The Attention Whore Dilemma

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, May 22, 2026

 

I’m just gonna start typing and see where this takes us.

 

One of the reasons I think my brain is defective—it’s a long list—is I’ve always been mildly obsessed with homonyms. I think maybe it’s because in third grade we were all asked to make a list of words that sound identical but are spelled differently and I beat everybody. I mean I had the most words, not that I went around and bludgeoned my classmates. That came later. I don’t know if it was the rare moment of praise for academic distinction that made me interested in homonyms or if my interest occasioned the moment. Causality can be hard.

 

Regardless, I will often listen to the news and wander off like Joe Biden at a photo op thinking up homonymic phrases for what I just heard and then converting that into synonymous rephrasing. You probably need an example. What do you call heterosexuals dedicated to the bovine exhortations of prostitutes? The Straights of Whore Moos. 

 

Okay, enough of that.

 

Massie exodus.

 

But speaking of whores, attention whores that is, Rep. Thomas Massie lost his primary this week, which I consider an unalloyed good thing. Massie is a Jew-baiting troll. He’s good at it. In his concession speech he joked with his coprophagic grin that he had a hard time getting his opponent on the phone because he had to track him down in Tel Aviv. Get it? His opponent, Ed Gallrein, a Kentucky farmer and retired Navy SEAL, is a tool of the hummus-gobblers!

 

Last night I lost my temper at Carrie Prejean Boller, a former beauty pageant contestant who recently converted to Catholicism. Remember the Seinfeld episode when Tim Whatley converted to Judaism “for the jokes”? Apparently, Boller thinks that if you convert to Catholicism you get to spew and defend antisemitic crazy talk (she’s a huge Candace Owens fan).

 

Erika Kirk praised Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s campaign ads—which are pretty great—and Boller responded:

 

Why didn’t you say the same thing about your late husband’s favorite congressman? I’m starting to see now why they took Charlie out. They wanted to take out his voice and his influence. Charlie would have undoubtedly campaigned alongside Thomas Massie publicly and unapologetically. Your silence speaks volumes Erika. The more people watch this, the more obvious it becomes why Charlie had to be removed from the equation. Charlie would have been boldly campaigning alongside @RepThomasMassie against billionaire donor Miriam Adelson.

 

“They took Charlie out,” “Charlie had to be removed from the equation.”  The “they” here, of course, is the Joooooz.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre is often believed to have said, “the anti-Semite doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.” I can’t find any evidence he actually said this, but he did say in his essay “Anti-Semite and Jew”:

 

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

 

Look, I get that some of the anti-Israel conspiracy stuff is sincere. But a lot of it isn’t. I am sure Massie knows he was lying when he told Tucker Carlson that “everybody” in Congress—except for him—has an “AIPAC babysitter managing their votes.” I am also sure that Tucker knew this was a lie.

 

The point of these kinds of comments isn’t just to dogwhistle to antisemites and “anti-Zionists.” It’s to force Jews to complain about the obvious antisemitism, which is the rhetorical equivalent of asking them to turn out their pockets.

 

In response to my criticism of Boller, a bunch of folks (some surely bots) insisted that it’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel. Um, okay. But maybe it’s antisemitic to insinuate—without any evidence, I mean literally none—that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk to keep him from campaigning for Massie (it’s also incredibly, seismically, stupid). To be clear, the outlandish claims aren’t necessarily antisemitic, but the desired result—make the Jews squirm, complain, and deny—is rooted in antisemitism. If I went around claiming that Ireland is a nation of drunk, bog-dwelling pederasts, I am sure that Irish-Americans would be rightly offended. If I dismissed their complaints by insisting that being critical of Ireland isn’t anti-Hibernian, few people would buy it.

 

A lot of people said, reasonably, that I shouldn’t give Boller the attention she craves. The dilemma that the attention whores present is that if you don’t complain, the lies don’t merely take deeper root, the whores are encouraged to say ever grosser nonsense to get the reactions they want.

 

Before Israel was founded, and for a few decades after, it was commonplace to insinuate—or declare!—that Catholics couldn’t be trusted because they had “dual loyalties.” The platform of the Know Nothing “American Party” proclaimed that “Americans must rule America,” and that no one should hold office if they have “any allegiance or obligation of any description to any foreign prince, potentate or power.” You can defend that text all you like, but everyone knew they meant the insidious forces of Popery. In 1960, Norman Vincent Peale convened a conference of fellow Protestant clergy at which Peale warned that “Our American culture is at stake. I don’t say it won’t survive, but it won’t be what it was.” What, specifically, was the threat to our culture? A Catholic president. “It is inconceivable that a Roman Catholic president would not be under extreme pressure by the hierarchy of his church to accede to its policies with respect to foreign interests,” he said. At Peale’s conference, the executive editor of Christianity Today warned that Catholicism was akin to communism. Another pastor, Harold J. Ockenga, said that John F. Kennedy was to Catholicism what Nikita Khrushchev was to communism. Each was “a captive of a system.”

 

That was gross. And I’m glad that Christians—even of the Christian-lite variety of Peale’s prosperity gospel—have largely shed that nonsense. But the animating passion that drove that garbage has been sublimated to Israel and Jews.

 

Back on the whores.

 

Donald Trump endorsed Ken Paxton for Senate this week. Senate Republicans are furious. They spent $90 million in the GOP primary in support of the incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, who would have almost surely defeated Democrat James Talarico. Now, in order to save a safe seat, Republicans will have to spend at least that much all over again on a guy none of them want to serve with, never mind defend. But Trump doesn’t like Cornyn and he apparently thinks Paxton would win the primary, and he loves to endorse winners in primaries.

 

The problem is that while his endorsements in primaries are very powerful, they can be an albatross, or simply ineffective, in general elections (see Mike Warren’s excellent piece on this point). Just ask Sen. Herschel Walker. The people for whom Trump’s endorsement matters a great deal are a shrinking minority in the broader electorate. Actually, I should rephrase that. The people for whom Trump’s endorsement matters as a positive thing is a shrinking minority. It’s quite possible that the number of people who think his endorsement is a negative thing is growing.

 

Paxton is easily one of the most obviously corrupt politicians not currently residing in the White House. If he gets the nomination, the corruption narrative already deservedly plaguing the White House will metastasize to the broader GOP. Trump doesn’t seem to care much, and any concerns in that regard are outweighed by the satisfaction he derives from treating the GOP like the chained up “gimp” from Pulp Fiction. Speaking of Caligulan excess, it’s probably not true that Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate, but he probably did threaten to do it because he loved to mock the aristocratic pretensions of the senate. Paxton is a different kind of attention whore, but he’s the kind Trump appreciates, because they share a disdain for anything that might pass for republican virtue. You do whatever you can get away with that serves your own purposes and rejoice at watching normies turn out their pockets to defend it. That’s part of the point of Trump’s slush fund scheme. It’s not the main point, but one of the joys of his brazenness is watching Republicans eat the sh-t sandwiches he serves them.

 

And most of them do it, with big bites. South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said yesterday that the January 6 riot was a “made up issue,” and “a staged, uh, thing from day 1.” Back on January 6, 2021, he had different things to say about the rioters who chanted “hang Mike Pence.” But that’s before Trump added heaping bowls of fecal fare to the menu.

 

The overriding political lesson, for me at least, of the last decade is that civilization is more fragile than I once took for granted. That was the point of my last book, after all. I’m not a catastrophist; indeed I think the greatest threat to civilization is, ironically, catastrophism. But when I see people like Norman embrace lies for political convenience, when I see hordes of whores play these games with conspiracies and bigotry for fun and profit, I appreciate the fragility of decency and the institutions that depend on a decent respect for the truth.

 

It almost makes me think Sartre was right.

 

I am not a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre’s. He was wrong about so many things: communism, Maoism, anticolonial violence, the Munich massacre, even metaphysics. Sartre was an existentialist, believing that “being precedes essence.” This is the idea that there is no objective moral truth outside us. There’s no metaphysical, theological, or moral backstop that will prevent us from going off the rails. He famously said, “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be.”

 

I don’t think we’re about to embrace fascism, because say what you will about the tenets of fascism, at least it’s an ethos. But I do think we’re flirting with the idea that having an ethos at all is for suckers.