BW: Do you worry about the trickle-down effect of the rhetoric of demonizing Israel, demonizing supporters of Israel, and the anti-Semitic attacks we are seeing?
RT: For me, the main culprit is Twitter. Twitter is a cesspool of antisemitism. I’m not suggesting that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. But Twitter is just a cesspool of antisemitic invective. It has the effect of amplifying the ideological extremes. The most egregious example is Donald Trump. And a visible vocal minority on Twitter can easily be mistaken for the majority and elected officials often mistake Twitter for the real world. And the amplification of ideas on Twitter can have a profound effect on the psyche of an activist or an elected official. It feels like people are jumping on the bandwagon against Israel and are making grand pronouncements without understanding the context, without fully understanding the facts. Increasingly, we’re operating on tweets and memes and infographics rather than actual facts.
I see our present moment, fundamentally, as an epistemic crisis. We’re losing a conception of what it means to know, of what it means to have knowledge. One piece of advice that I'm giving to Andrew [Yang, currently running for mayor of New York] is to never take a position on an issue unless you've heard both sides of the argument, unless you study the issue so exhaustively that you can defend it and you can stand by it. That's advice I would give to anyone. And Twitter just seems incompatible with critical thought.
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