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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?
Isn't that the opposite of what your link says? You mean any Jew who did not support him.
Zionism (like anti-racism) is a feature of the common civil religion and a non-negotiable, if informal, axiom in American politics, so both sides beat each other over the head with accusations of lacking it; same logic with sympathies for Russia and China, that are mutually suspected and awkwardly competitively disavowed at debates. Trump was going with the spin of him being the most stalwart Zionist, which is probably a somewhat honest branding by Trumpian standards, and Jews who vote against him (i.e. most American Jews) being insufficiently pro-Jewish and unsupportive of Israel (like all Democrats, within this rhetoric). But since Zionism, as per the tenets of his hardline branch of the American faith, is not just perfectly compatible but basically a component of American patriotism, they are also traitors to the US. It's a bit of an extreme rhetoric but it amounts to the anodyne «my side are true patriots», as expected of MAGA chief. Obviously Greenblatt and other such people, who are Democrats, have aikido-ed the charge of being anti-Jewish back at Trump using the absurd meme about «dual loyalty».
This isn't to criticize you, since we seem to agree on most counts, but I'll be blunt. The effects of Jewish political dominance are unappealing, scary and ultimately dangerous‡. What is described in the paragraph above, the background radiation of American politics, is de facto the condition of debasement for American Gentiles. You correctly observe how the conspicuous denial of the obvious, like overrepresentation in the media or having in-group preferences, is causing extra anti-Semitism. But that's small potatoes. The problem I observe is that this is the stage upon American minds are forged, and only autistic, schizophrenic or otherwise non-compliant ones tend to misbehave. Same as with canonical Culture War topics like race or sex, but equally for both political tribes (or actually worse so on the Red side with their Evangelical beliefs), Americans are continually, starting in the crib, undergoing the «calling a deer a horse» training, with those who break the kayfabe being made examples of. Most of them aren't autistic. They will bend, reform their entire epistemologies under the pressure, «understand» how it is at once laughably wrong and morally evil to believe that Jews with dual nationality have dual national loyalty, and also morally right to uphold the right of Jewish Americans to lobby for their «strong peoplehood, with a homeland and with an army committed to defending the Jewish people worldwide». At the same time they learn to punish the non-punishers. It is worse than it was in the Soviet Union. Soviets never reached that deep. This racial mental debasement is an insult to the premise of equality, and its cost is too great.
This is, I believe, where someone like Fuentes is coming from – assuming for a moment that he is not just a shallow grifter who waded into too spicy a topic and was prohibited from leaving. «But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism...» This is what pushes people to endorse Kanye, too.
‡ With the willful ignorance of Israeli WMD capacity, proactive Israeli militarism and self-defense doctrines, Israeli delusions of being a desperate underdog that are invulnerable to experience, changing Israeli demographics and beliefs of those new Israelis, effective Israeli self-sufficiency in the semiconductor industry, accelerating adsorption of American ML know-how by Israelis (just off the top of akhaliq's feed, 1, 2, 3, 4) and giddy Israeli willingness to weaponize obscure computer science and to manufacture semi-autonomous tools of war – in the AI age the uncritical adulation for Israel demanded of Americans and, less directly, their allies amounts to an existential risk number 1. Because, unlike with China or even American Big Tech or government agencies (!), we literally cannot touch the subject, and are reduced to muttering, like broken slaves, about muh paperclips and misalignment and such Lesswrong bullshit.
This can get very ugly, very quickly.
I mean, to consider, how ravingly, howlingly insane this is. Is there a popular movement in the US for destruction of Germany? I mean, that's literally people that invented the Nazis. Or Poland - we did pretty well for centuries without any Poland, why we need it at all? Or France - these bastards speak a weird language and are rude, why do they need a state, just to be more full of themselves than they already are? Let them have Quebec, and enough. Or, say, Japan - they attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and we had to nuke them, twice - why not just finish the job and get rid of it forever? You don't need to invent any "civil religion" to explain why there's not a lot of people advocating for such nonsense, do you? In fact, there's not even a word describing the idea that Germans, French, Japanese or Polish people deserve their own state - it's so obvious you don't need to call it anything. But talk about Jews having their own state - and talk about people saying maybe denying them that right is not a decent idea - and there's a conspiracy. Only a conspiracy can explain why such an idea is popular, only the absolute Despotism can ingrain the idea that Jews are people like Japanese, French, German and Polish are and their statehood does not have more reasons to be denied than any of these people, only an overwhelming pressure from a global plot and deep mental oppression can make this idea attractive, only an utterly brainwashed people can find any logic in it. It can not come into any mind by itself, it has to be forged into it by external forces. To think about it - those are Jews, how could they be like the other people? In fact, promoting such idea is a debasement of all that is proper and just.
And of course, if a person of Japanese descent lobbies for continued alliance between Japan and US - it's a natural thing. Why wouldn't they? They don't want their aunt to be nuked again. Friendship is much better, and also more profitable. But when a person of Jewish descent wants Israel and US to be allies - oh, here's dual loyalty! How dare you to think US can have common interests with the only democracy in the Middle East? How dare you to suggest it may be just good to not let millions of Jews to be murdered? It's all plot to steal our precious bodily fluids... sorry, wrong conspiracy, but it must be an evil plot, because nobody can have such an idea naturally. I mean, lobbying for the foreign aid to any other country? Sure. Working as a lobbyist for China, Iran, Russia, Egypt, whatever - nobody would dare to question the citizenly loyalties of those people, it's just not what decent people do - as long as it is not concerning Jews.
Yes, the term is called German/French/Polish nationalism. Prussians and their other German allies had to fight two wars, first with Austria in 1866 and later with France in 1871 in order to secure the the new state as homeland for Germans in form of Keiserreich. The formation of French identity as a state was also fraught: France was in the past basically something like Holy Roman Empire. For instance even in 1806 only around 58% of people living in France spoke French with large minority in the south speaking Occitan, a language in similar family as Catalan. With one exception being that Occitan nationalism was nowhere near as successful even compared to Catalan nationalism that fuels separatist movements up until today. Also there is huge complication with French Guayana being territory of France
When it comes to Jews and Israel, the major difference is that Israel as home of the Jews was carved by invasion and conquest. In 1800 Jews was small minority of around 2.5% in Palestine, it increased to around 10% by 1890 as Zionism picked up steam - also "thanks" to pogroms on Jews inside many new states that were fueled by nationalist identities and who considered Jews as foreign elements. In 1947 before the Israeli war of Independence, Jews consisted of around 32% of population of Palestine. Zionism is the Jewish form of nationalism with all the usual steps: creation of new language of Hebrew out of basically dead religious language, a solution that was necessary in order to integrate Jews comming to Palestine from all over the world and a solution that prevailed over some suggestions such as using Yiddish in that way. However the extra step of invasion and conquest is something that in eyes of many people make the state of Israel having less legitimacy over let's say Germany or France. Heck, there are many people now questioning the legitimacy of USA due to the fact of conquest of native population. The very fact that questioning the legitimacy of state of Israel is not taken as a joke but as something that has to be squashed by force points to this inherent weakness. This is a similar phenomenon in Spain where Catalans and Basque peoples are questioning the legitimacy of Spain as a state and they are met with similarly strong response.
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