Welcome to the Grotty Libertarian Hellscape
And so here we are. The Tony Stark manqué known as Elon now owns Twitter and the grotty libertarian vibe pervades everything. Over the weekend, Musk descended into his new purchase only to spread an anti-gay conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi (since deleted; but the damage is done). Paul Pelosi’s attacker, incidentally, published anti-Semitic blog posts:
Overt anti-Semitism is back. It is everywhere now. “To me, it’s like we’re coming back from a 50-year vacation,” Mark Oppenheimer, co-host of the Jewish podcast “Unorthodox,” told The Washington Post, which has done an excellent job chronicling this new era in which we now find ourselves navigating. The ADL Center on Extremism has found hundreds of Tweets and re-Tweets of anti-Semitic themes since Elon Musk took over the microblogging site.
Florida experienced a banner drop this weekend in which anti-Semites claimed Kanye was right. The state also experienced other incidents of anti-Semitism this weekend. Officials are expressing outrage, but the threat grows larger every passing day …
On Black Anti-Semitism
As Twitter descends into the the grotty libertarian hellscape we had hoped desperately to avoid, it is instructive to focus on one of its horrible aspects, namely Black anti-Semitism. We’ve seen too much of it lately. Pro basketball player Kyrie Irving is the latest black celebrity to join the bigot brigade, emboldened by the American Right. Irving boosted the prospects of the anti-Semitic 2018 film Hebrews to Negroes, which is as suspect as it sounds. The Nets organization has condemned him.
The scurrilous movie traces the beginnings of anti-Black racism to Jewish texts. The film is based on a book that is part of The Black Hebrew Israelite movement. Irving, of course, denies he is an anti-Semite. “Following Brooklyn’s 125-116 home loss to the Indiana Pacers on Saturday, Irving denied that he was antisemitic but did not apologize for his social media posts,” Glynn A. Hill and Ben Golliver write for the Washington Post. Libertarian means never having to say you are sorry.
Peter Beinart writes in his Substack notebook about Black anti-Semitism:
So, Kanye West is talking about Jews exploiting Black people in the media industry, Jews controlling the media. There’s an interesting thread … by a historian at UVA named David Austin Walsh, who starts by noticing that these kinds of tropes are nothing new. Kanye has talked about this for a while. There have been a series of Black public figures who kind of talked this way in the past, even going back to James Baldwin’s famous essay where he writes that, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Walsh notes that there’s a kind of an economic basis for certain class conflict between Black Americans and Jews, and that, tragically, that class conflict can get turned into antisemitism, kind of like what Karl Marx famously called “The Socialism of Fools,” when essentially you’re trying to express a hostility to a certain capitalist structure, but instead of focusing on the structure, you focus on the fact that Jews are in a particular moment in time playing a certain role in that structure. And so, you focus on Jews as rapacious, as exploiters, as money-grubbing, and money obsessed. And that’s what Kanye West is doing. Louis Farrakhan would do that for years. In some ways, it’s not that new. What I think is new is the fact that it now crosses this ideological boundary. Because Kanye West is a Trump supporter, because he—although being a Black public figure—is now someone who’s embraced by parts of the far White Nationalist right, these tropes now are being exploited on the right as well. You see the kind of neo-Nazis putting up these “Kanye was right” signs over highways. And it is because, I think, Trump emboldened the far right, that he created the possibility for this kind of cross-over effect between someone like Kanye West, who is saying things that sadly have been said by, you know, Black celebrities before.
And, unfortunately, at present too.
Jair Bolsonaro: A Superlative Example of Manliness
I’m not sure he is supposed to be doing this from behind the pulpit, as the Church is a tax-exempt entity, but the content is correct:
My cousin, the late Kenyan literary icon Binyavanga Wainaina, is celebrated by Al Jazeera. Rest in peace, Cousin Kenny. (Al Jazeera)
Writer Anka Radakovich went to two Playboy magazine parties back in the heyday, attended by such luminaries as Bill Cosby, Robert Blake and Heff’s hairdresser. “The two parties gave me a short glimpse into the weird and highly sexualized world of Playboy,” she writes. “Most of the women at the parties were 18-22, and most of the men, Hef’s friends, were in their 70’s and 80’s.” (Anka’s Newsletter)
Taylor Lorenz tells CNN’s Jon Sarlin that a growing number of Americans are using TikTok for news. (CNN)
“Lula’s challenges in office will be truly daunting,” writes eternal optimist David Reiff. (TNR)