Six years ago, I described Donald Trump as “our first Jewish President” because his enemies subjected him to the types of attacks that antisemites reserve for Jews.
The case grows stronger with each passing year. The attacks against Trump – constant lies, exaggerated hysterics, lawfare, betrayals from within, cultural defamation, the hopes for his suffering, the murder attempts, etc. – are far too familiar from history’s war against the Jews.
To choose only last week’s antisemitic salvo, a Turkish state-run news agency published a grim, pieta-like photo of a healthy mother holding a frail, emaciated child as proof that Israel was starving Gaza’s children. With the help of the New York Times and other prominent members of the mainstream media, the photo and the allegations went viral. They were, however, entirely false. The child looks sickly because of serious genetic disorders. An uncropped photo shows an older brother who appears as healthy as their mother.
For the Jews – as for Trump – all allegations are given immediate credibility, and the more gruesome the charges, the more credible they’re deemed. Worse, they persist long after they’ve been debunked, discredited, and shown to have been malicious fabrications. Over 40% of Americans still believe that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election!
These parallels are hardly coincidental. Widespread, hysterical hatred surrounds both targets; endless funding rewards those who can spread the madness. Trump Derangement Syndrome and conspiratorial antisemitism have been finely tuned to manipulate the masses. Once ensnared, normal cognitive functioning becomes impossible.
It’s a malady of our times – a pivotal moment in our transition into the Information Age. As our relationship with information changes, so too does our ability to discern truth.
To address that challenge, I designed and taught an “Information Integrity” course comprising the basic self-defense skills necessary to navigate the contemporary information and media terrain.
On day one, I introduced my students to two key messages:
All of social media, and the entire Internet economy, is designed to manipulate you.
If you read, see, or hear something, the only universally safe assumption is that the person presenting it wants you to believe it.
Today’s terrain blurs truth, thoughtful analysis, propaganda, manipulation, and AI fabrication. Over the past three years, AI LLMs (large language models) have added a layer of extrapolation and presentation – subject to a wide range of biases – to amplify and give undeserved credibility to the loudest voices. Independent study, research, and critical thinking have thus become more important than ever – at precisely the moment that instant lookup has eroded the value of knowing specific facts.
Another simple lesson: If you ever read a headline and think, “Wow! It’s almost unbelievable that anyone could be that stupid/outrageous/cruel/evil,” it’s probably best not to believe it. Skepticism and the search for original sources are always warranted. The need is heightened, however, when approaching subjects of widespread derangement like Trump, Israel, and the Jews.
The elevated manipulation potential in such cases is obvious. Once you’ve determined that you dislike some public figure, every additional unlikable story traps you in confirmation bias. Perhaps yesterday you “knew” 10 of President Trump’s outrageous statements. Now you “know” 11! He’s even worse than you’d thought! Except that you never bothered to verify whether he’d said any of those things – and if he did, whether he said them in a context very different from the manner in which they were presented. The case against him mounts – in your mind, if not in reality.
When it comes to conspiratorial antisemitism, blood libels have been around for a millennium. The stories about Jews poisoning medieval wells and spreading bubonic plague always seemed far-fetched, but now that you’ve heard about their campaign to starve Gaza’s children, perhaps it’s time to reconsider? Another classic manipulation.
All such things are possible, encouraged, and exploited when truth, propaganda, and AI generation intermingle as equals. A generation raised to look up factoids rather than to study, and to reject objective morality in favor of culturally determined opinions, is particularly susceptible to its predations.
The situation is so bad on these front-line issues that the safest rule of thumb is to assume that every outrage alleged against President Trump, Israel, or the Jews is an inversion of the truth. If you’re really interested, do your own careful research. Perhaps some rare allegation will turn out to have been accurate. The odds against it are very long.
The problem is pervasive. Entering such a terrain without basic self-defense skills is madness. Sadly, it’s also the norm. As a public service, I thus offer six bare basic questions you should internalize to defend yourself against manipulation. Think of them as the updated Five Ws.
Each time you encounter a new story, ask: Can you define your terms? How do we know that? So what? What’s the other guy going to say? Are you sure you’re not talking about yourself? Is it so perfect that it’s almost unbelievable?
There’s plenty to drill down on each question. Learning and internalizing them is but a start. The alternative, however, is debilitating madness – as so many of our once-respected contemporaries are so eager to demonstrate.
