The NYC Dyke March Finds Zohran Mamdani 'Unsafe'

Stop Pretending Zionism is Bad

Yesterday, New York City held the 2025 Democratic primary for mayor. You may be surprised to find out that the three main candidates – Andrew Cuomo (serial sexual harasser), Zohran Mamdani (newbie showman), and Brad Lander (proven progressive elected official) – are all avowed Zionists.

Talking to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani both affirm their Zionism, reiterating their belief in the right of Israel to exist.

That’s important to know because though the primaries are done it’s still Pride month and the NYC Dyke March has just banned Zionists saying they are “unsafe.” I’m pretty sure that Zohran does not identify as a dyke, but even if he did — he wouldn’t be welcome, they find people like him “unsafe.” That is a pretty radical exclusionary statement for an LGBTQ organization in NYC.

Not only radical, but counter-intuitive. I was amazed when I heard that the vast majority of my Jewish lesbian sisters had been banned from the March for holding a political belief held by not only this year’s Democratic New York mayoral candidates but by both of last year’s presidential candidates.

This year, the NYC Dyke March changed its mission statement, dropping “political affiliation” from the phrase “any person who identifies as a dyke is welcome to march regardless of … political affiliation.” By Jodie Kreines’ account – corroborated by others I know personally – this was changed solely to exclude Zionists. Surely though, not all the NYC marchers abstained from the mayoral vote rather than voting for people whose Zionist beliefs would make them “unsafe.”

I use this example because it is emblematic of an apparent, and deep, hypocrisy in the Western left. A Zionist is someone who believes in the right of Israel (the only Jewish state) to exist. Other definitions have been set as straw men or smears, just like Black Supremacist was used to smear Black Lives Matter supporters on the right, and MAGA is used to smear American patriots on the left. Setting up a political purity test seems wrong in general, aligning it with the only Jewish state seems discriminatory, and basing the test on falsely attributed beliefs is not only deeply unfair but hurts both the excluded and the excluders.

For a community to get rid of the Jews, like my friends or people like Edie Windsor, who have been at the heart of the march for LGBTQ rights seems contrary to the entire inclusive, tolerant, spirit of Pride. People who had been a part of the march — even central to it — for years, maybe decades, are now banned because of how other people construe their beliefs. This is a worrying and self-destructive trend in western progressive movements.

So, though I don’t think that Mamdani supporters will actually be turned away from the Dyke March (though Jewish Zionists have been) and though I don’t know whether other “political affiliations” (supporters of the virulently anti-LGBTQ Hamas, perhaps?) have been turned away, maybe there is a rationale? Maybe, the organizers would argue, their anti-Zionism is not antisemitism because there are anti-Zionist Jews. But if that is their argument, that itself reveals a profound ignorance of the issues and a gaslighting of Zionists.

Some Anti-Zionism Is Acceptable and Some Is Racist

It is true that there are two different types of acceptable anti-Zionism.

The first reasonable anti-Zionism is a belief that having a nation state is not the right, proper, or best way for Judaism to realize itself in the world. This belief has existed in the Jewish community for as long as Zionism has existed. There are a few different historical strands of it and, despite a 50 year lull, they are now, unsurprisingly, stronger than in any recent time. I disagree with these people. I think that, as a civilization, ethnicity, religion, people, and, yes, as a nation, Judaism and Jewishness plays out in many different ways. But OK, if you identify as Jewish – and especially if you are Jewishly engaged – you can definitely have an opinion about that.

The second way in which people could reasonably call themselves anti-Zionists is if they believe that the nation-state is an inherently bad organizational structure and that the right of self-determination of peoples into nation states is to be universally avoided. Of course that would make them anti-American, anti-Saudi, anti-Palestinian, and anti-French too, but that would be a position of integrity that anyone could hold.

There is a more specific subset of that position that believes that colonial nations such as the USA, Canada, Australia or Singapore are peculiarly illegitimate, having dispossessed indigenous peoples. That would underpin anti-Canadian or anti-Singaporean sentiments, but not anti-Zionism since, unlike the Western or Chinese settlers in those countries, Jews are indigenous to the region of their nation-state.

Understanding what is reasonable is important because beyond these two forms of anti-Zionism, I don’t know of any form of anti-Zionism that isn’t discriminatory either in theory or in practice. Since Zionism is the right of the Jewish people to have a sovereign state in their historic homeland, someone who was anti-Zionist in any other way would have to object to either the principle of an indigenous people having sovereignty in their own land or just object to Jews having the same rights as every other indigenous people. Denying indigenous people such rights is the realm of racial supremacists, and objecting to Jews having the same rights as other people is antisemitism.

Peoples Have the Right to Self Determination

When the League of Nations discussed “les Palestiniens” before World War II it was talking about all the inhabitants of the area regardless of ethnicity. Some people use that as evidence that the “Palestinians” are an invented people. Not marked out by religion like the Jewish tribes of the area, a shared pan-Arabist and Israeli-rightist argument goes, they were indistinguishable from the other surrounding Arab tribes of South Syria during the millennium that Israel/Palestine was part of the Mamluk Empire, then the Ottoman Empire, then the British Empire.

BUT it does not matter what I have heard or, indeed, what I believe about it. The Palestinians now clearly differentiate themselves from Syrians, Lebanese, or Egyptians, just as Israelis (whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or other) likewise consider themselves as a distinct group. That is the point of self-determination. To quote the U.N. principle

“people freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development without external interference.”

I happen to believe, as its Declaration of Independence lays out, that the Jewish state should be democratic and have equal rights for all — no matter gender, race, religion, sexuality, or colour. I happen to agree with the vast majority of Israelis (and the vast majority of Jews around the world) that the war in Gaza should stop. And, commensurate with this belief, I believe there should be a Palestinian State. But none of that should matter, those things just make me, alongside Zohran, one of the myriad types of Zionist.

Nations Have Obligations, People Have Differences of Opinions

No nations’ actions should be excused, whether at peace or at war. Indeed all actions taken by elected politicians should be constantly and fairly critiqued both by those people and by the community of nations. Perhaps especially when they execute domestic political opponents, or murder men for being gay. These criticisms though, should not mean those nations’ dissolution. Nor should people who support these nations’ right to exist — irrespective of those nations’ actions — be ostracized or purged. That’s true both for those countries’ citizens and for its non-voting supporters abroad. We should be supporting Indians who are fighting for civil rights in Gujarat not vilifying them, and likewise we should not shun Non-Resident Indians who believe in a better India and speak out against Narendra Modi’s anti-Muslim hate speech.

For another example, though I am a British citizen, I was disenfranchised for the Brexit vote and the subsequent discredited Conservative governments. I remain a critic of British governmental actions now and over the centuries but I am committed to the nation’s well being and its right to exist. Maybe I would get some ridicule or some pushback, but I do not expect to suffer any political or social repercussions in Britain or America for either my support or my criticism of Britain or, for that matter, for my opinions on Britain’s relationship with America.

Are we attacking Russian-Americans because Russia, unprovoked, attacked Ukraine and has been at war with Europe for the 3 years since? Are we boycotting Sudanese-Americans because millions are starving in a brutal civil war between Islamists in Sudan? Have we banned Saudis and Iranians and Yemenis from our Pride events because the Saudi-Iran proxy war in Yemen has destroyed an entire country? Did we think it was acceptable to attack Sikhs after 9/11? Are we in favor of Americans being tossed out of international business groups because of the U.S. imposition of illegal tariffs?

No, no, and no. No to all of them. Sole among the nations, people think that it is acceptable to call for the end of Israel. Sole among minorities it seems acceptable to tell Jews and Zionists what they believe and then, despite their disavowal, condemn them for it. And, sole among Zionists, Jews are being kicked out of the progressive movements they have founded and supported for decades or longer. If Zohran is welcome at the NYC Dykes March but Jodie isn’t — that’s pretty clearly discriminating against a Jewish Zionist and welcoming a Muslim one.

Anti-Zionism does not have to be racist but, on top of welcoming non-Jewish Zionists, there’s a simple test that is sufficient, but not necessary, to tell when it is antisemitic. There are practical cases for how the 14 million people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea can live in peace and tolerance together but, since there are two indigenous people with an internationally recognized claim to statehood in that area (one of which already has an internationally recognized state) there is no reasonable progressive basis to believe that you should have one and not the other. So if you believe – as the organizers of the NYC Dyke March do – that they cannot even feel safe with Zohran and others who think there should be an Israel then they cannot, in good faith believe there should be a Palestinian state.

So the effect of the misguided purging of Zionists from the NYC Dyke March – and from any progressive space – is to remove helpful, constructive, Jewish supporters, weaken the left, and make anyone in that space who supports statehood for other peoples, whether Palestinians, Singaporeans, or Americans, behave as an antisemite.

Two short postscripts *after* the NYC Dyke March

1. Zohran does not consider himself a Zionist, but he is. he actually is. Without the word. The belief in the right of Israel to exist is Zionism. Israel is — from Herzl to the UN vote to the declaration of independence to today — a state for the Jews. So there is no supporting Israel's right to exist without it being a Jewish state. It's like saying you support the right of champagne to exist but not as a grape product! Just like India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine were partitioned to serve as the Hindu/Muslim, Jewish/Muslim homes for the respective indigenous peoples.

2. Obviously LGBTQIA+ folk should be afforded full rights and love as they are in Israel, not murdered for their identity as they are in Gaza and the PA. For the horrendous conflation of hypocrisy and antisemitism, this happened to a gay Jewish friend of a friend when he walked out of his apartment yesterday as the Dyke March went past.

Put on Your Own Mask First

The perils and promise of AI

There is nothing inherently Jewish about Artificial Intelligence but there are three good reasons I wrote a series about AI from a Jewish perspective (that just concluded last week).

The Perils and Promise of AI from J: The Jewish News of Northern California

• Where is AI taking us: To Eden or to Armageddon?

• As AI charges ahead, Jewish thinkers are falling behind

• Jewish institutions slowly incorporate AI but risk falling behind

First, the topic is vast and it needs a frame, any frame really, to make it manageable. Second, there are a surprising number of Jews who have been involved in the development of the actual human technology that has led to the Large Language Models that are, for the moment, how people find AI. And third, the historical American imagination of AI has a disproportionately Jewish flavour.

How should Jews think about and interact with artificial intelligence? (AI art generated by ImageFX from a prompt written by J. editor Maya Mirsky)

When the Soong-type android Commander Data is in the dock pleading for his rights as a sentient being, Jewish actor Brent Spiner was the one staring out from yellow eyes. Spiner’s portrayal of Data in “Measure of a Man” and throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation follows in the Jewish footsteps of Leonard Nimoy as the machine-like Vulcan Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series and, even beyond Star Trek, Jews have long been associated with representing different, non-human, types of life.

Even if we ignore the legend of the Golem, the clay man brought to life by code, as a precursor to stories about AI, the broad Jewish contribution to science fiction extends to imagining worlds with thinking machines. Directors Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg (A.I. in 2001) followed after writers like Robert Sheckley (“Watchbird” (1953) et al), Harlan Ellison (“"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967) et al), Marge Piercy (He, She And It from 1991), and, most notably, Isaac Asimov (I Robot from 1950) to dramatically portray how artificial intelligence might affect human civilization. If Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics obligating robots to avoid harming humans could have been implemented in time, they might even have prevented HAL 9000 from famously attacking his crew in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (1968)

Few of these writers, though, looked at the topic through a Jewish lens. Is Judaism substrate agnostic for example? That is, does the religion care whether sentience is imprinted on a carbon-based lifeform or a silicon-based lifeform? Is it only humans who have souls? What does Judaism (or any other ethical tradition) say about our use of the technology? As I mention in the series, David Zvi Kalman and Sara Wolkenfeld — among others — have written about this.

David Zvi Kalman

• Jewish Lights video interview, AI and the Future of Humanity

• Belief in the Future podcast

• Jello Menorah, Deep Research will change Jewish Law

Sara Wolkenfeld

• Religion Dispataches, How Renegade Rabbis Teach Us About AI

• The Atlantic, Productivity Is a Drag. Work Is Divine

By the time J. published my third article on artificial intelligence — 7 months after we first started the project — some of the alarm bells I wanted to sound were already ringing across society, if drowned out by domestic U.S. and global events. Yes, there were doomsayers, but I wanted to ring the bells of both opportunity and caution. AI is the most consequential technology since electricity, yet, in much of the Jewish institutional world, like in the institutional world as a whole, urgency is either absent or unfocused.

Those recognizing the revolution are not necessarily those safeguarding the future.

My articles emerged from a growing sense that we are in danger of missing the moment.

Yael Eisenstat, who I quote — but whose appropriate warnings might have overweighted the article had I quoted her more fully — has spoken over the years and at length about the dangers of unattended algorithms and AI. To paraphrase her: AI is an unbelievably powerful tool and it can amplify bad human tendencies. Unless we have a major social movement, the databases that power AI and the people who are in charge of the technology will replicate and exacerbate our existing problems including inequities of situation and opportunity, biases of perspective, loss of privacy, poor employment conditions, and climate-altering systems. Look, at the moment, even using AI is such an energy drain, it’s worsening climate change.

With the help of my intrepid editor Chanan Tigay, I invoked both this caution as well as the utopian potential of AI in a quite lengthy, narrative first piece. Using Scott Wiener’s relatively friendly attempt to legislate toward a productive AI, I explored the tension between the chance to repair the world and the chaos that it could otherwise cause. AI holds the potential to amplify human creativity, cure diseases, and democratize knowledge, but it can also, easily spread lies, displace workers, concentrate power, and desensitize us to what it means to be human. I used some Jewish framing to discuss that clash but hopefully it is accessible to all. Religion and philosophy are useful places to find language to describe radical change that lies beyond normal politics — and Jewish thought is often more down-to-earth than philosophy.

In the second piece I asked where are the rabbis, the ethicists, the Jewish technologists? Again, I think the general public has been overwhelmed, religious thinkers and philosophers have been somewhat tech-blinded, and most useful responses have been transactional by folks with vested interests or by people who are able to put a business lens (rather than a Jewish lens or a justice lens) on the subject. Though some Christian, Muslim, and Interfaith institutions have begun to articulate theological responses to AI, and some secular Jewish technologists are active in AI safety, the organized Jewish intellectual world has been surprisingly quiet. Why does this matter? Because Jewish thought has a 3,000-year tradition of grappling with ethical dilemmas, human dignity, limits on power, and the role of creativity and responsibility we have something to offer. But we can’t offer it if we’re not in the conversation.

This image was generated by ImageFX based on prompt by J. culture editor Maya Mirsky.

Finally, in the third article, I looked at the practical side: how synagogues, federations, and nonprofits are experimenting with AI tools for marketing or education, but doing so cautiously — and with exceptions, like the PJCC that I discussed — often behind the curve. Rather than criticize, I was trying to show how the failure to engage fully with AI, both as a tool and a topic, risks sidelining Jewish institutions in a world rapidly being shaped by it. And, through the example of Jewish institutions, I mean to suggest community institutions of all ilks that are governed by human values and a commitment to being better than our past.

What I tried to do with these three pieces is sound a wake-up call. Not because AI is inherently good or bad, but because it’s a tool of such power and ambiguity that it demands serious moral attention and practical, careful action beyond the business community. As in many ways, Jewish life and thought is a canary in the coalmine for the wider Western world. If, despite the political distractions, the Jewish community can show up to think about and implement AI in a constructive, human way, perhaps there’s hope for the world.

If you haven’t played with ChatGPT from OpenAI to see what an automated assistant can feel like, try it out (*but turn on the privacy*). Likewise, try out Claude from Anthropic if you want better writing style or Perplexity for research that actually cites its sources. If you are more advanced and building agents, Manus and Lindy are good entry points. Sadly, none of those companies are paying me for recommendations!

Many thanks to all the people I spoke to for these articles and those whose excellent work I read so I didn’t have to bother them personally.

Of Orbs, Eruvs, and the AI Apocalypse

Notes from the cultural trenches

Let’s pretend we are living in an alternate history where narcissistic billionaires are not destroying the few good bits of Pax Americana and where we can engage with the future without having to fight for the present and the past too. Let’s take on climate change! Let’s think about AI!

In a series over at J., I began by setting out what’s at stake in the AI revolution “Where is AI Taking Us: To Eden or to Armageddon?” The subject is so vast that, actually, telling the story through a specifically local Jewish lens makes it approachable and, hopefully, comprehensible. Then in part two of that series, I asked why Jewish thinkers seem to be hanging out on the sidelines while AI evolves at an exponential rate with “As AI Charges Ahead, Jewish Thinkers Are Falling Behind.

**If you know of Jewish communities that are using AI in smart ways already, let me know ASAP!**

On a parallel (but slightly less existential) track, I’ve been cranking out the SF reviews over at Book and Film Globe, where things have been... delightfully weird. John Scalzi’s latest novel sees the moon literally turn into cheese, Sam Mills’ The Watermark is a metafictional novel in which Fate is (literally) an author and grief is the backdrop, while Ewhan Kim’s recently translated Korean cult classic observes humanity when black orbs arrive and start swallowing people.

Meanwhile at The Forward, I’ve been poking at the boundaries of Jewish identity—sometimes my own. Talking about “Eminent Jews,” I wrestled with David Denby’s literary kaddish for a bygone Jewish Golden Age embodied by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Mel Brooks (average height, 5’5”). Even before Brooks leaves us, Denby is bidding an ambivalent goodbye to a generation and an era that shaped American life.

Also at the Forward I reviewed a quite wonderful Agnes Jaoui film, “This Is My Mother” a French production about caregiving, memory, and the quiet brutality of maternal love. And I enjoyed a moment of maximum recursion when I indulged in the bizarre joy of reviewing Dan Friedman. The exhibition “Why Shouldn't I Have Fun All Day?” was a rare public glimpse into the aesthetic maximalism of gay modernist designer Dan Friedman who passed away in 1995.

We still have 267 days left in 2025 but it’s already been a year of looking backward and forward, of real and unreal, of sacred and profane. Orbs are still hovering. AI is still accelerating. And, in its tenth year, this newsletter keeps moseying along.

Happy Festival of Aspirational Freedom, to those celebrating.

Here are a few other books I have written about this year:

• “The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting” - I ask Rob Kutner about his irreverent romp through the history of the chosen people.

• “The River Has Roots” - Amal El-Mohtar released her debut solo novel six years after she and Max Gladstone had a surprise hit with their co-written, nonlinear narrative novella This Is How You Lose the Time War. This is a remarkably different offering.

• “Circumventing the Law” - Selling chametz seems like a total loophole — but maybe it is actually part of a way of thinking that is more central to a robust ethical framework than we think. I spoke to Elana Stein Hain about how to think about eruvs circumventions and the power of legalistic thinking.

• “The Death of the Author” - Nnedi Okorafor is one of the most interesting and prolific SF writers today. This adds the sharp realism of her sister’s death to the world of her speculative fictions.

A Brightening Glance at MOMO

No one wants to read about dance

No-one wants to read about dance.

A number of people like dancing, fewer like watching dancing, almost none want to try to grasp what it is for a contemporary dance troupe to address life today through the movement of highly trained bodies in space. Explaining dance in words is hard. It’s like trying to master the front crawl using only walking techniques – there’s nothing to hold onto. But that doesn’t mean one can’t try to swim.

Some editors were reluctant when I pitched them an account of the final tour performance of MOMO which is the latest “masterpiece” of a contemporary genius choreographer, performed by one of the world’s leading dance companies.

But I thought readers would be more curious than that. I’m no particular fan of dance either but seeing Ohad Naharin’s MOMO at BAM in Brooklyn, is like having a chance to see Picasso paint Guernica, watch Marianne Moore write “Poetry,” attend a Samuel Beckett premiere, or support FC Barcelona at the Vicente Calderón.

Even before the lights go down, the chorus starts moving across the back of the stage. Four men dressed in nothing but raggedy dark grey cargo pants walk slowly in sync around the stage. One has fluffy curly hair, the others are more closely cropped. They are individuals: lighter and darker, taller and shorter than each other. They are a unit: all put their hands on their left hip, sticking their elbows back, expressing their bellies. They are not just gifted dancers, they are stuck in the same absurd human bodies as we all are.

Chorus and individual dancers in Batsheva’s MOMO by Ohad Naharin. (photo Richard Termine)

During the next 70 minutes, this chorus will keep moving in the foreground or the background: sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes as an interacting, affectionate unit, occasionally separating from one another. Sometimes the unit provides the central action of the show, sometimes its counterpoint.

Not only is Naharin the long-time leader of the Batsheva company, he is also the inventor of the Gaga dance language and arguably today’s most important living choreographer. If, like me, you are someone who, mostly, moves their body rather clumsily and thoughtlessly through space, it’s an incredible idea that not only can someone move elegantly or intentionally themselves but also understand and express those principles across an entire stage.

Day-to-day our movement is transactional — I go there to do this; Naharin expresses movement as meaning — I move in this way to show this.

And, in moving to meaning, dance differs from the professional dancing we have seen on music shows or musicals in the way that Van Gogh differs from wallpaper. MOMO is constitutive not illustrative, it is not an accompaniment, it is the thing itself. As such, it is more similar to the dancing we do for joy, except its techniques are virtuosic and the emotions infinitely more subtle.

Seven individuals come out in turn to dance around the chorus. When they come out, one at a time, we are attracted into thinking of the narrative they provide, but that’s just us grasping for the familiar. These characters are different sizes, shapes and colours — we might say they represent different races — but how far does that matter?

Though, of course, the types of emotion the performance evokes are timeless, reading narrative or even headlines into the dance is a very human error. MOMO premiered in 2022 so, though the dancers feel October 7 and its aftermath, the show is no more a response to today’s news than Shakespeare's “Antony and Cleopatra.”

In “Mr. Gaga,” the Heymann brothers 2015 film about him, Naharin said of his later phase that his choreography is inextricably tied up in helping his dancers interpret the movement he is looking for. Gaga, which is more like Yoga than ballet, is a process of self-realization. In it, the body becomes an extension of the emotions, not just joy or rhythm as we often feel, but all the emotions, in a mindful way. Only at a performance level is Gaga stringent. Indeed, Naharin and his team host large public classes for people to come and learn how to dance the gamut of emotions.

Though I rarely write about dance, I did cover another BAM show when Emmanual Gat’s “Love Train” was danced to the music of Tears for Fears. Just as in that piece, throughout the course of the continuous performance of MOMO, the shapes and movements of the 11 dancers are mesmerizing. Not just as individuals developing their own styles through Gaga or as groups like the four-person chorus, but as an entire ensemble.

There Are No Words — And the Music Doesn’t Help

In that previous piece I was able to draw from my knowledge of the lyrics and music of the songs to shine a light on the dancing. In MOMO, however, Batsheva dance to music from the 2018 Laurie Anderson/Kronos Quartet album “Landfall,” as well as to music from Philip Glass, Arca, and Maxim Waratt (a pen name of Naharin himself). The music is abstract and occasionally rhythmic but, despite names of pieces like “CNN Predicts a Monster Storm” and “Wind Whistles Through the Darkness” the accompaniment is hard to peg, beyond calling it ominous.

There are no set scenes, just a continuous unfolding of action, but that action morphs as the music changes. The light changes too, highlighting dancers scaling the walls at the back of the stage. A whole new vertical dimension opens up: dancers climbing up the walls or along the walls in unison, reminding us among other things, that we are not bound to the floor.

Some of the sequences are a critique of dance itself. At one point all eleven dancers take a portable barre and do their exercises. First they are in elegant sync and then they move in accelerated syncopated sequence as if to say, “yes we know how traditional dance does it, but how daft to be limited to those stiff moves.”

And that escape from genre is parallel to Naharin’s escape from the strictures of gender. Naharin shows how dance has traditionally treated gender as a stiff binary, while engaging with it himself in a deeply physical, fluid, and expressive way. Most obviously in MOMO, a deeply muscled male-presenting dancer comes on stage in a small pink tutu without satire. He is, like his colleagues, just donning dance garb and sequences irrespective of gender.

Throughout the performance, the choreography rejects fixed gender roles, instead emphasizing the shared, organic vocabulary that comes from Gaga. Dancers of no-matter-what gender execute similar phrases with equal intensity, defying the traditional division between masculine strength and feminine grace. MOMO creates a space where gender is not a constraint but a human possibility. And, with gender one of the key intersections of contemporary society, where you advocate for a free open-ended, evolving aspect of movement, you advocate for a free inclusive humanity.

Despite the increasing proliferation of words being flung at us (everyone and their dog has an AI blog on Substack) there’s nothing more human than moving with emotion through the world. MOMO celebrates an inclusive humanity dancing onward through history, As with William Butler Yeats’ famous evocation of human learning in “Among School Children,” the matter of life is not simple, but the substance is found not only in “reading-books and history” but also in “body swayed to music.”

Breaking Things Is a Feature, Not a Bug, for the Unholy Trinity

Three separate machines have been working relentlessly for the month since they took over America’s executive branch. The good news is that they have entirely different motivations and methods. The bad news is that they are, for the moment and the foreseeable future, aligned in their delight in destroying the government of the United States.

“Three cogs with horns” from ChatGPT

Most apparent is the narcissist-in-chief. He loves to be involved in everything, whether blaming DEI for plane crashes, falsely accusing allies of being dictators, economically attacking friends, or illegally reneging on approvals that previous regimes have made. He has massive personal support, though I don’t really understand why anyone would believe their interests would be well represented by a felon, bankrupt, liar, who “was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll” and who was happy for his supporters to carry out an insurrection and hang his Vice President. He is brilliant at stirring up hatred, building inter-communal resentment, and painting a dystopian picture of America that only he can fix. But, like most conmen, he has no real grasp of the larger picture. He famously reads nothing, cannot grasp the simplest facts, and idolizes autocrats like Orbán and Putin. He is happy to bluff his ignorant way around the country and the world, breaking stuff and making America more like the dystopia he paints.

Then there’s the tweaked-out sociopath Elon Musk, whose Yarvinist beliefs I thought might only border on racist until he actually Sieg Heiled America. Unlike his co-narcissist, he does have an ideology – a virulently racist one based on the rule of the white elite who will do a much more efficient job of running the country than the messy, tolerant, regulatory, disapproving, bloated nanny state. Of course, as a sociopath, Musk’s criteria for efficiency are warped and – as his private ventures with SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter have shown – include mistreating employees in a way that would be devastating on a national scale. He is unelected, unvetted, unconfirmed, and willing to move unethically and illegally. He knows that, with the president’s backing there’s no downside to working at a speed that is highly destructive of the government’s ability to regulate his companies for the public good. His ability to manipulate technology and effect disruption at scale is both key to his mystique and a godsend to the third group.

Finally, there are the Project 2025ers. These are the extremists whose policies would never garner enough votes to get power, but who understood after 2016 that a charismatic airhead could lead them to power in a polarized country. From Steve Bannon to Russell Vought, they are pretty open about what they want to do, knowing that they are protected by a national ignorance inculcated by decades of GOP attacks on education and intelligence. Project2025 is a massive 900pp document that says many things, but in essence wants to expand the presidency to an autocracy, replacing government workers’ loyalty to the principles of the constitution and the people of America with loyalty to the president. Firing millions of people who believe in their jobs and replacing a fraction of them with people who believe in the president is just the start.

Where these three groups are aligned is in their opposition to truth, contempt for governance, lack of concern for non-rich, non-white people, and lust for the concentration of power in the office of the president. If they can make people despair of government, if they can make people hate politicians, and if they can marginalize the only organizations that can hold them accountable to the truth – all the better. It’s not a bug of the system that they have, for example, put the nutcase anti-vaxxer, antisemitic conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s health - it’s a feature. If they make a drama, it will take people’s attention from the actual shift in power they are effecting. If they make a dystopia (bird flu might be the new pandemic, or maybe just measles), it will take even fewer lies next time around to vote in a strongman charlatan, or to declare martial law. After all, the current president’s utter ineptitude led to the deaths of 1 million Americans in the pandemic, and he was still voted in 4 years later.

Likewise, it’s not a bug that they are throwing out executive orders that are illegal, or sending in high school techies with no security clearance to siphon off sensitive data. The more they can send in word bombs to disrupt governance, the better. If they work, great! If they don’t, what’s the downside? They do not want to govern in a particular way; they want to “dismantle government.” And, as for popular democracy, the plan is to do as much damage as quickly as possible, so that the damage is essentially irreparable. If they have to have elections, they would be happy to continue down the road of gerrymander, propaganda, and disenfranchisement.

So what to do? Well, the good thing about opposing such a swingeing attack on America is that there’s a lot to do. And the good thing about America is that it’s a big beast that takes a lot of killing – hundreds of millions of people believe in the hope of a country by the people for the people. Don’t self-censor or despair because, as both Yehuda Kurtzer and Corey Robin have said (though I slightly paraphrase), those attitudes amplify the power of this pernicious trinity.

Read the news (and Heather Cox Richardson), not social media. Make sure that you are not promoting propaganda from any side, especially not AI lies. Support the truth and effective inclusive governance – especially locally (as long as you are not governed by a corrupt mayor dangling on the whims of a politicized Department of Justice). And insofar as higher education and news organizations have not been bought by oil and oligarchs, support them as they are under attack.

Express outrage at the domestic attacks on immigrants, refugees and other vulnerable communities. Keep pushing your elected officials of whatever political stripe. Someone said (apologies, I forget who quoted whom!) “find someone who is doing something inspiring and join them.” Turn up for marches, actions, and community-building and keep turning up.