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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Candace Owens out at the Daily Wire

This is less than 24-hours after the ADL publicly attacked Candace, and Mediaite reports:

Owens’s departure comes after months of tensions between her and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro over her promotion of various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Her promotion of so-called antisemitic conspiracy theories has definitely been noticed on DR Twitter, and she's been engaged in public spats with a certain Rabbi Schmuley. So this isn't really a surprise, but it's a significant development that DR critiques of Zionism are making their way into Right-wing mainstream, as other rhetoric has in the past 10 years.

Candace is breaking from the Zionist right at the same time Tucker Carlson has turned heel on US support for Israel, and even Alex Jones who is notorious for his "the Chicoms are behind everything I love Judeo-Christian values" schtick - his willingness to humor every conspiracy theory to his audience except ZOG - yesterday accused Israel of Genocide.

I have a lot of criticisms of Nick Fuentes and his movement, but there has to be credit where it's due. I remember the Bush years, support for Israel was simply axiomatic and it was unthinkable for anybody to believe any differently. That has changed, and Zionism now faces a pincer movement of critique from both the Left and the Right, with the Right-wing critique of Zionism growing in influence among younger audiences.

The right's support of Israel never made sense. Israel has created a perpetual refugee crisis on Europe's border, it costs a fortune in foreign aid, and it is a PR nightmare. Meanwhile, ADL, AIPAC and every mainstream jewish groups work against the interests of social conservatism in western countries. Simping for the Israel lobby while the ADL wants to ban conservatives off Twitter is a one way relationship. Israel is oppressing Christians and has sponsored terrorist groups in Syria. Israel works to destabilize the region when the rest of us benefit from it being stable.

There is absolutely no reason to burn political capital defending some of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in recent history in the middle east. Israel can't really provide any tangible benefit to social conservatives in the west. Especially not when Ben Gvir who is Minister of National Security of Israel wants to relocate large numbers of Palestinians in the west.

Had Israel supported similar politics in the west as they promote in their own country, it could have worked. But "nationalism for me, open borders for thee", will upset the left in the west that doesn't like nationalism as well as the right in the west that doesn't like the "open borders for thee"-part.

Had Israel supported similar politics in the west as they promote in their own country, it could have worked.

You're doing what SS and his crew do, and assuming that Jews are all part of an orchestrated ZOG movement. Jews in the West are generally sympathetic to Israel, obviously, but Israeli political concerns are very different from Western ones - Israelis generally are not trying to get Western countries to open their borders. They don't care. They actually do have specifically Israeli concerns, they aren't seeing everything through the same lens of "Jewishness" that people who hate Jews do.

As for why conservatives have traditionally supported Israel, it's pretty simple: even if most conservative Christians don't particularly like Jews, they dislike Muslims even more, and geopolitically, a local boot to put on Arabs in the region is very useful.

And that's without addressing the Christians who genuinely do believe that support for Israel is Biblically mandated.

and geopolitically, a local boot to put on Arabs in the region is very useful.

And to have a competent ally in the area against Iran, who's probably the US' most dangerous enemy these days after China, Russia, and maybe North Korea.

Israel's the worst ally the US could possibly have, their competence is irrelevant.

Consider the invasion of Iraq. You might naively think that Israel would be really useful, sending troops to help the Coalition in their mutual goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's regime? No, of course not. They didn't lift a finger to help the US. Of course they sent some false intelligence to suggest Iraq actually had nuclear weapons, of course they flexed their influence to encourage the invasion. They just didn't do any fighting.

Why? Because the Arabs hate Israel and it would've let Saddam reframe the war as yet another Arab-Israel war. He tried doing that in 1991 by throwing some Scuds at Israel. Israel's presence would've made things worse for America.

There's no convincing reason to think that Israel would help against Iran, based on past practice. If they did help it would probably be net-negative in creating more opponents for US forces. Dumping Israel would make it much easier to work with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey, Egypt...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

Israel had helped a lot there as one example. But ultimately I don't know and cannot know how useful Israel is, given how much secrecy is involved in military matters. But I have some amount of faith in the US military establishment being able to gauge how useful Israel is, and inform administrations of that.