I am familiar with the author's name, but this may be the first of his works that I've read. And a single statement put me off consideration of him as a serious political analyst:
"The trend on the majority of contentious issues is towards polarization, with Republican administrations and politicians moving right on most things and Democrats going in the opposite direction."
Considering Rs, with the possible exception of abortion (the Rs remaining in the position they have always occupied on the matter), the issues in which they have NOT moved leftward are few and far between. Rs have, arguably, surrendered ground on nearly every major issue. The only reason Rs and Ds have drifted further apart is because the Ds have moved leftward at a far higher rate than the Rs.
This conceit that Rs and Ds are mutually moving apart is a fabrication to maintain the idea that both are responsible for making our divisions worse.
Considering a bellwether issue as a single example, if one listens to Bill Clinton's second inaugural address where he talks of immigration and border security, he sounds like Trump. Even if insincere, Clinton understood where mainstream America was on the issue, and was giving lip service to that extensive constituency. Since then, Rs have done little to oppose the Ds' purposeful erosion of our borders and immigration enforcement (their inaction not being indicative of "moving to the right"). When someone (like Trump) suggests we actually enforce our laws, he's labeled an "extremist," because naturally a suggestion that laws be enforced looks extreme compared to a policy that refuses to do so. This is commonly cited as an example "how conservatives and liberals are tearing the country apart", but the country can be torn apart by one side pulling against the middle, and the other side just standing firm. Although this is not exactly what is happening (Rs are slowly sliding leftward) the speed at which Ds are moving leftward is doing the tearing. It might be argued that both sides are doing the tearing because, although moving in the same direction, they aren't moving at the same speed. But even this view would debunk the idea that "Republicans have become more conservative."
The author's sort of analysis may fly with Millennials (having limited perspective), but us Boomers have been around long enough to know that it's simply untrue. We know that Rs are LESS conservative than they were 40 or 50 years ago. And even the "extremism" of MAGA* generally insists on nothing more than enforcement of existing laws, lower taxes, and energy independence. There is probably nothing in the MAGA platform that represents anything more conservative than the policies of Ds in the 1960s.
Another possible example of "rightward movement" among conservatives (if that's what MAGA is), is non-interventionism, usually called "isolationism" in order to make it appear more extreme. But being anti-war had been for decades a D position, so non-interventionism is not strictly "more conservative," even if more aligned with early American political thought.
*I'm referencing MAGA because the movement's critics and the media often cite its "extreme right-wing views." Obviously, I believe this characterization is inaccurate, but still MAGA's agenda serves as an example of what is commonly blamed for "moving the country to the right", when "returning to the right" is more accurate, but still a "right" less conservative than it was a few decades ago.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on policies alone. Rs are notoriously not policy-based and stick to vibes. They resemble progressives in this regard. If you look at metrics like the following:
1) Adoption of fringe conspiracy theories
2) Sympathy towards white nationalist rhetoric
3) Acceptance of anti-democratic politics and dictators
You end up with a clear indication that right-wingers have indeed moved right.
First, if the author addressed my concerns, then he would have disagreed with his own statement that both the Left and the Right are both moving in different directions. (Tacitly making conservatives at least partially responsible for our divide, a conclusion I reject.)
"(B)oth parties have moved to the right between 1968 and 2016." But this confuses practical, and sometimes purely political, policy decisions over time, and is not a good stand-in for actual conservative, or even liberal, thought. When today's conservatives have become "more conservative," they are usually moving back to what was mainstream thought only a few decades ago, not adopting new, or even radical, political thought. (It may seem "radical" only in comparison with modern "liberal" politics, which have never before been considered mainstream, when nearly all conservative political thought was, at one time or another, mainstream thought. Liberal politics grew out of a rebellion against mainstream thought, so it's no surprise that it represents a deviation from it.)
"Authoritarian" is a form of governance that describes the government's relationship with the people, not with how the government is run internally. Therefore, slashing government agencies is not "authoritarian." The chief executive has certain authority over the government, as granted by the Constitution. An exercise of that authority can't be "authoritarian," no matter how unpopular it may be. A president is elected to exercise his lawful authority as he sees fit. Although "book banning" would be authoritarian, making a policy decision to keep certain books out of public schools is not "book banning," it is simply a disagreement between which books should be, and which books should not be, made available to students by the state. (True banning would remove the books from circulation entirely. They would therefore be unavailable to any students, including those in private schools, as well as to anyone else. You have seriously mischaracterized conservative thought on what books should be available to students in public schools, which is not "authoritarian." It's simply a disagreement over policy, that the Left mischaracterizes in order to create outrage over something - book banning - that isn't actually happening.)
Funny that "contesting election results" wasn't anti-democratic when Al Gore did it (nor when Hillary Clinton complained that the 2016 election had been stolen from her). Election integrity laws that permit examination of election records exist for two reasons. First, to discover if irregularities in an election might be cause to reject the results, and second, to demonstrate to the public that an election was, in fact, fair and secure. If you don't believe Trump's claims the election was stolen, you would also have to believe that a forensic examination of any election would prove the election fair and secure. Then why is it that no State and no court has authorized a forensic examination of any election for the purpose of demonstrating this? It should be obvious that they fear it would do the opposite. (Why are Republican secretaries of state resisting such examinations? Wouldn't they want to expose cheating against Trump? Presuming that they're Trump supporters, doing so would still pin considerable blame on themselves, for having been responsible for election security and having failed miserably enough to permit cheating on a scale large enough to tilt a national election.)
Blaming Trump for not accomplishing certain, cherry-picked, problems is an indictment of the previous administration as well, which had two terms to address the same problems, and failed to do so. It's particularly rich coming from people who "resisted" everything Trump tried to do with lawfare and dirty tricks (like "Russia, Russia, Russia"). If liberals actually believed Trump was not the right man for the job, they would have allowed him to fail. But that's not what "the resistance" was about. The purpose of the resistance was to prevent Trump from from being successful, the welfare of the country be damned. You can't, or at least you shouldn't, blame a person for failing when his opponents did everything possible to cause his failure. And yet, Trump was far from being a failure, having done much for which he receives insufficient credit. Next time, just let him fail by himself. That is, if you're not afraid that the success he might have will ruin the Democrat party, and discredit RINOs and other never-Trumpers.
“It is pretty relevant that in practical economic policies, the Clinton and Obama administrations might have been to the left of Nixon, isn't it?”
Now maybe you have a typo and meant to say “right of Nixon” above. But either way, your statement is wrong (well, except to the extent that you inserted the qualifier “might”, which technically renders anything after it practically meaningless).
There is little doubt that Clinton’s economic policies were to the right of Nixon’s. Part of it, of course, because of Newt and the Contract with America GOP takeover of the House.
Obama’s economic policies were FAR to the left of Clinton’s. You can argue in a couple ways they were right of Nixon’s (wage and price controls were a particularly horrendous idea, and obscene marginal tax rates weren’t fixed until Reagan) , but on others - most notably, ObamaCare, and literally stealing GM from bondholders and giving a big slug to the unions - they were clearly worse.
"Look, the fact is that the Left and the Right are moving in different directions ever since the election of Obama (the Republican voters more to the Right under Obama and this manifested in Trump, and Democrats more to the Left under Trump). The author is right about this."
I'll reply to this, as you seem to have missed nearly all of the points I was making, and this will serve as an example.
The American people did not move to the right during the Obama administration. Conservatism in America has always been mainstream thought. Modern liberalism is an intentional deviation from/rejection of conservatism, that has deviated more and more leftward over time. American populism, being conservative in nature, is at, best, a return to conservatism and not a new development. It has always been there, it never went away. It just fell out of majority thought, but has never before been considered "radical." For a very long time it was considered quite normal.
What happened during the Obama administration was a rejection of radical liberalism. Obama didn't cause a new movement, he pushed the envelop of liberalism too far, causing people (who mostly already had conservative ideals) to react in opposition. But the conservatism was always there.
When Hanania says conservatives are "moving to the right," he is wrong. They are just now making their voices heard, and awakening others to join them. But there is nothing new about their politics or ideals, which are still considerably less conservative than they were decades ago. (And even if it oscillates between more and less conservatism, it still is never more conservative than mainstream conservatism ever was. Modern, radical liberalism is to blame for this, as every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But the conservative reaction did not push Americans into new conservative territory, at worst if pushed them BACK into old conservative territory. However I believe even this is an illusion. Many Americans have always been mainstream conservatives, but they hadn't yet been poked in the eye. Obama seems to have gone out of his way to do just that, and the reaction he provoked shouldn't be surprising. The current conservative movement is backlash that would probably have been avoided had Obama not been so precipitate in his radicalism. It was a tactical mistake that produced MAGA. Had he been less abrasive, Hillary Clinton would have been the next president. But then again, disruption of the nation's fabric may have been his objective. If it was, he was quite successful.)
As I pointed out in my OP, Bill Clinton spoke in favor of controlling the southern border. There was a time when liberals believed in the enforcement of the law and the punishment of criminals. They believed if they disagreed with the law, the proper thing to do was to change it, not ignore it. These were beliefs held by both the right and the left - core beliefs in the system and traditions, and working within them to effectuate change. The right has never departed from these beliefs, even as their politics and ideals have become more liberal. But the left's ideals have not only become radically different from what they were a few decades ago, their tactics and techniques are also radically different. I give you the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot, effectuated, incredibly, by a belief that due process of law is an unnecessary component to determining whether or not the man is guilty of the crime of insurrection (for which he has never been charged).
You might not care, this being 6 months later, but as I just reread this piece and saw your comments, I’d like to weigh in. I’m about 75% with you, 25% with Richard on the question of Dems and GOPers moving in opposite directions.
I fully agree with you that it is a false dichotomy to suggest that both sides are equally to blame and that both sides have moved roughly the same amount. The Ds have moved MUCH further to the left than any movement on the right.
I also basically agree with you that the midpoint of the GOP voter has not moved that much to the right (and that on a few social issues, notably gay marriage, the median has moved left). And we do agree re abortion, which is a place that’s particularly easy for the media to highlight, and which there’s little doubt that - whatever one’s views on optimal policy are - it has hurt the GOP nationally at the ballot box.
Where I agree with Richard and not your argument, however, is that the average elected GOP official *has* in fact moved right. The average R elected politician is now closer to the middle of the R voter base, where prior they were much closer to the Susan Collins / Mitt Romney wing of the party. so even though the GOP voters have not gone much (if any) rightward, elected GOP politicians now have.
And to this rightward move by GOP officials, I say “Hallelujah”! And I say this NOT as a social conservative (I’m a classical liberal / libertarian-leaning conservative) but as someone who wants to see smaller, more limited government and more freedom across the board.
And to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the average GOP elected pol is at the far right now (as the leftist media tries to suggest, and has tried to suggest ever since Reagan), nor that GOP elected officials have moved as far to the right as D elected officials have moved left, merely that GOP elected officials have moved somewhat right and are on average *finally* close to the center of GOP voters.
You took pains to avoid heretical statements by noting that Jews aren't "working together" to exercise power; said power is merely the mathematical outcome of their intelligence and political involvement.
Except they do work together, through an entire universe of explicitly pro-Jewish groups - which in recent years have drifted off-mission.
My guess? Hopes for a right-wing awakening are bunkum. Jewish billionaires will launch a speech crackdown on the one hand, and on the other they'll refocus Leftist hatred on (gentile) white men while trying to carve out an exception for Jews.
More salient IMO for the future of America's elites is how the relationship evolves between Jews and Indians.
All the loud, mainstream, centre-right Jewish voices on this issue (e.g. Bari Weiss, Pinker, and Ackman) have clearly stated all of DEI has to go, and that DEI with a Jewish exception is not possible and not what they seek. They say they share your goals. You so badly want to hate Jews you can’t even accept them when they try to be your friend and do your bidding.
Nate Silver just came out and said the same thing - he doesn't want Jews to get a power boost in the Oppression Olympics; he wants the OO to end entirely.
Nate Silver's article that RH cited basically argues that "the left" is a coalition of Marxists and classical liberals, and that coalition is breaking up. The Bill Mahers and Nate Silvers of the world are increasingly abandoning that coalition, even if they're not joining a right coalition.
Eventually the Democrats are going to realize they need the Bill Maher vote more than they need the Ibram Kendi vote.
Do they though? If you're talking votes, working-class people of any color are much more important to hold on numerical grounds, and the professional-managerial class that increasingly makes up everyone else in the Dem coalition believes in Kendiism. After all, they heard it in college and at DEI training...corporations and universities aren't places where it pays to think for yourself.
If you're talking elite influence, as Hanania originally is, I'm not sure the unwoke-liberal vote is all that important. Harvard and Penn may just be able to buy off the Bill Ackmans of the world by including Jews in DEI, and I'm not sure there are enough Quillette and Aporia fans to fill a stadium or that they're all that wealthy and influential.
My parents like Bill Maher. I don't think old Latin Americans with graduate degrees who think the left reminds them of Peron and Castro are a significant bloc.
Well it's both. On election day, whoever wins the normie swing voters wins the election. In terms of elite influence, Bob Iger over at Disney is quickly figuring out Kendiism is a money-loser at the box office, and Netflix figured out pretty quickly they need Dave Chappelle more than they need Hannah Gadsby. So the 'get woke go broke' factor is also driving a wedge between the wealthy normielibs and the Kendiists.
Then you've got the antisemitism factor Hanania discusses, you've got the economic realitycheck that is inflation, you've got crime rates making urban progressives uneasy taking public transit, and many other straws that are slowly breaking the camel's back. How many elites are trying to stop Cop City?
Leaving aside the confusion about Marxism per se, only on the internet can one draw the conclusion that the woke vanguard and the normie Dems exist in anything resembling comparable numbers.
We seem fated to unlearn this then relearn it in the next open Democratic primary.
The Left in the U.S. in the 21st century is a coalition of Marxists and Rooseveltian (FDR not TR) liberals. Classical liberals - I am one - are part of the center-right coalition.
If you buy that in contemporary politics the most relevant axis is woke vs antiwoke, then Pinker is center-right despite his other, more left-leaning beliefs.
In the US context where the Democrats are the major party supported by the left and the Republicans that of the right, he's reliably a supporter of the former even if he's willing to criticize many of them as well.
More likely is that Jews will actually change their mind about identity politics. Do you think they're going to keep supporting BLM after they supported October 7?
The goal, of course, is showing just how awful DEI is, so people will start to abandon it. That's a hard case, of course. Jews getting a carve out would be about the worst outcome, as it would allow the Marxists to pretend to have "fixed" DEI.
We work together on Israel and anti-semitism, but not anything else really. Two Jews, three opinions.
This idea that Jewish people get together to focus leftist hatred on gentile white men is just not accurate, I'm sorry. Many of us self-identify as white men.
The white nationalists are just very stupid and misinformed about this. The ADL does a few things that piss these people off--
1) They try to make strategic alliances with other anti-hate organizations (anti-black, anti-gay, etc.). I've spoken to a local organizer about this and he told me "we have to come to their rally, if we want them to come to ours".
2) They generally don't view "white men" as a persecuted minority.
3) They are supported by powerful, Jewish men.
The idiots put together (1)-(3) and conclude the organization is actively working against gentile white men. In reality, gentile white male victims are just not a category the ADL is very interested in. That is because it is very rare for people in that category to be a victim of a crime stemming from bias. White nationalists dispute this, but the data (e.g. FBI) makes it quite clear that such crimes are rare (although reporting may be inconsistent).
The entertaining thing is that left-wing critics of the ADL claim that it's nothing but a shill for Israel. That would seem to get in the way of victimizing white men, but Jews are super powerful right?
> it is very rare for people in that category to be a victim of a crime stemming from bias
They're frequently in that category, probably the most frequent of any group, but the bias against them is so strong it doesn't even get reported or recorded. For example it's an open secret that many/most large US corporations systematically discriminate against white men and have done for decades, but it's basically never prosecuted. When James Damore pointed this out the people in government who are meant to prosecute discrimination openly ganged up with those doing the discriminating. I myself have watched as the CEO at a former workplace told the entire company that the next head of sales "has to be a woman". That is a crime, but not one that will turn up in any statistic because it's so commonplace and governments like this type of crime so much.
The current leadership of the ADL is indeed horrible; it's become just another leftist takeover of something that used to be worthwhile. That leadership might just have noticed how bad DEI is... but will have to be pushed actually to do much about it.
The ADL made an explicit statement to defend anti-White terrorist Darrell Brooks from accusations of a hate crime, stating "there appears to be little evidence that Brooks actively subscribes to an overarching extremist ideology", on the basis that his anti-Semitism posted to Facebook was minor. That was in the immediate wake of the anti-Christian mass murder at the Waukesha parade, and in doing so the ADL unquestionably played an important role ensuring that it would not be charged as a hate crime. As of right now, the Wikipedia article on that attack reads as follows:
"The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks's alleged Facebook account, which contained Black nationalist and anti-white viewpoints, and his crime were exploited by white nationalists in order to push racist conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks's attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.[107][108][109] The New York Post, however, reported that Brooks had previously called for violence against white people.[110]"
You're a white nationalist supremacist conspiracy theory nutjob if you dare think Darrel Brooks perpetrated an anti-White terrorist attack, the ADL wants you to know.
Robert is spot on and your apologia for that organization is extremely disturbing for someone who claims to identify as White. The ADL is in every sense an evil organization filled with some of the most disgusting and genocidal Jewish supremacists in world history, and is dedicated to the destruction of even the most meager forms of White existence.
Bill Ackman, who has been very vocal on this, wrote a few days ago that he apologized for being so slow in coming around to understand that DEC is the problem, and implicitly, the generator of vast plumes of Jew-Hatred.
Ackman has apologized for being so slow and initially getting it wrong. He is now aware that the issue is DEI....that DEI is the generator of deep antisemitism. DEI has to go. His twitter X threads are really good...
I doubt the point is lost on Hanania but there is something amusing about his special dispensation and support for Jews who are ethnocentric (stereotype accuracy, remember?), have achieved a high IQ via selective breeding, who often undermine their host countries (they disproportionately support Leftism/Wokeism/rabid individualism for whites/mass non-white immigration), and have birthed an ethno-state that is right now killing thousands of Palestinians. In a manner of speaking, it’s like seeing Hoste/Hanania combined into one person in defense of Jewish supremacism.
How can Jews disproportionately support both Leftism and rabid individualism? Idiot. Presumably (based on your leanings) at least one of those positions would *not* undermine their host country. Idiot.
And yes, Israel is at war right now. Wars have casualties. Grow up. No one is confused for a second that you care at all about Palestinians. You just hate Jews. Maybe you should consider that your heavy bias affects your thinking across many domains.
No apology necessary. You can easily support individualism in terms of a hedonistic lifestyle and Leftism at the same time. Leftists typically reject bourgeois values but they don’t automatically reject hedonism. No, I don’t hate Jews but I do dislike Jews that simultaneously support an ethnostate for Jews but push for mass non-white immigration in the West.
Unpopular opinion: the way in which the current situation in Palestine will affect American politics is probably highly dependent on the actual facts of where the conflict goes from here, about which all sides seem to agree that it's very difficult to project an endgame.
American Jews are an anomaly. French Jews have been right wing for 30 years and overwhelmingly for 20. UK Jews also vote conservative. Israelis are right wing. Russian Jews are right wing. Only American Jews are so left wing.
I think you oversimplify quite a bit in painting all non-American Jews as right wing. Marx and most of the Bolsheviks were Jewish, etc. Maybe they are a minority or not as prevalent today, but highly visible left-wing Jews outside the US has always been a thing.
Also RE: Israel.. the European-descended Israeli Jews tend to be more left-wing while the Russian and Middle Eastern Jews tend to be more right-wing, with the latter groups nowadays outnumbering the former.
I want to add some more emphasis here, in case people think that the distinctions between Jews with different backgrounds are trivial. They are not.
Anecdotal example from my life. When my fiance and I were looking for a wedding venue, we found a Orthodox Syrian synagogue we liked. We're not Syrian. The Syrian synagogue would not host our wedding because my fiance's father is not Jewish. This is despite my fiance being fully Jewish (via her mother) and my father being an Orthodox Rabbi. We were not a "Jewish" enough couple for them because 1 of our 4 parents is non-Jewish.
This is a standard Syrian Jewish attitude. They literally don't think my fiance is even Jewish to their standard and wouldn't accept our family into their community. These are the kind of Jews that are also (surprise) not big fans of Palestinians.
I told the Jews I know not to give money to the Syrian synagogue. Then about a year later my friend had his daughter's bat mitzva at their synagogue, but I didn't say anything...
Kind of defeats Hanania's thesis. If we accept the premise of this article that Jews have amazing power and wealth throughout the West and that we want them on our side so that we may fight battles together against the radical left, it's interesting how Jews seemingly have no victories on the social or economic fronts that the right is fighting *in the countries where they are right wing*. Instead, in the UK and France, you get total industrial stagnation combined with token Islamophobia and hate speech laws that protect Jews more than any other group; aka the Republican party platform.
it's interesting how Jews seemingly have no victories on the social or economic fronts that the right is fighting *in the countries where they are right wing*
Go look up "counterfactual" and also note that the Jewish populations in France and the UK are relatively much smaller than in the US.
I'm not arguing a what-if, I'm arguing a what-is. The entire purpose of the article is to say that Jews have great power and influence despite always being a tiny minority - and that's a good thing if you get them on your team (in this context, that team is "the right", whatever that means).
Arguing that Jews are an insignificant influence on the UK is of course absurd; a British Jew basically founded the Conservative Party and spearheaded the colonization of Africa, the Rothschilds were substantially based out of the UK and were known to use their wealth to further Jewish interests, such as organizing a massive boycott against Norway for its Jew-excluding constitution in the early 19th century, Robert Maxwell did his business out of the UK as a top Mossad informant (if not outright spy), today if you pronounce his daughter's boyfriend's name with a Shh sound instead of a Sss in the UK you get labeled an anti-Semite. Those isles have not been particularly harsh to Jews for 100s of years.
Russian jews are so right wing that the Israeli religious right had tried for decades to ban alyahs from former USSR because jews coming from there are usually super-secularists...
Individual Jews can be very right or left wing. Bernie Sanders. Ben Shapiro.
We Jews just aren't all aligned with each other on most of the standard left-right issues.
You are right that organized Jewish politics tend to focus on what benefits Jewry, but that is due to a lack of consensus on other issues, not some result of Jews being neither left or right individually.
I'm curious about people like you. My instinct is that you are all just a bunch of sore losers, poisoned with envy. Tell us a bit more about yourself..
How much do you earn? Where did you go to school? What major?
I would be really surprised if you were doing really well in life and still consumed by all this hate, but I'll wait for the replies.
Ben Shapiro just came out a few days ago to support a company engaging in selective hiring for Jews. After several hours of criticism he retracted, but it's pretty obvious that the guy who says Americans do have an obligation to Israel, and that Palestinians are basically subhumans who deserve any bombs that come their way, believes in Jewish power first and foremost. Obviously he doesn't represent all Jews, but he does represent the Jewish right, an extremely powerful bloc currently dedicating all its energy to curtailing free expression on college campuses.
You could at least try to refute him instead of going ad hominem. I doubt Ben Shapiro and Bernie Sanders are coordinating, for instance. Sanders got delisted from AIPAC for being too pro-Pal if I remember right.
Yeah I mean obviously it's a ridiculous suggestion that Shapiro and Sanders are working together to advance "Jewish power". I am more interested in what kind of people say such nonsense, rather than the nonsense itself, which is nonsense.
Yes, there is gentile envy. Yes, there are ideological differences among Jews. But there are also general Jewish concerns about safety and various Jewish organizations that loosely coordinate on issues that are of concern, broadly speaking, to the Jewish community. Sometimes strategies for Jewish safety clash with gentile interests. If anti-Semitism has long existed/still exists, wouldn’t it be bizarre for the Jewish community not to take proactive measures to ensure their safety? But once someone begins discussing those proactive measures (it’s called noticing), shrieks of anti-Semitism erupt. “You’re an anti-Semite...but if you think I and my fellow Jews will do anything about it by exercising the Jewish power you envy (but is never coordinated), you’re a conspiracy monger! PS-You’re fired”).
That's a very interesting explainer for the link between post-40s western Judaism and social liberalism which I haven't come across before - the reasoning definitely holds up.
Ackman is also a positive case study for many other rich and influential people - Jewish and gentile - that are having a conservative political awakening. It does not appear that that he will be shunned by elite and polite society for calling a black woman an incompetent diversity hire that should be fired.
Has anybody so aggressively done so before him and kept their reputation in tact? This creates a new confidence and paradigm that you can fight back against wokeness on honest terms.
As a rich Jewish person, I am not at all happy that Ackman has appointed himself our spokesperson. Not that he's super evil or anything, but I just think he's an idiot.
Ackman is one of these guys like Ray Dalio or John Paulson that the media periodically anoints as the "go to" hedge fund guy. Almost always, the hedge fund manager is lauded for "calling" some major macro turn (Dalio- QE, Paulson- mortgage crisis, Ackman- Covid). Then, this person is presented as a guru for several years, despite none of their subsequent takes being any good. If the manager has an entertaining personality and desires publicity, it's a match made in heaven.
It's not bad to "call" these big macro turns, but it's simply not how hedge funds that are successful over the long-run operate. The successful funds generate lots of uncorrelated bets across many sectors and asset classes. At CNBC, they can bring Citadel's Ken Griffin or Millennium's Izzy Englander on the air, and those guys will talk about how they spread their funds out into 1000 different small investment ideas.. which is... boring. Better to bring on a gambler who claims to be able to predict the most important news items, to tell us the future.
The problem with anointing experts because of one big, timely trade is that you'll tend to misclassify a lot of people that just got lucky, as experts. Like Ackman. Ackman is wrong A LOT.
Ackman's fund lost money in each of the following years:
2022, 2018, 2017, 2016
I can't make this stuff up. Dude lost money in four of his last eight years of investing. He's literally a joke. Coin flips. Please cancel this idiot now. There are plenty of Jewish fund managers with actually good track records to represent us.
As much I dislike saying it, Musk, right? 500M people vote with their eyeballs monthly to go to his website, so it's not like people hate him. His stock is mostly owned by retail individuals who like him, the car sales didn't seem to have been much affected, and the U.S. government continues to hire his defense primer to do send stuff to the space. People may say they dislike Musk, but their revealed preferences beg to disagree.
That's because Ackman isn't nearly as rich or influential as Musk. He has like 2% of Musk net worth. But in practice, people use X. Revealed preferences.
An essay only you could write, and I mean that in a good way.
You've raised an important point about the possible effect of current trends that is being overlooked, if not outright ignored. You also synthesized and crystallized certain aspects of those trends I'd noticed but not put together in this way before; it gives me the feeling of seeing a clear photograph of an event I'd only glimpsed before, or of reading a philosopher who stood smiling, waiting patiently for me, at the end of a certain road of inquiry I'd struggled and grappled with for ages.
In any case, you have your flaws, some quite grave that I wish you'd not indulge for all our sakes. Nonetheless, I have a thick skin and skull, the ability to read those I don't agree with generously and with nuance, and an allergy to reading essays which simply present my own views - I already know them, after all, and invariably analyze and write about most topics better than my fellow travelers anyway.
Alors, ultimately I read thinkers who make me think. I appreciate insights and perspectives I'd not considered before that can supplement and clarify my own thoughts on a topic. You fit that mold without a doubt.
YGLESIAS-HANANIA DISCLAIMER: I don't agree with the author on multiple issues, including many/most of those dealing with race.
You're right, there will be a migration of pro-Israel Jews into the Right which is something we saw with the IDW that was majority Jewish and their biggest motivation was Wokeness especially when it came to Israel. This at least on the surface is the logical course of action for pro-Israel Jews, but is it sustainable to align oneself with the low-status loser party (GOP) if you want to make the moral case for Israel? That's not to mention the level of doublethink and hypocrisy required to justify an identitarian state in Israel but support multicultural states in the West. That's already too much for more principled anti-woke Jews and Gentiles to get behind, especially if they're secular.
I can see Israel support will become more low-status and generally more grubby and unhinged, especially as Israel moves rightward and American Israel supporters will have to lean harder on both Christian fundamentalism, anti-Muslim bigotry and white nationalism-lite to justify continued support of the Jewish state.
It's probably true that Hasbara is going to have to fall back on white nationalism lite, because only race realism can explain why the 2 state and 1 state solution are unacceptable. However, while white nationalism today is the ideology of prison gangs and schizophrenics, it was the dominant ideology of the United States for nearly two centuries. Stranger things have happened than white nationalism once again becoming tolerably high status.
Anti Muslim bigotry is also due a comeback. Most middle eastern states are on an unavoidable road to literal starvation as their population grows beyond the capacity/will of the rest of the world to provide them with food. Even the Syrian civil war only held up population growth 10 years. The Iraq war for barely more than 1. There is literally no alternative except people killing each other for food. We've seen how they behave when they have full stomachs; what's coming around 2050 is really going to make people's eye's pop out.
I can see one scenario where national white/American (personally, imo the American identity was always more multicultural even in the heydays, compared to Europeans) coalesces again into the dominant political identity. The emergence of China as a real global competitor, can potentially do it. Nothing defines "is" better than a "they", and China is the first serious "they" that have challenged US global hegemony since the Russkies
"personally, imo the American identity was always more multicultural even in the heydays, compared to Europeans"
That's true because white nationalism is all about different European groups teaming up and agreeing to call it quits on historical hatreds so they can team up and beat all the other races. Contrary to common belief, America was the white nationalist side in WW2, whereas the Nazis teamed up with pretty much anyone to pursue obsolete (from the enlightened perspective of white nationalism) intra-white ethnic vendettas. RH tweeted that you might as well call it 'anyone except black and Chinese nationalism', which is true, but doesn't role off the tongue.
Because Egypt and Jordan don't want Gaza and the West Bank back. They are not stupid and don't want to have to fight a war on their own territory. If you think "Palestinians" hate only Jews, ask the leaders of those two countries.
Yeah I think this is obvious to everyone but there is no shortage of bloodthirsty Jewish tribalists in the comments sections disingenuously stalling because they know they' are getting their way.
If we are to assume that a large majority of the top political donors are Jewish then we cannot expect anything different from their political dealings given recent events.
It does not matter which party is dominant in congress, the Jews will always get what they want. Money talks, and it always will.
You think Israel/Gaza conflict, DEI, ESG, LGBTQ and the climate agenda was an accident? Give me a break!
You have basically pointed out that our country is not being represented in the way that the founding fathers intended and it is obvious to anyone paying attention but you're trying to convince us that all their financial & political power is a good thing for conservatives and Republicans? That is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, all of this is counteracted by Qatar billions being funneled toward universities to ensure a steady presence pro-Palestinian professors and students, and, more importantly, a lack of pro-Israel faculty.
> Aside from Jews moving right, I think we’ll see Jewish influence within the Democratic coalition blunt the impact of liberals becoming more sympathetic towards the Palestinians
I think that's the bulk of the story. Neither Ackman nor Altman have indicated they're joining the political right, they're just coming out against the anti-Israel segment of the left.
How is your hypothesis re: Jewish political involvement not perfectly compatible with MacDonald's thesis that Jewish involvement in political/radical movements is an adapted behavior? If you are a small diaspora minority you survive by being obsessed with what everyone around you is thinking. You also survive with a strong ethnocentric tendency. You are restating his thesis in a slightly different way. Maybe that's the Schtick here? To present antisemitic premises in a way that suggests you are opposing antisemitism so it gets digested more easily? Am I just saying the quiet part out loud? Let me know and I'll Delet Dis.
Richard, you also avoid the other side of the equation, which is not just the *composition* of the elite but the *output* of the elite. Wouldn't you agree that the output of the Jewish elite has been biased heavily in an anti-white and pro-Jewish direction? Do you expect closer alignment here if the Jewish elite becomes more right-wing, whereas the white right-wing ingratiating itself with Israel historically has not moderated anti-white ideology from the Jewish elite? Hasn't the damage been done already?
Neoconservatism was born when the international left started favoring the Palestinians over the Israelis. Recent events therefore would predict another round of elite Jewish opinion to move from the left, ala Irvine Kristol, etc. in first move. See his op-ed in WSJ back in the day.
Long forgotten, though it seems to be making a comeback now. But I remember reading John Podhoretz's dad Norman in Commentary.
A neocon resurgence wouldn't be terrible if it cuts the legs off the modern woke left. I just don't want the USA dragged into another war on behalf of Israel.
Cool story other than ignoring Mossad infiltration of every important institution in the US, perpetrating 9/11, running Epstein Island. You are compromised and not worth listening to. Unsubbed.
I read it, and the author just found reasons to dismiss every bit of evidence. It was a clear case of "must I believe" the established stylized facts vs "can I believe" anything that might counter it.
As I made my way through Hanania’s piece, this stuck out:
“Those on the right who are prone towards white identitarianism or Christian nationalism might sulk about Jewish influence in their movement. To me, this is just as pathetic as black activists on college campuses complaining that physics departments are too white.”
Who is he referring to? Kind of a weak move not to provide an example. I’ll presume he has someone like Fuentes in mind since Fuentes supports both.
Fuentes’ complaints are about *what may/does happen* with too much Jewish influence in a movement or organization like commandeering it to serve their interests at the expense of the core mission or constituency. Just look at gatekeeper Ben Shapiro or lunatic Mark Levin for “conservatism”/the mainstream right concerning Israel. There’s nothing inherently conservative or right-wing about giving billions of aid to Israel or visiting bloodthirsty reprisal upon the Palestinians or letting/helping Israel annex Gaza, but those two will most certainly contort their rhetoric to force-fit those goals into the *American* right if they can get away with it. That’s messed up and we ought to oppose that.
It’s almost certainly not the mere fact that there might be heavy Jewish involvement in a movement or organization. For example, I’d guess that in some improbable hypothetical world where Jewish activists, thinkers, and funders for some reason were disproportionately involved in white indentitarian and Christian nationalist movements but never commandeered them for their own ethnocentric purposes or blunted their effectiveness, Fuentes would be more than grateful for their contributions. But if people like Fuentes see patterns of Jewish subversion and say, “No thanks. Let’s not run that risk in our movement,” then that’s “pathetic” according to Hanania? I don’t think so.
I am familiar with the author's name, but this may be the first of his works that I've read. And a single statement put me off consideration of him as a serious political analyst:
"The trend on the majority of contentious issues is towards polarization, with Republican administrations and politicians moving right on most things and Democrats going in the opposite direction."
Considering Rs, with the possible exception of abortion (the Rs remaining in the position they have always occupied on the matter), the issues in which they have NOT moved leftward are few and far between. Rs have, arguably, surrendered ground on nearly every major issue. The only reason Rs and Ds have drifted further apart is because the Ds have moved leftward at a far higher rate than the Rs.
This conceit that Rs and Ds are mutually moving apart is a fabrication to maintain the idea that both are responsible for making our divisions worse.
Considering a bellwether issue as a single example, if one listens to Bill Clinton's second inaugural address where he talks of immigration and border security, he sounds like Trump. Even if insincere, Clinton understood where mainstream America was on the issue, and was giving lip service to that extensive constituency. Since then, Rs have done little to oppose the Ds' purposeful erosion of our borders and immigration enforcement (their inaction not being indicative of "moving to the right"). When someone (like Trump) suggests we actually enforce our laws, he's labeled an "extremist," because naturally a suggestion that laws be enforced looks extreme compared to a policy that refuses to do so. This is commonly cited as an example "how conservatives and liberals are tearing the country apart", but the country can be torn apart by one side pulling against the middle, and the other side just standing firm. Although this is not exactly what is happening (Rs are slowly sliding leftward) the speed at which Ds are moving leftward is doing the tearing. It might be argued that both sides are doing the tearing because, although moving in the same direction, they aren't moving at the same speed. But even this view would debunk the idea that "Republicans have become more conservative."
The author's sort of analysis may fly with Millennials (having limited perspective), but us Boomers have been around long enough to know that it's simply untrue. We know that Rs are LESS conservative than they were 40 or 50 years ago. And even the "extremism" of MAGA* generally insists on nothing more than enforcement of existing laws, lower taxes, and energy independence. There is probably nothing in the MAGA platform that represents anything more conservative than the policies of Ds in the 1960s.
Another possible example of "rightward movement" among conservatives (if that's what MAGA is), is non-interventionism, usually called "isolationism" in order to make it appear more extreme. But being anti-war had been for decades a D position, so non-interventionism is not strictly "more conservative," even if more aligned with early American political thought.
*I'm referencing MAGA because the movement's critics and the media often cite its "extreme right-wing views." Obviously, I believe this characterization is inaccurate, but still MAGA's agenda serves as an example of what is commonly blamed for "moving the country to the right", when "returning to the right" is more accurate, but still a "right" less conservative than it was a few decades ago.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on policies alone. Rs are notoriously not policy-based and stick to vibes. They resemble progressives in this regard. If you look at metrics like the following:
1) Adoption of fringe conspiracy theories
2) Sympathy towards white nationalist rhetoric
3) Acceptance of anti-democratic politics and dictators
You end up with a clear indication that right-wingers have indeed moved right.
Republicans have now moved left on abortion, too.
I don't know where to start.
First, if the author addressed my concerns, then he would have disagreed with his own statement that both the Left and the Right are both moving in different directions. (Tacitly making conservatives at least partially responsible for our divide, a conclusion I reject.)
"(B)oth parties have moved to the right between 1968 and 2016." But this confuses practical, and sometimes purely political, policy decisions over time, and is not a good stand-in for actual conservative, or even liberal, thought. When today's conservatives have become "more conservative," they are usually moving back to what was mainstream thought only a few decades ago, not adopting new, or even radical, political thought. (It may seem "radical" only in comparison with modern "liberal" politics, which have never before been considered mainstream, when nearly all conservative political thought was, at one time or another, mainstream thought. Liberal politics grew out of a rebellion against mainstream thought, so it's no surprise that it represents a deviation from it.)
"Authoritarian" is a form of governance that describes the government's relationship with the people, not with how the government is run internally. Therefore, slashing government agencies is not "authoritarian." The chief executive has certain authority over the government, as granted by the Constitution. An exercise of that authority can't be "authoritarian," no matter how unpopular it may be. A president is elected to exercise his lawful authority as he sees fit. Although "book banning" would be authoritarian, making a policy decision to keep certain books out of public schools is not "book banning," it is simply a disagreement between which books should be, and which books should not be, made available to students by the state. (True banning would remove the books from circulation entirely. They would therefore be unavailable to any students, including those in private schools, as well as to anyone else. You have seriously mischaracterized conservative thought on what books should be available to students in public schools, which is not "authoritarian." It's simply a disagreement over policy, that the Left mischaracterizes in order to create outrage over something - book banning - that isn't actually happening.)
Funny that "contesting election results" wasn't anti-democratic when Al Gore did it (nor when Hillary Clinton complained that the 2016 election had been stolen from her). Election integrity laws that permit examination of election records exist for two reasons. First, to discover if irregularities in an election might be cause to reject the results, and second, to demonstrate to the public that an election was, in fact, fair and secure. If you don't believe Trump's claims the election was stolen, you would also have to believe that a forensic examination of any election would prove the election fair and secure. Then why is it that no State and no court has authorized a forensic examination of any election for the purpose of demonstrating this? It should be obvious that they fear it would do the opposite. (Why are Republican secretaries of state resisting such examinations? Wouldn't they want to expose cheating against Trump? Presuming that they're Trump supporters, doing so would still pin considerable blame on themselves, for having been responsible for election security and having failed miserably enough to permit cheating on a scale large enough to tilt a national election.)
Blaming Trump for not accomplishing certain, cherry-picked, problems is an indictment of the previous administration as well, which had two terms to address the same problems, and failed to do so. It's particularly rich coming from people who "resisted" everything Trump tried to do with lawfare and dirty tricks (like "Russia, Russia, Russia"). If liberals actually believed Trump was not the right man for the job, they would have allowed him to fail. But that's not what "the resistance" was about. The purpose of the resistance was to prevent Trump from from being successful, the welfare of the country be damned. You can't, or at least you shouldn't, blame a person for failing when his opponents did everything possible to cause his failure. And yet, Trump was far from being a failure, having done much for which he receives insufficient credit. Next time, just let him fail by himself. That is, if you're not afraid that the success he might have will ruin the Democrat party, and discredit RINOs and other never-Trumpers.
“It is pretty relevant that in practical economic policies, the Clinton and Obama administrations might have been to the left of Nixon, isn't it?”
Now maybe you have a typo and meant to say “right of Nixon” above. But either way, your statement is wrong (well, except to the extent that you inserted the qualifier “might”, which technically renders anything after it practically meaningless).
There is little doubt that Clinton’s economic policies were to the right of Nixon’s. Part of it, of course, because of Newt and the Contract with America GOP takeover of the House.
Obama’s economic policies were FAR to the left of Clinton’s. You can argue in a couple ways they were right of Nixon’s (wage and price controls were a particularly horrendous idea, and obscene marginal tax rates weren’t fixed until Reagan) , but on others - most notably, ObamaCare, and literally stealing GM from bondholders and giving a big slug to the unions - they were clearly worse.
"Look, the fact is that the Left and the Right are moving in different directions ever since the election of Obama (the Republican voters more to the Right under Obama and this manifested in Trump, and Democrats more to the Left under Trump). The author is right about this."
I'll reply to this, as you seem to have missed nearly all of the points I was making, and this will serve as an example.
The American people did not move to the right during the Obama administration. Conservatism in America has always been mainstream thought. Modern liberalism is an intentional deviation from/rejection of conservatism, that has deviated more and more leftward over time. American populism, being conservative in nature, is at, best, a return to conservatism and not a new development. It has always been there, it never went away. It just fell out of majority thought, but has never before been considered "radical." For a very long time it was considered quite normal.
What happened during the Obama administration was a rejection of radical liberalism. Obama didn't cause a new movement, he pushed the envelop of liberalism too far, causing people (who mostly already had conservative ideals) to react in opposition. But the conservatism was always there.
When Hanania says conservatives are "moving to the right," he is wrong. They are just now making their voices heard, and awakening others to join them. But there is nothing new about their politics or ideals, which are still considerably less conservative than they were decades ago. (And even if it oscillates between more and less conservatism, it still is never more conservative than mainstream conservatism ever was. Modern, radical liberalism is to blame for this, as every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But the conservative reaction did not push Americans into new conservative territory, at worst if pushed them BACK into old conservative territory. However I believe even this is an illusion. Many Americans have always been mainstream conservatives, but they hadn't yet been poked in the eye. Obama seems to have gone out of his way to do just that, and the reaction he provoked shouldn't be surprising. The current conservative movement is backlash that would probably have been avoided had Obama not been so precipitate in his radicalism. It was a tactical mistake that produced MAGA. Had he been less abrasive, Hillary Clinton would have been the next president. But then again, disruption of the nation's fabric may have been his objective. If it was, he was quite successful.)
As I pointed out in my OP, Bill Clinton spoke in favor of controlling the southern border. There was a time when liberals believed in the enforcement of the law and the punishment of criminals. They believed if they disagreed with the law, the proper thing to do was to change it, not ignore it. These were beliefs held by both the right and the left - core beliefs in the system and traditions, and working within them to effectuate change. The right has never departed from these beliefs, even as their politics and ideals have become more liberal. But the left's ideals have not only become radically different from what they were a few decades ago, their tactics and techniques are also radically different. I give you the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot, effectuated, incredibly, by a belief that due process of law is an unnecessary component to determining whether or not the man is guilty of the crime of insurrection (for which he has never been charged).
You might not care, this being 6 months later, but as I just reread this piece and saw your comments, I’d like to weigh in. I’m about 75% with you, 25% with Richard on the question of Dems and GOPers moving in opposite directions.
I fully agree with you that it is a false dichotomy to suggest that both sides are equally to blame and that both sides have moved roughly the same amount. The Ds have moved MUCH further to the left than any movement on the right.
I also basically agree with you that the midpoint of the GOP voter has not moved that much to the right (and that on a few social issues, notably gay marriage, the median has moved left). And we do agree re abortion, which is a place that’s particularly easy for the media to highlight, and which there’s little doubt that - whatever one’s views on optimal policy are - it has hurt the GOP nationally at the ballot box.
Where I agree with Richard and not your argument, however, is that the average elected GOP official *has* in fact moved right. The average R elected politician is now closer to the middle of the R voter base, where prior they were much closer to the Susan Collins / Mitt Romney wing of the party. so even though the GOP voters have not gone much (if any) rightward, elected GOP politicians now have.
And to this rightward move by GOP officials, I say “Hallelujah”! And I say this NOT as a social conservative (I’m a classical liberal / libertarian-leaning conservative) but as someone who wants to see smaller, more limited government and more freedom across the board.
And to be clear, I’m not suggesting that the average GOP elected pol is at the far right now (as the leftist media tries to suggest, and has tried to suggest ever since Reagan), nor that GOP elected officials have moved as far to the right as D elected officials have moved left, merely that GOP elected officials have moved somewhat right and are on average *finally* close to the center of GOP voters.
The word lumpenintelligensia alone made it worth reading this article.
I also like "Transtifa," and Buy Large Mansions, but lumpenintelligentsia may be a more accurate term.
You took pains to avoid heretical statements by noting that Jews aren't "working together" to exercise power; said power is merely the mathematical outcome of their intelligence and political involvement.
Except they do work together, through an entire universe of explicitly pro-Jewish groups - which in recent years have drifted off-mission.
My guess? Hopes for a right-wing awakening are bunkum. Jewish billionaires will launch a speech crackdown on the one hand, and on the other they'll refocus Leftist hatred on (gentile) white men while trying to carve out an exception for Jews.
More salient IMO for the future of America's elites is how the relationship evolves between Jews and Indians.
All the loud, mainstream, centre-right Jewish voices on this issue (e.g. Bari Weiss, Pinker, and Ackman) have clearly stated all of DEI has to go, and that DEI with a Jewish exception is not possible and not what they seek. They say they share your goals. You so badly want to hate Jews you can’t even accept them when they try to be your friend and do your bidding.
Nate Silver just came out and said the same thing - he doesn't want Jews to get a power boost in the Oppression Olympics; he wants the OO to end entirely.
Do you have a source on the Silver quote? I read his recent article, but don't remember seeing that exact framing in there
Nate Silver's article that RH cited basically argues that "the left" is a coalition of Marxists and classical liberals, and that coalition is breaking up. The Bill Mahers and Nate Silvers of the world are increasingly abandoning that coalition, even if they're not joining a right coalition.
Eventually the Democrats are going to realize they need the Bill Maher vote more than they need the Ibram Kendi vote.
Do they though? If you're talking votes, working-class people of any color are much more important to hold on numerical grounds, and the professional-managerial class that increasingly makes up everyone else in the Dem coalition believes in Kendiism. After all, they heard it in college and at DEI training...corporations and universities aren't places where it pays to think for yourself.
If you're talking elite influence, as Hanania originally is, I'm not sure the unwoke-liberal vote is all that important. Harvard and Penn may just be able to buy off the Bill Ackmans of the world by including Jews in DEI, and I'm not sure there are enough Quillette and Aporia fans to fill a stadium or that they're all that wealthy and influential.
My parents like Bill Maher. I don't think old Latin Americans with graduate degrees who think the left reminds them of Peron and Castro are a significant bloc.
Well it's both. On election day, whoever wins the normie swing voters wins the election. In terms of elite influence, Bob Iger over at Disney is quickly figuring out Kendiism is a money-loser at the box office, and Netflix figured out pretty quickly they need Dave Chappelle more than they need Hannah Gadsby. So the 'get woke go broke' factor is also driving a wedge between the wealthy normielibs and the Kendiists.
Then you've got the antisemitism factor Hanania discusses, you've got the economic realitycheck that is inflation, you've got crime rates making urban progressives uneasy taking public transit, and many other straws that are slowly breaking the camel's back. How many elites are trying to stop Cop City?
Leaving aside the confusion about Marxism per se, only on the internet can one draw the conclusion that the woke vanguard and the normie Dems exist in anything resembling comparable numbers.
We seem fated to unlearn this then relearn it in the next open Democratic primary.
The Left in the U.S. in the 21st century is a coalition of Marxists and Rooseveltian (FDR not TR) liberals. Classical liberals - I am one - are part of the center-right coalition.
Honestly, if they don't become right wingers, then what good are they? Not a rhetorical question.
They become swing voters that pull institutions away from the batshit woke left.
Pinker isn't center-right. He's center-left.
If you buy that in contemporary politics the most relevant axis is woke vs antiwoke, then Pinker is center-right despite his other, more left-leaning beliefs.
It drives a lot of discourse, but is not in fact the most important determinant of which political coalition people actually join.
Depends who you're talking to, I think.
In the US context where the Democrats are the major party supported by the left and the Republicans that of the right, he's reliably a supporter of the former even if he's willing to criticize many of them as well.
Depends what you mean. You wouldn't see them in the WSJ, but they're not aligned with the New Right that's getting more powerful.
More likely is that Jews will actually change their mind about identity politics. Do you think they're going to keep supporting BLM after they supported October 7?
It's one thing to want to give your university spots to blacks, it's another to support terrorists who literally want to kill you.
The goal, of course, is showing just how awful DEI is, so people will start to abandon it. That's a hard case, of course. Jews getting a carve out would be about the worst outcome, as it would allow the Marxists to pretend to have "fixed" DEI.
We work together on Israel and anti-semitism, but not anything else really. Two Jews, three opinions.
This idea that Jewish people get together to focus leftist hatred on gentile white men is just not accurate, I'm sorry. Many of us self-identify as white men.
This white nationalist argument never made sense. Don't they notice how many billionaire Jewish Republicans they are?
The white nationalists are just very stupid and misinformed about this. The ADL does a few things that piss these people off--
1) They try to make strategic alliances with other anti-hate organizations (anti-black, anti-gay, etc.). I've spoken to a local organizer about this and he told me "we have to come to their rally, if we want them to come to ours".
2) They generally don't view "white men" as a persecuted minority.
3) They are supported by powerful, Jewish men.
The idiots put together (1)-(3) and conclude the organization is actively working against gentile white men. In reality, gentile white male victims are just not a category the ADL is very interested in. That is because it is very rare for people in that category to be a victim of a crime stemming from bias. White nationalists dispute this, but the data (e.g. FBI) makes it quite clear that such crimes are rare (although reporting may be inconsistent).
The entertaining thing is that left-wing critics of the ADL claim that it's nothing but a shill for Israel. That would seem to get in the way of victimizing white men, but Jews are super powerful right?
> it is very rare for people in that category to be a victim of a crime stemming from bias
They're frequently in that category, probably the most frequent of any group, but the bias against them is so strong it doesn't even get reported or recorded. For example it's an open secret that many/most large US corporations systematically discriminate against white men and have done for decades, but it's basically never prosecuted. When James Damore pointed this out the people in government who are meant to prosecute discrimination openly ganged up with those doing the discriminating. I myself have watched as the CEO at a former workplace told the entire company that the next head of sales "has to be a woman". That is a crime, but not one that will turn up in any statistic because it's so commonplace and governments like this type of crime so much.
"The entertaining thing is that left-wing critics of the ADL claim that it's nothing but a shill for Israel."
Left-wing critics are correct on that matter.
you are a liar
The current leadership of the ADL is indeed horrible; it's become just another leftist takeover of something that used to be worthwhile. That leadership might just have noticed how bad DEI is... but will have to be pushed actually to do much about it.
I specifically referred to anti-semitism as a coordinating issue.
That's sort of an uncharitable interpretation, no?
The ADL made an explicit statement to defend anti-White terrorist Darrell Brooks from accusations of a hate crime, stating "there appears to be little evidence that Brooks actively subscribes to an overarching extremist ideology", on the basis that his anti-Semitism posted to Facebook was minor. That was in the immediate wake of the anti-Christian mass murder at the Waukesha parade, and in doing so the ADL unquestionably played an important role ensuring that it would not be charged as a hate crime. As of right now, the Wikipedia article on that attack reads as follows:
"The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks's alleged Facebook account, which contained Black nationalist and anti-white viewpoints, and his crime were exploited by white nationalists in order to push racist conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks's attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.[107][108][109] The New York Post, however, reported that Brooks had previously called for violence against white people.[110]"
You're a white nationalist supremacist conspiracy theory nutjob if you dare think Darrel Brooks perpetrated an anti-White terrorist attack, the ADL wants you to know.
Robert is spot on and your apologia for that organization is extremely disturbing for someone who claims to identify as White. The ADL is in every sense an evil organization filled with some of the most disgusting and genocidal Jewish supremacists in world history, and is dedicated to the destruction of even the most meager forms of White existence.
And you've never heard of Sheldon Adelson?
Bill Ackman, who has been very vocal on this, wrote a few days ago that he apologized for being so slow in coming around to understand that DEC is the problem, and implicitly, the generator of vast plumes of Jew-Hatred.
Ackman has apologized for being so slow and initially getting it wrong. He is now aware that the issue is DEI....that DEI is the generator of deep antisemitism. DEI has to go. His twitter X threads are really good...
I doubt the point is lost on Hanania but there is something amusing about his special dispensation and support for Jews who are ethnocentric (stereotype accuracy, remember?), have achieved a high IQ via selective breeding, who often undermine their host countries (they disproportionately support Leftism/Wokeism/rabid individualism for whites/mass non-white immigration), and have birthed an ethno-state that is right now killing thousands of Palestinians. In a manner of speaking, it’s like seeing Hoste/Hanania combined into one person in defense of Jewish supremacism.
You sound like a complete idiot, sorry.
How can Jews disproportionately support both Leftism and rabid individualism? Idiot. Presumably (based on your leanings) at least one of those positions would *not* undermine their host country. Idiot.
And yes, Israel is at war right now. Wars have casualties. Grow up. No one is confused for a second that you care at all about Palestinians. You just hate Jews. Maybe you should consider that your heavy bias affects your thinking across many domains.
No apology necessary. You can easily support individualism in terms of a hedonistic lifestyle and Leftism at the same time. Leftists typically reject bourgeois values but they don’t automatically reject hedonism. No, I don’t hate Jews but I do dislike Jews that simultaneously support an ethnostate for Jews but push for mass non-white immigration in the West.
If you wondered what antisemetism is, you just need to read the PRG BS.
Solid casual antisemitism on display here.
🤡
Unpopular opinion: the way in which the current situation in Palestine will affect American politics is probably highly dependent on the actual facts of where the conflict goes from here, about which all sides seem to agree that it's very difficult to project an endgame.
American Jews are an anomaly. French Jews have been right wing for 30 years and overwhelmingly for 20. UK Jews also vote conservative. Israelis are right wing. Russian Jews are right wing. Only American Jews are so left wing.
Good comment, but can be improved upon.
I think you oversimplify quite a bit in painting all non-American Jews as right wing. Marx and most of the Bolsheviks were Jewish, etc. Maybe they are a minority or not as prevalent today, but highly visible left-wing Jews outside the US has always been a thing.
Also RE: Israel.. the European-descended Israeli Jews tend to be more left-wing while the Russian and Middle Eastern Jews tend to be more right-wing, with the latter groups nowadays outnumbering the former.
I want to add some more emphasis here, in case people think that the distinctions between Jews with different backgrounds are trivial. They are not.
Anecdotal example from my life. When my fiance and I were looking for a wedding venue, we found a Orthodox Syrian synagogue we liked. We're not Syrian. The Syrian synagogue would not host our wedding because my fiance's father is not Jewish. This is despite my fiance being fully Jewish (via her mother) and my father being an Orthodox Rabbi. We were not a "Jewish" enough couple for them because 1 of our 4 parents is non-Jewish.
This is a standard Syrian Jewish attitude. They literally don't think my fiance is even Jewish to their standard and wouldn't accept our family into their community. These are the kind of Jews that are also (surprise) not big fans of Palestinians.
I told the Jews I know not to give money to the Syrian synagogue. Then about a year later my friend had his daughter's bat mitzva at their synagogue, but I didn't say anything...
Kind of defeats Hanania's thesis. If we accept the premise of this article that Jews have amazing power and wealth throughout the West and that we want them on our side so that we may fight battles together against the radical left, it's interesting how Jews seemingly have no victories on the social or economic fronts that the right is fighting *in the countries where they are right wing*. Instead, in the UK and France, you get total industrial stagnation combined with token Islamophobia and hate speech laws that protect Jews more than any other group; aka the Republican party platform.
Logical fallacy.
it's interesting how Jews seemingly have no victories on the social or economic fronts that the right is fighting *in the countries where they are right wing*
Go look up "counterfactual" and also note that the Jewish populations in France and the UK are relatively much smaller than in the US.
I'm not arguing a what-if, I'm arguing a what-is. The entire purpose of the article is to say that Jews have great power and influence despite always being a tiny minority - and that's a good thing if you get them on your team (in this context, that team is "the right", whatever that means).
Arguing that Jews are an insignificant influence on the UK is of course absurd; a British Jew basically founded the Conservative Party and spearheaded the colonization of Africa, the Rothschilds were substantially based out of the UK and were known to use their wealth to further Jewish interests, such as organizing a massive boycott against Norway for its Jew-excluding constitution in the early 19th century, Robert Maxwell did his business out of the UK as a top Mossad informant (if not outright spy), today if you pronounce his daughter's boyfriend's name with a Shh sound instead of a Sss in the UK you get labeled an anti-Semite. Those isles have not been particularly harsh to Jews for 100s of years.
Both of those countries have larger percentages of Muslims than the US.
Most French Jews did not vote for Marine Le Pen.
They're better described as center / center-right than right wing.
Russian jews are so right wing that the Israeli religious right had tried for decades to ban alyahs from former USSR because jews coming from there are usually super-secularists...
They're super-secularists because of their Soviet background as well as the high mixed marriage rate during the USSR.
That has nothing to do with being "right wing".
But your reply might have been sarcastic(?)
These labels are very contextual - French right wing is very different from Russian one.
Individual Jews can be very right or left wing. Bernie Sanders. Ben Shapiro.
We Jews just aren't all aligned with each other on most of the standard left-right issues.
You are right that organized Jewish politics tend to focus on what benefits Jewry, but that is due to a lack of consensus on other issues, not some result of Jews being neither left or right individually.
So, obviously, you really hate Jewish people.
I'm curious about people like you. My instinct is that you are all just a bunch of sore losers, poisoned with envy. Tell us a bit more about yourself..
How much do you earn? Where did you go to school? What major?
I would be really surprised if you were doing really well in life and still consumed by all this hate, but I'll wait for the replies.
Ben Shapiro just came out a few days ago to support a company engaging in selective hiring for Jews. After several hours of criticism he retracted, but it's pretty obvious that the guy who says Americans do have an obligation to Israel, and that Palestinians are basically subhumans who deserve any bombs that come their way, believes in Jewish power first and foremost. Obviously he doesn't represent all Jews, but he does represent the Jewish right, an extremely powerful bloc currently dedicating all its energy to curtailing free expression on college campuses.
You could at least try to refute him instead of going ad hominem. I doubt Ben Shapiro and Bernie Sanders are coordinating, for instance. Sanders got delisted from AIPAC for being too pro-Pal if I remember right.
Yeah I mean obviously it's a ridiculous suggestion that Shapiro and Sanders are working together to advance "Jewish power". I am more interested in what kind of people say such nonsense, rather than the nonsense itself, which is nonsense.
Yes, there is gentile envy. Yes, there are ideological differences among Jews. But there are also general Jewish concerns about safety and various Jewish organizations that loosely coordinate on issues that are of concern, broadly speaking, to the Jewish community. Sometimes strategies for Jewish safety clash with gentile interests. If anti-Semitism has long existed/still exists, wouldn’t it be bizarre for the Jewish community not to take proactive measures to ensure their safety? But once someone begins discussing those proactive measures (it’s called noticing), shrieks of anti-Semitism erupt. “You’re an anti-Semite...but if you think I and my fellow Jews will do anything about it by exercising the Jewish power you envy (but is never coordinated), you’re a conspiracy monger! PS-You’re fired”).
"Do you have a Master's Degree, goy? A Doctorate? Oh, you didn't make it into an Ivy League school, goy?"
Yeah, no idea why they've been hated for 2000 years. No clue.
That's a very interesting explainer for the link between post-40s western Judaism and social liberalism which I haven't come across before - the reasoning definitely holds up.
Ackman is also a positive case study for many other rich and influential people - Jewish and gentile - that are having a conservative political awakening. It does not appear that that he will be shunned by elite and polite society for calling a black woman an incompetent diversity hire that should be fired.
Has anybody so aggressively done so before him and kept their reputation in tact? This creates a new confidence and paradigm that you can fight back against wokeness on honest terms.
As a rich Jewish person, I am not at all happy that Ackman has appointed himself our spokesperson. Not that he's super evil or anything, but I just think he's an idiot.
Ackman is one of these guys like Ray Dalio or John Paulson that the media periodically anoints as the "go to" hedge fund guy. Almost always, the hedge fund manager is lauded for "calling" some major macro turn (Dalio- QE, Paulson- mortgage crisis, Ackman- Covid). Then, this person is presented as a guru for several years, despite none of their subsequent takes being any good. If the manager has an entertaining personality and desires publicity, it's a match made in heaven.
It's not bad to "call" these big macro turns, but it's simply not how hedge funds that are successful over the long-run operate. The successful funds generate lots of uncorrelated bets across many sectors and asset classes. At CNBC, they can bring Citadel's Ken Griffin or Millennium's Izzy Englander on the air, and those guys will talk about how they spread their funds out into 1000 different small investment ideas.. which is... boring. Better to bring on a gambler who claims to be able to predict the most important news items, to tell us the future.
The problem with anointing experts because of one big, timely trade is that you'll tend to misclassify a lot of people that just got lucky, as experts. Like Ackman. Ackman is wrong A LOT.
https://pershingsquareholdings.com/performance/net-asset-value-and-returns/
Ackman's fund lost money in each of the following years:
2022, 2018, 2017, 2016
I can't make this stuff up. Dude lost money in four of his last eight years of investing. He's literally a joke. Coin flips. Please cancel this idiot now. There are plenty of Jewish fund managers with actually good track records to represent us.
As much I dislike saying it, Musk, right? 500M people vote with their eyeballs monthly to go to his website, so it's not like people hate him. His stock is mostly owned by retail individuals who like him, the car sales didn't seem to have been much affected, and the U.S. government continues to hire his defense primer to do send stuff to the space. People may say they dislike Musk, but their revealed preferences beg to disagree.
Sort of. The normie NYT reader thinks Musk is a literal white supremacist. I don’t think Ackman gets the same reaction.
That's because Ackman isn't nearly as rich or influential as Musk. He has like 2% of Musk net worth. But in practice, people use X. Revealed preferences.
An essay only you could write, and I mean that in a good way.
You've raised an important point about the possible effect of current trends that is being overlooked, if not outright ignored. You also synthesized and crystallized certain aspects of those trends I'd noticed but not put together in this way before; it gives me the feeling of seeing a clear photograph of an event I'd only glimpsed before, or of reading a philosopher who stood smiling, waiting patiently for me, at the end of a certain road of inquiry I'd struggled and grappled with for ages.
In any case, you have your flaws, some quite grave that I wish you'd not indulge for all our sakes. Nonetheless, I have a thick skin and skull, the ability to read those I don't agree with generously and with nuance, and an allergy to reading essays which simply present my own views - I already know them, after all, and invariably analyze and write about most topics better than my fellow travelers anyway.
Alors, ultimately I read thinkers who make me think. I appreciate insights and perspectives I'd not considered before that can supplement and clarify my own thoughts on a topic. You fit that mold without a doubt.
YGLESIAS-HANANIA DISCLAIMER: I don't agree with the author on multiple issues, including many/most of those dealing with race.
You're right, there will be a migration of pro-Israel Jews into the Right which is something we saw with the IDW that was majority Jewish and their biggest motivation was Wokeness especially when it came to Israel. This at least on the surface is the logical course of action for pro-Israel Jews, but is it sustainable to align oneself with the low-status loser party (GOP) if you want to make the moral case for Israel? That's not to mention the level of doublethink and hypocrisy required to justify an identitarian state in Israel but support multicultural states in the West. That's already too much for more principled anti-woke Jews and Gentiles to get behind, especially if they're secular.
I can see Israel support will become more low-status and generally more grubby and unhinged, especially as Israel moves rightward and American Israel supporters will have to lean harder on both Christian fundamentalism, anti-Muslim bigotry and white nationalism-lite to justify continued support of the Jewish state.
It's probably true that Hasbara is going to have to fall back on white nationalism lite, because only race realism can explain why the 2 state and 1 state solution are unacceptable. However, while white nationalism today is the ideology of prison gangs and schizophrenics, it was the dominant ideology of the United States for nearly two centuries. Stranger things have happened than white nationalism once again becoming tolerably high status.
Anti Muslim bigotry is also due a comeback. Most middle eastern states are on an unavoidable road to literal starvation as their population grows beyond the capacity/will of the rest of the world to provide them with food. Even the Syrian civil war only held up population growth 10 years. The Iraq war for barely more than 1. There is literally no alternative except people killing each other for food. We've seen how they behave when they have full stomachs; what's coming around 2050 is really going to make people's eye's pop out.
I can see one scenario where national white/American (personally, imo the American identity was always more multicultural even in the heydays, compared to Europeans) coalesces again into the dominant political identity. The emergence of China as a real global competitor, can potentially do it. Nothing defines "is" better than a "they", and China is the first serious "they" that have challenged US global hegemony since the Russkies
"personally, imo the American identity was always more multicultural even in the heydays, compared to Europeans"
That's true because white nationalism is all about different European groups teaming up and agreeing to call it quits on historical hatreds so they can team up and beat all the other races. Contrary to common belief, America was the white nationalist side in WW2, whereas the Nazis teamed up with pretty much anyone to pursue obsolete (from the enlightened perspective of white nationalism) intra-white ethnic vendettas. RH tweeted that you might as well call it 'anyone except black and Chinese nationalism', which is true, but doesn't role off the tongue.
I don't understand why going back to the pre-1967 3 state solution isn't the default.
Because Egypt and Jordan don't want Gaza and the West Bank back. They are not stupid and don't want to have to fight a war on their own territory. If you think "Palestinians" hate only Jews, ask the leaders of those two countries.
Yeah I think this is obvious to everyone but there is no shortage of bloodthirsty Jewish tribalists in the comments sections disingenuously stalling because they know they' are getting their way.
If we are to assume that a large majority of the top political donors are Jewish then we cannot expect anything different from their political dealings given recent events.
It does not matter which party is dominant in congress, the Jews will always get what they want. Money talks, and it always will.
You think Israel/Gaza conflict, DEI, ESG, LGBTQ and the climate agenda was an accident? Give me a break!
You have basically pointed out that our country is not being represented in the way that the founding fathers intended and it is obvious to anyone paying attention but you're trying to convince us that all their financial & political power is a good thing for conservatives and Republicans? That is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, all of this is counteracted by Qatar billions being funneled toward universities to ensure a steady presence pro-Palestinian professors and students, and, more importantly, a lack of pro-Israel faculty.
> Aside from Jews moving right, I think we’ll see Jewish influence within the Democratic coalition blunt the impact of liberals becoming more sympathetic towards the Palestinians
I think that's the bulk of the story. Neither Ackman nor Altman have indicated they're joining the political right, they're just coming out against the anti-Israel segment of the left.
How is your hypothesis re: Jewish political involvement not perfectly compatible with MacDonald's thesis that Jewish involvement in political/radical movements is an adapted behavior? If you are a small diaspora minority you survive by being obsessed with what everyone around you is thinking. You also survive with a strong ethnocentric tendency. You are restating his thesis in a slightly different way. Maybe that's the Schtick here? To present antisemitic premises in a way that suggests you are opposing antisemitism so it gets digested more easily? Am I just saying the quiet part out loud? Let me know and I'll Delet Dis.
Richard, you also avoid the other side of the equation, which is not just the *composition* of the elite but the *output* of the elite. Wouldn't you agree that the output of the Jewish elite has been biased heavily in an anti-white and pro-Jewish direction? Do you expect closer alignment here if the Jewish elite becomes more right-wing, whereas the white right-wing ingratiating itself with Israel historically has not moderated anti-white ideology from the Jewish elite? Hasn't the damage been done already?
Neoconservatism was born when the international left started favoring the Palestinians over the Israelis. Recent events therefore would predict another round of elite Jewish opinion to move from the left, ala Irvine Kristol, etc. in first move. See his op-ed in WSJ back in the day.
Urban crime was also a big deal around the split.
Long forgotten, though it seems to be making a comeback now. But I remember reading John Podhoretz's dad Norman in Commentary.
A neocon resurgence wouldn't be terrible if it cuts the legs off the modern woke left. I just don't want the USA dragged into another war on behalf of Israel.
Good post. Nathan Cofnas beat you to this: https://thecritic.co.uk/twilight-of-the-liberal-jew/
Surprisingly, he called it even before the 10/7 attacks, for slightly different reasons.
Cool story other than ignoring Mossad infiltration of every important institution in the US, perpetrating 9/11, running Epstein Island. You are compromised and not worth listening to. Unsubbed.
That must by why the Mossad missed the Oct 7 attacks: all of their personnel were busy in the US.
You’re on crack.
https://open.substack.com/pub/forbiddentexts/p/the-myth-of-jewish-high-iq?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Please.
I will send your devastating criticism to the author.
I read it, and the author just found reasons to dismiss every bit of evidence. It was a clear case of "must I believe" the established stylized facts vs "can I believe" anything that might counter it.
A friend gave me permission to post his comment:
As I made my way through Hanania’s piece, this stuck out:
“Those on the right who are prone towards white identitarianism or Christian nationalism might sulk about Jewish influence in their movement. To me, this is just as pathetic as black activists on college campuses complaining that physics departments are too white.”
Who is he referring to? Kind of a weak move not to provide an example. I’ll presume he has someone like Fuentes in mind since Fuentes supports both.
Fuentes’ complaints are about *what may/does happen* with too much Jewish influence in a movement or organization like commandeering it to serve their interests at the expense of the core mission or constituency. Just look at gatekeeper Ben Shapiro or lunatic Mark Levin for “conservatism”/the mainstream right concerning Israel. There’s nothing inherently conservative or right-wing about giving billions of aid to Israel or visiting bloodthirsty reprisal upon the Palestinians or letting/helping Israel annex Gaza, but those two will most certainly contort their rhetoric to force-fit those goals into the *American* right if they can get away with it. That’s messed up and we ought to oppose that.
It’s almost certainly not the mere fact that there might be heavy Jewish involvement in a movement or organization. For example, I’d guess that in some improbable hypothetical world where Jewish activists, thinkers, and funders for some reason were disproportionately involved in white indentitarian and Christian nationalist movements but never commandeered them for their own ethnocentric purposes or blunted their effectiveness, Fuentes would be more than grateful for their contributions. But if people like Fuentes see patterns of Jewish subversion and say, “No thanks. Let’s not run that risk in our movement,” then that’s “pathetic” according to Hanania? I don’t think so.