Anti-Semitism Has Always Been A Predominantly Right Wing Phenomenom--It Still Is (Despite Netanyahu)

No One Can Be Progressive And Anti-Semitic At The Same Time

My friend Adam, who has a tendency to pay attention to conspiracy theories, Fox News, Hate Talk radio and QAnon, seems obsessed with anti-Semitism from the left. He’s Jewish and very concerned for the safety of his family. (So he’s buying a house in a wooded area where Tennessee and North Carolina meet. No lefties there.) He wrote this to me yesterday: “The massive increase in antisemitism dwarfs what it was in the past. I can promise you it's 99% coming from the left. It's vogue and trendy to hate Jews and Israel now. Idiots are marching for Palestine and against Israel and hating Jews along with it. If anything, those on the right might be less antisemitic right now, the same phenomenon occurred after 9/11. The Nazis marching [in Madison Saturday] was like 10 Nazis, have you seen how big and violent the anti Israeli protests are? There are videos of Jews being attacked in those riots. I agree antisemitism might have even stronger before on the right, now it's stronger on the left for sure.”

Can one hate what Israel is doing to civilians in Gaza on the same level as one hates what Hamas did on October 7, and not have an anti-Semitic bone in one's body? Can you detest Netanyahu-- as over half of Israelis do-- and not be anti-Semitic? Can you oppose AIPAC and not be anti-Semitic? Of course, 100%.

I suggested he read a serious academic study by Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden from the Political Research Quarterly, Antisemitic Attitudes Across The Ideological Spectrum, which can— at least in theory— disabuse him of all the nonsense along these lines churning around in his head. “Concern about antisemitism in the U.S. has grown following recent rises in deadly assaults, vandalism, and harassment. Public accounts of antisemitism have focused on both the ideological right and left, suggesting a ‘horseshoe theory’ in which the far left and the far right hold a common set of anti-Jewish prejudicial attitudes that distinguish them from the ideological center… We oversampled young adults because unlike other forms of prejudice that are more common among older people, antisemitism is theorized to be more common among younger people. Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right… Right-wing antisemitism in the U.S. has driven incidents like synagogue shootings in 2018 and 2019. White nationalists were seen in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and in the 2021 siege on the Capitol they were seen with pro-Holocaust paraphernalia. Violent right-wing antisemitism has also been resurgent in Europe. Violent antisemitic attacks have also come from the ideological left. For instance, during a period of warfare between Israel and Palestine in the spring of 2021, pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. violently attacked Jewish American diners and pedestrians in Los Angeles and New York, shouting messages including “Fuck Jews.”… Anti-Israel activism on college campuses has been the focus of several accounts of left-wing antisemitism. While we find evidence consistent with theories of both left-wing and right-wing antisemitism, the results show that antisemitic attitudes are far more prevalent on the right, particularly on the young far right… Right-wing antisemitism and left-wing antisemitism are not identical. In the far-right mentality, Jews are viewed as people pretending to be white—‘a faux-white race that has tainted America’— or disloyal white people— ‘the ultimate betrayers of the white race.’ American Jews are distinctive in that they are high in socioeconomic status and mostly identify as white, but unlike others with those attributes, they are liberal in their social views and supportive of racial equality and immigration.”

In the end, they found that “overt antisemitic attitudes are rare on the left but common on the right, particularly among young adults on the right. Even when primed with information that most U.S. Jews have favorable views toward Israel— a country disfavored by the ideological left— respondents on the left rarely support statements such as that Jews have too much power or should be boycotted. We find evidence on the left of anti-Jewish double standards compared to Muslim Americans and Indian Americans. The right exhibits strong anti-Muslim double standards. However, in these measures too, the anti-Jewish attitudes on the left are small in magnitude compared to the anti-Jewish attitudes on the right. The right does not have an anti-Jewish double standard, but they nevertheless attribute to Jews substantially more responsibility and culpability for Israel than the left does. Indeed, young far right identifiers are seven times more likely to believe that Jewish Americans should be held to account for Israel compared to young far-left identifiers.”

In his essay yesterday, Channels Of Rage, A.R. Moxon wrote that “all human beings’ lives carry an immeasurable and indestructible worth, but human societies seem increasingly captured by a lie that insists that human beings must be regularly measured to determine if their life is still deserved… [T]he great lie— that life must be earned— makes products of our lives. It consumes humans for the benefit of wealth, enforces a false insecurity upon us all, divides us into those who deserve life and those who don’t. In this way, the great lie forms the basis of supremacy— the idea that some people matter and the rest do not— which makes our human systems vulnerable to takeover by the most malicious types of supremacist; for example, the white conservative evangelical Christian Nationalists who are now broadcasting their clear intent to establish a fascist authoritarian rule in my country, the United States. And I believe the appropriate response to all of this corruption is anger, which I’m defining very specifically as something that is observant, clearly seeing the lie as a lie, and the lie’s corruptions as corrupt; as something that is restorative, seeking not to exchange wrong for wrong, but to exchange great supremacist lies with greater truths about intrinsic human value; and as something that is expectant, which believes that change is not only possible but necessary, and filled with a great conviction that it is the responsibility of all of us to see this restorative change come about. This appropriate thing I’m calling anger is, I believe, the thing that demolishes supremacist (that is, corrupt and abusive) systems.”

He was reminded of "how, in 2017, Nazis invaded and occupied an American city called Charlottesville, where they chanted 'Jews will not replace us.' This is a reference to a vile myth called Replacement Theory, a grotesque lie which insists that the world is run by a cabal of Jewish people, and it forms the foundation for the alternate reality that white supremacy advances, into which American conservatives are increasingly fleeing. Now it just so happens that here in actual reality, Jewish people are not only not running the world, but are actually one of the most traditionally and systematically threatened and marginalized and brutalized groups of human beings to be found. Nazis, like any supremacists, have never been known for their adherence to reality, so their break from it here should perhaps not be surprising, but it really is extraordinary the extent to which the Nazi ideology manages to posit the most threatened people, who Nazis themselves intend the greatest harm, as the greatest threat to them."

The vile replacement myth insists that this cabal of Jewish people running the world are maliciously replacing white people with people who are not white, which is why it is called Replacement Theory. This myth is vile not only because it is racist, but also because it is murderous, having been used to justify violence and mass murder against Jewish people for centuries. This includes the Shoah, when over six million Jewish people (and millions of others whose existences were deemed to have “gone way too far”) were murdered by other human beings deliberately doing monstrous things. These human beings entered into an aggrieved supremacist spirit, created a mechanized bureaucratic death machine, and then fed it Replacement Theory and other vile supremacist lies in order to make genocide a normal thing to do.

The replacement myth is also used to justify murder against many other types of people not deemed white people, because the vile replacement myth converts the very existence of other people into an existential threat against white people, a threat which justifies any sort of violence white people wish to enact. (“White people” is another myth that is popular with Nazis and other supremacists, but let’s move on for now.)

…People who believe the vile replacement myth have a tendency to murder people. And those who promote and publish the vile replacement myth inspire people to murder people, and then cast the victims of the murder as the cause of the murder, all of which is what makes it so vile. And Replacement Theory is very popular these days, in increasingly mainstream places.

Let’s take Elon Musk, since apparently we must. This week Musk— who has become one of the world’s richest people mostly by demolishing things of value, making claims he can’t back up, and not paying his bills— took to his social media platform to reply “you have said the actual truth” to somebody espousing exactly the vile replacement myth. It’s the latest incident in Musk’s ongoing promotion of white supremacist and neo Nazi ideology, and probably the most unignorable one, or at least it isn’t being ignored by advertisers, who have pulled their ads. Musk may be confused by this, since they didn’t pull their ads after many other horrible things he’s said recently, but he may also be counting on them coming back, as they have after other times he’s said horrible things.

And the replacement myth is being used all over the place right now by leading media figures and influencers on the right, people like Charlie Kirk, people like Tucker Carlson, and many others who have spent their energies and careers targeting gay people and Black people and immigrants and trans people and others for harm and marginalization and exclusion.

…There was a fellow who not too long ago sang a song attempting to harness some appropriate anger about corruption and abuse in our government. The fellow’s name was Oliver Anthony, and it still is. The name of his song is “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and it made Anthony a big deal for a couple of weeks.

Some disambiguation is probably in order. “North of Richmond” is where Washington DC is located. DC is my nation’s capital, and it is indeed where mostly rich mostly men do indeed often gather to carve up the civic turkey and give almost all of it to themselves and their already wealthy friends. It’s not the only thing that happens in my nation’s capital, but but howdy it sure does happen. It’s also where Christian Nationalists and likeminded fascist religious creeps have collected a lot of their power together into a big sweaty ball, in order to control the lives and bodies of everyone else, and it’s where they purchase judges in order to make decisions that made it easier and easier for greedy wealth and fascist Christian religious creeps to consume us and millions of our fellow human beings.

I agree with Anthony that it’s appropriate to be angry at the Rich Men North of Richmond.

On the subject of these Rich Men, Anthony came in hot. Check out verse one:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day Overtime hours for bullshit pay So I can sit out here and waste my life away Drag back home and drown my troubles away

Hot damn, son! And listen to the chorus!

Livin' in the new world With an old soul These rich men north of Richmond Lord knows they all just wanna have total control Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do And they don't think you know, but I know that you do 'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end 'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

Yow! That’s some anger all right.

A couple weeks after Oliver Anthony put out the song, he found himself downright consterned because as it turns out, many Rich Men North of Richmond absolutely loved his song, and praised it at the first Republican Presidential Debate and other right-wing outlets as a proof-text that they should be able to go on doing what they were already doing.

So why did the Rich Men love Anthony’s song?

For a hint, let’s check out Verse 2:

I wish politicians would look out for miners And not just minors on an island somewhere Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat And the obese milkin' welfare Well, God, if you're five-foot-three and you're three-hundred pounds Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds

So now we have Anthony’s diagnosis of the real problem: foreign aid and fat people. People who haven’t earned life, taking scant resources from others who have earned life. And other people, Rich Men who have earned life (they are rich, after all), are helping people who don’t deserve it, specifically for malicious purpose of hurting those who do. You might say they are taking what should be coming to regular folk, and replacing the recipient with somebody whose existence goes a little too far.

In the world of Anthony’s song, you can’t take care of both domestic miners and foreign minors. You can’t have social services for people who are food insecure and also those who are only in danger of falling into food insecurity, or at the very least you have to cut the fat people out until they starve down to skinny. Somebody has to starve in Anthony’s world; the issue is it’s the wrong people starving, because of Rich Men. Corollary: there are right people to starve, and Rich Men should be seeing to it that those people starve instead.

And I could be wrong, but I feel as if “foreigners and fat people” might be a bit of a synecdoche, standing in for other broader categories of undeserving people— people whose existence represents an unacceptable threat, because they are taking the resources from those who are more deserving— replacing their status as those who have deserved life.

Thus the consternation of Oliver Anthony, a man who can’t understand why the Rich Men he is so angry at found his message so resonant, unable to see that it is because he, like so many others, directed his appropriate anger into inappropriate channels of rage, carved by the same Rich Men he thinks he’s opposing.

I dare hope Anthony will figure out where he went wrong. I see it as a promising sign that he is discomfited by the company he suddenly found himself keeping. People who find themselves in uncomfortable places come to new and deeper understanding all the time, especially if they are near the truth and seeking it. Maybe that will be his journey.

Or maybe he’ll keep trolling through our national budget for inappropriate expenditure, searching for people who haven’t deserved life and shouldn’t get life anymore, working with the system that’s consuming his family and friends, pointing out apt new victims for it to consume. Maybe he’ll learn there is money to be made announcing that certain people’s existence just goes too far. Angry people go that way all the time, too.

It turns out that the Rich Men North of Richmond are just fine with you hating them, as long as you’re aligned with them on the notion that resources are limited, and that it is a moral calamity if any of the scant resources available go to anybody who might be undeserving. As long as you believe that, you’re still operating inside the great lie, which means you’re still aligned with them no matter how angry you get. You’ve taken your appropriate anger and put it into channels that will never threaten them, and they know that as long as they promise to steal life from the wrong sorts of people, you’ll probably never notice that they never get around to giving any of it to you. And—knock wood—you might one day become so enraged you get one of those guns that the Rich Men make sure are as easily accessible as possible and go off to solve the problem of other people in ways that will help make other people a bit more frightened and marginalized than they already were, which pretty clearly suits the Rich Men just fine.

Oliver Anthony thought he was singing “Rich Men North of Richmond,” but the Rich Men themselves took a listen and they heard that he was actually singing “Foreigners and Fat People,” and brother, that? That is their jam.

It’s known by many names. Again, I’m calling it rage.

Rage is what happens when anger surrenders to hate.

Like the thing I’m calling anger, rage has observable qualities.

Rage is misdirected. With a bully’s instinct, rage focuses upon the least powerful people, those most left behind and marginalized, those already seen as less deserving, and, on the basis of the pittance of life these marginalized people are still allowed to receive, casts them as undeserving beneficiaries of a vast subterranean conspiracy against more deserving parties. For example, we are now in at least decade five of people believing that the most powerful people in our politics are leftist college students (who are treated with nothing but contempt by both major political parties), and homeless mothers on welfare (whose crime is somehow simultaneously having too many babies and too many abortions). And of course, the vile replacement myth is still passed around in popularized public currency, telling people that the most historically threatened and brutalized people groups are the most powerful and the biggest threat.

Rage is unproductive and unimaginative. It can’t see outside of the rubric of lack into a rubric of plenty. It can’t imagine that there could ever possibly be enough to go around, and so rather than trying to replace a great and corrupt lie with greater truths about intrinsic human worth, it demands that we stay in the lie and manage it through increasingly strict questions of worth. We can’t spend money on schools when our veterans go homeless, but when it’s time to fund veteran programs, we balk, because how can we spend money on veterans when our infrastructure is crumbling? And, when it is time to invest in infrastructure, it’s wait, an infrastructure bill? Who is going to pay for that?

Rage is punitive. It has no answer to abuse but more abuse. It has no answer to violence but violence. It looks at a system that exists to consume people, notes that the system is consuming them, and then demands an even more predatory system, one that consumes somebody else first and worst. Rage’s response to harm is to demand more harm. The only idea it can muster to being punished is to manage punishment differently and more brutally. Its response to a manufactured lack is to demand more lack.

Rage is cowardly. Rage will never threaten abusive and corrupt supremacy, because rage agrees with abuse’s assumptions, and helps an abusive system select its next victims.

Rage accelerates abuse.

Rage makes a manufactured scarcity even more scarce.

Most insidious of all, rage allows those who are abused to participate in the abuse.

Consider again the vile replacement myth: a conspiracy that decides to cast the blame for wealth disparity and corrupted systems of power not on an ideology that seeks wealth accumulation for its own sake, but on the most historically marginalized and brutalized people groups— on Jewish people, and through them as proxies upon brown and Black people, and Muslim people, and immigrants, and eventually fat people, or disabled people, or sick people, or trans people, or gay people, or anybody else who might make a convenient target for rage.

When you come to the vile and antisemitic replacement myth, espoused by elderly supremacists like Donald Trump and by Nazi-sympathizing evangelical Christians like John Hagee and by spit-shined aging members of the Conservative Republican Youth like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, you have reached the pulsing murderous heart of rage, a centerpiece of all bigotries, a spirit that reacts to a world of abuse by demanding a world of even more abuse, which will allow infinite hurt to come to itself if only it can assure itself that others are being hurt more badly still, which takes a righteous anger and replaces it with a murderous and hateful rage.

But it doesn’t end there. If only it did.

“Rich Men North of Richmond” wasn’t just popular with the Rich Men. Like the vile replacement myth, it was a massive hit.

Channels of rage are popular. They are very popular.

A whole lot of people today hold worldviews that appear to boil down to “that’s why a lot of people had to die today, and a lot more are going to have to die tomorrow.”

Rage suffers abuse and then decides, not that abuse should end, but that the existence of somebody else, who is also already suffering from similar abuse, represents an unacceptable existential threat, one that deserves violence.

And then it defends its violence as not only necessary but good, casting those who imagine some response other than violence as hateful and dangerous.

This is the sound of American anti-Semitism. Click the image to hear Republican icon Nick Fuentes: