Anti-semitism

In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced. His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was. Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats.

It’s Thursday morning as I write. Has The Wall Street Journal weighed in with another attack on Kevin Roberts yet, the besieged president of the Heritage Foundation? No? Be patient. It’s early hours yet. Another fusillade is due any minute.  I have written about that tempest-in-a-teapot myself. I agree that Roberts’s brief video statement defending the Heritage Foundation’s friendship with Tucker Carlson was ill-advised. I say why in that column. I also think that his efforts at damage control have been ineffective. But given the incontinent fury of the response to that two-minute and thirty-nine-second video, I am not sure that anyone could have calmed the storm.

Many conservatives will have long suspected that “woke” language – the cocktail of victimhood narratives and group identity – alienates most Americans. It is simply too grating, and it is simply too divisive. And no matter what your politics, it is almost impossible to imagine a healthy society that is built on an aggressive competition over who is the most historically aggrieved.  Up until now this has been mostly an intuition. But a new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) finally puts evidence on the table: that this “woke” language actively provokes real anger, defensiveness and bile in respondents.

If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the day well – Tuesday was the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage. Tuesday’s hate-fest was not, of course, an unusual event. The first demonstrations in support of the 7 October massacre of Jews took place in west London on the day of the massacre itself. And the protests have not stopped since. In fact, they have only swelled in number.

The deliberate slaughter of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023, was the most consequential event in the modern Middle East. It sent powerful reverberations across the region and well beyond it to the United States, the UK, Europe and Russia. Those tremors, like the war begun by the massacre, continue to this day. On that fateful day, Hamas terrorists left Gaza, crossed into Israel in a carefully-planned attack, designed to kill as many Jews as possible and take others captive for negotiating leverage. The terrorists attacked young, unarmed concert-goers at an Israeli music festival and the residents of a nearby town. The attack killed 1,195 innocents. Approximately 250 more were taken hostage, dragged back to Gaza and held for ransom by their kidnappers.

Two things happened online in the past week or so, both online, both quite mad. First was the spread of a podcast clip – hosted by “men’s health” influencer Myron Gains – featuring a rainbow coalition of Gen-Z Americans discussing whether Germany’s 1930s Jews had done something to make the Nazis hate them. They reimagined Hitler as someone who simply had to perpetrate a genocide because the Jews deserved it. The second event was an American Eagle jeans advertisement starring Sydney Sweeney. One of these moments caused a meltdown about the rise of Nazism, and it wasn’t the podcast.

There is never a dull moment in the second, more cheerful reign of Donald Trump. I am writing from London, but was in France last week, picking my way through various battlefields and cemeteries in and around Verdun, Bastogne (think “Easy Company” and “Battle of the Bulge”), and Reims. Well-informed readers will know, as I did not, that “Reims” is not pronounced as its letters might suggest but rather as a nasalized “Reince.” I have always associated the place with champagne, and I am pleased to say that the city capitalizes on the association. But one point of interest had nothing to do with that magical elixir. Reims was also the location of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters at the end of World War II.

While celebrating his signature legislative achievement, President Trump managed to wade into another ridiculous controversy this holiday weekend. In a Thursday night speech touting the benefits of the Big Beautiful Bill for family farmers, he said: “No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases, shylocks and bad people,” Trump said. “They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.” “Shylock”, of course, refers to the Jewish character from The Merchant of Venice, who demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt.

Some dumb people made a dumb decision at a bar in Philadelphia this weekend. In a booth at the Barstool Sports-owned Sansom street, a group of guys paid a waitress to hold up a sign that said "Fuck the Jews." In their pisswater beer-soaked joy, they giggled and filmed it and put it on Instagram. In the hours after, professional doxxers StopAntisemitism located the video, identified the young men and blasted their name all over X. Enter Barstool founder Dave Portnoy. Dave, for those unaware of his antics, is what could best be described as a professional beefer. He fights anyone, usually on Twitter, and has threatened to “skullfuck” his adversaries with tweets on multiple occasions. He also happens to be Jewish.