son of thorns, bridger of minds

Leftist antisemitism is a symptom - American Jews and the Illiberal Left

TLDR: I think we would be wise to stop regarding leftist antisemitism only in its own context and habitually recognize it is a part of a larger issue, the rise of the illiberal left.

To the above examples of Jewish leadership of progressive movements, we can add that Jews were the biggest supporters of gay marriage outside the actual LGBT community, and also made up about half the readership of NAACP and MoveOn journals (last paragraph).

Environmentalism, reproductive freedom, immigration, gun control.... We have always showed up for other people who needed us. But then the progressives all went Except For Palestine.

Good news that we deserve 😌

for people who can’t watch the video: THE AMYGDALA CHANGES TRADITIONALLY FOUND IN MOTHERS SHOW UP IN ALL PRIMARY CAREGIVERS REGARDLESS OF SEX

Changes in this part of the brain were previously used to previously used to argue that women are the ideal primary caretakers of children in all cases. And apparently, it’s false. The reason they found these changes in women was that women were already the primary caretaker in almost all cases, not because there’s something inherent to women that makes them better parents.

this is big news for SAHF and single dads!

This is also big news for adoptive parents and queer couples! Many people try to argue that adoptive parents aren't real parents because of biology and blah blah blah. Bigots will also argue this case against queer people. So, to all my traditionalists: it's not science! It's bigotry and sexist!

I don't have time to do a deep dive for sources but a quick Google gave me this!

video where a Gazan dissident explains he has heard he’s been issued a red classification and is “on the kill list” here:

he knows this is not an idle threat:

Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.

To be clear, he didn't actually get to sit down. The rules say you can only keep talking as long as you're standing.

Also, that record he broke? Was held by a man opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which was intended to protect voting rights for Black citizens.

John Lewis was so outraged by what was happening during the civil rights movement that he started donating time as a lawyer pro bono. His work included setting up housing stings to catch real estate agents who were refusing to sell to Black families.

One of the agents he stung was representing a white family, who said "fuck that and fuck you, we'll sell directly to this Black family...."

....and that's the house Cory Booker grew up in.

Strom Thurmond and his ilk pissed off pre-Senator John Lewis so badly that Lewis started doing legal work that would lead to a Black boy living in a mostly-white neighborhood with very good schools and that Black boy would grow up to be a Black man who became a Black Senator who just destroyed Strom Thurmond's famous record speaking in defense of the ordinary people of our nation and let me tell you not only is truth sometimes stranger than fiction, the wheel of justice grinds slow but exceeding fine and it just turned Strom Thurmond to fucking dust.

And he wore a pin in support of getting the Jewish hostages kidnapped by Hamas home. This shouldn't have to be seen as brave, but in the current climate, it is. Thank you Cory Booker.

March 31, 2025: Columbia JVP pushing antisemitic tropes.

Obama is still tweeting for people to get out of the vote. But he's not going to run a shadow presidency. He's not going to hold massive rallies because 1) Black people, especially Black women, are in their self-care moment and have said repeatedly they are not going to attend protests since their hard work up till now has gone unappreciated by everybody; and 2) Obama lives rent-free in Trump's head and has ever since Obama won the presidency, and Trump would love any excuse to throw him in prison; and Obama does not owe this electorate anything anymore, much less putting his life and the lives of his wife and daughters on the line.

I feel REALLY bad for black, (and LGBT, and native) voters and activists who opened the door to allies and got the Palestine Omnicause using their movements to raise their own profiles to the direct detriment of their messages and cohesion and are now being told that they and their prominent members need to 'meet the moment and organize' or they're neoliberal bootlickers while 40 posadist book clubs decide who to excommunicate. This shit started with Qatari money in ed and activist spaces for years (Irony of ironies being the thing Jews/Zionists/bankers etc are accused of but like.) At a certain point that syncretism just becomes a takeover and it becomes harder to not just say 'Fuck it I told you so' when you do the right thing, get shit on for it, and the people who decided not to do the right thing are demanding you save them with power you don't have because they didn't do the right thing. Sorry if this is a little off topic but like. NAACP/CBC exist for a reason, and that reason is to primarily look after and protect black americans. Ideally other people too, when they can, but a lot of those people haven't been showing up for them. Why demand service from someone you threw away?

It's really enlightening watching white people on social media get really angry at Black people for saying they're not going to participate in the April 5th protests. Even tho they were upfront immediately after the election that many of them were going to step back and let everyone else take the wheel for a while. And white people across the political spectrum are really mad about it, even with Black people being like, "You said back in November you didn't need us, we have faith in you, this is your moment."

I think it's finally sinking in for white "no war but class war" leftists especially that, yeah, maybe burning all your bridges with your Black and Jewish allies wasn't such a smart move, especially now that leftists revealed they hadn't done any organizing beforehand, they had no backup plan.

I didn't think my TIL would be the gutpunch realization that a bunch of leftists and progressives need a Soulful (notional) Dead Holocaust movie Jew-victim or a Magical Negro Who Agrees With Them in order to 'inspire' them actually vote or 'organize' but uh. I guess we are, at best, movie characters to them, and any time we step out of that role they get nasty. I just didn't internalize how movie-y it would get. (So again, back to tropes and fandom. Great) It turns out that if you're a minority who knows how tenuous your rights and legal protections are and your experience is organizing to maximize said protections, you're going to be the backbone of a lot of activist groups that really would rather you didn't exist until they need a token. And if those groups go insane enough and stop fulfilling their function and stop protecting you while demanding your presence as a token and a shield, that's an abusive relationship, and it's time to leave. This of course is also a relevant comparison because the abuser gets more violent as you leave, and when you leave, the abuser tends to realize how much work you were doing for the group/household.

What’s really been bothering me as a jew is that idk what else to do. We got people in power who are working to create an environment where genocide against us once again becomes a mainstream position. The left has show they don’t really give a fuck about us, something we’ve known for a while, but what’s our alternative? If the only people fighting are people who hate us, but hate us less, it feels like I either do my best to work w them on the bigger goals and fight them in their bigotry at the same time. Or i just. Let myself and my people get killed. There was a quote on here I saw, idr who posted it, from a jew writing about jewish life in the USSR who summed it up fairly well.

“I repeat, I continue to think that the Jew, as a threatened minority, cannot allow himself, even today, even in Israel, to break with the forces of the Left. For us, the triumph of democracy, humanitarian and egalitarian ideals in the world, is a question of life or death. But we are here talking about a minimum—a defensive alliance. At best a powerful Left protects us; it does nothing to advance our cause.”

Even if the left is still rife with institutional racism and antisemitism, I don’t see how I can abandon it. Not bc I care about them or bc they care about me. But bc letting the cause go. Letting the right continue without an effective opposition is a death sentence. This isn’t a criticism of those in the black community or jewish community who have given up on the left. As a jew, I get the abandonment and neglect the left has shown for us. Ig I’m just asking, “How?” I realize “How?” can have an accusatory tone (i.e. ‘How could you?’) but I mean this literally. I’d love to give up on the left here but I can’t imagine how. Do you see a better way? Or are a lot of us just at a place where we believe that nothing we do will make a difference at this point? I’d desperately love to be able to give up on the left after how thoroughly the left abandoned us, but I don’t see how I can, just from a perspective of mere survival.

Like. The abusive relationship metaphor is accurate as all hell, and it feels like I can’t leave because all the resources I need to survive are being held hostage by the abuser (the left)

I believe it's from Sartre's Antisemite and Jew discussing Western/French leftism specifically but it's been a minute. I think with racial depolarization in the offing and the shift from White/POC to Black/Not Black (and Sinister Wreckers) we're looking at a need to create and seek resources in our own communities while building alliances with other communities who show up. That isn't to say you shouldn't look for communities elsewhere or are OBLIGATED to stay anywhere, but when my LGBT friends are saying they're more comfortable being, say, LGBT in Jewish spaces than Jewish in LGBT spaces, there's a BIG fucking problem that isn't on US to solve alone. And sometimes that means putting our time, resources, mental health, and allyship elsewhere if all it gets is kicked in the metaphorical dick any time we ask someone else we showed up for to show up for us. Currently my answer to 'How' is the Democratic Party, as angry as I am about how the progressive wing of it (And the leftists they seem to listen to over actual voters) has treated Jewish, Black and LGBT voters, they are demonstrably better than the alternative, and I trust the Biden/Harris/Pritzker/Torres wing of it and want to see them succeed. A third party is not an option. We have to fix the house we live in. Re Activism and organizing? Solidarity is not owed. It is not a brand, a fandom, a one way street or a suicide pact.

Fucking wild to be teaching about Rosa Parks at the same time as a trans woman in Florida does an act of civil disobedience to use a women's restroom in the state capitol

As far as I know, she is the first woman arrested bc of this law. The law requires that the trans person be warned to leave the bathroom by a state official, and then if they stay they are guilty of trespassing after a warning.

So like, me, my gf, others just piss and nobody asks or tells, but this young woman sent a statement about the law to over 100 FL lawmakers so they would know she was coming, the cops were ready for her, she brought a reporter and went in anyway and spent the night in a men's jail. She is out on bail, and is hoping this will inspire change of the law. But if found guilty, and the law is upheld as constitutional, then she could spend up to 60 days in a mens county jail.

Seriously, this is extremely Rosa Parks coded. Good looking, religious college girl. It's the whole playbook. She also added this selfie.

I support her and hope this goes as well as it can.

Shoutout to trans women for being the only ones to do something actually politically radical with the recent trend of girlcore catholicism

i think everyone deserves a large rock a short distance from their home. i dont like that discussions about walkable cities never include plans to allow wider access to large rocks. the people need large rock

If your goals basically amount to "after The Revolution everything will be great because people will all have the Good Ethics and work together in my Perfect System and the Evil People with Bad Morals and Bad Behaviour who are making this world bad will be gone (killed/imprisoned/exiled/all converted to agree with us when they see our Perfect System)" then that's just fascism. I hate to say it but you've put a gay socialist hat on fascism.

The MAGA people are still gonna be around in your Perfect System and a very large proportion of them are still gonna be Like That. We can discourage antisocial behaviour through laws and education and changing cultural norms, but if plans for future society involve [group I'm opposed to] magically not being part of it so the Good People can Do Things Right, well.

✨No Bad Guys Here✨ - how do you want to enforce that.

Honestly, I think this concept of The Revolution is to some leftists what Armageddon is to some Christians: an easy excuse to not try and grapple with difficult problems like hunger or poverty or injustice or climate, because any day now the Great Reckoning will come and wipe the slate clean.

#well you see america was founded on [original sin] which makes it irredeemable and any effort to improve it ultimately pointless#the only hope for salvation is to wait for [armageddon] to destroy it and cast down the unrighteous so the rest of us can [reach paradise]#voting for example is an act of interacting with and investing in this world which is too evil and tenporary to be worth it#not when The Great Reckoning is on its way to wipe the slate clean

@blujayonthewing you can't leave these in the tags

Pppffff

a storm over the ocean

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"Why does Group A deserve human rights if Group B doesn't have them?"

Both groups deserve human rights. That's how human rights work.

Anyone who convinces you to barter one group's rights against another is not interested in giving them to either group.

I don't care what you believe, "Zionazi" is antisemitic. To compare Jews period to Nazis, as well as people who believe Jews should have their native homeland to Nazis, whose very ideology was based on slaughtering and ridding the world of Jews, is antisemitic.

The amount of people in the notes trying to justify being able to call Jews they don't like Nazis is completely unsurprising.

Nazism is a specific form of fascism rooted in antisemitism. Not all forms of fascism are Nazism. Zionism is not a form of nazism, even if you wanted to argue that is a form of fascism (it isn't and not all political ideologies one finds objectionable are a form of facism). Calling Jews Nazis is just a way of leveraging historical trauma against us and engaging in historical revisionism, if not outright justifying or glorifying the Holocaust and Hitler. The slope from zionsm=nazism to "the nazis were right to kill those jews because they were all zionists" is not a very steep one.

Just see the types of things passed during the 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durbin, South Africa:

The Master Sword  ⚔️