The Native Language of Social Media Is Slurs

Recently, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City announced the launch of a new municipal Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, beginning his video with an oft-repeated Talmudic quote: “Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.” That lesson is something of a cliché in Reform Jewish circles, and not at all controversial. But given the nature of social media, it shouldn’t be surprising that the replies to Mamdani on Elon Musk’s X were a cesspit of antisemitism, islamophobia, and general hatred. What surprised and even alarmed some observers was how much of the negative reaction came from popular left-wing influencers and journalists.

Guy Christensen and Aaron Maté of the Greyzone both lashed out at the mayor, asserting that any effort to oppose antisemitism was tantamount to supporting the Israeli government. Many others were even less nuanced, referencing the blood libel or various other conspiracy theories about the Talmud, regurgitating medieval antisemitism, and using language indistinguishable from that of Nazis. These were not random accounts but people with considerable online prominence, often overlapping heavily in their audience and followers with mainstream figures and ordinary leftists. Sean Padraig McCarthy has 80,000 followers on X, and he is now posting about Simon of Trent and Leo Frank. He is by no means alone. 

The discourse, collectively, has spent a lot of time discussing ‘the left’s antisemitism problem’ and whether it’s real, whether it’s just being conflated with antizionism, and whether it’s worse than the rampant Nazism surging on the right. But I think many of these discussions have missed the forest for the trees. In attempting to analyze antisemitism on the left from an ideological or organizational standpoint, we have missed an obvious, inarguable reality—there is an antisemitism problem on the left because the left consists of people, and modern internet culture is built out of bigotry and slurs from the ground up.  

This is not to attempt a ‘no true Scotsman’ rescue of the left, which does have its own long and complex history with antisemitism, the so-called ‘socialism of fools.’ But Jews in modern America do not fill the unique ethnic or sociopolitical role they held in 15th-century Europe. Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question” at a time when Jewish emancipation was one of the defining questions of contemporary politics, in a society and civilization in which supersessionism had been one of the predominant pillars of pan-national identity for literal centuries. 

Antisemitism, in various guises, has continued to play a prominent political role in the conspiratorial politics of the left and the right, given its utility as an explanation and excuse for defeat: ‘The people secretly support us, but the cunning and manipulative Jew has misled them.’ This is a such a ready rhetorical and ideological move that we’ve seen it persist even in the absence of any actual oppressed and segregated Jewish community, from conservative attacks on “Cultural Marxists” to the way in which Israeli politics often recapitulates classical antisemitic tropes in attacks aimed at leftists or Arabs. But when it comes to popular left-wing podcasters or Twitch streamers calling something “spiritually Israeli” or zoomers calling anything they don’t like “goyslop” or Sunrise Movement blaming Israel for data centers or echoing Catholic blood libels from the fifteenth century, that’s clearly not what we’re looking at. 

What’s new is not the ideas themselves, or the terminology, but the degree to which they’ve become casual. The rhetorical tropes and behavioral patterns of what were once fringe movements have become democratized, spread throughout apolitical and common spaces, and are now deployed willy-nilly. What once required commitment has now become all too easy, a dynamic that we’ve seen repeated consistently in modern controversies and crises within internet communities. Antisemitism here is the symptom rather than the disease—a product of a communications medium and a cultural milieu that produces death threats and slurs as a form of carcinization.  

To put it another way, so many leftists are so antisemitic simply because that’s how we’ve trained ourselves to talk about anyone we don’t like. 

I think anyone active online in any serious capacity is aware of how rapidly any conversation—whether about politics, knitting, or Pokémon—can segue into death threats and conspiratorial condemnations. We’re certainly all aware of how the right has had success in weaponizing such trends (such as GamerGate) and turning them into engines for political radicalization. To suggest that such trends are also playing out on the left is not a form of “whataboutism” or centrism, it is simply the observation that “left” and “right” as forms of identity and cultural signifiers are substantially amorphous and fluid. For most people, politics isn’t a form of membership in an organized and active cadre, or loyalty to a manifesto, but a gestalt of associations and beliefs and relationships. Is it any wonder that it all starts to look sort of similar? For people whose politics are defined by these online communities and dynamics, that substratum shapes the politics that emerges.

Why doesn’t it surprise me to see figures who ostensibly represent the left rant about the intrinsic perfidy of the Jewish people, or drag out historical anecdotes to wield as cudgels in discursive dramas? Because I’ve seen the exact same dynamic play out with Syrians, Ukrainians, Taiwanese, Uyghurs, and every other group that has gotten on the wrong side of a factional dispute on X or Bluesky. People invent slurs, or drag out old ones, condemn people by their ethnicity or heritage, gleefully threaten their interlocutors with persecution, or invent new racial taxonomies to justify their prejudices, all in arguments that are nominally about geopolitics. Once you have decided that it’s acceptable to spew bile at Ukrainians because of the existence of Stepan Bandera, or to spam death threats at someone from Taiwan because of Chiang Kai-shek, or to mock the deaths of people in the Syrian Civil War because you’re mad at Barack Obama—well, maybe then it will also make sense to you to bring up Simon of Trent in an argument about Israel. 

In short, it’s not surprising that people keep accusing Jews of being bloodthirsty pedophiles, because that’s just our politics now.

Maybe the best example of this dynamic was the controversy over streamer Hasan Piker calling Orthodox Jews “inbred,” or referring to Israelis as “pig-dogs.” In his own defense, Piker has pointed out that he regularly uses terminology like that to address whomever he is attacking. But that just illustrates the broader problem. Once you’ve created discursive norms in which slurs, death threats, and constant, escalatory rhetorical attacks are condoned and encouraged, it’s impossible to maintain a cordon sanitaire around specific groups. It’s all just a big joke, regardless of topic. 

In online political arguments, slur-using leftists are often derided by liberals as “tankies,” but I’m not sure that really captures the problem. “Tankie,” as an insult, dates back to the split within socialist and communist organizations in the US and Europe over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The so-called tankies believed that supporting Soviet political hegemony was more important to progressivism than upholding an abstract concept of freedom or democracy. A similar, often overlapping category are “campists,” who tend to profess blind loyalty to any Third World nationalist or decolonial movement in the name of anti-imperialism. Campist or tankie, they strictly prioritize loyalty to a political bloc over loyalty to values. 

But while we still see the echoes of those debates today, the political landscape has shifted immeasurably. There is no coherent Communist bloc anymore, and the splits within the left are not playing out within organized political parties that are seeking to establish a singular party line. In a sort of cargo cult of twentieth-century politics, people attempt to substitute the Russian Federation or People’s Republic of China for the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, but the actual battle lines of discourse do not follow the contours of the Cold War. Instead, like everything else in our post-Berlin Wall world, the ‘lines’ are multidimensional and ever-shifting. 

We can see the same patterns of behavior and rhetoric playing out in every new field or front of political contention, regardless of how they originate. See, for example, the exceedingly contentious fights over the role of “AI” in modern society that have become unavoidable over the last few years. Litigating the capability and implications of LLMs is beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s striking how rapidly people have developed their own slurs, recreating the structures of bigotry and dehumanization in a new environment. There is no intrinsic reason why arguing about new technology would take on this construction and format, but it does—because that’s what everything else does too. No matter the topic, it always seems to lead back to the same place, and eventually you might conclude that that’s just what people want. And from there, you might decide to embrace it. 

In left-wing politics, the embracing of such behavior is often referred to as ‘dirtbag-ism,’ calling back to the cultural influence of Chapo Trap House and the so-called ‘dirtbag left.’ Liberal Currents’ own Alan Elrod defined it aptly:

Popularized in large part by the Chapo Trap House podcast and the universe of bro-y, loosely Bernie Sanders-aligned media figures who emerged in the mid-2010s, dirtbagism repackages antisocial and crankish attitudes as progressive authenticity. Rather than being strictly about substance, it’s an affective thing—an approach to politics that relishes aggression, mean-spiritedness, and heterodoxy as virtues unto themselves. In that sense, dirtbagism is a potentially fatal threat to any sort of liberal democratic future for a country already undergoing authoritarian drift and mired in deeply felt social anxieties and animosities.

The note on this being affective, rather than substantive, is key. Chapo Trap House and Hasan Piker, think of them what you will, are popular entertainers as well as political influencers. They cannot be separated from the cultural formats from which they emerged. The dirtbag left is not an ideological faction of the Party, nor a political tendency, so much as it is a bowing to influences of contemporary culture on the norms and structures of political discourse. And we should not pretend to be surprised that the package containing an attitude of ironic dismissal, contempt for the prevailing values of liberal society, and abrasive, cruel mockery as primary mode of communication has also come to include antisemitism. Why wouldn’t it? 

This is not merely a complaint about bad language or a call for civility. The problem with dirtbagism, and the general socio-cultural dynamics of modern political discourse that push towards it, is not simply that we are rude or insulting to each other. It’s that by replicating the attitude and actions of bigotries, we invariably fall into them. It’s not a coincidence that ‘smoothgroin,’ ostensibly an attack on distant and unaccountable elites, merely recapitulates reactionary gender dynamics around virility and sex. It’s not a coincidence that people chose ‘wireback’ as an insult to use for AI, echoing a slur for Hispanics. Playing at bigotry creates an environment for it, whatever our intentions may be. As right-wing Jews are beginning to learn, you cannot create a permission structure for racism and assume it will always exclude you.

The word ‘slur’ in my title is not used by accident. It is an attempt to capture the fundamental dynamic in which people’s humanity is dismissed as a casual form of political discourse. We all know that there is no real difference between ironic and sincere racism. We are what we pretend to be. That ‘Zio’ has become an acceptable slur in left-wing and apolitical spaces is indicative that we have not thought through the implications of this for ourselves, however. We can argue about the meaning of Zionism as a political philosophy, and the implications of the Israeli geopolitical project, but adopting a neo-Nazi insult as our own means we are also adopting neo-Nazi patterns of thought, and from that invariably flows neo-Nazi behavior. 

I do not know what was in the hearts of protesters who attacked a vigil for 10/7 in NYC this year, but I do know that a left that has lost the ability to regulate language and behavior is a left that is incapable of policing antisemitism. Once you have decided that cruelty serves a purpose in and of itself, you are no longer capable of drawing those lines. Once you have accepted the premise that politics is a competition between groups of people, defined by their inherently good or evil characteristics, you have lost the ability to defend any coherently liberal set of values. That is how we reach a point where people who—I am sure—do not think of themselves as antisemites in any ideological or doctrinal sense end up constantly spewing language that cannot be interpreted any other way.  

None of this is to say that material conditions, i.e., the Gaza genocide, the Israeli occupation, and the prevalence of Israel in American news since 10/7 has had nothing to do with this. Conversely, there have always been strains of antisemitic thought within left-wing movements and spaces, and that hasn’t changed. But that people have reacted to an ongoing human rights catastrophe by doing the exact same thing they do with any other cultural flashpoint seems predetermined. I don’t think antisemitism is the motivating force of ‘the left’ in any coherent capacity. But a world where objecting to the use of slurs is derided as ‘tone-policing,’ and defending factual accuracy is considered tantamount to ‘defending a genocide’ is not one that can reliably protect itself against any kind of intellectual contagion.

So I don’t really think it can be disputed that there’s a problem with antisemitism in left-wing spaces, especially online forums and social settings where there aren’t responsible institutional guardrails or leadership. But we’re not going to be able to combat that problem with political education on the difference between antisemitism and antizionism, or historical lessons on the relationship of European Jews with Christian Europe, because—at its heart—it’s not a function of ideology or belief in any firm sense. It’s the inevitable result of social and cultural norms that seem to invariably favor toxicity and infighting over anything else. At the end of the day we’re all trapped together in the Xbox Live Chat, and it’s all excused—even exalted—as so many heated gamer moments, in response to which you are only supposed to slap your bro on the back.

Until we find a way to change that, we’re not going to be able to fix it.  

Featured Image is L'Agitation antisémite à Paris