Antisemitism as the Resting State of the Far Right

Accept it and move on

In my previous article, I argued that the concept of antisemitism should be restricted to a modern ideology, originally identified under that name by its own proponents. It should not be used, by contrast, to denote an essence unifying disparate forms of conflicts or persecutions in Jewish history, because doing so creates an ‘anti-concept’, the union of unlike things which makes it harder, not easier, to think clearly about reality.¹

If you accept the argument, various things follow fairly automatically. First of all, there is no such thing as ‘left-wing antisemitism’. There are probably left wingers who are antisemites, just like there are right wingers who are into anarcho-syndicalism - the world is a funny place - but antisemitism is always a right-wing ideology.

A lot of people miss this because they see left-wing anti-Israel activism and conclude that it is so perverse, so irrational, so devoid of anything resembling a genuine and sincere interest in improving the general lot of mankind that it just must be antisemitism behind it. No, dumbass, they’re like that about everything. Leftism just *is* callous altruism in the same way that a crisp just *is* a fried slice of potato.² This isn’t hard to demonstrate. Go ask a leftist - any leftist - how they feel about the fact that, since Black Lives Matter, the number of black people being murdered and dying in car crashes has increased as a direct result of their ‘activism’. They really, genuinely just don’t care at all. If you campaigned for Rhodesia - where native blacks had easily the highest standard of living in Africa - to be turned over to Communists, and then they murdered a bunch of people, and there was a massive famine, and hyperinflation, and people infecting themselves with AIDs to qualify for food aid, then probably you’d feel bad. They don’t. They don’t at all. It moves them precisely 0cm before they move on to their next ‘cause’. The moment they develop an ability to care about the chaos they leave behind them is the moment they stop being leftists. T.S. Elliot nailed this all the way back in 1948.

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

We know this already; why do we have to talk about it anymore? Can’t we say something original?

Confessions of a Rightoid

Stereotypically, I was once a communist, but my parents were too improvident for me to take cocaine money to university, so I got over it pretty quickly. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have forgotten about politics entirely, knuckled under and made bank, but I didn’t and spent the best years of my life reading old books and slowly radicalising myself. Memories can be deceiving, but I can pinpoint quite precisely when I became Far Right, because it was reading VDare articles about the Trayvon Martin case when I was supposed to be finishing my PhD. That’s 12 years ago now, 1/3 of my entire life, 2/3 of my time as a legal adult. During all those years, I was a pathetic scroller lurking under articles, periodically commenting. All of this is to say that I know Far Right politics well, far too well, and that is why, today, I am bravely telling you to vote Kamala Harris for President in 2024.

/jk.

What I will do, though, is share a bit about how the Rightoid mind works. Unlike conventional explainers of the Far Right that you can find in academia or online zines, this isn’t motivated by feelings of superiority or hatred; it’s motivated by feelings of self-hatred, feelings so deep they can only be soothed by you, dear reader, subscribing.

Anyway, perhaps we should get on with it. The first characteristic of the Far-Right mind is the desire for anthropomorphic theories of socioeconomic reality. What I mean by that is the need to fit the data of reality into a shape that makes sense in terms of a consciously conceived plan to move that reality in a particular direction.

This mindset is commonly given the term ‘conspiracy theorist’, but, on the whole, I think that is usually too generous. A conspiracy theory involves an attempt to tell a story in which the various pieces of data fit into place. Doing so inevitably leads to spiralling layers of complication in which anomalous information can only be accommodated at the cost of creating yet more anomalous data points that can’t be made to fit. Hence this meme:

The typical Rightoid doesn’t bother with any of that. What he does instead is notice some apparently contradictory information, then use innuendo and rhetorical questions to assert that this can only be explained by they planning it. He believes not in conspiracy ‘theories’, but conspiracy deities, shapelessly malleable and borderline omnipotent entities whose mere existence is enough, by their own terms of definition, to explain any kink in the matrix you might observe (and, Heaven knows, the matrix is kinky enough you can do this all day).

To this day, a good portion of my friends are Rightoids. Most of them are good people, and none of them are wholly devoid of positive qualities. The need to anthropomorphise complex social structures exists in them to various degrees of extremity, a product of how frequently they indulge it, but, in all cases, is central to their entire engagement with politics. What I learned after many years is that it’s an act of pure self-harm to try and argue them out of this. You can sit with them, as patiently as you can, for literally hours on end, forcing them to stop changing the subject and actually explain how the different parts of their ‘theory’ fit together, to verbalise each step and watch as it dissolves into undeniable incoherence, and then later the same week they’ll be back with the exact same thing. This is how they want to be. Some people like crackers, and some people like crack. No point in getting aggravated about it (another thing I wish I could go back 10 years and point out to myself).

Antisemitism is a stable Rightoid equilibrium

To recap, the essential quality of the Far Right mind is the desire to explain the world around him in terms of the plan of a conscious intelligence. You therefore need a they; this is the whole point. Once we understand this, it’s pretty obvious why antisemitism exerts this queer magnetic attraction to all who enter the walls of the Far-Right asylum. If you have already decided that someone is behind the curtain driving everything going wrong around you, then who else it is supposed to be? The Yoruba? Inuits? The Jews are an obvious candidate not just because they are genuinely a big deal, but also because there is 150 years of antisemitic literature that you can read explaining how Jews do it and a small army of salesman eager to initiate you into their pyramid scheme. For years, I couldn’t understand why almost any dissident Right article on practically any subject would have at least one comment beneath with a fresh insight like ‘why do they call it the Cathedral, more like the SYNAGOGUE if you ask me!!!!’, but, when you think about it, it’s just good marketing. There’s always someone new who took a fistful of red pills and is looking for the next dose.

I came to this conclusion partly because I watched as, one after another, alt-right commentators and personalities adopted antisemitism with increasingly grim inevitability once they went down the ‘rabbit hole’. I saw it up close and in slow motion with Owen Benjamin, Z-man and with a host of other names who I’m too precociously senile to remember now. Eventually, you see enough that you can predict long enough in advance who will do it (for the record, it won’t be Elon Musk, and it will be Tucker Carlson). Every time you see it, it’s sad, not just because there’s a new human being out there who hates you as a point of principle, but because, in each case, this descent was accompanied by a palpable decline in wit, and in decency.

The main reason, though, is because of my experience with Jews. By that I don’t mean that I looked around me and concluded antisemitism has a lot going for it. No doubt, some antisemitic canards are true or partially true; it would be strange if there was an ideology with nothing true about it. In general, though, the more I have learned about antisemitism, the more remarkable I find how inaccurate it is about its chosen subject matter, how determined to frame the defendant even when he is guilty.

What I mean is that I know quite a lot of Rightoid Jews, and they are exactly the same. Some Jews, like Bobby Fischer, actually become antisemites, but for those I am familiar with, their social and familial relations make that too much trouble. What they do, though, is insist with the same tenacity, and, when challenged, offended ferocity, that they are behind the curtain. The they varies, though the modal choice, in my experience, is the Rockefeller family, but the black hole in their mind where they reside is a constant. At a certain point of frustration, I tried suggesting to my buddies that the Jews were a more plausible candidate than whatever they were babbling to me about. It rarely went well. I came in time to recall the following observation of Sartre:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I had always ignored this because Sartre was a filthy commie who signed a self-confessed habitual paedophile’s petition to legalise paedophilia but this description is just so true. It slaps. Frivolous. I knew there was a word that summed it all up. The only real problem is that Sarte implies that this is specific to antisemites when it is characteristic of the extreme Right in general. Becoming antisemitic does not make people this way; they become antisemitic because that is how they enjoy being, and antisemitism gives them the ability to do it without limit. It is true, though, that, upon discovering antisemitism, they typically get worse, like the lecher who discovers a cheap brothel, or the internet. All vices worsen with indulgence.

What is to be done?

I may, perhaps, be accused here of abandoning the commitment I made in the first article to analysing antisemitism as a historically defined body of ideas and not as an amorphous spiritual malady, but there is no contradiction here as long as we are being specific. Lots of ideologies are indicative, primarily, of a form of derangement and lots of ideologies have the capacity to derange. Antisemitism is one of them. An objective, dispassionate description of antisemitism includes these features no less than the intellectual content.

This brings us to the second stage of Rightoid thinking, which is that they whose conscious will makes reality explicable have victimised me who has discovered their will. Not all Rightoids, in my experience, reach this stage, but most do eventually, and the third step is the conclusion that, having been victimised, I now have license to wreak my revenge on them, or whichever of their representatives are to hand.

As a rule, for those who reach this stage, the rhetoric of justified retribution, though liable to become increasingly deranged and out of proportion to the imagined sins of them, remains just that, rhetoric. Not always, though. Before bursting into a Conservative Synagogue, Robert Gregory Bowers told his online comrades ‘screw your optics, I’m going in’. It’s a banger line, no doubt about that, but try to really think about what it means when the only objection you can now comprehend to shooting a group of lower middle-class grandads in the head is ‘optics’. I said I would take antisemitism seriously as a body of ideas. I will do more; I will take it literally. A man literally thought that the Jews had victimised him to such an extent that he was justified in shooting a bunch of pensioners minding their own business. And it’s not just the grunts. Bigshot intellectual Grindr Greg had this to say about me:

At the very least, all their property should be confiscated. At the very least. There are two reasons for this. First, we should consider it reparations. Second, if they were allowed to keep their wealth, they would immediately use it to stir up trouble against us. Just look at what happened when Adolf Hitler, with the typical excess of kindness that was his greatest flaw, allowed the Jews of Germany to emigrate with their fortunes.

Ideology is bad for you. All ideology, but not all ideology equally. Stay away from that stuff, and, if you love someone, keep them away from it too.

But how? There’s a strong tendency among establishment Jews, exemplified by the ADL, to identify antisemites in advance, to observe people talking somewhat incoherently about elites and their plans, and to condemn them as antisemites by analogy. The truth is that they’re not wrong; the ADL may not have a clear conceptual model of any of this stuff, but they’re experienced enough to have a general nose for it. That doesn’t mean, though, that jumping the gun is helpful. On the contrary, I think that, if you are Jewish, you should be as friendly as possible to people in the early stages of a Rightoid awakening. You probably won’t succeed; there are five antisemites for every one of you, and they have nothing if not free time to burn. But there’s a fair chance you’ll create enough impression that they’ll insert a ‘Not All Jews Are Like That’ clause into their personal version of antisemitism when they find their ideological resting place. If so, you’re doing them a favour, and, who knows, maybe yourself one day too. I think it counts as a small mitzvah if you can stop someone doing a Paul Nehlen. Apart from that, well, I don’t think there’s much you can do. Try not to let it faze you too much.

1. While the article got a lot of positive feedback, the email had my lowest open rate so far, probably because readers assumed I was going to add another piece of nonsense to the antisemitism studies edifice. Assuming makes an ass out of u and me.

2. ‘Potato chips’ for speakers of mong colonial jargon.