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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I'm not sure exactly which reply in this chain sparked this thought, so I'm putting it here.

There's a thing I notice myself doing, where I sort of expand my sense of identity in a solidarity with Republicans, because they are the enemies of my enemies. By a decade of common ground in the culture wars and politics, I have come to kind of think of them as my ingroup. I cheer the successes. I lament and fear their failures. But that identification can easily fall apart when stressed in the right place. Bring up abortion, or Iraq, or the drug war, and suddenly I remember Actually, I'm A Libertarian. I've never been a member of the Republican party. I've voted for roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats for significant offices, and more third party than either. To the extent that "Republican" is an identity, it is one I can detach like a lizard tail, when I need to do so to protect my ego.

When I see right-wingers complain about Jews, the usual context is pointing out that an ostensibly white writer talking about how America, or white people, or western civilization is terrible is actually Jewish.

"You're saying I can tell just by looking at the Early Life section on Wikipedia?"

"No, Neo. I'm saying that when you're ready, you won't have to."

As a demonstration and calibration, I quickly looked up I can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup. There's a section where Scott quickly lists 10 different articles purportedly showing intense, loathing criticisms of white people coming from white people. Two of the links seem dead, and 2-3 seem almost certainly gentile, but in less than 10 minutes of lazily Googling people who mostly don't have Wiki articles, I was able to find that Rebecca Schoenkopf and Jacob Weisberg are Jewish. Amusingly, Jacob is the only one with a Wikipedia article, and it doesn't have an early life section. It does mention his parents, and his mother is apparently a famous Jewish socialite from Chicago. So, minimum 25% Jewish rate.

I think a lot of what they're seeing is a phenomenon of Jewish people getting caught up in utopian purity spirals like wokeness, but having that ego-saving escape hatch allows them to go all-in harder. They're basically Motte-and-Bailey-ing their own identity, getting the kudos for vicious, scathing self-criticism while not actually taking any of that criticism to heart because it doesn't really apply to them.