The Time Loop from Hell: When History Doesn't Repeat, It Just Never Fucking Leaves

The Eternal Return of America's Oldest Profession

Somewhere in the smoking ruins of Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi, there exists a perfect symmetry so obscene it would make Kafka weep and Camus reach for the whiskey. The same building. The same hatred. Fifty-nine years apart. The only thing that's changed is the delivery mechanism—the Ku Klux Klan used dynamite in 1967, and a 19-year-old Christian fitness enthusiast used gasoline and Instagram in 2026.

Progress, ladies and gentlemen. We've digitized our pogroms.

The Rhetoric Never Changed Because It Never Had To

Let's be clear about what happened here: In 1967, the Klan bombed Beth Israel because Rabbi Perry Nussbaum had the audacity to believe that Black people deserved civil rights. In 2026, Stephen Spencer Pittman—who spent his social media life posting about baseball and Jesus before pivoting to antisemitic screeds at 12:52 AM on a Saturday—torched the same synagogue and called it a "synagogue of Satan."

The words are different. The vintage is identical. It's the same rotgut hate, just in a new bottle with a QR code.

What's remarkable isn't that antisemitism persists—we knew that, anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex and a passing familiarity with history knew that. What's remarkable is how little the playbook has evolved. The Jews are still somehow simultaneously too powerful and too weak, too insular and too influential, too foreign and too embedded. Schrödinger's scapegoat, perpetually guilty of contradictory crimes.

In 1967, it was "the Jews are behind civil rights agitation." In 2026, it's "the Jews are behind [insert this week's conspiracy]." The Mad Libs of hatred require only that you fill in the blank with whatever makes your lizard brain feel temporarily in control of a world you don't understand.

The Performance of Memory

Here's where it gets truly obscene: After the 1967 bombing, an interracial group of ministers marched down Old Canton Road in solidarity. Beautiful. Moving. Utterly fucking meaningless in the long run, because here we are again, with the same building reduced to charred ruins and the same community terrorized.

How many times will we perform the ritual of "Never Again" while doing precisely nothing to ensure it doesn't happen again? How many candlelight vigils constitute actual prevention? How many op-eds about "learning from history" can we write before admitting we have learned nothing?

The survivors of the 1967 bombing are now witnessing the 2026 arson. One described it as "déjà vu." That's not déjà vu. That's Groundhog Day directed by Elie Wiesel. That's a cosmic practical joke so cruel it transcends satire.

Lydia Kander, who remembers both attacks, noted that the motives were identical: "trying to send a message," "instill fear," attacking "the most prominent symbol of Jewish life in Jackson." She's right, of course. But here's the darker truth she's too gracious to say: The message keeps getting sent because we keep failing to receive it.

The Algorithm of Hate

Young Mr. Pittman's journey from baseball stats to burning synagogues happened largely online, in the toxic stew of algorithmic radicalization that we've collectively decided is just the price of doing business in the 21st century. We've created a machine that turns lonely young men into domestic terrorists with the efficiency of an Amazon fulfillment center, and our response has been to shrug and say, "Well, what can you do?"

What was he reading? What was he watching? These are the questions everyone's asking now, as if we don't already know. He was reading the same dehumanizing garbage that's been recycled since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He was watching content that the algorithms served him because engagement is engagement, whether it's cat videos or calls for genocide.

The Klan at least had the decency to require physical meetings. Now you can radicalize yourself in your bedroom at 3 AM while your parents sleep downstairs, unaware that their son is marinating in content that would make Julius Streicher blush.

The Heritage Americans and Other Fairy Tales

It's worth noting that this attack comes during an era when certain politicians and pundits have revived the language of "heritage Americans"—the notion that some citizens are more authentically American than others. It's the same nativist poison that's been bottled and rebottled throughout American history, and it always, always ends in violence.

When you tell people that certain groups are a threat to "the real America," you're writing a permission slip for violence. When you platform conspiracy theories about globalists and cultural replacement, you're loading the gun. And when that gun goes off—when a synagogue burns or a mosque is vandalized or a church is shot up—everyone clutches their pearls and pretends they couldn't possibly have seen it coming.

But Beth Israel saw it coming. They saw it in 1967, and they're seeing it now. The only people surprised by antisemitic violence are the ones who've never been its target.

The Arithmetic of Atrocity

Beth Israel is the only synagogue in Jackson. It's one of only 14 synagogues in all of Mississippi. When you attack it, you're not just attacking a building—you're attacking an entire community's ability to exist. That's the point. That's always been the point.

The 1967 bombers understood this. The 2026 arsonist understood this. The question is: when will the rest of us understand that this isn't an anomaly or an outlier, but a feature of a society that has never fully committed to pluralism, that has never fully reckoned with its foundational hatreds?

We've built museums to memory while doing nothing about the present. We've institutionalized remembrance while privatizing the means of radicalization. We've made "Never Again" into a hashtag while the fires still burn.

The Only Synagogue in Town

There's something particularly grotesque about the fact that Jackson has only one synagogue, and it's been attacked twice. If you're Jewish in Jackson, Mississippi, there's nowhere else to go. Your options are: worship in the building that's been bombed and burned, or leave. That's the choice antisemitism offers: accommodation to terror or exile.

And before anyone reaches for the comforting narrative of "but this is just one crazy person"—yes, it was one person who set the fire. It was also one person (actually, three) who bombed it in 1967. But individuals don't operate in a vacuum. They swim in the cultural waters we all create. They breathe the air of acceptable discourse. They absorb the ambient hatred that we've decided is just "free speech" or "robust debate."

Stephen Spencer Pittman didn't wake up one morning and spontaneously decide Jews were the enemy. Someone taught him that. Something taught him that. And we've built a society where that teaching is readily available, algorithmically optimized, and largely consequence-free until it manifests in violence.

The Lesson We Refuse to Learn

Here's the truth that no one wants to hear: We could stop this. Not completely—you can't eliminate human evil—but we could make it significantly harder. We could regulate the platforms that radicalize. We could actually enforce laws against hate crimes. We could stop treating antisemitism as a niche concern and recognize it as the canary in the coalmine of civilizational collapse that it's always been.

But we won't. Because that would require admitting that the problem isn't just a few bad apples, but the entire orchard. It would require acknowledging that mainstream discourse has mainstreamed ideas that were rightfully considered extremist. It would require powerful people to take responsibility for the monsters they've fed.

So instead, we'll have another vigil. Another op-ed. Another round of "thoughts and prayers" and "this isn't who we are" and "we must do better." And in another few decades, if there's still a Jewish community in Jackson, Mississippi—which is increasingly an open question—some future arsonist will burn whatever they've rebuilt.

Because that's the thing about time loops: you only escape them when you actually change. And we haven't changed. We've just gotten better at performing the appearance of change while the underlying hatred metastasizes.

The Oracle Speaks

The people of Beth Israel will rebuild, because that's what survivors do. They'll hold services in temporary spaces, raise funds, construct something new from the ashes. They've done it before. They'll do it again.

But they shouldn't have to. The fact that they will is a testament to their resilience. The fact that they must is an indictment of the rest of us.

Fifty-nine years. Same building. Same hatred. Same failure of imagination and will. The only thing that's evolved is our capacity for self-deception—our ability to look at this perfect circle of violence and call it anything other than what it is: proof that we learned nothing, changed nothing, and protected no one.

Welcome to the time loop from Hell. Population: all of us. And the exits, as always, are blocked by our own cowardice and complicity.

The synagogue will burn again. Unless.