My sister said that ratshit was missing from my taxonomy. I agreed there was some sort of gap, but I didn’t know what ratshit would be.

But then I was complaining to my friend Fish about the overeagerness of left and center-left Jews to keep the peace with progressivist antizionists. They are caught between loyalty to the Jewish people and to their political tribe. So they compromise by vocally hating Netanyahu and blaming him entirely for the rise in animosity toward Israel and Jews, instead of blaming their own political tribe for tolerating extremists, and blaming themselves for normalizing and legitimizing it by being token Jews who also hate Netanyahu and the allegedly horrible things he has made Israel do.

Fish said “They’re Judenrat.” The judenrat were all those rabbis and Jewish community leaders who, before and during the Holocaust, thought that cooperating with the Nazis might soften the abuse and reduce the danger, at least for themselves and maybe their own community.

Judenrat. Juden… rat! Ratshit!

But ratshit isn’t only for or about Jews.

Any nervous non-loyal coward can puke ratshit to try to win tolerance or even approval despite who they really are. During the moral panics of the early 2020, most of the identity renunciation we witnessed, which at first glance might look like bullshit, was actually ratshit. Because that shit was not meant to inspire anyone. It was meant to deflect hostility to someone else, usually someone not paying enough attention who slips up and attracts attention.

Ratshit — cowardly nonsense — the equivocal, half-true, semi-sincere things semi-loyal people say and leave unsaid when they think knuckling under and selling out their own people will appease the people who despise them.