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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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You know I'm just going to cut through the epistemic fog once again.

If there's a festering level of antisemitism amongst the GOP/Conservatives, its not having any noticeable impact on actual outcomes at the Federal or State level.

Can you name a single policy proposal, let alone an actual piece of legislation that was debated and voted on that could legitimately be characterized as 'antisemitic?' There are at least 38 states that explicitly passed laws that discourage anti-israel activities.

"Hints" and Dog Whistles and carefully cropped photos don't signal much to me when the actual legislation that is passed and enforced doesn't reflect that attitude in the slightest.

And uh, at risk of pure whataboutism, its been the left that is assassinating Jews and electing actually antisemitic politicians to congress.

Near as I can tell, there's <1% of honest-to-goodness Nazi sympathizers on the right. There's a larger contingent (still, <10%) who aren't antisemitic but also 'notice' that Jewish activists are behind a whole lot of the subversive activities on the left, and provide a lot of the intellectual cover for its beliefs. The kind who see Soros funded plots behind every tree.

Then there's an actually significant contingent who are seeing the tension between "America First!" as a guiding principle and the GOPe's continual preference for assisting Israel and protecting Jews in ways they clearly do not prefer or protect other racial or religious groups, and find that suspicious.

I model this mostly as a tug-of-war between the waning Evangelical right that considers Israel their greatest ally, vs. the more secular newer right that doesn't consider the U.S.-Israel or Christian-Jewish relationship to be sacred and mutually beneficial. The latter may in fact admire Israel as a functional example of a Nationalistic, Jingoistic homogenous ethnostate with strict border controls, but wants some actual justification for spending U.S. tax dollars as economic or military aid to such a country.

And hey, it is actually obvious that Israel puts their thumb on that scale and does in fact use different forms of leverage to impact U.S. domestic and foreign policy outcomes, which is precisely why the aforementioned tension/tug-of-war isn't going to subside for a while.