The Anxiety is Real. Truth... Not So Much
More and more groups of people are being weaponized by disinformation.
Sometimes I wonder if Sonia Sotomayor takes anxiety medication.
I mean, most of us do, don’t we?
Most of my adult life, I feel like I’ve been watching a very slow moving train very slowly heading toward a cliff.
And yelling, “If we keep heading this way, we will go off a cliff!”
“Look,” I say, “here’s economist Joseph Stiglitz telling us there is a cliff over there!”
“Here is former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calculating the speed of the train and recommending we switch tracks.”
“Here’s 97% of climate scientists saying that the train is moving faster toward the cliff because of climate change!”
The cliff is Dickensian squalor borne from inequality. The cliff is war. The cliff is racism. We’ve seen it before. We know how it works.
And yet here were are. Hurtling to the rocks below. Wholly untethered from the tracks.
From reality.
Lost in our anger. Pointing fingers.
Wrapped in the terrible combination of fear and hatred.
Last week I found myself scrolling through one of the most racist conversations I’ve ever encountered. By Jewish women, in a Facebook group originally formed to support Kamala Harris.
Liberal Jewish women.
Spewing lies about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
Because he is critical of Israel.
And a socialist.
And, you know, “not like us.”
The person writing the post - who is clearly a political troll - prefers Andrew Cuomo to Mamdani. “She” brushes off Cuomo’s sexual harassment charges with a dangerous misrepresentation that “all the allegations were retracted, and the only one that reached court was dismissed without a hearing.”
It should have been obvious that this is not true, if only by the use of non-specific references.
Lack of specifics is a clear indication that what you’re reading or hearing is disinformation.
According to a January 2024 piece by Politico, the Department of Justice concluded in a civil rights settlement that “Cuomo ‘repeatedly subjected’ women in his office to non-consensual sexual contact, ogling and gender-based nicknames. Top Cuomo staff ‘were aware of the conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed.’”
Rebecca Traister points out that New York Attorney General Letitia James also found credible evidence that Cuomo sexually harassed women. More to the point, Traister’s years-long reporting on Cuomo showed that the former governor’s leadership style is based on “toxic, brutal tactics” of which sexual harassment is just one.
And the Times this month revisited the sexual harassment allegations by 13 different women, during his various terms as governor and when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Clinton. Some of the lawsuits and investigations are still pending.
What’s interesting about the Times piece is it shows how Cuomo changed his views and tactics. At first he took responsibility, or said women were misreading his actions but he was sorry. Now, as he wants to resurrect his career, he is blaming the women, and painting himself as the victim.
Thirteen women, over 20+ years, have told the same basic story (because sexual harassment and bullying, while pervasive, usually has a signature). But this poster in this Facebook group for women, is brushing them off as gold diggers who brought false allegations.
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Just as the Cuomo campaign has not been subtle in smearing the reputations of the women who came forward with harassment allegations, they have also not been subtle in trying to paint Mamdani as antisemitic.
Which is what this poster was doing.
I mean, hell, if the poster really did feel Mamdani was antisemitic, then she could have encouraged people to rank current New York Comptroller Brad Lanker, who is Jewish, as their number one choice.
But too many of the women in the Facebook group did not see the disinformation. In fact, they added to it.
“The [Democratic Socialists of America] platform is socialist to the core, and for anybody who came from the Soviet Union, it is painfully familiar. And scary,” wrote the original poster. “I am not talking about Western capitalist welfare states; I am talking about Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. They are DSA goals.”
North Korea?
“I am very concerned about the NYC mayoral primary,” wrote a woman in the comments. “The latest I read was that self-hating Jew Bernie Sanders is supporting the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel candidate.”
Self-hating Jew?
This one, though, threw me into a state of momentary hopelessness: “I wish Zohran Mamdani would move to Gaza and spread his beliefs there.”
She wants this man, who is a New York State Assembly member, to move to Gaza. Where about 60,000 people have been confirmed dead by Israeli bombs, and where a million more are currently starving to death.
She hates this man so much - for criticizing Israel, for being Muslim - that she wants him to die.
And she wrote this just a few days after Minnesota state assemblywoman Melissa Hortman DID die because someone disagreed with her politics and then cast her as evil.
This is some serious hate.
From women whom I had always considered my people.
I haven’t been paying close attention to the New York mayoral race, because I really have no connection to New York.
Mamdani has been very clear, as journalist Marisa Kabas notes, that he opposes the attacks on Gaza, opposes the current Israeli regime, and supports Jews, themselves. Especially those who live in New York.
Where he is running for mayor.
In fact, there are a lot of prominent progressives and Jews who have endorsed Mamdani. And, as this video shows, the people opposing him are the billionaires will will see their taxes go up if he wins.
Kabas speaks for me when she writes:
My Judaism is not defined by Israel. And for the past 20+ months (and even well before then) there’s been immense pressure on Jews by fellow Jews and non-Jews alike to shape our worldview based on a country in which we do not live. And now there’s immense pressure on Jews in New York City specifically to define candidates for mayor through the lens of a country in which they will have no political power.
Mamdani wants rent control. He wants buses to be free and safe. He wants to provide free child care (as former mayor Bill De Blasio also promised, and failed, to do). He wants to raise taxes on the richest New Yorkers.
In other words, he is a Social Democrat. He believes that helping the poorest raises everyone else, too.
As Heather Cox Richardson noted on Friday, the word “socialist” has been trotted out and used as a political cudgel for the last 150 years, at least.
She wrote about an 1898 coup by the Ku Klux Klan - whom she compares to today’s masked ICE agents - in Wilmington, North Carolina after a bunch of progressive white people and Black people were elected.
Wrote HCR: “The [1898 KKK] Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were ‘socialists’ and had no idea how to run a government.”
This, of course, is the very idea that the Facebook group poster sought to capitalize on. Using “socialism” as a stand-in for racism, just like the KKK did.
Except the KKK, and its successor Joseph McCarthy, also used the socialist bogeyman as a stand-in for antisemitism.
Now, we’re framing socialists AS antisemites.
And support for a fascist regime in Israel as inherently part of our Jewish identity.
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Too many of the people in this group took the original poster’s lies as truth.
And THAT scares me.
Jewish women are being radicalized in the same way that working class white people were radicalized in 2016.
The racism that was just under the surface is now being used to stoke irrational fear.
Disinformation works because it plays on the resentments and prejudices people already have. And amplifies them.
It is a constant source of anguish for me to watch people fall for the disinformation time and again.
We are now gleefully wishing people death.
Because we believe the manipulative messages that it is either them or us.
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This Facebook thread happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, just as the Supreme Court was announcing its decision upholding states rights to ban gender affirming care to minors.
As that news was crashing over me, I saw that Iran bombed an Israeli hospital.
On social media, Jews whose identity is tied up with Israel called bombing a hospital horrific. Maybe even a war crime.
Without irony.
But with excuses for why Israel’s bombing of hospitals in Gaza were not war crimes.
Obviously because war crimes only happen TO Jewish people. Not by us.
That’s when I thought of Justice Sotomayor, who told a Harvard audience in May of 2024 that “there are days that I've come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried.”
I wondered if she had cried while writing the dissent in Skrmetti, which came out on Wednesday.
I wondered if she had cried when the men on the Court gave Trump permission to simply ignore the law when they ruled in the presidential immunity case last summer.
I wondered if she cries when she watches clips of masked ICE agents sweeping people off the street. For trying to find work. Or criticizing the government.
I wonder if she is shaking her head at the hate that is swirling around us in a tornado so vicious that far too many people don’t know what’s up or down.
Then I wondered if she was taking anxiety meds. Because lord knows she has a stressful job. And lord knows we live in stressful times.
All she can do, really, is warn the world that the train is barreling off the tracks, hoping that someone in some future civilization will read the official records about the fall of the U.S., and perhaps not make the same mistakes.
In the meantime, I left that Facebook group.
Here’s Mamdani talking about his support for Jewish people, how antisemitism is being weaponized, and how often people send him messages saying, “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.”
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Further reading:
Elad Nehorai wrote a bracing critique of the antisemitism that Netanyahu is perpetuating:
Elana Tztokman, reporting from the Israeli left, is essential reading these days:
Carrie, Mamdani's victory makes me fiercely proud to be a New Yorker, even as the gentrification-exile I have been since late 1986. It also shows the City has retained at least some of the exquisitely defiant mind, heart and soul it had in 1962, when James Baldwin described it with loving accuracy as "Another Country."