All the Apparatus

Thoughts on conspiracism, anti-system politics, and our Dumb Era.

Welcome to All the Apparatus, a newsletter that will discuss ideas that animate the Dumb Era we’re doing our best to live through—illiberal thought, anti-system politics, and the conspiracism and conspiracy theories underneath too much of it.

“All the Apparatus” alludes to the Bodies Upon the Gears Speech by Mario Savio, a prominent Sixties activist with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. On the steps of Sproul Hall, he declared:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.

This inspiring call to change seems to have slouched toward the present day, where it might now describe the pessimistic fatalism of so many people in our factious and unstable democracy, on both Right and Left. People who believe everything of importance is “rigged,” who think their lives are controlled by “systems,” who yearn to “dismantle” the “structures,” who rail against globalists, the “deep state,” and “the regime”. People for whom optimism and progress have been replaced by paranoia and a posture of violence. People who have lost basic faith in the liberal order.

I’m a freelance writer who has been covering bad ideas in politics for over a decade. Because Antisemitism is inevitably the axis for illiberal movements, I’ve often focused on it. In so doing, I’ve acquired some depth of knowledge about less commonly addressed facets of the anti-Jewish phenomenon: Left-wing Antisemitism, Black/Jewish tensions over peoplehood and Zionism, the aspects of contemporary “Antiracism” that are inimical to the welfare of Jews, and most of all—the nature of Antisemitism in its most salient form as a conspiracy theory.

Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory.

I’ve had bylines in The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Tablet Magazine, and the Jewish Daily Forward. You may recognize me as the guy who wrote that Antisemitism “punches up.”