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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Maybe Jews as a group have too many ancestral memories in their culture to ever end up giving 80% of their money to something like MAGA, at least for the foreseeable future. For them, MAGA has too many unpleasant connotations of past cultures that were violent toward Jews.

On a side note, I think that while Jews lean left in American politics, they also happen to be over-represented relative to their population size in American right-wing politics. Unsurprisingly if one believes in the hypothesis that they are influential mainly because of high intelligence, they're basically over-represented relative to their population size in every political movement that does not deliberately exclude Jews.

Maybe Jews as a group have too many ancestral memories in their culture to ever end up giving 80% of their money to something like MAGA, at least for the foreseeable future. For them, MAGA has too many unpleasant connotations of past cultures that were violent toward Jews.

What makes MAGA different from the causes they're actually supporting, like infinity Muslim immigration, or the Blue Tribe in general?

Blue tribe doesn't have the connotations of "stupid angry white hicks who will come to our village and pogrom us".

The Muslim immigration doesn't seem like a viscerally real, tangible problem because so far it has only built up to small minorities in Western countries.

Blue tribe doesn't have the connotations of "stupid angry white hicks who will come to our village and pogrom us".

How so? They're the ones doing all the "antisemitic" protests that they were complaining so much about.

The Muslim immigration doesn't seem like a viscerally real, tangible problem

Then why were they complaining so much about all the people celebrating October 7th?

How so? They're the ones doing all the "antisemitic" protests that they were complaining so much about.

That's very recent and mostly confined to a small subset of Blue tribe. So far it's not much compared to hundreds of years of being pogromed by people who seemed more like Red tribe.

Then why were they complaining so much about all thr people celebrating October 7th?

You can get viscerally upset watching some people celebrate the killing of your co-ethnics without it making you decide that their entire ethnic group is inherently unassimilable to Western civilization. And I think that Jews have been turning more against Muslim immigration recently.

These two issues were relevant enough for them to (successfully) lobby for state actions like deportations and withdrawal of government funds. If they were such a small issue that they don't warrant any reciprocical support, their requests should have been denied. Hell, they should not have made them in the first place.

Well, they're not a monolith. Some of them wanted such radical actions, some were opposed, some indifferent.

My overall point is that, even though Jews in Western countries have been moving a bit to the right recently, white-dominated right-wing populist movements probably have, to a Jewish perspective, so much historical baggage that I don't expect 80% of Jews to support them any time in the near future. They might do it if Muslims rise to make up like 20% of Western populations or something. Even then I'm not sure.

Well, they're not a monolith. Some of them wanted such radical actions, some were opposed, some indifferent.

Okay, so if so few of them cared about it, their request should have been denied. Opt-out's entire point ia that if we're going to engage in such radical actions, they should come with the corresponding support from the community.

My overall point is that, even though Jews in Western countries have been moving a bit to the right recently, white-dominated right-wing populist movements probably have, to a Jewish perspective, so much historical baggage that I don't expect 80% of Jews to support them any time in the near future.

And my point is that given the movements they actually supported that perspective is unreasonable. If these movements can be somehow seen as "not a big deal" so can the populist right.

Well, since I'm not a Jew and also to my knowledge I never did anything to support requests for deportation and the like, I'm probably not the person you should be saying this to.

That said, I also don't like the populist right, so it's my hope that they don't end up supporting the populist right. Or supporting crazed college kids. Or supporting Islamists / Arab nationalists / etc.