Toying with Evil on Twitter
Hi all. I would like to give you all a break from the anxiety in the media. Although this post gets dark, understand that it’s meant fundamentally to be uplifting. I’m a romantic optimist. I mention the darkness so you understand the scale of the light we’re all capable of.
This post is about Shawn Eni, who for some reason, agreed to talk with me (we only met the day we recorded). I was curious to know how his parody Mossad account on Twitter has more than 200,000 followers. Specifically, what does that mean about us?
Before we get into it, please consider this call to the jungle on Shawn’s behalf. He’s looking to monetize what he’s built.
My fellow creatures, if you have creative ways to make money with Shawn, let me know. Let fate do its thing.
Okay. I’m going to tell you about a guy who has over 200,000 people who are into his daily jokes online. It’s the kind of thing one thinks was planned. Instead this started as a joke.
Shawn Eni describes himself as the kind of person who finds humor in everything. He’s developed a knack for spotting the funnies in the darkest part of Jewish existence, but doing so with care. There’s plenty to mock about anti-Semites. The belief in silly conspiracies is its own self-parody. The sheer amount of time of this ongoing disaster is too almost it’s own joke.
It’s just that the magnitude of the atrocities can only ever be confronted with deadly seriousness. You can’t defeat paranoid lunacy with witticisms.
There’s no need to dehumanize an anti-Semite either.
Shawn is someone who reads the comments section in articles about Israel. I was kinda shocked when he told me this. My wife reads the comments section too. As though she’s seeking the reminder that, yes, the target of those hostile remarks is me. All those terrible things did happen. They can happen again.
There’s wisdom in subjecting yourself to that. To know that your fate could be to suffer miserably for years, with almost no hope, a slow torture bestowed on you by your fellow mammal, supposedly animated by the divine – but that there’s a way to avoid that. And dedicating yourself to the virtues you follow with wobbly aim is the best method forward. The beauty is, the core idea is universally applicable.
Several years ago, Shawn noticed that officials in Muslim countries were accusing the Mossad of odd plots, like stealing Iran’s rain clouds and sending sharks to eat tourists in Egypt. One Muslim anti-Israel activist in the UK claimed that Israeli spies broke into his house to rob one shoe.
Not documents. Not money. Not even the full pair of shoes. Just one shoe.
Shawn’s reaction? “Oh my god, this is sweet,” he told me on my podcast. “I need to be that Mossad. Not the real Mossad. I need to be THAT Mossad, where, whatever you want to blame on the Jews, whatever you want to blame on Israel, the craziest thing you can come up with, we’re that organization that comes up with that stuff.”
To watch the whole episode, click here. For the audio version, here.
It’s a brilliant insight. That’s because… anti-Semitism is funny!
I mean, it’s terrible. But it’s also hilarious.
Here’s the premise: The Jews are so powerful, and have so much time on their hands, that they can train sharks to eat specific people off a rather long coastal area? That they deftly enter the house of a marginal political activist, just so they can mess with his head?
That last one isn’t only dumb. It’s also a form of self-delusion. The Jews have to deal with serious threats on a daily basis, and yet YOU, because of your mediocre “accomplishments,” are high on this list?
Paranoid narcissists: You want to punch them, right? Who can stand them? Better to poke fun at this obvious character flaw instead. It delivers the same point with higher intensity anyway.
Using this strategy, he sent this tweet:
For those that don’t recall, Linda Sarsour is an American progressive political activist who rose to a measure of prominence by organizing Black Lives Matter protests, and protesting the Trump presidency. She was born in New York to Palestinian immigrants, which undoubtedly shaped her views on Israel.
I’m not judging. I get it.
Now, she wasn’t the perfect target. Her record with the Jews is mixed and incoherent. She supports the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, and while she believes in a one-state solution she also (?) supports Israel’s right to exist. She once said “nothing is creepier than Zionism.”1
She has also raised money for the reparations of a vandalized Jewish cemetery.
Can you be anti-Israel and not an anti-Semite? The anti-Israel claim is that Jews should not have their own state. In practice, this idea means that they should be a slight majority of the population some comically ill-defined country at best.2 Preferably a minority.
Where else are the Jews supposed to go though? How many more times do we need to be fucked with before people understand that anti-Semitism is a force of history, and we remain historical creatures?
It’s possible to be simply callous about it. To say Israel shouldn’t exist because my claim to nationhood is stronger than yours, and not wish any further malevolence upon the Jews.
It’s when you throw in the malevolence that starts getting us worried. You don’t just want the Jews to lose their national sovereignty. You want them to burn afterwards.
It’s a very fine line. Perhaps close to invisible given historical precedents.
In Sarsour’s case, there was just enough there. Did she think Twitter was Geek Squad at Best Buy? Was she not aware of her public profile? Low chance. So was she soliciting conspiracy theories about her lost texts?
Ahhh. There’s the bullseye. Sarsour didn’t go there. But the joke somehow landed.
Shawn went to bed that night with some two thousand followers.
He woke up the next morning with ten thousand more.
Charles Manson? Jeffrey Dahmer? Jeffrey Epstein? Shit, even Jeffrey Toobin is creepier than Zionism.
Would the culture be based on Hebrew or Arabic? Would we be discussing both cultures as if they were our own? Would the economy be observing Passover and Ramadan? No one ever tells us those bits.