Hate as Entertainment

And the whole world's a stage

Before this summer and the Glastonbury Festival in England, I imagine far fewer people had heard of the musical duo Bob Vylan. Quite a few more know the name now. Not because the world was introduced to a transcendent talent, but because the artists hijacked a concert and turned it into a forum of hate that, surprisingly or not, was not just well received, but echoed by the audience.

It's not often that a crowd chants “Death, death to the IDF,” – or death to anyone else, for that matter – at a concert, but Glastonbury became an enthusiastic orgy of homicidal complicity. The British govt responded by announcing a police investigation, and the US followed suit by canceling Bob Vylan’s visas and, effectively, the group’s American tour, actions that both miss the larger point.

What happened at that show is not “the current thing” as the internet catchphrase goes. It is a sentiment that is being normalized in tandem with the left’s belief that violence is an acceptable form of political expression. Spoiler alert: it isn’t. One can speculate what the reaction would have been had the chant called for “death to Hamas” or “death to Russia” instead of being aimed at Israel, but that, too, is immaterial and relies more on emotion toward the target than on substantive argument.

It is legitimate criticism to say that Israel has gone too far in responding to the barbarism of October 7^th. Nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed that day. Since then, the corresponding death toll among Palestinians varies depending on the source. One group estimates that 84,000 have been killed thus far. That is far more than the roughly 55,000 dead as claimed by the Gaza Health Ministry. One can quibble about how seriously either number should be taken, but the fact remains that the death toll from the response is substantially higher than the event that triggered it.

At some point, one can rightly ask if there is a formula that compares the value of Israeli lives to those of people in Gaza or the West Bank. What is the “proper” ratio of dead Jews to dead Arabs – 1:10, 1:100, 1:1,000, more? In other words, when is enough enough? I am generally supportive of Israel. When the alternative is some version of Hamas or another faction of the Islamic death cult, that is not a choice as the term is defined.

Still, Palestinians are human beings, and when an Israeli paper reports that IDF soldiers are told to shoot civilians near aid distribution sites, that’s a bad look for Netanyahu and his allies. In some quarters, anything that casts a shadow over the Israeli prosecution of this conflict is treated as hate speech. It isn’t. No nation or govt is above reproach. Just because someone dislikes particular facts does not make those facts less real. And this is where the protesters do themselves no favors.

Peppering any distaste for what the IDF is doing with calls for a global intifada undermines the argument by turning the critics into a reflection of what they claim to hate. In this sense, what happened in Glastonbury is the foreseeable consequence of identitarian politics. When people are first, members of some group, and only much later (if ever) individuals, they are effectively dehumanized. This reductionism that makes pets and mascots of human beings is a standard practice of activism. Once this mentality gains a foothold, large segments become easy to scapegoat.

Remember Covid? The mob did everything but demand that the unholy unvaxed wear yellow stars on their clothing for easier identification. Parents who object to books that are grossly inappropriate for eight-year-olds are attacked with flimsy straw men that have nothing to do with “a curriculum that teaches their child to be part of a rich, multicultural society,” and everything to do with believing that schools should focus more on grammar and math than on sexuality. And every other day brings a new thing that is branded as evidence of white supremacy, with perfectionism as the latest example.

All of this is to say that when group identity trumps individual qualities, little good follows. The new darling of the left, Zohran Mamdani, won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary despite – or, perhaps, because of – a history of incendiary comments. He only stands to be the leader of the nation’s largest city, so this is something worth following. Mamdani did exceptionally well among college-educated voters, who have succeeded in moving the campus ethos into the regular world.

People immersing themselves in a mob mentality is not new. It happened with the Vietnam War protests, marches to ‘ban the bomb,’ and displays of flag-waving when the Soviet Union collapsed. Those have given way to the climate cult, doxxing and swatting perceived opponents, and ‘Putin is bad.’ Individuals often yearn to be part of something larger than themselves. This, by definition, means recognizing or inventing an enemy and creating a means of separating “them” from “us.”

Groupthink clouds one’s ability to hold independent thoughts, and when people can be convinced to get behind a certain cause or to boycott specific businesses, then cues that make it acceptable to harm or kill others amount to a difference in degree, not in kind. Responsible leadership does not rely on mass programming. But leadership interested in power and dominance has no issue with that. This sort of leadership understands that the single greatest source of power among human beings is the willingness to use violence to achieve desired ends, even when violence is not necessary.