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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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The "red tribe" and "blue tribe" heuristic is way overused, there are other types of tribes. The "Blue Tribe" dislike of Christianity has little to do with the driving forces behind the emergence of Public Menorah lightings. Joe Biden has now done two separate Menorah lightings at the White House where he's promised the Jewish People major financial handouts to Israel, Jewish causes, synagogues and Jewish community centers, as well as only this month created a task force to use the National Security apparatus to organize a government response against anti-Semitism.

Does any of this strike you as symbolically demonstrating the political and cultural power of Judaism in the United States government? You think it really reduces to a "blue tribe" dislike of Christianity?

I think that Jews as a group have lots of power in the US and that they're generally not interested in using this power to promote the Jewish religion, for the simple reason that they mostly don't believe in it themselves.

I also think that 'dislike of the religious aspects of christianity' is a real thing that really explains a lot of blue tribe behavior and hypocritical-seeming behavior of institutions under substantial blue tribe sway, and that rounding it all off to Judaism or whatever is dumb because almost none of these people are themselves religious Jews, and that even if a disproportionate number of them are ethnically Jewish it's still a very large majority of them that are gentiles.

I think that Jews as a group have lots of power in the US and that they're generally not interested in using this power to promote the Jewish religion, for the simple reason that they mostly don't believe in it themselves.

Their religion is themselves, and they are their religion. Their religion is a matrilieanly-inherited status to the Chosen people, and that membership is often extremely important even to "non-religious" Jews. Their influence to give themselves special financial and legal privileges as members of that group, handouts of federal funds to their synagogues and community centers, billions of dollars of taxpayer money to their ethnostate, and now a "task force" which will use the national security apparatus to "counter" people who dare to criticize them... That is all promoting their religion, even if "promoting their religion" does not involve great effort to convert gentiles.

You don't necessarily promote a religion by trying to convert others. You can promote it by giving it special status and privileges and protections, or by lighting giant menorahs in symbolically important spaces where Christians are denied a Nativity during the Christian's own very import holiday.

You think it really reduces to a "blue tribe" dislike of Christianity?

I'm not @hydroacetylene, but stated bluntly, yes. I really do think it reduces down to that.