Mazal tov! Partisans on the left and on the right, fighting bitterly for a larger swath of America’s increasingly divided political landscape, have now found a goal around which to unite in harmony: The Jews are our misfortune.
Talk to your average committed progressive, and you’ll soon hear one or another rant about Palestine, variations on the theme of how it’s a darn shame that Jewish political influence is directing American weapons to Israel, where they’re being used to facilitate a genocide in Gaza. That this phase of the war itself erupted only after Hamas’s savage attack, or that it can end the moment the terror group returns the civilians it still holds hostage—these are treated as superfluous details. What matters is the raw sentiment that powers the contemporary progressive movement and holds that America is complicit in Israel’s colonial wars. It’s a powerful enough rallying cry to place Zohran Mamdani, a political wannabe with a virtually nonexistent resume, within striking distance of becoming the mayor of New York City. Forget income inequality or social justice or all the other pinko chestnuts of old—all you need to do to excite the left these days is to chant “globalize the Intifada.”
Turn to the right, and you’ll hear a similar tune. America—thus spoke Tucker Carlson and his minions—is fighting Iran at Israel’s behest. “The one silver lining to all this,” wrote Darryl Cooper, a popular self-styled internet historian on the right and a guest on Carlson and Joe Rogan’s shows, “is that everyone, left, right, and center, now knows that Israel controls U.S. foreign policy, and that most politicians and conservative media personalities are foreign agents.” A million people viewed Cooper’s rant on X, and many—including influential pundits like Candace Owens —echoed it for days. The mantra: We oughtn’t to send American boys to die in Israel’s wars.
Call it a Jewish superpower: causing the shrillest voices on the left and the right to converge. We’ve been here before, and it’s not a happy place. When both sides turn on the Jews, we know we’re facing a major and potentially lethal social contagion. And as is usually the case when anti-Semitic spirits run high, the problem has absolutely nothing to do with the Jews themselves.
Anti-Semitism works best when Jews are treated as both anti-matter and matter: They’re the Marxist fiends who plot communist uprisings and also the capitalist pigs who own all the factories; they’re effeminate little creeps who can never achieve true and noble masculinity and also libidinous sexual predators who seduce the women and corrupt the young; they’re pathetic because they’re so powerless and dangerous because they’re all-powerful. These blatant contradictions aren’t a bug—they’re a feature, allowing the haters to cast the Jews as the ultimate shapeshifting villain. It’s a convenient illusion, excusing the Jew-haters from the hard task of fighting their real, and far more formidable, enemies.
And let’s not kid ourselves; the real enemy of our contemporary lunatics, left and right, are not the Jews, but those who think that America is a great, godly, and exceptional nation. Which is to say, most Americans.
Consider the fact that no lesser lion of liberalism than Jon Stewart now fawns over Carlson’s cackling propaganda videos, warning that World War III will soon ensue if President Trump takes any action against the murderous mullahs in Tehran. Recall that Stewart effectively ended Carlson’s career at CNN after eviscerating him in a memorable and contentious interview. But the bitter enemies both share a foundational belief that America is first and foremost the sum of all its flaws, and that the best way to mend it is to cut it down to size by making sure it enjoys no undue advantage over any other nation. Who, after all, is to say that any one country is better than any other?
That, of course, is the worldview that guided Barack Obama, which is why he was so fond of repeatedly telling his fellow Americans that “that’s not who we are” as a country. Obama had a vision of America that was radically different than that endorsed by most Americans, and to sell it to the American people, he often insinuated that anyone who didn’t share his more enlightened worldview was simply a benighted soul erring on the wrong side of history. And Carlson, I believe, is little more than an Obama bro in a tanned MAGA skinsuit, defending Iran—the crown jewel of Obama’s foreign policy—and castigating America for believing it has any moral advantage or right to pursue its interests. It’s no coincidence, then, that Stewart sang an ode to Carlson on his own podcast while hosting Obama’s senior aide, Ben Rhodes.
At its core, the furor over U.S. action in the Middle East (or, for that matter, Ukraine) is not a political position. It’s a theological one, predicated on a rejection of American exceptionalism. And because American exceptionalism is an article of faith shared by most Americans—a recent survey put the number at 73 percent—the new America downgraders must find new ways to sell their wares.
But how? It’s impossible to portray Trump’s policy as needless warmongering. Such claims fall apart upon contact with reality, because no one, least of all the president, is proposing Iraq redux, a large-scale military operation that risks American dollars or lives. Instead, Trump’s approach is as cautious as it is reasonable.
Judicious policies and limited involvement: There’s little here to excite the imagination, which leaves those who reject American exceptionalism in a pickle. Their worldview, to be fair, is a legitimate one, and it does not necessarily bend toward rank anti-Americanism any more than fervently believing in American exceptionalism risks souring into arrogant and ill-advised triumphalism. But if you hold—as does Obama, and as does Carlson— that America is just another nation, neither special nor godly nor chosen, your options are limited when it comes to convincing others that your views are worthy of consideration. Because the facts don’t support any real cause for alarm over impending Armageddon. And because it’s more than a little inconvenient to target a supermajority of Americans as the enemy, the America downgraders turn to—and on—the Jews.
It’s a trick the hard right in France tried about a century ago. Unable to sell their political vision to a nation increasingly enamored with secular liberalism, they dragged a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus to court and accused him—and, by proxy, all Jews—of treason. You hardly need to be a historian to know that the gambit backfired, miserably. And yet here we are: Rather than arguing in good faith about what America’s role in the world ought to be, too many, on the right and the left, are arguing that America’s enemies aren’t really its enemies, that its interests aren’t really its interests, and that those dastardly Jews are once again manipulating the righteous gentiles to do their dirty work for them.
It’s a canard, of course, but a clever one. The Jews represent 2.4 percent of the American population. Seven million or so reside in Israel. But it’s not real people that concerns the Jew-hater. In hateful discourse, right and left, the Jews stand as representatives of the foundational belief that America is a covenantal nation—the Hebrew name for the United States is Artzot Ha’Brit, the lands of the covenant—and as a covenantal nation, our nation occupies a unique place in the Creator’s plan for mankind. Here’s the logic: Reject the original bearers of the covenant, and you negate the whole project. Turn against the root, and you’ve cut off the branch of American exceptionalism as well.
Let us, then, be clear: Those who ululate about Palestine or Iran rarely care about either. Nor are they engaged in an earnest conversation about American policy and its goals. Instead, they’re arguing for an America stripped of its divine mission, seeing us as just another bloated Rome, stumbling toward ruination. America, to them, is not a shining city on a hill, spreading the light of liberty and hope to a world drowned in darkness, but an empire to curb, resist, and, ultimately, overcome. This is why Whoopi Goldberg, to name but one useful idiot, recently argued on The View that women in Iran had it better than black Americans, and why Carlson famously traveled to Moscow to opine on camera about the superiority of the Russian way of life. Both statements are rejections of the belief that America is an “almost chosen” nation (as Abraham Lincoln wisely put it), and if you’re going to reject God’s providential favor, you could hardly do better than rejecting the chosen people themselves, the Jews. No chosen, no “almost chosen.”
Don’t worry about us Jews; we’ll be just fine. Worry mightily about America. We can and should argue about how we ought to respond to Moscow, Tehran, or any other global threat. We should never, though, doubt the role this exceptional nation was destined to play in the course of human events, or to undermine it by denying its favor in God’s eyes. It’s time to reject the Jew-haters, reaffirm our love for and commitment to this country, and work together to let America be America again.
