At the gut level, most of our politics can be reduced to a simple question: “Whose fault is it?” Conservatives and liberals blame one another, nationalists point the finger at globalists, and for the woke left, it’s always the fault of straight white men. In the fever swamps of the internet, an age-old answer is now growing in popularity: the Jews. Indeed, in the past year or so, it has become impossible not to notice the number of influencers—led by Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens—who are aggressively pushing, with varying degrees of subtlety, what the kids call the “Jewish Question,” or JQ for short.
According to contemporary proponents of the JQ, Jews have been behind every left-wing cause and degenerate social trend since Marx launched his assault on Western civilization. In America alone, we are told, Jews bankrolled the civil rights movement, which destroyed the Constitution; championed open borders and the resulting demographic transformation of the country; and are behind the soft-on-crime policies that have ruined countless American cities. Jewish intellectuals devised and promoted communism, psychoanalysis, sexual liberation, feminism, critical theory, multiculturalism, and a host of other corrosive ideologies that have rotted the American mind and destroyed the fabric of society. Meanwhile, Jewish control of the media and Hollywood allows them to deceive honest gentiles (to say nothing of what their seedier cousins in the porn industry have done to public morals).
In The Culture of Critique, arguably the foundational text of the modern JQ, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald argues that Jews have promoted radical leftism as a survival strategy to undermine host societies. He concludes that the twentieth century really was a “Jewish century, a century in which Jews and Jewish organizations were deeply involved in all the pivotal events.” As a result, “the Western intellectual world has become Judaized” and “the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history—surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people.” In other words, James Burnham was wrong. The West did not commit suicide. It was killed by the Jews.
“In other words, James Burnham was wrong.”
The nefarious influence attributed to Jews is not confined to domestic policy. The Israelis, in cahoots with their coreligionists here at home, have hijacked American foreign policy to advance their interests at our expense. Exhibit A is, of course, the Iraq war, which “would almost certainly not have occurred” were it not for the Israel lobby, in the judgment of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (who, though not JQers themselves, have a Jewish fixation). Some go further and also blame the Israelis for 9/11. At the very least, Tucker Carlson suggests, they had foreknowledge of the attack but kept quiet as they wanted us to get ensnared in the Middle East.
Though precise numbers are impossible to obtain, there are undoubtedly not many people who espouse the maximalist view of both prongs of the JQ: leftism as politicized Judaism and Jewish control of American foreign policy. Jews and gentiles alike can continue to ignore the ramblings on the Unz Review and The Occidental Observer. Real, malicious antisemitism—as opposed to whatever the ADL labels as antisemitism—remains, at most, a 5/95 issue. That said, watered down versions of the JQ are spreading and resonating with younger male audiences. Based on anecdotal evidence, most young men who pick up elements of the JQ are not antisemitic. They’re just noticing the Jewish footprint in American life, the same way they’ve noticed high black crime rates or the correlation between IQ and life outcomes.
Indeed, unpleasant as it may be for Jews and philosemites to admit, the JQ—unlike Candace Owens’ obsession with Brigitte Macron’s purported manhood—does have some basis in fact. There is an Israel lobby. It has cultivated powerful allies in Washington. And it was part of the loud chorus of pro-war voices in 2002. To this day, it is hard not to wince when one hears the likes of Nikki Haley or Lindsey Graham conflate America and Israel (“This is not just an attack on Israel, this is an attack on America,” Haley said after October 7).
Jews—more specifically, Ashkenazi Jews—are vastly overrepresented in all left-wing movements. I teach a class on “American Progressivism and Liberalism,” and about a quarter of the authors on the syllabus are Jewish (in a country where Jews make up about 2 percent of the total population). Marx, Lassalle, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and countless other leading communists were at least ethnically Jewish (Marx’s family had converted to Lutheranism and he was baptized). The godfather of the sexual revolution, Sigmund Freud, was a Jew, as was the renegade disciple who actually coined the term, Wilhelm Reich. The two most important American feminists of the twentieth century, Betty Friedan and Shulamith Firestone, were both Jewish. Emanuel Celler, one of the two Congressmen who introduced the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, was a Jew. The list goes on.
Thus, the conclusion is reached, either explicitly or implicitly, that were it not for the Jews, there would not have been a left. And without this Jewish left, America would today be a healthy republic, rather than a decaying empire. Seen in this light, the JQ becomes the issue, the root cause of it all. Everything else is either epiphenomenal or unimportant. Hence, the JQers’ singular fixation, not to say monomaniacal obsession, with the Jews, both at home and in Israel.
Off-putting as all of this will undoubtedly sound to most, the JQ does have a certain undeniable appeal. By pointing at the Jews, it offers a luminously clear answer to the question of who bears the blame for our present maladies. The mind-boggling complexity of the managerial neoliberal world order, with its diffuse centers of power and conflicting factions, is but an illusion. In truth, there is a central nexus of control: global Jewry, by which the JQers obviously don’t mean every last Jew, just those who implement or support the Zionist agenda to weaken the West to benefit Jews. No need to plow through Churchill’s The Second World War, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, or the collected work of Adam Smith. The JQ is all you need to know.
That the average Fox News watcher is utterly oblivious to the JQ only enhances its appeal. The JQ is a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge that allows the enlightened few to pierce through the illusions of ordinary politics and grasp the ultimate reality. “All things are hidden from one who does not know the root of all things,” the early Gnostics taught. And what pleasure it is to look down upon those who do not know, to feel more intelligent than anyone else, to be able to say: “Here is what they don’t want you to know.” One almost gets the sense that JQers don’t want the world to wake up to the perfidy of the Jews, as it would cheapen the value of their treasured teaching.
The JQ also has the virtue of being genuinely transgressive, in a way that mocking other contemporary pieties is not. The right has some sort of an agenda on the identitarian trinity of race, sex, and sexuality, but the silence on the Jewish Question is deafening. The fact that any attempt to go there will be met with accusations of antisemitism only enhances its appeal.
And when the garden-variety JQ itself gets boring, as all repeated transgressions inevitably do, one then turns to Holocaust revisionism (outright Holocaust denial has become déclassé). That is the ultimate taboo and hence, the ultimate intellectual transgression. Not all JQers get there, but the JQ necessarily points to it. The Holocaust is not just the ultimate piety, it is also the moral anchor of the ruling class. It teaches that the greatest evil is hating those who are different. That lesson is then weaponized against Western nations in countless ways, from celebrating LGBTQ identities to defending endless immigration.
“The JQ absolves America.”
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the JQ absolves America. If America is in such a mess today, it’s not our fault. It’s the Jews’ fault. The JQers have effectively adopted a modified version of Ibram X. Kendi’s central moral teaching: There is nothing wrong with gentiles. America may be corrupted, perhaps irredeemably so, but at least we had nothing to do with it. At most, we can be faulted for our naïveté.
The JQ’s appeal and its partial basis in fact do not, however, mean that its fundamental premise is true. All conspiracy theories are appealing and most contain at least some element of truth. But they also contain many falsehoods and, just as importantly, they conveniently ignore all the facts that contradict their worldview. Even more so than outright lying, selective noticing is the hallmark of the JQ. Indeed, the fundamental lie—that Jews are to blame for all that ails us—is based on a carefully selected arrangement of facts (some more true than others).
JQers, for example, notice all the Jews on the left, but somehow manage to overlook all the Jews on the right, including those on the anti-establishment right. The greatest living paleoconservative after Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, is a Jew, and he has written more against neoconservatives than anyone else. The most principled Trumpist in the administration—at times even more Trumpist than the president himself—is Stephen Miller. In France, the most formidable French nationalist and fiercest public critic of immigration, Éric Zemmour, is Jewish. Jean-Marie Le Pen endorsed him over his own daughter in the last presidential election.
Looking beyond these narrow confines, it is hard to find any realm connected with man’s higher faculties in which Jews have not disproportionately excelled since they were permitted to leave the ghettos of Europe—so much so, in fact, that the term Jewish overachievement is an understatement. In his comprehensive survey of human excellence in the arts and sciences, Charles Murray notes how the Jews’ contributions to civilization are completely out of proportion with their relatively small number: a statistically insignificant, if not invisible, share of the world population (0.3 percent) produced a quarter of all notable human intellectual accomplishment in the modern period. In America alone, 38 percent of all Nobel laureates in the hard sciences and economics have been Jews. Discoveries made by Jews, from Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine to Karl Landsteiner’s identification of blood groups, have saved billions of lives.
The Jewish contribution to Western civilization is of such great magnitude that even those most hellbent on not noticing it are sometimes compelled to do so. In the preface to the second edition of Culture of Critique, MacDonald does admit, in passing, that Jews have contributed to civilization, but insists that non-Jews would have eventually made these contributions. “I am hard pressed to think of any area of modern Western government and social organization (certainly) and business, science, and technology (very probably) that would not have developed without Jewish input, although in some cases perhaps not quite as quickly,” he writes. “In general, positive impacts of Jews have been quantitative rather than qualitative. They have accelerated some developments, for example, in finance and some areas of science, rather than made them possible.”
The truth is closer to the opposite. There are no necessities that govern the process of scientific discovery and innovation. If there were, we would expect artificial intelligence to soon solve all the remaining riddles of nature. Certain discoveries obviously pave the way for others. Once Fermi discovered nuclear energy, it was only a matter of time before someone put it to military use. It just happened to have been Oppenheimer (which is a reminder of the importance of getting there first—in this as in many other cases, thanks to Jewish scientists). Other breakthroughs, such as the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick, are derived from empirical work, and could presumably have been made by others. But there are some scientific breakthroughs driven by individual geniuses who go beyond what others have seen. Had Einstein not discovered general relativity, it would probably remain unknown today.
Liberal democracies, by contrast, are all subject to the gravitational pull of democracy (leveling egalitarianism) and the centrifugal pull of liberalism (individualism and the resulting centralization of power). And because they also enthusiastically embrace modern materialistic science, they all put religious faith on a defensive footing. That is why all modern liberal democracies are afflicted by the same problems, including those, like the Scandinavian countries, where Jews played no significant role on the left. Even the Jewish state exhibits these pathologies, as even the most casual perusal of Haaretz makes clear. There is something in the DNA of Western liberal democracies that inclines them toward egalitarian leveling, licentiousness, bureaucratization, and multiculturalism.
Suppose, for example, we grant the JQers their premise that our black fellow citizens should never have been granted civic equality. How can anyone seriously believe that, were it not for the Jews, Jim Crow would still be in force? How can a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” tolerate second-class citizenship in perpetuity for the descendants of those it once enslaved? So, yes, Jews were heavily involved in the civil rights movement. But Christian America would have arrived at some version of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, even without a single Jew involved. It may have taken longer, and some of the details would have differed, but the conclusion was all but foreordained.
Indeed, Tocqueville’s masterwork Democracy in America essentially predicts the leftward drift of the country and does so without ever mentioning Jews. For example, Tocqueville all but says that what we today call second-wave feminism will eventually find its way to America. It already existed among his contemporaries in Europe, and he saw how the democratic passion for equality inexorably brings “down all the imaginary or real barriers that separate man from woman.” So yes, both Friedan and Firestone were Jews, but the founder of second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, was not. Nor, might I add, were countless of her epigones, from Catharine MacKinnon to Susan Moller Okin.
On these questions, as on all others ranging from immigration to the sexual revolution, JQers notice the Jews, but never the much greater number of gentiles. The JQers also never seem to notice all the countries without a conspicuous Jewish presence, from Germany to Canada, that underwent cultural revolutions in the second half of the twentieth century. If the JQ were true, one would expect countries like Ireland and Norway, that are all but judenfrei, to be strongholds of Christian nationalism, rather than the multicultural EU sub-units they are.
“The JQ begs the GQ.”
Most of all, the JQers do not seem to notice just how dumb gentiles appear to be in their worldview. Gentiles, we are forced to conclude, are driven like cattle by their Jewish overlords. And though this has been going on for generations, the gentiles are no wiser to it. They continue to swallow whatever nonsense is peddled by the latest coterie of radical Jews. The JQ begs the GQ. Kevin MacDonald, a former professor of psychology at a second-rate state school who wrote a dissertation on wolves, and low-level Hill staffers, it is true, have figured it all out. But the greatest minds of the West, including the greatest minds on the right, somehow missed it all. And they still refuse to see it.
It should be noted that the Jews themselves, for all their wizardry in tricking gentiles, do not appear to be particularly adept at thinking through the long-term implications of their actions. If MacDonald is right that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy designed to ensure the survival of Jewish people by weakening host societies, then one must conclude that its latest iteration has not been a uniform success. If Jews are to be blamed for mass migration, then they created effective “no-go” areas for themselves by importing millions of Muslims into Western Europe. If they are responsible for wokeness, then they essentially demanded that elite institutions admit and hire “people of color” rather than their own kinsmen. The Jews, one must conclude, are really no smarter than the gentiles who fall prey to their manipulations. Only the JQers, it seems, are smart.
The implied stupidity of both Jews and gentiles as well as the biases of selective noticing are on full display in the JQers’ analysis of Israel’s influence on American foreign policy. The Jews, we are asked to believe, are in complete control of our foreign policy and have turned the United States into a vassal state of Israel. As a result, America wastes billions supporting Israel and, what is worse, fights endless wars at its behest. “We are engaging in war on Israel’s behalf all over the Middle East,” Jeffrey Sachs recently explained on Tucker Carlson’s show. “Somehow we gave away our foreign policy to Israel years and years ago, and it’s been absolutely devastating.” And so the conclusion is reached that the USG is, in truth, a ZOG, a Zionist-Occupied government (as are the governments of other Western nations).
It is worth noting that the JQers’ analysis perfectly converges with that of the Arab street, Ilhan Omar (“Israel hypnotized the world”), and the drunken ramblings of Mel Gibson. Guilt by association is, of course, not a dispositive argument. But for ZOG to work as a global concept, JQers only need to ignore the fact that Israel is today one of the most hated countries in the world—and surely the one most hated by “the globalists.” Someone ought to tell the Zionists that they should instruct their gentile lackeys to vote differently at the United Nations and the European Parliament. Nothing speaks to the power of global Jewry like Israel being the most condemned country at both the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council (which has issued more resolutions against Israel than the rest of the world combined), to say nothing of the fact that the Palestinians are the only people in the world who inherit refugee status.
Turning to America, the JQers are correct to note the extraordinary support that our country provides to Israel. Indeed, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid, receiving over $300 billion in total economic and military assistance (adjusted for inflation). Ukraine now receives much more aid each year ($175 billion in the past 3 years), but Israel still gets about $4 billion annually and has been receiving more since it went to war in Gaza.
“There are good arguments for and against continuing Israeli aid.”
There are good arguments for and against continuing Israeli aid. Prime Minister Netanyahu, for one, recently said that he wants to phase it out. In the grand scheme of things, though, aid to Israel is a drop in the bucket, as even Mearsheimer and Walt admit. When America goes bankrupt one day, it will not have been because of aid to Israel, which currently amounts to a tenth of a percent of the federal budget (and normally amounts to half of that). More importantly, aid to Israel in no way proves that the Jews—pardon, the Israel lobby—control the federal government. If the nature of our regime is to be revealed by its spending priorities, then we are a gerontocracy, not a ZOG. The top two drivers of federal spending are Medicare (22 percent) and Social Security (19 percent). A concern for Uncle Sam’s finances cannot justify an obsessive focus on military aid to Israel (three-quarters of which must be spent purchasing American weapons). The AARP is a much greater fiscal menace to America than AIPAC.
Except, of course, that the AARP did not drag us into the Iraq War, which was a great strategic blunder, cost upward of $2 trillion, and indirectly benefited the regime that hates us (and Israel) the most: Iran. And this was the brainchild of the neocons, which has increasingly become a polite way of saying “the Jews.” As Mearsheimer and Walt explain:
The driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives who had long favored the energetic use of American power to reshape critical areas of the world. They had advocated toppling Saddam since the mid-1990s and believed this step would benefit the United States and Israel. This group included prominent officials in the Bush administration such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the number two and three civilians in the Pentagon; Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey, members of the influential Defense Policy Board; Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff; John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and his special assistant, David Wurmser; and Elliott Abrams, who is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council. It also included a handful of well-known journalists like Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and William Safire.
One cannot help but notice that this group did not include the sitting president of the United States of America and the commander-in-chief of its armed forces, George W. Bush. Nor did it include such “prominent officials in the Bush administration” as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, or National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. In other words, none of the five principal decision-makers responsible for the Iraq War were neocons, Jews, or part of the “Israel lobby.” They therefore play a secondary, if not minimal, role in Mearsheimer and Walt’s explanation of the cause of war. In their account, AIPAC and Doug Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, each get more mentions than President Bush.
Mearsheimer and Walt would have us believe that those who made the actual decision to go to war in Iraq were manipulated by their sub-Cabinet-level Jewish officials and a handful of Jewish columnists. Once again, the JQ begs the GQ. When Donald Rumsfeld was once asked about the role of Jewish subordinates in pushing America to war, he gave a memorable response: “I suppose the implication of that is that the President and the Vice-President and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs.”
The most comprehensive account of the decision to go to war, Michael Mazarr’s Leap of Faith, by contrast, focuses squarely on the actual decision-makers. In researching his book, Mazarr, who is neither a Jew nor a neocon, conducted more than 100 interviews (Mearsheimer and Walt did not conduct a single one). He carefully shows how, in the days following 9/11, the president and his inner circle decided each in their own “highly personal, idiosyncratic ways” to launch a global war on terror, guided by “the messianic conception of American power that had come to dominate the US national security community after the Cold War.” Thus, on September 17, 2001, well before any of the lobbying described by Mearsheimer and Walt, President Bush called for updated military plans to go to war in Iraq just after signing the order for war in Afghanistan.
It would take a book to document all the omissions in Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, and to correct all their mischaracterizations. Each of their chapters more or less follows the same pattern: magnify the role of the Israel Lobby, often by relying on AIPAC fundraising letters as proof of the organization’s clout; largely ignore the lobbying efforts of all other groups and nations to give the impression that AIPAC sets policy in America; never bother to establish that particular lobbying efforts actually influenced the decision-makers; and casually dismiss all the times America acted against the lobby’s wishes. Mearsheimer and Walt even go so far as to blame anti-American Islamist terrorism on our support for Israel. They would almost have us believe that, were it not for AIPAC, 9/11 would have never occurred, and Osama Bin Laden would today be running the family construction business.
Mearsheimer and Walt conclude their chapter blaming the Israel lobby for the war in Iraq by noting that “we should not be surprised that some Israelis and their American allies have tried to rewrite the historical record to absolve Israel of any responsibility for the Iraq disaster.” In truth, it is Mearsheimer, Walt, and their admirers who are rewriting history to absolve America for the war by pinning it on the Jews. George W. Bush assuages his bad conscience over the war by painting portraits of wounded soldiers. Tucker Carlson does so by shifting blame to the wily Jews and their Christian Zionist friends.
To recognize that Israel does not set American foreign policy and did not orchestrate the war in Iraq does not mean that one may not question aspects of the US-Israel relationship. Or think that some of the pro-Israel rhetoric, by Jews and gentiles alike, is over the top. Or notice that some of those who lobby on behalf of Israel are indeed motivated by “passionate attachments” to a foreign nation, to quote Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address. But it is just as true that the JQers and their ilk display “permanent, inveterate antipathies” to this same foreign nation, to quote the other half of Washington’s warning.
The new prominence of the Jewish question is having some remarkable effects on the right. Some JQers, for example, are blaming the Mossad (who else?) for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and thus, directing attention away from the fact that the alleged shooter engraved antifa slogans on his bullets. What’s worse, since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, JQers and their fellow travelers inevitably end up cozying up to leftists and Islamists who share their opposition to Israel. Nick Fuentes has repeatedly said that “the Muslim thing is just a complete non-issue in the United States,” calling it a distraction from Jewish influence in American life.
Because I am a Jew, my entire argument will, of course, simply be dismissed by the JQers. Then again, a Christian or atheist who tried to somewhat minimize the role of global Jewry in explaining all that ails America and the West, would also be dismissed as a Zionist, a neocon, or an AIPAC shill. Like all ideologues, the JQers fervently cling to their delusions.
From a right-wing perspective, it is easy to see why. The problems we face are so daunting, the odds so overwhelming, that it is easier to rail against the Jews than to undertake the Herculean task of revitalizing the dying nations of the West. The JQers simply don’t have the stomach to consider that, in fact, it may well be our fault. We Americans and Westerners are the ones who squandered our inheritance, defiled our countries, and replaced our populations. We elected—and re-elected—the leaders who launched reckless wars and embraced foolish policies. They were not hoodwinked by the Israel lobby, and they would not suddenly become prudent statesmen if all Jewish influence were expunged from our politics.
The JQ is ultimately yet another species of victimhood politics. By teaching that we are victims of Jewish plots, it denies us agency and promotes the mental habits of servitude: impotence and resentment. The JQ isn’t just a stupid conspiracy theory, it’s an affront to the American spirit.