Progressive Zionism

Debra Messing and the Pursuit of Meaning

After a friend of mine made a viral tweet about Debra Messing going wild (again) on Instagram as it became clearer Zohran was going to become the next mayor of NYC, I decided to check in and see what the former Will & Grace star, NYU grad, “activist” (according to her Wikipedia page) and rich deranged woman fearing for her “safety” as a Jew was posting about this time. The backlash was swift, which is cool, but it’s worth looking more closely at the type of things Debra is posting, and who they might still appeal to.

Before I report back from watching 9 harrowing minutes of her Instagram story (and I was skipping through stuff, it was likely closer to a 20-minute watch) let me refer you to a few previous newsletters on related topics and a cartoon that feels pertinent:

Okay back to Messing. Messing is not alone in her hysterical (derogatory) ramblings about personal safety as a rich Jewish woman who never has to take the subway and see POOR PEOPLE, and linking this with the importance of supporting Israel. Some seemed to point to Zohran’s rise as her breaking point. Undoubtedly her Islamophobia ramped up seeing him gain success, but she’s been posting like this for a while now.

I am interested in the type of Whiny Baby syndrome Messing and the people she reposts from seem to typify. They are strolling down beautiful streets, dressed well, recording with nice phones, terrified of how Zohran will increase “antisemitic attacks in the city.” This would be an actor’s understanding of how to view the world – through performance. When they look straight to the camera and talk about how scared they are, it’s hard (for me) not to see rich people terrified of being taxed, of losing a private gated park, and finding it more convenient to blame it on Zohran being Other rather than make it about his working-class-forward campaign. Because why make it about class when they could pretend it’s about culture? A culture war is winnable, for them. A class war is not.

In her posting frenzy, Messing posted clips from “The Jeffrey Mead” who does a reaction video describing why a rent freeze is bad, actually. She posts from a person called “different point of jew” (too embarrassing I cannot) and “Antisemitism today.” She frequently reposts Canary Mission, which may seem “normal” if you don’t know what they do–but they are one of the nastiest organizations around, doxxing people who protest Israel and saying they are keeping Jews safe while actively endangering everyone they post about (take a deep dive on Canary Mission here). Drop Site reports:

“Canary Mission is likely to continue being influential in the Trump administrations’ crackdowns on speech and immigration. This month the group has latched onto the growing policing of free speech, following the murder of Charlie Kirk, that has targeted pro-Palestine advocates using their views about Kirk and his death. Meanwhile, wealthy Americans continue to donate to Canary Mission through these murky channels, essentially creating a conduit for direct government influence in the State Department and the highest levels of US government, without any transparency about the donors and their aims.”

In the midst of her Israel support, Messing also says she is an LGBTQ ally, something she proves by posting a short video of Billy Eichner chasing her down the street. Says she’s voting for Cuomo on a red carpet. Now she’s at a skin spa. Now she’s posting Jeremy Corbyn on the DSA phonebank. Now she’s posting from Triggered Pod, which is Donald Trump Jr’s space to be triggered and blame it on everyone else. She reposts an account called “strength4Israel” which shows yet another woman in a fancy backyard yelling about antisemitism. It is all making me feel rather antisemitic. (I’m a Jew). Then, naturally, she posts about a pickleball win for Israel. Later she posts about some orcas trapped in a sea park. Also, Israel is sending aid to Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa. Isn’t that wonderful? Did we mention the pickleball win?

You would be forgiven for thinking all this sounds…rather schizophrenic. (I had a schizophrenic grandma, and the letters she sent to our house had a similar…je ne sais quoi about them). That does not excuse what she’s saying, but I find it helpful context. Someone who has deluded themselves this intensely, who is so deeply and chronically online, who is clearly being fed a specific sort of video through the algorithm and people IRL in her tax bracket—this is not a person who is well. She is posting hundreds of stories a week, to her millions of followers. She’s a political nobody, and yet she has garnered power through celebrity, by cozying up to Israel and becoming yet another spokesperson to help launder their image. She still, reluctantly, has cache, even if it seems dwindling. What do we do with such figures? Do we censor them? Do we add a warning? Do we intervene in real life? How are we to support free speech with the necessity of curbing people with influence who are wrong or unwell, or both? And, what to make of “free speech” if certain types of speech–on privately owned social media companies–are more free (and promotable) than others?

I am interested in how someone who is not chronically online and aware of where things are sourced might view her stories. For instance if you don’t know that an organization called “stop antisemitism” is actually not in service of stopping antisemitism, you would be forgiven. If you believed the ADL actually cared about defamation, not just finding inventive ways to excuse Elon Musk giving a Heil Hitler, you might be forgiven too. I can easily imagine a Boomer looking through her stories, feeling confused, seeing the pickleball and the video about orcas in captivity, and thinking, “she seems nice!”

THIS is what I find so fascinating, and also hard to untangle. Because if you have clear political views in the “real” world, none of this is confusing. But if you have newly formed, or still-forming, political views that are informed and fed by the algorithm, then you might be very confused indeed. If you weren’t chronically online, or up-to-date on the news, or even aware of good sources to get your news from other than TikTok and Instagram, you might think she was simply plodding along. With most Americans getting their news from social media, such schizophrenic musings seem less like schizophrenic musings and more, simply, like the way people post now.

The bitter irony, perhaps, is that it is Jewish American stars like Messing who end up doing antisemitic propaganda – it is they who are misled, who have found themselves on the same side as Trump and the ADL and AIPAC and are left, impossibly, still feeling like the victims. This is a crucial rallying point in which progressives-except-for-Palestine can unite around. They are actually the ones being silenced. College campuses are scary for them. The same people who made fun of liberal snowflakes and trigger warnings now gleefully align with such previously derided concepts because the direction in which they want censorship now matches their material interests and investments. In many ways it seems a macrocosmic version of what we saw/see with college students protesting for Palestine: it didn’t matter where or how they protested, the problem was a manufactured perceived threat to “Jewish safety” based on the premise that students were anti-Israel, despite many of said protesters being Jewish. This just continues to show that Jewish “safety” and concerns about antisemitism have never actually been about protecting Jewish people, but protecting the right of a Jewish state, one which in being continually conflated with all Jews actually makes life more unsafe for Jews everywhere.

Like other “influencers” or celebrities who post about Israel, Messing is useful to the Israeli government. She probably is doing this for free, though many other influencers are paid per post. Messing was flown to Israel, given her own little Birthright tour, shown “Hamas tunnels” of which she made content about and disseminated to her 1.4 million followers. Israel generated fake videos of Hamas tunnels in order to justify attacks on hospitals and schools. By having people like Messing embody Jewish “fear,” they can make real what they have invented as reasons for the destruction of an entire peoples. They don’t need to create an AI woman to repeat verbatim what the Israeli military made up in support of their larger extermination campaign: Debra Messing is here. After the “ceasefire,” Messing wrote on her Instagram that the “silence of the ‘Free Palestine’ movement is sickening…your silence makes it unavoidably obvious that it’s only about terrorizing Jews.” Well, despite the obvious problems there and lack of convincing ceasefire at all, perhaps everyone would seem silent to you if your version of “loud” is reposting the worst and most incomprehensible content you’ve ever seen all day, every day.

I have interacted with liberal zionists for many years—if you can imagine, being a publicly Jewish and leftist artist gets me reactions from all corners of the vast treasures the internet has to offer us. I would get called slurs and a self-hating Jew about the same post—it really is a Rorschach, and one that showed me early how much in common “liberal zionists” have with Christian zionists and pro-Israel conservatives. (Listen: Confronting the Anti-Zionist Right.)

It seems common that some people who are “progressive” – i.e., supporting of LTGTQ+ rights – lean heavily on said progressiveness and the language of this whilst continuing to support Israel. It is hard not to see this as a deep cognitive dissonance, a schism of the self, a failure to integrate reality into a sense of politics created out of the internet. Look over here! I love the Gays! Listen to Jews or else you’re antisemitic! Reason, and logical thinking, simply whiff out the window when you combine the internet and the deliberately obscuring means of discussing social movements that have defined the last decade, where personal identity can be used as a trump card in which to crowd out reality. (Read: Elite Capture, How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics.) “EXPERIENCE” has come to exemplify something deep and true. “TRAUMA” can mean anything. The more words you use like this, the better. What is felt, personally, and then conveyed back to us is treated as a privileged form of knowledge. A truth truer than true–someone has lived this. But lived experience does not a coherent politics make. You have exited the world of coherent discourse. You’re in the Slop Sector now.

A few years ago, maybe 2021, I made a post that made fun of Birthright along with some sources I trusted where people could read what left-wing and non-white Jewish thinkers had to say. (It’s still up, take a look). I was met with predictable hostility. This remains one of my favorite messages I have ever received:

I got this message after I closed comments on the post, because I was getting things like this:

I am struck by how five years ago this feels truer than ever, especially towards Debra Messing and similar “progressives” that are pro-Israel: “stop weaponizing social justice adjacent language to say genocidal regimes are good, actually.” (I was stalked offline shortly after all this, surely unrelated).

But that’s the ticket: if you use language that sounds otherwise in-line with progressive politics, you can—at least to some people—continue to propagandize in whatever direction you choose. You can sound correct while saying nothing. You can seem “good” while you casually say an entire population doesn’t deserve the right to exist. You can sound “woke” while saying “genocide is good.” This shouldn't be surprising on an individual level as we’ve seen years of corporations and elites adopt “woke” language in service of their bottom line (or as a bandaid to a larger systemic issues, i.e. painting “Black Lives Matter” on the streets of Washington D.C. while doing nothing to materially improve the lives of Black Americans) and quickly “unwokify” to adapt in the Trump era. Remember when the CIA got woke? #Metoo.

It helps, too, if you embrace context collapse. Use words like “policing” and “silencing” about things that are neither policing or silencing, while actual policing and silencing are occurring (like being put in prison, or killed). There are almost no journalists left in Gaza, because they’ve all been martyred. But if you close the comments to Messing, or deny a Trump podcast bro the metrics he feels entitled to on social media, you are silencing and policing them. If you are primed to see yourself as a victim, then everything and everyone is out to get you. Today it’s the algorithm, tomorrow it’s [insert marginalized population trending now to distract from Trump’s war on poor Americans]. It is not a coincidence America has such a high percentage of conspiracy theory believers: we are given every possible reason for things being obviously shitty in the world besides the actual reasons. Almost anything will stick, if you throw it hard enough.

Messing’s posts seem to exist in this same vein: she’s a victim, everything is threatening to her personally, if you suggest otherwise you’re the anti-woke one. She’s actually the one with progressive beliefs, she’s the enlightened one, she’s the truth-teller who must be protected and preserved. Our fragile lil Debra. Earlier this year Messing joined other deranged celebs by signing an open letter against an Israeli boycott that many peers in the film industry had signed. A snippet of the COUNTER letter she signed from Variety:

“We know the power of film. We know the power of story. That is why we cannot stay silent when a story is turned into a weapon, when lies are dressed up as justice, and when artists are misled into amplifying antisemitic propaganda,” the letter begins. “The pledge circulated under the banner of Film Workers for Palestine is not an act of conscience. It is a document of misinformation that advocates for arbitrary censorship and the erasure of art. To censor the very voices trying to find common ground and express their humanity, is wrong, ineffective and a form of collective punishment.”

If such inversions of reality make your head hurt, you are not alone. The power of a story, a story turned into a weapon, lies dressed up as justice. This is what THESE PEOPLE DO! This is what they are doing right now! This is what they did with this very press release! They are making solidarity with Palestinians into “punishment” that they feel for themselves, being so hollow and spiritually bereft that they cannot imagine a world in which people have morals and will stand with the oppressed no matter what color they are. They cannot imagine a world in which their stories, their voices, are not the loudest. They cannot imagine a world in which they are WRONG.

“When artists boycott fellow artists based solely on their country of origin, it is blatant discrimination and a betrayal of our role as storytellers,” Messing said in a statement. “History shows us that boycotts against Jews have long been a tool of authoritarian regimes — by joining this effort, these artists are knowingly or unknowingly aligning themselves with a dark legacy of antisemitism.”

History also shows us that unspeakable trauma does not exempt one from committing unspeakable traumas of their own. Our role as storytellers, it should be, is to tell the truth. Or if we write fictions, to do so in a way that broadens our understanding of what it means to be human, not confuse our sense of selves.

Messing is not a storyteller, she is a performer—and a bad one at that. She is not generating wisdom, nor imparting knowledge. She, like the Instagram slop accounts she reposts, is nothing but a mimicry, a marionette, the strings of which need not be conspiratorially held by a foreign power, but by her own inability to see what it is that animates people in earnest. She is her own puppet master: it is her own interests which move her, it is narcissism that causes reflexes and reactions. The inability to conceptualize a world in which you are not the target demands you conceptualize a world in which you are not as important as you think you are. This ego-death cannot happen. Until a breaking point, which I doubt will ever come, she and others of her ilk will remain trapped, stuck, hollow, unfeeling.

The antidote to such kinds of jesters is to call them as such, and to live loudly with feeling, with compassion, with love. And log the fuck off social media already! Okay?

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