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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   25538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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It's not just that we Jews are basically breeding ourselves of existence

The link appears to be talking about secular Jews. I get that that's quite common, but religious Judaism is still also a thing, and isn't ultra-orthodox Judaism decently sized and growing? But I suppose that might not matter to those who are only really ethnically Jewish.

We’re also doing quite well in the homeland, in TFR terms. Looks like a symptom of blending with general western culture. On a scale, you can see that those most influenced by the west are also the ones who don’t have kids.

Initially I was about to say it’s a symptom of being more diasporic, but come to think of it the ultra-orthodox are actually the most diasporic in terms of their thought process, but also have the most kids, so it can’t be that alone.

Is the reform Jewish TFR in the US actually any different from the general blue tribe TFR? AFAIK the American blue tribe(to which functionally all reform and secular Jews in the US belong) has a southern-europe tier TFR, America's relatively decent white TFR is mostly driven by the almost exclusively Christian red tribe being at replacement(although not above it). The question becomes "why are secular/reform jews so heavily blue", but I think the answers are pretty obvious; college educated urbanites with liberal religious views are, well, college educated urbanites with liberal religious views.

I think reform jews outside of Israel are just progressive and Israel is a special exception.

In an interesting manifestation of the horseshoe theory, Jewish Zionists and the far right agree that the ongoing campus protests are expressions of a growing anti-Jewish trend in the US.

I don't really agree that that is horseshoe theory. The other end from the far right is the far left, which would definitely not agree that it's anti Jewish. Zionists are far from leftists, zionists and leftists have not seen eye to eye in... longer than I've been tracking politics. Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects.

Part of the annoyance of Western rightists about Jews being disproportionately left wing is because reactionary Jews are disproportionately likely to move to the Jewish ethnostate, while leftist Jews are highly likely not to, especially if they dislike ethnonationalism in general.

The major annoyance of Western rightists is that "reactionary Jews" still oppose White ethnocentrism and support Jewish ethnocentrism (you fall into this category as well as far as I'm concerned). Both left and right-wing Jews engage in that behavior.

That's why it's a "fake" opposition.

Both the Jewish left and right support Jewish identity politics and vehemently oppose White identity politics. The entire left-right spectrum is meant to prop up this central pillar of political organization, which both sides of that political dialectic so happen to agree on, that's why it's a false opposition.

Well duh. White ethnocentrism that you would accept as white ethnocentrism is usually pretty opposed to Jews and Judaism. Putting our tribe first is not a realistic expectation. Do Serbian reactionaries support the Ustase?

I suspect that "anyone pale" ethnocentrism actually has disproportionately heavy Jewish support.

White reactionaries are performatively anti-zionist and say they support white ethnocentrism and oppose Jewish ethnocentrism. Your criteria for being a Jew who does not oppose white ethnocentrism is to be like Ron Unz, who in American Pravda blames Jews for literally everything that he (and the right more broadly) dislikes that occurred in America in the entire 20th century. This is no different to saying that a black person is anti-white unless they agree with the most extreme anti-black position imaginable and agree that all problems in modern America are overwhelmingly the fault of black pathology. It is a requirement well above that which can be expected of even a self-aware individual who agrees with you politically and accepts their fair share of tribal responsibility.

Unz is a caricature, the equivalent of the most extreme self-hating white who believes that black people built this country and that we’d be living in Wakanda if the pale skinned barbarians had not ruined everything. It’s not a standard you would accept for your own people in any kind of political relationship or alliance. Is there any way for a reactionary Jew to be tolerant of white ethnocentrism without agreeing to blame Jewish people for (at least almost) everything wrong with the modern West? I’ve asked you this question several times and the impression I get is ‘no’.

Since pathological self-hatred is rare among non-northwest Europeans, you’ve created an impossible standard for Jewish reactionaries to live up to (‘denounce your entire people and agree to take absolute responsibility for everything wrong with modernity or you’re subversive’) which you would (and do) consider it unjust to apply in reverse to your own people, or perhaps even to other non-Jewish peoples. It is not even enough to abandon Judaism, to intermarry with white gentiles, and to have no particular affinity for Israel, since your demand requires the active, Unz-style repudiation of Jewishness itself on a genetic-memetic level as fundamentally destructive and anti-civilization, a demand you would never accept if anyone appeared to make it toward those of your own ethnic origin.

you’ve created an impossible standard for Jewish reactionaries to live up to

I am not creating a standard I demand they live up to, I recognize an impasse and a subsequent political conflict. Jewish identity politics is intrinsically opposed to White identity politics on both the Left and the Right. Any Jew who tries to say this is not the case is a liar as far as I'm concerned. And, according to you, it's totally impractical to expect Jews to accept that fact. So, it's just an impasse.

Is there any way for a reactionary Jew to be tolerant of white ethnocentrism without agreeing to blame Jewish people for (at least almost) everything wrong with the modern West? I’ve asked you this question several times and the impression I get is ‘no’.

The weasel word is "everything wrong with the modern West."

The equivalent would be if White people refused to ever, in recorded history, acknowledge the existence of anti-Semitism. This is what you constantly do, in the reverse. I do not deny anti-Semitism, i.e. White engagement in cultural-political aggression against Jews, and how it has waxed and waned and changed form throughout history, but you deny Jewish engagement in political aggression against White people or, at least, refuse to accept its nature as anything other than a good-faith attempt to assimilate to liberal values (lol). There's not even a word for the "reverse" form of anti-Semitism, and indeed we are all supposed to pretend that it doesn't exist, and it's a conspiracy theory to suggest it does in any form.

If Jewish reactionaries don't acknowledge this behavior, they can't be allies because they aren't even acknowledging the existence of a very real political conflict. How could a Jew ever consider someone an ally who refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is a thing that even exists, or ever has in any cultural-political, systematic form?

Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects

While Zionism has always had a spectrum, up until the 1990's Israel was a pretty left wing country. Early Zionists especially were almost all socialists of one variety or another. The Kibbutzim are communes!

The Kibbutzim are communes

That's definitely true. I don't know much about past Zionism, I guess, mostly just about the last 15 years, maybe.

I've heard a lot of former kibbutzim are now no longer communes.

A certain type of libertarian loves to talk about this one.

This might be a weird distinction but I do not think most of the protestors are antisemitic in the traditional sense (some are) but they are against Jewish traits. Being wealthy, successful, intelligent, winners in a meritocracy, puts Jews at the top of the oppressor pyramid. If Jews practiced the Jewish religion but were poor and not in power then the protestors would not care about them.

I am not sure if that is the same thing as antisemitism. There may no no functional difference since the protestors will always be against Jewish interests.

The only thing that leans me towards it actual antisemitism is because the protestors do not pay attention to any of the other wars going on in the world. Non of the protestors are going to Ukraine to protect the Ukranians despite Ukraine facing far worse than Palestine.

Ukraine to protect the Ukranians despite Ukraine facing far worse than Palestine.

Really? Less civilian Ukrainians killed by war in 2 years than Palestinians in few months (and that's not counting as a percentage of population). Also Ukrainian women are free to travel outside.

Being wealthy, successful, intelligent, winners in a meritocracy, puts Jews at the top of the oppressor pyramid

Also, I think it bears mentioning, white. Jews are effectively seen as super-white among some circles. Much has been said about how Jews in Israel originate from Europe, meaning they're on the wrong side of left-wing ethnic preferences, adding to the disdain that they should draw.

It's pretty ironic that Palestinians are far more closely related to the Biblical Hebrews than Ashkenazi Jews are. The latter are just displaced Slavs.

The latter are just displaced Slavs.

I'm curious where you got this idea. There's definitely people who believe that the Ashkenazim are descended from Turkic-speaking converts(and the usual rebuttal of 'but Yiddish isn't a Turkic language' leaves out that it's also not a Semitic language- the real issue with this theory is the lack of DNA in the Ashkenazim which can be plausibly attributed to Khazars). It's not implausible to me that some people believe they're genetically heavily German; after all they speak a Germanic language and lived in mostly-German areas for hundreds of years. The mainstream, of course, believes that they're of largely levantine descent with significant southern European admixture, and the evidence for this is genetic studies.

I've never even heard the idea that 'they're just Slavs'.

And also ironically, the Palestinians are also not direct descendants of biblical Hebrews. Levantine Christians probably come closest of any group, but have some Greek admixture.

Why would you think that? Do you think a mass conversion happened that was initially unopposed by their local brothers? Do you think that rates of intermarriage were as high as between Goy Slavs?

Ashkenazim are genetically a mix between Jewish paternal and Italian maternal DNA. The origin population is theorized to be Jewish traders who moved to Italy under Roman rule and married Italian women whom they converted to Judaism.

Some Ashkenazim have small amounts of German or Frankish genetic ancestry, but significant Slavic ancestry is quite rare except in recent ex-Soviet immigrants to Israel of questionable halachic status (and that intermarriage occurred within the past century).

The European populations most similar genetically to Ashkenazi Jews are Sicilians and others who have a mixture of Italian and semitic/near East genetics.

Yes, the idea that the left-wing anti-Israel protests in the US are essentially motivated by antisemitism seems silly to me given that I feel like I actually have a decent amount of experience with the kind of people who go to these protests. Granted, I am removed from my experiences with these kinds of people by quite a few years at this point, but I doubt that college-aged left-wing protesters are very different nowadays from what they were like the last time I was commonly encountering them.

I say "in the US" because it might be different in Europe, I can't speak to that. Europe has a very different history with antisemitism than the US does.

I have no doubt that a decent fraction of the actual Arabs and Muslims who go to these protests in the US are anti-semitic, but I also think that that only a tiny fraction of the rest of the protesters are.

To me it seems that the typical naive young college student SJW leftist not only has not a single bone of anti-Jew sentiment in his or her body, they probably don't even think much about Jews as an ethnic group to begin with. This is true of most Americans. The majority of American gentiles barely even realize that, for example, white people with curly hair or names that end in -berg or -stein are likely to be Jewish. They just think of Jews as a flavor of white people, and they rarely think about them as an ethnic group to begin with. They know that the Holocaust targeted Jews, of course, but they rarely think about the Holocaust, or about any other historical event for that matter. In the US, discussing Jews as an ethnic group is something that is mainly done by three groups: Jews themselves, highly pro-Israel Christians, and highly online alt-rightists. Maybe also to some extent by black people, but I am not familiar enough with black attitudes towards Jews to weigh in on that.

The average young college protester freely mingles with Jewish people in personal life and enjoys Jewish artists without having the slightest bit of prejudice towards them. In many cases, the protester does not even realize that his/her friend, or that musician he/she listens to, is Jewish to begin with. In other cases he/she does realize it, but does not care about it any more than he/she would care about a friend having red hair, for example.

It is of course possible that my experience with college-aged protesters is simply out of date and I am stuck in the past. I wouldn't advise anyone to make decisions that could affect life or limb based on my recollections. But to me, the idea that college leftists have actually become antisemitic seems absurd. There would have been no precedent for it 10 or 20 years ago, even though college leftists hated Israel back then too.

I have no doubt that a decent fraction of the actual Arabs and Muslims who go to these protests in the US are anti-semitic, but I also think that that only a tiny fraction of the rest of the protesters are.

The problem for Jews is that, under the progressive framework, they have absolutely no cause to criticize someone beneath them on the oppression hierarchy, so those Muslims may be a minority, but they cannot be questioned.

I think it actually could become a problem in that the far left and far right are in pretty strong agreement on the accusations against the Jews, that they’re manipulating narratives to their own benefit, and that they only care about themselves. The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do. There’s barely even a whisper of blame on Hamas for launching the attacks or holding hostages or the crimes committed during the attack. And when you couple that with full support of the intifada, chanting of the slogans that deny Israel’s right to exist,

Personally, I think most of the Gaza situation is on Lakud which isn’t all Israelis and has little to do with Jews who don’t support Lakud or Natanyahu.

The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do.

I agree about the "they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do" part, but not about the "The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel" part. Where are you seeing this?

To me, it seems obvious that the anti-Israel left is sweeping Hamas' atrocities under the rug. However, I haven't seen any reason to think that the anti-Israel left, in general, is blaming all Jews for Israel's actions.

The problem for the antisemitic far right is that their allegation is that the entire ideology upon which the leftists base their support for Palestine (and BLM, and affirmative action, and DEI, and taking in refugees and so on) was invented and bestowed upon them by Jews. This creates an internal contradiction [edit: for any leftists they might ally with] that is very difficult to bridge. In addition, the white nationalist far right has no message for brown or black leftists (including Muslims) beyond “leave”, which again would make a coalition difficult.

The far left has successfully forgotten that their entire moral framework was created by Christianity. They have successfully forgotten that their entire intellectual framework was created by enlightenment era European men from colonialist countries. They have successfully forgotten that their constitutional republic was created by white male slaveowners. They hate all those demographics now without any cognitive dissonance or ambiguity. I don’t think they will have any problems scrubbing away the memory that a lot of the luminaries of the modern civil rights and feminist movements were Jewish.

You can oppose stuff—even hate it—without forgetting anything.

There's a difference between ignoring the historical roots of your current ideology, on the one hand, and allying with people you currently consider to be despicable evil Nazis, on the other.

They haven't forgotten any of those things,otherwise they wouldn't want problematic statues torn down would they? Because they would have forgotten those people were slave owners. They know who did what, they just think the bad things they did outweigh the good.

It’s the same logic extended one more step. Recognizing that Israel isn’t living up to those ideals or even pretending to puts Jews on the negative of DEI.

This creates an internal contradiction for them

For the far right?

They don’t think so. In fact they’ve been anticipating this situation for years, see the parable of the golem.

No, for the far left (who do not, for obvious reasons, see their ideology and worldview as Jewish trickery)! I understand that was unclear, and edited my answer.

Europe has a very different history with antisemitism than the US does.

No, it really doesn't. Before and during WW2, antisemitism was common across the present 'western world'.

In a 1938 poll, approximately 60 percent of the respondents held a low opinion of Jews, labeling them "greedy," "dishonest," and "pushy."[42] 41 percent of respondents agreed that Jews had "too much power in the United States," and this figure rose to 58 percent by 1945.[43] Several surveys taken from 1940 to 1946 found that Jews were seen as a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group.[44]

Government attitudes to Jews in Europe also varied wildly, even among German allies. Finland told Germans to pound sand. Italy refused to hand over their Jews -that 30% of Italian Jews were members of the Fascist party had something to do with it & transports started only after the German occupation.

There is a big difference between prejudice and actual discrimination. Until 1932 many Jews felt Anglos (including Americans) were more antisemitic than Germans, but of course it was Germany that produced the Nazis. After 9/11 polling would have showed Americans as broadly very hostile to Muslims and Arabs in particular (see the ubiquity of early 2000s bro humor about them), but Islamic immigration increased over the period and there were no attempts to even somewhat institutionally discriminate against them and most Americans were relatively tolerant of individual Muslims. The English elite had widespread sympathies to nordicist racialist theories of men like Madison Grant in the late 19th and early 20th century but again were relatively fine with tolerating various groups of foreigners (including Eastern European Jews) moving to London.

The English speaking countries are more individualist and tolerant of difference even where they are equally prejudiced compared to other European-majority lands.

shift hard and fast to the Right and mean it

This is not going to happen. But also I predict almost all American jews will not move to Israel. The author is really setting up a false choice here.

Yep. When push comes to shove, most American Jews will prefer siding with Hamas over siding with Republicans. They'll try to win the fight for the left, but they won't defect to the right.

I have seen a lot of centrist Dem members of my own family become Trump supporters over the last 6 months because of this. None are hardcore leftists, mostly suburban Long Islanders and Chicagoans, and there were already a few Republicans in my family before 10/7, but I think you underestimate the shift happening in many Jewish American families. We’ll see what happens in the election, but I do think there will be a noticeable shift among Jewish voters.

Is this disentanglable from the fact that basically everyone has shifted against Biden over one thing or other? It’s understandable to me that Palestine has particular salience for members of your family, but a president widely perceived to be lying about the inflation rate and mismanaging core responsibilities can expect a shift away from him anyway.

The Democrats who switched voted for Obama, and Hillary, and Biden, they’re not typical swing voters.

I don’t see these events as anything but (1) a textbook example of college student protests and (2) a frightening display of Jewish social and cultural power.

The students believe that Israel is killing too many innocent people. Lots of intelligent people believe that; whether or not it is factually the case, it is a rational belief that many reasonable people hold, including many Jews. Even Chuck Schumer of all people has the opinion that Israel is behaving immorally. The students want their universities to cut financial and academic ties with Israel. All very simple, all very traditional, and very reasonable as far as college kids go. No different than protests against the Vietnam War or South Africa or the Iraq War. The protests have been exceptionally peaceful; if BLM was “mostly peaceful”, PLM is utopian. Try as I might, I could find no clear case of a Jewish student being physically victimized. Most of the arguably anti-Semitic comments have come from outside the campuses, by random non-affiliated protests, one-off statements that do not tell us anything about the college protestors. There’s your typical extremism college student view, but this is normal as far as college students go.

What makes this event so unique IMO is how Jews have finessed the narrative in their favor. Despite no evidence of any physical attack, the most over-represented ethnicity on college campuses (with the most advocacy groups and the most political clout) claim to feel “unsafe”. The media reports this as if it is true, and now the narrative is no longer “is Israel committing human rights violations?”, but “are Jews safe?”. In a reasonable world, the discourse would center on whether Israel is or is not committing human rights violations, and why some of the smartest students in America strongly feel they they are. A secondary question may be whether Jews in America are too close to Israel in terms of political ties, because that’s a serious problem if Israel becomes a pariah state. But Jews have strategically shifted the narrative to their own victimhood, with zero evidence. They have influenced politicians to make statements and start inquiries. They have significant sway over MSM narrative. They threaten to take tens of millions of their donations away from universities who don’t prevent the protests.

I found a video from earlier this week that illustrates the power of victim politics. An immigrant Uber driver arrives to his requested client, but can’t fulfill the request because the client accidentally ordered the wrong car. A verbal altercation ensues; phones are equipped by both parties. The client brags about his status as a lawyer, threatens to get the driver fired, claims he is being aggressed, claims the driver has threatened his children, and when all of these fail to exert his power, he claims that the driver muttered antisemitism under his breath. This last accusations makes the driver flee immediately.

The internet is saying that the client is a big shot music industry lawyer. If the internet is right, the client was on the board of directors of UJA, a Jewish charity that oversees more than one billion dollars in endowment (one of the largest local charities in the world). The man is from a pedigreed family: his Dad once ran Columbia Records. Without any shame, he punches down to a poor immigrant rideshare driver and falsely accuses him of antisemitism to record him and get him fired. And not for anything serious, but because of a minor inconvenience. If this is the attitude of someone on the board of UJA, then I think it could hint to a larger, dangerous attitude in the Jewish-Zionist community: that it is permissible to weaponize victimhood for personal or communal gain.

In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.

In red states like Texas it’s manifestly true that the much more heavy-handed response isn’t being driven by Jews but by gentile GOP politicians. Most of them are zionist to some extent, but I think in (for example) Abbott’s case, it’s more that there’s a very big ideological divide between the right and these progressive student protestors and this is a way to hurt the outgroup to the delight of the base. Pretty much no protesting student is going to vote for a Republican candidate, and a lot of Republican voters dislike leftist college students.

In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.

It seems like you're not really contradicting @coffee_enjoyer but simply explaining how the influence works? It's not some shadowy cabal, it's money. An awful lot of the donations for universities comes from wealthy jewish donors. Especially the kind of donations that come in regularly, year after year, with no specific purpose (as opposed to one-off donations from someone who dies and wants a new building named after them- that's nice, but it doesn't really help pay the general expenses of the university). Those donations start off no-strings-attached, but you suddenly see the strings when they call up and demand a specific action.

I don't have any specific numbers, but it does seem like a hugely disproportionate amount of private university donations comes from these wealthy Jewish donors. Probably even more so in schools like Colombia and USC where we've seen the harshest crackdowns on protestors.

Most of them are zionist to some extent, but I think in (for example) Abbott’s case, it’s more that there’s a very big ideological divide between the right and these progressive student protestors and this is a way to hurt the outgroup to the delight of the base

You’ve hit the nail on the head here. Abbott is as Zionist as is politically necessary, but he’s much more interested in an excuse to wield state power against left wingers, because it makes him look strong to his normie supporters.

Wealthy Jewish donors are uniquely driven to withhold donations based on this combined ethnic, religious, and political interest (Israel + the Jewish people). No gentile donors are as motivated toward any issue because they lack this level of tribalism. Imagine if Bill Gates was concerned about the low number of white admits, or withdrew donations because of white identity politics, or etc. This is a prisoner’s dilemma problem, or even example of Popper’s paradox of tolerance. There is one group of Americans who have a maximal focus on their tribe; all other groups are pressured to focus on helping Americans generally. If only one group is hyper-focused on the Israel issue, then they effectively get to decide the mainstream narrative. Non-Jews either have to be okay with a perpetual Jewish “decisive vote” on matters regarding the Middle East and the anti-semitism topic, or they have to rebuke this level of tribalism.

Abbott

One his largest single donors is Jewish, Jeff Yass, who made the largest single donation in Texas history. Yass is also a big supporter of Israel and Zionism. Another big donor is Ken Fischer. There are other wealthy Jewish philanthropists in Texas who he may want donations from, like Michael Dell. If these donors are single-issue donors, then Abbott knows he can get millions by taking a hard stance on the protests. Evangelical interests need not factor in.

Imagine if Bill Gates was concerned about the low number of white admits, or withdrew donations because of white identity politics, or etc.

Imagine indeed. WASPs did once have this level of in group solidarity, Ben Franklin thought even admitting Germans was a step too far, but it faded over time.

Ben Franklin

Close but no cigar. “When I consider, that the English are the Offspring of Germans [..] I am not for refusing entirely to admit them into our Colonies: all that seems to be necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, establish English Schools where they are now too thick settled […] I am not against the Admission of Germans in general, for they have their Virtues, their industry and frugality is exemplary; They are excellent husbandmen and contribute greatly to the improvement of a Country.”

His worry seemed to have been that they would outnumber the English. Remember at this time they all spoke German, had German newspapers, etc

Franklin considered the Saxons (whom he was discussing in this instance) to be white, but the other Germans to be ‘tawny/swarthy’ (like the Spaniards and Italians), unlike the ‘pure white’ English.

leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.

You’re conflating “white” as the term used to refer to European peoples, with “purely white” of complexion which Franklin refers to. That context is complexion. The founding fathers unanimously believed that common European people were “white”, as French and Spaniards were granted citizenship during a time in which it was restricted to whites. I mean, you should know that, France was a key ally to America at this time.

So Frankin makes this aside that he likes his ethnicity, and then says

But perhaps I am partial to the Compexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind

Of course, as you know even Turks and (largely Sephardic at that time) Jews were ‘white’ in the colonial and early independent American hierarchy, which was tripartite (white, native, black). Nevertheless ‘pure’ along with the rest of the quote and a desire to preserve that purity suggests this is not merely a matter of being partial to one’s own tribe but an actual judgment of the gradation of races. There is no doubt that while many founding Anglo-Americans were willing to accept European settlers of diverse backgrounds as fellow citizens they wished to preserve a predominantly Anglo character and ethnic supermajority in their new country. My original point was that WASPs did practice in-group tribalism and loyalty, it just faded or they could not keep up with (or did not wish to stop) the rate of inbound migration. There was consternation about losing Philadelphia, Boston, New York to the white ethnics. As late as Lovecraft’s time it was a topic of considerable debate, although by that point the ship had long sailed.

Evangelical interests need not factor in.

Abbott is not an evangelical anyways. He’s a Catholic.

That’s surprising to me for some reason. But, (afaik) it’s evangelicals who are most supportive of Israel among Christians in Texas

Abbott has practical political reasons for supporting Israel, he doesn’t need to be an evangelical for it. Most likely he converted to Catholicism under pressure from his wife(who is an IRL tradcath); he certainly seems less religious than she is and while going to a Christian church is necessary to be a successful republican politician at a high level, that church being evangelical is not; mainstream evangelical theology holds that religious Catholics have no reason to convert because the church is an invisible brotherhood of true believers in Jesus Christ and not a singular institution.

Do Evangelicals really not believe in converting Catholics?

To add on to the other responses, there is a subset of evangelicals who are anti-Catholic because they believe that certain Catholic teachings contradict the gospel. In particular, Catholicism teaches that you need both faith and good works to be saved, rather than just faith (although it's actually much more complicated than that). I've known people who think Catholics do not even count as Christians based on this criteria - because true Christianity is unique in being a religion where you don't get saved by doing good things.

My church happens to have a lot of ex-Catholics, including myself and also several of the pastors - for those guys, converting Catholics is not very important, not nearly as important as spreading the gospel to unbelievers. But they will certainly preach in such a way as to correct what they see as the false teachings of the Catholics.

They might, but it tends to be significantly less important. In general, Protestants tend not to assert that their denomination is the One True Church, preferring a communion of believers across denominations. In interpersonal compromises, this will obviously lend itself towards the one who cares less about a specific church being more willing to compromise on that. This is augmented by the fact that evangelicals are often more minimalistic with regards to doctrine.

This is a shame; Protestantism is worth fighting for.

Most don’t care and see it as an essentially aesthetic difference; evangelicals who attempted to evangelize to me usually stopped upon finding out that I was a believing, churchgoing Catholic because from their perspective I was already ‘in’. Evangelicalism is heavily orthopraxic and big tent and in practice sees any conversion experience within trinitarian Christianity as basically as good as any other, and in evangelicalism, it’s the conversion experience that counts.

There are a few Protestants who care, a lot, about converting Catholics. Most of them are not evangelicals- although I suppose many of them are adjacent to evangelicals and I don’t think it’s possible to collect the data on whether confessional Lutherans or oneness Pentecostals are more common.

In Texas specifically there’s a minor phenomenon of white evangelical men marrying Hispanic women and either going to Catholic Church without converting or formally converting for the sake of keeping a family together, because evangelicals will generally go to Catholic services but not Vice versa. Abbott falls into this group and has used this fact in his campaign materials, most famously with the mother-in-law ad.

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The protests are neither (at least not predominantly) antisemitic nor a resurgence of 20th century antisemitism.

Which is why the protesters wave the flag of Hamas and chant about how Jews should go back to Poland.

The fact that there are foolish Jews who cleave to their enemies does not change this.

“The protestors” don’t wave a Hamas flag, any more than “the Israeli protestors” call everyone protesting a Hamas terrorist (see: Shai Davidai). Some instances (almost always of non-affiliated / non-students outside of campus grounds) do not allow you to impugn a whole protest movement.

Some instances (almost always of non-affiliated / non-students outside of campus grounds) do not allow you to impugn a whole protest movement.

I can certainly impugn the whole protest movement, since it is a whole.

I don’t follow. The normative protestor is not pledging allegiance to Hamas, those are exceptional outliers.

The normative "peace protestor" wasn't pledging allegiance to the USSR, but they were doing the Soviet's bidding just the same. Different players, same playbook.

Hell, Bernie Sanders came out swinging this week:

Should be noted here that while Bernie has rather tendentiously called for a ceasefire (while saying the same letter that the war against Hamas in itself was justified), saying that Netanyahu is bad is not the same as saying that the war is bad. Presumably something like a half of Israelis would simultaneously say that Netanyahu is bad while the war is good.

With the exception perhaps of the Arabs and some on the hard left, most Israelis who dislike Bibi don’t base that judgment on his treatment of the Palestinians, but on his corruption and other issues.

If we were to fairly apply the progressive criteria of "disparate impact", then we would have to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

If a meritocratic hiring process results in a disproportionately low number of blacks getting hired, then the process is racist, regardless of the intentions behind the process or its alleged fairness. Similarly if anti-Zionism ends up materially hurting Jews, then it's anti-Semitic.

Of course no one on the progressive left will actually buy this argument, they'll just say "no we're doing anti-racism, and anti-racism can't be racist, duh" and leave it at that.

Far be it from me to pass for an idpol-progressive under ITT conditions, but if I had to steel-man the progressive position here, I would say that disparate impact that harms an oppressed group is sufficient to define an act as racist (intention notwithstanding, as you say). Actions to redress oppression, to equalize the conditions of oppressor and oppressed are definitionally not racist; “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” and all that.

But, seeing as it is functionally a non-universal principle that must be adjudicated based on arbitrary definitions of oppressed and oppressor, isn't it just post-hoc rationalization? (Adolf Hitler, great advocate of social justice: taking from the Jewish bourgoise oppressors and giving to the German proletariat.)

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Less flippantly, my imagined progressive would say that there's no avoiding (at least some) zero-sum games in this world. Thus, the only question is who must win at the expense of whom. And since there must always be an oppressor and an oppressed in every such game, the only political question is how to decide who is oppressing whom in a given situation: to do so clear-sightedly, taking into account the relevant history and particular context, or to bury our heads in the sand and cling to the fiction of "universal principles" -- which is to say, to side with the oppressor?

I think it is uncontroversial that societies at similar tech levels can have vastly different amounts of inequality.

There is inequality ("oppression" in modern parlance) both in ancient fucking Sparta and modern day Sweden, but the amount of inequality matters.

Despite coming from the traditional left, I believe some inequality is actually beneficial: if Elon Musk collected the same UBI as everyone, this would not make the world a worse place (except for Twitter, perhaps). On the flip side, taking the land away from aristocrats and redistributing it to the peasants may likewise stimulate the economy as well as lowering the Gini coefficient.

Who is on top and who on the bottom only matters to me as far as their economic policy might differ due to their background.

Just because there is a winner and loser doesn’t make the loser oppressed or the winner the oppressor.

Moreover it is pretty clear there are numerous positive sum games.

I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.

With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.

It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).

In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.

The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.

However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.

Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.

The Dissident Right is not a Conservative. One major point made by the Dissident Right, which is in fact emblematic in these protests, is that there is a false opposition. The Jews are "on top" of both sides of the protest. They are the most important representatives of the anti-war side and the most important representatives of the war side.

The DR perceives a similar paradigm on the left/right spectrum. Ben Shapiro vs Woke Jew is ultimately a false opposition. A Trotskyite can become a Neoconservative because Stalin has turned against Jews, but that doesn't make him change his stripes or become any more pro-white. And the neocons were not pro-White at all, they were pro-Israel and they made being right-wing about being pro-Israel.

A more Jewish-dominated right-wing movement is not something the DR wants, so I have no problem whatsoever gatekeeping former Jewish progressives from what is an ascending post-liberal Right-wing movement. It's a feature not a bug. There are Righteous Jews like Ron Unz who are truly allies, but "I'm no longer progressive because the left has turned against Israel, now I'm an edgy right-winger who shares racist memes and supports based Israel" is something to be vigilant against, not something to support. It leads towards more fake opposition.

That wasn’t really my point, which was that I don’t think these protests increase the popularity of the dissident right policy platform at all, which is fundamentally hostile to the interests and politics of almost all these protestors.

Do you see the leftist DEI advocates and BLM fans protesting as ‘true’ rather than fake opposition now that they oppose Israel?

Have these anti muslim zionists ever done anything for white people? The whole Bush era was full of white people siding with AIPAC to fight Islam. It achieved absolutely nothing and Europe got swamped with migrants. While the mainstream right got blown up fighting peasants in the middle east their home countries were taking in millions of Muslims. There is no reason to side with people who have been consistently hostile to White people for decades because they now want you to fight for Israel again.

Will these jewish lobbyists actually do something for White people or will they just try to convince us that we are owning the libs when we waste tax money bombing peasants fighting the same billionaires that donate to ADL?

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts. Unfortunately, it seems like jews use conflicts with the host population in order to increase cohesion within the jewish community. An outside enemy is a great way to unite a people and jews therefore need to be in a continuous state of conflict.

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!

For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.

host population

That phrase is Problematic.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

Yes, the major factor in the thrid reich's policy on jews was jewish support of communism, the rampant issues with jews engaged in degeneracy. Jews such as Magnus Hirschfeld were not exactly making their people look good. This was during the same era that the Soviet union was wrecking eastern Europe and killing millions, the Bolshevik party was stuffed with jews.

Jews don't have to act as a coherent group. Jews can still be highly overrepresented in certain movements such as communism. There have continuously been problems with dual loyalty amongst jews throughout history and the jews in Germany were clearly not loyal to the German people. Jews have high in group preference and are nepotistic. Their overrepresentation is largely due to them working as a group to promote their own. When a group's members primarily are loyal to their own group and engage with rampant nepotism that hurts the host society.

gentile industrialists were funding Hitler

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population.

Yes, they are a diaspora population that moves around.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.

Congratulations, this comment has finally spurred me into registering an account on this website after lurking since the Reddit days. (I have a few comments on the sub, but nothing major besides one about Ukraine). In my defense, the Motte’s UX on mobile isn’t great.

I’m not interested in commenting on anything re: “jews engaged in degeneracy”, and anyway I wouldn’t say anything 2rafa hasn’t already pointed out, but this stood out to me:

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

What I believe you are referring to (feel free to correct me!) is the formation of the Volksstaat Bayern, the People’s State of Bavaria, on November 8th 1918. And you’re sort of right, the organizer of the anti-Wittelsbach revolution and the subsequent Minister-President, Kurt Eisner, was, in fact, a middle-class Jew (as well as a socialist from Berlin who left his wife and child for a journalist, very degenerate indeed). Well, he wasn’t actually a communist, and most of his government wasn’t, either (though many were Jewish, also). Eisner was assassinated by the rightist Anton Arco-Valley (an aristocrat who himself had significant Jewish ancestry), and the whole government collapsed.

The Volksstaat was couped by more radical left-wingers and set up the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919 (led by Ernst Toller, who wasn’t a communist either, but was a Jew). Anyway this lasted six days, and then the actual communists took over the government, led by Eugen Levine (finally, a Jewish communist), and then a month later elements of the German Army and the Freikorps overthrew said communists and ended the whole fiasco. And it would be correct to say that there were individuals involved in the latter that would go on to join the NSDAP.

I don’t understand the BLM allusion, and I ended up writing more about a fairly obscure event than I intended, but for my own sake I decided to steelman the context here. It is not irrelevant to the NSDAP’s history as a whole. Biographies of Hitler often spend a good chunk on this period of his life, as he (and a few other later prominent Nazis, like Sepp Dietrich) literally participated in the revolutionary government!

I object to taking this event, however, and using it to characterize the NSDAP entirely! I’m not going to write an essay now on the demographics of the Nazi support base in 1932 (Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted For Hitler is probably the best source, although Seymour Martin Lipset has also written extensively on the subject).

But to put it shortly — the idea of the great brown wave, the common man who said enough (!) to Jewish degenerates, communists, sodomites, etc. is an absolute myth. The NSDAP’s voters were primarily middle class and self-employed, and they were Protestant (Catholics voted for Zentrum). The urban working class voted for the communists, or the SPD, before that party’s growing unpopularity caused by the Great Depression and Chancellor Bruening’s austerity policies radicalized the electorate. The economic crisis did drive parts of the working poor to the Nazis, but these were primarily artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, small farmers, and domestic workers; and their motivation was not particularly anti-semitic, and if it was, I’d agree with quiet_Nan, that this was brought on by the more important economic and political anxiety. Although I would disagree on the finer points, as most of the NSDAP’s voters probably would not have voted for the communists anyway, as most likely some owned private property.

More interesting to me, however, is the support of the upper classes for the NSDAP, which was motivated primarily by anti-communist sentiment, albeit with some anti-semitism and anti-democratic sentiment thrown in. The NSDAP received extensive funding from industrialists, such as the directors of IG Farben and Gustav Krupp, and Alfred Hugenberg’s media empire was critical in setting the scene for Hitler’s electoral program. The Nazis also extensively courted the German aristocracy (famously Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Germany), and several key members, such as Goering, were decidedly not salt-of-the-earth types. These people were not inspired to shut down a BLM rally by degenerate Jewish communists (they were probably personally each much more degenerate than the bohemian Kurt Eisner). Their motives were political and economical, and related far more to gentile Soviets than to Jews.

I probably rambled on for too long, and it’s possible I’m reading too much into a throwaway sentence, but sometimes I read takes on this forum about the Nazis that I find uninformed, and this being one of them, here we are.

Oh also

Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.

This just isn’t true.

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

Jews were not mostly disloyal to Germany. Most were not involved in politics at all. Jews were well represented in the Freikorps beyond Prussia despite their substantially antisemitic character in the North especially re. certain chants, among them heroic anti-communists like Weissenstein (killed by communists defending Essen in the Ruhr insurrection) and men like Ernst Kantorowicz, who was of course later famous for The King’s Two Bodies and remained a lifelong German patriot even after the Holocaust.

Ernst and Gertrud Kantorowicz were typical of German Jews…They were passionate nationalists, as völkisch as you could get. Like other Germans, they celebrated the outbreak of war as a momentous chance for national renewal. The late historian Fritz Stern remarked that the passionate German response to the war went beyond mere patriotism. Many intellectuals, especially, saw the guns of August as a triumphant release from dead-end bourgeois culture, a call to a new nobility and manliness.

In summer 1914, during the first frenzy of battle, even German Zionists declared that there was “no difference” between Jews and other Germans. Martin Buber wrote enthusiastically in August, “Never has the concept of the Volk been such a reality to me than during these last weeks.”

And yet years later these were the same Jews blamed both for Germany’s defeat and the Treaty of Versailles, and even amid that, many still served in right-wing anticommunist paramilitaries. The great majority of German Jews were apolitical and loyal to their country.

But that isn’t even the question here. The majority of German Jews fled the Nazis well before 1939. If it had been a mere expulsion of German Jews, the few hundred thousand would be removed and the whole chapter would be just another expulsion of many. What happened, however, was the invasion and occupation of other countries and the murder of their Jewish populations. Greek or Dutch Jews were not Germans or (in almost all cases) communists, and had no intention of becoming so.

And the Soviet Union’s role in WW2’s early years was as Nazi ally whose territorial conquest of Poland was accomplished hand-in-hand with the Germans. By the late 1930s many old Bolshevik Jews had already been purged, even Yagoda was dead, and you seem to ignore that the predominant impulse behind Soviet policy in Eastern Europe by this time certainly was gentile. Was alleged (minority) Jewish involvement in German communist movements enough to justify cleansing the entirety of continental Europe of them, as was the plan? I don’t think you’ve made a case for that.

I didn’t tell you to ally with them or that they would serve the ‘interests’ of white people. I said that a large shift in their politics away from the increasingly anti-Israel left in America would be a win for the right regardless because they would separate an important part of the progressive coalition from it. Most Islamic immigration to Western Europe has been from Pakistan, Algeria and Turkey, and to some extent from the Caucasus, not from Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. They left not because of American policy but because Europe offered a much higher quality of life and welfare. It’s delusional and ridiculous to suggest that the large increase in the Muslim population of Western Europe since the 1960s is the fault of US intervention in the Middle East.

It is true for Sweden specifically, where functor is from.

Sweden also could’ve said “no.”

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