No, Slate, We Can't Tune Out The Antisemites
The louder and more explicit antisemitic voices become, the more dangerous they get. We have to shout them down.
The other night, I was perusing my favorite website, Slate (ha! You thought we were right-leaning!) when I came across an unusually misguided take on the recent antisemitic, white-nationalist, Hitler-loving rants of Kanye West and his ilk. The piece was written by Dahlia Lithwick, who is, for my money (and yes, I'm a paid Slate Plus subscriber) the best writer they've got.
She's apparently sick and tired of having to keep up with Ye's latest outbursts. She's sick of having to care about Nick Fuentes (read more on him from GotD here). She's sick of Trump. She's sick of how much space - how much air time - it appears that the Republican Party is willing to grant them. In the piece, she asks,
In short, the defining questions of this political era continues to be about how much attention the seemingly endless series of Matryoshka dolls of damaged celebrity narcissists currently running the world must be granted, and how much of our attention do they deserve, given that they feed off it, and also, what do we do about the fact that they never ever do anything actually worthy of any of it?
Lithwick goes on to suggest,
Maybe Ye finally saying “I like Hitler” out loud is solid enough to stop the endless cycle. Maybe we just need to see just enough “I like Hitler” to bear witness to what may just be the end of the line.
As much as I respect Lithwick, I’m alarmed by these questions. And as for her last suggestion, I have to disagree strongly. The “end of the line?” Far from that, I'm afraid that someday, we will look back and recognize that this was only the beginning.
It's not that I don't understand the impulse to ignore this rhetoric, to tune it out. It's very, very hard to stay constantly open to bad or distressing news. I remember feeling this way during the first couple of years of the Trump presidency: “Can't I just ignore him?” I'd think, as he attempted to ban immigration from Muslim nations, or referred to Caribbean and Central American states as “shithole countries.” I'd sit there on the sofa, peacefully sipping my coffee and clicking aimlessly about the internet, when I'd stumble on a report of his declaration that Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS.” Or I'd be driving to the grocery store, cheerily oblivious, when the radio would announce that Trump had stated that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville Nazi demonstrations and their protests.
I still remember hearing that. I almost drove up onto the curb.
Every single instance like that shocked and drained me - even as I came to expect such remarks to keep rolling in, worse and more inflammatory than before. So I just stopped following him. It was hard, but yes, for awhile, I simply stopped reading and listening to the news. It felt good, for awhile.
However, I eventually came to see that, because of these comments - this kind of rhetoric - there were a lot of groups of people who felt threatened by that administration. Muslims, Hispanic immigrants - all immigrants, really - members of the LGBTQ+ community, and many more began to feel that their safety was not guaranteed. I have to say that I felt more or less personally safe during that administration, but that didn't mean I should tune out. Rather, I decided, this meant that the very least I could do was stay informed. I could at least track who felt threatened, why, and what could be done to combat what felt to many like a fire hose of hate, located in Washington or in Palm Beach, capable of spewing suspicion, disdain, disrespect, and prejudice all over the country.
So, when it comes to Kyrie Irving, Kanye West, Dave Chappelle, etc., I truly do empathize with the temptation to say, “These people aren't worth my time,” or, “I have to turn away from this.” But the recent escalation, and the remarkably high visibility, of recent declarations of antisemitism are too dangerous to ignore.
See, the thing is, West didn't just say he “liked” Hitler. He said he “loved” him. In fact, he said on Alex Jones' Infowars podcast that “there's a lot of things I love about Hitler.”
This, frankly, should scare the living hell out of anyone hearing it.
Kanye West is an incredibly rich, famous, influential, and loud person. Judging from the very high number of people walking around in eye-wateringly ugly, misshapen foam sneakers, plenty of folks are willing to take their cues from him. So, whether we think there should be or not, the fact is that there are an awful lot of people listening to him, to Nick Fuentes, et al. There are an awful lot of people agreeing with them. Violence is being committed in their names. This is not just rhetoric - this is something else. This is tangible harm.
Antisemitism must always be refuted. Antisemitism must always be denounced. Like racism, like Islamophobia, like homophobia, it must always be roundly rejected whenever it crops up.
But the big difference with blatant hatred for the Jewish people threatening, once again, to go mainstream, is that we all know where it leads. We know what happens when people, in large enough numbers, want to go “death [sic] con three” on the Jews. It's happened before - not even a hundred years ago.
It must never be allowed to happen again.