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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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In "holy shit" culture war moments, Kanye has lashed out at (((us))) on Twitter. He came out of the gate swinging by stating that:

... when I wake up I'm going death [sic] con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda

Please note that Kanye is using double-spaces instead of periods for some reason.

This comes shortly after he was pictured wearing a White Lives Matter shirt, and shortly before he asked rhetorically

Who you think created cancel culture?

As always, the reaction is worse than the action, and causes the story to explode. In response to accusations that Jews control the media and invented cancel culture, Jewish organizations have loudly declared that such accusations are anti-semitic and inherently untrue, and then demanded Kanye be cancelled. The irony appears lost on them. To the surprise of I'm sure absolutely no one, Kanye was quickly locked out of his twitter account.

Social media reactions have been mixed, to say the least. /pol/ has apparently decided that Kanye is one step removed from goose stepping his way down the isle at the Grammys, and is almost /theirguy/. Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam n****r so I'm going to stop short of saying that Kanye has struck a blow for unity within the racist community.

/r/Kanye, which is dedicated to exactly what you think, is in full melt-down mode understandably.

I really don't have anything else to add to this monumental pile of flaming garbage. There is no redeeming anything buried here. Only more decay and hatred seeping into public spaces. I leave you with only this thought that has been said by far smarter men than I. Twitter delenda est.

I don't have anything useful to say about this... I don't think Kanye is a mentally stable human being, but I'm not sure many humans at that level of fame can be stable. Existing on that scale is so far outside the ancestral environment that I suspect brain stuff just gets weird.

What immediately struck me about this case was how clearly it feeds Kanye's argument. When saying "the Jews are shutting down everyone who disagrees with their agenda" gets you shut down by organizations substantially owned and/or operated by Jews, like, what--you think he's gonna conclude "oh, I must be mistaken?" This is on the same rhetorical playground as the well-trod "canceling conservatives just gets them bigger book deals, 'left media bias' is obviously a myth."

I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic. The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable. But I can imagine being a black person whose community openly expresses frustration at whites or Asians or Hispanics "keeping me down"--in such an environment, why wouldn't a statistically wealthy, powerful group of phenotypically white people be permitted targets of the same basic criticism?

It also seems related to stuff like this. Armed black militants demanding reparations and a closed border seems like evidence that some blacks, at least, have decided that they don't want to be pawns for either "Left" or "Right" politics. Not sure that works out for them, in a two-party left-right coalition environment... but maybe?

And yeah. Twitter delenda est.

I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic.

It may not be anti-Semitic but it's not weird to me that she got suspended for this.

She committed two cardinal sins in idpol-land, where victimhood is status:

  1. "It’s not about race. It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”. She tried to remove the specificity of the Holocaust. Just as you can't just say "all lives matter" you can't take away the fact that Jews specifically suffered this, anymore than you can make slavery about "man's humanity to man". That is too vague and doesn't saddle one group with the responsibility to pay the debt.

  2. “But these are two white groups of people!”. She placed Jews in the camp of other white people, which is anathema to liberal Jews who jealously guard their right to secede from whiteness and enter the victim camp when it gets a bit uncomfortable (including when they make it uncomfortable).

I also personally think that her comments are just silly and historically illiterate (the Nazis attributed a specific place to Jews in their ideology). But I don't think that's why it was so outrageous.

Whoopi Goldberg was totally in the right - after the definitions of race and racism were adjusted to make sure that it was impossible to be racist against white people, "the holocaust wasn't about race" is actually correct.