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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil.

I really don't think this is true of a great deal of American conservatives. The fact that Japan, say, prioritizes the ethnic Japanese does not seem to be a moral problem at all for an awful lot of people, which is why I think online edgelords have latched on to it as a useful argument. America can't really be that kind of country, of course, because of its actual settler+immigrant history means we've always been a mess of different fractious groups from the very beginning, but the fact that other nations have other ways of organizing their borders seems pretty unobjectionable.

From that perspective, though, the problem with Israeli influence is that Jewish people are being very normal about their enthocentrism (which is a default almost everywhere around the globe, and will return to being more apparently as America and the West become relatively weaker compared to everyone else), and current American liberalism rules it entirely out-of-bounds to name it and respond appropriately to it, because saying that groups exist and fight for their own (entirely sensible, but also entirely non-universal) interests, sounds a great deal like what has been defined as antisemitism in this case... To that conservative perspective, someone Jewish being a partisan for Israel and Jewish people is totally normal and sensible, but the fact that the American government refuses to likewise be a partisan for Americans and American people (and the boundary here is certainly complicated) is the actual glaring problem, especially in a case like this where (so the claim goes) these Jewish interests are being especially sharp elbowed as the expense of a lot of Americans.

That's at least something like the kind of perspective I come across, at any rate.