WHY JEW-HATRED GETS SUCH A RISE OUT OF ME
— I don’t think Jews matter more. I think Jew-hatred tells us more. —
Why does Jew-hatred get such a rise out of me?
Not because I’m Jewish. I’m not. I’ve never been to Israel. I have no special attachment to it. I know embarrassingly little about Jewish religion or culture. I respect the Jews I’ve known. A tiny people punched absurdly above their weight in science, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, the arts, and the West. None of that is why this hatred sets me off.
I have always had a violent reaction to irrational hatred and scapegoating, whoever is on the receiving end.
A lot of my followers first found me because I spent years during Covid fighting a totalitarian turn. The world split into clean and unclean. The unclean could be fired, silenced, barred from restaurants and universities, locked out of travel, and cut off from ordinary life. Some were denied medical care, including organ transplants. Billions were pressured or forced into a medical intervention. It arrived wrapped in righteousness. The people doing the excluding were the good guys.
I have also pushed back against hatred of ordinary Muslims, including when that wasn’t popular with my own audience. Radical Islamism deserves contempt. Hamas, ISIS, the Taliban, and the Islamic Republic are monstrous. A Muslim accountant in Michigan is not responsible for any of them. Collapsing a huge, mixed population into its worst members is exactly the stupidity I’m talking about.
I don’t have a special rule for Jews. I have a problem with mobs.
Part of this comes from being a scientist. I study inference, perception, and complex systems — the things human intuition is spectacularly bad at. We want one cause, one villain, one story. Once enough people believe it, the crowd itself starts to feel like evidence. They can’t all be wrong. Yes they fucking can. Crowds don’t just err. They stampede. And the people getting trampled are always said to have had it coming. If my training helps me see a stampede forming, I feel some duty to yell.
Which brings us back to the Jews.
There are roughly two billion Muslims and about 15 or 16 million Jews. If hatred were distributed evenly, I should be a hundred times more exercised about anti-Muslim hatred. All else equal, sure. All else is not equal. Jews are 0.2 percent of humanity, and this microscopic population keeps getting installed at the center of gigantic theories about what’s wrong with civilization. The banks. The media. Hollywood. Academia. Capitalism. Communism. Wars. American foreign policy. Cultural decay. Whatever the disease is this week, someone eventually finds the Jew behind it.
The old line about Jews as the canary in the coal mine is apt. The point is not that the canary matters more than the miners. The point is that what happens to the canary tells you about the mine. If you are blaming 0.2 percent of the species for half the world’s problems, that tells us far more about your mind than it does about the Jews.
Before the blood from October 7 was dry, people were already screaming “gEnOciDe!!” — on October 8. Then came the claims that Israel massacred its own people, wanted October 7, allowed October 7. The evidence did not produce the hatred. The hatred was already there, hunting for evidence.
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