(Jewish Group) 'Nobody is talking about anti-Semitism.' Are you kidding? [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Slate podcaster Mike Pesca has a theory that whenever President Donald Trump says “everybody” it means “almost nobody,” and when he says “nobody” or “anybody” it means “almost everybody.”

Try it: When Trump said, “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated” — well, nearly everybody disagreed. And when he says, “Everybody knows there was no collusion,” he means, “I insist there was no collusion, but am worried that nobody else, including Robert Mueller, agrees with me.”

That kind of verbal irony has become a way of arguing on social media. A Facebook friend complained recently that two weeks after Louis Farrakhan gave yet another anti-Semitic speech, “no one really cares.”

In fact, the Farrakhan speech was widely reported in the mainstream media, from The Washington Post to CNN to Fox News to Rolling Stone, especially after a leader of the Women’s March attended the Nation of Islam leader’s speech and refused to acknowledge his hate or apologize. By waiting too long to release a tepid statement on the incident, march leaders kept the story going another week. So did the right, which used Farrakhan’s re-emergence into the public spotlight as an opportunity to bash the left.

You could say people now care about Farrakhan more than they have in 20 years.

I don’t mean to pick on my friend; the “everybody” and “nobody” trope is everywhere these days. In part it is a symptom of news overload — important things that demand attention disappear at the speed of a tweet about some other thing that demands immediate attention. Everybody knows that Trump is adept at changing the subject, and almost nobody knows how to resist the bait. And while the web has democratized news and made it theoretically easier to get a story out to the public, it also means that many more stories and ideas are jockeying for attention.

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This article is from March, but still a good one, though I don't agree with parts, the rest pretty much sums up the issue of discussing anti-Semitism in this culture and climate.