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.

Thomas and Alito: The Anti-Gorsuchs on Tribal Rights

In the wake of today's blockbuster decision in Haaland v. Brackeen (upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act against constitutional challenge), and somewhat-less blockbuster decision in Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Coughlin (holding that tribal sovereign immunity is abrogated by the bankruptcy code), Josh Blackman observes that Justice Gorsuch appears to have ruled in favor of tribal parties in every case he's heard while on the Supreme Court. There's one case on that list that is arguably a bit dicey -- Yellen v. Confederated Tribes of Chehalis Reservation -- but by and large Justice Gorsuch's strong affinity for Indian tribes and tribal rights is very well-known.

Blackman thus asks whether Gorsuch has "ever written an opinion that ruled against an Indian Tribe or Member?" It's an interesting question. But reading Blackman's list, I noticed that in every case where Gorsuch ruled in favor of tribes, Justices Alito and Thomas were on the opposing side. He even recognizes that Gorsuch "is consistently on the other side of Justices Thomas and Alito" on these issues. Gorsuch has never written a unanimous opinion on a tribal rights question because in every case (at least) Thomas and Alito have voted against the tribes. Just as Gorsuch has apparently always voted on the side of tribal interests, it appears that, at least during Justice Gorsuch's tenure on the Court, Thomas and Alito have never voted in favor of tribal interests.

This is a striking streak -- maybe even more so than Gorsuch's 1.000 batting average. Obviously, Alito and Thomas don't have any general negative view towards Gorsuch's jurisprudential outlook -- they're aligned most of the time. And, whether you agree with Gorsuch or not, it's hard to gainsay that he is the foremost subject-matter expert on Indian law on the Supreme Court. So it's surprising that Alito and Thomas have never been willing to sign on to one of his opinions. When I was on the Eighth Circuit, my Judge (the late Diana E. Murphy) was generally recognized as one of the court's Indian law specialists, and so would typically get some amount of deference from her fellow judges on those questions -- not always, and not blindly, but it was there. Yet despite general ideological concurrence, and despite specific reasons to know that Gorsuch is the Supreme Court's Indian law specialist, Alito and Thomas have nonetheless been as implacable foes of tribal rights as Gorsuch has been a friend.

So again, asking whether Gorsuch has "ever written an opinion that ruled against an Indian Tribe or Member" is an interesting question. But still, I think there's also a corollary question to Blackman's. "When is the last time (if ever?) that Alito or Thomas have written an opinion ruling for an Indian Tribe or Member?" Thomas and Alito have been on the Court longer than Gorsuch has, so their record stretches back further than his tenure. But if we wonder as to why Gorsuch is so friendly to tribes and tribal interests, we perhaps should be equally curious as to why Thomas and Alito are so hostile to them.

Happy Blog Birthday!

Happy blog birthday! The Debate Link turns a ripe old 19 today! And this year is the cross-over year -- as of now, I have been blogging on this site for the majority of my life. What a thought.

Loose Cannon

Judge Aileen Cannon has been assigned to oversee the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump.

I've seen enough high-profile political cases to be familiar with a very specific script that gets written about the judge assigned to the case. Pretty much without fail, you'll get a passage that reads something like the following:

Judge Smith is a veteran judge who ascended to the bench after fifteen years in the U.S. Attorney's office. He has a reputation for being no-nonsense and demanding a tight ship at trial that includes rigorous questioning of attorneys on both sides.

"He doesn't tolerate a lot of guff," said one attorney who had practiced before him for many years. "You won't agree with all of his rulings, but he's universally respected."

This template is so common I've begun to wonder if it's reflex (not every judge can be "no-nonsense"!). Which makes it all the more striking that nobody -- nobody -- is writing lines like this about Judge Cannon. They weren't writing them even before she went 100% YOLO in trying to block the Mar-a-Lago investigation; they certainly aren't writing them now.

Since the news broke, I heard folks suggest that Cannon was only assigned to the preliminary aspects of the case, which appears untrue. Then I heard other folks assert that Cannon likely will be forced to recuse herself from the case. And honestly, I'm dubious about that too. 

To be clear: Judge Cannon absolutely should recuse. Her conduct in the Mar-a-Lago case suggests that she's so completely in the tank for Trump that there's no possibility that she'll be perceived as impartial. But if she was the sort of person who could be shamed into recusing just because it's the right thing to do, it wouldn't be as much of a problem if she didn't recuse.

The fact is our judicial system is not well-equipped to handle a problem like Cannon. The problem is not that she was nominated by Trump -- two of the three 11th Circuit judges who bench-slapped her Mar-a-Lago catastrophe into oblivion were Trump appointees. The problem is that Cannon, specifically, is a complete hack who's decided that her job as federal judge is to be Donald Trump's offensive line.

For very good reason, our judicial system starts with a healthy presumption of impartiality on the part of its judges. We don't let either party force out a judge just because they don't like their lean. Recusals are easiest to justify when the judge has a direct financial stake in a given controversy, or when they're close personal friends or associates with a party. These sorts of connections give everyone a face-saving option -- the problem isn't actual bias, but the appearance thereof; one could be as pure as driven snow and still agree that it is a sound policy to not preside over a case where your best buddy is being charged with a serious crime.

Unfortunately, other than the fact of her nomination Judge Cannon doesn't have those concrete ties to any party here, which means that there's no hiding the actual issue on the table. Judge Cannon needs to recuse because Judge Cannon is, in relevant respects, incompetent. I say incompetent not to suggest that her mistakes stem from ignorance rather than malice; rather, an important part of Judge Cannon's job is to administer the law fairly and impartially, and she has demonstrated herself to lack competency in that dimension of the judicial role. Hence, she cannot be trusted and is not qualified to preside over a trial like this one, with a defendant for whom she's already shown herself to be incapable of adjudicating impartially.

But once again, if Judge Cannon was the sort of person capable of recognizing that shortcoming, she likely wouldn't have it. There's no clear face-saving out where one can disclaim actual bias but recuse for prudence's sake, and there's no universe in which Judge Cannon agrees "I was so egregiously wrong in the Mar-a-Lago case that one can't help but infer I was biased." Which means it is up to an appellate court to make that determination for her, and needless to say, that's a very awkward proposition which appellate courts are going to be loathe to undertake. 

Appellate courts are not prone to saying "this case must be stripped from this district court judge because this judge is in general too biased to handle it." The closest one sees to that sort of ruling is when a case is stripped from a lower judge after repeated obstinance in refusing to implement appellate orders, and that is exceedingly rare. Even assuming that the Mar-a-Lago reversal should count towards such a showing in the criminal case, the problem with Judge Cannon's ruling there wasn't really that of repeated lower court disobedience of superior court mandates. It instead stands out because of Judge Cannon's absolute, rancid lawlessness. But again, our system is not well-built to account for the possibility that an Article III judge might as a general matter -- not due to financial stakes or personal connections, but purely as a matter of ideology -- be congenitally incapable of ruling in accordance with the law.

It's a similar problem to the situation with those single-division Texas judges. The thing everybody knows and everybody is thinking -- that the problem is that these judges are utterly and completely in the ideological tank such that law simply doesn't matter for them anymore -- can't be uttered out loud, at least not in a formal proceeding. On the outside, everyone knows that's the problem. But in a filing, you can't come out and say "judge, our basis for recusal is that you're a lawless hack." And since that is, at the end of the day, the problem, whatever alternative basis you try to hang your hat on will ultimately be a poor fit that probably won't end up justifying recusal. The structure of Article III life tenure means that placing a hack like Cannon on the federal bench is an irreversible mistake.

So count me skeptical that Judge Cannon will recuse herself, and count me skeptical that any superior court will force her recusal, at least immediately. Unfortunately, the reality is we're likely stuck with Judge Cannon and whatever hijinks she comes up with to justify torpedoing this case -- at least for the foreseeable future.

How To Train Your Writer

Right now, on a purely technical/stylistic level, ChatGPT is an okay writer.

It's not great. But it's not bad, either. It's better (and again, we're talking purely technical here -- leaving aside factual hallucinations and the like) than some of my students, and I teach at a law school. Of course, even when I taught undergraduates I was inordinately concerned that many of my students seemingly never learned and never were taught how to write. So there has always been a cadre of students who are very smart and diligent, but just didn't really have writing in their toolkit.  And I'd say ChatGPT has now exceeded their level.

The thing that worries me most about ChatGPT, though, isn't that it's better than some of my law students. It's that it will always be better than essentially every middle schooler.

Learning to write is a process. Repetition is an important part of that process (this blog was a great asset to my writing just because it meant I was writing essentially every day for years). But part of that process is writing repeatedly even when one is not good at writing. Writing a bunch of objectively mediocre essays in middle school is how you learn to write better ones in high school and even better ones in college.

ChatGPT is going to short-circuit that scaffolding. It is one thing to say that an excellent writer in, say, high school, can still outperform ChatGPT. But how will that kid become excellent if, in the years leading up to that, they're always going to underperform a bot that could do all their homework in 35 seconds? The pressure to kick that work over to the bot will be irresistible, and we're already learning that it's difficult-to-impossible to catch. How can we get middle schoolers to spend time being bad writers when they can instantly access tools that are better?

There might be workarounds. I've heard suggestions of reverting to long-hand essay writing and more in-class assignments. There might be ways to leverage ChatGPT as a comparator -- have them write their own essay, then compare it to a AI-generated one and play spot-the-difference. I think frankly that we might also be wise to abolish grading, at least in lower-level writing oriented classes, to take away that temptation to use the bot. I don't care how conscientious you are, there aren't a lot of 14 year olds who can stand putting in hours trying to actually do their homework and then getting blown out of the water by little Cameron who popped the prompt into an LLM and 45 seconds later is back to playing Overwatch. And again, that's going to be the reality, because ChatGPT's output just is better than anything one can reasonably expect a young writer to produce.

In many ways, large language models are like any mechanism of mass production. They displace older artisans, not because their product is better -- it isn't, it's objectively worse -- but on sheer volume and accessibility. The art is worse, but it's available to the masses on the cheap.

And like with mass production, this isn't necessarily a bad thing even though it's disruptive. It's fine that many people now can, in effect, be "okay writers" essentially for free. It's like mass-produced clothing -- yes, most people's t-shirts are of lower-quality than a bespoke Italian suit, but that's okay because now most people can afford a bunch of t-shirts that are of acceptable quality (albeit far less good than a bespoke Italian suit). The alternative was never "everyone gets an entire wardrobe of bespoke Italian suits", it was "a couple of people enjoy the benefits of intense luxury and most people get scraps." Likewise, I'm not so naive as to think that most people in absence of ChatGPT would have become great writers. So this is a net benefit -- it brings acceptable-level writing to the masses.

If that was all that happened -- the big middle gets expanded access to cheap, okay writing, with "artisanal" great writing remaining costly and being reserved for the "elite" -- it might not be that bad. But the question is whether this process will inevitably short-circuit the development of great writers. You have to pass through a long period of being a crummy writer before you become a good or great writer. Who is still going to do that when adequacy is so easily at hand?

I'm not tempted to use ChatGPT because even though my writing takes longer, I'm confident that at the end my work product will be better. But that's only true because I spent a long time writing terribly. Luckily for me, I didn't have an alternative. Kids these days? They absolutely have an alternative. It's going to be very hard to get them to pass that up.