Here’s a historical overview of perceived justifications for anti-Semitism across eras, highlighting how societies constructed narratives to rationalize their hatred. This should serve as a reminder that these justifications were, and continue to be, post hoc rationalizations for prejudice.

Ancient Era (Pre-Christian)

•Cultural Isolation: Refusal to assimilate, distinct customs and practices.
•Economic Role: Seen as outsiders competing for resources.
•Religious Differences: Monotheism seen as an affront to polytheistic societies.

Early Christian Period (1st–4th Century CE)

•Deicide Accusation: Blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus.
•Religious Exclusivity: Refusal to accept Christianity.
•Scapegoating: Blamed for societal misfortunes like plagues or economic hardships.

Middle Ages (5th–15th Century)

•Usury Accusation: Banned from many professions, Jews often worked as moneylenders, leading to resentment.
•Blood Libel: Falsely accused of kidnapping and murdering Christian children for ritual purposes.
•Plague Blame: Accused of poisoning wells and spreading the Black Death.
•Religious Conflict: Seen as Christ-rejectors, targeted during Crusades.

Early Modern Period (16th–18th Century)

•Economic Resentment: Jews prospered in certain niches, leading to envy and suspicion.
•Religious Conversion Pressure: Refusal to convert viewed as obstinance.
•Nationalism: Seen as disloyal outsiders in emerging nation-states.
•Racial Theories Begin: Early pseudo-scientific claims of inherent differences.

19th Century

•Economic Scapegoating: Blamed for capitalism, banking, and perceived exploitation.
•Socialism Blame: Simultaneously accused of fostering revolutionary socialism.
•Nationalist Ideologies: Portrayed as a stateless, rootless “other.”
•Scientific Racism: Rise of pseudoscientific ideas claiming racial inferiority.
•Media Control Accusation: Blamed for alleged influence over press and public opinion.

Nazi Era (1933–1945)

•Biological Racism: Framed as a genetically inferior threat to Aryan purity.
•Economic Conspiracy: Accused of controlling global finance.
•Cultural Corruption: Blamed for modern art, liberalism, and moral decay.
•Communism Blame: Portrayed as instigators of Bolshevism.
•Historical Scapegoating: Resurrected medieval and nationalist accusations.

Post-War Period (1945–Present)

•Israel and Zionism: Criticism of Israeli policies extended to anti-Jewish sentiments.
•Global Conspiracy Theories: Accused of controlling media, banks, and politics.
•Economic and Cultural Scapegoating: Blamed for globalization and liberal values.
•Religious Conflict: Continued tension in Muslim-majority countries over Israel and perceived Jewish influence.

Key Takeaway

Across millennia, the perceived “justifications” for anti-Semitism have shifted based on the needs and anxieties of the time: religion, economics, politics, and pseudo-science. These rationalizations were always tailored to fit the dominant narratives and fears of the era.

The crucial reminder is this: justifications for hatred always feel “valid” to those who embrace them. Recognizing the parallels across history should warn against falling into the same traps today. What is framed as “reason” or “justification” is often just a veneer over prejudice. x.com/markchangizi/s… x.com/markchangizi/s…

These excerpts — which look to have been in early March 2020 — are your regular reminder that the Covid mass hysteria did not come from the top down.

And then mass hysteria “hit.”

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1239995212572876802

If you were PRO-CHOICE, you would allow the 8.5 month old unborn a choice.

If you were PRO-PALESTINIAN, you would demand the elimination of its genocidal and brutal unelected oppressor, Hamas.

If you were FEMINIST, you would ensure biological men are not in women's sports and spaces.

If you were PRO-CHILDREN, you would not allow them to "consent" to permanent body-altering elective procedures.

If you were for FREE SPEECH, you wouldn't have supported the censorship of your opposition.

If you were for BODILY AUTONOMY, you wouldn't have pushed for mandatory masks and vaccines.

If you were PRO ENVIRONMENT, you would not give CO2 infinite weight and thereby abandon preserving wildlife and reducing pollution.

If you were PRO EDUCATION, you wouldn't have kept children out of school for months and years over a cold they had zero risk from.

If you valued THE POOR, you wouldn't incessantly battle the greatest boon to lower classes, the free market, as well as implementing other massively harmful interventions such as lockdowns, which disproportionately hurt the poor.

If you valued VOTER RIGHTS, you would ensure every vote is made via a citizen in person inside a voting booth; anything else threatens to undermine our voting rights.

If you valued SCIENCE, you would not make the mistake of presuming that your chosen "experts" are "The Science," when science, like free expression, works because of endless unfettered disagreements and discussion.

If you valued CIVIL LIBERTIES, you would for once actually value civil liberties, rather than claiming they must be "balanced" in order to give Y to group X.

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1786454481174921385

I’m not here to make friends. That’s why I am egalitarian in who I go after, including social media silverbacks like Tucker Carlson, Neil Oliver, Matt Walsh — all who I targeted today — and so many others over the last several years.

The freedom leadership was shown in early 2020 to be worse than worthless, yet all those worthless unprincipled leaders are still here today, with more sway than ever.

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1613998585988714505

COVID IS BIG FOOT [thread]

1/

What do Big Foot, ghosts and UFOs (or UAPs) — on the one hand — and climate change and Covid — on the other hand — have in common?

Surely very little, right?

The former, UFO-like stuff, are the illusory observations by fringe observers of questionable reliability.

The latter, such as Climate Change and Covid, are deemed to be serious threats to the world, and the arguments for that are made by some of the smartest and most educated scientists and intellectuals on Earth.

These two classes of beliefs are, however, much more similar than they at first appear.

——

ALTOGETHER NOVEL

First, they’re all about some completely new thing, heretofore not known to exist. The hypothesis in each case is, “This thing no one used to think exists actually exists!”

They are therefore inherently exciting, mysterious, and mystical, at the border of the known and unknown.

This is obvious for Big Foot, Loch Ness, ghosts and UFOs. That’s what fun about them: If the observations are right, there’s a whole new entity to add to the list of players in the universe!

How about Covid? If you remember, it was “altogether novel.” We heard that a hundred times per hour in February and March of 2020.

Climate change, too, is about the entirely new climate forces fossil fuels are claimed to have brought upon us.

If it’s entirely novel, that might imply we know absolutely nothing about it, and so all bets are off! All information we might possess about other things simply doesn’t help whatsoever in making sense of this new thing. That would mean our prior probability distributions on the many possible properties of the new thing would be flat. And that means that we basically throw out all common sense about the thing, something I talked about early on at Twitter.

But it’s worse than that, as we’ll see… 2/

BUT KINDA LIKE THIS

I said above that the hypothesis form they all share is, “This thing no one used to think exists actually exists!”

But that’s not quite right. It’s more specific than that. It’s not merely that some unknown thing might exist.

It’s that a very particular kind of unknown thing exists.

Big Foot isn’t just some monster, but an in-between-apes-and-humans creature. Loch Ness is the one dinosaur species that didn’t die out tens of millions of years ago (setting aside the birds, etc.). Ghosts are wispy, semi-transparent, usually humanoid apparitions with the power to go through walls and kinda sorta move things. UFOs can go really fast, don’t seem to have propulsion, can change direction arbitrarily quickly, can dive through oceans, seem utterly smooth and composite, and so on.

The narratives for each have a bit of give. They’re certainly broader than my above brief pointers in their general direction. But they stay within certain rough bounds, and we all kinda know them. If you write a Big Foot story but it’s a humanoid two-headed reptile then, nope, it ain’t Big Foot. A ghost story with hard metallic robots coming out of the toilet isn’t a ghost story.

Now, for Covid, notice that it wasn’t simply altogether novel. Instead, right away the narrative about Covid attributed to it hosts of fairly specific expected properties:

(a) its infection fatality rate (IFR) is super high

(b) there are few asymptomatics (and so IFR will be roughly the very high early CFR values)

(c) transmission is unprecedentedly high

(d) asymptomatics can spread it

(e) it’s disproportionately risky for the young

(f) no one is safe, comorbidities or no

(g) it will hit the entire population (and so let’s multiply CFR by total population and see the total expected deaths)

(h) immunity doesn’t apply

(i) herd immunity can’t happen

(j) it leaves you with chronic health issues

(k) seasonality does not apply (i.e., the epidemic doesn’t have a tendency to come, and go, at a typical time of year, like almost all other viruses do)

(l) it goes away only via intervention policies (lockdowns, masks, etc.)

(m) all variation in epidemic severity is due to intervention policy

(n) a vaccine will be easy to build soon, and super effective

…and what sums most of them up fairly nicely is, “Covid is expected to be like the viruses found in the most dystopian horror flicks about pandemics.” (Along of course with “and only our greatest expert minds and the power of the state can possibly save us.”)

And, for Climate Change, it’s usually not merely that the climate will change. No, the narrative is filled with a certain suite of devastating and apocalyptic changes: some places becoming deserts, some forever flooded, some experiencing permanent deathly winter, and a surfeit of natural disasters such as hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. The narrative of climate change is definitely not, say, that the world will be a little warmer and greener.

So, these aren’t mere hypotheses about unknowns. They’re hypotheses about a construct within an existing narrative.

The president supported violating civil liberties en masse, and the following aren’t excuses:

- “if he hadn’t supported lockdowns they would have crucified him”

- “it was supposed to be for just two weeks”

- “no one knew much”

- “he was duped”

loofwired.com/p/four-videos-…

Sam Harris making the ethically incorrect claim that our civil liberties depend on data.

Our freedom does not depend on the IFR.

Our freedom does not depend on whether a vaccine is sterilizing.

A high IFR virus would NOT justify tyranny.

loofwired.com/p/were-at-risk…

— FREE EXPRESSION —
— the thread from hell —

The world has long lost its memory of the importance of free expression. But over the last three years of Covid the world has rapidly acted on its ignorance. The average person agitated for censorship of Covid “misinformation,” and governments proudly took the lead.

I was one of the millions censored. I am part of the first First Amendment lawsuit against the U.S. government. I started a research institute devoted to understanding and fighting for free expression. I have a new book on the origins and importance of human expression.

And… I have a video series — the Science Moment — that has a hundred videos on the many complex and counterintuitive dimensions of free expression.

Free expression is NOT simple. There is a strong intuition that the state (or other centralized fact checkers) should simply only allow true speech. Why not?

Answering that requires understanding how truth is actually found, and how decentralized networks can be insanely powerful.

In this series of Science Moment videos I cover a lot of ground, and — if you stick with the whole series — you will come away with a whole new appreciation for the richness of free expression.

Keep coming back to this thread, as it may take some time for the videos to get uploaded. You can also find the “censorship playlist” at YouTube (), but here at Twitter I want the videos themselves, not links to elsewhere.

Here we go!
Moment 54 — Nov 23, 2020
Gossip is the cure for censorship.

1/ On March 10, 2020, when I first spoke out against Covid irrationality, I had not appreciated how radical (and risky to my career) my common sense stance was.

https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1237406449959043072?s=20

2/ But fast forward a couple days, and the culture had noticeably transitioned. A phase change had occurred, and most of the populace had become zombies.

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1238265849032695810?s=46&t=3U-fDJVwddwRltwRU5YL8Q

They fired, banished and denied medical treatment to the unvaccinated, even though (1) the vax didn’t slow transmission, (2) it wouldn’t make epidemiological sense to urge the unvaccinated to cluster even if it did, (3) almost everyone had already gotten and recovered from Covid… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… (1) The vax didn’t slow transmission.

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1420121021923856384?s=46&t=3U-fDJVwddwRltwRU5YL8Q

🚨
Freedom of Information Request to Scottish Government reveals that…

“Over a three-year period in Scotland, there were zero deaths from ‘the Covid–19 virus’ amongst the employment sectors most in contact with the public (including doctors, nurses, shop workers, police, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1431991109543211011

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1653409758341111809

https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1657429910254768128?s=20

ME: Even Pol Pot was well-intentioned, and there is no greater evil.

THEM: WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING POL POT! HE’S EVIL!!!!

https://twitter.com/dionbram11/status/1646966364727394305

Excerpts from "The Power of the Powerless" - Vaclav Havel, 1978

1/ TOTALITARIANISM MUST BE UNDERSTOOD HOLISTICALLY
“Here, by the way, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2/ NO DIABOLICAL MASTER PLANNER
“The fact that human beings have created, and daily create, this self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity is not therefore the result of some incomprehensible misunderstanding of history, nor is it… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1645919240296226821?s=20

https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1434116532196478977?s=20

DALL-E created this image of a paramedic and nurse wearing VINO OPTICS Vein Finder Glasses.

These people don’t exist, but our tech most certainly does. #veinfinder

Lest we forget just how totalitarian things got with Covid, please leave in the comments example where individuals, groups or companies went beyond what was mandated to “help save us from Covid.” I’ll start with a couple of the most obvious:

~ Masking outdoors: Billions of people wore masks outdoors, despite it not being mandated.

~ Snitches: Millions of people went out of their way to enforce the mask mandates, despite not having any responsibility for doing so.

— Early viewing of Moment 359 —

Societal level evil is always done in the name of, and has the intent to, “help” human life.

It’s simply vacuously true that they think they’re doing good.

But they’re in fact not, and they’re evil.

People with a such a high “regard” for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1637853132481785856

Why does it matter that I insist that it was not a Plandemic?

It matters because it is one of many MANY impossibilities in the claim that this was all due to a Plandemic.

And, most of all, it matters because if one just believes this is all due to evil FreeX.group… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/markchangizi/status/1638503839014739968

The Plandemic-ers have become — for more than two years — a righteous cult of their own.

I have devoted three years of my life trying to explain and prevent the dangerous totalitarian situation we found ourselves in with Covid.

But because as a scientist I know it’s not a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Playlist on culpability at the societal level. youtube.com/playlist?list=…

🛎️ Perceived Emergencies 🔔
🛎️ Do Not Justify 🔔
🛎️ Violating Civil Liberties 🔔

1/ There will be a next perceived emergency. If it looks sufficiently different than what we just experienced w/ Covid, most won’t generalize from their experience at all. 2/ For example, I have found that individuals in my Iranian community are no more likely to have seen the totalitarian flavor of what transpired for Covid, despite themselves fleeing something similar.