The Jewish Problem

When I warned you that the "alt-right" was but a mirror image of the identitarian left, I wasn't kidding

Hello, all. It’s been a while! I apologize for the absence. But I needed to step away from political writing for a bit to concentrate on other things. Like my youngest son’s return to wrestling. Congrats, then, to Tanner Hart, District Champion for 6th Grade! Undefeated and unscored upon. In fact, none of his matches made it to the second period. You can watch his season here.

Now. Onward.

First, my thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Baltimore whose lives have been unimaginably impacted by the collapse of the Key Bridge. As some of you may know, though I’ve lived in Colorado for close to thirty years, I grew up in Baltimore. Baltimore County, to be specific. Before moving out west to the University of Denver, I attended high school in Randallstown, MD; I went to college first at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, then Towson State University, and finally, Johns Hopkins, where I did a Masters. Many, many of my closest and oldest friends continue to live in and around Baltimore. So the accident shook me harder than have some others of recent vintage.

Second, and on a slightly different note: I’d like to point out that “Diddy” can be a sex trafficking multi-millionaire engaging in all manner of illegal activity and somehow do so without being backed by a shadowy cabal of Jewish paymasters. When I hear intimations from people like Candace Owens, who seems more like Kanye West by the day, that Combs’ multiple palatial homes were being raided by the feds in order to cover for the real sex traffickers — and we all know who they are run by! — I immediately think two things: such a suggestion is not only unnecessarily conspiratorial, playing into very old hatreds and stereotypes long favored in the black community by the ideological progeny of Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton; but it also makes the implicit claim that black men, despite their wealth and power, have no agency outside of what some shadowy cabal of powerful, circumcised global cosmopolitans allow them.

That must be an awful way to live life, believing that as an individual you can have no free will. But I suppose that’s what it’s like to be kept on a mental plantation.

Note here that I began this second point indicating that the bridge collapse and the Diddy raid were only slightly different. The reason for this is that I read putative Christian Identitarian “conservatives” online yesterday speculating that the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore was the result of retaliation for a certain “genocide” taking place in the Middle East right now. In other words, the Jews caused it. Is there nothing these Satanic wizards can’t do? And why can I not seem to get in on it?

— all of which, in a circular manner, brings me around to the real topic of this piece: the modern “Jewish Problem” as it is increasingly understood by a faction of the “right” whom we’re told are vying for the very soul of conservatism, hoping to save it from the global Jewish interests that control it — and do so with the intent only of securing favors for Israel. As everyone with any Jesus in them knows, you can’t spell “Hell” without the same “e” and “l” that also appear in “Israel.” That’s just science.

To me, this all sounds batshit crazy: Jews, especially the more secular minded Jews, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. There are plenty of reasons for this going back to Kennedy and LBJ, to our coastal political culture in this country, and to a lazy misunderstanding of how the parties have realigned since the Civil Rights movement, etc.; but for our purposes here, let’s keep in mind that it is generally the case that, like tens of millions of people who identify as non-Evangelical Christians, secular or reformed Jews vote almost by rote for Democrats. Making those who “control” the conservative movement the “alt right” is seeking to upend but a subset of an already very small subset of the population.

For those who don’t spend their lives on social media, the current state of things within conservatism — precipitated by the Daily Wire’s having parted ways with popular conservative commentator Candace Owens — is a supposed internecine war between those who fancy themselves “alt right” or “groypers,” and those they consider apostates — conservative figures whom these alt right personalities assure us are Jews or Jew adjacent, and whose longterm goal it is to keep Christians marginalized and demonized.

Once again, this sounds batshit crazy to me, but then, well, “Goldstein,” amirite?

So heated has this battle become that Daily Wire publisher Jeremy Boreing appeared alongside Christian identitarians, groypers, and other “concerned conservatives” in a relatively impromptu social media “Spaces” group discussion to explain how the Daily Wire is actually a conservative outlet that doesn’t merely cater to Jewish interests. And from what I can tell, that shitshow went about as well as any show trial usually does: his responses have been misrepresented online, their context removed; he’s been pilloried as a tool of the “Jew lobby”; and, the verdict goes from the Warriors of Christ, that in parting ways with Candace Owens, he and his company have overtly exposed their deep-seeded hatred for Christians, especially for the kind of modern Christian soldiers one seldom sees outside tales of the Crusades. In fact, many of these alt-right figures responsible for the verdict are requiring declarations from individual Daily Wire figures that decry the choices made by their bosses. Matt Walsh, it turns out, may not be a real Christian, as his failure to label his company a tool for Jews clearly shows. All his concerns over cultural issues are merely a way to distract from the fact that he hasn’t yet saddled up for Christ online.

During this “Spaces” meetup, one of the people taking notes was Megan Basham, who diligently recorded testimony of one Nicholas J. Fuentes, the King Groyper, a man so dedicated to preserving Christianity in its purest theocratic iteration that he is the only man alive not afraid to expose the Satanism of Jews, all day, every day — growing his “groyper army,” as they call themselves, of (largely) disaffected young Christian men with the aim of “taking back” their country from the invidious invading forces of Moloch. Fuentes, some of you may recall, accompanied Kanye West to a meeting with Donald Trump a few years back, and the media was quick to point out how 45 meeting with a pair of Jew-dubious dudes proves that he himself is on board with a “White Nationalist” agenda, one evidently being helmed by a black rapper and a squirrely-looking incel named “Fuentes.” Trump noted that he hadn’t known who Fuentes was — and that’s likely true — but that didn’t do much to ease the concern many of us continue to express about his personnel judgments.

In many ways, Fuentes has become the wan, almost grossly feminized face of the “alt-right,” which — as I’ve noted before — is a decidedly misleading appellation. But it is precisely because he has assumed this role that he and his many online confederates who, since the outset of the America First movement, have joined the ranks of online “conservative influencers,” were invited to participate in the show trial of Ben Shapiro (Ur Jew), and the Daily Wire’s “conventional" conservatism more broadly. Shapiro, it turns out, has had a number of public disputes with Owens, even while she was an employee with the company he co-founded — and Owens, it seems, is determined to monetize this rift by appealing to the Christian identitarians, the groypers, the black nationalists, and other frayed strands of the alt right that have grown in number and become radicalized — in some ways understandably so — over the course of the last decade.

Here’s Basham describing what went on during this “conservative” struggle session:

Being specific is important to me. So let's be specific about some of the things Fuentes said last night. These are direct quotes:

"Jews are a very narcissistic group. Similar to black people."

"We can say Christ is king. And we can say that we would like to live in a Christian country without necessarily always having to be held hostage by these Jews. Like, do you understand how long of a shadow they cast over American life?"

"I don't hate Hitler, you know, I mean, I don't. I'm not in favor of genocide or whatever. But I look at Hitler as a statesman. Hitler didn't kill my people or anything like that."

"Jews globally are extremely networked, they enjoy immense power and privilege." [Fascinating how much Fuentes sounds like Ibram X Kendi or some other CRT proponent here, except his grievance peddling is on behalf of white people].

“We took prayers out of school, we put the Holocaust in, you don't pray in school, we don't learn about the church in school."

"We don't live in a Christian society. That is not the hegemonic religion or the hegemonic philosophy, the organizing principle of the state, it's something else. It's something like liberalism, tinged with, you know, some preference for Jews. And I think that is reflective of the fact that Jews run our society."

Now, for those who want to put in the nearly four hours, certainly go listen to these remarks in context. But he offered no concrete support or citations for claiming blacks and Jews are narcissistic or that our country is "held hostage" by Jews or that they "run our society." Do Jewish people tend to be successful relative to other ethnic/religious groups? Sure. So maybe we should consider the fact that according to Pew, they have second highest marriage and second lowest divorce rates (just behind Mormons, who also tend to be pretty successful). They score third-highest in educational attainment, just behind Hindus and Universalists (both MUCH smaller groups). What Fuentes did was mix things many Christians like me agree with (like that we should be very concerned about how Soros is promoting open borders and we should want Christian leaders and policies) in with things that are manifestly anti-biblical, like obsessing on Jewish privilege. Things that are, in fact, sin. He suggested it's a Jewish conspiracy that the Left talks about the Holocaust so much relative to other genocides when the much more obvious explanation is that the Left doesn't want to highlight mass slaughter driven by socialism. I have zero problem with people who want to argue that it is not in America's interest to devote U.S. resources to Israel's war with Hamas. But that's not what this was. This was not, as he complained during the space, his "greatest hits" taken from over the course of many years or jokes taken out of context. It was all said within the space of about an hour. And it was all said in all seriousness. I believe in the First Amendment and support Fuentes' right to say these things I deeply reject BECAUSE I'm a Christian. So, for those claiming I am "concern trolling," I can assure you, my concern that there is a subset of young men on the right who find such remarks anything more than a manifestation of what seems to be deep seated envy that results in the same divisive identity politics in which the left engages is very real.

Reading this this morning — and having not been asked to take part in the new Inquisition of Jew Apostates — I began to reply to Ms Basham on X. But as my reply began to grow in length, I decided to publish it here, instead.

To begin with, Ms Basham is largely correct, though I’d take issue with her positioning of Fuentes and his band of fey pseudo-warriors on “the right.” As I’ve been writing since before my Federalist piece in 2016, the “alt-right” — here, “groypers” — is beholden to identity, identity politics, tribalism, victimhood, and envy.

That is, they’re leftists who have lost their pride of place on the intersectional totem pole. Because of this, they’ve sought refuge “on the right.”

In that Federalist piece, I made the mistake of believing that this group’s early admiration for Trump meant that The Donald would in fact govern with their interests and ideology in mind. He did not. And Richard Spencer, one of the mouthpieces for racialized identity “conservatism,” accordingly voted for Biden in 2020, a dog returning predictably to his vomit.

Here’s the unvarnished truth. What the alt-right is — what the “groypers” are — is the Klan, repackaged and re-badged. They are Christian collectivists and tribalists. And we should reject them entirely. That we should do so while still fighting against the left’s attempts to demonize whites, or Christians, or men, etc. goes without saying, however. Still, we needn’t invite the most vile of these people and their mindless followers into our tent simply because they are being besieged by other leftists who’ve relatively recently replaced them in the identity politics pecking order.

That is, to believe the left has unfairly vilified and attempted to marginalize certain groups, one need not embrace the very caricature the left presents to justify its vilification. In fact, doing so — and what else is the blustery open antisemitism of the groypers if not that? —is a strategy so absurd that it borders on the unbelievable. And it just may be.

Fuentes, I’ve decided, is either a plant (he agitated for entry into the Capitol on Jan 6, yet he hasn’t been arrested or even questioned, that I’m aware of), or else he’s being amplified by Uniparty types to discredit America First populism and is just too fucking stupid to understand how he’s being used. Either way, he’s doing a bangup job of poisoning an important and necessary movement meant as a check on the ever-growing — and far too powerful — administrative state. And he isn’t alone. During the Trump era, a number of America First “conservative” influencers greatly grew their followings on Twitter / X. And they believe this to be their moment. But they’re reading the room wrong. As these types always do when they’ve reached that lathery point right before sweet, sweet release.

Whether it’s Elijah Schaffer or an0moly or Lauren Chen or some other cliched bigot with a cross plastered into their avatar like a BLM flag, you need reject them. Just because they agree with you on the outsized power of, say, the trans lobby, doesn’t make them conservative. If anything, it bespeaks a certain envy, given the kernel assumptions of the collectivist identitarian ideology that animates them.

When people show you who and what they are, believe them. Calling yourself “conservative” while championing group identity, embracing and policing official group narratives, or demanding public denouncements and public declarations of allegiance to a faith, is like renaming your brisket a green bean, then arguing that obviously you’re a vegan. Don’t you see my green beans, Jew? These ideas are the stuff of intellectual collectivism, of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, of post-colonial cultural Marxist twattle, not of Americanism, classical liberalism, or modern-day conservatism.

Since yesterday the “groypers” decided to rebut my arguments by typing out my last name — Goldstein — as if that was somehow a valid dismissal of the points I was raising, let me be upfront here about my position in re: the post 10/7 Israeli response to the Hamas attacks. It’s not my business. It’s not the UN’s business. US ties to Israel, and the US-Israel alliance, are clearly useful to both countries — for us, as a means of keeping abreast of middle Eastern politics and potential threats to the US and the West from Islamist terror campaigns; for the Israelis, as having the implicit backing of a hyperpower to maintain the only western-style democracy in the region. For those reasons, we give Israel aid, and Israel accepts our aid — as do many other countries across the globe, often for less obvious or understandable reasons. What this arrangement should not mean is that we as the US claim control over Israel’s defense policies. I want the US to take no position on what’s going on in Gaza other than the one that notes Israel has every right to defend itself, its citizens, and to answer an act of war with an act of war.

Personally, I hope the Israelis wipe out every last Hamas member and make the very thought of enabling that group terrifying and fraught with physical consequence. My rooting interest isn’t for “The Jews.” It’s against terrorists and those whose foundational beliefs revolve around bringing about a genocide. You won’t find this conservative on the side of AOC or Rashida Tlaib. I’ll leave that to Christian Warriors like Candace Owens, whose ignorance — publicly corrected, much to her enormous ego’s dismay — on Israeli beliefs and policies in some ways led to her break with the Daily Wire. No, Jews in Israel don’t engage in mandated segregation; no, Jews don’t eat foreskins; no, Jews don’t drink the blood of Christians. What they — or we — do do, too often, is overstate our own victim-hood, especially here in the US. Just as racism exists, so too does antisemitism. But the fact of its existence doesn’t mean it is everywhere always. But this victim mentality is not something peculiar to Jews or blacks or the transgender community. It is instead peculiar to identity politics, to collectivism, to leftism. It’s a method of destruction and chaos. Do I really need to remind the poor victimized Christian identitarians that a purported 81 million people voted for Joe Biden — and that the vast majority of those, from a simple demographics perspective, identify as Christian?

In what I consider an ironic twist, one of the litany of complaints groypers and their putative “conservative” representatives in the social media sphere have leveled recently “proving” Jews control everything is that Congress has broached hate crime-legislation directed toward antisemitism while not immediately doing the same for attacks on Christianity.

Who would be voting for this, should it pass? The all-Jew legislature? Or a body comprised overwhelmingly by those who identify as Christians? Similarly, it never ceases to confound me how people who escaped religious oppression in England to start a largely Christian country in the New World are so ready to scapegoat everyone save those who for centuries actually ran the country. I mean, I’ve heard of Christian forgiveness, but c’mon, guys. Really?

But I digress.

Having made my position clear on a specific point of foreign policy — that I hope the Israelis raze Gaza and reduce Hamas to mist — I suspect, opens me up to claims that I’m a globalist, an interventionist, a “neocon,” and every other sort of shorthand term the alt-right uses when they fear “kike” might be too unseemly. This, despite my not wanting US money spent on a Ukrainian border dispute, my strong stance against illegal immigration in the US (up to an including a re-visitation of Eisenhower policy), my rejection of DEI, and my decades long campaign against Cultural Marxism as manifest in things like “diversity” initiatives and multiculturalist tokenism.

In fact, I have been an open critic of “hate crime laws” and the “multiculturalism” project since well before some of these juicebox Klansmen were born. Among other things, I support prayer in school; I’ve written extensively on attempts to demonize whites and Christians — to the point where I’ve explained how having as a society institutionalized certain incoherent linguistic assumptions, the regression to tribalism through identity politics is baked into our underlying epistemology. And I’ve shown the remedy to it, available to conservatives and classical liberals through a corrective on language.

But all that matters to the “alt-right” is that my last name is “Goldstein.” This makes me “one of them.” Individualism is not only bracketed by such collectivist thinking; it is conceived of as impossible.

What we are experiencing right now — this putative fracturing of the right — is no such thing: it’s an attempt by disaffected leftists (Christian identitarians, in this case, many of whom have a vanishingly small understanding of the Scripture they claim to defend) to lay claim to conservatism, having had their longstanding pride of place within the Democratic party inverted in favor of “marginalized” coalition politics, a real-life Revenge of the Nerds with a noisome political odor. They make no secret of this, in fact. Their goal is to “take over” the conservative movement. And turn it into a Robert Byrd backyard barbecue, only with more Jesus and fewer lawn jockeys.

It is a mistake to “debate” such poison. Like all collectivism and the collectivists who preach it, it is anti-American in a very real sense. And this is true regardless of the religious sloganeering they use as both a cudgel and a shield. No, it’s not anti-semitic to say “Christ is King” if you are saying “Christ is King” in a way that you don’t intend as an attack on Jews. Meaning is determined by intent; and yet, our failure to recognize this allows malign actors to hide behind Christian theology, which we’re to assume cannot under any circumstances mean anything other than what that group as a whole has sanctified.

This is, of course, linguistic and hermeneutic nonsense. Were it not so, irony, for instance, could not exist. Saying one thing conventionally while meaning something else is not only entirely possible, but it happens all the time and is a permanent part of language. By allowing malign actors to hide behind “Christ is King,” pretending that their usage is something other than a way to identify and attack certain of their perceived “enemies,” is to repeat the error of language we’ve long allowed to hold up institutionally: it allows the mob to determine meaning. It collectivizes Christianity in a way that doesn’t allow for individual agency. It is leftism wrapped in God, Country, and flag. It’s the re-emergence of the Klan.

To deplore antisemitic attacks and refuse to “debate” those who traffic in them isn’t to “deny free speech”; it’s to cut out a cancer. The very classically liberal notions the “alt right” reject elsewhere they eagerly embrace when it suits their aims. In this way they are just another tentacle of the Cultural Marxist octopus.

You don’t argue with a virus. You try to eliminate it.

So Ms Basham is correct to have noted who these people are from the perspective of their ideological assumptions. They’re La Raza. The Nation of Islam. The LGBTQ+ Alliance.

They use victimhood as a weapon and a way to justify bullying. Sadly, in this case, the predicate is correct: whites, Christians, and men are being intentionally vilified. But the remedy is not to embrace the worst aspects of the vilified stereotypes. It’s to reject tribalism and collectivism as an organizing principle and reassert the autonomy and primacy of the individual. That’s what our Great National Experiment is based upon.

This is an internecine war, as it turns out. Only it’s similar to the one between Stalinists, Nazis, and Fascists. It’s a war the left is fighting over identity privilege — the natural culmination of a collectivist ideology. And one group has picked up its ball and decided to leave.

They want to come into our house and take up residence.

Why on earth would you let them?

*****

Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?