He and other late-night hosts are rare voices when it comes to honest discussion of Gaza and Trump – which says something frightening about our public discourse
Some time ago, an acquaintance sent me a cryptic text message. “Thought of you after I saw one of your recent articles,” they said. “Thank you for saying it.”
I write columns regularly. Some are about vaginas; some are about the genocide in Gaza. Was this person thanking me for drawing attention to the desperate plight of people on eBay who are prepared to pay five times the original sales price for Gwyneth Paltrow’s delisted This Smells Like My Vagina candle? Or were they referencing Gaza?
I suspected the latter, but there was no way of immediately knowing – which often feels par for the course when it comes to the conversation around Gaza. The Trump administration has cracked down on pro-Palestinian speech to such a draconian degree that even within a private text message, some people are too terrified about jeopardising their career or immigration status to speak up. Many lawmakers and parts of the media seem to have lost the ability to communicate in plain English when it comes to Palestine. I have seen long articles handwringing about the desperately complicated situation of starving kids which don’t mention the word “Israel” once. I have lost count of the number of articles talking about “starvation stalking Gaza” that circle endlessly around exactly how this starvation has come about.
