MAGA fuels techno-antisemitism

Unpopular Front from John Ganz can be pretty highbrow, immersed in the intellectual history of European fascism as much as his more local topic, the American variant of the same. He wants to know where our barbarism comes from. I like his writing.. 

Here he issues a warning about American antisemitism under Trump, when our rulers' loud protestations of combating anti-Jewish bigotry serve as cover for illegal censorship and power grabs in media and academia.

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... When Jews are thus singled out for protection by the state and otherwise seem to be doing economically well in America, and when Israel’s special relationship with the United States grows increasingly difficult to justify, this will only provide fuel for antisemitic demagogues. The shrill castigation of any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic” will only increase curiosity in an uneducated public justly outraged by Israel’s conduct about what’s in the rest of the antisemitic program.

... The Internet’s wholesale destruction of the role of literate cultural mediation threatens all those intellectual professions that Jews have historically held in high esteem and sought out. In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic. Perhaps the mechanism—or more likely its creators in whose image it is created— “recognized” Jews as its competitors in the role of general informational factotum and stood for an older institutional regime, contributing to the “spontaneous” turn of AI to antisemitism. Even if one does not buy this admittedly speculative theory, the decay of national citizenship and the rule of law in favor of the regime of privileges and the manipulated enthusiasms of mobs creates the ideal conditions for the growth of antisemitism.

When the manifest failure of the project of Trumpism becomes clear, one clear course for what’s left of MAGA is to take its populism in a more manifestly antisemitic direction and blame hidden Epstein and Israel supporters for manipulating and hijacking the movement. There will also be a temptation to use antisemitism to distance itself from its contaminating Jewish element. Whether this would lead to its marginalization or its extension of mass support is anybody’s guess. 

We shouldn't be hostage to having to guess -- but here we are, swimming upstream against bigotries.