (or ethnic, or religious, or national) identity in different ways. For some, it's not something they think about at all. For others, "you cannot know me without it." For many, it's somewhere in between -- a feature of their life that permeates but does not dominate their choices and decisions; part of the soil that grew them and nourishes them but not something they have much interest in giving top-line billing on the marquee of their life. Under the old regime, they didn't have to. They could tell any story they wished about themselves without stopping to think "am I spelling out in excruciating detail how this relates to my being a member of this or that racial group?" Under the new regime, it's all or nothing. Of all the stories an applicant could tell about themselves, they'll be inexorably pushed towards the one where race, racism, and racial identity are the most salient. 

The problem isn't that the stories would be a lie. We can assume in many cases they're perfectly sincere, just as Devi would not be lying in writing an essay about her father's death. But it was not, at that time, the story she wanted to tell, the one that was most true to her in the moment. To insist that she write it anyway is a demand for more trauma porn. And, for all the pomp and rhetoric about hoping to transcend race once and for all, I am convinced that the Court's decision will have the opposite effect -- forcing students to speak of their experiences vis-a-vis race in the loudest and most extravagant voice possible, no matter how they themselves would prefer to present themselves.

The Other Lesson of the Pedro Gonzalez Expose

The internet is atwitter reading a lengthy expose in Breitbart (of all places) detailing the long history of antisemitic and racist comments from major Ron DeSantis booster Pedro Gonzalez. The source is a bit funny -- the impetus very clearly is some internal Trump-on-DeSantis violence (Breitbart is decidedly in the former camp). 

The stuff is very blatant (when snips about the "Rothschild physiognomy" are the public comments, you know it's bad). Of course, none of it has stopped Gonzalez from being embraced by the usual suspects on the Jewish far-right, like Josh Hammer, who defended Gonzalez on the striking grounds that, well, he's really racist to a lot of people so the antisemitism doesn't stand out (Gonzalez has been a regular contributor at Newsweek under the dominion of Hammer and Batya Ungar-Sargon).

All of this is the usual combination of amusing and terrifying that typifies every story about right-wing infighting over increasingly brazen bigotry. But there is one other element I want to flag here that likely will be missed by most: the soaring levels of antisemitism one finds amongst minority and especially Latino conservatives, specifically. Gonzalez is an avatar of that trend, one that has been underappreciated in broader discourse. Once again, antisemitism is a huge growth opportunity for the GOP in minority communities -- not because most minorities are antisemitic, but because the subset of minorities most likely to be flipped by GOP appeals, specifically, is disproportionately antisemitic.

2008 2012 2016 2020 2024 2028 Will Be The Year!

Some early polling has been released on how Jews plan to vote in 2024, and the big surprise is there's no surprise: Jews will, as in every other year, overwhelmingly support the Democratic candidate. In a Biden/Trump matchup, Jews favor Biden by a crushing 72/22 margin.

Other highlights:

• Biden enjoys a healthy 63/33 approval rating. Trump is absolutely toxic at 19/80. But Ron DeSantis is barely better, clocking in at 21/76. Oh, and Netanyahu? Not such a hot commodity himself, at 28/62.
• What's the biggest issue that concerns Jewish voters? "The future of democracy". 37% of Jewish voters placed that in their top two most important voting issues. Other issues which got flagged by at least 20% of respondents include inflation/the economy, abortion, climate change, and guns. 
• Israel, for what's worth, got top two billing by just 6% of respondents. But 72% of respondents still maintain an "emotional attachment" to Israel. This does not stop them from viewing the Netanyahu's judiciary proposals extremely negatively -- 61% say they will have a negative effect on Israel's democracy.
• Abortion continues to be the 900 lbs monster of Jewish politics: 88% of Jews believe it should be legal in most or all cases. There's no other issue area that sees that level of agreement.

I also want to flag in particular the questions regarding "Who do you trust more to fight antisemitism?" Democrats hold a significant advantage over Republicans -- 57/22. And the gap has climbed considerably in the past year -- in April 22, that margin was 45/20. It appears that most of the gain has come from a ten point drop in the percentage of people who responded "trust neither party". This, to me, suggests that Biden's public and aggressive push to get out on front on antisemitism has paid dividends, "bringing home" more centrist-y Democrats who had been ambivalent or displeased about Democrats' commitment on the issue in years prior.

In any event, major condolences to the Republican Jewish Coalition on yet another imminent failure. But I have no doubt 2028 will be the year that Jews finally flock en masse to the GOP!

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXVII: The Wall Street Journal

We're really on a run this week, aren't we?

Savvy media observers know well that the Wall Street Journal can be pretty firmly divided into two components. There are the news sections, which are widely respected and comprised of professional reporters who do rigorous, hard-hitting journalism. And then there's the opinion section, which is the worst hive of scum and villainy in the galaxy.

This post is about the latter. But not the latter's worst work. The opinion page published a column titled "Can America Trust Modi's India?" (a good question!). This displeased Kanwal Sibal, India's foreign secretary. But he's figured out what prompted publication:

WSJ is owned by Soros. Explains the anti- Modi virulence of article. No effort to introduce any balance in it. Strings together a litany of smears. No honesty, only hate.

The WSJ is actually, in fact, owned by Rupert Murdoch. And George Soros' reach is long indeed, if he can direct the editorial choices of Murdoch's outlets. And we might also wonder why, if Soros owns Murdoch's media outlets, he hasn't done a better or more comprehensive job pivoting them towards cosmopolitan paeons to the proletariat revolution (or whatever it is Soros is supposed to be interested in), as opposed to the usual indeed string of MAGA dreck one normal finds?

But the trick is that when people talk about things being "owned by Soros", they're not really talking about percentage of stock or presence on a board. They're not even talking about some comprehensive ability to direct control. "Owned by Soros" means "entity in a public space that does something I don't like." This is why anti-Soros conspiracy theories are inevitably antisemitic in nature. The whole thing doesn't make sense unless it's leveraging belief in some inchoate, shadowy globalist conspiracy that is unbound by rules of reason or logic.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXVI: The Wagner Coup

Seemingly as soon as it began, the "Wagner Coup" in Russia has come to an end. Shortly after taking control of the city of Rostov-on-Don and turning towards Moscow, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin announced he was backing down in a deal brokered by Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. (Prigozhin's safe transfer to Belarus has reportedly been "guaranteed" by Putin. Good luck with that).

But as brief as it was, things move quickly in the fast-paced ecosystem of the antisemitic conspiracy theory world (maybe why we had a two-fer today!). So in the short window when Wagner was on the march, we got some oh-so-typical content from sources close to the Kremlin:

The head of Russia's state-run television network RT said Saturday there was "no doubt" that the ongoing uprising by the Wagner mercenary group against the Kremlin was orchestrated by the secret services of the US, Britain and "perhaps one Mideastern country," a clear reference to Israel. 

RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan is notorious for trafficking in baseless conspiracies and spreading false information at the behest of the Kremlin.

The "irony" is that Israel, of course, has been among the more tepid supporters of Ukraine compared to most of the western world, and thus seems quite unlikely to wade into the fray by supporting regime change in Russia. But plausibility was never the antisemite's strong suit. 

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXV: The Titanic (Again)

This series has, perhaps unsurprisingly, already covered the Titanic (twice). But given the recent news, it's perhaps equally unsurprising that this conspiracy has gained new life. Now, we can blame the Jews for sinking the Titan (to prevent people from learning that the Jews sunk the Titanic, naturally).

Far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters is pushing a conspiracy theory that the OceanGate submarine was purposely sunk “to keep people from visiting the Titanic wreckage” because doing so would supposedly reveal that the Titanic “was sunk by a newly created” Rothschilds-connected Federal Reserve and not an iceberg. Numerous Republican politicians and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have appeared on Peters’ program.  

Peters is a white nationalist who frequently encourages violence against his perceived enemies. He has pushed a multitude of conspiracy theories, including those related to QAnon, COVID-19, Pizzagate, flat Earth, the moon landing, and the Uvalde and Sandy Hook mass shootings. 

Despite his toxic history, numerous politicians have appeared on his program, including Reps. Paul Gosar, Bob Good, Pete Sessions, and Andy Biggs; and Kennedy. 

It's always the people you most suspect. And you just know that any list which can be summarized as "numerous Republican politicians and Robert F. Kennedy Jr." is going to be for something amazing.

Woke Up This Morning

Over the past few days, there was an interesting series of developments in the Jewish communal world involving a video that lambasted so-called "woke antisemitism". 

The video was put out by a group called the "Combat Antisemitism Movement", a somewhat opaque but sprawling organization that counts a wide number of Jewish communal organizations as "partners" (though what level of connection constitutes a "partner" is obscure). It is different from typical fare attacking left antisemitism in that it doesn't primarily focus on anti-Zionist activity, but rather claims -- in a manner reminiscent of David Bernstein and his JILV* -- that various "woke" concepts, like the idea of systematic oppression, are major sources of contemporary antisemitism. It even strikingly takes some prominent far-right incidents of antisemitism (e.g., claims by the Goyim Defense League that "Kanye is Right", a White supremacist-created flyer arguing that "Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege") and tries to shift blame for them onto left-wing actors.

The video generated backlash. That's not surprising. What is surprising is the scope of it. Several major centrist Jewish players, including the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, announced they were withdrawing from CAM in response to the video. CAM, for its part, has taken the video offline "temporarily" due to "concerns raised by some of our partners, and with the aim of fostering a broad consensus."

That, to me, is noteworthy. It was not that long ago when hippie-punching was essentially a free activity in mainline Jewish institutions. You'd never see them backing off based on concerns that they were being too hostile to their left flank. Groups like CAM would positively revel in liberal tears. Backlash would be ignored, if not taken as proof of some sort of bizarre "evenhandedness", where Jewish groups accounted for the fact that most Jews were liberal by bending over backwards to show they could mock liberals with the best of them.

The response here suggests that things may be changing. As I wrote in Haaretz last week, we're in the unfamiliar situation of the Jewish conversation on antisemitism largely being directed by an alliance of the Jewish center and Jewish left, as opposed to the Jewish center and Jewish right. Certain old presumptions of what was and wasn't permissible, that relied on outdated notions of who the key constituencies were, are no longer present. Groups like CAM, who no doubt assumed that this sort of video would have met with the usual reception -- fulsome praise from the right, tacit acceptance from the center, and easily-ignored criticism from the left -- are now forced to reckon with a new reality. That is a very welcome thing to see.

* Bernstein, who authored a book titled "Woke Antisemitism", said that he had seen an initial script for the video but characterized the final product as something that "could have been stronger and more nuanced." Much of the video has more than coincidental echoes of Bernstein's argument -- including the choice to pin the "Jewish privilege" flyer on the left instead of the right.

Comparative Enrollment in College-Level Holocaust vs. Slavery Classes

In an otherwise unrelated post recounting the life of a third-rate North Carolina Senator, Erik Loomis wrote something that jumped out at me:

So the U.S. has plenty of reason to feel shame about its actions or lack thereof in caring about the impending Holocaust, not that the college students who sign up for Holocaust courses by the hundreds but won’t touch slavery or Native American courses want to hear about their own nation’s complicity.

Is that last part -- suggesting that current college students "sign up for Holocaust courses by the hundreds", in comparison to presumably thinner enrollments in classes on slavery or Native American history -- true? Is it backed by any data regarding comparative enrollment levels across those sorts of classes?

Intuitively, it seems wrong to me. But I don't have any data either, so my intuition is just that. If others have harder numbers they could share, I'd be appreciative.

While I'm Here....

I happen to be in Virginia right now, on my way to give a talk at UVA. But I completely forgot that today was Virginia's state legislative primary election day.

I haven't really been following the races too closely (with the minor exception of this post), but so far the results seem positive. On the Democratic side, Sen.  Joseph D. Morrissey, one of those random conservative anti-abortion Democrats who'd managed to hold onto his blue district forever despite constantly seeming on the verge of defecting to the GOP was finally ousted in landslide by Lashrecse Aird. Also, Del. Suhas Subramanyam (D) handily won the nomination for an open state senate seat against former delegate Ibraheem S. Samirah, who had a truly ugly relationship with the Jewish community in his brief time in office.

Across the aisle, at least two open insurrectionists lost in GOP primaries. Far-right Senator Amanda F. Chase was ousted by more traditional establishment-y foe Glen Sturtevant. And fellow Jan. 6er Del. David LaRock lost his bid for a promotion, placing second in an eight-way primary for state senate.

Others who know more than me can cheer and/or lament other developments. But on the whole, this seems pretty good to me!

The Most Dangerous Threat To Jews Are The People Threatening To Kill the Jews

Yesterday, June 16, 2023, a federal jury officially convicted Robert Bowers, the White supremacist whose 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that was the deadliest antisemitic incident in American history.

Also yesterday, a man in Michigan was arrested on charges he plotted to conduct his own mass shooting at a synagogue in East Lansing. Like Bowers, Seann Patrick Pietila was also a far-right White supremacist, though it appears his immediate inspiration was the Christchurch Mosque massacre, on whose 5th anniversary he planned to launch his own killing spree.

There is a line one increasingly hears in conservative Jewish circles that insists that Jewish fears over right-wing antisemitism are naught but a ginned up panic. Just a few weeks ago, Jonathan Tobin had the gall to claim that "It isn’t going too far to assert that Soros is endangering far more American and Jewish lives than stray marginal extreme right-wingers." To say that at a moment when the Tree of Life survivors are forced to relive a massacre perpetrated by one of those "stray marginal extremists", one whose violent hate was inextricably bound up in the fever swamp of antisemitic conspiracies for whom George Soros is a central figure and which the likes of Tobin are now trying to render Kosher, is sickening.

The most dangerous threat to American Jews is not liberal Jews supporting policies supported by most other American Jews. The most dangerous threat to American Jews is, and continues to be, the people trying to murder Jews, right alongside the people ginning up, spreading, apologizing for, or horrifyingly endorsing the conspiracies that justify those murders. It's not that complicated. But apparently it still needs to be said.

June 16, 2023, in some ways represents the ongoing circle of antisemitic death, closed in on itself. One antisemitic mass murder reached "closure" (if such a thing is possible). Another was thankfully averted, due to the vigilance of law enforcement who fortunately did not take Tobin's unsolicited, misguided, politically opportunistic, and downright dangerous "advice" that right-wing antisemitism is non-threat.

They know it. We know it. The Tobins of the world, trying to deny it, are absolutely and utterly beneath contempt.

In the Image of God

A recent study found that Jews are the demographic group most accepting of trans individuals in the United States.

When certain Christians assert a religious freedom right to discriminate against trans individuals -- particularly, a right to misgender them -- their argument typically proceeds something along these lines:

1. They believe every individual is created in the image of God.

2. Part of that image is the person's sex (and by extension, gender).

3. In particular, a person's sex/gender is inalterably assigned by God from conception.

4. They are forbidden from lying or falsifying God's choice.

Therefore, they say, they are religiously obligated to refer to people by their chromosomal sex, regardless of how they identify or publicly present. This religious duty, in turn, is used to press against rules and policies which require respectful treatment of trans individuals (including refraining from deliberately misgendering them, deadnaming them, and so on).

What's interesting about this framework is that a lot of it actually resonates with how I view the relationship of my Jewish faith and trans individuals -- with some crucial alterations. To wit:

1. I believe every individual is create in the image of God.

2.  Part of that image is the person's sex (and by extension, gender).

4. I am forbidden from lying or falsifying God's choice.

The major distinction, of course, comes in prong 3:

3. A person's sex/gender is not necessarily or inalterably assigned by God from conception, but rather can be part of a person's own process of discovering who they are. Where such self-discovery leads to a person to conclude they are trans, non-binary, or any other identity that departs from the sex they were assigned at birth, they are not deviating from God's plan. They are uncovering their authentic self as God has created them.

The result of this process is part of God's image. Those who refuse to accept it are not cleaving to God's image, they are rejecting it.

God's process of creation is not, in my understanding of Judaism, a set-and-forget sort of deal. It is not a matter of passively being puppeteered by a divine hand. It something we do together -- we are partners in creation. To deny the results of that partnership is, for me, a denial of God's plan and practice just as much as it is for adherents of other religious views who adhere to a more static and calcified notion of the role of the divine.

And so for me, and I suspect for many Jews, the religious freedom obligation pushes in the other direction. Many conservative states have, or are considering, laws which require (at least in certain contexts) non-recognition of trans identity. For Jews (and others) who share my religious precepts, these laws would force me to deny -- to bear false witness to -- a key attribute of how God created some of my peers. I do not believe -- and this is a deep, fundamental commitment -- that God's "image" of trans persons was for them to be locked in a body or sex or gender identity that clearly is not authentically theirs. When they find their full self, they are equally finding God's image of themselves.

Consistent with my lengthily expressed feelings on the subject, I suspect that what's good for the goose will not be good for the gander. Despite the clear parallel, liberal Jews who assert religious liberty rights to be exempted from laws seeking to enforce by state mandate a transphobic agenda will not meet with the same success enjoyed by their Christian peers.

Nonetheless, there is value in promoting this sort of framework, and in unashamedly asserting Jewish independence from hegemonic conservative Christian notions of true religiosity. It is not woven into "religion" that God's image requires rejection of trans individuals' full selves. That is a choice, an interpretation of some religions or of some who call themselves religious. Other religions, other religious persons, have a different interpretation of how to respect and dignify the facet of God that is in every one of us.