Tom Lehrer Should Write Another Song September 24, 2024September 24, 2024 I’ll tell you why, but first . . . The Anti-Semitic Revolution on the American Right . . . the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies of them all . . . Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are not inconsequential voices. Neither is Trump, who dines with Holocaust deniers. . . . Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power, compelling Republicans to either sign on to his claims of 2020 fraud or be exiled to irrelevance. The fundamental fault line in the conservative coalition became whether someone was willing to buy into ever more elaborate fantasies. The result was to elevate those with flexible approaches to facts, such as Carlson and Owens, who were predisposed to say and do anything — no matter how hypocritical or absurd — to obtain influence. Once opened, this conspiratorial box could not be closed. After all, a movement that legitimizes crackpot schemes about rigged voting machines and microchipped vaccines cannot simply turn around and draw the line at the Jews. For mercenary opportunists like Carlson, this moment holds incredible promise. But for Republicans with principles — those who know who won the 2020 election, or who was the bad guy in World War II, and can’t bring themselves to say otherwise — it’s a time of profound peril. And for Jews, the targets of one of the world’s deadliest conspiracy theories, such developments are even more foreboding. . . . If you’re Jewish, or have Jewish friends, or think America was on the right side in World War II, this piece is worth reading in full. It made me think of Tom Lehrer‘s, “National Brotherhood Week” (“oh the black folks, hate the white folks, and the white folks hate the black folks, and the rich folks hate the poor folks . . . and everybody hates the Jews”). He should write another song. Except he won’t because (a) he once said, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize” and (b) this has passed the point of being funny.