Zionists will be lamenting the attack against Israel today in 2023, and it’s a load of bullshit. Not that the attack didn’t happen or anything—but that Israel is somehow the victim. When decades of oppression and violence result in retribution, you can’t collectively claim innocence.

There’s also the fact the IDF was ordered to enact the Hannibal Directive, which basically says to kill anyone and everyone—Israeli soldiers and citizens included—to avoid hostages being taken. These casualties were blamed on Hamas, even if they were not the ones who pulled the trigger. (This is from a report by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.)

The years since have seen non-stop violence perpetuated by Israel, predominantly against citizens, with complete support of Israelis and western governments alike. American colleges punish protesters and quelled free speech while allowing for violent counter-protests and police intervention. England mass arrests the public who support Palestine. Primary media sources—The New York Times stateside and the BBC across the pond—both have repeatedly published support of Israel and frame headlines constantly to portray them as the victim and downplay what is happening in Gaza.

Simply put, if you support Israel now you would have supported Germany then. Perpetuating a genocide can be swept under a flag of any color. Seeing other people as subhuman to the point they deserve extermination—especially when your justification is some millennia-old myth from a book—is ideologically grotesque to the point there probably isn’t a word vulgar enough to describe it.

I don’t care much about Trump’s speech where he riffed on Iran ‘taking out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. Like, whatever. Guy says more egregious things in a week than most politicians do in their entire career. Anyone surprised or offended must live under a rock. What is kind of funny to me is just the people who cheered in the crowd.

The speech took place in Nebraska, where earlier this year over 2,000 people climbed some stairs to honor the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. It’s just one of those things that goes to show how absolutely warped the red-state perspective is. Like, nothing on 9/11 affected fucking Nebraska.

So many of the people in these places will say bullshit like Never Forget while, in their next breath, hoping that some ‘liberal’ city gets wiped off the map. It’s a weird, fake patriotism where political morality adjusts to whatever point they’re trying to make (or support) in the moment. It’s the epitome of spineless American stupidity, so no wonder these people support a guy like Donald Trump.

Reflecting

There’s this really famous scene from the first season of The West Wing where, after an episode of built-up debate surrounding funding for public education, Rob Lowe makes this speech about how, “Education is the silver bullet.” It’s been on my mind today.

This liberal-minded idea that if we were all just smarter everything would be magically fixed about society is pretty insane. Every election it’s a manufactured debate—how did the college-educated vote against the non-college-educated? It becomes a whole discourse, another thing that keeps us divided.

But those Cornell rapists? Well, they’re going to Cornell. Aren’t they educated? George W Bush, Dick Cheney, the Clintons, and JD Vance all went to Yale. Benjamin Netanyahu graduated from MIT while taking classes at Harvard. Richard Nixon went to Duke. I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement to go to Oxford to be Prime Minister in England. Half of the psychopath tech guys in Silicon Valley attended Stanford.

I do believe that all education should be free and excellent, but these ideas that cross into areas of discrimination and bias about intellect and aptitude and leadership can really irk me. The people who have done the most harm to the world are the ones who come from the best schools. An education happens in many ways outside of reading pages from a book and it doesn’t take much time to see in the news what these men are really learning in American schools.

I haven’t really been writing much about politics these days. When I do, it tends to be pretty local or small-scale. Though I haven’t been making a ton of art, any political ideas never get too far.

Earlier this year, Conor Oberst talked about the difficulty of making protest-oriented art in the time of Trump. It’s the great paradox of Trump that is perhaps the most interesting thing about him: For a man with so many obvious character flaws, with only self-interest in his heart, he is remarkably difficult to actually insult. He is incredibly vain and therefore does care about image, but only in a specific capacity that art, or perhaps even language, doesn’t have a known capacity for.

Like I said, it’s a challenge, but one that I would think and hope any artist would be up for at least trying to overcome. That hasn’t really been my problem. Trump is just a guy, and in the end he’s a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.

What has become impossible, though, is reconciling the parallel horrors that have become the background noise of everyday life. The ongoing genocide in Gaza being one line; the Epstein Files being another. Blatant evidence of human life being ruined or ended at a massive scale to no consequence at all.

I have to imagine the only parallel in the United States would be living during the time of the slave trade. Slavery allowed for the evil to be on display the way it is now being broadcast over social media—after slavery but before the internet, the forces of white supremacy could use the media to generally control the discourse around atrocities. They could two-sides any scandal.

But there’s no way out of this one. These events are a mirror. From Palestine to Little St. James, there is no excuse for the systems that are operating via child trafficking, murder, mass rape, or ethnic cleansing to continue—much less for those who participate in any of it to get away unscathed. There is no room for debate. At some point, a line must be drawn, and to my mind, we crossed it years ago.

I’ve always felt that art is the closest thing we have to being able to get a better understanding of the soul. But these past few years have been killing off whatever was left of that human spirit, to the point where I ask myself, What am I even trying to relate to anymore?

Making art right now feels like hosting a party inside of a burning house. Anyone who wants to be entertained in this moment isn’t someone I’d want to entertain. But the lack of consequences for these monumental horrors are now embedded in our culture. And that makes me feel I just don’t want to participate in that culture any longer.

Watching Ed Sheeran’s career implode this week has been a delight. He dropped Macklemore from his tour due to pressure from known associate of Jeffery Epstein Robert Kraft regarding voicing support for Palestine on stage. The fallout from Sheeran’s spineless bending of the knee to billionaire Zionists has been wonderful. Everyone else performing (including his backing band) left the tour while Macklemore pledged $1 million of his earnings from the tour to Palestine Aid.

It’s unfortunate but the only way to really change things under capitalism is to fuck with Big Money. Though some some celebrity entertainers who remain ‘apolitical’ (Taylor Swift and Jay-Z come to mind) for the sake of their ticket sales are still kind of untouchable from public criticism, this fall-off for Sheeran suggests the protests against Israel have reached a new level in American discourse. The general public cares more about celebrities than most things, and this kind of attention will hopefully provoke those at the top to understand standing with Israel—or deciding to not comment on the matter and thus side with the genocide—could potentially lead to major losses in both income and legacy.

With the Trump administration agreeing to sell $2.8 billion in arms to Israel, Sheeran’s disaster is helping to increase the scope of debate about the United States’ position in funding genocide and protecting an apartheid state—and what it means to say, No Comment.

At this point I will not even speak to someone who supports Israel (except maybe to tell them to get fucked). There is no excuse for ‘not picking a side’ regarding (much less openly supporting) a genocidal apocalypse state that protects pedophiles while targeting children in Gaza. Over fifty percent of the population supports killing every Palestinian, while eighty-two percent support expelling them from Gaza using force. It is a depraved horror show of a country that should be dissolved immediately and left to the history books in a chapter titled Great Mistakes of International Governance.

I hope Ed Sheeran learns some kind of lesson from this and I hope every PR agency is in a state of panic as to how to handle their clients with this increasing public discontent for the wealthy supporting mass murder. Mostly, I hope this becomes the type of protest that begins to really interfere with the finances of people who only care about money and are OK with disregarding human life. They are the rot of humankind and the only reason I hope there’s a heaven is because that means there is a hell that they will all burn in for eternity.