No matter who ultimately wins the presidential election, the Jews in America are the big losers. As Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard has long explained, Jews are the bellwether for the health of democracies. Hatred of Jews rises in societies whose democratic institutions and values are in crisis. Jew-hatred is generally low in healthy, working democracies.
If we learned nothing else from the election campaign and its aftermath, we learned American democracy is in crisis.
The media is the first force responsible for this crisis. For the past four years, all major U.S. television networks and national newspapers have dedicated themselves not to reporting news, but to defining the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Big Tech firms—Facebook, Google and Twitter, in particular, having amassed powers the KGB could only have dreamed of—serve as the enforcers of those boundaries.
The goal of all media corporations has been the same: to overturn the results of the 2016 election. To advance this goal, the media have demonized President Donald Trump and his supporters for four straight years. The shared conviction has been that by subjecting the public to continuous indoctrination to hate Trump and his supporters, Trump would disappear from the White House, whether through a prolonged special counsel probe, impeachment or defeat at the polls.
Nearly all the stories about Trump and his supporters have been negative for the past four years. Consequently, while most Americans never heard that Trump conceived and implemented an entirely new foreign policy doctrine that has met more success than any adopted since the end of the Cold War, all Americans know that the media expect them to believe Trump is a racist. They know that the media expect right-thinking Americans to hate Trump and his supporters, and admire his opponents, from Nancy Pelosi to Black Lives Matter (BLM).
Big Tech, for its part, has made clear that Trump supporters express their support for the Orange Man at their own risk. They may be subjected to doxxing or ostracism, and they may be de-platformed or even fired if they make their views—which deviate from the acceptable boundaries of public discourse, as dictated by the media—known online.
This massive multi-year indoctrination and enforcement campaign has had mixed results. On the one hand, the election results demonstrated that the media moguls and the social media bazillionaires have utterly failed to convince the public to hate Trump and his supporters. Trump won more votes last week than he won in 2016. He dramatically expanded his support among Hispanics and blacks.
On the other hand, the polls show how the media and Big Tech have changed American society. There are probably two reasons that the polls were even further off the mark in 2020 than they were in 2016. First, the pollsters themselves operate inside the media bubble. The likes of Nate Silver know that the likes of Jeff Zucker and Jeff Bezos aren’t interested in what the public thinks. They are intent on telling the public what to think. The pollsters’ questions and polling samples did just that by predicting the desired results.
Secondly, Trump supporters know that the media not only do not want to know what they think. They will punish Trump supporters if they say what they think. So they lie. What Trafalgar Group President Robert Cahaly describes as the “Shy Trump Voter Effect” was clearly expressed in the disparity between the polls and the vote count. Why tell an anonymous person who calls you randomly that you intend to vote for Trump? You don’t know who he is or what he will do with the information. So you hang up on him or tell him you’re voting for Biden.
Since election day, the situation has only grown worse. The progressive social media mobs are calling for boycotts of law firms that represent Donald Trump in his lawsuits alleging massive vote fraud in battleground states. The hope is that without adequate counsel, Trump will lose his legal fight. Politicians and political operatives, along with CNN’s Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Jen Rubin, are openly threatening to destroy the livelihoods of Trump administration employees and of Trump supporters who dispute the media’s coronation of Biden. Twitter censorship of Trump and his supporters grows more aggressive every day.
There is every reason to assume that whether or not Biden is inaugurated as anticipated on January 20, this vindictiveness, hatred and censorship will continue to metastasize in the coming months and years.
The consequences of this media and Big Tech tyranny are disastrous for the health of American democracy. Americans know they are expected to act like the citizens of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union. The media will tell them what they can say, and social media will enforce the media’s dictates.
And like the denizens of the USSR, Americans haven’t stopped thinking as a result of this tyranny. They have just stopped telling people what they think.
As thinkers, Americans seek out explanations. And since Trump supporters cannot receive explanations in the media for what is becoming of their country, they are naturally drawn to alternative voices. Most of them find the explanations in conservative media outlets. But as the aggressiveness of the media and Big Tech increases, many will be drawn to conspiracy theories. The draw of conspiracy theories is that they claim to explain everything.
This is a problem for Jews.
Anti-Semitism is the mother of all conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories change over time, but their attraction has remained constant from the days of Pharaonic Egypt to the present. The Jews are a small, distinct group of people. They are relatively weak and non-aggressive, and have no automatic allies. Anti-Semites can attack them with relative impunity. Most importantly, you can develop an entire intellectual thought loop that explains all-natural and unnatural phenomena by saying the Jews are behind them.
During Trump’s four years in office, American Jews were subjected to a massacre and an attempted massacre carried out by white supremacists, who were indoctrinated by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the Internet. The more Trump voters are pushed out of the discourse and demonized, and the less they trust the news they see on TV and in the newspaper headlines, the more they will turn to conspiracy theorists. And as surely as night follows day, more Americans will become convinced that Jews are responsible for everything that is wrong in America.
This then brings us to the Biden camp. The Biden campaign announced that on Biden’s first day in office, he will cancel Trump’s executive order banning “critical race theory” (CRT)-based training in the federal government. Perhaps more than any single policy announcement, this should send shivers down the spines of American Jews. In 2019, Jews were subjected to a massacre and an attempted massacre carried out by black supremacists, who were steeped in anti-Semitism borne of critical race theory and like-minded claptrap.
CRT ascribes a basic malevolence and inborn racism to all white people. In CRT training, through various indoctrination seminars and rules, whites are coerced to disavow their “white privilege” and thereby make the United States, birthed in the original sin of slavery, less sinful and evil.
Progressives, for whom CRT is an article of faith, view politics as a zero-sum game. And that poses a problem. They know they will not be able to repress all white people. And most progressives are white, anyway. To advance their political goal of reorganizing American society around CRT, progressives need a stand-in for whites. By adopting programs against the avatar, they can advance their larger agenda without being noticed. Just as Obama demonized the “one percenters” to advance his socialist economic programs that harmed all wage earners and savers, progressives today need a white form of “one percenters” to advance their racial governing programs.
Enter the Jews. Since progressives have already determined that Jews are “white,” Jews are the perfect nemesis for progressives. There aren’t very many Jews. Jews are too weak in the Democratic Party to make progressives pay for their behavior. Many Jews want to be part of the progressive movement and can be depended on to serve as fig leaves. And Jews are fairly easy to identify and single out.
BLM’s singling out and vilification of Israel in its original charter, and BLM rioters’ repeated targeting of Jewish businesses and synagogues for looting and vandalization, show precisely where the movement is headed.
CRT dominates the discourse on campuses. And today, from Berkeley to Columbia and everywhere in between, the only acceptable form of discrimination is discrimination against Jewish students who dare to support, or fail to sufficiently condemn, the Jewish state of Israel. This too, shows where the movement is headed.
The media’s abandonment of journalism and their hatred of half of American society, as well as the Democrats’ embrace of a totalitarian theory of race and American secular sin as an organizing principle, are unmooring America from its democratic, pluralistic anchors. American society is moving into a post-democratic reality. And if action isn’t taken to restore those anchors, American society as a whole will suffer. But American Jews will be the first to suffer.