From the New York Times opinion section:
An Old Hate Cracks Open on the New Right
Nov. 19, 2023, 9:00 a.m. ET
Charles Lindbergh addressing a crowd. Behind him are U.S. flags and signs reading “America First.”
By David French
Opinion Columnist
In August, I wrote about the “lost boys” of the American right, many of them young and relatively unknown, who were outed for having secret or anonymous online profiles and using those profiles to spread raw bigotry, including antisemitism. Some of these people worked for the right wing’s biggest names, including Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
What started in the shadows is now right in the open. It’s being advanced by some of the most powerful and influential people in America, and there is nothing subtle about it. The latest eruption started with a fight between the Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire colleague Candace Owens. Both are immensely popular right-wing stars. Owens, for example, has more than four million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and more than five million on Instagram.
On Nov. 3, Owens posted on social media, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.” Many of her followers interpreted this as a criticism of Israel, and Shapiro, who staunchly supports Israel in its present conflict with Hamas, was later caught on tape at a private event saying Owens’s behavior during the war has been “disgraceful.”
Daily Wire drama should be of little interest to anyone outside The Daily Wire, but what happened next was truly alarming. First, Jason Whitlock, a leading personality at The Blaze, one of the largest right-wing websites, accused Shapiro of dual loyalties: “The guy has multiple loyalties. He loves America, but he loves Israel too. And maybe he loves Israel and he loves America too.” Owens, he said, “is a bit more America first. She only has one loyalty.”
… The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us.
Okay … Well, sure … Still, who would have guessed that Charles Lindbergh’s ghost would come back to haunt us in the form of Candace Owens?
And Jason Whitlock?
The huge irony is that of, course, virtually all Jews in the United States officially count as white for purposes of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion affirmation action initiatives.
Thus, during the last decade’s Great Awokening, young Jews have been getting hammered in hiring for elite careers. But many Jews haven’t noticed because the current “racial reckoning” is explicitly anti-white rather than anti-Semitic.
For example, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign to give more opportunities in films to blacks nominally targeted whites as its designated victims, even though the most disparate impact of the campaign would of course impact white Jews.
But many Jews don’t realize DEI is not good for the Jews because they, like anti-Semites, fantasize that they aren’t really white on the inside. But that’s not how the Office of Management & Budget’s race categorizations work for counting DEI progress: officially, almost all Jews in the US are white, whether they feel white or not. So, when corporations announce DEI goals, they are implicitly promising to hire fewer Jews (along with fewer white gentiles) even though that logical implication is never spelled out.
