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My feelings on this story are complicated and contradictory, which is how I know I'm having a good time.
So, here's my background. I'm Jewish, but I'm also autistic. I come from a semi-religious household, but I haven't been personally religious since childhood. I thought of myself as just another white guy until 2015, when I was forced to be aware of my ethnic identity. During that election cycle, some leftists told me that Trump was an anti-Semite and that supporting him made me a traitor. The alt-right was also hostile towards Jews in the MAGA movement, but for more conventionally anti-Semitic reasons. I found both of these attitudes offensive, and my recognition of this manifested into an ethnic consciousness. I'm often told by people in rationalist communities that I don't see racism or anti-Semitism in places where they're present because I'm unwilling (because of bias) or unable (because of autism) to the kind of inferences that normal people do. I don't know if this is true. I never know if this is true. But I'm not going to abstain from discussing issues for fear that I may be wrong.
I will say, there was one time Trump said something I found genuinely anti-Semitic, and that was when he said that any Jew who didn't support him was a traitor to Israel (maybe?) and therefore a bad Jew (hell naw). Yeah, I think Israel has a right to exist, but I don't think I have to believe that as a consequence of being Jewish. To me, racism is when you use race as the sole factor in making a decision, or when you say that someone is required to be something because of their race. I do not not racist to acknowledge statistics about IQ, wealth, or crime. It is not even racist to speculate about the genetic link between these things. I wish every American would read Bryan Caplan's explanation of why racism is morally wrong..
So, do I think Kanye is anti-Semitic? My answer is "not yet, but he's dangerously close."
I think it was insensitive for Kanye to use the phrase "defcon" as a prelude to his JQ posting, given that the term references military action and there have been several high-profile mass shootings at synagogues in recent years. I mean, this is the exact kind of hyperbole that I would use when I want to be cheeky (which is all the time), but I'm not a public figure. Kanye's statement on Piers Morgan didn't make explicit that he was being hyperbolic, but it did make clear that he wasn't talking about Jews in general, so that was good enough for me.
As for everything about Jews being overrepresented in media, and the banks, and everything that requires high verbal IQ.. yes, that's absolutely, obviously true, and denying it is not only wrong for the deontological reason that lying is wrong, but also the consequentalist reason that denying an obvious truth makes it look like "they" (the people denying the claim, whether or not they're Jewish) have something to hide. This will obviously increase anti-Semitism. Watch this Steve Hofstetter video, and then look at the comments. If you live in middle America and haven't met any Jews, and your primary exposure to Jewish people is seeing them deny obvious truths and punish people for pointing them out, you're going to be steered towards anti-Semitism. So I'm not nearly as angry at the commenters as I am at Steve Hofstetter for empowering them.
So I was sympathetic to Kanye.. until he invited Nick Fuentes to see Trump. Forget the cookies remark, which is several years old at this point. Earlier this year, he went on stage at AFPAC and implied that if Putin was the next Hitler, it wouldn't be a bad thing. I'm not going to jump the gun and say Nick is absolutely for sure a Neo-Nazi, but he is a white nationalist who, at the absolute least, does not treat the holocaust with reverence mocks those who do. Why the heck did Kanye hire this person? My understanding is that Kanye's specific beef is that he's not allowed to acknowledge the disproportionate representation of Jews in certain fields or speculate as to how that impacts the culture of those fields. That is understandable. It'd be like if women couldn't acknowledge how men are overrepresented in positions of power or how this leads to the specific needs of women being overlooked. (This is a point upon which I absolutely agree with feminists.) Nick, however, is upset that Jewish people have any role in American governance at all. He believes that America is a white Christian nation, and that white Christians should make its decisions. (I don't have a direct quote where he says this, but that's the vibe I got from him by listening to him speak for several hours over the course of a few years.) I don't like guilt by association, or telling people that they can't be friends with people who they disagree with. But this goes beyond that. Kanye hired Nick to be a part of his campaign, and he invited the man to meet the former president of the United States! I can't explain how, specifically, but I intuit that this goes beyond "agreeing to disagree" territory and goes into outright an endorsement of Nick's beliefs. Either Kanye isn't aware of who Nick really is, or Kanye is much farther down the rabbit hole than I realize. Either way, for Kanye's sake, I hope he gets rid of Nick.. but for my sake, I hope whatever happens next is funny, and Nick being involved with a presidential campaign is funny. Like I said, I'm conflicted.
I watched the Tim Pool interview live as it aired. While I share Pool's preference for individualism, I think Kanye absolutely nailed him about how he groups black people together when talking about "the black vote," and Pool's rebuttal came across as word salad to me. If black peoples' awareness of their blackness can lead them to prefer certain policies, couldn't Jewish peoples' awareness of their Jewishness lead them to prefer certain policies? You can advocate individualism while still acknowledging that humans have tribal impulses that have to be fought and conquered. Pool doesn't seem to understand this nuance. I found that disappointing. Instead, he contradicted himself in a way that made him look foolish. And West walking out was both bad strategically and bad for my entertainment. I don't know who messed up more last night.
So, to those of you who have read my message this long, I pose you a question: suppose you are Tim Pool. You tell Kanye that there's no reason to group together Jewish individuals as a collective, when they're all individuals who happen to be Jewish. Kanye points out that you have previously discussed "the black vote," a concept that involves black people making electoral decisions because they're black. You now have to explain how this is different from talking about "the Jews" who control record labels and movie studios.
What do you tell Kanye?
[[I have no clue who Tim Pool is or what his deal is, so this might not match what "Tim Pool" would say at all]]
Every political goal is and must be downstream of winning. Anything that isn't winning isn't, in the short term, politics; it is speculation, philosophy, academics. Now, short term loss can turn into long term triumph, political philosophy isn't valueless, but it is at core a separate domain from politics. Letting the one infect the other poisons both.
So when we talk about "The Black Vote" we are talking about the behaviors of voters with identifiable characteristics. That those characteristics correlate at a rate of over 80% with voting behavior does not reify the idea that all Black folk act or think alike. But it is a fact you need to grapple with if you want to win elections. If you want to win elections without thinking about voters in demographic groups, you won't win, and if you don't win you don't achieve anything at all. Deontology is fine, if you have a principled religious objection to labeling groups that's great, go be a Shaker or a Jain and leave the real world alone. We're out here trying to win elections, not ask how many angels dance on the head of a pin or tell the axe murderer where our friend is hiding.
Talking about the Black vote doesn't elevate or deny Black agency, any more than looking for tall players on a Basketball team or fast soccer players is denying short slow people their humanity.
So, to turn it around, what does Kanye hope to achieve by going Death Con 3 on the Jews in the media industry? What does his ideal media universe look like? Would it be strictly representational by race, by religion, by social class? Would it be meritocratic, and in what ways is our current system less meritocratic than it should be? What needs to change, say it out loud, don't hide it behind vague ideas of representation.
{I'll note personally that I have basically skipped any "literary" work with a 20th century Jewish protagonist, particularly one who lives in the Northeast USA, for a few years now. I just got sick of so many of the tropes. And I find it funny that so many critics of Big Mouth decry its lack of Black voices, while failing to notice that it has only a single white Christian (inevitably, a comic-relief flaming homosexual) in a sea of NYC-metro Jews. I've also reduced consumption of anything related to WWII, movies books histories etc; I find that our culture overemphasizes WWII to the detriment of learning about literally anything else in history. So I do see some room for expanding our set of literary and cultural tropes by expanding the representation of creators. But that has to be accompanied by genuine quality and audience enjoyment, not by politically correct dictates}
Well, it is our origin story, at least for the current incarnation of the United States as a globe-spanning empire with interests and soldiers everywhere. Without WWII as the central part of that story, without Hitler as the stand-in for Satan and the ensuing rise of the Soviet Union as a permanent threat, the rest of the story looks pretty weird. We have 55,000 soldiers in Japan, 36,000 in Germany, a few thousand in Spain and Italy, hundreds in places that most people don't even know exist (what the hell is Diego Garcia?). Everything that comes after WWII is justified by WWII and the new role of the Greater American Empire in which nearly every country on Earth is an American protectorate or an American adversary.
I don't think maintaining buy-in for the modern American civic religion would be possible without centering the 20th century's triumphant struggle for the primacy and legitimacy of Democracy^tm above all other systems.
That is exactly why I object to centering it so strongly in our popular understanding of history. I find the American imperial project abhorrent both to much of the world {Remember Allende and the day before, before the army came} and to the interests of the American people.
Historical analogy, consider the quip*: Athens recovered quickly from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta never recovered from its victory. Sparta would never be the Sparta of Lycurgus, in a pure decline until their defeat against Antipater snuffed them out forever as a real power, they became a mocking footnote in Alexanders memorials "These victories were won by all the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians." Athens would become a center of learning, prominent into the days of Julian the Apostate, our modern framing of Athens descends as much from the later period under Roman rule as from the Athenian Golden Age. Most of what we remember about Sparta was mythmaking by Athenians playing up their great rivals as models or as villains.
I fear that it might be the same for the USA; we may never recover from winning WWII and the Cold War.
*I can never remember where I first heard it or who to attribute it to.
Oh, I'm in a distressing amount of agreement. The initial American project was unstable for all of the reasons that culminated in the Civil War, but the post-Reconstruction nation really seems to me like it could have stayed as a hemispheric superpower indefinitely. The post-WWII arrangement strikes me as being on its last legs, with some major realignment approaching quickly.
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