If you’re an American Jew who enjoys dark humor about antisemitism – in other words, if you’re an American Jew – you’re probably familiar with the game “Explain How This is Antisemitic” (sometimes shortened to “Six Degrees of Kristelnacht.”)

For many years, the art of the game was ambiguity: We’re mostly joking — but maybe not totally joking? — but yes actually joking and that question was a joke that you fell for — ooh, actually not totally joking especially since you’re not Jewish and you don’t understand that antisemitism isn’t just a complete joke how dare you — ha ha no we’re actually joking this is why we have a better sense of humor than you.

Today, the game has gotten more complicated, but let’s give it a go. Here are three stories ripped from the headlines. Which one involves antisemitism?

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1. The Trump administration indicts fifteen Minnesota labor union activists for their role in organizing opposition to ICE and Border Patrol invasion of their communities.

2. The latest media-generated DSA “scandal” is that a leading New York City organizer lives in a house paid for by his parents.

3. The Justice Department falsified the results of its investigation to declare that Columbia and Brown created unsafe environments for Jewish students and faculty.

The answer is below this picture of the Broad City’s Ilana and Abby gaily shopping outside the fictional “Holocaust Museum”.

Answer: All of the Above.

Duh, obviously. In the spirit of the game, I’m now going to abruptly pivot into a more serious essay. Because I truly do see antisemitism in all these stories, not necessarily explicit anti-Jewish bigotry but age old paranoid tropes that have returned with a vengeance.

Let’s start in Minneapolis, where the feds want revenge for the popular resistance to ICE that has helped Trump’s deportations from a political strength to a weakness. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Trump’s frighteningly well-funded and unregulated private police force, dug through the finances of local unions and planted undercover agents and informants at union meetings and Signal chats is a search for illicit financing of “domestic terrorism”. They called their investigation Operation Puppet Master. As Shane Burley notes in Jacobin, HSI couldn’t find evidence of activity any different from that taken by countless others in Minnesota and around the country: “such as planning for demonstrations, organizing their neighbors using encrypted chat threads, and blockading roads in a desperate effort to slow the deportation machine.”

But the indictments show the DOJ’s determination to find people to label as “puppet masters”, master manipulators able to fool ordinary folk into identifying with their immigrant neighbors more than the masked and ominously tattooed government “warriors” flying in from around the country to patrol formerly quiet streets. The more widespread the popular opposition to an invasion of ICE and Border Patrol goons, the more it only shows how powerful these string pullers must be – perhaps people with deep ties to the masters of media and finance and two thousand years of experience practicing their devious arts.

Now let’s go to New York City, where the media has been having a devil of a time trying to make a dent in the surging popularity of our happy anti-Zionist socialist mayor. I mean, this is just sad:

Unwilling to concede defeat and let this tax-the-rich-terrorist win, conservative and centrist journalists are now turning their sites onto local rank and file DSA members, most recently the co-chair of the New York City chapter who has been scandalously revealed to come from an upper middle class background. The attacks, stupid as they are, are about more than embarrassing DSA. They imply that there’s something abnormal about opposing sky-high rents and crumbling public infrastructure, that these socialists who claim to be ordinary New Yorkers aren’t really one of us.

The “outside agitator” trope was made infamous in the Jim Crow south as a way to blame northern communists for stirring up the supposedly docile local Black population; it’s been revived in recent years by (largely Democratic) officials to try to isolate Black Lives Matter protests and Palestine encampments. Its dual effect is to cast suspicion on activists and to assert that “real” community members are fine with the status quo.

Unlike 1950’s southern sheriffs, most “outside agitator” charges today don’t explicitly name Jews (although there are exceptions!) But the silly notion that political protest only happens because of outsiders seeking to foment division for their own twisted ends can only find purchase because it draws on deep histories of what Richard Seymour calls racialized anticommunism – viewing the left as an alien force, with the alien race usually being Jews.

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In other words, the left is coded as Jewish, even when the left is simultaneously being called antisemitic for standing with Palestinians. Which brings us to our final headline, whistleblower reports that the Trump administration shamelessly distorted the findings of its own investigations into antisemitism on college campuses in order to force schools into settlements that ceded unprecedented controls over admissions, academics, and campus life. Here’s what that looked like at Brown:

The whistleblower said that instead of substantiating a violation at Brown, “witnesses, including a Jewish student leader, multiple rabbis, and faculty member [sic] from the medical school, described Brown’s consistent, proactive responses to any allegations of antisemitism.” But Brown and Columbia settled with the Trump administration anyway last year… Brown committed to adopt the Trump administration’s definitions of male and female and ban its doctors from prescribing puberty blockers to minors, among other provisions.

No one paying attention will find anything surprising in this mendacity. Many will once again note how many Jewish students and faculty were involved in Palestine solidarity work in order to call out the irony, or hypocrisy, of the protests being slandered as antisemitic. Fewer will discern the actual antisemitism lurking within the slander.

It’s something the liberal historian of fascism Timothy Snyder recognized in the moment. Snyder wasn’t the only person to make the point that “when the government claims that it’s enacting all kinds of policies because of antisemitism… they’re trying to… say or to imply that the Jews are in charge.” But he also found compelling significance in Columbia being the primary target of the witchhunt:

But why was Columbia put first? It is in New York. More than twenty percent of its undergraduate students are Jewish…My guess is that Columbia was selected as the symbolic first target less because of the presence of antisemitism than because of the presence of Jews.

And I think that this is something that actual American antisemites will immediately have grasped. The city of New York is coded for antisemites as Jewish. The antisemites in America, seeing Columbia and New York punished, will see Jews being punished -- and they will be pleased by this. The same goes for universities as a whole. Universities are often understood by antisemites to be Jewish. The attempt to bring universities to heel will be met by antisemites with approval.

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Like many other secular left-leaning American Jews, I’ve long found antisemitism to be more of a rich vein of sarcasm than a subject for serious concern. Younger Danny would likely scoff at my current interest as my sad surrender to becoming a middle aged Jew – with the growing unruliness of my bushy eyebrows helping his case immeasurably.

So let me assure both my former self and current readers that I’m not succumbing to irrational generational trauma but engaging with the world as it is evolving. Here’s what I said at a presentation on antisemitism at last year’s Socialism conference:

If, over the last 10 years, you’ve struggled to understand the widespread appeal of hateful, stupid, crazy, racist leaders, chances are you don’t see the antisemitic, conspiracist wavelength through which they are sending out signals.

If you’ve been continually surprised and disoriented by the viral spread and appeal of Pizza Gate, QAnon, anti-vaxers, and other seemingly nonsensical conspiracy theories and paranoid politics, chances are you are underestimating the role of antisemitism in providing organization and theory to the forces that propagate them.

On the flip side: if you have been surprised at the sudden “return” of antisemitism as a major force in American life, chances are you’ve also been surprised at how seamlessly white supremacists and fascists have been able to assume control of the American state, and how easily liberal institutions have caved in to them.

What many of us, including until recently myself, don’t understand about antisemitism is that, while is is of course a danger to Jews, because it is an organizing principle for facism, it is more immediately a threat to facism’s first targets: Palestinians, trans people, migrants, and everyone on the left.

Some readers might roll their eyes at what they perceive is my attempt to inject Jewish victimhood into current global shitstorm. That reaction is a symptom of both the instinctive identity-based politics that most current leftists were raised on and how Zionism and American Jewish assimilation have understandably dulled the Left’s formerly rich understanding of what lies at the heart of antisemitism, which is not the oppression of Jews but an ideology of a world controlled by hidden Jewish power. (This is entirely different from Zionism’s understanding of antisemitism, which strings together every anti-Jewish moment in history into a narrative of permanent and unchanging Jew-hatred, justifying first a Jewish nation-state and then that state’s right to do anything in order to maintain its existence.)

Antisemitism is a two-hundred year old reaction to the problems of modernity, capitalism, and the nation-state, carefully curated from the worst aspects of two thousand years of Christianity. Many of the eye-rollers will be other Jewish lefties who mistakenly see all discussions of antisemitism as ceding ground to a Zionist narrative and end up depriving the rest of the left of our own hard-earned wisdom. If the Jewish left doesn’t expose and explain antisemitism as an evolving and growing force, we’re doing our comrades a disservice.

Our responsibility is not only to refute the lies that Zionism is Judaism and that Palestinian freedom is an antisemitic aspiration.We have to do that AND use our antisemitism Spidey Sense to show our comrades how right wing obsessions with secret Jewish control are helping them cohere a powerful movement around batshit ideas. Talking about antisemitism isn’t about “centering” Jewish suffering but adding our piece to the puzzle of who our enemies are and how they think.

All this is to say, don’t let Zionism stop you from playing Spot the Antisemitism. It’s a serious project — but maybe not totally serious? — that’s also good clean antifascist fun.

I went to a New York Liberty game in the first year of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Like the team’s games today, the atmosphere was way more fun than most American pro sporting events. But unlike current WNBA crowds, many fans seemed less locked into the game than just happy that it was happening. The early WNBA was a bit of a novelty, and it would take time for the game to develop a strong enough fanbase to thrive in a saturated American sports landscape.

(Actually, the biggest difference was that back then the Liberty didn’t have Ellie the Elephant, the greatest mascot ever to hit a city so mascot-deprived that we previously celebrated a guy with a baseball for a head called“Mr. Met”.)

One obstacle facing the league was being taken seriously by male fans and media members, whose most common form of disrespect was to muse about how players in this new league would fare against male players. The few times the WNBA was discussed on sports radio or ESPN, the conversation invariably veered into how the current best team or player would fare against this or that college or men’s squad.

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Writing those opening paragraphs makes me feel really old, because the WNBA is a completely different league today. Nationally televised regular season games average over a million viewers, with the biggest increase among young women and Black women. Perhaps surprisingly, 57 percent of the league’s viewers are male, and viewership among boys under 18 has more than doubled in the last four years. Today’s arenas are filled with multiple generations of fans who still bring the happy vibes but also diehard knowledge of player tendencies. I can’t remember the last time I heard a grumpy pundit or ex-jock belittle the WNBA with a dumb crack about how they’d do against men.

Until recently that is, when Enis Kanter Freedom (he added the last name in 2021) and Royce White, former NBA players now sadly addicted to the fumes of right wing microcelebrity, declared themselves to be trans women who wanted to enter the WNBA draft. Their publicity stunt had all the sophistication of the 8th grade class clown, making it ideal “news” content for a Fox News ecosystem increasingly desperate for counter-programming to compete with the calamitous reality of the second Trump administration.

On Sunday, Kanter attended a Chicago Sky game against the visiting Indian Fever, who have attracted a traveling road show of bigots embracing the anti-trans comments of role player Sophie Cunningham. At the game, Kanter wore a provocative t-shirt and eventually got into an altercation with Sky point guard Natasha Cloud — a better player than Cunningham and Kanter combined who doesn’t stay silent in the face of injustice — leading to his removal from the arena.

I can’t recall a current or former professional athlete ever disrespecting a game in another league like this. (The only scenario I could imagine involves late 90s Dennis Rodman on a really bad mental health day.) But as the WNBA has grown in popularity, especially with the arrival of transformative young talents like Olivia Miles and Cunningham’s Indiana teammate Caitlin Clark, conservatives have tried to hijack attention by imposing culture wars – first by manufacturing controversy over the white Clark getting hard fouls from Black opponents, and now by using Cunningham as an excuse to turn the Fever season into a national tour of (very small) hate rallies.

It’s a cruel attack on trans people inside and outside of sports, but it’s also an attempt to smother the WNBA in the toxicity of a culture war waged by people who couldn’t care less about women’s hoops. As this very funny video makes clear, the people showing up to arenas to “defend” women know nothing about the game, and don’t care about it – in stark contrast to the many knowledgeable trans and queer fans for whom the league “feels like a lifeline.”

As the W approaches its 30 year anniversary, it is becoming part of the sports fabric for increasing numbers of fans of all races, genders, and sexualities. But to the bigots, a women’s basketball league is still a novelty, not for celebration but trolling. These people are so out of touch, they think the WNBA is still a minor league for their juvenile pranks, and that women playing basketball is a dangerous new experiment with unknown health consequences.

Kanter’s antics, like J.K. Rowling using her billionaire platform to vilify a cis female boxer who seems too masculine for Rowling’s tastes, shows the deep misogyny of an anti-trans movement that poses as defenders of women when it’s convenient but ultimately is driven by a desire to police all violations of traditional gender norms.

I’m not surprised that there’s a WNBA player who has bought into their narrative. We live in a country where one party relentlessly demonizes trans people and the other can’t decide whether or not to join them. But Sophie Cunningham is also a serious athlete, and I wonder what she makes of seeing Enis Kanter mock her sport and harass her peer (and former friend).

Maybe, just maybe, she has a little more going for her than a couple of mediocre NBA has-beens, enough to help her break free of the bigots’ embrace and question whether the people who keep making a sideshow out of her sport actually care about the same things she does.

For years, the only people who have wanted to remember 2020 are those trying to rewrite its history. As a result it’s become common sense that we as a society OVER-reacted to a virus that has killed more Americans than every war put together. That we OVER-reacted to racist police violence during a year when tens of millions spontaneously erupted against years of brutality, and law enforcement responded with more brutality and deepening alliances with white supremecist militias.

The occasion for me to write this is obviously “Woke 1.0 was crazy”, AOC’s recent attempt to articulate a pivot for socialist politicians away from abolitionist demands that seem woefully ultra-left after five years of backlash. Like all things said by AOC, the line has been decontextualized and sensationalized by the left, right, and center, but she said it and now it’s the terms of debate about 2020.

To help us actually remember that year, I’ve creed a timeline to give some context for tweets that might seem extreme today, and to show the price we’ve paid as a society for our inability to sustain movements that could work towards the ideas expressed in those tweets.

You’re going to see that majorities and strong minorities of Americans were open to and supported radical change. And you’re going to see right wing quotes, and more importantly actions, far more outrageous than anything expressed by Francesca Hong – things that nobody is being asked about or held accountable for today. That’s because ideas that were sociopathic six years ago – things like “diseases should kill people as quickly as possible to cull the populace of unhealthy elements” and “public executions of unarmed people are normal forms of law enforcement” – are now governing policies.

The sociopaths won, but the world they created absolutely sucks, and now the left is back. Let’s not forget how we got here.

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January 20

• The CDC reports the first confirmed case of COVID 19 in the U.S.

February 22

• Bernie Sanders wins the Nevada caucus, largely based on his support from Latino voters.

  • He is the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

February 29

• Joe Biden wins the South Carolina primary.

  • Although this victory is widely expected, in the coming week most other candidates drop out and endorse Biden, paving the way for his nomination

  • With a nominee pledging a return to the pre-Trump status quo, Democrats will be peripheral to the radical protests to come.

March 11

• COVID cases rise to 118,000 worldwide, with over 4,000 deaths.

• The WHO declares a pandemic.

March 13

• Louisville police murder Breonna Taylor, an African American emergency room technician, while she lay in bed. They were conducting a no-knock drug raid for which she was not a suspect.

March 16

• President Trump announces COVID guidelines that include avoiding large social gatherings and the closure of schools, gyms, bars, and restaurants in places where transmission has already occurred.

  • Within days, he is trying to undermine his own guidelines because they are unpopular with his supporters.

• New York City, the first US center of the pandemic, finally closes its schools, and only when forced to act under the threat of a teacher sickout.

  • Former CDC head Thomas R. Frieden estimates that the early death toll could have been cut in half had the city taken preventative measures sooner.

March 24

• Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick tells Fox News that says many elderly people are willing to risk death to keep businesses open and “keeping the America that Americans love.”

March 28

• Nurses at Jacobi Hospital, a public hospital in the Bronx serving the low income Black and Latino community, hold the first protest of the pandemic to demand more masks and personal protective equipment.

April 7

• The Chicago Tribune reports that African Americans, who make up 30% of the city’s population, have accounted for 68% of COVID deaths.

April 14:

• Dr. Oz says schools should reopen because it “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.”

  • 3 percent of the 1.2 million Americans who have now died from COVID is 36,000 – roughly the number of US soldiers who died in the Korean War.

April 20

• Trump invokes the Defense Production Act to order meatpacking plants to stay open.

  • 423 meatpacking workers would die of COVID in 2020.

  • Many workers infected on the job are denied workers comp.

  • Almost all meatpacking workers are Black or Latino.

April 30

• Armed protesters storm Michigan state capital to protest COVID restrictions from governor Gretchen Whitmer.

  • Trump issues his support for the action by tweeting LIBERATE MICHIGAN!

  • Among the heavily armed protesters are members of the Wolverine Militia, who later that year will arrested in a plot to kidnap the governor.

May 5

• In New York City, Black people make up 68 percent of NYPD arrests for violating social distancing, Latino people 24 percent, and white people 7 percent.

May 28

• The recorded death toll from COVID-19 in the U.S. surpasses 100,000.

May 25

• George Floyd is killed by four Minneapolis cops after allegedly using a fake $20 bill. Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed, lying face-down, and gasping “I can’t breathe.”

  • Two other cops assisted Chauvin and the fourth officer prevented bystanders from intervening.

May 28

• The Minneapolis Third Precinct police station is torched.

  • A Monmouth poll shows 54% of Americans think the arson is “justified.”

June 6

• Half a million Americans attend Black Lives Matter protests in over 500 locations.

  • Polls report that between 15 and 28 million people participated in protests over the past week, making it possibly the largest protests in US history.

June 8

• Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi wear kente cloth in Congress, creating a symbol of Democrats’ awkward attempts to show symbolic support for BLM.

• A similar vibe comes from the flood of PR statements and tweets from corporations eager to “stand with” Black Lives matter.

  • One example from Reebok: “We are not asking you to buy our shoes. We are asking you to walk in someone else’s.”

  • In the years of backlash to come, this corporate cringe will be invoked by some on the left as evidence of how easily the movement could be coopted; in the moment it’s evidence of how deeply the protests resonated across society.

June 28

• Zohran Mamdani, a candidate for New York State Assembly, tweets:

  • “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”

July 22

• According to a Gallup poll:

  • 58% of Americans believe “major changes” are needed in policing.

  • 56% support eliminating police unions.

  • 47% support shifting money from police to social programs.

    • Including 70% of Black Americans and 78% of Democrats.

  • 15% support abolishing the police, including:

    • 22% of Black Americans, 27% of Democrats, and 33% of people under 35.

August 25

• Kyle Rittenhouse travels from his home in Illinois to Kenosha Wisconsin to “defend private property” during protests against the police killing of Jacob Blake. He kills protester Joseph Rosenbaum in a confrontation and then kills Anthony Huber and wounds Gaige Grosskreutz as they try to apprehend him.

  • Shortly before the shootings, Kenosha police thanked Rittenhouse and other armed vigilante for their presence.

  • Kenosha police would later donate at least $5000 to the crowdfunding campaign for Rittenhouse’s legal defense.

August 29

• Michael Reinohl allegedly shoots Aaron Danielson during a pro-Trump convoy through the streets of Portland, Oregon.

  • Reinohl tells a journalist he was acting in self defense against the member of Patriot Prayer, a far right group with a documented history of close collaboration with Portland police.

September 3

• Reinohl is was murdered by US Marshalls in a manner reminiscent of a death squad assassination.

  • Trump holds a triumphant press conference to declare, “We got him.”

September 22

• The reported death toll in the U.S from COVID-19 surpasses 200,000.

November 3

• Joe Biden wins the presidential election.

• 1,517 Americans die of COVID.

November 20

• Recently elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly, Francesca Hong tweets: “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx [sic] and women, so be it”

December 14

• The recorded death toll from COVID-19 in the U.S surpasses 300,000.

• Sandra Lindsay, a New York nurse, is the first American outside of clinical trials to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

December 31

• Over the course of 2020, it’s estimated that over 800 mutual aid groups have formed across the US to help communities weather the pandemic.

January 6, 2021

• “Stop the Steal” mobs storm the Capitol. The counterrevolution has begun.

A final thought. After AOC say “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” she offered some context:

“During Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton Window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had -- that were had in that time were quite fruitful… During lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

That’s a little better, but while focusing on economic issues has proven to be a winning electoral strategy for the left, let’s not forget that what radicalized people in 2020 — not just hyper-online activists but a near majority of the country — was not just mass unemployment but the shock of America’s deep evils being exposed to the light of day.

Now those evils have become our official politics. In response, many people are turning to socialist candidates who are, in AOC’s terms, willing to entertain different policies that can get us to a better place. Since 2020, a number of socialist politicians have followed AOC’s lead in winning upset victories, growing the audience for socialism and the membership of left organizations. In doing so, they are creating a new, necessary set of debates with about how the left can continue to grow inside a political system designed to turn insurgents into loyal oppositions.

As we have those debates, let’s be clear that the main problem we had in 2020 wasn’t radical rhetoric but insufficient power to make it a reality.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a brilliant dude, and an old friend. Khury and I have a tendency to have REALLY long conversations, so I turned our conversation into a two-part interview. Click here for Part 1, in which we discussed Khury’s analysis of Trump’s use of spectacle as a political weapon – and how that’s starting to backfire. In this part, we discuss what this analysis means for our tasks as progressives and organizers.

Revolution for Cowards: I want to bring up two other comparisons of images from the War on Terror and the Iraq War. First there’s Bush’s Mission Accomplished banner, which was just devastating for him politically. But Trump does that shit every day, making empty promises, and it’s just rendered meaningless, right?

Then there’s the torture pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib, which shocked people and truly discredited their project in the Middle East. Today, ICE would almost post those images as a brag – Israeli soldiers actually do. So the spectacle strategy on one hand is overwhelming, and on the other hand, it’s like numbing – it’s the old Steve Bannon line of flood the zone with shit. So just pointing out that they’re wrong means nothing; the task is to build alternate meaning, which is why the resistance in Minneapolis and other communities is so inspiring – it’s not just resistance but people creating alternate visions of living in community.

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Khury PS: If the ethos of the second Trump administration is I get what I want through coercive violence, the ethos of the first Trump administration was destabilizing notions of truth. It’s meant to leave one not only disoriented about what has actually happened, but in the realm of fantasy. Believing what SHOULD be true gets elevated in a way that is confusing but also really kind of enticing…

…thank God there isn’t an emerging technology that half of the economy is going into that just tells you that whatever you think is true. That would really be bad.

Khury PS: Right! Which is made by corporations that are run by people who are in or close to the philosophical, political, and economic circles of the White House. All of that is at play. And it’s being wielded by somebody who is a master of spectacle. One of the most important conversations I ever had was with a philosopher you may know named Fainan Lakha. During the first Trump administration we talked about the question of what it should mean that Trump is targeting the truth itself. This is when Trump really enshrined these notions of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And Fainon’s response was that “the truth is always partisan.”

This notion that there’s some objective truth that just has to be discovered is a notion of a kind of classical liberalism that’s rooted in the Enlightenment, and it’s limited. Yes, I believe that things actually happen, that there is truth. But the truth has to be campaigned for; it’s not sufficient to just point to its existence.

That gets to what you’re pointing to about the incredibly heartening response in this country, to the ICE crackdown. It’s not just that thousands of people all over this country have shown up for their neighbors. It is the kind of world-making that people are doing in the context of that. When people are interviewed in Minneapolis, people who haven’t necessarily been to a protest before and now find themselves mobilizing to confront the police – risking their lives, knowing that the police have just killed people, right? In these interviews, people are saying, All I know is that these people are my neighbors. You know, these are the people… you know, their kids go to school with my kids. And they belong here.

This is a different notion of belonging than not only what Trump is putting forward, but what has been the dominant notion of belonging that we get, from the political class. We learn this idea that Americans belong in the U.S, right? But then who gets to be an American? That’s been the negotiation for a long time–between different politicians, different political parties, different sections of capital: These are the ‘good immigrants’ that we want, because they’re hard working. But these are the ‘bad immigrants’ that don’t deserve to be here. Now a lot of people are saying, I don’t care about that, you know? These people have a right, these people are part of our community. They belong here, and I’m gonna defend that.

There’s a comparable thing in the way Mamdani talks about belonging. It’s quite brilliant, actually, the notion of belonging that he puts forward. Mamdani doesn’t talk about Americans, he talks about New Yorkers. And New Yorker is a much more expansive geography. Anybody can be a New Yorker, right? All you have to do is live in New York. We are talking about notions of belonging that have nothing to do with the nation-state, with its borders and discrimination. So there’s some political possibilities that are actually quite profound. When we think about left and liberatory projects, not just against the repression and the violence, not just in defense of people under attack, but campaigning for a truth in which everybody belongs. That feels pretty central.

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Similarly, there’s what’s happening around Palestine, when you get half of Democrats voting against funding Israel. With the Iran war, the politics of opposition feel more like it’s still kind of dominated by Trump’s spectacle, and then just a broad opposition to Trump spectacle, which is not necessarily about people in Iran. But it’s different with Palestine and opposition to Israel, which made its genocide in a spectacle, soething that’s unique in the history of genocides, right?

Khury PS: The daily practices of the Israeli state are a masterclass in the use and limits of spectacle, and that was true well before the Gaza Genocide, Much has been written, about, for example, the IDF’s Twitter feed, which for years has been trying to make a general case, but also trying to kind of, like, whip up and consolidate a particular base of people who are enthusiastic about Israeli violence.

And I think that we finally saw the limits and structural problems of that approach, like, in light of the Gaza genocide. Where you have a military that is so accustomed to impunity, to being able to do literally anything and not face any consequences for their violence. With that impunity comes a level of normalization of spectacle, so that you have IDF soldiers self-documenting their own war crimes. Not one or two, but many, as a general practice. That’s combined with what’s really sympathy and solidarity with Palestinians: Palestinians themselves in Gaza who have been able to document the genocide Israel is carrying out against them.

I think I’m thinking about your phrase, “campaigning for truth”.

Khury PS: Yeah, exactly! We look at these images coming from Palestinians in refugee camps that are being bombed, or coming from Palestinians in refugee camps that are just, This is what my day is like. Waking up in a refugee camp and making it through another day. There’s a way that the clarity and straightforwardness of those videos can be really deceptive, like it can seem like you’re just turning on a camera and hitting record. But there’s actually an incredible level of intention and agency to be able to depict and narrate a reality in a way that an audience can see and hear. And that is what so many Palestinians have done

And it has been precisely a campaign for truth. And then what’s really interesting is you have Israeli soldiers campaigning for their truth on social media: Hey guys, like, Watch me… whatever, like detonate explosives in this house or watch me go through the home of these Palestinians and kind of humiliate them by tearing through their personal belongings. Here are two campaigns for truth, you know, which one do you choose? And hearteningly. millions of people in this country – obviously, tens of millions around the world – but millions in this country have sided with Palestinians.

Many people in this country are making sense of violence against Palestinians and standing with Palestinians in that sort of… broader category of belonging. And that’s what’s so powerful about campaigns like the Deadly Exchange [and other Palestine solidarity] campaigns by Black Lives Matter activists. People have made these connections and said the same way that I am moved by the violence done against Black folks by police, I can also be moved by what Israel is doing to Palestinians.

Take the analyses that we have built around the notion that there should be no perfect victims, for example. It doesn’t matter if somebody had a criminal record before they were killed by the police or, lynched by some white supremacist. They deserve to live. Their lives matter. Palestinians can also belong to that same truth, right? Like, it doesn’t matter what Israelis say they did that they say justifies their being killed or being displaced or expelled. I reject that in favor of a world where we belong. Despite the dehumanization, I see their humanity.

That is the most hopeful and exciting thing that is animating so much of the sentiment in solidarity with Palestine. And you see glimpses of it when we talk about Iran, too. The media conversation tends to be toward the high price of gas and the incompetence with which the Trump administration is waging the war. And look, I don’t want to minimize the impact of affordability; that crisis is real. But the question of the humanity of people in Iran and Lebanon and Palestine really has to be at the center here, you know? The right of these folks to thrive and live without being bombed.

When Americans are asked about the bombing of this school, or even asked why are you against this war, a lot of people are saying the bombing of this girl’s school in Minab. It’s a big atrocity that really has moved a lot of people, because we can think about the schools we know, the children we know. Despite all of the dehumanization, despite the manufactured ignorance about Iran, {the fact that there’s] not much reporting in the U.S. about Iranian society, that going there is complicated for Americans, and we don’t get Iranian much film or television, that there’s so many ways that we are separated from Iran, unless you have a special particular connection to it.

Despite all of that, there are ways that I think a lot of people in this country can see Iranians belonging to the same world community as us, and that’s really powerful.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a brilliant dude, and an old friend. Early last year, he wrote about the new Trump administration’s use of spectacle as a political weapon. It was was of the most clarifying articles I read during those chaotic and disorienting months. More recently, he has described how that strategy is starting to backfire, and I wanted to talk to him to explore those ideas further, and bring his writing to the attention of my readers. Khury and I have a tendency to have REALLY long conversations, so I’ve turned this into a two-part interview and will publish the second part next week.

Revolution for Cowards: Early in this Trump administration, you wrote an article about their use of spectacle as a weapon, which I found really helpful in understanding what Trump was doing that was a continuation of previous administrations and what was truly different. Can you summarize your argument?

Khury Petersen-Smith: Trump has a particular mode that relies on spectacle. The big example is Trump’s approach to the U.S.-Mexico border. There has been continuity across presidential administrations in policy, from Bill Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper, which was the first iteration of building a barrier at the border, right through Obama, who deported more people than any previous U.S. president.

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So there’s a lot of continuity, yet I was struck by this thing Trump did in his first term, where there were caravans coming from Central America, with thousands of people seeking asylum, by and large. At one point, Trump actually ordered a bunch of the lanes closed at the massive border crossing at San Diego/Tijuana, which is one of the largest land border crossings in the world, where many people cross on a daily basis – because people work in San Diego and live in Tijuana, and vice versa. They closed these lanes so that there would be more traffic, it would be backed up, and there would be a visual of a frustrated, chaotic scene at the border. There were a number of these spectacular moments – including forces firing tear gas over the border at crowds of families, children and adults – all of which were about producing these images of chaos that justified a heavy-handed police response.

[In contrast] the Biden administration created this program to apply for asylum in Mexico via an app, which is a violation of international law and U.S. law; you’re actually supposed to be able to enter a country, including the United States, and claim asylum here. This was also a way of violating the law and keeping people out, but instead of a spectacular image of chaos, it was concealing – obscuring the reality of asylum seekers from the view of the U.S. public. So there’s a similar goal here, which is keeping people out of the country, but Trump had a much more spectacular mode to kind of pursue that goal.

A lefty can look at everything you’re saying and say See? They’re just two sides of the same coin. What Trump is doing is just more overt, but it’s the same thing happening. But there’s something different politically about reveling in somebody else’s suffering.

Khury Petersen-Smith: Respectfully, I think that those who argue that a Trump and a Biden are the same are missing the dynamic of what is happening. Donald Trump’s career has been based on two things: real estate and entertainment. We can have a whole other conversation about his real estate sensibilities. But let’s talk about entertainment, because he is a master of spectacle. He thinks a lot about optics and image, and he’s familiar, in his way, with narrative and archetypes that produce the kind of responses among audiences that he wants.

It was extremely important for me to read Guy DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle, a Marxist set of theses published in 1967 about the rise of a mass media culture, particularly visual media through television and cinema. He’s saying that spectacle, the use of the image by media controlled by the capitalist class, is actually a mode of class relations, another means of imposing exploitative class relations. That’s quite different than how we tend to talk about Trump, that he’s distracting us, this notion of bread and circus or sleight of hand, like, look over here while I’m actually doing this thing over there. To apply Debord to this Trump era, closing those lanes at the border, creating a manufactured crisis, is not a distraction. It’s a mode of imposing a new policy, which is a more restricted, fortified, and militarized border where U.S. forces exercise more violence.

I feel like there was an earlier version of this with the Bush administration in the years after 9/11. I’m thinking of Dick Cheney bragging that the US is going to “work on the dark side” – the openness about torture and rendition, not going through the UN – all this would be the new norm. In the same way, with the Iran war Trump seems to want to show that he can pull off a war without lifting a finger to galvanize support, like that in itself is part of the point. What parallels do you see in terms of spectacle between what the Bush administration did after September 11th and Trump today?

Khury Petersen-Smith: Spectacular use of violence has been a feature of the U.S. way of war for a long time. The most obvious example is the atomic bomb. Not only was the apocalyptic level of violence, there was also the visual imagery of it, and Truman’s triumphant address to the nation. There is no greater example of We will use the most destructive possible violence to get what we want. That moment is THE seminal example, particularly for the U.S. right wing, of how to advance U.S. power in the world. There’s a long kind of history of the right saying, We lost the Korean War, we lost the war in Vietnam because our hands were tied behind our back. Which is to say, we weren’t allowed to use nuclear weapons. So this is a deep feature of U.S. imperial violence.

The Bush administration post-911 war had a very calculated use of spectacle. When the first men were detained and brought to Guantanamo Bay, there were very carefully crafted images of marines parading these men in their orange jumpsuits with hoods over their heads, which visually communicated notions of American strength versus notions of Muslim weakness. And then those are the only images that we were ever allowed to see of Guantanamo Bay. It was like, that was it. That’s why I say calculated use of spectacle. Similarly, when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it was, in their words, Shock and Awe. And that was crafted to send a message to Iraqis, that the US will use overwhelming violence against you, and you should not even try to resist. But it was crafted to send a message to Americans as well. And so there were images on the front pages of U.S. newspapers of Baghdad being bombed. Which called to mind the images of the 1991 Gulf War, when the US was bombing Iraq, and the televised coverage that Americans saw was this spectacular imagery through the lens of night vision technology, TV screens glowing green, which was meant to send a message not only of U.S. military superiority, but technological superiority.

I mention these examples to say spectacular use of violence is not something that Trump invented. But now Trump wants to use it on a daily basis. He’s playing that card every day, you know: A whole civilization will end tonight. We’re gonna bomb the bridges. These wild threats, which are not just threats – in terms of bombing the bridges, he delivered on that, and they bombed lots of places all over Iran. If you’re using spectacular violence every day, it is absolutely devastating for the people being targeted, but it also doesn’t have the kind of intended effect that a more calculated use does. It is neither having Trump’s intended effect on Iran, or what he is trying to demonstrate and communicate to the US population.

The whole ethos of the Trump administration is this notion that If I yell loud enough, and I hit you hard enough that you will submit. And that’s not what happened. Instead of this war being a demonstration of U.S. power, it’s actually been a demonstration of Iranian power, because Iran now exercises control over the Strait of Hormuz. When you communicate in a very loud and visual way, and then it doesn’t work, it makes your failure that much more significant.

If you operate in the mode of spectacle, when you fail, you fail spectacularly.

Let’s connect that theme to immigration. Other than the DOGE attack on the government, Trump’s initial deportation strategy of having ICE and Border Patrol invade a number of Democrat-led cities was the most prominent example of Trump’s use of spectacle as a mode of rule. And acknowledging the tremendous destruction of people’s lives through deportations, detentions, and murders, it hasn’t succeeded for them politically. Anti-immigration was Trump’s most popular policy, but his polls on that issue have gone way down. So they’ve shifted from that policy to more quiet large-scale deportations. That shift is very dangerous and activists have to figure out how to respond, but for Trump politically isn’t this a real retreat?

Khury Petersen-Smith: We’re witnessing the limits of spectacular violence as a way to get what they want. Trump starts out by tapping into what is unfortunately a sort of broad and vague sentiment that there is a “problem” when it comes to immigration. That sentiment starts in the political class, but it has filtered into the population in general. These are not just U.S. questions, by the way, this is one of the key global political questions of our time, the notion that people have a right to migrate, and in particular refugees – people who are fleeing their homes. They have a legal and moral right to move and to live somewhere else, but there’s been a collapse in that right all around the world.

Trump made a calculation that there was enough frustration around immigration – or that if people weren’t frustrated, they wouldn’t care enough to oppose a crackdown on immigration. The other calculation was that there was a sufficient number of people in the U.S. who are as depraved, as cynical, and as enthusiastic about violence as he is. That informed the visual imagery of fascist propaganda, of troops fanning out in our cities, and [former Border Patrol commander Gregory] Bovino walking around in a fascist outfit.

That was a miscalculation. In fact, it ended up repulsing a lot of people. A lot of people who might not have been in the streets, went into the streets when they saw the violence of this crackdown. And even some MAGA supporters, when they saw some of the reality of this, questioned their support for Trump. The good news is we’re seeing limits of spectacle in the hands of Trump. Images he thought would secure support among his base and demoralize people outside of his base instead provoked and galvanized opposition and even peeled some people off his base.

The more complicated news is what DeBord would say. He cautioned that in a society where social relations are mediated through mass media, we’ll also attempt to contest them solely in images, rather than contest the relations themself. DeBord is making a critique that’s sympathetic to the working class: we didn’t choose this world, but it’s trying to relegate us to being spectators of the spectacle.

I feel the danger of that every day in a world not only of media but social media. There is a compulsion to make the post that will dunk on MAGA, but that may or may not be actually connected to advancing the fight. Or we can be compelled by activism that stays at the level of bearing witness to atrocity, so it becomes a question of who you follow on social media, rather than: what is our activist strategy.

My point isn’t to dismiss images in terms of their power to move people, and move them to action. In Palestine images of a child standing in front of a tank, or more recently the Freedom Flotilla setting sail, have moved many people into taking action to stop Israeli violence. The challenge is to move people into making that connection to taking those steps. I’m grateful to the people in our movement who know how to move people with imagery - the artists and professional communicators. Legendary musician David Byrne at his concerts is projecting videos of ICE agents chasing people in Minneapolis and failing. The image that ICE is trying to project is invincibility. This is showing they aren’t invincible actually, and that our people standing with immigrants outnumber them. That’s powerful imagery. Then it’s the role of organizers to take all that is kind of stirred up by engagement of images like that and give people a path into effective action.

Elon Musk’s official title at Tesla is Technoking. “I just did that as kind of, like, a joke,” he said a few years ago, “just to show that these titles don’t mean a lot.”

One of the themes of Quinn Slobodian’s and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed is that Elon’s jokes, unfailingly awful as they are, play a vital role in his business model. Technoking (as in “Techno King”) is a case in point. Far be it from me to defend our executive class, but when Musk says “CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title, general counsel...They don’t mean anything,” you get a sense of what it’s like to work for a guy who takes in pride in being able to distinguish between the little things (other people) and what’s really important (himself).

But what am I saying? You don’t need to have worked at Tesla – or SpaceX or Neuralink, or Twitter X – to experience being one of the Technoking’s subjects. You can be a Twitter user facing a barrage of bile from his blue check bots, a government employee fired by one of his DOGE child soldiers, or anyone being robbed of water and breathable air by one of his AI data centers.

Musk isn’t the only technoking; he is one of a handful of tech oligarchs rapidly remaking the world without virtually no external input. As their book title implies, Slobodian and Tarnoff aim to sketch what this new world system is based on, and what it might look like if we can’t stop them. They write in their introduction that, just as “Fordism” became a “shorthand for twentieth-century capitalism,” they hope “Muskism” can help us name whatever the hell our economic system is today: “The more useful question is not who is musk? But what is musk a symptom of?”

This is a great, important book, and I highly recommend it. But after reading it, I’m still stuck on who is musk? along with related questions such as why is he like this? and what in the holy hell is happening to him?

So with all due respect to the Slobodian’s and Tarnoff’s essential analysis, I’d like to retell sections of Muskism as the origin story of a comic book supervillain: Technoking. (Watch the recent Superman and you’ll see I’m not the first person to have this thought.) Consider it political economy fan fiction.

(Unless otherwise indicated with hyperlinks, all my information comes from Muskism – which you should read! – and direct quotes from the book are in italics.)

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Chapter 1: The Loneliness of Apartheid

Once upon a time, 1971 specifically, Elon was born in an evil land known as apartheid South Africa. His grandfather was a right wing Canadian kook who had moved his family across the world to join a country bucking mid-century decolonization and doubling down on open racism. But young Elon didn’t share this naked bigotry. He was part of South Africa’s Anglo elite, and looked down at the paranoid white supremacist Afrikaners – and resentful of how they had left the country isolated from the world.

As a boy in 1980s Pretoria, Musk was drawn to computers as a chance to escape his provincial confinement and be connected to a wider world. Faced with impending military conscription to fight his government’s brutal war against anti-colonial resistance in what would become Namibia, Elon chose to leave South Africa. “Spending two years suppressing black people didn’t seem to be a great use of time,” he would later say.

But the germs of apartheid society would stay in the young man’s bloodstream, making him different from many of his future peers. Economically, his instincts were honed by the very isolation he resented. As a pariah state, South Africa had to develop its own manufacturing and technology independently – a unique path during a period of international trade deals and global assembly lines. These instincts would lead Elon to buck outsourcing trends and build SpaceX and Tesla as vertically integrated companies, which has paid off handsomely in recent years.

Though often dismissed as an anachronism, South Africa was in some respects – like its partner state Israel – a precursor to our own time. Its model of militarized, modernizing isolation fits more comfortably in today’s world of export controls, trade, wars, rearmament, and reshoring.

And while young Elon may have scorned his native society’s obsession with anti-Blackness, its culture of dehumanized segregation marked him in ways that would reveal themselves in later decades:

One of the characteristics of South African life for white people was a life dependency on a vast and largely faceless class of laborers… Waiting at bus stops, in the long lines that you breeze past into government buildings or at border crossings. Floating above an in distinct, but chromatically marked caste of human beings was part of the patrimony of whiteness. To the white population, they were “non-player characters” (NPCs) , a concept for video games that would later furnish Musk with one of his favorite terms of abuse.

Chapter 2: Triumph in the Valley

Once he left South Africa, Musk came into his own, laying the foundations of both his business empire and iconic cultural status, the combination of which would make him a powerful and dangerous man.

In 1995, the US government gave private industry control of the internet infrastructure that had been publicly developed (in return for… nothing). The rest of the decade became a competition for who could attract the most venture capital with their promise of developing The Next Big Thing. Musk learned from his Silicon Valley peers how to combine coding with conning. He was a natural.

In the 1990s, the value of a startup lay not in current earnings but in imagined future profits. What set Musk apart wasn’t engineering skill or business acumen, but his unshakable belief in the future – and his talent for making others believe in it too.

This talent was especially notable given that Elon had a slightly different future in mind than many of his peers. Unlike his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Musk didn’t harbor libertarian fantasies; he had no qualms about his industry’s reliance on government-funded technology, government funding, and government contracts. His goal was never to break free from the state, but to control it.

The War on Terror gave him his first opportunity. After the dot-com crash of 2000, Musk started SpaceX and quickly won a contract to build the Pentagon a new generation of cheaper rockets to carry missiles. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to neoliberalize the Pentagon with more public-private partnerships; he gave SpaceX greater autonomy over production design than traditional firms like Lockheed Martin – in return for getting the job done at a fixed price and avoiding the notorious cost overruns of the old firms.

The result was unprecedented military power in private hands, as would be seen two decades later when Musk might have altered the course of the Russia-Ukraine war through his control of the hegemonic satellite network Starlink, a SpaceX subsidiary.

Musk… cut service in eastern Ukraine… crippling a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson… After the Polish foreign minister warned his country would be “forced to look for other suppliers” if Starlink was an “unreliable provider,” Musk shot back, “Be quiet, small man.” When a single individual owns the infrastructure, he doesn’t need to run a government to shape geopolitics.

Elon’s friends and rivals spent the 2000s discovering how to make the internet profitable through the creation of monopolistic platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. In creating SpaceX, and taking over electric car maker Tesla a few years later, Musk went in a different, more industrial, direction. But they shared the goal of amassing so much market share that their users, whether individual consumers or entire governments, would have to purchase “sovereignty as a service” . . .

Interlude: trippy dream sequence

sovereignty . . . a word always hovering around him, as a youth in South Africa, where national autonomy was key to survival when surrounded by a hostile continent and those damned global activists spreading boycotts like a woke mind virus… no wait, that comes later . . . sovereignty . . . what he and Zuckerberg and Bezos are seeking in their full control of platforms, so that they can institute a new world order when mankind is ruled not by the ignorant masses but the enlightened technocrats . . . hang on, that’s Elon’s grandfather talking back in the 1940s . . . this must be a ketamine flashback, or is it a flashforward . . . it’s getting worse, but the Technoking can’t stop . . . the K-hole is the only place where he can let go of all this . . . sovereignty, where he can escape his body and truly feel connected . . . Technoking is one with Grok one with the parties restoring Western civilization one with the memes . . .

Chapter 2 continued

. . . sovereignty as a service is a promise that can change dramatically for different customers, different political moments, different price points. The one constant is that each sale increases the sovereignty of the man now starting to climb the Forbes list.

Musk does not just sell cars, rockets, or satellites. He sells the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructure.

The launch of SpaceX was well-timed for the War on Terror, and Tesla was perfect for the backlash when the Iraq War turned into a quagmire. The Obama-era push for renewable energy was not only about climate change but also about the US gaining “energy independence” from the Middle East. For its part, Tesla’s vision of sovereignty aligned with both the Obama push for clean energy and the opposing right wing fears that a Black president augured the need to prepare for civilizational collapse.

Tesla sold the idea of electric autonomy: the notion that renewable energy can promote self-reliance. This idea can be scaled up or scaled down. Scaling up to the national level, electric autonomy means using EVs to secure national energy independence, freeing countries from dependence of foreign oil and the geopolitical entanglements that come with it. Scaling down to the personal level, it means using Tesla’s cars, solar panels, and energy storage systems to foster individual resilience against grid failures and natural disasters in an increasingly unstable world.

By the early 2010s, innovations in tar sands extraction created a North American fossil fuel boom and the clean tech moment was over. But Tesla and its owner were ready for the increasingly reactionary future, which became apparent when the world saw the design of the Cybertruck.

Chapter 3: Rise of the Technoking

We have arrived at the third act, the descent into monsterhood, when Elon disappears inside his ascending alter ego. Technoking. World’s richest man. Fascist puppet master. Excruciatingly unfunny poster. The young South African who didn’t support apartheid is now a middle aged American who promotes “white genocide” lies. The new age industrialist discovers that building stuff has less impact than creating memes. The guy who, love him or hate him, was undoubtedly smart, becomes a reply guy to some of the internet’s stupidest people.

There are two key moments in the process: first a surprising surrender of psychological sovereignty, then a frightened and angry attempt to take it back.

In the mid 2010s, Must started to become terminally online – through Twitter, of course. Barely active in the platform’s early years, he started tweeting about twice a day in 2015, leveling up to 60 daily tweets in 2024.

I can hear your letdown: Social media addiction? That’s the big catalyst? He became a worse person because he spent too much time online? That’s literally all of us.

Hang on, this is different, for two reasons. First, Elon was way more rich and powerful than you and me, making his contact with the toxic sludge of social media way more impactful and gross. But more importantly, you have to picture Twitter, and eventually AI, the way Musk does, as a “cybernetic collective” in which humanity is literally fusing with machines. (He’s not wrong, by the way).

Musk was different from the other tech oligarchs, who kept their distance from social media the way that drug lords know better than to get addicted to their own product. Elon eagerly ingested Twitter through every pore, because he recognized that it was giving him a new and unique form of power.

• 2018: Musk tweets a dumb 4/20 joke: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” – the company stock jumps 11%. Hmm.

• 2020: he tweets “stock price too high imo” and it drops 12%. Interesting.

• 2021: he adds “#bitcoin” to Twitter bio, sending its value up 20% within an hour.

This new power he was mastering was both awesome and irreverent. He could inflate his assets with a dumb tweet – the dumber the better, actually, both because of the lulz of winning capitalism with weed jokes and because of the alpha dominance of forcing big name journalists, politicians, and bankers to talk about 420 and Dogecoin.

This wasn’t just cynical manipulation. He was an avid and eager participant in the platform’s cyberspace. Three quarters of Musk’s Twitter posts were replies, often to random accounts.

When Tesla became the world’s most valuable car company, tech journalist Charlie Warzel called him a “human meme stock.” Musk, who once tweeted “I am become meme” (a play on Robert Oppenheimer’s “now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds” – itself a quote from the Bhagavad Gita ) would eagerly agree. He loved the toxic sludge and it loved him back, at a bitter cost.

The second moment in Elon’s transformation into TechnoKing comes in 2020, with his contemptible responses to two major events that he viewed as challenges to his sovereignty, one as a business owner the other as a father.

When his California Tesla plant was ordered to temporarily shut down to slow the spread of COVID, Musk bullied the government into allowing him to reopen. 450 cases (this was before the vaccine) would be reported from his factory that year. When his daughter came out as trans, he disowned her.

Faced with two developments beyond his control, a disease killing millions and a child discovering a different identity, Musk turned to conspiracy, bemoaning the spread of wrong ideas spreading through his beloved internet. In a year when millions were killed by a real virus, Musk began his obsession with what seems like a metaphorical one, but that he took literally, not as a biological virus but as a computer bug. In 2024 he declared that he considered his daughter to be dead, “killed by the woke mind virus.”

When Musk and Sam Altman started OpenAI, both men were driven by the questionable assumption that general artificial intelligence was inevitable, and the grandiose assumption that it was up to them to develop it first so that it would be a force for good. For Musk, the best way to prevent a bad, machine-overlord AI was to accelerate the fusion of humans with AI, which he saw as the “democratization of AI power.” As I’ve written elsewhere, this is all extremely weird (and laughable) to begin with. But as Elon transformed into Technoking, his AI obsessions became a chilling effort to prevent the wrong people from “infecting” the coding of our future cyborg species.

The fascism of the previous century viewed nations as organic bodies that needed to cleanse themselves of unhealthy germs like Jews, communists, and the disabled. Whether or not you think of Elon Musk as a fascist, he is spreading the very Nazi 2.0 conception that humanity in the era of social media and AI is one artificially augmented network, whose future is threatened by those trying to insert bad code like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.

It wasn’t just about lockdowns, dismay at being snubbed by President Biden, or personal grievances related to his family. Musk saw obstacles to a larger mission, boundary troubles in the smooth functioning of the interface between person and machine. Letting them propagate could threaten the entire enterprise. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped,” he told his biographer Walter Isaacson, “civilization will never become multiplantary.”

Cleansing the machine of the pathogenic memes that had reached such power in the street protests of 2020 meant first boosting what seemed like the only effective antibodies: the parties of the far right, which were proving adept at multiplying in the online ecosystem and mastering the memetic warfare in a way that impressed Musk with their efficacy.”

Like many racists, Technoking sees empathy as a Western weakness (a paradoxical claim that non-white people aren’t capable of empathy and that white liberals are dupes for having it.) Since our future AI masters are being trained on the language of humans today, it’s all the more important for Elon to have full control of the means of expression, by funding far-right parties around the world and buying Twitter to de-wokeify it. Today’s human propaganda is tomorrow’s AI training content.

The End(?)

We’ve arrived at the present moment, so my story is over – although Muskism ends with four possible scenarios for where this is all heading. I hope this encourages you to read the book, and I hope the authors don’t mind my recasting it as a monster tale, something they repeatedly emphasize is not their approach.

“Is insanity the best way to understand what happened to him?” they ask at the book’s midway point, their point being that the cyborg obsession comes not from Musk but Muskism, not “out of one man’s cyberpunk delusions, but out of a bipartisan consensus about where America needed to direct its brightest minds and deepest investments.”

My answer, however, is still yes. Insanity is the best way to understand what happened to Elon Musk — and Bezos and Andreesen and the broader ruling class consensus that Muskism describes. This collective flight from reason is therefore more societal than individual, of course, and our fight against it a political and collective one. But to build that kind of broad movement we can really use some familiar narrative tropes. The tale of Elon’s transformation into evil Technoking is one way to start making at least some sense out of so much senselessness.

Note to readers: I’ve been writing this piece on and off for a couple of years. It’s longer than my usual posts, and gets into some detail about shoplifting and the retail industry, but I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. If you like it, post it or send it to a friend! -Danny

Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item that costs $5.99, and navigate the emotional complications of feeling like both a suspected criminal and an entitled ass.

The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods. When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works.

Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.

It’s far from the most important way our lives have gotten worse, but it might be the most pointless – which makes it useful for understanding so much else about a moment in history defined by breathtaking self-sabotage.

What’s happened to going to the Walgreens or Target is a store-sized version of what’s happened to living in America. It’s the experience of being subject to the decisions of a ruling class that responds to every challenge with authoritarianism, greed, and the same levels of poise and wisdom as an inbred Pomeranian.

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People lost their damn minds in 2020

This story, like many others in the larger narrative of American derangement, begins with the panicked reactions to the summer of COVID and Black Lives Matter.

In the early years of this decade, retail chains announced the closure a number of urban store locations. This shouldn’t have been a surprise given that the pandemic had accelerated the shift to online shopping — and maybe CVS and Rite Aid had overreached by seemingly having stores on every other block.

But industry executives and right wing media favored a third explanation: stores were on the run from rampant crime. When Walgreens announced the closure of five stores in San Francisco, a company spokesperson blamed “organized retail crime,” helping to galvanize the recall of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and fueling a pro-policing backlash around the country.

You probably remember headlines about brazen smash-and-grabs at high end retail stores, and helpless urban business owners forced to close up shop in the face of widespread theft and perhaps civilizational collapse. What was happening, we were told, was not just a few incidents being endlessly passed around social media, or a temporary spasm of pent up pandemic aggression, but the work of dangerous new criminal syndicates.

Shoplifting no longer fits its traditional mold as a nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults. Nearly two-thirds of the retailers surveyed by the National Retail Federation said that violence associated with store thefts has risen, led by organized gangs that resell the goods they steal.

That’s from a 2022 New York Post article headlined “Shoplifting is soaring across the US – and will only get worse.” In fact it wasn’t, and it didn’t, but as most of us stayed home and doomscrolled, it certainly seemed to be.

As politically impactful as store closures were, the defining image of the shoplifting panic was the lockup of toothpaste and tampons behind a plexiglass prison. My friend Amy started referring to her local CVS as “shampoo jail.” We had entered the era of mascara incarceration, of detergent detention, of — and I promise this is the last one:

the ham hoosegow

Whatever you called it, plexiglass was suddenly everywhere. During an earnings call in 2023, a Rite Aid executive said that stores were “literally putting everything behind showcases to ensure the products are there for customers who want to buy it.”

But how many of us would still want to buy products we could no longer take to the checkout counter ourselves? Some industries can get away with steadily making the customer experience worse. Airlines and a certain search engine, for example, operate as a cartel and monopoly, respectively, which means there’s little we can do about how much more they suck each year. Retail stores, on the other hand, exist in a shadow of the Bezos Behemoth, which made their decision to degrade the in-store shopping experience a disaster.

In 2024, a retail customer survey found that almost half of customers “will turn to third-party retailers like Amazon when encountering locked items.” The report also noted that untold sales are lost when plexiglass prevents customers from impulsively buying other items they encounter: “Each locked display case potentially represents lost opportunities for spontaneous sales.”

Thanks to the new policy of making it harder and more aggravating to buy things, in-store sales at retail drug stores have taken a nosedive. In early 2025, Walgreens CEO Timothy Wentworth bluntly acknowledged the industry’s own-goal: “When you lock things up… you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively.”

Two months later, Walgreens was bought by a private equity firm after years of losses. Locking away the items it was trying sell was far from the only factor in the company’s decline, but it was widely seen as the suicidal final straw.

A vibes-driven approach to shoplifting data

Given how drastically locking up products impacted company bottom lines, you would think that this strategy must have been a response to a clear and obvious increase in theft. Incredibly, it’s not clear if there was any increase at all. Yes, we all know what we “saw” (on social media) in 2020 and 2021. But there are few accompanying statistics to back it up.

Journalist Amanda Mull, who wrote a great 2021 piece in the Atlantic that is unfortunately behind a paywall, recently explained the surprising lack of hard data on The Big Take podcast:

“There’s not a lot of good data available on theft rates. Often these numbers are released by industry lobby groups and people who are trying to demonstrate a phenomenon that they believe is happening from surveys that ask retail management how they feel about shoplifting, how they feel about certain types of product loss as a threat to their business. It is very squishy. They’re asking about perception instead of asking for proof.”

To understand what data does exist, we need to distinguish between theft and shrink, the industry term for all inventory loss.

As the above graph from the industry publication Retail Dive shows, only about a third of shrink comes from outside theft, and most of the rest comes from employee theft and products being lost or damaged in any number of ways. Now let’s look at the graph below, which indicates that total shrink has barely changed over the past decade.

If there was a major spike in shoplifting, employee theft and/or other damage or loss must have gone down just as significantly, a highly unlikely event at any time, much less the hectic pandemic period.

So if it wasn’t based on hard data, why did the serious grownups at the head of these giant companies decide that they had no choice but to turn their stores into fortresses? Was it just frightened rich guy vibes? Yeah, kinda.

Here’s a quote from yet another executive from yet another earnings call, this one focused on Rite Aid locations in New York City (emphasis mine): “I think the headline here is the environment that we operate in, particularly in New York City, is not conducive to reducing shrink just based upon everything you read and see on social media and the news in the city.“

New York City supermarket magnate (and locally notorious right wing crank) John Castimiditis told Fortune that he thinks locking up items makes customers feel safe and reduces theft, but he doesn’t know because “this is not an exact science.” Indeed.

Much of the “science” that does exist comes from the National Retail Federation (NRF), which represents the interests of retail giants like Walmart, BJs, and Target. But in the years after 2020, the Federation added fuel to the fire with some suspiciously bizarre reporting errors (which were uncovered by the great reporting of Retail Dive reporter Daphne Howland.

To begin with, the NRF mistakenly listed all the inventory lost to shrink as being a result of “retail crime”, an obvious error that you now understand thanks to the graphs I made you read earlier. Even more egregiously, the NRF claimed that half of all retail shrink in 2021 was due to organized retail crime, which would have been truly unprecedented if true. It was not.

In fact, it’s estimated that ORC accounts for only five percent of inventory shrink. An industry economist told the New York Times that the fifty-instead-of-five percent error was comparable to “the census claiming that nearly half of the U.S. population lives in the state of Rhode Island.”

Blaming shoplifters for their own looting of employees

If there were temporary increases in shoplifting in different parts of the country, they were almost certainly encouraged not by Black Lives Matter protests or declining moral standards but by the industry’s ongoing drive to eliminate the most effective theft prevention solution: workers.

Industry research indicates that engaged “front-line employees” are more important for preventing shoplifting than sensors and security cameras. But employees are the one security measure that managers’ hate to pay for. This is especially in the retail industry, which for decades has reduced staffing levels and forced those who remain to endure not only low pay but “flexible” scheduling that can make it impossible to work second jobs, go to school, or have stable family lives. Here again is Amanda Mull:

“Retailers really love to reduce labor costs, and after a certain point that just means having fewer workers. When you get to that point, it becomes really hard to manage a store well. So what retailers have done is sort of retrofit stores with systems that mean in their minds that they can run stores with fewer employees. That’s what self-checkout is. And that’s what these locked up shelves are.”

Unsurprisingly, an industry already facing chronic understaffing due to crappy conditions was hit especially hard by the “Great Resignation” of 2021, leaving even fewer employees to combat shrink, either by deterring shoplifting or catching shipping errors.

Speaking of self-checkout. Have you ever been scanning your own groceries at a self-checkout and thought about how easy it would be to throw that fancy salsa in your bag without scanning it? Have you ever done more than think about it? You’re far from alone. Stores that have self-checkout have much higher rates of inventory loss than stores that don’t, and more than a quarter of people have knowingly stolen from self-checkout.

Self-checkout and locked up products may both be driven by management’s desire to reduce staffing, as Mull notes, but in combination they create a nonsensical system: have your staff walk around unlocking cases and handing customers items they will then not pay for because your staff will not be working at the checkout machines. Great plan, boss!

When the going gets tough, bosses light everything on fire

The retail industry has long accounted for certain levels of customer and employee theft as a predictable if unfortunate operating expense. The turn to self-checkout is a clear indication that the business is okay with increased shrink if it comes with lower labor costs. But these same people during these same years had a nervous breakdown over shoplifting that led them to adopt a security policy that was terrible for the bottom line. Why?

With the caveat that it’s impossible to overestimate the racist panic that rich guys felt at the sight of massive Black-led protests in 2020, I think the main factor was executives trying to keep their jobs.

The COVID pandemic greatly accelerated the shift from in-store to online shopping, bringing the doomsday threat of Amazon much closer to major retail chains like Target and Walgreens. I’m not sure if stores could have better weathered the crisis by making in-store shopping more appealing. What I do know is they found it easier to respond to a fake crisis, and in so doing made their real one much worse.

Remember those San Francisco Walgreens closures? The San Francisco Chronicle reported that there were actually few reported shoplifting incidents at those five stores, and added that “the timing of Walgreens’ decision led observers to wonder whether a $140 billion company was using an unsubstantiated narrative of unchecked shoplifting to obscure other possible factors in its decision.”

Others have had similar suspicions. In a 2023 note to clients, the investment firm William Blair wrote that “some more recent permanent store closures enacted under the cover of shrink relate to underperformance of these locations.”

Plexiglass is bad business, but great propaganda

In the summer of 2020, an online rumor spread that there would be a “loot out” in my neighborhood. When the day of the supposed event came, stores boarded up their stores for up to a mile away from the supposed target area. People scrawled hand-written pleas to not touch their “immigrant owned business.” The day came and went without incident. It was a rumor, shamefully amplified by the police and some local politicians. But I had a sinking feeling as I walked the neighborhood that day, that BLM would get the blame.

Plexiglass cases, like boarded up stores, send a powerful message of a society under siege, even when the real message should be not to trust everything we hear. Locked up goods is great propaganda for more cops, more crackdowns.

During his failed mayoral run against Zohran Mamdani, Republican Curtis Sliwa repeatedly said, “We lock up toothpaste in a drug store but we don’t lock up criminals.” It’s an effective line that connects with the feeling when we encounter plexiglass being collectively punished for the sins of a few bad apples (our mistake being to think of those apples as shoplifters rather than CEOs).

Studies show that when customers encounter locked up products, they assume it’s because there is a major theft issue. Of course we do. We may think companies are immoral, but that’s because we assume they are coldly dedicated to their bottom line, not making billion dollar decisions based on something someone sent them on Facebook.

The left has never been immune from this mistake. We often look for some rational ruling class plan where only bigotry and short-termist idiocy exist. In “The Civil War in France”, Marx was making a point about the benefits of the immediate recall of delegates when he added a comment that has aged quite poorly:

“It’s well known that companies in matters of business generally know how to put the right man in the right place and if they make a mistake to redress it.” (It’s probably the dumbest sentence he ever wrote, and the only one you’ll never hear a capitalist complain about.)

Recently, retail has been trying to quietly walk back from its lockdown folly. A Walgreens executive admitted that “maybe we cried too much” about shoplifting and organized retail crime. But once the wheels of criminalization get moving, they aren’t easy to stop.

This May, the House passed the Combatting Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), which would create a new center within Homeland Security that would “strengthen collaboration among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, along with retail crime associations, to create a cohesive strategy to combat organized retail and cargo theft.”

CORCA has been included in the Senate in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, so we can expect the largely non-existent issue or organized retail crime to become a federal priority. (Meanwhile, the actually existing threat of organized crime networks stealing poor people’s SNAP benefits continues to be largely ignored in states like New York.)

Equally ominous is a new system being developed by CVS, in which customers with the company app can unlock shelves from their phones. If this plan spreads throughout the industry (and of course it will), picking up a product with your own hands will become a privilege you can only have in exchange for giving more personal information to the company.

Will this be the final, camel-back-breaking, indignity? How far will we let these stores degrade us before we rise up to free the shampoo? I don’t have the answers, but I have to think that the arc of history bends back towards being able to touch a stick of deodorant.

When it does, how will the people rise up to free our imprisoned consumer goods? Maybe it will come through civil disobedience campaigns, where dozens of us ring every damn “Assistance Needed” button in the store. Or perhaps it will be the fire next time, and angry mobs people will descend in fury on the chain stores to take back our shelves, and the bosses who built all these locked cases will see that they only created more walls to be torn down.

I’m writing to share with you a few things:

1. Thank you for reading some or most of my posts, giving comments or feedback, or at least not unsubscribing. Writing for you over the past 18 months (look at all these posts!) has helped me think through some issues, discover more about my current writing voice, and get back in the game. I hope you’ve gotten something out of it as well. You have? That’s really great, and I think it means we’re ready to take this to the next level.

2. For me, that means giving this thing a new name. Shamefully, most people in the English-speaking world don’t know my name, and I’m hoping Revolution for Cowards can help some of them find me. You are still to refer to me as “Danny Katch”, but if you call my blog that from this point on you are deadnaming it and will be shamed accordingly.

3. What does this exciting change mean for you? Thank you for asking.

   • First, I’m hoping you can take a minute to tell one or one hundred people you know about Danny –er– Revolution for Cowards. You can do it now, or you can wait until my next post, which will be tomorrow and I think is pretty good.

   • Second, if you think the time is write to upgrade your subscription from free to paid, follow that impulse right now! Click here to find out how.

4. Okay that’s it. Apologies for the self-promotion. Actual content coming tomorrow!

Yours,

Danny Katch, Author, executive producer, & special effectors coordinator of Revolution for Cowards

I only know a few people rooting for Argentina today.

One is a former student, who I’ll call Marissa. Marissa moved to New York from Buenos Aires a few years ago. For a current events presentation, she told my freshman writing class about protests taking place back home against the anti-immigrant policies of the country’s new president. Javier Milei, the fascist-friendly Trump ally, had started charging non-Argentine citizens (mainly from other South American countries) for health care and higher education. Marissa explained to us that Milei’s anti-immigrant politics were causing major divisions in a country that was proud of the social welfare state it had won through decades of struggle.

Another is someone I’ll call Ángel, from Córdoba, who cut my hair for almost twenty years. I’m not a big talker in the barber shop, but twenty years is a long time and I got to know him pretty well, especially his proud stories about his daughter, a self-published author. The day that Ángel learned I was a writer, he got so excited that he called her on the spot and made us awkwardly talk to each other about the fact that, yes, we are both writers.

Last March, Ángel stopped returning my texts. I went to the salon where he works and nobody had seen or heard from him in weeks. It was the early months of the second Trump administration. None of us had to mention the obvious.

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There are many reasons to want Argentina’s national team to not win the World Cup today. On the field, they are soccer’s version of the old New England Patriots: repeat champions who have gotten the benefit of some bad calls and have often played a bullying, miserly style against more sympathetic underdogs (long live Cape Verde). Off the field, they have a minority of fans who are racist assholes, the above mentioned terrible president, and the support of literally the world’s worst people.

But I’m also hearing some reasons for rooting against Argentina that are strange. Like calling it a country of “colonizers” on the eve of a match with… Spain. Like decrying the whiteness of Argentina’s squad, in contrast to the racial diversity of the teams of representing the imperial metropoles of England and France.

(As for refereeing conspiracy theories, if a few bad calls that favor Argentina means that FIFA is rigging the tournament for Messi, I’d love to hear the sinister grand narratives for why there was terrible officiating that favored Paraguay over France, or why VAR would try to help Bosnia and Herzegovina defeat the US team by giving its striker a dubious red card. That card was of course later infamously overturned, which should highlight what actual rigging looks like)

Many fans across Latin America have long rooted against Argentina, often for depressingly valid reasons. What feels different in this World Cup is how a regional rivalry has been decontextualized and dumbed down through global social media channels. Being anti-Argentina now reads as some kind of gesture at solidarity that reads more to me like ignorance of the ways that every society has plenty of people worth cheering and booing.

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Consider some of the recent Argentina opponents that everyone was rooting for. A victory for Egypt would have sparked celebrations across much of Africa – and also given a prestige boost to a brutal dictator and key enabler of the Gaza genocide. Switzerland were plucky underdogs against Argentina, and its most popular current political party just pushed for draconian immigration restrictions (which were thankfully rejected in a recent referendum.) Then there’s today’s opponent. Like Argentina, Spain has a subsection of fans who are infamous for the vicious racism that has targeted stars like Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius Jr. (Not to mention being the country that actually conducted and profited from the colonialism and genocide that took place in what is now Argentina.)

It’s been rightfully noted that the racial composition of Argentina’s squad is a legacy of the country’s anti-Black and anti-indigenous history. That doesn’t mean that there is something progressive about the multiracial makeup of teams the represent European imperial centers where people from Africa and Asia have been forced to migrate.

Yes, France is overwhelmingly composed of non-white players, much to the delightful consternation of its fascists. But actually listen to those players and you’ll hear that their acceptance by French society is highly conditional:

In 2011, striker Karim Benzema said: “If I score, I’m French. If I don’t score, or if there are problems, I’m Arab.” In 2022, defender Patrice Evra echoed his remarks: “When you win with France, you’re a French player. When you lose, suddenly, you get your Senegal passport.”

Argentina’s team is very white today in part because of a history of racism in the country and the national team, and in part because the country is not a global migration destination because for over two decades its economy has been strangled by global financial institutions. That’s right, it’s possible for a country to be both mostly white and part of the Global South. Just like it was possible for Ángel to be both white and disappeared by Trump’s white nationalist goon squad.

The best political case for rooting for Spain today comes from the best political sportswriter, my friend Dave Zirin, who writes that a victory for Spain might slightly boost the fortunes of its socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez, and hurt those of Milei.

Support Spain because their collective style of play—instead of gearing everything they do around one, singular player—is better for the sport. Fans should also support Spain because Milei will swallow his tongue if Argentina loses and Trump’s mottled face will fume. Trump may even stay away from the award ceremony, his petulance outweighing his ego. The political benefits would flow away from Milei and his already weak regime. And Sánchez—and everything he represents, even with all its imperfections—will get some wind at his back.

Those are fine enough reasons, but I haven’t heard any news about anti-Milei organizers in Argentina aren’t rooting for their beloved La Albiceleste today. Surely these people on the front lines of the fight against fascism also deserve nice things.

Whatever happens in the game today is less consequential for the fights against colonialism and racism than the fate of social movements like the one currently gathering in Argentina. Milei’s popularity is dropping like a stone after imposing drastic cuts to health care and university budgets. Protests have grown significantly since Marissa’s presentation to my class.

It turns out that when Milei raised fees on foreigners, it wasn’t meant to benefit Argentines but to open the door to making everybody pay. Sadly, the right wing often understands the benefit of divide and conquer better than us.

Too often people on the left buy into a simplistic counter-nationalism (known by insiders as “campism” for obscure historical reasons) that essentially views geopolitical conflict as a sport in which you have to root for one of the two teams. It’s not surprising then than an actual game is being treated like a political choice between two countries. But the world is more complex than that, thank God.

Like almost everybody I know, I’m probably rooting for the Spanish team today. I like watching Rodri and Lamine Yamal, and, like Dave, I prefer their style of play. But in the months ahead, I’m rooting for the people Argentina, and I hope you are too.

Donald Trump’s greatest power was, and I’m using the past tense for a reason, his ability to live in his own awful reality and then impose it on the rest of us. For most of the last decade, he’s been able to shamble his way through bold lies, disastrous policies, and revolting behavior that would sink any other public figure, and end up creating the meaner, dumber world that nobody wanted.

Now, just when plummeting polls and Republican defections indicate that Trump has finally returned to being subject to basic laws of cause and effect, the AI oligarchs seem to have inherited his power to make reality whatever THEY say it is.

Elon Musk, you may have heard, became a trillionaire (maybe) after the IPO of his company SpaceX. In the company’s SEC filing for SpaceX, Musk pledged “to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.”

Do SpaceX investors, including the ones who may run your pension fund, actually think they are getting into the business of Mars colonization? No, what they know is that investing in Musk has been profitable, regardless of what his companies have actually done. The fact that most of his wild promises don’t come true is not a flaw in his business model but an essential element of it. As Henry Farrell puts it, “propagating a mythology of the future that is in fact a promissory note that you can turn into financial and political capital today.”

Farrell’s post is a review of Muskism, a book I look forward to reading over the summer. Authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff write that throughout his career, Elon has “spun persuasive science fictions to win the confidence of his investors.” The AI bubble, which is not only financial but epistemic, should make us question a premise shared by most of us – from Marxists and free market ideologues – that there is an underlying logic to capitalism, a tangible source of value underneath the hypes and hysterias. The implications of this question are more profound for humanity’s future than any chain of words that’s come out of ChatGPT.

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While Elon was preparing his company’s psychedelic IPO, his rivals at Anthropic were performing their dystopian version of the same con. The company has been gaining ground on its competitors both because of user satisfaction with its Claude model and its wildly successful branding campaign as an ethical AI alternative – which mainly consists of CEO Dario Amodei repeatedly issuing dire warnings about the technology his company keeps right on producing.

The excellent tech journalist Brian Merchant recently recounted the success of Anthopic’s most recent round of this doom marketing:

After sparking a major news cycle in the tech media with its April announcement that it had built an AI model, Mythos, so powerful, so dangerous that it threatened to upend the entire civilizational order—and that it was diligently withholding the product from the public so as to protect us from it—the nation’s now-#1 AI startup decided to put Mythos up for sale after all.

Apparently two months’ of protection from the ultra-AI is all the safeguarding we needed. Interestingly, that’s precisely the amount of time that it took Anthropic to translate the press attention around Mythos into a historic $65 billion funding round. What a coincidence. According to its marketing materials, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, is a “Mythos-class model” that has been “made safe for general use,” and will be on offer to “organizations taking on their hardest knowledge and coding work.” It’s available now “on the consumption-based Enterprise plan.”

It’s hard for me to exaggerate how shameless this is. Has there ever been a more successful marketing campaign, one that yielded so many billions of investment in so short a time? The Mythos campaign is nothing less than the ne plus ultra of AI ‘doom marketing’, the practice that has helped animate the entire AI boom, and that sees tech companies drum up investor and media interest in their products by registering harrowing claims about the threats those products pose to jobs, norms, even humanity’s very existence.

There’s an old Mr. Show sketch called The Dr. X Annual Save the Earth Telethon. An evil scientist hosts a cheesy televised fundraiser to pay ransom to prevent him from destroying the planet with his doomsday space laser. The best moment is when an adorable little boy is given the microphone and says, “Please don’t kill me,” “Aw, you see zees is why I do zees,” says Dr. X as he turns to the camera. “For ze kids.”

A wonderfully silly sketch in 1997 has become an embarrassingly effective business model in 2026.

But wait a second, hasn’t AI produced actual technological advances? Of course. How could it be otherwise when unprecedented amounts of capital are poured year after year into research and development? Decades of neoliberalism created vast pools of wealth in the investor class, now impatient with small and steady profits and eager for literal moonshot gambles on farfetched technologies. Those massive investments (and massive theft) enabled tech companies to buy enough computing power and research talent to create Large Language Models (LLMs) to a scale that have produced some genuinely startling results.

In the excellent Empire of AI, a Chinese researcher tells author Karen Hao that AI could only have originated in America, not because of its superior technology or personnel but because Chinese researchers couldn’t have raised billions of funds investment without “an articulated vision of exactly what it would look like and what it would be good for.”

Of course, most of us could have articulated visions of what trillions of dollars would be good for – cancer cures, renewable energy infrastructure, and (not or) ending world hunger – but that’s a fantasy, isn’t it? Let’s stay focused on what’s realistic, like space colonies. Hao writes that “the tech industry could profess big bold visions about changing the world and building a better future while ignoring the very problems at its door,” noting the “utter contradiction of declaring the problem of creating and managing beneficial AGI possible, but San Francisco’s housing crisis too tough to tackle.”

LLMs have clearly achieved breakthroughs in the automation of writing and coding, among other tasks – and some of these achievements raise real and disconcerting questions about the future of these fields, as well as how we will understand “intelligence” moving forward. But there’s nothing profound about the current AI discourse driven by industry hype and a grim ruling class desire to replace its mortal labor force with obedient code.

Ted Chiang makes a clear distinction between what’s actually impressive about LLMs and what’s utter bullshit. Responding to Amodei’s claim that Claude might in fact be “conscious”, Chiang writes:

It’s not plausible to me that a development path where the first step is a sentence-continuation machine that emits bad Julius Caesar dialogue and the next step is a sentence-continuation machine that emits decent Julius Caesar dialogue is one with a conscious Julius Caesar—or consciousness of any sort—as its end point. Faking the moon landing is a good step toward faking a Mars colony, but it’s not a good step toward actually putting astronauts on Mars.

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Chiang is a great science fiction writer with a longstanding fascination with language, as anyone who’s read or watched Arrival knows. The science fiction of artists like Chiang presents us with alternate realities that give us new perspectives on the one we’re actually in. This new science fiction of capitalists does the opposite. They demand we accept an alternate reality in which they will always be in charge because they determine what’s real.

Over a decade ago, Mark Fisher famously coined the term capitalist realism to describe the way that decades of neoliberalism had made hegemonic the idea that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE to the increasingly depressing societies of Western capitalism. We seem to have now passed into capitalist unrealism.

Early Silicon Valley was shaped by 1960s counterculture: half a century later it has turned an iconic slogan of 1968 into an authoritarian dictate: Be realistic: accept the impossible. Sentient algorithms are the inevitable reality, and anyone who disagrees is a reckless daydreamer.

I’m wondering if this has something to do with the pragmatic nature of our social democratic moment, where leftists are succeeding by combining radical energy behind some pretty moderate policy ideas. If you’re an Overton Window type, and I kind of am, it doesn’t bode well to see the left being so moderate while the right is so extreme.

But maybe the left can take advantage of our opponents abandoning the terrain of reality. As billionaires become trillionaires on a dangerous bubble that relies on mass delusion, it’s becoming subversive to simply insist that up is up and not down. We can build a wider base for socialism not just through inspiring but distant visions of a better world, but a common sense vision of this one.

I’m not talking about pedantic “fact-checking.” I’m talking about asserting obvious truths: machines are not human; nobody wants data centers stealing their water and raising their electric bills; access to health care saves lives. I’m talking about being unrealistic, perhaps even revolutionary, and demanding what is so obviously possible.

New York is a city longing for something to bring us together in joy (and some property destruction). This is a tough place to live, and you see it on our faces every day. But when you do live here, you cherish random moments that bring people out of their guarded weariness. Someone faints on a street corner and passerby coordinate to call for help, prop them up, and run to the bodega for some water. A tourist family on the subway asks for directions, and an entire subway car debates whether they should switch to the E or the 7. The moment passes and we retreat back into looking straight ahead, but feeling a little more connected.

The Knicks magical playoff run created one of those moments for the past two months. A nod from a stranger. A broad smile or dap from someone else rocking blue and orange. Knicks in Four uttered, chanted, and shouted like a password into the world’s least secret society.

Most of the country, the part not trapped in violence porn algorithms, is smiling at our smiles, thrilled at the raw New York passion coming from loud young men with different skin tones who they might otherwise find frightening. As Knicks Nirvana culminated in the Finals, America has been entranced by this incredibly likeable team, but also by its less uniformly sympathetic fanbase, celebrities, clickhunters , and all.

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There’s an affection for both the diversity and obnoxious self-regard that normally generate heartland fears and resentments. This is the real New York people are watching, not the idea of New York Americans claimed to love after September 11, a Big Apple made up of firefighters, Rudy Giuliani, the Yankees and nobody else – least of all the nearly one million Muslims turned into a domestic enemy population.

Hack sportswriters claim that fans in New York – a city run by finance and real estate – value “blue collar” players who “bring their lunch pails to work” and do various other absurd metaphors that invoke white ethnic tough guy characters from 1940s Hollywood. But this Knicks team embodies something far more authentic.

A Real New York team has a Dominican center who jokes about not being able to say anything nice about a teammate because he’s Puerto Rican. It has an MVP whose first words when accepting the trophy is a sarcastically trolling of his father. (The comedic timing was ruined because he had to wait for applause, but I loved the attempt, Jalen.) And yes, a Real New York team has a gritty fan favorite who skips off the court after the final game with Timothée Chalamet.

But as likable as this team is, and as much as people tend to root for a team that hasn’t won in over a half-century, national Knicks love has also been driven by the hopes generated last year by Zohran Mamdani’s even more unlikely mayoral victory.

My mayor Muslim, my bagels Jewish went viral because it captured how the Knicks run has revived and deepened the New York pride that Zohran’s campaign tapped into with his own viral content about halal trucks and the Polar Bear Plunge. (The fact that the MD Hossain shouted his now iconic words for a video sponsored by an evil predictions market company is a bit depressing but largely irrelevant.)

Mamdani’s mayoral victory brought hope to a good portion of this country’s non-fascist majority. Some hoped for a revival of Obama multicultural liberalism, some for a new path that involves some sort of socialism, and some for some amalgam of the two. I’m betting most rooted for the Knicks in an NBA Finals that generated the biggest audience in 30 years.

Reader: this is a bait and switch warning: if you just want to bask in this moment, stop reading.

But if there is a similar emotional resonance to Mamdani’s and the Knicks’ victory, the meanings are very different. Winning a championship is the endpoint; winning an election is just the beginning. As impressive as Mamdani’s defeat of the Democratic establishment was, he has yet to prove that, now that the stakes are real, he can defeat his opponents and outmaneuver his supposed allies in the way the Knicks took down both the Spurs and their own dipshit billionaire owner.

If anything, Mamdani is currently where the Knicks were four years ago, when they signed Brunson and Josh Hart and were starting to raise their fans expectations after decades of dismal failures. We suffered many disappointments since then, but were largely forgiving because our expectations had been so lowered in the previous decades that we were grateful to at least have a decent team. But those vibes started to change at the end of last year’s disappointing playoff loss: the coach was fired, and the players (even Brunson) were on notice. It was time to deliver.

Right now most New Yorkers remain excited about Mamdani’s modest improvements over his predecessors, and are overlooking his failures so far to deliver on taxing the rich, protecting trans kids, and even attempting to assert authority over the NYPD. The predominant feeling (which I’m starting to doubt) is that we’re moving in the right direction and greater victories lie ahead.

But there’s nothing inevitable about moving from modest victories to greater ones. To go from raising our hopes to delivering on them, Mamdani and the left can’t rest on satisfaction of our initial victory. It’s going to take sober reflection on what’s not worked out, empowering the team that got us here, and taking the chances necessary to wrest democratic control of this city from the billionaires and cops.

Is this comparison corny? Yes, but these Knicks are corny as hell. (For real, click this link of the team chanting “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and watch Chalamet cringe. The series is over and he’s doubting the team more than he did when they were down 29 in Game 4.)

So let’s fucking go New York. Put on Sinatra: If we can (bop bop) win a ring, we can win (bop bop) anything.

Or put it on TikTok:

My mayor Muslim

My bagels Jewish

Knicks won in five

Tax the Upper East Side

In 1957, a young linguist named Noam Chomsky (yup, same guy) wanted to demonstrate the distinction between grammar and meaning, and came up with the following sentence, which would pass Grammarly inspection, but makes zero sense:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The most recent AI writing controversy is about an obviously LLM-assisted short story that won a literary prize. Why does everyone know that the author used AI? Because it has some sentences that bring to mind Chomsky’s paradoxically hued sheep. Like this one:

She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

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As a writer and a writing teacher, I follow many people who are upset about this latest assault on literacy – an injury followed by insult when the publisher of the sponsoring literary magazine said that, to get to the bottom of the issue, “We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was A.I.-generated.”

But it’s hard for me to defend the honor of non-AI writing when some of our most prestigious publications produce presumably non-LLM sentences like this:

Demonstrations outside the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center have at times turned violent, with the authorities deploying tear gas and wielding batons as protesters resisted calls to disperse.

Demonstrations…have turned violent is a pairing of subject and verb that works grammatically but has no meaning. Violence is committed by people, not events. More importantly, the actual subjects that committed violence, the authorities deploying tear gas and wielding batons, have been placed in a secondary dependent clause, where they are placed in a parallel construction (again following rules of syntax but not logic) with the victims of the violence who resisted calls to disperse.

This sentence, the subheading of an important news article in an important newspaper is a different type of non-human writing, one much older than Claude and ChatGPT. It’s the muddy language of bureaucracies devoted to the protection of unjust systems of power. For reasons that are completely unrelated to juvenile acronyms, I will call this mode of writing Authoritarian Syntax Structure.

“Demonstrations turned violent” is a classic piece of ASS. It’s not something naturally written by a human being who has witnessed uniformed goons shooting tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at unarmed protesters, unless that human being is functioning as the outward face of power-protecting institution.

The name appearing in the byline belongs to a human being, perhaps one who went home that night and, when disconnected from his employer, said something like, “Jesus, those ICE thugs really went fucking crazy on the protesters.” But a byline appearing in this type of article is not the same as the person with that name. The byline is a human-sounding avatar for what is in fact a complex of writer, editor, publisher, and authoritarian state.

Like AI, ASS creates writing that can seem competent, even skilled, at first glance. Its deeper meaninglessness only becomes apparent if you think about what you’re reading. Both languages are produced by sources incapable of actual human understanding, instead parroting back prompts in ways that only simulate deeper engagement.

Regarding protests outside Delaney Hall, for example, an obvious human question would be why these protests are happening. This would lead a sentient journalist in charge of her output to discover and write about how protesters are responding to calls for support from detainees inside the prison, how those detainees have been on a hunger strike to call attention to being beaten, tortured, given rotten food and bad water, and being treated inhumanely in many other ways. The human reporter might then publish the hunger strikers’ demands:

1. An immediate in-person meeting with Governor Mikie Sherrill at Delaney Hall to directly observe conditions and hear testimony from detained individuals.

2. Immediate medical attention for detainees in units 2/2b beaten and attacked by ICE.

3. The immediate release of vulnerable detainees including elderly individuals, pregnant women, young people, and those with serious medical conditions.

4. Meaningful review of immigration cases and habeas filings.

5. An end to what detainees describe as coercive pressure to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents.

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ASS journalism, in contrast, is unable to “understand” root causes in the way you or I could. It is automated to describe any protest as an unnatural and unwelcome disturbance to what it has been programmed to understand is a normal state of societal obedience. Over many decades of system updates, ASS is now better able to give an initial impression of writing about underlying issues, but look closely at the following paragraphs simulating an analysis of the reasons for the protest:

The center first drew wide attention in May 2025, when Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, was charged with trespassing, and Representative LaMonica McIver, was charged with assault amid a protest and chaotic clash with immigration agents there…

Last June, four men escaped from the 1,000-bed center through a flimsy wall during unrest that, immigration lawyers and detainees’ relatives said, was touched off by crowded conditions and a lack of regular meals. In December, a 41-year-old man from Haiti died soon after arriving at the center because of what federal officials called a medical emergency.

The latest conflict began during the Memorial Day weekend as protesters rallied in support of detainees reportedly staging a hunger strike over conditions at the center. It escalated on the holiday, after New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, joined the protest.

The first paragraph is classic ASS. The framing prioritizes how Delaney Hall “drew wide attention” — the notable issue being a disturbance to the normal functioning of the horrific injustices taking place inside., The second and third paragraphs, by briefly describing the conditions inside the prison center, come closer to approximating human writing. True, most human journalists might follow up with quotes from family members, or provide a link to the detainees’ public letters, but that’s not the biggest tell of authoritarian syntax.

A complex sentence is one that has both an independent clause and a dependent clause. The dependent clause is generally meant to give added information and context to the main point in the dependent clause. In these two paragraphs, the main independent clauses from the two paragraphs are about the disturbance to authority:

Last June, four men escaped from the 1,000-bed center through a flimsy wall during unrest…

The latest conflict began during the Memorial Day weekend as protesters rallied…

Details about the conditions that sparked protests are relegated to the secondary, dependent clauses:

was touched off by crowded conditions and a lack of regular meals.

in support of detainees reportedly staging a hunger strike over conditions at the center.

There is one complete sentence actually devoted to the horrific conditions inside Delaney:

In December, a 41-year-old man from Haiti died soon after arriving at the center because of what federal officials called a medical emergency.

But this shocking information is relegated to the end of a paragraph, as supplementary information to four people trying to escape a hellhole that is trying to kill them.

There are many articles in corporate media outlets like the New York Times that are not written by ASS (including, presumably, some written under the byline of the article we are looking at.) There is a much more human-written article, in fact, about Jean Wilson Brutus, the man murdered by Delaney Hall last December.

So I agree with Times publisher AG Sulzberger that it’s a bad thing that AI is “hijacking the public square.” I too am concerned that “we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting — going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful.”

But I think more of the public would better recognize and reject AI writing if we hadn’t spent our whole lives being taught that being a smart and educated person means admiring Sulzberger’s ASS.

On November 2, 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series for the first time in over a century, ending the most famous championship drought in American sports. Millions of Cubs fans went their whole lives without seeing their team win it all, and millions more assumed that would be their fate. Six days later, Donald Trump almost as shockingly won the presidential election.

My sense of equilibrium was seriously shook on the night of November 8, so I can only imagine how much Cubs fans must have questioned reality after being hit with those two events within a week. It doesn’t matter that one event was happy and the other ominous, or how silly it is to compare a sports upset with the shock of America beginning its lurch towards facism. Both violated the way people’s finite worldviews had come to process the ways of the universe. (It only got weirder when people realized that the 1989 comedy Back to the Future: Part 2 prophesied both of these events, sort of.)

My beloved New York Knicks, basketball’s version of the old Cubs (and Red Sox), are winning every game they play as they near a championship, and the impossibility of what they’re doing is starting to mess with me.

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This is not a sports blog, but let me briefly explain the impossibility of what’s been happening over the past six weeks:

1. The Knicks have won 13 playoff games in a row, something only two other teams have ever done, and even though last night’s game was a nailbiter, they’ve won those 13 games by far more points than any team in history.

2. The Knicks are really good, but their players are not nearly great enough to be on such an unprecedented run of basketball dominance.

3. They’re doing it with a sports movie underdog cast of such extremely likeable and overachieving players that most of the country is actively rooting for a New York sports team, which is unheard of. People even seem to get a kick out of our gloriously obnoxious fans, who have the money to show up to road games around the country and celebrate as home fans in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and now San Antonio console their sobbing children on their way out of their own arenas.

Back here in New York, I walk the streets in a stupefied daze, daydreaming about the previous game and the next one, listening to any podcast that will talk about the Knicks, smiling at everyone walking around New York in Knicks gear, taking a minor vacation from dealing with the real world that I know is still out there.

Or is it? Can I be totally sure what’s real anymore? I can’t understand what’s happening with the Knicks, and neither can anyone else. The most analytically-minded basketball minds are throwing around words like magic. But I’m not used to magic of the good kind. For over a decade, when I’ve said, “I can’t believe this is happening,” it’s most likely been in relation to a pandemic, a genocide, or Donald Trump. I’ve come to associate surprise with dread. Perhaps you have too.

Speaking of which, the Knicks villainous owner has invited Trump to attend Game 3 of the Finals on Monday night. From a purely sports perspective, I can’t imagine anything an owner could do to derail his own team more than creating a giant, disruptive distraction in the middle of their winning streak.

But this team is rewiring my brain towards hope. I’m dreaming of twenty thousand New Yorkers in too-tight jerseys chanting “Fuck Donald Trump” on national TV as their team wins 14 in a row and moves one win away from the title. The Knicks have already broken sports reality; for the next few days I’m going to let myself dream they can close the hell-mouth portal that the Cubs accidentally opened in 2016.

Yes, it’s just sports, but the Knicks are reminding me that good unexpected things are possible too. Unless you’re a Jets fan.

Last month, the New York Times broke the story that US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has created new hurdles for those looking to become permanent American residents. After a directive from last year that added support for “terrorism” and “antisemitism” to the list of factors for denying green cards to applicants, USCIS has now produced training materials with specific ideological red flags that immigration officers should look out for:

The administration includes criticism of Israel as a potentially disqualifying factor, with the training materials citing as an example of questionable speech a social media post that declares, “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out…

“If you hate America, you have no business demanding to live in America,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesman for U.S.C.I.S…

Further examples in the documents of conduct characterized as antisemitic include a social media post showing a map of Israel with the nation’s name crossed out and replaced with the word “Palestine.”

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Notice how these examples mention nothing about “terrorism” – or even armed resistance. And even those who (wrongly) equate opposing Israel with hating Jews can’t seriously think that an administration that regularly dog whistles its support for Nazis is concerned about antisemitism.

According to these new guidelines, supporting Palestine is a sign that “you hate America.” Anti-Zionism is now officially a forbidden ideology, a status previously reserved only for communism and totalitarianism, which were written into immigration law during the height of the 1950s Red Scare (and still on the books today.)

The new UCSIC guidelines are the latest manifestation of the myriad ways that the campaign against Palestine solidarity has followed the path of America’s anticommunist witch hunts (which were also deeply antisemitic).

The revocation of student visas for Palestine supporters was compared by a federal judge to the 1920s Palmer raids that deported hundreds of left wing immigrants (many of them Jewish). And the ritualized humiliation of Ivy League presidents at Congressional hearings about “campus antisemitism” echoes the way the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) went after Hollywood figures in order to portray socialism as propaganda being produced by elite cultural (i.e. Jewish) institutions.

This is all clearly very bad, and you can read about just how bad it is elsewhere. In this post, I’d like to point out that this is also very strange.

Anticommunism was a cause that many millions of Americans viewed as a crucial fight for the soul of their country and the future of the world. The Red Scares were a potent synthesis of elite class warfare and reactionary populism, binding large sections of the American public passionate supporters to their ruling class’s imperial ambitions.

There are only two ways that similar numbers of Americans could ever care so deeply about Israel: Christian Zionism winning the majority of the country to its enticing vision of imminent apocalypse, or every Orthodox Jewish family having quintuplets every nine months for the next fifty years.

In the absence of either of these unlikely scenarios, most Americans – even that declining number who support Israel – will view it as a faraway country with an endless war that they do not want to make their own. Which means that the new Red Scare is being waged without the wide base of reactionary panic that made the previous ones so potent.

To understand why Zionism cannot handle the ideological load it’s now being asked to shoulder, you have to appreciate the political and emotional resonance of anticommunism in 20th century America.

First and foremost, socialism was a legitimate threat to the material interests and/or deeply held beliefs of many millions of Americans. The first Red Scare was a direct response to the 1917 Russian Revolution, which inspired around the world strike waves and the formation of communist (and radical Black nationalist) parties. The second Red Scare, which is often known as McCarthyism, was a response to the Chinese Revolution and Russia’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb – as well as a backlash against the gains that American communists had made during the Great Depression among workers and African Americans.

In other words, unlike Palestine solidarity, the spectre of communism was legitimately scary for the interests of US capitalism and empire, and the many ordinary Americans who strongly supported both.

But anticommunism, as Joel Kovel argued in Red Hunting in the Promised Land, wasn’t just a reactionary response to socialism. (h/t to Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism for introducing me to the book.) It’s better understood as a positive political framework and identity formed by a nation founded on the duality of genocide/enslavement and individual liberties. Kovel, a former psychoanalyst who worked in a genre he called “psychohistory,” argues that anticommunism fused ruling class hopes and fears with populist resentments and scapegoats.

The book opens with the strangeness of the second word of HUAC, noting that other countries never called communism “un-French” or “un-Korean”.

“In no other society was Communism so marked with the sign of the outsider…To the rest of the world, Communism signified a more or less straightforward antagonism to the ruling classes, and was dealt with accordingly. In America, on the other hand, Communism entered the realm of the shadowy bizarre, and to be touched by its label was to experience a radical banishment, even a kind of social nonbeing.”

Of course, this is exactly what is now being attempted with anti-Zionism, and many Palestine solidarity activists have suffered accordingly. But outside America’s small pockets of Jewish and Christian Zionists, support for Israel is experienced by most Americans as just another foreign policy is accompanied by unusual demands for unanimous domestic obedience.

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In contrast, Kovel elaborates how anticommunism much more naturally fused imperial geopolitics with widespread and passionate anti-elite populism. (Of course, and this is awkward for today’s witchhunting Zionists, that’s largely because of communism’s association with Jews, who represented both a dangerously seditious immigrant underclass and a secretive elite network of intellectuals and power brokers.)

What Kovel terms “elite anticommunism” was embodied by Cold War architects like George Kennan, who plainly understood that the ideological struggle against the USSR was rooted in a need to maintain America’s post-war economic hegemony: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population,”Kennan wrote in 1948. “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”

Operating on a very different emotional frequency was “populist anticommunism” led by figures like Joseph McCarthy and J Edgar Hoover, whose witch hunts to root out communists lurking in schools, unions, Hollywood, and the government were a crusade against invisible internal foes. This anticommunism was a conspiracy theory that tapped into a deeply felt grievance lurking beneath the triumphant surface of post-war America. In a brilliant passage, Kovel defines populist anticommunism as “an ideology of unhappiness”:

It is not in this sense the voice of the “Real” America, a country where happiness as well as unhappiness occurs, but of that portion of the national experience for which the American Dream has been bogus. The masses of people who sign on to the terms of anti communism as a vague dislike of “outsiders” or in a desperate attempt to put America first, are expressing a sense of betrayal for which they have no better way to speak.

Taken together, elite and populist anticommunism formed a powerful synthesis: the former kept precipitating global conflicts that the latter took extremely personally. Of course, many Americans opposed this framing, but many others found tremendous meaning in it: Kovel notes a 1987 poll that found 70% of Americans found anticommunism to be the most unified American idea–compared to 49% who said that about religion.

The reactionary “unhappiness” that Kovel wrote about is obviously still a major part of American political life, but anticommunism alone can no longer channel it. In the decade after 2011, anti-terrorism worked well as a unifying reactionary idea, providing popular support for America’s attempts to tighten its military grip on the world system and build up the apparatus of domestic surveillance and repression. But the country squandered its political capital in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the populist dimension of the “Global War on Terror” faded. (Infuriatingly, it was Trump who cannily distanced himself from those “forever wars” even as he gleefully assumed the controls of their apparatus of domestic surveillance and repression.)

Today, the American project is ideologically adrift, with conspiracy theories running rampant among the base, and open grift dominating the upper echelons. In these conditions, Zionism is playing an outsized role because Israel at least has a strong sense of purpose, blood-soaked and nihilistic as that may be.

Zionism has deep roots in American politics and culture, and I highly recommend Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel for those looking to understand why. But it can’t bear the weight of being the basis for a new Red Scare.

Support for Israel primarily fulfills some of the geopolitical strategic functions of elite anticommunism, it will never have mass appeal. Partly because it’s inextricably tied to Jews, who will always play a villainous role in the right wing populist imagination, but even more so because it’s a DIFFERENT COUNTRY. Protecting Israel will simply never resonate deeply with most Americans, any more than protecting South Korea, or the Saudi monarchy.

Nor can most Americans be moved by Zionism’s ideological cover of fighting antisemitism. Some Americans don’t care about anti-Jewish hate. Many do care, but they are the ones more likely to also care about the genocide of Palestinians, and see no contradiction between the two.

The claim that Palestine solidarity is antisemitic works most effectively on administrators who need an excuse for complying with the censorship and repression, but that’s a tiny segment of the population. A successful ideology needs to be rooted in something deeper than just the cynicism and cowardice of its managerial class.

The three most expensive Congressional primary races have all involved massive spending to unseat incumbents who opposed US support for Israel: Democrats Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush, and now Republican Thomas Massie. All three were successfully punished. But this is a more shallow desperate intervention than anticommunism would ever have required, with predictably short-termist results.

On the Democratic side, the opposition to Israel that cost Bowman and Bush so dearly two years ago is becoming a near requirement for rising Democrats seeking any type of anti-establishment cred. On the Republican side, Trump once again successfully imposed a loyalty test, but that just means that right wing Zionism is now associated with Trump’s narrowing base (and uh, covering up the Epstein files).

The new USCIS rules in this light read less like a generational commitment to Zionism than yet another knee-jerk command to obey the strongman: opposing Israel is “un-American” for no deeper reason than that it’s opposing Donald Trump, which means that strong majorities of Americans are now un-American.

In terms of ideological coherence, the attempt to turn support for Israel into a defining feature of what it means to be American simply makes no sense. The machinery of anti-Palestine repression is starting to approach the level of 1920s and 1950s anticommunism, but at a time with popular support for Israel is plummeting.

None of this means that repression won’t continue, or even that they can’t succeed in imposing Zionism as a national requirement. But it does mean that they are attempting this level of repression without the accompanying political support that has defined its precedents. It’s another manifestation of the ascendence of authoritarianism and oligarchy in place of even the most reactionary elements of American democracy. As scary as this new wave of repression is, there’s also a strong whiff of third time as farce.

Seemingly every walk of life is being disrupted by Ape Iteration, popularly known as “Ape In-slavement” or “AI” for short. The speed of this development has been dizzying – as recently as 2026, “AI” referred to so-called “artificial intelligence.” That fad crashed and burned after a series of events that began with a lawsuit between industry leaders and escalated into a public competition over who had the best AI spacecraft – which ended when the underpaid Filipino workers who were actually remotely piloting the ships walked off the job, sending all the CEOs hurtling to their cold, lonely deaths in the bleak, black depths of space.

Since then a new crop of billionaires has filled their shoes with a new AI that’s totally better!

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So what is Ape Iteration?

AI accelerates the process of evolution to an exponential degree. What took human beings tens of thousands of years to develop – advanced tool making, complex divisions of labor, and endless HR meetings – are now achievable for our simian siblings in a matter of days. Suddenly, chimpanzees are reaping harvests in California, where immigrants used to do the work; gorillas driving taxis in New York City, where immigrants used to do the work; and orangutans flashing their hilarious grins as actors in Hollywood, where liberals used to do the work.

How does the technology work?

Ugh, you won’t understand it, but here’s a super-dumbed-down version: Ape Iteration has two prerequisites: zillions of apes, and immediate evolution. We got the first part through animal cloning. We got the second when researchers at the University of Nairobi developed an algorithm that trains primates to self-evolve after one thousand hours swiping left and right on oversized iPads. Think of it as a sort of high-tech DuoLingo, only the apes are learning a new species instead of a new language – and are rewarded not with meaningless points but with fruit, nuts, and massive orgies.

Sounds impressive, but is it accurate to call this process “evolution”? Sounds more like a new form of domestica….

Jesus Christ, here we go with the philosophizing. Look, we don’t have time for this ivory tower bullshit. This new technology is revolutionizing the world, but it also threatens to destroy it. Apes are far stronger than humans and if the wrong people get a hold of this technology, which they probably will because we will sell it to the highest bidder, they could use it to destroy humanity. So while I’d love to sit around questioning the nature of evolution, or the ethics of mass cloning and enslavement, I’m going to need you to stay focused.

Okay, okay. I’m sorry. So tell me, who are the new AI leaders?

Great question! The two most important are the wholesome boy genius Zach Sam-Max-Sam and the eccentric fascist Elton Afrikaner. These two wunderkinds had their Eureka moment as they watched a movie about apes taking over Earth while K-holing their extremely pale butts off. In a moment that would change the future of humanity, they turned to each other and said, “okay okay okay we know this is only a movie but if some stupid screenwriter could imagine an ape takeover than other people can too including evil people and even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance of it happening we should redirect the tech industry’s investments and concerns away from climate change so that we can prevent an ape takeover and the best way to do that is to create a gorilla army but the good kind because it will be our gorilla army and we’re good people and… hold on a second you’re pissing down your leg… yes you… no look down… see how your pants are getting wet yes that’s you… okay I think you stopped so anyway this is amazing we are going to save the world!”

Are there concerns about quality control and safety?

A few here and there. Hospitals report a sixfold increase in deaths since gorillas started taking over surgical duties. Many customers are taking a while to get used to having their packages arrive with grapefruit sized holes punched through the packaging. And teachers are whining about boilerplate thesis statements, excessive and off-topic banana metaphors, and the general feel of reading something produced by “a million monkeys typing in a room”, which of course is precisely the process.

What about the AI slop that’s everywhere?

Unfortunately we haven’t been able to get the apes to evolve to use toilets. It’s not great.

Are we sure this new AI is a good idea?

Sigh, what a pathetically irrelevant little question. Listen, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, evolution is real and it’s here to stay. If you want to be a Larmarckite and deny the inevitable march of natural progress, go ahead and stick your head in the sand while the rest of us get on with making history. But I’d be careful if I were you: that sand probably has considerable traces of AI slop.

• I’m happy to announce that the Strait of Hormuz has just been reopened.

• And here’s a bonus, folks: so have the Suez Canal and the Straits of Gibraltar! Isn’t that wonderful? And people are telling me we’ll soon be reopening the Panama and Erie Canals. Also the Grand Canyon. That’s one of the Seven Wonders of the World, you know, and we’ve gotten almost all that toxic sludge out of it.

• Our men and women in ICE are doing a wonderful job, aren’t they? So are all the boys in the Border Patrol, Homeland Security and the Committee to Protect Female Athletes by Checking Their Genitals. We’ve gotten some complaints about bodies being dumped in unmarked graves, which I”m not sure is even happening, but you know abundance of caution and I’m a nice guy so from this point on I’m announcing that dead bodies are going to be gently placed in those unmarked graves, and it’s going to be very respectful.

• The price of air has come all the way down to seven cents a breath.

• A million babies were born over the last year in this country, a lot of them white babies. You know, something I always say is that every life is a miracle, and each one of those miracles happened with me as president. Remember that next time you hear the liberal media saying “Oh no, all these people are dying because of polio.” They never talk about all the people being born, have you noticed that? It’s truly remarkable. And by the way, we’ve working on the polio thing, which isn’t even really that bad. I mean FDR had it and he was fine, I didn’t agree with him on many things but he was very popular with the fireside chats and Pearl Harbor and everything, but we’re working on the polio thing and people are saying that by next year we’ll have found a way to prevent people from even getting it, if you can believe that.

• As for COVID 20, Avian Flu, and Rat-borne Heart Exploding Syndrome, I’ve got some very exciting news. Starting today, I’m selling gold immunity tokens. These things are amazing, they’re solid gold on the surface and you just keep one in your pocket and it prevents all these diseases coming from China and Iran and the Vatican. If we can get a close up here, yeah zoom in a little more, you can see one side they have the official Center for Disease Control guarantee that you’ll never die. And then the other side has a picture of me, it’s not my best picture because that’s not I would ride a real dragon but it’s not bad when you consider having to fit the worshippers on a little coin. We’re selling these for $1000 each. It’s not cheap but again, you can’t put a price on saving your life. Or what about your children, you want them to live too, right? You don’t want them to get bitten by one of those rats that are running around everywhere because the cities had to lay off their sanitation workers when the oil shortage crisis caused the AI bubble to pop and the world went into recession and then an evil immigrant told a rat to bite your child and now her poor little heart has exploded all over the place. We don’t want that, so I have directed the Social Security Administration to direct all contributions towards immunity tokens until every American has bought at least one, possibly five.

• That’s all for today. They need me in the Ballroom for another assassination attempt.

Bonus round: Things Democrats will demand in response

• ICE murders in unmarked graves must end. No ifs, ands, or buts about it: under a Democratic administration, every single mass grave will be fully marked.

• Tax credits for those making five ninths of the regional median income to be applied to job retraining programs so that laid off coders can become rat catchers.

• Six cents a breath!

Wanna play? Add your own in the comments!

You’d think America would be really good at discussing mass shootings and assassinations. But all we can do is pathologize. Someone who tries to kill a powerful person, no matter how odious, is crazy by definition, and the only thing left to discuss is what kind of crazy.

Which will make it difficult to have open discussions about what people actually think Donald Trump’s most recent alleged would-be assassin, Cole Allen. He might not become another folk hero like Luigi Mangione, but I wonder what will happen as word eventually spreads that his manifesto is not anti-Christian, as Trump claims, but in fact deeply Christian. I wouldn’t be surprised if Allen triggers some quiet soul-searching underneath obligatory condemnations among those Christians who still think their religion has something to do with morality. (This is a more remote possibility, but perhaps it will lead some people to gain a touch more empathy to those who react violently to mockery of Islam.)

The subversive appeal of shooters like Allen and Mangione is that they transgress the border of who is allowed to take violence into their own hands. Personally, I don’t want anyone thinking they have the right to play God. but the man I’d put at the very bottom of that list is the commander-in-chief of the most lethal and powerful military and surveillance apparatus in the world.

Donald Trump was elected by millions of people, which is one of the most important reasons why people shouldn’t go around trying to shoot him. But that doesn’t address the question of how we got to the point where such an unappealing ogre could be elected president, which leads inevitably back to a political system that is entirely broken from the point of view of democracy (but fine for oligarchy and currently being tested for fascism). The assassin steps into this crisis and says it’s not only our right but our obligation to take matters into our own hands when the system blocks all other options. His argument is usually disastrous, for himself and millions of activists and organizers who will face greater repression. But it’s not crazy.

The fact that many people identity with acts of violence is a fact, not a virtue, and it extends to acts where the victims are far more innocent than war-mongering presidents and health care-denying CEOs. It’s horrifying that some people secretly celebrate even the most depraved mass shootings, but these horrors tend to take place in locations associated with hypocrisy and oppression, from workplaces to military bases to, yes, schools, and so they can resonate with people even as they horrify them. It’s of course taboo to discuss such things, which is one of many signs that we have no idea how to deal with them.

In what is surely a coincidence, America is also unable to discuss the mass murders of people in Iran, Palestine, but for the opposite reason. If domestic shootings can only be seen through the lens of homicidal instability, foreign ones can be debated only in their policy efficacy. Sure, protesters can scream from the sidelines about baby-killers and genocide, but imagine someone with real clout equating the bombing of an apartment building in Gaza City with the same exact action that takes place in the Twin Towers, or truly reacting to the bombing of a school in Iran the way they would to the shooting of a school in Connecticut.

These are the dogmas we either accept or are afraid to publicly challenge. But dogmas are better at squelching speech than thoughts, and are worse than that at suppressing feelings. Donald Trump has been a virtuoso exploiter of that gap, an expert norm-destroyer and transgressor of political boundaries. Now, even as we go through days of official hand-wringing over what appears to be another assassination attempt, I have a feeling he might experience some of the new culture he has helped to create: fewer Americans feeling the obligation to pretend to care.

Shit, man, I really wanted to write more regularly about the Zohran experiment, especially given how much importance I (like everyone) have attached to it. Oh well, let’s start with some inane punditry that at least contains useful links about THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED DAYS.

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• Universal Child Care: Got the governor to pledge money for the start of an expansion that is scheduled to become universal 2K by 2029 (barring unforeseeable factors like a severe global recession triggered by a global oil shortage that then pops a massive AI bubble.)

  Danny’s grade: Three stars

• Freeze the Rent: Appointed a new majority to the Rent Guidelines Board that is expected to halt increases on rent stabilized apartments later this year.

  Danny’s grade: Two thumbs up

• Fast and Free Buses: Fast? Hopefully soon. Free? Don’t hold your breath.

  Danny’s grade: B-

• Serious police reform: The promised new Department of Community Safety has, for now at least, been stripped down to a Mayor’s Office of Community Safety; the NYPD is still headed by a conservative billion-heiress who swats away her boss’s proposals for even modest reform. No, in other words.

  Danny’s grade: I’m not mad; I’m disappointed

• Being a Proud Muslim mayor in an Islamophobic society: Check.

  Danny’s grade: Ahssanta

• The Right to Protest. In response to demonstrations outside synagogues that are hosting Israeli real estate auctions on illegally occupied land, the City Council has passed two awful bills that will severely limit the ability to demonstrate outside of religious sites and educational buildings. It’s up to the mayor to sign or veto the bills.

  Danny’s Grade: Incomplete

• Showing that a Socialist Mayor can be Politically Successful: One poll has his approval vs disapproval rating at 48 to 30 – with 58% trusting that he’ll act “in the best interests of the city.”. Another has approval/disapproval at 43 to 27, with most voters saying the city is on the wrong track, but that Mamdani is focusing on the issues that matter to them.

  Danny’s Grade: I’ve run out of gimmicks for this bit

Overall, it’s fair to say that Mamdani can point to at least some progress on many of his campaign promises, while avoiding scandals (despite the thoughtful efforts of the local conservative intelligentsia).

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With that summary out of the way, let’s talk about strategy, trajectory, and messaging, because there has been quite the vibes shift from candidate Zohran to Mayor Mandani. We’ve gone from Eugene Debs to Victor Berger. Don’t like the century old socialist references? How about from pitchforks to potholes? Hand grenades to handyman?

I’m getting carried away. Zohran’s campaign was always marked by his infectious positivity, an ability to bring liberals comfortable enough to choose his socialism and Palestine solidarity over Andrew Cuomo. But consider the following contrast:

Last October, on the eve of his historic election victory, Zohran held a jubilant rally in Queens, where one of the speakers was New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a consummate corporate Democrat who had recently and belatedly endorsed Zohran through gritted teeth because he was popular and she was not. When Hochul came out and tried to deliver her flat speech, she was repeatedly interrupted by thousands of people chanting “Tax the Rich”, which would have continued through her whole speech had Zohran not graciously come on stage to call off the dogs.

Last week, to mark his first 100 days in office, Zohran held another rally in Queens. This time supporters waved signs for “Pothole Politics”, a reference not only to the mayor’s widely hailed response to the street damage caused by two massive winter storms, but to his own personal rebrand of “sewer socialism”, a once-pejoritive left wing term for the socialist mayors in Milwaukee and other cities a century ago who stressed delivering effective government services and modest expansions of social programs. Mamdani, and his still-impressive social media team, has been all over the city for the past three months highlighting street repairs, small service expansions, and lawsuits against landlords and wage-stealing corporations.

It’s likely that Zohran’s focus on focus has helped Zohran start to make inroads to constituents who didn’t vote for him - as evidenced by the polls showing a layer of voters who respect the job he’s doing even if they don’t yet support him. Socialist writer Nathan Robinson makes a strong defense for Mamdani’s initial approach.

“You can see this as the “compromise” of a radical who has run into reality, but as a socialist (and the author of a book literally called Why You Should Be a Socialist) I think Mamdani is extremely smart to focus early on on delivering small things that people can see and feel. This was the approach taken by the “sewer socialists” in the early 20th century, and by Bernie Sanders when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s, and it resulted in popular mayoral administrations that served as living disproof of propaganda about socialist politicians bringing “disaster” and “ruin.’”

Alas, this is only part of the story. At Zohran’s 100 Days rally was another prominent guest – Bernie Sanders instead of Kathy Hochul. You might think this indicates tension between the two wings of the New York Democrats, but it’s more likely the opposite: The governor no longer needs Mamadani’s shine because two months ago, he endorsed Hochul’s re-election bid – even as many other elected DSA members did not.

Zohran made this endorsement after Hochul had pledged money for his child care initiative, and in the months since she has been almost immovable on the demand to raise taxes on the rich, which is the foundation for all significant continuations of his agenda. The only thing the mayor seems to have gotten in return for his endorsement is Hochul’s recent agreement to pass a welcome but woefully insufficient tax on luxury second homes in the city.

Somewhat shockingly, Mamdani made this endorsement in the middle of a major local nurses strike in which Hochul was tipping the scales in favor of the bosses. A few weeks later, DSA and other groups mobilized for a long-planned mass rally at the state capitol, but Zohran didn’t come, stripping the long-planned event of most of its sizzle. Meanwhile, Hochul is very much enjoying a Zohran bump: her primary opponent dropped out and her approval ratings are up, even as she has only budged on

Is this strategy or sellout? David Dayen and Whitney Curry Wimbish argue for the former in The American Prospect. They correctly frame Mamdani’s first three months as geared around efforts to show “supporters meaningful progress on their concerns, and expand participation in New York City democracy even more.” Their second argument, which I think is also true at this point, is that Mamdani’s activist supports are “waiting in the wings… ready and eager to act” if governor Hochol and NYC City Council speaker Julie Menin (another centrist Democrat) continue to stall on any form of economic redistribution.

On the flip side, former AOC staffer Corbin Trent warns that Mamdani’s alliance with Hochul (like his earlier opposition to a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries) is a repetition of left wing Democrats’ continued reluctance to wage a serious fight for the party’s direction:

“The trap is not charm and it is not strategy. Both are tools and you need them. The trap is believing they are enough on their own, that if you are careful enough about managing your relationships with the people who currently have power, you can eventually get them to share it. That is not how power works. Power does not get shared. It gets built or it gets taken. A real supermajority, the kind that actually passes something, has never been built through accommodation. It gets built through aggressive political infighting, through primarying the members of your own party who are blocking your agenda, through making it more dangerous for someone to oppose you than to support you.”

I used the word “sellout” adobe to be provocatively alliterative. I remain hopeful but wary about this Mamdani experiment. But I’m dubious that avoiding a fight with centrist Democrats is good strategy – and I don’t see what it has to do with good government. With the admittedly important exception of the child care funding, most of Zohran’s initiatives that have endeared him to New Yorkers have not depended on Hochul. He could be combining pothole politics with a little more class war; imagine the videos his social media team could have put out about the better staffing levels nurses had won thanks to him forcing Hochul to back the strike.

Looking ahead to the next few hundred days, if there isn’t a serious fight to tax the rich, and mobilize Zohran’s real popularity against those who stand against it, there’s a danger that pothole politics becomes just another euphemism for managing austerity – particularly in the dark economic times to come. That will breed demoralization, cynicism, and the awful feeling that we were fooled by another false messiah. Activist armies don’t just wait in the wings. At some point they demobilize.

We’re not at that point yet, and it’s possible we’re nowhere near it, given the reservoir of good will Zohran has among his supporters (along with our desperate need for this thing to work out.) But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to anticipate how quickly things may change.

What we do know, however, is that for Zohran to succeed, he will at some point need to fully fight most of the Democratic Party that stands in his way (plus the Republicans, the cops, and the billionaires). That fight will be difficult and we might lose, but the terrain is likely more favorable while his popularity is high and his city is not yet being crushed by an economic downturn.

I don’t underestimate the importance of Mamdani’s sewer socialism initiatives, or his hopeful initial polling.Socialists desperately need to broaden our bases of support past the stronghold of while college educated leftward moving progressives. So his good government initiatives are very important, as is the ongoing impressive publicity work. So is the way he conveys his Muslim and immigrant identities in ways that are both proud and inviting. All of this shows the potential for expanding the socialist base.

But we’re trying to win people to socialism not just as an idea but as a fight. There’s a common misperception that socialism alienates many potential supporters because its ideas are foreign or radical. No, it frightens them because they know it will incur the wrath of those who already oppress us but can do so much more.

The reason our movement is currently based among white people with college degrees is that working class people of color have less confidence that it’s possible to take on the moneyed elite than. This is something most people in the media willfully misunderstands, preferring to posit universal health care and taxing the rich as things only privileged people care about, when in fact many less privileged people are simply worried that these “radical” ideas will elicit a backlash that they or their loved ones won’t survive.

That’s why Mamdani will have to demonstrate not only that he can govern but that he can conquer. The real viability of socialists in office is not just good government, but being able to use office to mobilize a base of support that allows you to fight corporate democrats to tax the rich.

To truly expand the base of active socialists in America, it won’t be enough to show people that socialism is safe. We have to convince them that it’s worth the risk.

Members of Local 814 passed a resolution against the brutality of the Border Patrol and ICE, only to have it overturned a week ago on dubious procedural grounds. I wrote about it for The Indypendent. Click here for the full article. Here’s an excerpt:

Last month, members of Teamsters Local 814 in Brooklyn passed a resolution that condemned the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and called for the abolition of ICE. This was a rare moment of public dissent from inside the 1.3 million member International Brotherhood of Teamsters against the well-publicized support for Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies by Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

The moment didn’t last long. Within weeks, Local 814 called an “emergency meeting” that overturned the anti-ICE resolution on grounds that the original result was the result of improper “intimidation” to encourage a yes vote during the meeting. This explanation, which sounds a bit like the complaints of a certain United States president when a vote doesn’t go his way, is adamantly rejected by the 814 members who put forward the initial resolution. But as it stands, a small but significant expression that Teamsters don’t support the Trump agenda has been conveniently expunged from the record.

Click here to read the rest of the article at The Indypendent.

If you organize for Palestine solidarity, you have probably faced the loaded question of why you spend more time protesting Israel than other violent governments around the world. Most of us offer a pragmatic response: it’s our government funding, arming, and defending this apartheid state; therefore, it’s our duty to organize against it. This answer is true, but it doesn’t fully explain – to the questioner and maybe even to ourselves – why we find this struggle so resonant.

Equally loaded is the question – now being asked across the political spectrum – of why America’s government and leading institutions support Israel in a way that is different, qualitatively and quantitatively, from any other country. Why is the biggest power in the world so willing to sacrifice resources and credibility to aid and abet the unpopular and illegal actions of a small country that doesn’t sit on a mountain of oil or rare earth minerals?

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Alana Newhouse’s Zionism for Everyone is a macabre mini-manifesto for violent nationalism, but it’s also a useful answer to these questions. Repulsive thought it may be to read, it’s ultimately a good thing for the editor-in-chief of Tablet – the leading outlet for Jewish American Zionism1 – to dispense with the canard that this debate is about Jews or antisemitism. Instead, she asserts something about which we all can agree: the conflict between Palestine and Israel has become a proxy for two different visions of what kind of 21st century we want to live in – internationalism or nationalism, freedom of movement or border walls, multicultural cosmopolitanism or veneration of the “ethnostate.”

That last word is something Newhouse wants to reclaim as a civilizational standard, not just for Jews, but for “everyone” (a term that obviously excludes Palestinians, along with many of Israel’s neighbors). Zionism, she proclaims, is not just for Jews but for right wing nationalists across the world:

“In other words, what Milei is manifesting is Zionism for Argentines. Lee Kuan Yew conceptualized Zionism for Singaporeans. Narendra Modi is practicing Zionism for Indians. What connects these men is not only that they chose nationalism over internationalism—that they rooted their ideologies in the specificities of their unique cultures, which they insisted must remain separate and apart from others—but also that they are future-oriented, high-octane idealists. This balance of cultural particularism with tough-minded pragmatism and inspiring, almost unfathomable idealism? That’s Zionism.”

It’s not a good use of my time or yours to go through the piece’s more tedious right wing talking points. This is a putatively serious essay that refers to Joe Biden’s “open borders” immigration policy as a statement of fact, and groups together DSA and OpenAI as constituents of the same “left” for no logical reason beyond authorial convenience.

Newhouse aims for intellectual gravitas. A sizable section of her argument is dedicated to 19th century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who pioneered modern ideas of nationhood and saw ancient Jews as an early example. I make no pretense of being a scholar of the origins of modern nationalism. I just Googled “johann gottfried herder and german nationalism” and the first two non-Wikipedia entries make clear that Herder defined nation in cultural rather than political terms, and that he strongly opposed national groupings being organized around a centralized military state. To put it simply, the thinker Newhouse uses as the foundation for her defense of an ethnostate opposed tying the ethnos to the state. (Also, it seems strange that Tablet’s editor-in-chief doesn’t feel the need to add any reassuring qualifications about connecting Zionism with a key figure in the origins of German volk nationalism.)

John Ganz, who does know more about most things than I do, makes a similar observation about how Newhouse’s historical analysis of nationalism seems to rest on a shallow reading of the Jewish historian Hans Kohn, who believed in binational Zionism (Jews and Palestinians sharing the land in one state) until he quit Zionism altogether in 1928 after witnessing the non-theoretical brutality of Zionist settler society in Palestine.

But the main reason this essay is ignorant is the same reason why most Zionist arguments are ignorant. They choose obliviousness over acknowledging the obvious but inconvenient existence of another people.

Palestine appears once in this 7500-word essay, the same number as Gaza, and one more than West Bank or Lebanon. There are no references to anything that Israel has done or is currently doing that has generated global outrage. Instead, like a Lost Cause historian bemoaning Lincoln’s “War of Northern Aggression”, Newhouse writes: “Almost out of nowhere the one thing that seemingly everyone—elites, normies, old, young, right, left—suddenly agreed on was that their problem was … Zionism. Israel is uniquely evil, they claimed, because it is an “ethnostate.”

All of this is vapid and typical, except that Newhouse is changing the terrain of the fight in important ways. The fight over Zionism is not about a Jewish state but ethnostates in general; ethnonationalists of the world to unite behind the blue and white flag.

We should welcome this reframing. Let’s all agree that “Narendra Modi is practicing Zionism for Indians,” and that opposing Hindu nationalist pogroms is part of anti-Zionism. When Javier Milei tries to erase the history of his country’s infamously brutal dictatorship2, we should see that this is “manifesting is Zionism for Argentines.”

While many on the left have been making these same connections in recent years (please read Naomi Klein’s speech “The Iron Dome is Global”), it’s good to see the other side doing the same, whether out of bravado, ineptitude, or fanaticism.

The zealotry of “Zionism for Everyone” also helps answer a question that is causing lots of mischief: how is it that tiny Israel seems to be able to lead the giant United States straight into a disastrous Iran war?

Blaming Israel offers a comfortable excuse for right wingers looking to jump ship from this disaster. In Joe Kent’s resignation letter from being the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, he also claimed that Israel tricked the US into not only this war with Iran but the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Don’t be surprised when Tucker Carlson’s 2028 presidential run features claims that Mossad agents aided the Viet Cong, exploded the Space Shuttle Challenger, and stole signs for Venezuela to knock in the go ahead run in the World Baseball Classic.

Newhouse offers an explanation for Israel’s outsized influence that doesn’t rely on implicit or explicit antisemitism. Israel is the global leader of the hard-right nationalism that the current US administration is grappling for. This is a country that has been an out and proud ethnostate for almost 80 years, with a core population fully on board. Militarily and geopolitically, Israel remains a junior partner to the US. But for our country’s Christian imperial nationalists, it’s become every bit the moral, philosophical, and spiritual leader that Newhouse makes it out to be.

This is not a new dynamic. Amy Kaplan writes in Our American Israel about how Israel’s victory in the 1967 war inspired many Americans who saw it as a counterpoint to their own country’s failing war in Vietnam. The new state of Jewish refugees became an unlikely avatar of America’s original settler colonial fighting spirit, prevailing over the natives who surrounded them.

But while Israel and the US formed quite the special relationship over the ensuing decades, there was never any question over who was the Dom. But in the 21st century, American imperialism has become directionless: the shock of 9/11 and the failure of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars has left the US with a military apparatus capable of unprecedented surveillance and destruction but with no clear strategy on how to deploy it. No amount of drone strikes or covert special forces operations has slowed the rise of China or halted the rise of sub-imperialist rivals in a multipolar world.

Now our declining empire has entered its terminally inbred monarch phase. A seemingly limitless menu of assassinations, abductions, and anarchy is at the fingertips of a malleable dullard demagogue being steered by white nationalist advisers and commanding officers cheering on a Christian apocalypse.

What’s changed in the US-Israel relationship isn’t that the latter is an unstoppable force but that the former has become an extremely movable object. Israel remains the tail, but under Trump the giant dog has become functionally brain-dead America under Trump is a brain-dead elephant being flopped around in response to stimuli from what is normally an appendage.

Israel may have more of a political vision than the US, but that doesn’t mean it’s coherent – or sane. Beyond keeping Netanyahu in power, Israel’s strategy is to expand into southern Lebanon, annex the West Bank and Gaza, and… then what? Unlike the US, Israel isn’t looking for simple regime change in Iran – that’s why it keeps assassinating the people Trump is trying to negotiate with. Instead it seems to be trying to degrade Iran and many other countries in the region into “failed states” that might cause global chaos but can’t threaten Israel’s military, economic, or diplomatic regional hegemony.

This is a plan for endless war, and it’s not only sociopathic but also ultimately self-destructive. Does Israel actually think that world powers want the countries on the strait of Hormuz to be as unstable as Afghanistan?

Like any other nationalism empowered to reach its logical endpoint, Zionism is becoming a self-destruct button for the world. The strangest part of Newhouse’s piece is its timing: she writes as if the world is celebrating Israel rather that screaming “What the fuck are you doing?”

Not surprisingly, there’s a fragility to this obtuseness, a deep insecurity underneath the bluster. Like Palestine, the word Trump appears only once in an essay that would rather busy itself with multiple paragraphs about the apparently underrated world importance of Javier Milei.

You would think that a champion of ethnonationalism would be eager to discuss the world’s most famous nationalist, but that might draw attention to the fact that he’s also the most openly antisemitic president in US history. Instead, Newhouse ignores Trump and uses JD Vance and Tucker Carlson to represent the dangers of the right wing turn from Israel. But she’s still in a tough spot, because Vance and especially Carlson use nationalism (America first!) to argue against support for Israel. Newhouse’s only rebuttal is to claim without explanation that opposing Israel is un-American, ludicrously arguing that Carlson has turned against Israel because “he is appealing to an international audience.”

Nationalisms are unable to recognize the legitimacy of competing nationalisms. Everything Newhouse writes about the unifying spiritual power of the ethnostate could be used by a neutral observer to explain why Palestinians continue to resist, with unimaginable consequences, their national erasure. And her words can also explain why in the United States, the people who base “their ideologies in the specificities of their unique cultures, which… must remain separate and apart from others” are moving to open antisemitism. They probably wouldn’t like the analogy, but Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are practicing Zionism for Americans.

At the same time, as more people are recognizing the array of fascist threats from Fuentes through Trump, they are also moving to solidarity with Palestine. “Gaza is the Compass” was the theme of last year’s People’s Conference for Palestine. The slogan was meant to correctly keep the genocide foremost in people’s organizing, but it also works as a larger political orientation for global solidarity against the cruelties and derangements of ethnonationalism. The fight against Zionism is a fight for us all.