I keep running into it on X: seven million, eight million Jews killed by Hitler. Not from deniers — from people who plainly believe they’re honoring the victims by saying it. But the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s figure, built from decades of transport lists, camp records, and demographic reconstruction, is six million Jews murdered. That is the documented number, and it does not need help.
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What’s it called when a person knows the truth but refuses to acknowledge it? Well, denialism fits, as does cognitive dissonance. Something I find more disconcerting every year is the number of people afflicted with this disease. I know it’s not an actual disease, the kind tracked by the Centers for Disease Control, but it is an epidemic that has exploded among the population as a whole.
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Israel voted on Tuesday, in the highest turnout since 1999 — 77.7 percent, per the Central Elections Committee — and produced the one result nobody on either side wanted to say out loud: a deadlock. The exit polls put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc and the opposition bloc led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot at roughly 51 seats each in the 120-seat Knesset, with Arab-led parties holding about 18. Two days of counting have since moved the seats around — with more than nine in ten ballots counted, Netanyahu’s bloc stands at 53, the opposition at 48, the Arab-led parties at 19 — without moving the conclusion. Sixty-one seats form a government. Nobody has them.
That is the result the speeches were given over. What the two men did with it is the story.
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For as long as pollsters have been ranking groups of Americans, atheists have finished at or near the bottom of every list they make. Least trusted. Coldest rated. Last hired for the jobs that involve other people’s children. And the strangest part is who is doing the ranking: people who, by their own admission, mostly don’t know any of us. They are not rating neighbors. They are rating an idea.
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I ran across a short video on YouTube the other night — “What No One Understands About the Apostle Paul,” by Dr. Matthew Larsen, a scholar at the University of Copenhagen — and it corrected a picture I’ve apparently been carrying around in my head for years without ever noticing I had it.
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