The title of this article is a recent quote from Steven Crowder, an immensely popular conservative YouTuber with almost six million subscribers. \u201cHe\u2019s not wrong about everything,\u201d Crowder quipped about Kanye West\u2019s recent and obviously anti-Semitic remarks. \u201cIs there a conversation to be had about secular humanists with Jewish last names exploiting people in Hollywood?\u201d<\/p>\n

Crowder went on to articulate that these \u201csecular humanists with Jewish last names\u201d aren\u2019t evil \u201cbecause they\u2019re Jewish\u201d. His distinction serves two purposes here. First, it allows a modicum of plausible deniability for anti-Semites and people foolish enough to believe \u201cI hate Jews, but not because they are Jewish\u201d is a legitimate opinion. Second, it allows the divorcing of Jews with non-reactionary views from the Jewish populace as a whole. It separates Jews that Crowder finds worthy\u2013religious conservatives like Ben Shapiro, the late Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli far-right\u2013with those he finds unworthy. The fact that Crowder was referring to wealthy Hollywood executives is irrelevant here, as he does not make a distinction between powerful Jews who aren\u2019t religious and Jews who hold left-wing views. For Crowder, there is no water between Noam Chomsky and Harvey Weinstein. They\u2019re both part of the same cabal.<\/p>\n

The comment section of Crowder\u2019s video rips the mask off this farce. It\u2019s full of open anti-Semites. So too with \u201cjournalist\u201d Tim Pool\u2019s Kanye West interview, in which Pool tried to make a distinction between \u201cthe corporate press\u201d treating Kanye unfairly vs. Jews as a monolithic bloc doing so. A large chunk of these comments consisted of Pool\u2019s fans criticizing him for not identifying the \u201creal problem\u201d, i.e., Jews.<\/p>\n

Crowder is noteworthy here because he straddles the gap between American conservatism\u2013people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson\u2013and overt fascists like Milo Yiannopolis and Nick Fuentes. That gap shrinks by the day. We may soon see mainstream Republicans running on a rhetorical platform similar to Crowder\u2019s. Donald Trump\u2019s admonishment of American Jews for \u201cnot caring about Israel\u201d is probably a portent of an ever-more noxious Republican Party, one an inch from Nazi talking points on Jewish issues. The predominance of conservative discourse on \u201ccultural Marxism\u201d (The Nazis said \u201ccultural Bolshevism\u201d) means we\u2019re already pretty close.<\/p>\n

Where does this thinly-veiled prejudice come from? Consider Slavoj Zizek\u2019s commentary on anti-Semitism in The Sublime Object of Ideology<\/em>. In response to the overt anti-Semitism of Nazis and their ilk, Zizek writes, many will say that<\/p>\n

\u2018The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.\u2019 Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called \u2018unconscious prejudices\u2019 with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not \u2018Jews are really not like that\u2019 but \u2018the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Zizek is a difficult and provocative thinker, but my interpretation of this passage is that people like Crowder will find \u201cthe Jew\u201d a convenient ideological fantasy to justify already-held beliefs. For Crowder, whose politics revolve around disgust at those he finds displeasing\u2013black people and LGBT people in particular\u2013\u201dThe Jew\u201d serves as the source of the revulsion. This is to say, Crowder and company cannot admit that queer people have a legitimate right to their gender and sexual expression, or that black people have legitimate grievances with contemporary America. There must therefore be a nefarious source spreading these ideas among the populace. The source of the \u201crepulsive ideology\u201d is, conveniently, \u201csecular humanists with Jewish last names\u201d. By situating Jews as the master manipulators, Crowder legitimizes the prejudices he previously held and espoused.<\/p>\n

We must remember that conservatives have set the bar impossibly high for what constitutes prejudice. Donald Trump, for instance, in justifying his dinner with Kanye West, denied Kanye\u2019s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye did not, in that particular dinner<\/em>, say anything anti-Semitic. Similarly, Steven Crowder denied Kanye\u2019s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye was \u201cusing a Howitzer\u201d, but \u201cdoesn\u2019t hate Jews.\u201d For the modern conservative, to be prejudiced is to hold hatred for a group in one\u2019s heart of hearts<\/em>. As humanity has not yet developed telepathy, this is a standard that cannot be met. The potentially virtuous inner life of a Nazi does not prevent him from doing the things that Nazis do.<\/p>\n

History does not look kindly on these conservative fence-sitters, those who refuse to oppose fascism. Paul Von Hindenburg is not viewed as an anti-fascist but rather as the man who invited the Nazis into government. Erwin Romell, who was perhaps not a Nazi in his political inner life, still served as the general of a fascist army. Aside from Claus Von Stauffenberg, the conservatives and monarchists who fought alongside the Nazis are remembered correctly as Nazis. Ditto with Steven Crowder.<\/p>\n

To quote the novelist A.R. Moxon: \u201cHistorians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.<\/p>\n

That word is \u2018Nazi.\u2019 Nobody cares about their motives anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The title of this article is a recent quote from Steven Crowder, an immensely popular conservative YouTuber with almost six million subscribers. \u201cHe\u2019s not wrong about everything,\u201d Crowder quipped about Kanye West\u2019s recent and obviously anti-Semitic remarks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":653,"featured_media":42100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1988,1477,3409,1512,1929,2826],"tags":[3686,3687,3688],"yoast_head":"\n