The world-historical question at the moment is whether American Jews—who are, arguably, the single most influential politically mobilizable group in the modern globe—will figure out that Woke anti-white hatred is inherently anti-Semitic. Or will they assume the solution must be tripling down yet again on promoting racist anti-white hatred as the only way to unify the Coalition of the Fringes?
I could see it going either way.
On the optimistic side, here is an editorial in the Jewish opinion journal The Tablet
Stop Being Shocked—Once and for All
The ideas, institutions, and people that caused the collapse
BY THE EDITORS
OCTOBER 12, 2023None of the horrors you are witnessing this week—not the massacre of Jews, not the betrayal by public figures and popular activist movements, not the moral insanity of our universities and cultural spaces—happened by accident.
For the past decade, an elite consensus began to emerge. It was marketed as a worldview of optimism, of progress and justice brought about by the dawning of correct morality. It favored using the power of digital monopolies and elite institutions to reeducate Americans in new and better ways of thinking, writing, speaking, and being.
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID-19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
As journalists, the increasingly strident calls for uniformity of opinion and perception struck us, from the very beginning, as dangerous and wrong. We believe in empirical investigation and analysis and in subjective personal observation and experience, not in party-line obedience to an instant consensus being formed and managed God knows how or where. As Jews, we had concerns, too. For as long as we’ve been in this country, Jews have relied on and sung the praises of stalwart American institutions like the federal government, universities, media organizations, corporations, labor unions, and more. We watched in horror as each of these institutions not only fell prey to the new mania, but also seemed increasingly unable to do the jobs they had historically been tasked with doing.
We were also alarmed that … no one else was alarmed, especially among communal leaders. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union, once the protectors of the vulnerable, became handmaidens of power. Think tanks and politicians and journalists gave cover for policies that seemed obviously destined to set the world on fire. Internet monopolies merged with the federal government to produce a censorship and surveillance apparatus that would ensure that only the voices of some could be heard.
Tablet didn’t wade into the culture wars for its own sake. We did it because we feared we saw an emerging world in which the broad-minded American civic ideals and institutions that had kept us safe for so long were falling apart, which was bad for the country—and also meant that Jews would once again be seen as enemies to be eliminated.
I don’t watch much TV, but I was riveted to the set for hours on the evening of May 30, 2020 by helicopter newscam footage of the Mostly Peaceful Protest in West Hollywood turning into a pogrom on Fairfax and Melrose, the heart of Jewish America west of the Hudson River.
But what was truly fascinating was how fast this mob action was memoryholed because it didn’t fit The Narrative.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Intellectuals had explained over and over who the real bad guys were: the lower-middle-class cop whites way out in Simi Valley. But, it turned out, they were a really long, boring drive away, so George Floyd’s mourners attacked Jewish businesses in nearby West Hollywood instead. The distinction between white gentiles and white Jews that had appeared obvious to intellectuals turned out not to matter to nonwhite looters at all.
But that would be embarrassing to admit. It was more convenient to simply quadruple down on the pre-established Narrative that Black Lives Matter were the Good Guys and simply not admit to the West Hollywood pogrom ever happening. After all, it didn’t take place until about a million o’clock in the morning Eastern Daylight Time, so it’s not like important people even noticed it.
But, in the subsequent “racial reckoning,” it turned out (admittedly, “turned out” is a phrase I use over and over in my descriptions of why the current decade turned out less satisfactory than the people driving events had hoped) that the demands for increased DIE quotas were less for boring Simi Valley jobs like cop and fireman, which had already been affirmative actionized a half century ago, than for the really good West Hollywood jobs like film director.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.
But it did.
When you think about it, it’s hard to see how it could have turned out different because the federal government has rules that very definitely mandate that almost all Jews are white. And if The Establishment is out to reduce the number of whites in the really good jobs, that means Jews are going to pay the price because they have long been disproportionately represented in the really good jobs.
Sure, a lot of elites didn’t really grasp that fact because it would be anti-Semitic to notice that Jews made up a disproportionate fraction of white elites. But being ignorant of the obvious doesn’t mean your obliviousness isn’t ignorant.
