A lesson for the tsar, and a lesson for the ages: if you want to crush a revolutionary movement coming at you from below, nothing works quite like an anti-Semitic conspiracy that calls up hatreds older than Jesus Christ. In truth, any number of identity-based divisions can be marshaled to perform this function: Jews versus Blacks, Blacks versus Asians, Muslims versus Christians, “gender critical” feminists versus transgender people, migrants versus citizens. This is the playbook used by Trump and the other pseudo-populist strongmen the world over: throw some minor economic concessions to the
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