The Death of an Epithet

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I hate to be an optimist. But whenever I see an epithet begin to die, I have to smile a little.

So, here is a tidbit of 2016 ephemera that I’m sure we are all going to forget in a few weeks. Writing from her perch at the Daily Beast, Russian-born Jewish writer Cathy Young took a nasty swipe at Ann Coulter. The topic, of course, was Miss Coulter’s supposed anti-Semitism. During one of the Republican debates last year, Miss Coulter famously tweeted “How many f**ck­­­ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?” With this as a starting point, Miss Young then expanded her broadside to include the entire Alt-Right.

According to Miss Young, we’re all a bunch of anti-Semites, and therefore are bad, bad, bad. Adjectives are her thing, apparently, since she uses them a lot. In the first paragraph alone she employs “ugly,” “rabid,” “extremist,” and “virulent” to describe us. Of course, the idea that she herself might be these things as well never occurred to her.

Ramzpaul offers a nice take ^[2] on her article. Vox Day outright refutes it ^[3].

My take on it is slightly different. I would like to direct everyone’s attention to the stridency of Miss Young’s tone. She reminds me of a person waiting for an elevator. She presses the button once and nothing happens. Then she presses it again, and again, and again. Still nothing. Then, in a spasm of impatience, she begins to pound on the button rapidly and with far more force than necessary. As if that would bring the elevator any sooner.

This is essentially her anti-Semite charge. As its effectiveness weakens over time, her delivery of it becomes more and more desperate and, well, strident.

But why is her anti-Semite charge getting weaker? I can think of several reasons.

For one, by going after the Alt-Right, she’s picking the wrong target. Yes, there are people to the right of mainstream conservativism who hate Jews, just as there are people in the mainstream left and beyond, Jews included, who hate white gentiles. However, her mistake is to mistake Judeo-criticism with anti-Semitism. The term anti-Semitism originated in the 1870s as a euphemism for Jew-hatred. A true anti-Semite believes that the only redemption for a Jew is to die. Anti-Semites in the Arab world would like nothing more than to take over Israel and kill every Jew in it. That is anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, what you get much of the time from the Alt-Right is expansive criticism of Jews based on their behavior as minorities in white, Christian countries for hundreds of years. Some of that criticism may be a little nastier than others, true. You may also find some resentment and can argue back and forth whether it is justified. But Miss Young should remember that Jews are not above criticism, and gentiles have the right to criticize them (as Jews in the Frankfurt School have been doing to gentiles for years). Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique is a great example of this. He’s not calling for genocide. He’s simply offering a cohesive and evolutionary theory which explains the remarkably consistent Jewish behavior throughout history. Sure, his view of Jews is hardly flattering, and one can agree with it or not. But that is small potatoes compared to the anti-Semitic bile coming out of the mouths of Muslims every day in the Middle East.

I believe that most on Alt-Right go from grudging respect to enthusiastic support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself. Ramzpaul and Vox Day support this right (as do I). After all, the unifying theme on the Alt-Right is for whites to form a whites-only state as well. Many of us support Jews living in a Jewish ethnostate just as much as we support the Japanese living in the Japanese ethnostate known as Japan. We’re just waiting for mainstream Jews such as Cathy Young to return the favor. So is it any wonder that we grow frustrated and angry when they don’t, and instead paint us awful people?

Miss Young would rather group us with the most hateful anti-Semites out there than admit that our Judeo-criticism has any validity at all. So when she accuses us of being bigots, perhaps she should also hurl that epithet at a mirror.

The second reason why her anti-Semite charge is not as strong as it used to be (at least as it appears in her diatribe against Miss Coulter) is that it is laden with proxy arguments. Here is the course of most of her attack on Miss Coulter:

1. Miss Coulter used the F-bomb when describing Jews
2. Miss Coulter is associated with VDARE.
3. VDARE publishes race-realist writers such as Jared Taylor (gasp!)
4. VDARE features Confederate flags
5. VDARE supports white identity
6. VDARE wishes to reduce nonwhite immigration
7. VDARE opposes black-white miscegenation
8. Miss Coulter retweeted tweets from people who are very critical of Jews
9. Therefore, Miss Coulter is anti-Semitic.

So what exactly do points three through seven have to do with anti-Semitism? Nothing, really, except that Miss Young dislikes them almost as much. Jared Taylor is, of course, no anti-Semite. The Confederacy had a Jewish treasurer named Judah Benjamin. Meanwhile, Jews in Israel trumpet their Jewish identity, limit non-Jewish immigration, and oppose Jew-gentile intermarriage quite strongly as well. One can be openly pro-Israel and philo-Semitic and agree with these points.

In point eight above, she complains about the sources of Miss Coulter’s retweets, but doesn’t show the tweets themselves. This is because they had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. One claimed that young conservatives read Alt-Right media rather than NRO. And the other dealt with Donald Trump getting Mexico to pay for his Wall. So, again, what does this have to do with Miss Coulter’s supposed anti-Semitism?

A third reason of the weakening of Miss Young’s position is that she finds it sufficient just to level charges against Miss Coulter and the Alt-Right without bothering to determine if these charges are as bad as she thinks they are. She did not ask if the white identity promoted by VDARE and other sites is a good thing. She also did not ask if ending nonwhite immigration and black-white miscegenation are also good things. People on the Alt-Right make some very convincing arguments that they are, in my opinion. Yet Miss Young keeps her blinders on by insisting that anything to do with white identity is an a priori evil. She doesn’t bother to drill down and prove this because, within her comfy Pauline Kael-like bubble, she just assumes that all reasonable people agree with her.

Furthermore, she doesn’t realize that by supporting nonwhite immigration, she is working against the racial interests of whites, who are slated to become a minority in their own country in thirty or forty years. This is frankly offensive. So it behooves one to point out that perhaps one reason why some whites resent Jews in the first place is because of the obnoxious behavior of people like Miss Young.

Finally, Miss Young does not realize that the reason why the anti-Semite charge ever worked at all is because it has primarily been used against whites. Whites and only whites are sensitive to this sort of thing whether because it effectively shames them (since many whites like nothing more than to nurse their guilty consciences) or forces them to contemplate difficulties they, living in a prosperous country, would rather not deal with.

Here is an example from history to illuminate this point. In the late 1940s powerful Jews employed a strategy called “Dynamic Silence” to stifle rabble-rousing politicians who were hostile to Jewish interests in America. Whenever they went somewhere to speak, groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress would contact local newspapers and radio stations and threaten them with the boycott of Jewish advertisers if they covered their speeches. This strategy worked well and helped marginalize anti-Semitism in America in the post-war period. On the other hand, it also helped make Judeo-criticism taboo.

If Miss Young thinks that Dynamic Silence would work on Muslim business owners once Muslims outnumber Jews in this country, she’s dreaming. Further, there just aren’t enough Hispanic or black entrepreneurs (compared with white ones) to make up the difference. Even if there were, it’s an open question whether they would be more hostile to Jewish interests than whites were, hostile enough to overcome economic pressure to comply with strategies such as Dynamic Silence.

As America becomes less and less white, the ability of Jews to manipulate public opinion through the media will decline. Jews are quite adept at this, but mostly when the opinions they manipulate are those of whites. Whites, bless their hearts, are the only ones who care. Without the Holocaust hanging over their collective consciences like a Damoclean sword, would Mexicans or Guatemalans care if Miss Young were to call them anti-Semites? I doubt many from India or the Far East would either. If given enough political power, Muslims in this country would gladly cop to such a charge and call it a good thing. At that point, the potency of the anti-Semite charge would evaporate entirely.

So why is Miss Young opposing Miss Coulter’s position on immigration? Because people on the Alt-Right are also immune to her charges and sometimes bring up the negative things Jews have done throughout history? Is this really a good enough reason? I believe that if Miss Young gets her way by stifling resistance to nonwhite immigration, the last thing people like her would have to worry about is the Alt-Right.

But instead of appreciating this strange irony and proposing ways to work with the Alt-Right (many of whom are already sympathetic to Jews identifying as Jews and have no problem with Israel), Miss Young prefers to keep hitting that button as hard and as fast as she can, hoping that that elevator will someday arrive.

She would probably do better by taking the stairs.