Note on Libel

 

JD Vance is now using the term "blood libel" to describe criticism of ICE, saying, "The Democrats and the media — because they so hate the idea of a real border — are engaging in a kind of blood libel against ICE agents." Somewhere, our ancestors wept.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 3:07 PM

That's not a very good choice of imagery, JD. I wouldn't expect you to know, because I wouldn't expect you to know much about these things, though you went to Princeton, but "blood libel" is a technical term in the history of Jewish people in medieval Europe, who were treated as dangerous foreigners, with their strange languages and strange religion, barred from various occupations, and confined to ghettos and shtetels where they lived segregated from the Christian population, and victimized by a particularly horrible myth; that Jews would steal Christian babies from their parents' houses and kill them, for their blood, which the Christians supposed was used for some kind of magical ritual—like the making of Passover matzoh, the weird Jewish analogue to the Christian communion wafer (historically it was the other way around: the communion wafer, the symbolic Lord's Supper, being modeled from the unleavened flatbread, matzoh, that Jesus would have eaten at his Last Supper, a Passover seder with his followers, telling them, according to the Gospel, that it was his own flesh, and the wine they were drinking was his own blood). 

This was a typical example of the dreadful lies that brought about the persecutions in which Christian peasants or townsmen periodically slaughtered Jews by the dozens and hundreds and thousands, and served as precursors to the 19th-century pogroms of eastern Europe and the 20th-century Shoah, the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish question". 

It's like the ancestor of all antisemitism, born out of the story that the Jews, as a collectivity, murdered God's own baby, his only-begotten son, which in the terrible history of antisemitism is the fons et origo.

ICE, in contrast, is a national police force that attacks ghettosful of aliens, and the story of their violence against the presumed foreigners is no libel, but attested in cell phone videos from all over the country. We've seen them knocking women to the ground and tearing children and their parents apart. If you're looking for a blood libel, you can find something like it in the words of *checks notes* Vice President JD Vance, in the 2024 campaign, spreading the false story that Haitians fleeing from the murderous violence of Port-au-Prince and living completely legally in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status had taken to killing and eating their neighbors' pet cats and dogs. Vance basically admitted that he had no citable evidence but claimed he needed to tell the story anyway, on the weird grounds that the mere presence of the Haitians in town was causing the good (white) citizens of Springfield some kind of "suffering" that couldn't be described, only communicated, apparently, by lying about it:

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents [although media reporting had clearly established by then that there were no such first-hand accounts]." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

Totally ignored what? How the American people were "suffering" from a thing that wasn't in fact happening. "It's not real, but the media must pay attention to it!" And given the way people feel about their pets, hardly different from the way they feel about their kids, it's not just like a version of the blood libel. Telling the local citizenry that if they were unhappy it was the fault of those dark-skinned, foreign-accented people in their midst

What's wrong with these people? 

Sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.

All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:

Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.

"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"

Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later: