Never Again, again

Canceling the Canceling of "Cancel Culture"

In a post to X yesterday, Megan McCardle, lately of The Washington Post (but to me, always a fellow old-school political blogger), tried tightening the strands of the Gordian knot many coastal intellectuals have been keen to anchor with of late — namely, the supposed difficulty of reconciling support for free speech with the uncomfortable, or at least, inconvenient, specter of the educated elite, from whom their kind routinely draws the next generation of ideological reinforcements, protesting in support of a government explicitly dedicated to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Using the context of calls by some business people to make publicly available the identities of Harvard students who have joined with Hamas in condemning the Jews — whether the “villains” are couched as “Zionists” or “Israeli colonialists,” et. al. — McArdle, in reaction to a New Yorker piece exploring the fallout for the “courageous” students at Harvard who publicly supported the terror group whose stated goal is genocide, performs the intellectual prestidigitation favorited by her media colleagues:

I am against cancelling students who issued tone-deaf statements downplaying Hamas atrocities. But I am also goggling at the assumption that what protects them is not free speech norms, but the scandalous impossibility of firing too many Harvard alums.

Note here that McArdle’s concern isn’t the downplaying of Hamas atrocities, which she dismisses as the mere “tone-deaf statements” of “students” who by dint of not having completed their Harvard educations cannot possibly be held responsible for the stances they take. Instead, what really steams Meghan’s beans is that these same students assume that a consequent mass “firing” of Harvard students connected to pro-Hamas protests would be “scandalous” and socially untenable.

For McArdle, highlighting the students’ smug entitlement while simultaneously forgiving the substance of their public denouncements of the Jewish State as mere rhetorical faux pas — just the workaday consequence of an elite education that has not yet extended to the graduate level, where presumably Harvard students are taught to better disguise their antisemitism, or at least, keep it to themselves until they reach such a point professionally where they’re able to get away with holding such views — is the compromise she makes between what she must feel is some sort of necessary condemnation that, in the end, hides the real and significant offense committed by the most privileged of the radical chic.

The truth is, these students didn’t offer “tone deaf statements” in the laudable and courageous course of free speech activism. Rather, as the presumptive future leaders of a pluralist country — adults who have access to more information faster than any others like them in history — these self-satisfied virtue groupies got a charge out the transgressive stance of blaming the Jews for the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of their own civilians, many of whom were killed in door-to-door sweeps whose object was their complete extermination.

It is not “cancel culture” to hold supposedly highly educated and privileged adults to account for their support of genocide — and it is now incontestable that the aims of Hamas, as they have long held explicitly in their charter, is not peace, or land. It is the extermination of the Jewish people, wherever they are on earth.

That these privileged, self-important, and morally vacuous future leaders have adopted and furthered the kind of post modernist theories of racialist “oppression” dynamics central to leftism such that they believe them plausible cover for — if not the proximate cause of — their ostentatious antisemitism, simply underscores the rot in our culture that will only be extended by granting these people unearned grace.

We are facing a new Nuremberg moment, and it is not a “blessing of liberty,” as many kamikaze liberalists believe, to forgive active calls for genocide, or the active support of exterminationist terrorism.

No. It is our duty rather to reject such sanctimonious twaddle. Because to do so is to be civilized. And in a sane world, it should be a civilizational imperative to root out and reject those who’d luxuriate in the prospect of a nice, meaty genocide.

Never again meant never again. Again.

The push back against this desire by some including myself to publicly “out” terror humpers, is — predictably — a cynical appeal to the very liberal ideals the terrorists have absolutely no use for, but which the left raises to shame us into committing cultural suicide. In this case, we’re told that should we outrageously demand consequences for those actively supporting terrorists acting on bounties offered by Hamas leadership, we are really no better than the terrorists. Which is of course utter nonsense. You may as well be equating rapists with those who find it problematic, as a matter of empirical certainty, to “believe all women”.

More, in addition to the absurdity of such a repulsive equivalency, no one wants to punish these people for their speech, which they’re free to formulate, articulate, and air publicly. Instead, what some of us are supporting is the gathering up of information that makes it easier for future employers, many who may not wish to have their businesses tethered to genocidal ideation, to identify those whose past positions, publicly extolled, promoted the cause of terrorists who intentionally targeted civilians for extermination. In short, it’s a business decision that takes into account the content of speech offered freely. You can have your speech. I can protect my business from it.

And that’s because to correctly diagnose our current morass of feel-good libertarian-tinged liberalism, we know that 1) intellectual fashions change over time, and 2) the left will be there to hang the past around the necks of anyone they feel presents a threat to their long march, using any out of context utterance to do so; and therefore, turnabout is fair play — especially when the offense is real, as in the case of literally supporting a genocidal medieval death cult.

Identifying willing and public enablers of genocidal terror based in ancient blood libels so that someone somewhere is given prior warning before fiscally subsidizing those who have supported the would-be murderers of an entire ethnic demographic, isn’t untoward or unfairly punitive.

Indeed, what such a civil movement should represent is a lesson to all those who, in the moment, feel — correctly, to this point — that the safety of belonging to the mob allows that their object of hate, being the scapegoat for much of the “global community,” will not cost them the fruits of their incredible privilege. In fact, such a stance, whether real or cynical, can only help bolster their social bona fides within the circles they hope to run.

It’s time we were honest about what we’re seeing in the aftermath of Israel’s decision to react to the unprovoked attack on its civilians by Hamas terrorists: people on the left, though not at all exclusively, using a “fog of war”-excuse to lend cover to their desire to assert Israel’s culpability. Immediately in the aftermath of attacks on Israeli civilians, these wannabe revolutionaries showed a fevered inclination to believe Hamas — which has as its aim the elimination of Jews.

Safe, radical chic LARPing, never accompanied by actual consequences.

Again, these aren’t misguided youth issuing “tone-deaf statements” from which they might one day learn of valuable retrospective lesson; these are instead young adults, often sophisticated and cynical, raised in activism to assess power dynamics and gain cultural favor in the “liberal” West — awash not in actual liberalism but in identity Marxism masquerading as liberal — by siding with the supposedly oppressed victim group.

Their public reaction was a conscious attempt by these Harvard students (and it wasn’t relegated simply to them) to project self-righteous radicalism, to condemn the “oppressors” as the true villains of their own rapes, murders, and kidnappings — regardless of the political beliefs of the actual individual victims, many of whom may very well have been Israeli leftists who supported “Palestinian liberation” or pressed for “Palestinian rights” in Israel beyond that which the Palestinian authority itself grants its own people.

The politics of the Israelis who were attacked didn’t matter. Their potential solidarity with the Palestinian cause didn’t matter. They were Jews, and Jews must die. This is the policy of Hamas as recorded in its charter. And it is one of the inevitable ends of identity Marxism: a return to tribalism and pre-propositional nations. Medievalism.

Sadly — and predictably — the real revelation in the aftermath of the attacks has been the support for Hamas from many on the alt-right, who — as white identitarians (whom we used to call “Klan apologists”) — reverted to their Democratic Party form, embracing identity politics and Marxist tropes about colonialism and power to condemn the Jews, in many cases even going so far as to revive conspiracies about the “Jewish media” and its control over master narratives — an accusation convenient to them in at least two ways: first, it sets them up as reluctant, world-weary prophets with the perspicacity to see beyond the veneer of Jewish lies that direct Western media; and second, that this in turn allows them to tether a “conservative” distrust of mainstream media to Jews in the abstract, and to the Zionist global network of intelligence assets in the immediate and tangible present, further driving together America First conservatism and white Christian identitarianism — the latter of which has long held a special and dazzling distrust of Jews, whom they feel are the far more serious threat to their white Christian nationalist claim to identity supremacy than any wretched Bedouin peoples ever could be.

In a post last evening, Professor and Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Gad Saad, tried to articulate the despair many of those sympathetic to Israel have been feeling over the past several weeks. Writes Saad:

Over the past two weeks, the reality has been unabated, unhinged, orgiastic Jew-hatred. They are coming from all directions. I do not see a way out of this. Nothing seems to temper the attacks, the delusions, the hateful fervour. I’m trying to play out different scenarios and it looks so bleak. I always believe in the power of reason but not if your predators are foaming with genocidal zeal. I truly think that this might be a historical tipping point in the West. Good night.

— to which he received what has become a rather boilerplate rejoinder:

All of this hatred is fueled by the US and Israeli leaders indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and Westbank, and the revelation to ( previously unaware ) global population of the living conditions of Palestinian people. The solution alway begins with a ceasefire.

The combined arrogance and ignorance here — the idea that the “global population” is only now becoming aware of the “living conditions of the Palestinian people” — is hardly surprising, because it allows its adopters to shift blame to the powerful “oppressors” while entirely ignoring the fact that the rest of “global population” shocked by the state of Palestinians has done precisely dick to take them in; and it completely ignores the massive aid monies sent to the Palestinians that have been directed toward wiping out Jews rather than toward improving those living conditions the leaders of Hamas want to keep dire as a way of promoting international sympathy from pig-ignorant people like this gentleman.

Meanwhile, we hear from White Christian nationalists such “reasoning” as this:

Perhaps if a certain community didn’t sit there and let lobbies push for policy and narrative that Christian Europeans and Americans need demographic replacement, you might see more people on your side. Not too late to reflect and start a dialogue on that.

The “certain community” he’s alluding to here isn’t the one comprised of secular leftists who happen to be Jewish, and who join with all the non Jewish demographics — far greater in number — pushing multiculturalism, racial essentialism, intersectionality, identity politics, and other tenets of Cultural Marxism. No. Instead, he’s referencing the Jews both specifically and en mass as a singular identity comprised of a singular aim. And the reason he’s doing this is because he believes that, like him, everyone thinks in terms of tribal allegiances rather than individual agency. Groypers gonna groyper, I guess.

Is there a way back from this mess of coalitions and pacs angling for cultural power? I have no idea. But what I do know is that there is nothing “conservative” about those putative conservatives who have unmasked themselves as a result of the current conflict.

They jumped the gun. So desperate have they been to decouple the US from Israel — the Christian from the Jew — that they pounced on the first real melee to draw-in ranks and, rather unsurprisingly, find ways to place the blame with the Jews.

That’s what leftists do and have always done. Even those who pretend they aren’t leftists — but whose rejection of the current identity politics isn’t a rejection of the politics, but rather a rejection of where they stand in the current victim Olympics.

*****

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