The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 18 August 1790
Dear Reader,
This Memorial Day, I reflect on the great American victory of the Second World War. The cost of freedom, the lives lost to save the world. It mattered that the USA and not the USSR was the major winner of the war. The US victory in World War II secured its position as the dominant global power, economically, militarily, and diplomatically. Americans rebuilt war-torn nations through the Marshall Plan and established the postwar international order, including institutions like the United Nations, the IMF, and NATO. For the world, it meant the defeat of genocidal totalitarianism, a reassertion of sovereign self-determination, and a new era, no matter how imperfect, of American-led global stability. And over the next half-century, the United States’s victories created losers: international racism and international communism. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Bloc, Apartheid South Africa, and even domestic white supremacy, they all fell to the heirs of George Washington. The 20th century was the undisputed American century.
Now in the 21st century, as America has suffered from the cynicism of politics following Vietnam and Watergate, the dislocation of deindustrialization and the Gig economy, and from the social dysfunction of family breakdown, consequently, there has arisen an old bigotry made a new tool of subversion: very online antisemitism. What I call Very Online Antisemitism refers to the growing ecosystem of memes, influencers, and conspiracy theories spreading Jew-hatred under the guise of irony, contrarianism, or political discontent. These are the ideas of the 20th century’s losers, not the winners; their spread is a sign of decline and crisis. Let’s be clear, Judenhaas, Jew-hatred is what antisemitism is, it is the hatred of Jews, as Jews, for being Jews. And, antisemitism is a deterministic bigotry that attempts to craft a worldview around the hatred of a people. To use the hatred of Jews to make sense of the world, especially among those for whom things are not going their way when they think it should; and it is an explanatory bigotry that scapegoats problems onto a people. Historically, America was the most tolerant Western and Christian society of Jewish people. Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia and hatred in France came to America for a reason. If anything, America was known for racism against Blacks and Native Americans, and for intense episodes of anti-Catholicism, and conspiracies regarding Freemasons. But Protestant America had inherited the Reformation’s tendency toward a high regard for Jewish people and an emphasis on the Tanakh, the Old Testament. Hence, the prevalence of Hebrew-origin first names for Anglo-Protestant Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I. The Victory Tradition vs. the Culture of Defeat
The German historian, the late Wolfgang Schivelbusch, wrote Cultures of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, in which he examined how nations process and reinterpret military defeat psychologically and culturally. He focuses on the American South after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), and Germany after World War I, arguing that defeated nations often reframe their losses in moral or spiritual terms, creating narratives of martyrdom, betrayal, or inner superiority to preserve national identity and pride. Very Online Antisemitism has these features. The stoking of resentments online has evidence of coming from a combination of internal American racism, angry at Jewish Americans for their support for the Civil Rights movement, as well as the importation of racism from individuals linked to Second World War and postwar Germany, and Apartheid South Africa, and from provocateurs both state and non-state actors from the former Soviet Union. An infection of the defeated. The effect is to divide and enfeeble the Americans, to turn America from a victory culture into a culture of defeat. Suppose there was an international racist conspiracy to weaken the United States and get revenge for liberal American victories that destroyed Nazi Germany, Jim Crow, the USSR and Apartheid. Would it look any different than what Americans are allowing to be done to themselves?
II. Antisemitism as Mental Death-Rot
This pattern of turning cultural frustration into scapegoating is not new. History shows us what happens when societies resort to this kind of death-logic. The antisemitic pogroms in late imperial Russia and the Dreyfus Affair in France were not minor outbreaks of prejudice that should be seen as footnotes of history; they were symptoms of deeper societal and regime corruption. The pogroms did not protect the Romanovs, and ruining Dreyfus did absolutely nothing to enhance French national security. In both cases, ruling elites exploited old European bigotries to deflect from internal failures, chasing out loyal subjects and undermining public trust. These distortions of justice and deliberate divisions eroded the moral legitimacy of the state and left both nations in the hands of ill-thinking men. By the time the July Crisis of 1914 arrived, this moral corruption helped lead both nations into disaster.
Moral degeneracy was the ingredient required to bring down haughty France and mighty Russia, states that, all other factors considered, had the material ability to be major winners of the 20th century. Their antisemitism was a measure of their intellectual dysfunction. Their will to die, overcoming their will to live, was a disguised drive for power. When looking at Nazi Germany is even clearer: Hitler believed that if the Germans could not win the war then they deserved to die so he persisted even when it was clear all his prolonged war was doing was causing the death of more Germans. The core of his ideology was hatred of Jews more than love of Germans, and Germans died, before and after Hitler killed himself, as a failure, the loser of the greatest war in history. However, if one does not want to blame Nazism for its own defeat, if one does not want to learn and reject it, then one must look for someone else to blame and the Americans are a good culprit, and if you hate that FDR’s America embraced an anti-Nazi ethos that his New Deal coalition then turned against the Jim Crow South then you have reason to hate the New Deal and the liberal Jews who allied with liberal Protestants, Catholics and Blacks to push the Civil Rights movement to victory. And others, malefactors whose modern identities have been built on celebrating their so-called great patriotic victory over the Nazis would love nothing more than for the Americans to embrace the suicidal ideology of the vanquished enemy.
III. Passive Mind Virus
Individuals who maintain racist, especially antisemitic, ideologies frequently experience elevated psychological distress, characterized by heightened anxiety, rigidity of thought. Moreover, as such bigoted ideologies foster paranoia and conspiracy-mindedness, they exacerbate mistrust and isolation, which is magnified when collectives are formed to reinforce these biases. Their group is therefore weakened and made more vulnerable to self-destruction, not less. Only America’s enemies and those who wish to confuse, exploit, and degrade Americans would push such things.
But let us examine the issues plaguing America, such as the border crisis, economic dislocation, and family breakdown. Take the decline of industrial jobs, like automotives in Detroit, from the 1960s to the 1980s. During this period, Ford, GM, and Chrysler had famed CEOs like Lee Iacocca and Donald Petersen but almost no prominent Jewish corporate leaders. Major corporations, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel, were also run by traditional WASPs and sometimes Catholic leaders during this period.
Antisemitism serves to elide the fact that White gentile leaders offshored the jobs of White gentile workers because it was best for the corporate leaders. Jewish Americans did not create deindustrialization or the social disintegration that followed. Turning to antisemitism is a passive, defeatist evasion of responsibility, a way to avoid facing that White gentile capitalists made choices that neglected “their own communities.” The same is true of many major corporations from that era. I could continue, but the record is clear: antisemitism will solve no American problems, and blaming Jews does not answer a single serious question about how this country lost its footing. Antisemitic conspiracy theories cannot explain the actions of US Presidents during the Vietnam Conflict. They cannot explain the Watergate scandal, nor can they account for the conditions and choices that led to the push-pull factors of mass migration. It was President Ronald Reagan who agreed to amnesty for illegal aliens in the 1980s, and it was then California Governor Ronald Reagan who signed the nation's first no-fault divorce law on September 4, 1969, making California the first US state to permit divorce without requiring proof of wrongdoing. Likewise, it was under Reagan that the US debt went from almost one trillion to three trillion dollars, nearly a 200% increase. In 1984, Reagan won two-thirds of the White vote and 49 states. Most Jewish Americans voted for Democrat Walter Mondale. Jewish Americans did not drive trickle-down economics.
Since the 1980s, America and the world have undergone massive, often unsettling changes. Again, the decline of traditional industries combined with the rise of global competition, and rapid technological shifts that came first with the internet, now with artificial intelligence, have upended how people work, communicate, and define their place in society. In addition, major shocks like 9/11, the 2008 Financial Crisis, rising student debt, fears over the national debt, the failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, have added to a sense of uncertainty and anxiety. For many, the pace of change and loss is overwhelming. Conspiracy theories can become a salve that justifies passivity in the face of change. They are not only dishonest history, they are also a form of surrender disguised as achieving hidden and secret knowledge: a literal occult deception.
IV. Foreign Weaponization
America is strong, too strong to be brought down without massive systemic internal dysfunction. Antisemitism is a hyper-aggressive cancer of social dysfunction, rotting a free society from the inside out. NPR, Fox News, the Washington Post, all have reported how Chinese and Russians are provoking and producing many of the antisemitic attacks online in an effort to influence the United States. Russia has been called out by the Indian University Institute for the Contemporary Study of Antisemitism. The US State Department's Global Engagement Center outlined how Russia’s weaponization of antisemitism remains a deliberate strategy by the Kremlin to sow division, promote disinformation, and scapegoat Jewish individuals, contributing to a global rise in antisemitism; the report seeks to expose and counter these tactics. Even North Korean-aligned groups have gotten in on the antisemitic act in the USA. And the Iranians have been busy, especially since 2020, and the controversy surrounding the death of George Floyd and other racial tensions, promoting both antisemitism and other racial bigotries. These countries are not our friends, and they do not want a healthy, vibrant America. They want revenge, to dethrone the United States and impoverish the American people by turning them against one another. They want to corrupt our morals and trick Americans into embracing communal self-harm. Antisemitism is not only a lie, it is a trap. Hating can feel like doing, when it is, in fact, perhaps the most slavish thing that could be done in the face of real problems.
In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The Nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the Government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The Government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times, it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of Nations has been the victim. - George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796
V. Slavery
One thing that has stood out to me is that George Washington was a slaveholder, and yet he calls those who indulge in habitual hatred slaves. He knew what a slave was; he had hundreds. It is not an idle word to use. He understood it. The more I studied it as a mature scholar, the more unsettling it was. The Father of our country saw the bad habits of mind, which I see in the same category as the deterministic bigotry of Very Online Antisemitism, as a form of mental slavery. He understood that slavery was the deprivation of will and power over oneself and the imposition of another’s will over your own. He got it, and that it was a bad and undesirable thing. Deterministic racial bigotries, conspiracy theories, and paranoia are indeed suicidal ideologies that enslave and destroy.
American antisemitism is the rejection of George Washington, the rejection of American confidence and greatness. America’s enduring greatness, historically rooted in transcending petty divisions, demands abandoning these destructive alien ideologies in favor of embracing Americanism and its norms of competency and agency; of active renewal and the rejection of passive blame and scapegoating. Americans acknowledge problems and do something about them, we organize and reform. We have Great Awakenings and refoundings: Square Deals, New Deals, and Fair Deals. And we must recognize that our true enemies are the agents of the ideologies our ancestors defeated. Those who want to exploit you need you to hate your neighbors because uniting across our ethnic and religious lines makes Americans unstoppable. By rejecting antisemitism, Americans will take the first step to making the losers lose again and making Americans win again. It is a choice between defeat and national suicide or renewal and a second American century.