call me Adaptus the way Pharma lives rent free in my brain

This regularly happens with Jews. And I noticed it as soon as the New York Times started reporting after October 7th. Survivors were describing the sexual violence, and the New York Times took the terrorists’ word that committing sexual violence was against their religion. Even though the perpetrators had literally filmed themselves. But this happens all the time with Jews. When the ambulances were set on fire in London, people had to discuss violence in the Middle East. When a man drove explosives into a preschool, people had to make excuses for him. When a man threw Molotov cocktails at a peaceful march intended to raise awareness for the hostages, people made excuses for him. Even after he killed a Holocaust survivor. People felt bad because the muderer’s daughter wanted to be a doctor.  I’ve actually seen people do this for every single hate crime against Jews including Bondi in Australia. The murderer of the two young Jewish people who were unalived at the Holocaust Museum has become a martyr to some people. There are posters, honoring him at a university in my state. You don’t have to both-sides-ism a hate crime. Thank you to @msjennspeaks for putting it so eloquently. When you look at it like this, you can see how foul this type of thinking is.

Antizionists: "fuck you, you're trying to silence me"

Jews:

On Saturday, my phone showed me Ro Khanna, standing in the West Bank, announcing that the IDF had detained him. I study attention for a living. The Tel Aviv Institute exists because my colleagues and I believe you can learn more about antisemitism from engagement data than from statements of concern. So when the Khanna story landed, I did what I always do. I scrolled back a week.

On Monday, Khanna was calling on Graham Platner to quit the Maine Senate race. He had rallied with Platner during the campaign. Platner is the candidate with a tattoo widely understood to be a Nazi symbol, which he says he never recognized as one and has since covered, and who was accused last week of rape by a former girlfriend. He calls the allegation categorically false. The Maine Democratic Party’s executive director called it credible. By Wednesday, Platner had suspended his campaign, and Khanna was standing in Khirbet Zanuta. By Saturday, Khanna was posting that settlers with American-made rifles had held him and that soldiers had sided with them. A fundraising email went out shortly after the post. He told The New York Times it was unwise to detain long-shot presidential candidates, and told Reuters the trip had left him more resolved to consider running in 2028.

Parts of his account are contested. The IDF says its soldiers dispersed the settlers and reopened the road. Israeli police say the group had entered a closed military zone. But masked, armed men did block a congressman’s bus; a New York Times photographer witnessed it. Settler violence in the West Bank is real and deserves condemnation from anyone who claims to care about Israel’s future. The incident happened. What interests me is the week that led up to it. Khanna began it tied to a collapsing campaign and ended it as a wronged man with a viral clip and a donation link.

Once you see the shape of that week, you see it everywhere.

I had never heard of Kneecap until footage surfaced of a band member holding a Hezbollah flag while, prosecutors said, chanting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah.” The terror charge collapsed before trial, thrown out because it was filed a day late and without the required sign-off. The career did the opposite of collapsing. Hundreds of fans stood outside a London courthouse for the hearings, and one woman told a reporter she took a day off work just to be there. In the week the charge was announced, the band advertised a surprise London club show with tickets they said would be gone in minutes. They were. A courtroom is an expensive thing to book as a promoter, and they got theirs free.

I did not know Bob Vylan existed until June 2025, when the duo’s frontman led a Glastonbury crowd in chants of “death, death to the IDF,” live on the BBC. The punishment arrived fast: dropped by their agency, US visas revoked, pulled from a festival, a police investigation. Then it evaporated. The investigation closed in December for insufficient evidence. The frontman said in October he would do it again tomorrow, “twice on Sundays.” This week, the duo announced a defamation suit against the BBC, represented by the same Belfast solicitor who won a case for Kneecap. Eighteen months ago, they were a footnote. Today, they are an international free-speech cause with a High Court docket, and the scandal is the only reason anyone outside their scene knows their name.

Greta Thunberg owned 2019. By 2025, the climate movement had slipped out of the news cycle and taken its most famous face with it. Then she boarded a boat to Gaza, was intercepted by Israel, and was deported in front of the world’s cameras. She has been in the headlines ever since. Susan Sarandon’s agency dropped her in November 2023 after she told a rally that Jews were getting “a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country,” remarks she later called a terrible mistake. The apology drew a fraction of the coverage. The relevance stayed. Lizzo spent 2023 and 2024 fighting harassment lawsuits brought by her own dancers, allegations she denies. In March 2024, she posted that she quit, a statement she later softened. Six weeks after that post, she was back on camera thanking the activists working against what she called genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, and crediting them with pulling her out of a depression. The redemption arc wrote itself, and the lawsuits fell out of the conversation.

Every one of these stories turns on the same hinge word: until. A career was over, or a name meant nothing, until. And what sits on the far side of that hinge is never an album or a film. It is Israel.

Anecdotes can be cherry-picked, so here is the case where someone counted. Jackson Hinkle, a commentator who has been thrown off YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram, had 417,000 followers on X on the morning of October 7, 2023. Six months later, he had 2.5 million. The New York Times documented the surge. An Israeli research firm that sampled his new followers found he gained 1.2 million of them in the first nineteen days of the war, and that roughly 40 percent were inauthentic accounts. The Anti-Defamation League tracked five influencers in his orbit and found their combined engagement rose more than 1,070 percent in the six months after the massacre. Hinkle had already explained the business model himself, on a livestream, before any of it happened: “I do everything for the clout,” he said, adding that no one would ever see him do anything without that motive.

Or take an even more unlikely musical comeback. Macklemore had not placed a solo song on the Hot 100 since 2017. In May 2024, he released Hind’s Hall, a protest track against Israel, and within a week reached new solo career peaks on three Billboard sales charts. Forbes covered it as a comeback, in those words. He donated the proceeds to Palestinian refugees. The donation does not change the market data. Attacking Israel was the first thing in seven years that returned him to the charts.

The honest objection is sincerity. Greta may believe every word. Lizzo may be sincere, and Khanna may have been genuinely shaken. I will grant all of it, because it changes nothing. A market never asks whether the seller believes in the product. It asks whether the product sells. What the last three years have demonstrated, in the follower counts and the chart positions, is that anti-Israel positioning is the most reliable comeback vehicle in Western public life. The same vehicle carried a MAGA communist, a progressive congressman, a punk act nobody had heard of, and a pop star everyone had forgotten. Its passengers share no ideology and no audience. The one thing they share is a need for the spotlight.

I will not accuse Ro Khanna of sitting in a minibus calculating engagement. He did not need to. The calculation was finished long before he landed, and every public figure in decline can read the results. The exit from irrelevance runs through Israel, and it stays open because it keeps paying. Platforms reward the rage with reach. Institutions fold after a single news cycle, and audiences keep accepting each conveniently timed awakening as conversion rather than commerce. At the Tel Aviv Institute, we have started logging these comebacks, with dates, follower counts, and revenue. Somewhere out there is a fading name none of us could guess today, someone about to discover the Palestinian cause at the exact moment a career requires it. When that awakening is announced, it will land in our log as one more entry, right on schedule.

According to a source for the New York Post, Ro Khanna was invited to meet freed hostages and survivors of October 7th.

Khanna's team didn't even bother to respond.

His team was also offered an opportunity to meet with Druze civilians in the Golan Heights and a briefing on how aid is currently getting into Gaza. They didn't take it.

Now, if Ro Khanna genuinely believes that aid is not properly getting into Gaza, why not go to the briefing? If he thinks Israel is lying, wouldn't that be the perfect time to get proof?

But he didn't go, because those aren't his intentions. He didn't want to meet with victims of Hamas or those trying to get as much aid into Gaza as they can because they contradict his narrative.

And the narrative is all that matters.

I can’t read this whole piece because he has it locked, but here is his video addressing it and talking about settler violence:

I was looking something up the other day and got a result from the 1930s subreddit, and there was a comment that had been removed by the moderators, but to which someone had replied (and that was still up) telling them they were an antisemite for saying that Jews are the cause of all the abuses in Hollywood and that they’d never generalize like that about any other group of people. this doesn’t mean there haven’t been abusive Jewish men, especially in positions of power, there certainly have been, and we know who they are, and the Jewish community as a whole overwhelmingly condemns them, but their individual behavior is used to smear and demonize world Jewry in a particular way. it’s scary seeing the stereotypes and suspicions and vitriolic attitudes continue to grow.