"'Fugitive virtue.'"

Speech and 'the anti–Semitism hustle.'

Their free speech is our free speech. Columbia, Missouri, 2007. (KOMUnews, cc by 2.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

14 DECEMBER—The Atlantic, for many of its 166 years a fine monthly journal, went on to become a pretty good monthly journal, and then an O.K. monthly journal on the way to becoming a forgettable monthly journal that for many years barely survived. Since Jeffrey Goldberg took the editor’s chair in 2016, The Atlantic has been a truly awful magazine one would like to forget but cannot: If the journalism is third-rate, it has a natural appeal among the third-rate minds who have come in recent years to lead the liberal-authoritarian charge into paranoiac “Russophobia,” the censorship regime that grows more prevalent as we speak, the corruption of America’s institutions of government, and altogether what remains of American democracy.  

Goldberg, who previously served in the Israel Defense Forces—and as an Israeli prison guard, if you please—has made The Atlantic a spear-carrier for every neoliberal orthodoxy one can think of—as well as every war the neoliberals who run Washington have started. It is no surprise at all that the magazine now voices unqualified support for Israel’s daily barbarity in Gaza while finding—this seems a Goldberg preoccupation—anti–Semitism everywhere everywhere everywhere.

The creep of censorship against independent, non-corporate media has been evident in the U.S. since the days of the Russiagate hoax, 2016 to 2020. But the IDF’s genocide operation in Gaza has intensified the liberal authoritarians’ attacks on dissident reporting, commentary, and free speech altogether. There are two reasons for this. 

One, the Israelis’ racist savagery is so openly and obviously offensive to the most basic human values that it requires maximum effort to stifle objections to it. Two, the charge of anti–Semitism—dangerous, life-threatening anti–Semitism—makes excellent cover for those who think free speech is an antiquarian notion we must now dispense with.