another sufferer of jiang cheng brain disease

"For much of the last two years, Mace has made McBride a frequent target, repeatedly invoking the Delaware Democratic congresswoman in speeches, interviews, social media posts, and legislative fights over transgender rights. Since McBride became the first out trans member of Congress in January 2025, Mace has emerged as one of the most visible anti-trans voices on Capitol Hill, championing efforts to restrict transgender people's access to bathrooms and other gendered facilities in federal buildings. Mace at one point even chased a woman she thought was McBride into a Capitol restroom, only to discover that it was a cisgender colleague.

But on Tuesday, it was McBride delivering the punchline.

"Today is a big day because today is the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary," McBride told the gala crowd. "And for those of you who aren't aware, my colleague and Congress's top bathroom sheriff, Nancy Mace, is on the ballot."

The audience laughed and applauded.

"And while not all of the votes have been counted yet, she is in a respectful fifth place," McBride continued. "I don't like punching down, and I believe in the politics of grace. So all I will say is happy Pride, Nancy."

The room at the Mellon Auditorium erupted with schadenfreude."

danaaliyalevinson:

I don't think most non-Jews realize how scary things have been getting for Jews in diaspora because what's been going on literally doesn't pierce peoples' algorithms if they're not Jewish.

I'm not going to be so hyperbolic that I'd say things are feeling very 1930s Germany, but... I don't think saying that things are feeling very... maybe 1920s Germany? Post WWI Germany? I don't think that's hyperbolic.

Jews have been by far the most targeted group in the United States as far as hate crimes in the most recent data. Antisemitic incidents are up 344% over the last five years. I quibble with defining antisemitism as religious hatred as the current FBI stats do, but even so, antisemitic incidents made up 70% of all 'religion- based' hate crimes in the US in the last year.

Truly every day there's another synagogue set on fire, another foiled terror attack on a Jewish site, another violent incident. Also, of course it's religious Jews, who are the most visible, who bear the brunt of it.

But what's especially been scary is that we are seeing a rise in antisemitism that has broad *active* (not just tacit) support across the political spectrum. From left to right, the rhetoric coming from people has become increasingly just boldly antisemitic. Just straight up blaming Jews for all of society's problems as if we're some nefarious malign actor within US politics level antisemitism. And this antisemitism is being widely disseminated and supported. I have seen people I know *in real life* share and disseminate antisemitism and casual malignment of Jews.

And then the silence from people about it, signaling tacit support, or at least an unwillingness to stick ones' neck out for us in allyship, is making all of our collective inherited trauma spidey senses tingle. Especially because the rhetoric we're seeing from right and left is the same classic antisemitism we know from our history has led to extreme violence, pogroms, and genocide, being repackaged with a pretty transparent "politically acceptable" veneer.

It just really feels as if the rhetoric is hitting such a fever pitch that, being a student of my own history and knowing where such things historically lead, it's inevitably going to lead to something terrible. I am not saying Holocaust-level terrible, I'm not going to be that hyperbolic, and I don't believe that. But terrible nonetheless.

And there simply aren't enough Jews in the world for us to fight against this on our own. And there's just no groundswell of support from anywhere on the political spectrum seeking to help. Which leaves us all feeling very precarious and vulnerable.

And if your instinct when you read the previous two stories is some sort of subconscious 'it's deserved cause, Israel,' ask yourselves...

How do you feel about Russians? Chinese? Iranians? North Sudanese?

If you instinctively understand you shouldn't hold all Russians collectively responsible for the actions of the Russian government, or all Chinese people responsible for the actions of the Chinese government, etc, but if your gut instinct from reading the previous two stories is that Jews should be held collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government (whether or not those Jews are Israeli citizens), or deserve the steep rise in antisemitism because of the actions of the Israeli government, you might want to do some introspection.

There's also a reality that so many people are much more interested in using Gaza, or using the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict more broadly as a politically acceptable space to litigate their feelings about Jews than they are in actually trying to resolve conflict.

And I know this because I watch so many people who, without any actual understanding of Jewish history, culture, identity, or Israeli history, culture, identity, and most of all politics and realpolitik of the country beyond turning it into a flattened strawman, engage in rhetoric and activism that actively perpetuates conflict rather than doing anything that might even come remotely close to resolving it.

Because if people had interest in resolving it they'd be supporting the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps and supporting organizations and people that promote dialogue, respect, and coexistence, not calling for more violence in the name of seeing their side "win" while pretending they're "pro-peace."

And I admit I'm speaking emotionally and not with as much nuance as I normally would. So pretend this is as nuanced as my usual content is and understand I don't mean to be speaking in such absolutes.

Case in point, this is all over Jewish social media today. And this comes right on the heels of a bunch of Hatzalah ambulances, two synagogues, and a Jewish- owned store being set on fire over the last few weeks, mostly in the same neighborhood.

Because our community is seeing these sorts of stories just about everyday at this point. That's how often newsworthy antisemitic incidents are happening.

And you have to remember too that the Jewish community is small. There's about 15 million of us in the entire world.

About half the world's Jews live in Israel, and the other half which are in diaspora are mostly in the US. Israel and the US are the only two countries with a Jewish population in the millions.

There are smaller but substantial diaspora populations of hundreds of thousands in the UK, France, Argentina, Russia, Australia, Germany, and Canada. And after that, we're looking at diaspora populations that only number in the tens of thousands or less.

But because of how small we are, so many of us have connections throughout the entire Jewish world, or Am Yisrael as we call it. AND Jews are very good at maintaining community ties across borders. So, oftentimes when something happens, Jews throughout the world are literally connected to it from ways that are tangential, to ways that are concrete.

So these antisemitic incidents really reverberate throughout the global Jewish population in ways that I think people don't quite grasp.

And also, the thing is, that given that half the world's Jews live in Israel, most of us in diaspora have personal connection to Israel beyond just general affinity due to culture, history, spirituality, etc. We have family and friends who live there. Many Jews living in diaspora are dual citizens.

So if a group's litmus test for who is an acceptable Jew is zero connection to, or empathy expressed for, Israel or Israelis whatsoever... that is by design going to ostracize most Jews.

And the thing that gets me is that there's no engagement beyond that. Because Israelis and Israel have been flattened into a strawman that doesn't actually exist, there's zero political nuance or exploration of one's actual beliefs to ascertain whether or not they actually believe the terrible things which get ascribed to them in this strawman argument. The sin is simply having any connection to Israelis or Israel and that's proof enough. I've seen it happen again and again.

The strawman says that Zionism means being actively pro-genocide, apartheid, colonialism, and white supremacy.

Then it says that evidence that one is a Zionist is any connection to or empathy expressed for Israelis or Israel, even in the most tangential of ways.

And then the logic doubles back on itself, the person who expresses any empathy for Israel or Israelis or any direct connection to them, is now labeled as "pro-genocide” and “pro- white supremacy” without any actual investigation of whether or not the claim that they are pro-these things is true. It basically amounts to slander at this point.

And I know it's happening because I've seen it happen again and again to others, and I've had it happen to me.

I have had people unceremoniously end years long friendships because I posted about the hostages.

And it's like, you have KNOWN me for years. You actually think that *I* am ACTIVELY "pro-genocide"? Like, are you insane?

But that's how strong this strawman bogeyman that's been created has become.

Oh and THEN because this circuitous logic winds up applying to most Jews, and therefore Jews as a collective get coded as being "pro- insert horrible world evil here," violence against us is repeatedly justified along these rhetorical lines and reframed as social justice. After all, it's not antisemitism if one is just fighting against "insert horrible world evil here." Nevermind that the claim is a slanderous strawman argument to begin with.

And the thing is, it's not even original. Like post-enlightenment, as religious antisemitism lost favor, this is how antisemitism functions.

Collectively assign blame for a world evil on Jews. Then ostracize them and commit acts of violence against them in the name of social justice and being against said world evil.

It's what the Nazis did, it's what the Soviets did, it's what multiple governments in Arab and Muslim majority nations did.

ACTUALLY being pro-peace means recognizing that both Jews and Palestinians have legitimate ties to the same piece of land.

It means uplifting voices that seek to find common ground so that both Jews and Palestinians can share it in safety and security.

It means recognizing that a big part of the reason why this conflict has not been solved yet is that *both* movements are ethnonationalist movements, and *both* movements have totalitarian elements within them who want to control all of the land between the river and the sea at the exception of the other people. And that throughout the history of the conflict, one of the two sides has had that totalitarian element in political power, sometimes both at the same time.

It means recognizing those totalitarian elements and naming them.

It means recognizing that Bibi Netanyahu has never been pro peace since the very beginnings of his political career including before his first time as PM and that any framing that pre-supposes that a Netanyahu-led government would make peace if there was a partner on the Palestinian side is nonsense. He'd love to see the West Bank annexed and as many Palestinians forced off their land as possible. That isn't conspiracy, he has said that no Palestinian state will be formed under his watch going all the way back to the 90s.

It means recognizing that Hamas is oppressive toward its own people, and its aims are also totalitarian and within the lineage of other extremist movements in the wahhabist lineage: an Islamic nation under shariah law and the slaughter of all Jews worldwide. And recognizing that the Fatah-controlled PA in the West Bank is sclerotic and has no real political power and that if elections were held tomorrow in the West Bank, Hamas would probably win.

Those who think that supporting Hamas means supporting a pluralistic state built on liberal democratic principles with protections for Jews and minority groups. is either woefully naive, delusional, or both. It's just so incredibly detached from the lived reality of either group living on the land and the realpolitik of the situation. This is entirely a fantasy living in westerners' heads.

And so when you actively support either of these totalitarian views of the future, you are actively supporting the continuation of conflict, not its resolution.

Also my biggest frustration with diaspora Jewish legacy orgs right now is their abject failure to confront this issue head on.

The ones that are willing to name it are also essentially doing hasbara, which then damages their credibility with moveable middle audiences when they refuse to acknowledge the big issues in Israeli society and human rights abuses committed by this government, or only do it tacitly after immense pressure.

Then the ones who aren't essentially just doing hasbara refuse to name the problem directly, and will talk around Israel when they talk about antisemitism, out of fear that the other left wing organizations they're in community and partnership with. will ostracize them and brand them as "insert world evil label here"

And so it's just leaving this big vacuum where the actual issue is not being addressed by anyone with institutional power. And Jews on social media have tried to fill the gap. But it's a drop in the bucket.

And just to be clear, obviously supporting Palestinian liberation doesn't inherently mean one supports Hamas. I don't mean to imply that.

That previous story is specifically directed at the explicit 'support the axis of resistance' crowd who actively does support Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. And that part of the movement in the west has absolutely become ascendant.

All Zionism means to Jews is that the belief that Jews have a right to self determine in our ancestral land.

That's it. That'd the whole thing.

And while modern political Zionism is new, it's hardly the first attempt to reconstitute Jewish safety and sovereignty on all or part of the land, whether we're talking messianic movements like Sabbatai Sevi in the 1600s, or political movements like Doña Gracia's efforts to carve out a Jewish autonomous zone in Tiberias and Safed in the 1500s, or the efforts of Jews in the 600s to reclaim sovereignty over Jerusalem, and many movements in between.

This idea that Jews were exiled by Rome and then just came back 1800 years later and said 'this is ours now' is just a preposterous distortion of history.

Ever since Rome smashed Jewish sovereignty over the land, Jews have maintained cultural, spiritual ties to the land, have venerated the land, have remained living in the land, and have sought to regain self determination in it. And contrary to popular belief, Jews remained the demographic majority of the land until at least the 400s AD, and some historians argue all the way up to the 600s at the time of the Arab conquest. And even for those historians who don't believe Jews were the outright majority in the 600s, most would still agree that Jews were the largest group by plurality.

And in fact the Jewish population of the land didn't REALLY start to decline until the Crusader era and the years post the Crusader Kingdoms due to extreme discriminatory laws barring Jews entirely from the Crusader Kingdoms, and then after that, extreme pressure via systemic discrimination to convert to Islam from successive Arab and then Ottoman leaders (and many did which is why Palestinians and Jews are so genetically similar).

So this is all to say, this connection to the land, this cultural self perception of being born of this land, physically living in the land, trying to regain self determination in the land, this has been a huge thread in Jewish history for over a millennia and a half.

And as far as Zionism.

There are left-wing Zionists Right-wing Zionists

Zionist environmentalists

Zionist federationists

Right wing Zionists

Fascist Zionists

Religious Zionists

Zionists who don't believe in a centralized nation state and think self determination should be more community based.

I could go on and on. Zionism isn't one thing. It is an umbrella term that states Jews have a right to self-determine on at least part of the land.

saw this cute pic of a raven making a heart, had to draw crowxian

My first illustration for my typesetting of the amazing fic I wish you were my husband 🤭