Dispatches from the Race War Podcast

In this commentary, I discuss being targeted for death (along with a couple of dozen others, including a U.S. Senator, a federal judge, and the former mayor of a major U.S. city) by the international Neo-Nazi terrorist group, the Terrorgram Collective, whose leaders are now either in prison or awaiting trial.

First, I note the shift in priorities at the…

Ok, so actually, this commentary isn’t just about white racial privilege, and the example isn’t either. But the title needed to be short enough to grab you, and here you are. So, mission accomplished.

Anyway, today, I discuss the recent 60 Minutes interview with a Texas Republican (a real “cowboy” by the looks of him), who is fighting data center construction in his community and who told Norah O’Donnell that this was the first time in his adult life that an issue was going to affect him personally. Needless to say, only a white, straight, middle-class or above, Christian, cis, able-bodied, non-immigrant, English-speaking male could possibly say some s**t like that—in short, it was the ultimate expression of a privileged existence. Never having had to worry about the impact of political or social policies before is no minor matter, after all. But of course, people like the person interviewed would bristle at the suggestion that they were privileged, because the concept is so often misunderstood.

Here, I discuss the meaning of his obliviousness but also the dangers, and suggest that the crisis he now faces (the data centers) is evidence that his indulgence of privilege — his willingness to overlook the harms to others from the very policies he previously endorsed as a conservative — has now come back to bite him. After all, the same people behind AI (the tech bro oligarchs) are the ones who have pushed policies and politicians that have immiserated the working class, attacked immigrants, hollowed out civil rights, etc. Perhaps it is time to join with the folks he’s ignored all these years and fight the folks he’s been previously aligned with. His privilege, it appears, has finally let him down.

In this commentary, I discuss the origins of the modern right-wing GOP. Although the exploitation of racial fear and grievance has a long history in politics, the modern iteration of Republican/MAGA race politics traces back to the early ‘90s, in the wake of David Duke’s disturbingly successful campaigns in Louisiana. In the wake of those elections, Pat Buchanan encouraged the party to run on Duke’s “playbook of winning ideas,” and did so himself in the 1992 presidential primaries, capturing nearly 3 million votes. Then, at the 1992 convention, he delivered his culture war speech in which he conjured the images of the L.A. riots (which had just happened a few months earlier) and the need to “take back the country” from those who presumably threatened it.

But what I saw at the time — because I was in Houston for the RNC (long story) — was how the conventioneers were greeted at the Astrodome on the first day with the image of a snarling Ice-T (the O.G. version, not the Law and Order SVU version) on the Jumbotron, meant to scare them and remind them of Black danger. Coming on the heels of Los Angeles, as well as the murder of a Texas State trooper by a Black man whose attorney blamed Tupac’s first album for his client’s actions, and Ice-T’s song “Cop Killer” — released that summer by his speed metal band, Bodycount — the imagery was meant to signal: this is the enemy.

It was clear to me then that the GOP was in the process of turning from antiquated supply-side economics and deregulation as their main focus, and pivoting to white racial rage. Thirty-four years later, we can see what kind of horrible adult the child birthed that day in the Astrodome has become. Come back in time with me to the delivery room and witness the delivery.

In this audio commentary, I address my belief, stretching back to my own experience in Hebrew School, that Zionism has become an unfortunate substitute for a healthy Jewish identity. As a result, most American Jews have become so wedded to it that acknowledging the mistreatment of Palestinians, let alone the Gaza genocide, is experienced as an existential threat to their very sense of Jewish identity itself. Until and unless we as Jews are brave enough to actually process our historic trauma and allow ourselves to grieve (as opposed to simply viewing ourselves as permanent victims of others, in need of something like Israel to protect us), the killing will continue, as will the denial of it, and the moral self-destruction of Jewish ethics that goes along with it. Not only is change needed for the sake of Palestinian lives; so too is it needed for the sake of our own, and for the memory of our ancestors, whose memories we are spitting on in the name of this destructive ideology.

In this audio commentary, I respond to those who accuse Barack Obama of being responsible for the nation’s “racial divide,” as if somehow it had been he who injected racial division into a country where it would otherwise never have existed. You’ll hear this often from MAGA types, folks who paper over Donald Trump’s long history of racist behavior but find Obama’s expressed sympathy for Trayvon Martin evidence of anti-white bias, apparently. Herein, I go through Obama’s supposedly “divisive” comments on race and show how ridiculously ecumenical they actually were — how tempered they were so as not to offend white folks — and yet, they still are pointed to as evidence of his divisiveness. It leads one to conclude that what really made some white folks mad was Obama’s mere presence, as a Black man, in the White House itself.

In this commentary, I begin by discussing the five times from 2011 to 2023 that I was warned by the FBI about credible threats to my life by white supremacists, thanks to the Bureau’s focus on investigating and infiltrating far-right extremist groups, which have been responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the U.S. in recent years.

But apparently, the agency no longer thinks right-wing violence is a problem, or at least not one worth warning potential targets about. Instead, as the news reported today, the FBI has decided there is another group in need of their warning…

ICE agents.

And why? Because apparently women (those crafty succubi) are pretending to like said agents, and even going on dates with them, just so they can get their personal information and dox them as part of some antifa plot! It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ridiculous. Actually, it’s hilarious too, as I explain in this piece.

In this audio commentary, I explore Ed Sheeran's decision to kick Macklemore off his concert tour after billionaire Robert Kraft (whose stadium they were slated to play) pressured him to do so, following Macklemore's “Free Palestine” at a prior show. While Sheeran’s capitulation was obviously cowardly, the real villain in the scenario is Kraft, whose wealth and power (and those of other stadium owners who issued the same threat to Sheeran) led him to believe he was entitled to impose such censorship at his venue. Sadly, as anger has been directed at Sheeran, the role of billionaire owners like Kraft has been largely elided.

At the same time, while Sheeran could have been more courageous, perhaps, those who say he should have canceled the tour rather than agree to Kraft’s terms, and those of the other stadium owners — or called their bluff, and possibly risked them pulling the plug on the shows — overlook an important point: namely, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people for whom Sheeran is responsible directly and indirectly on the tour. From crew on his payroll to stadium crew to contractors, if the shows got canceled because of his political decision, it would not simply be Sheeran himself who paid the price (arguably a cost he should be willing to pay so as to make a moral statement); rather, it would be others, for whom he most certainly does not have the right to make that decision.

To say the lives of Gazans are more important than the paychecks of all those people is existentially true, of course, but also irrelevant: one person does not have the right to jeopardize other people’s paychecks to satisfy that moral calculus for themselves—and especially when there is absolutely no chance that Ed Sheeran making such a statement and jeopardizing the tour would save even one life in Palestine. At best, it would be a powerful symbolic and moral statement; at worst, it would be performative, especially coming from someone not known for activism.

Ultimately, this entire episode raises questions about what we expect from celebrities and why. Should we demand celebrities speak out about important issues? And if so, which ones? How do we decide? And if they don’t, do we abandon them as fans? If so, are we consistent in our condemnation, or do we selectively condemn, only singling out artists we already didn’t like anyway? And do celebrity statements really work? Might they backfire? And why do we care what celebrities think anyway?

In the end, we should obviously celebrate whenever anyone condemns genocide in Gaza. But expecting celebrities to speak out more than anyone else is not only unrealistic; it’s likely unproductive. And spending time condemning them or expending energy critiquing them for what they do or don’t say about this or that issue is time we’re not spending educating people about issues ourselves.

On this, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I reflect on where I was that day and one of the often-missed lessons of the day’s tragedy—specifically, how a failure to see oneself (or one’s nation) as others see it can leave one (or one’s nation) vulnerable. I discuss how the same lesson applies to domestic mass school shootings, which disproportionately occur in “nice, safe” (read: white, middle class and above) communities, and each time shock residents who assumed such horrors and dysfunction “can’t happen here.”

By viewing danger, pathology, and dysfunction as something that happens “over there,” we are prepared neither for violence in certain neighborhoods nor for terrorism in our own nation. And by not seeing one’s community or country clearly, one can let down one’s guard to danger, whether from within or from outside the community, either because one overlooks local dysfunction or because one assumes others, in other nations, view you as you view yourself. In both cases, everyone is less safe.

Donald Trump’s decision to declassify the JFK assassination files was not about satiating some historical curiosity on his part. It was about feeding the idea that conspiracies are everywhere, because this kind of thinking serves the narcissistic ends of MAGA. If all “official stories” are suspect, but Trump is “brave” enough to tell the truth about JFK, then it “proves” he’s the only one to be trusted. The left needs to figure out how to respond to conspiracism not simply with mockery, but with systemic thinking that explains why bad things happen, but without the Wizard of Oz-type manipulation behind the scenes that conspiracists always look for.