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Notes -
Vibe shift?
I lost count of how many anglos, jews and anglo-jews on the center-left/left that, in the past days, had a "Conversion on the road to Damascus", openly admitting on Twitter that their views on the Left were utterly wrong and that they had no idea their side was so full of apologists for jew-slaughter. And I am talking about big figures, including some of the loudest neoliberal mouths, admitting grudgingly that the Right-wing view of academia had some points.
Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?
In my view, there are still some enormous obstacle to shift like these, primarly the enormous influence of academia on journalism and èlites policy and opinion-making in the west, and the machine of the anglo-left working in case of another menace from Trump, that can rapidly rebuild the ranks. Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe, where it is true that there are way less Jews, but the Right has way more influence between young and important people. By tasting the environment, almost everyone apart from the aggravated minorities and feminists groups are very, very angry about all of this.
I do not know if it is ok to post this here or in the Gaza thread, if it is wrong I will move it there.
I'm not seeing a real vibe shift here. The pro-establishment left in the US has always been pro-Israel (anti-Israel views are the only left-wing views people were ever cancelled for in establishment institutions, with Steven Salaita the most famous example) and the anti-establishment left has always been anti-Israel, and often rabidly so. The pro-establishment left have always despised the anti-establishment left with the same level of vitriol and for the same reasons that the pro-establishment right despise the MAGA right, and anti-anti-Semitism is used to enforce the left edge of the Overton window in the same way that anti-racism is used to enforce the right edge. It's just that they kept quiet about it for a while after the George Floyd asphyxiation because they were afraid of being called racist.
"The left are cheering Hamas" on your social media dashboard because the people you follow are signal-boosting a small number of idiots, some of whom are tenured academics or leaders of usual-suspects lefty student groups, but most of whom are randos. This is the usual suspects coming out in force - anyone on the pro-establishment left who are surprised by this is an idiot, and I suspect most of the pro-establishment lefties claiming to be surprised are faking it.
The number of Democratic office-holders, university administrators at Dean/Deputy Provost level or above, NYT journalists, or woke corporate executives who are saying these things is negligible. I'm sure that Jewish-American elites don't like the fact that the Squad have called for de-escalation and said that the US should not fund Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but this is the kind of milquetoast stuff that anti-establishment figures who are testing the edges of the Overton window say, not "The left are cheering Hamas". Rashida Tlaib has gone further than the rest because she is Palestinian - again the fact that she is rabidly anti-Israel should surprise zero people who are paying attention.
In Western Europe, normies ran out of sympathy for both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict decades ago. Everyone except the usual suspects on the anti-establishment left is lining up to condemn the latest round of Hamas atrocities because they are unusually barbaric, but in a month's time we are going to be back to "Hundreds dead in Middle East. Bear shat in woods. Football scores to follow." I can't tell Arabs from Europeans in the dark, but the pro-Hamas protest outside the Israeli embassy in London looked like it was majority south Asian Muslim.
There's a somewhat stronger pro-Israel reaction on Finnish social media than I've seen previously, but that might be because the Ukraine war has made it easier to associate Russia with all manner of "anti-West" political forces, including Palestinian militants in this case.
I am definitely seeing pro-Ukrainian forces trying to spin up a Russia/Iran/NK/Hamas axis of evil meme. This has the advantage relative to the Bush-era axis of evil that the countries in the alleged axis are actually allies, whereas the Bush-era axis of evil, while evil, was about as far from being an axis as it is possible to be.
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