Wear down a word, turn it inside out, and let institutions give the corpse a certificate of authenticity. Then, you can accuse anyone of anything, and the accusation itself becomes its own proof.
If we are going to obliterate the distinction between war crimes and genocide, then we will need yet another third term to describe Germany’s actions during WWII, which were so manifestly aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people, NO MATTER what country we lived in. In fact, they rounded us up in Germany and every country they occupied—way before the Nazis conceived of a more efficient way of doing away with us—and murdered and raped us JUST BECAUSE WE WERE JEWS. Beyond the communists, Germany did not have political targets of their hatred—this was a RACIAL war, imagined from the beginning as aimed at racial purification. (And even the evil of communism was attributed to the dominance of Jews within the ranks of “Bolsheviks”)
Have any Israeli soldiers invaded nearby countries, looking for Arabs to gather up and rape and murder? Have they ever lined up Palestinian women and children in Gaza, shot them and thrown them into mass graves? Have they ever celebrated the deaths of the civilians who were killed in the bombings of buildings built over Hamas’s network of tunnels, where the terrorists cowered, allowing their own people to be collateral of THEIR war against Jews?
Hamas’s stated (often, proudly stated) aim IS genocidal. Yet somehow, the so-called “pro-Palestine” groups in this country and others have ignored that, while seeing the Israelis who have been terrorized, raped, and murdered by Hamas as the unfortunate by-product an act of “resistance.”
Susan, what you write goes to the core of what this essay was trying to name. The Holocaust wasn’t merely a crime of scale; it was a crime of intent - a state-organized, industrialized campaign to erase a people from existence. It gave birth to the very word genocide, a word that was meant to be unambiguous, non-transferable, and sacred in its precision.
When that word is now flung at Israel - a state fighting an enemy that openly calls for its annihilation - we’re not just lying. We’re desecrating memory. The moral vocabulary forged from the ashes of Europe is being retooled by those who would have applauded the original crime. And, as you rightly say, if everything is genocide, then nothing is.
However harsh Israel’s actions may be judged, to equate them with the racial extermination that defined Nazi Germany is a moral and historical obscenity. Yet the semantic inversion continues, precisely because it serves the same psychological need that antisemitism always has: to cast Jews as the aggressors even when they are defending their right to exist.
Your comment captures what’s at stake here: not just accuracy, but moral proportion. If the distinction between war and genocide collapses, then the meaning of evil itself collapses with it - and that, more than any bomb, is what threatens civilization.
Your comment means a great deal to me. Your piece is absolutely brilliant and I’ve posted it on my Facebook page and many others. Would be grateful and delighted to have you read my latest. It’s the first part of a couple of stacks bringing popular culture, history, and my own experience together. https://susanbordo.substack.com/p/i-am-not-a-camera
As the UN is a worthless organization the solution is to remove them from the US and have them meet in Iran, Saudia Arabia, or Bangladesh. Turn the Turtle Bay building into housing in a city which sorely needs it and just to be provocative here the US and Israel should leave this corrupt body. Since the US alone pays about 25% of the cost of this clown show let the anti-semites around the world pay for their forum elsewhere.
Richard, you’re right about the rot of the UN, but geography won’t disinfect it. Moving them from New York to Riyadh or Dhaka would only change the wallpaper on the same decaying structure. The problem isn’t where it sits, but what it has become - an institution hijacked by the very regimes it was meant to restrain.
Even stripped of its American address, the UN would continue to serve as the final court of moral authority in global discourse: “The UN said so.” Nobody asks who drafted those resolutions, who voted for them, or what interests they serve. Look closely at the roll call - Iran, China, Venezuela, Yemen - and you’ll see a rogues’ gallery sitting in judgment over democracies.
The tragedy is that their proclamations still carry the aura of legitimacy. When these regimes speak through the UN, they weaponize its blue flag to launder their own crimes and indict those who resist them - above all, Israel. What we’re witnessing is not just corruption but the inversion of moral order: genocidaires accusing the targets of genocide, dictators claiming to defend human rights.
What’s needed now isn’t relocation, but exposure - the discrediting, and ideally dismantling, of an organization that long ago ceased to serve the ideals it invokes. Until that happens, the UN will remain exactly what it is: a cathedral of hypocrisy built on the graves of meaning and memory.
That's why I said the US and Israel should leave the UN and send them anywhere out of the US. They're a toothless disorganization and the sooner they've moved on the better.
Not to mentioned biased against Israel, the home of the most amazing people and human advancements. Half to 2/3 of the UN would have us all living under sharia regimes if they had their way!
Brilliant! Do I have permission to use “semanticide” ? I written op-Ed’s and letters to editors trying to describe this with only a modicum of success getting published. Perhaps this will jazz my rhetoric enough to get there.
I'm reading "Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins" (2015) by David Patterson and one thing I'm learning is that there's no word, phrase, thought or deed involving Jew hatred and the desire to destroy Israel that wasn't done first by the Soviet Union:
—The Soviets were among the first to propagate the lie that the Zionists were the instigators of the Holocaust, with figures such as historian Vladimir Begun (d. 1989) declaring that the Zionists’ evil is based on the Torah, which, he says, is full of “bloodthirstiness and moral degeneracy.”...The Soviet Union’s campaign against the Zionists was most profoundly reflected in its vicious oppression of Soviet Jewry, cementing the tie between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism....“the orchestrated [Soviet] campaign [against the Jews] that unfolded in 1982, and the unexpected resonance it found in the West, eroded the already flimsy distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Not surprisingly, the primary quarter in which this anti-Zionist Jew hatred found some resonance in the West was among left-wing intellectuals.
Nicholas De Genova of Columbia University: “The heritage of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The state of Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust.” (2009)
Marc Ellis of Baylor University: “The Palestinians are comparable to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, awaiting annihilation.” (2005)
Joshua Schreier of Vassar College: “Israel is engaged in a low-grade war of genocide against the Palestinians.” (2005)
The list of left-wing academics who live off of Jew hate is so long that we would need an encyclopedia to include them all.
Israel's enemies have been accusing it of "genocide" since at least the 1970s and like their Soviet predecessors they are shamless liars who believe it's justified to do or say anything, no matter how wicked and dishonest, if it's in pursuit of their Sacred Cause, which in this case is the destruction of the Jewish state. The modern Left picked up its Jew hate from their beloved Communism and now it's merged with jihadism to become a totalizing crusade that brooks no dissent and is the paramount purpose of every Leftist on the globe—the dictatorship of the proletariat has been exchanged (once again) for the extermination of the Jews.
Patterson again:
"For anti-Zionists, the more repugnant the accusation made against Israel the better. In other words, like all anti-Semites, the anti-Zionists oppose the Jewish state not for any action but for its presence. Indeed, whatever the current evil might be—racism, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide–one can be sure that the anti-Zionists will hang the label on the Jewish state. Like the religious and secular anti-Semites of the nineteenth century, the religious and secular anti-Zionists, from rabid Jihadists to radical liberals, share a self-righteous indignation over the very existence of the Jewish state precisely because they themselves would be the moral measure of humanity."
The inversion of language began when the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis was described in industrial and scientific language ad the Final Solution and implemented via language such as resettlement in the east
I am sending it to Ann Telnaes - a wonderful American cartoonist (usually) who had it all wrong when she drew Netanyahu with a large Jewish star on his middle looking into the eyes of supposedly starving Gazan children. Her substack was full of accolades and anyone who dared to disagree with her depiction was immediately attacked, full scale.
Another word I have seen is "empathicide" (not sure if I have spelled it correctly) which is basically feeling so much "empathy" for one people that one is unable to see the larger picture or consider that they may have fallen prey to very effective propaganda instead of using their empathy wisely to the point that they kill the victim, not the perpetrator.
What the world itself has taught me since October 7th is that Jewish hatred is like a cancer that always exists on a microscopic level. Often undetectable, it metastasizes quickly once activated. In this case, the slaughter of 1200 innocent people at a music festival became the symptom of the spread to higher education, all kids of supposed human rights groups, countries who are already known to violate human rights, and it becomes the soapbox everyone stands on, including people who should know better, but don't.
As for the UN, Israel and Jews everywhere should see it for what it is - an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist organization and withdraw from it, completely. Let them honor the real wolves in sheep's clothing. Until every country in the UN respects Israel and states, at the very least, that Israel has a right to exist, it does Israel and Jews everywhere no favors. We should not be part of any organization that does not recognize us at even a very basic level.
This essay reminds me of a very similar speech and book written years ago by Sha’i ben-Tekoa:
War of words to change reality
Phantom Nation: Inventing the "Palestinians" as the Obstacle to Peace, Volume I
Product description by Amazon
"Phantom Nation is available as one complete Kindle eBook or in three separate paperback volumes. They can be purchased separately or together. (See below.) For either supporters of Israel or the putatively Paleolithic “Palestinians,” Phantom Nation is a must-read. Sha’i ben-Tekoa skewers the myth of a “Palestinian” nation with rights to land the League of Nations specifically recognized as Jewish. The author, hired for a research project by the Office of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir discovered the first mention ever in a United Nations resolution of “Palestinians” in the year 1970, three years after Israel conquered Judea and Samaria, a.k.a. the “West Bank.” The author shows how this very no-name of a name, “West Bank,” had to be invented for hills the Arabs never had a name for; hence the sterile, topographical description lacking all historical associations which exposes the fraud that is the “Palestinian” counter-claim to land the League said was Jewish. Before 1959, when Gamal Nasser of Egypt conjured up the idea of a phantom “Palestinian entity,” the record of Holy Land history is perfectly empty of any mention of them. After Ben-Tekoa's government assignment ended, he went in search of the full story surrounding the birth of this allegedly archaic society, and the story he tells covers the entire sweep of Zionist and Israeli history, its wars and waves of Arab and Muslim massacres (terrorism) and the birth of this notional nation a Biblical generation of forty years after the League of Nations Mandate. He likens the rise of “Palestinian Nationalism” to Holocaust Denial as a twin perversion of history, our generation’s successor ideology to medieval Christianity and Nazism as forms of homicidal anti-Semitism. It is our time’s way of justifying the mass murder of Jews. Phantom Nation is also a crackling, riveting, great read.
About the Author
Sha’i ben-Tekoa was born, raised and educated in the United States of America. He received a B.A. in Comparative Religion from Columbia University and did graduate work in same at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A traveler in Arab lands, he served in the Yom Kippur War effort of 1973. His articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Midstream, Congress Monthly and other publications. He appeared on American Public Broadcasting’s The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. In preparation for 1991’s historic Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, he worked on assignment for the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir. Formerly the lead English language commentator for IsraelNationalNews.com, his Internet radio commentary and music program can be heard at: www.deprogramprogram" 👇
Your comment means a great deal to me. Your piece is absolutely brilliant and I’ve posted it on my Facebook page and many others. Would be grateful and delighted to have you read my latest. It’s the first part of a couple of stacks bringing popular culture, history, and my own experience together. https://susanbordo.substack.com/p/i-am-not-a-camera
Thank you for this article. It is a lot to digest. I want to print it, break it down into small bites and digest it. Besides writing about something very important, you have done so beautifully. It is an ambitious piece and could well serve as the foundation for serious round table discussion groups, course in linguistic studies, or even a graduate thesis. It certainly bears reading more than once or indulging in the typical "scrolling down" process that we engage in when a catchy title captures our curiosity. The only note of encouragement I glean from reading something as thoughtfully executed as this essay is that there are people like you who think deeply and analytically and present your observations in such a way that your readers are compelled to do the same. Kudos.
We know this is happening, though you do an excellent job of articulating and cataloging it. The million dollar question is how do to combat/stop it?
I see this as sadly one more example of the corruption (and destruction) of our institutions. We’re fast approaching a world where trust will be an endangered species (if not totally extinct) facts will not converge, and narratives will drive everything.
If we are going to obliterate the distinction between war crimes and genocide, then we will need yet another third term to describe Germany’s actions during WWII, which were so manifestly aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people, NO MATTER what country we lived in. In fact, they rounded us up in Germany and every country they occupied—way before the Nazis conceived of a more efficient way of doing away with us—and murdered and raped us JUST BECAUSE WE WERE JEWS. Beyond the communists, Germany did not have political targets of their hatred—this was a RACIAL war, imagined from the beginning as aimed at racial purification. (And even the evil of communism was attributed to the dominance of Jews within the ranks of “Bolsheviks”)
Have any Israeli soldiers invaded nearby countries, looking for Arabs to gather up and rape and murder? Have they ever lined up Palestinian women and children in Gaza, shot them and thrown them into mass graves? Have they ever celebrated the deaths of the civilians who were killed in the bombings of buildings built over Hamas’s network of tunnels, where the terrorists cowered, allowing their own people to be collateral of THEIR war against Jews?
Hamas’s stated (often, proudly stated) aim IS genocidal. Yet somehow, the so-called “pro-Palestine” groups in this country and others have ignored that, while seeing the Israelis who have been terrorized, raped, and murdered by Hamas as the unfortunate by-product an act of “resistance.”
Susan, what you write goes to the core of what this essay was trying to name. The Holocaust wasn’t merely a crime of scale; it was a crime of intent - a state-organized, industrialized campaign to erase a people from existence. It gave birth to the very word genocide, a word that was meant to be unambiguous, non-transferable, and sacred in its precision.
When that word is now flung at Israel - a state fighting an enemy that openly calls for its annihilation - we’re not just lying. We’re desecrating memory. The moral vocabulary forged from the ashes of Europe is being retooled by those who would have applauded the original crime. And, as you rightly say, if everything is genocide, then nothing is.
However harsh Israel’s actions may be judged, to equate them with the racial extermination that defined Nazi Germany is a moral and historical obscenity. Yet the semantic inversion continues, precisely because it serves the same psychological need that antisemitism always has: to cast Jews as the aggressors even when they are defending their right to exist.
Your comment captures what’s at stake here: not just accuracy, but moral proportion. If the distinction between war and genocide collapses, then the meaning of evil itself collapses with it - and that, more than any bomb, is what threatens civilization.
Your comment means a great deal to me. Your piece is absolutely brilliant and I’ve posted it on my Facebook page and many others. Would be grateful and delighted to have you read my latest. It’s the first part of a couple of stacks bringing popular culture, history, and my own experience together. https://susanbordo.substack.com/p/i-am-not-a-camera
The flag of the United Nations should be the swastika.
As the UN is a worthless organization the solution is to remove them from the US and have them meet in Iran, Saudia Arabia, or Bangladesh. Turn the Turtle Bay building into housing in a city which sorely needs it and just to be provocative here the US and Israel should leave this corrupt body. Since the US alone pays about 25% of the cost of this clown show let the anti-semites around the world pay for their forum elsewhere.
Richard, you’re right about the rot of the UN, but geography won’t disinfect it. Moving them from New York to Riyadh or Dhaka would only change the wallpaper on the same decaying structure. The problem isn’t where it sits, but what it has become - an institution hijacked by the very regimes it was meant to restrain.
Even stripped of its American address, the UN would continue to serve as the final court of moral authority in global discourse: “The UN said so.” Nobody asks who drafted those resolutions, who voted for them, or what interests they serve. Look closely at the roll call - Iran, China, Venezuela, Yemen - and you’ll see a rogues’ gallery sitting in judgment over democracies.
The tragedy is that their proclamations still carry the aura of legitimacy. When these regimes speak through the UN, they weaponize its blue flag to launder their own crimes and indict those who resist them - above all, Israel. What we’re witnessing is not just corruption but the inversion of moral order: genocidaires accusing the targets of genocide, dictators claiming to defend human rights.
What’s needed now isn’t relocation, but exposure - the discrediting, and ideally dismantling, of an organization that long ago ceased to serve the ideals it invokes. Until that happens, the UN will remain exactly what it is: a cathedral of hypocrisy built on the graves of meaning and memory.
That's why I said the US and Israel should leave the UN and send them anywhere out of the US. They're a toothless disorganization and the sooner they've moved on the better.
Not to mentioned biased against Israel, the home of the most amazing people and human advancements. Half to 2/3 of the UN would have us all living under sharia regimes if they had their way!
Well stated! The UN is worse than the League of Nations ever was and good folks had the intelligence to end it. The corrupt UN must end immediately!
Brilliant! Do I have permission to use “semanticide” ? I written op-Ed’s and letters to editors trying to describe this with only a modicum of success getting published. Perhaps this will jazz my rhetoric enough to get there.
You have my expressed permission to use it. Thank you for your attentive reading and for sharing your comment.
I'm reading "Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins" (2015) by David Patterson and one thing I'm learning is that there's no word, phrase, thought or deed involving Jew hatred and the desire to destroy Israel that wasn't done first by the Soviet Union:
—The Soviets were among the first to propagate the lie that the Zionists were the instigators of the Holocaust, with figures such as historian Vladimir Begun (d. 1989) declaring that the Zionists’ evil is based on the Torah, which, he says, is full of “bloodthirstiness and moral degeneracy.”...The Soviet Union’s campaign against the Zionists was most profoundly reflected in its vicious oppression of Soviet Jewry, cementing the tie between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism....“the orchestrated [Soviet] campaign [against the Jews] that unfolded in 1982, and the unexpected resonance it found in the West, eroded the already flimsy distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Not surprisingly, the primary quarter in which this anti-Zionist Jew hatred found some resonance in the West was among left-wing intellectuals.
Nicholas De Genova of Columbia University: “The heritage of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The state of Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust.” (2009)
Marc Ellis of Baylor University: “The Palestinians are comparable to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, awaiting annihilation.” (2005)
Joshua Schreier of Vassar College: “Israel is engaged in a low-grade war of genocide against the Palestinians.” (2005)
The list of left-wing academics who live off of Jew hate is so long that we would need an encyclopedia to include them all.
Israel's enemies have been accusing it of "genocide" since at least the 1970s and like their Soviet predecessors they are shamless liars who believe it's justified to do or say anything, no matter how wicked and dishonest, if it's in pursuit of their Sacred Cause, which in this case is the destruction of the Jewish state. The modern Left picked up its Jew hate from their beloved Communism and now it's merged with jihadism to become a totalizing crusade that brooks no dissent and is the paramount purpose of every Leftist on the globe—the dictatorship of the proletariat has been exchanged (once again) for the extermination of the Jews.
Patterson again:
"For anti-Zionists, the more repugnant the accusation made against Israel the better. In other words, like all anti-Semites, the anti-Zionists oppose the Jewish state not for any action but for its presence. Indeed, whatever the current evil might be—racism, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide–one can be sure that the anti-Zionists will hang the label on the Jewish state. Like the religious and secular anti-Semites of the nineteenth century, the religious and secular anti-Zionists, from rabid Jihadists to radical liberals, share a self-righteous indignation over the very existence of the Jewish state precisely because they themselves would be the moral measure of humanity."
It’s not coincidence that truth died under communism.
The inversion of language began when the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis was described in industrial and scientific language ad the Final Solution and implemented via language such as resettlement in the east
Brilliant piece.
I am sending it to Ann Telnaes - a wonderful American cartoonist (usually) who had it all wrong when she drew Netanyahu with a large Jewish star on his middle looking into the eyes of supposedly starving Gazan children. Her substack was full of accolades and anyone who dared to disagree with her depiction was immediately attacked, full scale.
Another word I have seen is "empathicide" (not sure if I have spelled it correctly) which is basically feeling so much "empathy" for one people that one is unable to see the larger picture or consider that they may have fallen prey to very effective propaganda instead of using their empathy wisely to the point that they kill the victim, not the perpetrator.
What the world itself has taught me since October 7th is that Jewish hatred is like a cancer that always exists on a microscopic level. Often undetectable, it metastasizes quickly once activated. In this case, the slaughter of 1200 innocent people at a music festival became the symptom of the spread to higher education, all kids of supposed human rights groups, countries who are already known to violate human rights, and it becomes the soapbox everyone stands on, including people who should know better, but don't.
As for the UN, Israel and Jews everywhere should see it for what it is - an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist organization and withdraw from it, completely. Let them honor the real wolves in sheep's clothing. Until every country in the UN respects Israel and states, at the very least, that Israel has a right to exist, it does Israel and Jews everywhere no favors. We should not be part of any organization that does not recognize us at even a very basic level.
Am Yisrael Chai - whether the UN likes it or not.
Thank you Paul Friesen for a truly remarkable piece!
This need to be distributed widely...
This essay reminds me of a very similar speech and book written years ago by Sha’i ben-Tekoa:
War of words to change reality
Phantom Nation: Inventing the "Palestinians" as the Obstacle to Peace, Volume I
Product description by Amazon
"Phantom Nation is available as one complete Kindle eBook or in three separate paperback volumes. They can be purchased separately or together. (See below.) For either supporters of Israel or the putatively Paleolithic “Palestinians,” Phantom Nation is a must-read. Sha’i ben-Tekoa skewers the myth of a “Palestinian” nation with rights to land the League of Nations specifically recognized as Jewish. The author, hired for a research project by the Office of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir discovered the first mention ever in a United Nations resolution of “Palestinians” in the year 1970, three years after Israel conquered Judea and Samaria, a.k.a. the “West Bank.” The author shows how this very no-name of a name, “West Bank,” had to be invented for hills the Arabs never had a name for; hence the sterile, topographical description lacking all historical associations which exposes the fraud that is the “Palestinian” counter-claim to land the League said was Jewish. Before 1959, when Gamal Nasser of Egypt conjured up the idea of a phantom “Palestinian entity,” the record of Holy Land history is perfectly empty of any mention of them. After Ben-Tekoa's government assignment ended, he went in search of the full story surrounding the birth of this allegedly archaic society, and the story he tells covers the entire sweep of Zionist and Israeli history, its wars and waves of Arab and Muslim massacres (terrorism) and the birth of this notional nation a Biblical generation of forty years after the League of Nations Mandate. He likens the rise of “Palestinian Nationalism” to Holocaust Denial as a twin perversion of history, our generation’s successor ideology to medieval Christianity and Nazism as forms of homicidal anti-Semitism. It is our time’s way of justifying the mass murder of Jews. Phantom Nation is also a crackling, riveting, great read.
About the Author
Sha’i ben-Tekoa was born, raised and educated in the United States of America. He received a B.A. in Comparative Religion from Columbia University and did graduate work in same at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A traveler in Arab lands, he served in the Yom Kippur War effort of 1973. His articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Midstream, Congress Monthly and other publications. He appeared on American Public Broadcasting’s The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. In preparation for 1991’s historic Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, he worked on assignment for the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir. Formerly the lead English language commentator for IsraelNationalNews.com, his Internet radio commentary and music program can be heard at: www.deprogramprogram" 👇
https://youtu.be/SH0w7dUBfnE
Thank you .. I have just bought volume 1 and 2 ..
Your comment means a great deal to me. Your piece is absolutely brilliant and I’ve posted it on my Facebook page and many others. Would be grateful and delighted to have you read my latest. It’s the first part of a couple of stacks bringing popular culture, history, and my own experience together. https://susanbordo.substack.com/p/i-am-not-a-camera
Brilliant article. Thank you so much for calling this out. Kol hakavod!
Thank you for this article. It is a lot to digest. I want to print it, break it down into small bites and digest it. Besides writing about something very important, you have done so beautifully. It is an ambitious piece and could well serve as the foundation for serious round table discussion groups, course in linguistic studies, or even a graduate thesis. It certainly bears reading more than once or indulging in the typical "scrolling down" process that we engage in when a catchy title captures our curiosity. The only note of encouragement I glean from reading something as thoughtfully executed as this essay is that there are people like you who think deeply and analytically and present your observations in such a way that your readers are compelled to do the same. Kudos.
We know this is happening, though you do an excellent job of articulating and cataloging it. The million dollar question is how do to combat/stop it?
I see this as sadly one more example of the corruption (and destruction) of our institutions. We’re fast approaching a world where trust will be an endangered species (if not totally extinct) facts will not converge, and narratives will drive everything.
I do not see that leading to anything good.
Liah Greenfeld: “fascism” is one of the most abused terms in contemporary political discourse; it is, I would argue, never used correctly. https://liahgreenfeld.substack.com/p/abusing-fascism