F**king Mondays: Alex Jones Is Back, Not A Real Minority, And War, War, War

Because the world isn't screwed up enough.

Welcome to this week’s edition of “F**king Mondays!” In the round up today:

Alex Jones is back

In perhaps Elon Musk’s most desperate move as Twitter’s deranged overlord, the billionaire has reinstated Alex Jones’s account on the platform. Via CNBC:

Elon Musk on Sunday reinstated the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on X, formerly Twitter, reneging on a year-ago vow to keep Jones off the social network.

Jones was previously suspended from Twitter in 2018 for violating the company’s “abusive behavior policy.” That suspension, deemed permanent under the company’s prior management, came as Jones faced a defamation lawsuit for spreading the false claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

Musk’s decision to bring Jones back to X comes on the anniversary week of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Twitter’s resident white nationalist Tucker Carlson apparently had a big role in getting Jones back on the platform, because “freedom of speech” etc, etc. Ad revenue at Twitter has declined every month since Musk took over due to serious concerns over the platform’s content, so it is hard to see why Musk thinks this is a good idea. Musk could be looking at new ways to monetize the platform and might believes that more attention and more clicks will at some point lead to more revenue.

My own theory is that he secretly wants the platform to fail because it is the only way to stop his social media addiction. I’ve seen this happen with alcoholics who unconsciously manufacture extreme crises as a desperate call for help, and Musk may be doing something similar. Either way, if you are still on Twitter, now really is the time to leave.

Not a real minority

I missed this part of the Congressional hearing on antisemitism where Oregon’s first Latina US Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT and U-Penn why their institutions exclude Jews from minority history classes. Said Chavez-DeRemer:

The Jewish people make up 2.4% % of America's population and are only 0.2% of the global population. For the past 5,000 years they have been enslaved lynched and systematically murdered. During that same time they have relentlessly improved the course of humanity, selflessly contributing to societies which eventually betrayed them. And yet president Gay, your University Harvard teaches only two courses on the history and culture of the Jewish people at the the undergrad level and one of those classes is focused on portraying all Jews who support Israel's existence as colonialist and racist. Compared to the roughly 125 classes Harvard offers on Latino black indigenous and AAPI history the discrepancy feels, odd.

But you're not alone president McGill the University of Pennsylvania offers three classes on Jewish history to undergrads and president Cornbluth MIT only offers two classes on Jewish history to your undergrad students. This gives the impression that your Deans and professors view Jews as an exception, that their voice as a minority group isn't worth amplifying. This near erasure of Jewish history from offered courses is chilling to me. Harvard MIT and the University of Pennsylvania offer its students an incredibly limited opportunity to learn about the 5,000 years of Jewish history it's no wonder so many of your students see Jews as having less humanity than the rest of us.

There are two competing theories as to why these academic institutions are in effect erasing Jewish history. The first is that your bog-standard antisemitism is just as pervasive on the left as it is the right. The second is more complicated and cuts deeper into the “anti-colonial” ideology taught under the framework of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Writes Andrew Sullivan:

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified.

It would be wrong to see this as a function merely of old-school anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism is simply a subsidiary of the entire rubric of “anti-Whiteness” that is taught as the supreme principle of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” DEI does not mean and has never meant diversity, equity and inclusion for all. It means active support for the “oppressed” against the “oppressors.” It means challenging “whiteness,” as represented by individual white people.

So which theory is correct? My guess is that it is actually a mix of the two. When you combine the stereotypes of Jews being wealthy, controlling the banks, the media, government etc, etc, Jews are no longer just white, but super white. Just as all white people must benefit from white privilege, Jews reap the white privilege rewards as well as their Jewish privilege.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to most Jews around the world, most of whom are not rich. In fact one in five US Jews experience poverty, and there has been a serious rise in children and senior poverty in recent years.

Historically, Jews in both the UK and US have been extremely poor. My own family for example, were working class Jews who fled the violent pogroms in Russia, Poland and Ukraine and came mostly to the desperately poor ghettoes of east London. My dad was the first person in his family to go to university, and contrary to myths about Jewish/white privilege, he succeeded despite the fact that he was Jewish. In the 1960’s there were unofficial quotas on Jewish students in British schools, and Jewish students were routinely subjected to appalling antisemitism from both the institutions and fellow students (my dad included).

The notion that my family has benefited from, and perpetuates “white privilege” in tandem with the “white power structure” in the UK is essentially an erasure of my family’s history. But not of course to identity politics militants who deem it perfectly acceptable to inform Jews not only about who they are, but what they have experienced.

Hopefully these hearings don’t just benefit Republicans desperate to deflect attention away from their own racism, but Jews who could do with a bit of help right now.

War, war, and more war

2023 has not been a great year for humanity. Writes Max Hastings:

This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published the latest edition of its authoritative annual Armed Conflict Survey, and it’s not predicting much peace for the holidays. It paints a grim picture of rising violence in in many regions, of wars chronically resistant to broking of peace. The survey — which addresses regional conflicts rather than the superpower confrontation between China, Russia, the US and its allies — documents 183 conflicts for 2023, the highest number in three decades.

It highlights “intractability as the defining feature of the contemporary global conflict landscape.” Nonstate armed groups, of which Hamas in Gaza is only the most immediately conspicuous, play a baleful role. In many places these forces are supported by disruptive major powers, notably Russia and Iran.

Hastings, like many other historians, views America’s deeply dysfunctional domestic political climate as one of the reasons why conflict is on the rise. Mired in never ending culture wars and legislative paralysis, American global leadership is fast becoming a thing of the past. For all its faults, American hegemony after World War II did result in what Steve Pinker called “the most peaceful era in our species’ history.”

Call me a globalist imperialist, but I do think there are some benefits to American hegemony (at least when America elects sensible leaders). Yes, America has done some terrible things, but it is a generally well educated, extremely tolerant, democratic nation governed by elected representatives. Compare this to say, Russia, where throwing your political opponents out of windows constitutes debate, and colonialism is still a thing.

We do face a choice as a species going forward: a return to the post-World War II liberal order, or chaos. The 2024 US election then is pretty damn important.

The official Banter festive lunch!

Despite living fairly close to each other, recording two podcasts, and sending multiple DMs a day, your hard-working Banter crew rarely meets up in person. So we fixed that and did an official holiday lunch in DC with accompanying silly hats:

A big thanks to our readers for keeping The Banter going all these years!

See you next week!

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