On the rise of antisemitism in American public life

There is something almost mathematically precise about the persistence of antisemitism: every civilization that has indulged it has sooner or later found itself diminished, barbarized, or destroyed.

One might have supposed this lesson — written in the ash of a continent — would have been sufficient instruction for the ages.

One would, of course, be wrong.

Tennessee spent ninety minutes turning an execution chamber into a trembling medical farce — a grotesque national ritual where bureaucracy, vengeance, and incompetence merged into a bloody theater

There are countries that build bridges. Countries that cure diseases. Countries that place telescopes into orbit to study galaxies older than language itself.

And then there is the United States of America, where highly paid adults gather in fluorescent government chambers to spend ninety minutes trying to stab a condemned man in the neck while arguing about whether the doctor knows how veins work.

How America turned children’s lungs into a revenue stream, regulators into ventriloquist dummies, and nicotine addiction into just another patriotic growth industry wrapped in mango flavor and campaign cash.

The great genius of the modern American state is not merely that it permits suffering, but that it industrializes it with the bored efficiency of a clerk stamping parking tickets during a flood.

Pain in this country is no longer a bug in the system.

It is the product.