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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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I think most people here would accept these two things:

  1. Most human beings have a loyalty to their own tribe. As thus Jews have interests not shared by other Americans.
  2. Jews likely made up 30-40% of the highest IQ Americans for decades. This may be lower now with the large amount of filtered immigration the US had between roughly 1970-2010.

So I do think a very high in human capital group with their own interests is something the rest of society should notice.

And yes it was a Jew Scott Alexander who made me aware of AIPACs ability to target political races on a small budget. It’s there very high human capital that gives the group an ability to do things like AIPACs political lobbying. So yes there isn’t some Jewish hive mind working in perfect coordination, but Jews do have tribal interests. As does every tribe.

I’ve never met a Jew I didn’t get along with. I think I likely have more than a few Jewish traits. As an Italian American and as genetic testing has improved it turns out Italians and Ashkenazis share a bunch of common ancestors especially on the mother’s side. They are much more my cousins than Anglos.

I'm not calling you anything personally, nor am I implying you engage in that sort of behaviour. I'm largely indifferent to someone's personal prejudices, be it antisemite, anti-Muslim, anti-Indian, anti-apache helicopter. I'm just echoing Amadan's sentiment that this particular discourse, unless heavily moderated, has an extremely high propensity to collapse into a kind of zero-nuance intellectual junk food, where a single reductive heuristic is made to bear explanatory weight for an otherwise complex world. Take Tucker Carlson for instance, he constantly implies that Israel and Israel alone wanted this war to happen, as if Trump did not have any agency here or that the war doesn't reflect his own ideological commitments independent of Israeli/Jewish influence. It's rhetorically potent and emotionally satisfying, but it obscures more than it clarifies. At that point, it turns into a self fulfilling prophecy and even Jewish moderates grow understandably suspicious of any non-Jewish criticism of Israel, reading it through the lens of prior experience rather than in isolation. In turn, those most immersed in that discourse often do tend to display broadly negative priors, which reinforces the cycle. Kinda how black activists who fixate monolithically on institutional racism and slavery probably do signal anti-white proclivities.

I have no interest in going back in time on this issue. We are not going back to a place when any criticism of Jews are called antisemitism.

If somehow we ranked a groups political power. Jews probably control in the neighborhood of 25% of global power despite having a minimal population. If you could some how measure influence, tech, military, etc. So yes we can criticize Jews.

If somehow we ranked a groups political power. Jews probably control in the neighborhood of 25% of global power despite having a minimal population. If you could some how measure influence, tech, military, etc.

Isn't that just the old "white privilege"/"male privilege" argument, but repackaged?

Jews and white men are privileged. We do have higher human capital. But the conclusions are different than the wokes. I don’t believe in DEI.