My latest: ugliness and hate are having a good year

Politics is show business for ugly people. It’s an old line, one for which many claim parentage.

But it’s true. And there’s been quite a bit of ugliness pinballing around in recent months. Because, too often, it works.

In 2016, Democrats didn’t believe ugliness could prevail. In that U.S. presidential election year – where, full disclosure, this writer worked for Hillary Clinton in three different states, including her Brooklyn headquarters – nobody believed that Donald Trump’s style of politicking could possibly succeed.

Trump called Clinton a criminal. He called for her to be locked up. He said Barack Obama founded ISIS. He said Mexicans were rapists, and attacked Jeb Bush for marrying one. He said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he got caught. And so on.

Nobody believed that kind of ugliness could win an election, let alone a presidential election. But Trump did.

Eight years later, Democrats aren’t taking any chances. They’ve quoted Trump’s former chief of staff, who has called Trump a fascist. They’ve slammed Trump at every opportunity, sparing no adjective. Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican Party – because they are, indisputably, his party – held a big rally at Madison Square Gardens on the weekend and permitted all kinds of ugly things to be said.

Like that Puerto Rico is a “island of garbage” floating in the ocean. Like that Kamala Harris is “the antichrist” and “the devil.” And, as the Times of Israel noted, antisemitic jokes – most notably, the comedian who said that “Jews have a hard time” spending money. Because, presumably, Jews are cheap.

That kind of ugliness – the ugliness of antisemitism – has been everywhere, in the past year. CyberWell, an Israel-based watchdog that tracks antisemitism online, has issued a report that concludes antisemitism has surged by almost 40 per cent in the eleven months since the murderous attack of Hamas of October 7.

Says CyberWell’s brilliant founder and executive director, Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor: “It’s important, especially since there’s a lot of fanfare around the next administration in the United States and potentially in Canada – it’s very important if you care about what’s happening in your society – that the way to address [antisemitism] in a systematic way is to look at social media reform. We cannot shy away from it just because it’s the tech sector. In fact, the opposite. It’s the key to safer and and more stable societies at this point.”

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