A Singular Square Of Puffed Wheat

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.

While not a traditional entryist group, I think back to the Tea Party Movement and how they took over the Republican Party during the Obama administration (technically they were an insurgent political faction that radicalized within the party rather than an outside faction that joined in order to capture it, but there are similarities in their methods). I also think back to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and entryists took over before it could even be organized into something cohesive. I remember the infighting from different factions who wanted to push different messages in Philly, the confusion that happened due to said infighting, and the abandonment of the movement by people not members of said factions because they did not agree with the intended escalation of the messaging by factions/faction leaders and the disorganization that resulted from the politicking. Ironically, Isserman talks about this type of phenomenon in regards to how the SDS collapsed.

All told, in that last frantic year of SDS’s existence, the factions in the organization (PL’s “worker-student alliance,” Weatherman, one or two others) amounted to no more than a few thousand members. The other 98,000 rank-and-filers (including me, and most of the small chapter to which I belonged) helplessly watched the unfolding disaster that left us politically homeless.

Isserman talks about how this pattern has repeated multiple times for Left Wing movements in the USA. I've personally seen this same pattern repeat ad nauseum with Leftist movements and political groups I have been a part of or aware of. As soon as something starts to get momentum then the entryists show up and try to take it over. This results in the collapse of the entire thing before any meaningful work can actually get done. The persons who took over and caused the collapse then return to shrieking about how this is proof that their radical beliefs are valid and the entire system/government/world/etc needs to be thrown out and that you can't trust "normies".

Isserman then makes this statement which is truly poignant -

When DSA was founded in 1982 it represented the merger of two groups, one based in the remnants of the labor/socialist left, the other drawn mostly from veterans of the New Left, both determined to learn from the political disasters of the 1960s.

The founders of the DSA were persons who watched the SDS collapse from factional infighting due to entryism. They were veterans who knew how bad factions were and put it into the bylaws. From Isserman -

Tens of thousands of eager young recruits were energized by the 2016 presidential bid of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (although Sanders was not a member of DSA), and the election to Congress of DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in 2018, joined by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in 2020.

All well and good—except for the return of the entryists. Suddenly, in the eyes of revolutionary purists in a host of small competing sects, DSA was no longer to be sneered at as just a reformist swamp. “Why rob banks?” career criminal Willie Sutton was once allegedly asked by a reporter. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied. The exchange is apocryphal, but substitute warm bodies for cold cash, and it offers a concise explanation for DSA’s sudden attractiveness to sectarian strategists. Unknown numbers—hundreds, perhaps more—started joining in 2016, some of them former members of defunct Marxist-Leninist groups, others (in violation of DSA bylaws) still belonging to and carrying out the agendas of such groups. They proceeded to quarrel and compete among themselves, splitting and recombining under various banners like “Red Star,” “Marxist Unity Group,” and even the “Communist Caucus.” But they remained united in one overarching shared aim—to take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating “the left wing of the possible,” and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.

The founders of the DSA knew how dangerous factions and caucuses were. They knew how entryists worked because they all saw it happen in real time. But, and I think this is key, the new members were young and distrusting of their elders because in their minds nothing has been done. As such, the bylaws, rules, SOPs, and procedures were and are just ignored because "they know better". If you have any experience in queer spaces as an elder queer it's not unlike younger queers dismissing anything their elders say or advise them about because "they know better", and then having the exact problem that the older individual was trying to help prevent. As such, entryists and their ideologies were allowed to take over the DSA, all that it stood for, and change it into a monstrously antisemitic organization that demands purity and adherence to certain factions and their ideologies. All of their candidates have horrid foreign policy positions and the national organization (and local chapters) have all put out lip service messaging that barely hides the factional ideals that have subverted the organization from what it once was. Isserman closes out his article with this -

So why am I quitting DSA? There are many reasons. But in the end, the most important comes down to the Sarah Silverman Rule #1 for Judging One’s Political Associates. An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist. It has, as Sarah says “lost me forever.”

What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members. Without descending too deeply into the weeds of sectarian history, entryism has been a recurring phenomenon on the American left since the 1930s.

While not a traditional entryist group, I think back to the Tea Party Movement and how they took over the Republican Party during the Obama administration (technically they were an insurgent political faction that radicalized within the party rather than an outside faction that joined in order to capture it, but there are similarities in their methods). I also think back to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and entryists took over before it could even be organized into something cohesive. I remember the infighting from different factions who wanted to push different messages in Philly, the confusion that happened due to said infighting, and the abandonment of the movement by people not members of said factions because they did not agree with the intended escalation of the messaging by factions/faction leaders and the disorganization that resulted from the politicking. Ironically, Isserman talks about this type of phenomenon in regards to how the SDS collapsed.

All told, in that last frantic year of SDS’s existence, the factions in the organization (PL’s “worker-student alliance,” Weatherman, one or two others) amounted to no more than a few thousand members. The other 98,000 rank-and-filers (including me, and most of the small chapter to which I belonged) helplessly watched the unfolding disaster that left us politically homeless.

Isserman talks about how this pattern has repeated multiple times for Left Wing movements in the USA. I've personally seen this same pattern repeat ad nauseum with Leftist movements and political groups I have been a part of or aware of. As soon as something starts to get momentum then the entryists show up and try to take it over. This results in the collapse of the entire thing before any meaningful work can actually get done. The persons who took over and caused the collapse then return to shrieking about how this is proof that their radical beliefs are valid and the entire system/government/world/etc needs to be thrown out and that you can't trust "normies".

Isserman then makes this statement which is truly poignant -

When DSA was founded in 1982 it represented the merger of two groups, one based in the remnants of the labor/socialist left, the other drawn mostly from veterans of the New Left, both determined to learn from the political disasters of the 1960s.

The founders of the DSA were persons who watched the SDS collapse from factional infighting due to entryism. They were veterans who knew how bad factions were and put it into the bylaws. From Isserman -

Tens of thousands of eager young recruits were energized by the 2016 presidential bid of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (although Sanders was not a member of DSA), and the election to Congress of DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in 2018, joined by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in 2020.

All well and good—except for the return of the entryists. Suddenly, in the eyes of revolutionary purists in a host of small competing sects, DSA was no longer to be sneered at as just a reformist swamp. “Why rob banks?” career criminal Willie Sutton was once allegedly asked by a reporter. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied. The exchange is apocryphal, but substitute warm bodies for cold cash, and it offers a concise explanation for DSA’s sudden attractiveness to sectarian strategists. Unknown numbers—hundreds, perhaps more—started joining in 2016, some of them former members of defunct Marxist-Leninist groups, others (in violation of DSA bylaws) still belonging to and carrying out the agendas of such groups. They proceeded to quarrel and compete among themselves, splitting and recombining under various banners like “Red Star,” “Marxist Unity Group,” and even the “Communist Caucus.” But they remained united in one overarching shared aim—to take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating “the left wing of the possible,” and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.

The founders of the DSA knew how dangerous factions and caucuses were. They knew how entryists worked because they all saw it happen in real time. But, and I think this is key, the new members were young and distrusting of their elders because in their minds nothing has been done. As such, the bylaws, rules, SOPs, and procedures were and are just ignored because "they know better". If you have any experience in queer spaces as an elder queer it's not unlike younger queers dismissing anything their elders say or advise them about because "they know better", and then having the exact problem that the older individual was trying to help prevent. As such, entryists and their ideologies were allowed to take over the DSA, all that it stood for, and change it into a monstrously antisemitic organization that demands purity and adherence to certain factions and their ideologies. All of their candidates have horrid foreign policy positions and the national organization (and local chapters) have all put out lip service messaging that barely hides the factional ideals that have subverted the organization from what it once was. Isserman closes out his article with this -

So why am I quitting DSA? There are many reasons. But in the end, the most important comes down to the Sarah Silverman Rule #1 for Judging One’s Political Associates. An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist. It has, as Sarah says “lost me forever.”

-> this I why I love Mamdani, he never does that!

-> he literally did do exactly that

-> yeah, he did do exactly that, but he could make a spectacle of not doing the thing he promised he could do that he could not practically or legally do!

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.

this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.

therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:

- being a cow

- being an almond

- being a woman

- being a coconut

- being in the omegaverse

- being an oat

(list is exemplary and not finite)

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.