Society

Last weekend, Felix Klein, Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner, said that he can no longer ‘recommend to Jews that they wear the skullcap at all times everywhere in Germany.’ This statement betrayed two devastating truths. First, that anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance in Germany, as elsewhere in many European states. Second, that no one with any knowledge of the situation has any confidence that things will get better anytime soon. Instead of working to change the latter, Jews are instructed to hide their faith. This is abhorrent for several reasons. The kippah or yarmulke is, like the hijab, an external signifier. It proclaims to the world that the wearer identifies with a particular group and a particular set of ideas.

The faked video of Nancy Pelosi slurring her words as if she was drunk was shared on social media over 2.5 million times. The video wasn’t only shared by random accounts intent on spreading misinformation. Those willing to believe it, or at least to seem willing to do so, included Trump attorney and former NYC mayor, Hizzonor Rudy Giuliani. ‘What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre,’ Giuliani asked, before his critical faculties kicked in and deleted the post. Though Facebook has banned some forms of speech, including white nationalism and fair housing ads from the city of Houston, it opted not to take down the doctored Pelosi video. The concept of reality is under threat.

Knowledge, which is known information, has become the number one commodity in the world. It doesn’t matter how large and important or how small and insignificant a piece of information may be: there is still value in it. Knowledge of a person’s shoe style preference, for example, is valuable to shoe manufacturers or sales organizations which may place targeted ads on social media. Knowledge is king. Given the massive effort placed in collecting, analyzing, cross referencing and disseminating this near infinite body of valuable knowledge, it is odd that no one has yet attempted to exploit the far larger collection of knowledge’s mirror image – the world of ignorance.

Alexander Nazaryan, the national correspondent at Yahoo! News, has a new book out – The Best People, pillorying the Trump administration’s staffing. And guess what? The NeverTrumper set is throwing a book party for him in New York in June, Cockburn has learned. The shindig will be held at the home of the new it girl of the Never Trump clique: Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of northeastern blue-bloods Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast. MJF is known most for her libertine parents, her partial-renunciation of their antics and a weirdly massive Twitter following. She’s now contributing editor of The Bulwark, the Studio 54 of out-of-power, baby boomer conservatives.

If you spend a lot of time reading technology news and commentary on Twitter, you’ve probably heard about the ‘techlash’ – Silicon Valley’s alleged fall from favor in the public eye. From data breaches and Cambridge Analytica to the specter of job-stealing robots and an endless string of comparisons to Black Mirror, tech news has taken a turn for the dystopian. And public trust in these companies, especially Facebook, is legitimately dropping. But Silicon Valley’s media machine sometimes has a tendency to get caught up in its own hype, or in this case, its anti-hype. How real, and how lasting, is the ‘techlash?’ We may have a new litmus test in South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for the presidency.

Hours after being knocked off Facebook and Instagram last week, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, Patient Zero for Twitter-banning, joined the messaging app Telegram and wasted no time firing off the n-word. To his growing list of followers there, he wrote, ‘Like John Lennon, I take “n*gger” to mean any oppressed person. Today’s n*ggers are me, Laura [Loomer], and Alex Jones,’ adding that his black husband gave him permission to write that. That, of course, would have never been allowed on Facebook or Twitter. But Telegram is the new platform of the damned (Tommy Robinson has over 35,000 followers there).

‘First Family’, declares the cover of this week’s TIME, as Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten gaze at the camera, dressed in blue jeans, brown belts and tucked-in button-downs. TIME has only been going since 1923 – a full 95 years younger than The Spectator – but in that time, it’s sought to position itself as something of a political Nostradamus. Hey, if you’ve got to fill the void between the TIME 100 and Person of the Year somehow, why not wildly guess who the next president will be? But how often do those tipped by the magazine rise to glory? Cockburn peered through the archives to discover...not frequently at all. Hillary Clinton has featured on several TIME covers in the past 30 years...

Remember when Donald Trump’s administration courted the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk? What about when the American right was still enamored with Big Tech? That seems a long time ago now. On Friday President Donald Trump tweeted: ‘I am continuing to monitor the censorship of AMERICAN CITIZENS on social media platforms. This is the United States of America — and we have what’s known as FREEDOM OF SPEECH! We are monitoring and watching, closely!!’ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1124447302544965634?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1124447302544965634 Conservatives increasingly accept that Big Tech is a problem, something that stifles creativity and ideas. But will anyone in power ever do anything about it? Sen.

The eccentric debut of Raheem Kassam and financier-attorney Will Chamberlain’s new Human Events is here. Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine is now Raheem’s roundhouse. So how does it look? Not the worst. Eager to solidify the bridge between the Trumpzine of today and the conservative periodical of old, the site is highlighting a forty-something Trump shaking hands with the Gipper. ‘This is no time for “peacetime” Republicans,’ say the editors, dissolving any pretense of partisan non-affiliation. ‘This is a time for brawlers. And we are here to brawl.’ On tap for week one: Donald Trump Jr., Chamberlain’s legal analysis of the Mueller exoneration, the popular populist Italian writer Alessandra Bocchi and Conservative Inc. grandee Dennis Prager, among others.

With the mosque shooting in New Zealand, the bombings of churches in Sri Lanka and the attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, each of the major monotheistic religions have had places of worship attacked by terrorists almost within a month. Houses of worship are a common target for racial and religious supremacists. In the United States, there have been, within the last decade, neo-Nazi shootings at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a black church in Charleston, South Carolina and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These events have kept alive a grim tradition, going back to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, where Ku Klux Klansmen attacked a church with dynamite and killed four little girls.

During the Passover Seder, Jewish families sing a poignant, and sadly, all too true song: וְהִיא שֶׁעָמְדָה לַאֲבוֹתֵיֽנוּ וְלָנֽוּ. שֶׁלֹא אֶחָד בִּלְבָד, עָמַד עָלֵיֽנוּ לְכַלּוֹתֵנֽוּ.

Easter worshippers who opened Thursday’s copy of the International Edition of the New York Times were treated to a cartoon to warm the cockles of white supremacists, Islamists and lovers of ‘Edelweiss’ everywhere. The cartoon, apparently by a Portuguese artist named Antonio Antunes Moreira of Espresso, depicted a blind Donald Trump, resplendent in the kippah he wears at all times except when the cameras are near, being led by Benjamin Netanyahu in the form of a sausage dog, wearing the Star of David dog collar that all sausage dogs wear. Some people published something, and now all those over-sensitive Jews are blaming the entire New York Times for it. How thin-skinned they are.

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.