I'm not a swastika-poster. I hate your Uncle Adolf almost as much as FDR's "Uncle Joe" (may you burn in Hell, Frankie). But tribalism is very interesting, and very real, and in that sense, I feel it necessary to point to some recent posts:
Glenn Reynolds posted a link to an Algemeiner post defending Bari Weiss and said,
Remember: If you interpret “woke” as a synonym for “crazy and stupid” — or, increasingly, “crazy, stupid, and vicious” — you’ll seldom go far wrong.
So far, so good. And Kerstein offers a mildly stiff defense of Western civilization. But that post also made an odd point:
Cancel culture is necessary in order to prevent the spread of racist, violent, and insurrectionary incitement.
He even links to another article he wrote, "We Need Cancel Culture to Fight Hate and Antisemitism, but Must Limit Its Abuse," saying, "Trump deserved to be canceled for his incitement..."
... Really? Because this is a lie and deeply unAmerican.
Remember, HUAC did not pursue Communists. It pursued people who had joined the CPUSA, which was infamously under the control of Comrade Stalin. In other words, they did not investigate belief, they investigated membership in a foreign-controlled political party.
Remember when Gina Carano posted "the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?" Someone noted the Auschwitz Museum posted almost exactly the same thought.
That is correct.
Everyone has political beliefs, even if they can't articulate them. To persecute someone for what they believe is as anti-human as any anti-Semitism, because you're persecuting them for what they are, not what they do.
The old Protestants of the Reformation called this, "freedom of conscience," and this idea was and is anti-thought crime. (Yes, Cromwell and others banned the public practice of the Catholic mass, but the Pope was an enemy of the Anglican Church for a long, long time.)
Not all Jews believe this. A. J. Kaufman, discussing black-on-Asian violence in ‘Whitewashing’ troubling attacks on Asian Americans, said, "Matters aren’t helped when disingenuous outlets like CNN often avoid identifying the ethnicity of the recent assailants... No group has a monopoly on hatred or racism."
Of course, a lot of Jews see Nazis everywhere. Even Dennis Prager fails to fully recognize this failure in "I Now Better Understand the 'Good German'":
Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.
What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter).
It's a good article, but Prager elides a very important point: by the time Weimar hit, the two major parties were the Catholic Zentrum (soft socialist) and the SPD, hemi-demi-semi-maybe-democratic Socialist party.
The Communists, under the KPD, were out to destabilize Weimar and destroy the Zentrum/SPD duopoly, and they co-operated with the Nazis and other radicals to do it... until 1932, when the Nazis were about to seize power, and all of the sudden the Red Shirts became "Antifaschistische Aktion," a monumentally bald-face lie, er, "re-branding" of the people who had made the Germans desperate enough to vote 40% for the Nazis.
We are in the same situation now.
Cancel culture is one step up from early-'90s P.C., closer to the Red Guards and CCP's Social Credit. Some people think we should stay away from CC. "It makes us as bad as them."
No, it doesn't. What did Saul Alinsky say? "Make them live up to their own rules."
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
— H. L. Mencken
Good and hard. Until they stop. Until they apologize to the people they tried to destroy.
Interesting post with some good info, but where did the 80% figure in OP come from? Are you conflating "voting for Democrats" with "loving Cancel Culture"?
Yes. And I don't think I'm wrong to do so.
I think almost every Jewish American who's come out against cancel culture has been: a Leftie personally defenestrated (Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein); already on the right (Gad Saad, David Cole, Daniel Greenfield, Andrew Klavan, but NOT Ben Shapiro who tried to blacklist Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, and Milo); or a few dedicated contrarians (Bill Maher). The people howling on YouTube about cancel culture on YouTube are overwhelmingly not Jewish. (Nor are they conservatives, largely.)
Obviously, I think this is very sad.
Let's take a look at the Jewish votes for President, GOP side:
2004 Bush 24% 2008 McCain 22%
2012 Romney 30%
2016 Trump 24%
2020 Trump 22%
Trump did well in 2016, but Romney is the real outlier. He almost beat Ronald Reagan, who got only 31% and 35%. (Carter had the Camp David accords. Freakin' Eisenhower beat Hitler and only got 36% and 40%. Think about that.)
Trump was polarizing, yes, but Israel is even more so.
Romney was a standard Conservative Inc., RINO candidate, not too different from McCain. What was so compelling about Romney?
I think it's his religious minority status. (Or identity, pardon while I roll my eyes.)
Romney is Mormon, of course. Yes, his essential RINOcity may have attracted some of the Jewish vote; he was governor of Massachusetts after all.
Take a second look at that Mondoweiss article linked above. "Asked whether antisemitism stems from the right or left, or is not a political ideology, here’s how Jews respond":
Pity they don't say how which group of Jews (religious/agnostic, political spectrum) responded.
How annoying: 42% of American Jews think the GOP wants them dead. But in another light, 43% of Jews think it's equal or only "mostly" right-wing. (The threshold for "mostly" is usually 55/45.) Perhaps they consider al Qaeda or ISIS "right-wing," in spite of being nothing an American would consider right-wing.
It's that 29.8% who interest me. "Social/cultural/ethnic factors". Is this really a ethno-cultural issue, or is it where leftie Jews who think anti-Semitism comes "all" or "mostly" from the Left park themselves? "Ah, poverty [or marginalization or the patriarchy or ...] causes anti-Semitism," they nod sagely to themselves.
Is this where "Romney's 10%" came from? "Ah, he's a minority like us," they thought, "he'll understand."
But that "not political" part... In addition to Hitler-on-the-brain (which I do not fault them for, anymore than I fault a black American who regards whites with a certain reserve), I think a lot of Jews are exhibiting an anti-majoritarian streak that is damaging the country as a whole―a kind of "Whatever it is (those dumb hicks want), I'm against it."
As I suggested in the post above, most Jewish Americans seem to be placing themselves in a self-fulfilling prophecy:
The endless hostility of Marxists towards observant Jews makes me suspect that the suicidal nature of the strategy is not accidental. (This is hard to distinguish from everyday suicidal Marxism, of course.)
The school lockdowns have convinced most Americans that the teacher unions are out to get them, and have pushed lots of people towards home schooling or toward privatizing education. Given the push for "black-only" spaces from blacks, they may well be in favor of that, too. (As a part anarcho-capitalist, I heard Antifa's first calls for "defunding the police" with glee, though I suspected they wanted to replace cops with social-workers-with-arrest-powers, which they do.)
But not the Democrats, and not non-Orthodox, non-right-wing Jews. Which brings up another hard-to-answer thought: does the relentless drive to over-regulation provoke the hostility which Jews interpret as anti-Semitism, which drives even more efforts to over-regulation?