Politics is show business for ugly people. It’s an old line, one for which many claim parentage.
But it’s true. And there’s been quite a bit of ugliness pinballing around in recent months. Because, too often, it works.
In 2016, Democrats didn’t believe ugliness could prevail. In that U.S. presidential election year — where, full disclosure, this writer worked for Hillary Clinton in three different states, including her Brooklyn headquarters — nobody believed that Donald Trump’s style of politicking could possibly succeed.
Trump called Clinton a criminal. He called for her to be locked up. He said Barack Obama founded ISIS. He said Mexicans were rapists, and attacked Jeb Bush for marrying one. He said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he got caught. And so on.
Nobody believed that kind of ugliness could win an election, let alone a presidential election. But Trump did.
Eight years later, Democrats aren’t taking any chances. They’ve quoted Trump’s former chief of staff, who has called Trump a fascist. They’ve slammed Trump at every opportunity, sparing no adjective. Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican Party — because they are, indisputably, his party — held a big rally at Madison Square Garden on the weekend and permitted all kinds of ugly things to be said.
Like that Puerto Rico is a “island of garbage” floating in the ocean. Like that Kamala Harris is “the antichrist” and “the devil.” And, as the Times of Israel noted, antisemitic jokes — most notably, the comedian who said that “Jews have a hard time” spending money. Because, presumably, Jews are cheap.
That kind of ugliness — the ugliness of antisemitism — has been everywhere, in the past year. CyberWell, an Israel-based watchdog that tracks antisemitism online, has issued a report that concludes antisemitism has surged by almost 40% in the 11 months since the murderous attack of Hamas of Oct. 7, 2023.
Says CyberWell’s brilliant founder and executive director, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor: “It’s important, especially since there’s a lot of fanfare around the next administration in the United States and potentially in Canada, it’s very important if you care about what’s happening in your society, that the way to address (antisemitism) in a systematic way is to look at social media reform. We cannot shy away from it just because it’s the tech sector. In fact, the opposite. It’s the key to safer and and more stable societies at this point.”
The sobering statistics — and the use of antisemitic “jokes” in mainstream politics — buttresses Cohen Montemayor’s point. In the three weeks that followed Oct. 7, when Israel was still (correctly) considered a victim of Hamas in most Western countries, antisemitism surged by nearly 90%, CyberWell found.
Before Oct. 7, antisemites posted that Jews were interested in world domination and control. After that date, the narrative became “Jews are the enemy,” CyberWell found. Denial of the rapes and assaults by Hamas — and denial of the murders and violence, too — became “a top narrative,” CyberWell says in their report.
Says Cohen Montemayor: “The Oct. 7 attacks were actually the most successful hijacking of our mainstream social media platforms. Hamas flooded these mainstream social media platforms with anti-Jewish snuff content, essentially the gore of their attacks, broadcasting it for millions and really traumatizing Jews globally.” Her organization tracked a small sample of just 300 examples of this sort of antisemitic denial, she adds: “And it reached well over 25 million accounts.”
Not all of the news is bad, and not all of the ugliness is finding a receptive audience, she says. X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok have become better at removing antisemitic content that is brought to their attention by CyberWell and others. TikTok, which has long been among the worst social media platforms for Jew hatred, now even has a policy against denial of violent events, Cohen Montemayor says.
That said, the hate and the ugliness — whether at a rally at Madison Square Garden or online — haven’t gone away. And, in some cases, a bad situation has gotten worse.
Ugliness will always be part of our politics, and online. But, after the year all of us have just gone through, it’s time to push back against it — before it’s too late.