Progressives and the far right share a mutual antisemitism. The revival of Jew-hatred has become a problem we can no longer ignore. It shapes politics in the West.
I’ve had conversations with people who condemn Israel’s just war against Hamas—a rational response to the pogroms of October 7—who admit that they are ignorant about October 7. “When did that happen?” No, how did that happen? How could you not know about October 7? I think we know the answer to that question.
For many, Israel is perceived as a white-settler colonial state that periodically bombs Gaza to advance the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land. Why do they refuse to accept that Jews are the indigenous peoples of that land and that Palestinians are a social construct? They’ve uncritically accepted a revisionist history in which Jews are aggressive and avaricious, devoid of humanity. It’s the enduring stereotype of an ancient hatred, just repackaged as “anti-Zionism.”
I see images every day on social media showing the ruins of Gaza City. I respond by sharing images of German cities after Allied bombing during WWII. (There are essays on this platform that contain those images.) This is what fascist aggressors have coming to them, I remind them. I thought you were antifascists.
“But the children!” they cry. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 350k to 500k German civilians were killed during WWII, around 50k to 100k of them children. War is terrible. But the aggressors are to blame, not those who meet aggression with necessary violence.
My counters are futile. They’re true believers. The ghost of Hitler is used to smear Trump, while his Arab allies are portrayed as “victims” of the Jews. Indeed, the world is a victim of the money-changers. And of Trump (a third attempt on his life occurred just Saturday).
How have so many people been brainwashed to see Jews as the enemy and not the Hamas death cult? Why do they not see National Socialism’s analogue in Islamism? Would they have opposed Hitler if he lived today? “We oppose Trump, don’t we?” Good Lord.
Reviving Jew-hatred has been years in the making. Postmodernist notions—critical race theory, post-colonial studies, etc.—and the embrace of Islam on the left are common in university classrooms and in online chatrooms. (Postmodernism is also the parent of queer theory, hence “Queers for Palestine.”)
Matti Friedman identifies the literature at the core of the indoctrination program as “Gazology.” Gazology refashions Israel’s just war as colonialist aggression to reinforce the portrayal of Jews as uniquely evil. The comparison of Zionism (Jewish nationalism) with Nazism is a central part of the Red-Green project, the communist-Islamist front.
A virulent mind virus has infected college students across the transatlantic space. They wear the keffiyeh, march with placards celebrating clerical fascism, chanting genocidal slogans (“From the River to the Sea.”). Far right podcasters—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones—thrive on antisemitism. They’re natural allies to the antisemitic left.
Jew-hatred is not just a rank-and-file phenomenon. Transnational elites—super-rich financiers—bankroll street-level action pushing the Islamist narrative. The MSM treats Israel as an exceptional case, immoral for exercising the right of sovereign nations to collective self-defense. They recognize that Israel is the Oriental outpost of the Enlightenment. And they hate that.
The double standard that marks antisemitism is stark to those who see what they see. During WWII, the West didn’t secure a ceasefire with Nazi Germany. The forces of the Enlightenment ground Hitler’s monstrosity into dust and denazified the population. Yet Israel is supposed to quit its war with clerical fascism. Anybody working from clear reason knows that anything less than the total annihilation of Hamas will guarantee future pogroms against the Jews. The global elite shame Israel into passivity to give Hamas time to regroup. One could infer this from the facts, but the antisemitic network is explicit about its aims.
This is why the progressive left and the far right oppose preemptive war in Iran. The Iranian Islamic Republic bankrolls Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, and uses the proxies to wage war against the Jews.
But it’s more than this. The Islamic Republic is part of a global network whose designs undermine the West.
A major actor in the project is the CCP. A significant percentage of China’s oil comes from Iran. China needs Iranian oil to fuel its expansionist project. Transnational elites need China for its export processing zones. China is a major destination for the jobs Americans depend on for their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals come to America every year. They take jobs from Americans and steal American technology.
These are the sides of the global struggle for human freedom: On one side are the enemies of freedom, and tens of millions of their devotees walk amongst us. They enjoy major party representation—in America, the Democrats have been advancing the project for decades.
On the other side are conservatives and liberals who defend the liberal capitalist arrangements that liberated creativity and expression from the chains of the Ancien Régime. This is America First, and, more broadly, West First.
The latter is my choice of comrades. America First is defending Western Civilization against the barbarians who would return us to the Ancien Régime, reducing the proletariat and the middle class to serfs to be managed on high-tech estates in a neo-feudalist world order. The enemies of freedom seek a new Dark Ages.
George Orwell warned us about this development. The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, is arrested by the totalitarian socialist state of Oceania and “re-educated” in the Ministry of Love. His interrogator, O’Brien, isn’t merely trying to extract a confession—he’s trying to completely reshape Winston’s mind so he genuinely believes whatever the Party says.
During one exchange, Winston asks about the future. O’Brien responds, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
freedom and reason 