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Here’s what I know about having a large platform on other social media sites.
NONE of them drive any traffic to Substack. None.
Less than 1% of my traffic comes from any social network.
The average American today is significantly wealthier than even the top 1% in the Roman, Han and Aztec empires.
Looking at the data in 2023 US Purchasing Power Parity:
The average American earns around $81,695
The top 1% in the Aztec Empire earned about $70,421
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Just like most school shooters since 1999, Hale became obsessed with Columbine years before she opened fire inside The Covenant School in Nashville.
What's a little different about Hale's case is the level of detail and effort that when into mimicking the Columbine shooters. She recorded her own version of "The Basement Tapes" on actual V…
"I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn't want ancient European antisemitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil."
To diverge from the context in which you wrote that last sentence and also from your personal perspective, as I'm a Gentile --
I think we can say that the persecution of good Arabs in the US of those days, on account of an atrocity for which they were not responsible, led to a fateful overcorrection. Soon everything Arab and everything Muslim was to be defended. The secularism of many on the American Left did not prevent them from crediting followers of Islam with a moral purity unknown in Christendom and insisting on a thoroughly benign interpretation of the Qur'an. (Having read it in its entirety, I can't go so far.) Fifteen years later, Donald Trump's antipathy to Muslims set the seal on their standing with progressives. If Trump was against them, progressives would be for them. No questions asked, no distinctions made.
All people -- good, bad, or indifferent -- with roots in the Arab world became beneficiaries of the reverential goodwill which modern-day Americans reflexively extend to immigrants with stories of hardship and persecution to tell. The stories may be corrupted by ancient prejudices, but it's bad form to notice; one must be a cooperative listener. In this way, undissipated antisemitism pursued Jews from the old world to the new, where it assumed a sympathetic new identity in the environs of elite universities, progressive NGOs, and even the US Congress.
The struggle ahead which you mention in closing must include American intellectuals' self-liberation from the thrall of the Magical Other and their recognition that there is such a thing as an exotic bigot.