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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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with the Right-wing critique of Zionism growing in influence among younger audiences.

Are we sure about that? Certainly the left-wing critique of Zionism is growing in influence, but I'm not sure about the right-wing critique (to say nothing of explicitly DR ideas). I get the impression that when young people are critical of Israel, it's overwhelmingly for progressive reasons: Jews are white colonialists who are oppressing the non-white Palestinians, and opposing Israel is part of the broader struggle for racial justice. Right-wing inflected critiques of Israel seem to me to be as fringe as ever in the mainstream conscience. But I do agree with your general point that even "normie" right-wing media has become edgier recently; Fox News is a lot more willing to say "white" than they were a few years ago.

https://forward.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/part-1-The-Social-Costs-of-Being-Jewish-and-Supporting-Israel-on-Campus-What-a-Before-After-Survey-Can-Tell-Us.pdf

Interesting polling shows weirdly, conservatives are most likely to think Israeli civilians are valid Hamas targets, conservative students are more likely to avoid Jews because of Israel, conservatives are less likely to see anti-semitism as a problem in American society. Now, there's some interesting stuff about how Jewish students feel on campus, but the idea it's progressives are the leading edge of general Jewish hatred.

The red tribe normies are a lot less axiomatically Zionist than they were in, say, 2010. Now a lot of that is ‘why should we have to pay the bill for the war? They can pay market rate and create American jobs’ in a post-Ukraine context, there’s very little ‘poor oppressed Palestinians’, but outright criticism of Israel is Socially acceptable now.

Yes, and the right wing critique that appears to be most shared is just the left wing critique copied by thirdworldist rightists like Fuentes and Woods, and to some extent by Owens, it’s not a distinctly reactionary critique. Rightists forget that the left zoomer response to “‘open borders for thee but not for me’ is unfair!” isn’t going to be to advocate for closed borders in the West, its just going to be to advocate for more leftist policies on the border, immigration and identity in Israel, which of course Soros and others already do. I suppose if one’s primary motivation is just owning the juice that might be enough, unless their view of Western leftists (who they typically argue are dominated by Jewish influence anyway) is so delusional that they think they’re going to abandon all their other principles to go full fash because they don’t like zionism.