Rational anger at Jews

Just because a group has been persecuted, doesn’t mean they haven’t behaved badly.

Deuteronomy 13:10 You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Leviticus 24:16 Whoever blasphemes the name of the LORD shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death.

The Hamas-led slaughter, rape, and mutilation of Israeli Jews on October 7 2023—gleefully recorded and boasted about by the perpetrators—resulted in an initial wave of public horror across Western countries.

Remarkably quickly, this was followed by a virulent public campaign against Israel that then extended into doxxing and other attacks on Jews in Western countries, particularly in the Anglosphere. This was even more remarkable as—apart from the nasty Irish-Catholic Limerick boycott/pogrom of 1904-6—there had been no anti-Jewish pogrom in the Anglosphere since the C13th.

Part of what was going on was a consequence of Muslim immigration into Western countries. There were also other factors, but what it showed overall was a dramatic loss of cultural standing for Jews.

Why? In large part, because activists and networks purporting to speak and act on behalf of Jews had been undermining public respect for Jews for decades. This was just the moment when the cultural cachet of Jews finally collapsed.

Context

Ethnic groups are like species: they come and go, but lineages continue. Your ancestral lineage(s) have passed through many species and many ethnicities.

The complication with ethnicities is that lineages can voluntarily adopt (or shed) ethnic identities. Modern genetic studies suggest such has happened quite a lot across history.

The permeability of human groups is one of the problems with strong notions of group selection among humans. It is, however, perfectly compatible with different distributions of traits between human groups, which we can clearly observe.

Regino of Prum (d.915) came up with a fourfold definition of nation, based on Classical conceptions, that became the standard definition in medieval Europe:

Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.

(The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.)

Where genere (origin) is ancestry. What may be adopted in one generation can easily become completely assumed in the next, and on down the generations. An interwoven chain of entering and departing lineages can sustain an ethnic identity.

The people who became the Jews arose around 3,000 years ago, with the first possible mention of them being during the period of New Kingdom Egypt (c.1570-c.1069BC). Which of the ethnic groups of the Levant of that time are still with us? None but the Jews still are.

Moreover, Christianity came out of the Jewish community. Islam adopted the Jewish prophetic tradition and was clearly deeply influenced by Judaism—there were lots of Jewish tribes in Arabia at the time of Muhammad, and there had been a Jewish monarchy in Yemen.

Source.

Communism—very much a political religion—was founded by a Jew (Karl Marx), even though it is very Christian-derived in its patterns. The thinkers Marx drew from—most obviously Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach—were definitely not Jewish. Marx himself was raised in a family that had converted to Lutheranism. So, Communism is more of an offshoot of an offshoot.

Yes, there have been wildly disproportionate number of prominent Jewish Marxists, but that is for much the same reason that Arab Nationalists are disproportionately Christians: both Marxism and Arab Nationalism are framings that do not put their group on the outer.

Take almost anything intellectual, there will be a wildly disproportionate number of Jews. We can see this in the wildly disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel, and Nobel memorial, laureates. Alas, this also means that there is also likely to be a wildly disproportionate number of Jews in involved in noxious intellectualism.

Arguing with Libertarians is very similar to arguing with Marxists. They both use Theory to judge evidence and, when in trouble, refer back to their Theory. It is perhaps not coincidental that there are lots of Jews in both groups, that they are disproportionately drawn to this mode of intellectualising.

As author and YouTuber Mark Manson observes, models are tools, of varying utility. Turning them into parts of one’s identity is a recipe for disaster. For the other thing Marxists and Libertarians have in common is that their model is their identity.

So, if we looked at the world in, say, 1950, its belief systems were overwhelmingly dominated by religions—both secular or not—that were Jewish offshoots (or an offshoot of an offshoot). This is remarkable in itself. You can reasonably argue that the Jews are the most important continuing group in human history.

The survival of the Jews has a further remarkable aspect, given that they became an almost entirely urban people after their expulsion from Roman Palestine. As YouTuber Rudyard Lynch observes:

42:30 After the diaspora the Jews became an almost entirely urban culture, almost never owning land. Urban populations were never sustainable in the pre-industrial period, and it's kind of a mystery how the Jews were able to maintain a stable population as an almost entirely urban nation. Every city in the pre-industrial world was a demographic sink—and it's still true today for different reasons—but in the pre-industrial era, it was because the amount of diseases concentrated in cities killed people off faster than they had children, especially given how crowded cities were, and it's a mystery how the Jews were able to maintain their stable population, not gradually going extinct, while almost being entirely urban, and you wonder how many of the Jewish religious dietary and health obsessions stemmed from trying to lower the disease death rate to not face the normal population decline seen in cities.

So, the Jews are, in so many ways, a remarkable people.

They are also a people with a history of being persecuted. The long, tragic history of anti-Jewish pogroms is, alas, not all that distinctive. Market-dominant minorities being massacred, or expelled, has a long history that is not at all specific to Jews. The very industrious clannishness that makes market-dominant minorities commercially effective can incite envy and resentment among local populations.

What is more distinctive has been the long history of Christian and Muslim animus against Jews. Muhammad and Martin Luther had very similar hostility to Jews, because the local Jews had failed to agree with this Gentile who told them that he had successfully “completed” their religion. These were two very specific and personal instances of the wider pattern of those who had appropriated the Jewish prophetic tradition resenting the Jews for not going along with said additive appropriation.

Christianity, Islam and Communism may be Jewish offshoots, but each of them has a history of turning on the Jews. Karl Marx infamously attacked Jewish identity and the “rootless cosmopolitans” gibe was a particularly effective attack because, well, there is something to it.

In his discussion of Jewish civilisation, YouTuber Rudyard Lynch observes that:

43:35 The Jews were more connected to their continent-spanning ghetto networks than the local populations a mile away. This created mutual suspicion between the Jewish and Gentile populations.

There's a few interesting elements of ghetto life. One was that they were these sort of strange artificial cultures that stem from never having to govern or protect the regions they were in and with no connection to the land.

Other cultures developed strong hierarchies, aggressive warrior cultures, based off honor, aristocracies or peasant cultures rooted in the earth. The Jews didn't, and much of the current issues of the delusion of many Jewish thinkers in the modern world is their subconsciously projecting the social structure of the Jewish ghetto, which existed in a very specific historic context that can't be replicated elsewhere.

There's an interesting book called The Ordeal of Civility which looks at how Jewish thinkers from the early industrial era such as Marx, Freud or Leo Strauss were trying to square assimilating into modern culture. On top of this, how many of the theories they were developing were themselves attempts to recreate the ghetto culture on an international scale.

The ghetto was a society without pronounced social class, a theocracy with no military, no privacy, or politeness. They had enormous welfare to take care of the poorer members while everyone belonged to a highly constrictive society which controlled their every action, with enormous mutual social trust.

In the ghetto, things worked since it was such a small cohesive community, bound together by a strong religion. Look, we just described communism and you could see Marxism as an attempt to turn the entire world into a Jewish-style ghetto community.

The Jews were frequently perturbed by the idea of civility or the politeness that West Europeans prized so deeply a century ago. They were all convinced it was some kind of lie or sham and they faced enormous neurosis about not fitting in with the society. What they failed to realize is that European culture is fundamentally aristocratic, in which politeness stemmed from a culture of heroic individualism in which you had courtesy so you wouldn't get murdered for insulting someone's honor.

Jewish culture had no concept of martial honor and so always writes it up as repression, with Freud being the most notable example. Fun fact, The Ordeal of Civility likes to say that Freud's id was similar to the yid, to show how much like the mind [of] the average recently assimilated Jew [who] would put up a mask of civility before making a mistake that showed his ghetto roots.

These thinkers—although this doesn't include all Jews—never understood Western concepts of individualism, honor, heroism, nationalism, freedom, private property and duty, since the Jews hadn't had enough military experience to cultivate these. When you're looking at mismatches between things [that] anti-semites criticize Jews doing, it's normally a disjoint relating to this.

Jewish culture tends to be built around following ideological principles irrespective of actual world conditions, whether or not they make sense. For leftists of Jewish ancestry, they see this as furthering their religion of leftism, while for Western nationalists it's the destruction of their nations.

In other words, Jewish ghettoes were fragment societies.

The gulf in attitudes between secular Jews of the West—particularly the US—and those of Israelis are widening as the former are absorbed into what Rudyard Lynch calls the urban monoculture while the latter are dealing with governing a state and defending their borders, becoming a martial people in the process. Cultures operate as sets of normatively and socially reinforced and reproduced life strategies, hence they can, and do, change under the right sorts of pressures and shifts in circumstances.¹

Jewish newspapers and magazines are notorious for regularly going bankrupt due to successful libel suits, because Jews defame other Jews (and non-Jews). They lack a culture of civil disagreement. Indeed, if you disagree with Jews about something they are emotionally invested in, the responses are often over-the-top, with them treating mere disagreement as a personal—even existential—attack. The travails of UK lawyer Sarah Phillimore is an example of this failure to conform to the norms of public civility necessary for a culture of freedom of thought and speech.

After a period where Jews had considerable cultural power in the Anglosphere—cultural power that was, as we will see, seriously misused—they are now finding themselves increasingly friendless across much of the Anglosphere.

Some of this has nothing to do with them specifically. The combination of the spread of:

1. oppressor/oppressed dichotomy via various forms of Critical Theory—a mode of thought and analysis created by (mostly Jewish) Marxists, or perhaps neo-Marxists, but which has evolved and been disseminated much more widely; with

2. the notion that it is reasonable to expect all groups to have equal social outcomes, such that any failure for that to happen must be due to maleficent reasons; plus

3. Settler-colonial Theory being applied to Israel;

has led to Jews—a notoriously successful group—being tagged as oppressors. (Any oppressor/oppressed analysis is naturally going to end up looking for kulaks.)

But much of the current lack of friends Jews are suffering from comes from the actions of Jews. Specifically, it comes from:

1. the role of the Israel lobby in seeking to bring a Middle Eastern conflict into domestic Western politics; and

2. the systematic attack by the Jewish lobby on freedom of speech and thought.

One of the more irritating patterns regarding the role of Jews in Anglosphere politics is preciousness about the existence of, and the term, the Jewish Lobby. Everyone knows what and who you mean when folk talk of the Jewish Lobby. They mean the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of, and agitate for, Jews. This overlaps with the Israel Lobby: the networks of activists and supporters who speak and agitate in support of Israel.

This is not a post about Israel and Israel-Palestinian contentions, except to note that many Westerners dislike and resent attempts to drag their countries—and their local politics—into apparently endless Middle Eastern conflicts. This dislike extends both to those attempting to make them care about Israel and those attempting to make them care about the Palestinian cause.

Importing such sectarianism into local Western politics is increasingly rebounding against both the local Jewish and the Muslim communities. The Greens losing House of Representatives seats in the 2025 Australian federal election was directly tied to their egregiously pro-Gazan rhetoric, importing—with maximum self-righteousness—a Middle Eastern conflict into Australian domestic politics. The same factor helped collapse the NDP vote in the 2025 Canadian federal election.

It is therefore important to draw a sharp distinction between Israel—an internationally recognised democracy that has every right to defend itself, especially against the openly genocidal terrorist organisation Hamas—and the behaviour of the Jewish supporters of Israel in Western countries, which can be (as we shall see) appalling.

Three levels of failure

For the other point to note—and this goes more directly to the concern of this post—is the counter-productiveness of the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak, and agitate, on behalf of Jews and for Israel. This operates on at least three levels.

The first is the failure of the wider Jewish community to realise how much “wokery” has captured many Jewish academics and intellectuals. The tribalist assumption that all Jews “were on the same page” in the matter of Israel, and preserving Jewish heritage, has proved to be gravely mistaken.

The second—more serious and destructive—negative effect is failing to realise how much the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews, and for Israel, have proved to be excellent recruiters for the pro-Palestinian cause. As soon as such networks monster someone, they will be approached by the Pro-Palestinians. The experience of being monstered by these networks sets people up to become pro-Palestinian, even if they were not already.

Let us be clear what such monstering involves. When someone is targeted by networks of Jewish activists; they will be doxxed; their families will be targeted hoping to use family pressure against the targeted individual; their employer will be bombarded with complaints; any certifying body will get the same treatment; they will be defamed, as columnist Kevin Myers famously was; they can expect waves of threatening letters and public abuse.

All of this being based on taking the most morally important thing about someone as being what they say about Jews, or about Israel; that Jews have the right to control what people say about them and to destroy careers, lives and reputations to do so. In other words, these activists display a viciously uncivil censoriousness.

The third—and most destructive—negative effect has been to assume (1) that the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews and for Israel could never throw away their cultural cachet and (2) their tactics could never be used against Jews. Now that their cultural cachet has collapsed, and such tactics are being used against Jews, the self-destructiveness of activists purporting to speak of behalf of a small minority working consistently against liberal norms of freedom of speech and thought has been fully exposed. (Something they were repeatedly warned about, but failed to pay heed to.)

The point of such liberal norms has always been that protection of one is the protection of all. That any group that pushes structures of censorious persecution—undermining the norms and institutions of freedom of thought and speech—could find that they have ended up stripping protections from themselves.

This is precisely the situation that Jews in the Anglosphere now find themselves: in large part because the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews, and for Israel, have mounted their decades-long assault on the norms and institutions of freedom of speech and thought in the name of the demand to control how others speak of their group. An assault that others are now exploiting against Jews, Israel and Israelis. (The US First Amendment blocking hate speech laws has likely protected American Jews from the full blowback from their activists’ censorious incivility.)

Conservatives in the (non-US) Anglosphere have every reason to be angry at Jews for the way the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews and for Israel were crucial in the development of hate speech laws. Laws which not only were disproportionally used against conservatives, but proved to be the forerunner of ever-expanding structures of censorship. Conservatives in the UK have the particular annoyance of such networks helping to sabotage the—too little, too late—attempt of the UK Conservative government to do something about rampant academic censoriousness.

The perennial campaigns to get people sacked for what they wrote or said have helped generate hostility among unions to Jews and Jewish causes, precisely because of the threats they made to people’s jobs.

Jewish support for mass migration and multiculturalism in the Anglosphere also attracts conservative ire. Not least because of the blatant hypocrisy: so often the same advocates for mass migration—including Muslim migration—into the West, and for multiculturalism that seeks to decouple Western countries from their cultural heritages, have been very much in favour of Israel controlling its borders and using its migration policy to preserve Israel as a Jewish state.

Some of the smarter Jewish commentators—e.g. Andrew Klavan—have worked out that this is very much a losing game. But it is a game that should never have been played in the first place.

As Muslims from the Greater Middle East—Morocco to Pakistan—again and again prove to be poor migrants, a lot of Anglosphere conservatives blame Jews for multiculturalism and high rates of Muslim immigration.

Cartoons of Contempt: When Satire Becomes State Weaponry

As a friend has observed:

The core anger is at Jewish support for mass immigration of Muslims, who right-wingers now want to expel. If that means Israel gets wiped out, they don’t care.

But they are furious with Jews for hate speech laws, for cancel culture, and for “we’re special” (the latter is very intense among Canadians, notably those with Ukrainian surnames).

Support Israel’s right to exist, while still cross about Jews and cancel culture, and for being ungrateful to conservatives for sheltering them after the left threw them out.

Douglas Murray attempting to police who Joe Rogan has on his show is ridiculous and hypocritical. People like Murray have spent years being quietly policed off other people’s shows in exactly this way. Douglas Murray has apparently adopted Jewish censoriousness.

Genocide rhetoric

One grave intellectual damage that the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews, and for Israel, have done is to cooperate with left-progressivists to stop Marxist mass murders having similar saliency to the Holocaust. That Jewish Holocaust victimhood is sui generis—and so must never be compared—is a principle such activists have aggressively supported.

Thus, noticing that many of the Ukrainian Communists who organised the Holodomor were, as it happens, Jewish—a simple historical fact that an afternoon’s research in any decent library can confirm—has been subject to shrieking campaigns of abuse and vilification.

Left-progressivism has been able to get away with far more than it should because the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews, and for Israel, have helped to “pinkwash” history so that Marxist tyrannies and mass murders lack the moral and intellectual salience they should have, in order to preserve the Holocaust as The Great Unique Crime.

At the same time the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews and for Israel have pushed that The Holocaust Could Happen Anywhere, which blatantly contradicts The Great Unique Crime trope. Jews can go “look Holocaust!” and be both morally entitled and avoid facing bad Jewish behaviour. But that requires the Holocaust to be sui generis yet universal: the great unique crime that could happen anywhere. Both these claims are false.

From Jewish to Trans activism

The group that has most obviously copied the tactics of the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews and for Israel in attempting to control how “their” group is spoken of is Trans activists. While admitting the Trans activists’ cause is genuinely evil—how hard is it to work out that hormonally and surgically mutilating and sterilising minors is not an appropriate response to a gender nonconforming child?—and that they have been, if anything, even more viciously censorious with their “no debate” demands (necessary, as they have been pushing blatant untruths), they have clearly copied the Jewish/Israel lobby playbook.

People are increasingly waking up to what destructive nonsense this all is. As one employer said to a past target of such activism:

The letters, the complaints, the badgering: I realised we should not have listened.

Trans activists copying such tactics is part of what is generating the blowback against Jews. More than one person has observed, having observed or experienced their patterns of activism, that:

Jews and Transloons, they’re just the same.

While it is true that various gay and lesbian activist organisations pivoted to Trans to keep the donations flowing, their Trans activism did not replicate the previous campaigns for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

The case for gays and lesbians had been argued in public, using the model of previous civil rights campaigns of “we want to be included”. Instead, the repurposed-for-Trans activism replicated the censoriousness of the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews, and for Israel, treating disagreement as an existential threat and seeking to manipulate institutions while blocking public debate.

Novelist Lionel Shriver recently observed:

In 2010, if you’d polled the public whether it was a good idea to induce widespread and often permanent in-abilities to orgasm and to reproduce in their nation’s children – or in anybody, really – almost no one would have said yes. Virtually overnight, the public has come to endorse child sacrifice.

This points out the genuine power of the activist tactics pioneered by the networks of activists and supporters who purport to speak on behalf of Jews, and for Israel. As someone commented at a private British event after the UK Supreme Court ruled that sex meant biological sex and there were only two:

“It’s caused political fuckery on a scale I can’t credit. I’ve met centre-right anti-trans civil servants who hate Israel and TRAs [Trans Right Activists] because both groups try to get people sacked. Muslims try to get people sacked but are no good at writing letters so they do loud noisy protests instead.” The Jewish and TRA behaviour claim to be “weapons of the weak”. “But it’s not, really—it’s highly effective and makes them hated.”

It does not matter that many Jews are unaware of what has been done in their name. What has been done in their name is many folks’ most salient experience of Jews.

Part of the aforementioned preciousness is to mount some version of the “No True Jew” claim—no True Jew would do this bad thing. This claim is self-exculpatory nonsense that is not only not persuasive, it just comes across as more Jewish “we are special” arrogance.

Things done in the public sphere by Jews will rebound on Jews in general. This is especially so when done by folk purporting to speak and agitate on behalf of Jews, and Israel, but is not restricted to such cases.

Another element in the Jewish/Israel lobby playbook that has been used against Jews and Israel is the trumping victimhood—“there are no historical victims as grandly victimised as Jews”—has now multiplied across the various categories playing oppression bingo, including turning whatever adverse thing into a potential/actual genocide.

Thus, denying “Trans identity” becomes a “Trans genocide”. Urban warfare being prosecuted against murderous religious sectarians who have spent billions turning their own people into human shields becomes “genocide”.

Parading the Holocaust as the central moral fact of Jewish identity—and especially using it is as a censorious moral bludgeon by claiming that “the Holocaust could happen anywhere”—opened the path to using genocide hysteria as a blunt rhetorical weapon.

Australians in particular, but Anglosphere folk in general, have particular reasons to be hostile to this uncivil censoriousness from within their Jewish minorities. Apart from the nasty Irish-Catholic Limerick boycott/pogrom of 1904-6, there has been no anti-Jewish pogrom in the Anglosphere since the C13th.

Australia was particularly welcoming to Jews. The second Chief Justice and first native-born Governor-General was Jewish (Sir Isaac Isaacs). The sixth native-born Governor-General was (Sir Zelman Cowen) was Jewish. The great Australian military hero (Sir John Monash) was Jewish. The Anglosphere never allied with Nazi Germany and spent much blood and treasure in the war to destroy it.

Yet, here was this censorious aggression within a society that had been so welcoming to Jews, with its freedom of speech and thought being systematically degraded by activist networks purporting to speak on behalf of Jews. Jews can thereby come across as precious, self-righteous, and controlling: an unlovely combination. Worse, their activists lead Jews in general being regarded as nasty, ungrateful, censorious, sneaks and dobbers.

Yes, this is a particular subset of the general pathology of activism; the modern activism that degrades all it touches. Activism too often licenses nasty obsessives. Too often, it enables Cluster B personalities to cloak their bad behaviour as being moral concern, as being social concern, enjoying the nasty pleasures of power without responsibility. As writer Aldous Huxley observed:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. … To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Introduction (July 24, 1933), Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1934).

Nevertheless, it is precisely the pioneering role of activists purporting to speak and agitate on behalf of Jews and Israel in developing the claims and tactics of modern cancel culture—especially the demand to control how others speak of their group—that has now rebounded against Jews in general.

Moreover, there may be reasons it was Jewish activists who were the pioneers of all this. Rudyard Lynch again:

37:22 Judaism is possibly the most feminine of the major world religions in its emphasis on submission to an irrational god; it follows lots of ritual prescriptions; and it values family and community above all else. On top of this, the idea [is] that if you follow the religious rules things will work out, not prizing independence or strength as much as other cultures. When you look at Jewish history they normally utilize feminine indirect evolutionary strategies to survive, since they've been so physically threatened for their history that they play into feminine strategies which were developed in order to counterbalance women's physical weakness versus men.

The way Jewish activists have monstered people is classic relational aggression, which is a form of aggression that most suits physically weaker people, including the physically weaker sex. You attack people’s social connections under a guise—including to yourself—of moral and social concern. This makes the aggression more effective and hides from yourself, and others, that what you are doing is aggression.

Jews increasingly lack public friends in large part because of their activists targeting of people, writing to their employers, trying to get people sacked, attacking their social connections, seeking to destroy their careers: all for things they said, even in fictions, even if true. This has now blown back via the doxxing of, and similar attacks on, Jews.

The fall of Jews from the top of the bully-pole has been precipitous. But it was always a potentially catastrophic strategy for a small minority to think it could use such tactics to attack freedom of thought and speech and it would never blow back against them.

Well, now it has. There are now a lot of people—including many conservatives—who are now (quite rationally) angry at Jews. Anger that, especially from conservatives and unionists, can be quite directly laid at the feet of Jewish activist networks and intellectuals.

Rule by scolds

The classic problem of relational aggression—of aggression that parades to itself and others as moral concern, as social concern—is not knowing when to stop. Such unrestrained aggression can emotionally dis-regulate communities and corrode social trust. This is a concern for any human community, but particularly ones that live subsistence, or near-subsistence, lives.

A c.1615 ballad expresses a well-known medieval and early modern response to the corrosive effects of unrestrained emotional aggression:

Then was the Scold herself,

In a wheelbarrow brought,

Stripped naked to the smock,

As in that case she ought:

Neats [ox] tongues about her neck

Were hung in open show;

And thus unto the cucking stool

This famous scold did go.

In most human societies, the response to unrestrained relational aggression by the physically weaker sex (women) from the physically stronger sex (men) was simple: they hit them, using physical aggression against relational aggression. Islam being Islam, it regulates such physical chastisement.

In medieval and early modern Christian Europe, you could not do that, it was assault. Hence, it was turned into a legal matter, with an associated punishment.

Social media has enabled emotional aggression to be far more easily scaled up, though ordinary media has always been a potential vehicle for it, as have whispering and letter writing campaigns.

The massive surge in moral abuse terms in media and academe observed since 2014 has very much been part of the emotional dys-regulation and loss of social trust—the increased political polarisation, the decline in trust in institutions, particularly media and higher education—that we are observing.

The feminisation of institutions—so the movement away from teams to cliques, the shift from facts to feelings—is also in play. Feminism itself is often about rampant scolding; about social aggression, parading as moral and social concern. Hence, if you criticise men, it’s feminism, and if you criticise women, it’s misogyny.

Nevertheless, many of the more effective techniques of such moralised aggression have been pioneered by activists networks purporting to speak on behalf of Jews and Israel as, alas, Jews are clever. Cleverness, like intelligence, is not a virtue in itself. Wisdom is, but there has been precious little of that.

It is clear that folk are increasingly over Jewish scolding, let alone the other forms of activist aggression that Jewish activists have proved so apt at.

Recently, a billionaire Jewish donor to the Manhattan Institute donor publicly boasted of getting economist Glenn Loury sacked from the Manhattan Institute. Glenn Loury is (1) popular among conservatives, (2) morally brave and (3) intellectually serious.

What Is Social Capital?

Who cares what he thinks about Israel-Palestine, about which he explicitly says he is not an expert? Moreover, his views are hardly strange, unusual or extreme. Rather the opposite. Some Jews can see what is wrong with this. Nevertheless, Glenn Loury is merely the latest target of a pattern of behaviour by Jewish activists as self-righteous scolds (and worse) going back decades.

Progressives using oppressor/oppressed framings attack Jews because they are the currently most salient kulaks. Meanwhile, the uncivil censoriousness of Jewish activism alienates conservatives and unionists. This is self-destructive blindness on a grand scale, an astonishing lack of wisdom. How bad do they have to make things for themselves, let alone others, before they learn to stop?

References

Gil Atzmon, Li Hao, Itsik Pe’er, Christopher Velez, Alexander Pearlman, Pier Francesco Palamara, Bernice Morrow, Eitan Friedman, Carole Oddoux, Edward Burns, and Harry Ostrer, ‘Abraham's children in the genome era: major Jewish diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,’ American Journal of Human Genetics, 2010 Jun 11;86(6):850-9. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3032072/

Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Bloomsbury, 2018.

Zach Goldberg, ‘How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening.’ Tablet Magazine, August 05, 2020. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening

David Rozado, ‘Themes in Academic Literature: Prejudice and Social Justice,’ Academic Questions, (2022) 35.2. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/2/themes-in-academic-literature-prejudice-and-social-justice

Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen, ‘The rise and fall of rationality in language,’ PNAS, 2021, Vol. 118, No. 51, e2107848118. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, 2009.

1. It also matters how much reinforcement cultural patterns get. Individuals and small groups of newcomers get absorbed into a local culture much more readily than large groups do. Even within Jewish history, there is a recurring pattern of resident—largely acculturated—Jews looking askance at Jewish newcomers with rather different cultural outlooks and habits.