#cause like. on one hand i don't want to minimize the very real antisemitism here

[faggotry-enjoyer]

U of M sounds like a nightmare rn. I’m an MSU graduate who wants do my PhD in geophysics and I’ve considered U of M bc they do have a good geology department but I think I’m just gonna uhhh Not Go There. I haven’t really heard what’s up with MSU but I know we had an SJP chapter 🥴 So I suspect it’s not quiet. But U of M’s antisemitism makes HEADLINES, stay safe

It's really more of a mixed bag. The antisemitism here is very real and very scary, you'll never catch me denying that. But it's not the whole story.

On October 7th this year, there may have been an SJP protest at Rackham. But the Diag was like a mini Hostages Square all day long, and there were hundreds of people at the memorial in the evening. Hundreds of people saying a prayer for the state of Israel and mourner's kaddish, hundreds of people singing acheinu and hatikvah. A week or so prior, 500 people gathered on the diag in support of Jewish students and our right to be here. And I can't speak to the latter, as I wasn't there, but on the 7th campus security was by us all day to make sure nothing happened.

If I recall correctly, about 15% of the student body here is Jewish. We have a very active Hillel, as well as a Jewish Resource Center and a Chabad. Even when campus is scary, we've got each other and we've got a lot of each other. There is fear, but there's hope too.

[caffeineandsociety]

Refusing to agree with the right on the most superficial level is the fast train to getting suckered into actually helping them if not outright getting recruited by them and I am not joking.

Hate movements always recruit by using things that ARE superficially true. They don't lead with "kill all [insert minority here]" unless they know a target has been primed to see that as a reasonable option. They prey on REAL experiences of alienation in their targets. They start with things like "hey isn't it kind of unnerving how everything looks bland and same-y lately because no one is willing to take any kind of risks in design?" or "isn't it fucked up how parents are getting so reliant on technology as toys that kids are going into kindergarten without the grip strength to hold a pencil?" Both of which are true!

It's only once they're controlling the conversation around those points that they end up dragging it to "the reason minimalism is evil is because it's keeping our great white artistic geniuses underappreciated and western society is crumbling to appease minorities" and "technology to let disabled people survive and let marginalized voices be heard is weakening the human race".

Hell, sometimes they'll straight up pretend to be leftists to turn the conversation about wealth inequality and how it translates to power into a pipeline to antisemitic conspiracy theories, and based on the amount of antisemitism I see on the left, I hate to say that they manage to do a pretty damned good job of it! Ecofascism is a thing, and that always starts from an ostensibly leftist position of "we should maybe not destroy the planet" before veering off the rails into "minorities are the real plague and might makes right is the law of nature and survivalism is about knowing 50 ways to kill a man with your bare hands" bullshit!

There are a LOT of things that the right is...very superficially correct about. Refusing to engage with those points and point out how they may be true but they do not even remotely support the right's conclusion doesn't protect you, or your community; it just makes it easier for the right to control those conversations.

This is why it's not enough to know WHAT people who hate you value; it's important to know HOW they use those facts.

I say this in response to the fact that I've been seeing people lately starting to rail against environmentalist causes, against climate-focused native plant gardening, by claiming that it's CLEARLY a pipeline to ecofascism and CLEARLY anyone who wants you to understand that there are ways to control ticks and mosquitoes other than sterilizing your entire neighborhood just doesn't CARE about the dangers of insect-borne disease and wants disabled people to die off, nature wants us dead - that whole rabbit hole is, uh...Bad. That's bad, guys. Nature is good. Climate-focused gardening is good. Native plant restoration is good. "A well planned and maintained lawn replacement is no more of a tick risk than your barren wasteland of a monoculture lawn" isn't the same thing as "if you can't handle a tick bite you should just die" and you NEED to be able to spot the difference or else the people saying the latter will just find a new way to sneak their bullshit in.

Similarly I've been seeing people rail against ALL feminism, no matter how intersectional, because terfs infiltrated a lot of spaces - no, no, we can't LEARN what specific talking points are red flags and yellow flags; we have to abandon the WHOLE concept completely, the dudebros who openly hate women were right, feminism is cancer! ...wait a second-

When you abandon entire concepts because Bad People use them...the results are never good. Hell, this is a huge part of why we're JUST starting to see pushback from the left on a large scale against the idea that you can solve all the world's problems by using the Right Words and NEVER saying the Wrong Words, because the right poisoned it by controlling the conversation around """political correctness""".

They were right. "Political correctness" - i.e., performativity, valuing words and optics over actions and intentions - is bullshit. It's ableist in its demands. It allows for a lot of abuse, both systemic and interpersonal, by people who just Know The Right Words. But for a long time most of the left doubled down because saying anything against it was Something Bad People Do.

Or to provide a positive counterexample, this is why I'm so grateful that the left is willing to talk about gifted kid burnout - because if WE weren't, guess who would be the only people willing to say "yeah, I get it, your parents and teachers and society promised you the world and then just abandoned you when they decided you weren't good enough, and that IS terrible" would be?

Hint: that other group is out there, and exclusively focused on extending that "support" to white cis boys.

In short, when you categorically write off the facts and experiences that someone warps to support a shitty conclusion, at best you leave the door open to let them recruit; at worst you end up railing against your own cause without realizing that's what you're doing.