Various members of the Boulder City Council deserve to experience extreme and prolonged personal misfortune, hunger, shame, and other classic bereavements

It takes five seconds to condemn a genocide. But it also takes both a spine and freedom from childhood or mass-media indoctrination

On February 15, the nine-member Boulder (Colorado) City Council voted 5 to 4 against “considering a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, as a non-bylined piece in Boulder Reporting Lab reported the following day. That is, the majority of this perennially elite governing body’s members declined to permit a process to move forward that would ultimately compel them to offer an on-the-record opinion on the matter of freewheeling human slaughter, essentially pleading that such faraway, easily abstractable matters lay outside the bailiwick of local-level public officials.

Council member Matt Benjamin—an edge-case mimbo who has spent probably one-third of his life attempting to achieve an even more blindingly white smile—framed his and his mates’ reluctance to move forward as an act of civic decisiveness in itself:

Benjamin requested the informal “nod of five” vote on whether to open a process for the resolution, stating, “We owe the community a decision one way or the other.”

Councilmembers Taishya Adams and Lauren Folkerts voted to open a process for a Gaza resolution. Mayor Aaron Brockett, Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer, and Councilmembers Benjamin, Tina Marquis, Ryan Schuchard, Mark Wallach and Tara Winer were generally opposed. (Marquis was the only councilmember who did not weigh in on the discussion.)

So, it looks like Adams and Folkerts, widely believed to be the sole two Wokish-leaning members of the current iteration of the council, are decisively against the U.S.- and Israeli-led wipeout of Palestinians—not to mention the Israeli hostages the Americans and Israelis are starving to death along with the Arab savages—and wanted to compel the other seven board members to consider a resolution calling for a cease-fire. But as almost everyone elected to public office in any U.S. municipality is some combination of swindler, coward, and beaming, glad-handing idiot, this gambit failed to move the needle.

I wasn’t aware until reading the Boulder Reporting Lab piece that a non-negligible number of Boulder residents have been hectoring the city council to take a public stand on the genocide currently and unambiguously underway in Gaza. Although this is in theory an international concern, and one being carried out in the ground psychotically, even triumphantly inhumane Israelis, the U.S.—a country that manages to double as that magnificently toxic nation-state’s mentally challenged but brawny big brother and its most captive and submissive whore—is the ultimate driver of this genocide, and its government is capable of shutting the mass torture down immediately. The U.S. government and especially its state department may be infested with Ziopathic ghouls and their death-cult-adjacent operatives, mostly bumpkin-class Christians, but in the end, that’s irrelevant. As then-U.S. President Bill Clinton exclaimed to his aides in 1996 after meeting current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Americans could never be matched in the reverse even by a U.S. citizen who spent his entire life as a professional, widely heralded antisemite burning Swastikas onto the doors of every synagogue in his path: “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

As of 2021, about 26 percent of Boulder’s households were Jewish. That may not sound like significant heft, but only about 1 in 40 or 1 in 50 Americans are Jewish overall, and according to a piece posted on the Jewish Community Center of North America website in September of that year, Boulder County (population 320,000) possesses “perhaps the fastest-growing Jewish community per capita on the continent.”

Decent, educated people have long recognized any targeted criticism of, or even tenebrous commentary about, Jewish public figures as the surest and most guaranteed path to misery and have mostly just worked around this often-entertaining limitation on natural idea-expression as needed. Now, of course, people in even relatively Zionism-free communities are keeping their mouths shut, though less and less so as the level of sheer inhumanity they’re seeing—usually in bilgewater form, given their news sources—becomes increasingly patent and infuriating. Normies are petrified to do anything that might possibly be framed as antisemitic. And though this is hardly a nascent, genocide-driven phenomenon, prominent Zionists—mainly through their highly paid (though sometimes blackmailed) congressional and media stenographers—have explicitly stated that simply protesting any of Israel’s actions, be it online or in a peaceful campus protest, is antisemitic. The primary face of this is Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, whose favorite trick (when not trying to manipulate X CEO Elon Musk into banning anti-Israel content on the only major interactive media platform still allowing such content, that is) consists of accusing others of pushing hackneyed and divisive antisemitic tropes about monetary greed, then offering to not ruin the lives of the accused or demonize their organizations into effective nonexistence if they pay him and the ADL millions of dollars in atonement fees.¹

In a way, the rest of us can take solace in being classified as haters when most of us are at worst just tormented wiseasses who bristle ostentatiously confronted with too much ill-concealed and destructive bullshit and are blessed with an utterly irrational and immutable expectation of human beings to virtually always act rationally (and within limited logical frameworks at that). Gone, I suppose, are the days when impish stunts like dressing up like Heinrich Himmler for temple or cracking creative jokes like “Why did the Jews wander the desert for 40 years? Because someone dropped a quarter!”² at bar mitzvahs were generally required to earn opprobrium at significant scale. If we’re all antisemites now—including Israel-critical journalists and media personalities Glenn Greenwald, Katie Halper, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, Keaton Weiss, Russell Dobular, Dave Smith, Alexander Rubenstein, and Jeffrey Sachs—then no one is, and we can all just surrender our PayPal accounts voluntarily by the millions before they’re inevitably zapped anyway for the excessive use of First Amendment rights.

So, it’s understandable why these council members did what they did. But “understandable” applies to a lot of passively evil actions. Once these folks became elected officials, they lost their “right” to issue craven statements without blowback from people who expect no better from them but demand it anyway just to inspire a few pangs of conscience and occasionally outright humiliation. I doubt they think they’re really fooling serious people with this non-maneuver, but they still need regular and forceful reminders that this is the case. Not that they care, given the city’s non-acknowledgement of the e-mail I sent them concerning the recklessness of Boulder’s racially targeted covid-jabs campaign.

The individual quotes echoing “thanks, but I’ll pass” sentiments from city officials:

• Mayor Aaron Brockett: “We have so many huge problems right here in our town of Boulder, Colorado, dozens of people living out on our streets, people dying in traffic violence on a regular basis. [There are] any number of major local problems and issues where the nine of us can have a very direct and immediate impact. And I feel that that is what we need to focus on as a council.”
  
  This man is a coward and should be ousted from public service. He’s smart enough to know that others know every city has “major local problems and issues,” especially “traffic violence.” If he wanted a “I refuse to condemn genocide” off-ramp, he could have chosen a slicker, less hangdog delivery. But this watery nonsense is exactly what a reasonable person would expect a guy who looks and talks like Brockett to produce.
  

• Matt Benjamin: “As Mayor Brockett pointed out, we have people dying right now in this community. A lot of them…How do we define what is the threshold [regarding wars to weigh in on]? How do we define when we do it, how we do it, how often we do it?”
  
  Oh-oh-oh I know this one! Someone should probably inform this guy that it’s not a difficult-to-parse issue, mainly because what’s happening in Gaza in no way resembles a war. Benjamin sounds like a tropical bird that has spent too much time as a Zionist house pet. Anyone who uses “politics is hard” as an excuse to dodge this of all issues should retire from public service as well as from collecting porcelain dental veneers (I think his wife actually pays for all those goodies, too).
  

• Tara Winer: “Even after Oct. 7, people did not come up to me and asked my opinion on the Middle East. They wanted to know what are we going to do as a city council to make a difference in climate change, to do something about people experiencing homelessness and mental illness.”
  
  According to the Boulder Reporting Lab article, plenty of Boulder residents are in fact interested in their leaders’ opinions on the genocide. So, clearly, are two of Winer’s own eight fellow council members. But Winer is a lost-cause pro-Israel loon, seen reposting material on X from the speech-policing, narrative-warping bot-like account “StopAntisemitism” and other garbage-sources. Winer’s bigoted views should disqualify her from public service, and she should resign from the city council immediately.
  

• Nicole Speer: This woman, who split her childhood between Europe and the U.S., calls herself a “champion of the people” but is in fact a Zionist propaganda-spreader and hence a pro-mass-murder goon as well as the placeholder mayor of the haven in which I reside. Speer’s website also identifies her as a member of the First Congregational United Church of Christ as well as the Boulder County branch of the NAACP.
  
  I know homeless advocates who have interacted with Speer, and she has absolutely no idea how to confront a combination of homelessness and opioid abuse despite being a scientist and despite having access to informed input on the matter. She should have resigned a long time ago, but no matter—the time for that is now.

  

• Ryan Schuchard: “Impossibly challenging … My challenge is starting a project that I really am concerned that we’re not resourced … to do in a way that would not threaten to exacerbate tensions. I would just like to remind you — or underline — that you have a city council here that’s being paid for something like a handful of hours a week, that’s being expected to make transformational progress on [various issues].”
  
  Really? This putz is using a marginally elaborate form of “we’re overworked” as an excuse? This guy should just quit already. No one cates what “his challenge” is, although I suspect he’s not adroit at overcoming remotely unexpected or challenging challenges.
  

• Mark Wallach: “If you make a list of the 10 most important issues in Boulder — and that list can change from person to person — but pick 10. We have solved none of them. We have made progress. We have made improvements, but we’ve solved none of them.”
  
  Is that cribbed from Councilman Wallach’s re-election flyer? Combined with Councilman Schuchard’s complaint about limited hours, it sounds like these people only have a few hours a week to get together and discuss making no progress whatsoever on ten or more issues of civic importance.
  
  This guy has a reputation for being fair and sometimes even humorous, but if he’s saying “We can’t do a single damn thing right as it is, and now you want us to expand our influence?” then he should expect people to call for his resignation. He won’t be running again anyway, as he’s already learned that absolutely nothing of community value is ever accomplished in city-council meetings. Most of the members have their fingers plunged deep into ESG-driven grifting-pies, chiefly the kind organized around “climate action” that makes rich hypocrites richer while ensuring high levels of homelessness and doing absolutely nothing for the environment except divvying up not just the choicest parts but even the so-so parts only for the privileged rule-makers.

The real job of any Boulder city council member is to woo developers, keep real-estate prices high, and create policies that make it easier for landlords to charge higher and higher rents while blaming this on externalities. This is exactly what the “leaders” of a city full of wealthy people are expected to do, so I can’t begrudge them that, but it’s still bleakly entertaining to watch the same people pretend that the folks who voted them into office are, as a general rule, remotely compassionate toward poor people. Poor people tend to not mask their faces outdoors, you understand. The anti-poverty comments on the Nextdoor site alone are almost unbelievable, especially considering that people attach their names and fairly precise locations to their cruel comments, remarkable more for their casual dismissal of suffering than for any especially creative slurs.

One of the few comments to the article repeated a popular falsehood among American cable-news fans: the existence of an “unprovoked, one-sided attack from Russia on Ukraine,” something that has yet to happen and certainly didn’t happen in 2022. Yet the same person has Israel-Gaza right, including the reasons almost everyone who can’t stand what’s happening pipes down about the subject. Eventually, this person will probably be apprehended by the reality of her own country’s demoralization in other geopolitical areas.

As for Boulder Reporting Lab itself, its publisher is a woman named Stacy Feldman, whose main focus seems to be railing against oil and gas and in general pushing whatever Google claims are the ideal policies concerning energy, public health, race relations, war, traditional Nazis, black and Chinese Nazis, and Zio-Nazis. According to her LinkedIn profile, over two decades ago, Feldman worked as a reporter for The Jerusalem Report Magazine, a publication owned by The Jerusalem Post. Unlike the Post itself, its supplementary magazine permits the publication of essays across a wide range of editorial stances, far wider than that allowed in the American mainstream press. On February 11, the Jerusalem Report even published a story titled “Youth United Against Racism brings Israeli Jewish, Arab youth together.”

Stateside, on the other hand, and close to home, it’s all nonsense—misdirection, minimization, and speech-suppression. On February 21, JEWISHColorado posted an open letter of thanks to the Boulder City Council “for not engaging in international affairs.” I wonder if they would have written the same letter if all nine council members had come out in support of turning Gaza into a parking lot, an idea at least one New York Times reporter and countless (other) Israelis have openly supported.

The letter contains stock bitching and moaning about rising levels of antisemitism, with the usual complete lack of self-awareness or the assumption of any responsibility for why people are pissed off. It bemoans “cities and towns across the country creating permission structures for antisemitism,” which apparently translated to “not shutting down people with other opinions.” Zionists are un-American and couldn’t care less about anyone’s right to speak and be heard other than their own. It is very easy to maintain this posture as long as one maintains a near-paranoid sense of persecution even in the face of great personal prosperity. The forebears of Zionists, who only formally came to be in the early 1900s, have been perfecting this dark magic of the soul for thousands of years.

Here’s how these anxious letter-writers could draw down what they’re seeing as antisemitism: Condemn the actions of the Israeli government and moreover that of the United States for perpetrating a genocide. A failure to do this gives away the game. I have no remaining respect at all for the JCC of Boulder, but also no inclination to harm them or divest them of their ugly ideas and the false versions of history that have been planted in their heads. They also keep a lot of cool goats over there, so there’s that, although these goats live on a different Boulder farm.

I don’t care how conflicted other people may find themselves over this issue, because anyone who lands on the side of “Bibi” et al., whether they can see it or not, is deeply sick. It amazes me that I can say, “You know, the U.S. isn’t part of Israel, and none of this benefits me or a single person I know at all,” and Zionists—and even some of the Americans they’ve misled, with most of these being chronically MSNBC-poisoned Boomers—just offer blank, uncomprehending stares: Peacenik says what?

Also on this page, disturbingly, is a link to donate to “The Israeli Emergency Fund.” How much more money does that country need after all the cash, missiles, and tanks already furnished by American taxpayers living in an open-borders state of burgeoning social dystopia?

Israelis enjoy tuition-free college and far better healthcare than Americans do, even allowing for the fact that Israelis are the most aggressively covid-jabbed people on Earth—95 percent or more of them got the mRNA special-sauce. This isn’t the only sign that Netanyahu hates everyday Israelis as much as he hates Americans and everyone and everything that interferes with his insatiable blood-lust. This rare example of a psychotically power-mad human ape is no mere Nazi-level aspiring exterminator but a Nazi in toto whose untrammeled ideological sadism is enhanced by the victimhood-narrative equivalent of doses of Deca-Durabolin and hGH sufficient to cause even the shoulders of bull elephants to break out in cystic acne.

Everyone with a mind, a conscience, and more than a fleeting and earnest, ego-free interest in international affairs can not only see and admit this, but has known most or all of it for some time. It’s just typically very costly to criticize Israel, and even if among those with no careers to lose or bank accounts to raid, the reflexive, inoculated whining any anti-genocide chatter sparks among Zionists is itself sufficient disincentive for most Americans to stand up and say, “I live in the United States too, and although even if invited I would never travel to the place you yammer about nonstop but oddly refuse to settle in yourself, at least you have another options once your nonstop wars and financial crimes ruin this one beyond repair.” The only gratifying way to deal with someone else’s combination of great, often inherited wealth, catastrophic moral deviance, and unparalleled propensity for overreacting to trivial offenses—no matter what religious or ethnocultural veil they try to hide behind—is to simply cop to whatever they’re accusing you of and then explain why that doesn’t matter. In this case, that’s easy: “At least I’m not a lying, genocidal, bigot who rails against identity politics only to embrace and maximally enforce them. I win.”

Those who consistently seek “information” from CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News are either cringe-comedy addicts or regular, decent people who, merely by consenting to watch these channels, are unintentionally yet staunchly determined to remain propagandized to the utmost about all matters of common civic importance for the rest of their blinkered and obtuse—but often superficially quite pleasant and, more importantly, unperturbed—lives. And the level of outright lying by the corporate media has reached unprecedented heights when it comes to Israel’s methodical and intentionally brutish eradication of the people of Gaza (and soon enough, the West Bank as well).

It’s not difficult to understand why. For one thing, the media have never not lied about U.S.-funded wars. For another, the sheer scale of the damage being intentionally, gleefully inflicted on noncombatant human beings has no contemporary precedent. And for still another, it is simply a fact that every U.S. corporate media outlet is a Zionist asset, and not benignly or remotely by cheerful coincidence. These people lie about practically everything and, like anyone else with a business to run and guided chiefly by avarice, never tell the truth when self-interest is involved.

Those of us who, on the other hand, follow genuine reporting on Israel-Gaza have a much easier job. We only need to consult some combination of The Grayzone, Mondo Weiss, or Electronic Intifada to gain a sufficiently accurate sense of what’s actually happening in the Middle East and why.

If anyone reading this thinks that observing the fact that Zionists control the U.S. mainstream media is antisemitic—and I assume no one who’s read even this far would inanely argue the claim itself is untrue—or is unhappy with any of my other characterizations here, then consider these offenses a series of feeble warm-up tosses. Since early October, it’s become not only clear to me but undeniable that Israelis, as a rule, are presently the most debased human beings on the face of the planet, and whatever tribe is in second place is so impossibly far behind that the comparison is not even close enough to call a race. The “liberal” ones, with some exceptions, are only tepidly against genocide, while most of them are not only for it but want to kill or silence anyone who’s against it. The music they produce and attendant “dancing” both leave something to be aesthetically desired as well, but now I’m straying too far into international concerns when I wasn’t elected to do that.

These people are mentally ill; just ask the rest of the world, other than too many people in the almost equally insular and arrogant, and even more ignorance-soaked, United States. And the fact that this is entirely the result of quasi-religious brainwashing is hardly exonerating, since mass indoctrination starting from early childhood is required to produce people as openly dehumanized as the Israelis partying in the streets over reports of more deaths of women and children to the south. These people are blocking food supplies to the people they’re already bombing to death, just to make it hurt more. Just read their X posts, for G-d’s sake.

If you disagree with any of this, fine. We all come from different places and come to our beliefs because we believe them. As Australian commentator and occasional metaphysical poet Caitlin Johnstone puts it forthrightly but with far more reservation and eloquent profundity than I ever could, people can still try to cling to morally defensible excuses for continuing to somehow see this genocide as just, but practically every vocal supporter of this “war” is both hollow and complacent and invariably an uncloseted ignoramus in other meaningful ways.

This is only a superficial take on the entire situation. I think about it every day, but have a hard time deciding what to write or, at this stage, why I should bother. I have consistently given strong hints about my feelings in this area in sidebars using insulting portmanteaus (“Zio-” is just too ripe a prefix to not abuse). And I’m not spacing these posts out to avoid upsetting anyone reading. I’m doing this because it tears me apart to understand that humans will always disappoint me in crucial and insurmountable ways. I’m not filled with hate, as that would at least be energizing. Watching other people these days, I’ve come to understand that as easy as I am with glib insults and repetitive campaigns against deeply imperfect content-generators, I’ve never known what it’s like to truly hate anyone or anything. I’m instead filled with the purest form of often-enervating disappointment I can imagine ever experiencing about anything in life that doesn’t directly threaten my own safety and security. If this is who we blandly allow ourselves to be, then why participate in common conversations, industries, or goals at all?

For now, though, a question. Let’s say Israel manages to get what it seems to want out of its current machinations. Do people think that will just be that, and the billions of Muslims (and others) around the globe will just nod glumly and move on? I do think that it would be a tragedy if Israel—or anyone’s homeland—were demolished or degraded into unrecognizability and its people forced to assimilate into other countries, as historically this simply hasn’t worked out at all well for Jewish people. But it would be worse if it continued to commit suicide in plain sight.

1. Handy tip: The easiest way to tell a Jewish person from a Zionist is that Jews are almost invariably funny, often at inappropriate times and seeing every ridiculous and bawdy angle. In this, I and all Jewish persons are united as scamps and rhetorical siblings. One of my local friends, who will remain nameless so that he can continue to live both locally and Jewishly, claims that all the coolest Jews have a raucous antisemitic streak. Zionists, meanwhile, never express honest mirth unless they’ve just screwed someone over or, in their minds, scored a point. For example, I’ve seen videos showing ferretlike, hyperkinetic Ziomite Ben Shapiro briefly laughing and photos of Bari Weiss with her Wicked Witch of West Jerusalem mouth twisted into an arid, crimped version of a smile, but neither of these wealthy and celebrated people ever appears happy. And they’re probably not; their programming and mission forbid their experiencing anything besides the most transient satisfaction in any of their perceived cultural or political victories. Then it’s right into the next warmongering-based, invented fight.

2. This is the first antisemitic joke I ever heard. I was around seven years old and heard it from the same classmate who already knew every racial slur invented and also had access to a mammoth stash of dog-eared (and worse) copies of Hustler Magazine. Didn’t everyone? (I didn’t even understand the joke until I was in college, so maybe I still have lots to learn.)