Obsessing Over 'the Left' Sabotages the Fight Against Antisemitism
Don't let your political enemies' rhetoric and agenda distort your moral clarity
This post is the eighth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
Look, I’m the first to admit this is a pretty weird publication. We’ve got contributors with a wide range of views, contributing from around the world. We’re running book reviews, podcasts on art films, spiritual reflections drawing from multiple mystical traditions, fiction, poetry, cultural criticism, humorous personal reflections, and now this series exploring antisemitism in culture. We’re also planning to publish books across styles and genres, from science fiction and thrillers to poetry collections, literature, memoir, and polemic.
Much of the publication’s weirdness admittedly derives from my own personal weirdness. However, another critical factor is that, professionally, I emerged out of a particularly weird political movement and media tradition. From 2009 through 2015, I was an editor at two Southern California conservative political publications: FrontPageMag and, later, Pajamas Media, soon to be rechristened PJ Media, ostensibly in a bid to be taken more seriously by the journalistic establishment. I also contributed to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood at his own invitation while he was still alive, hence my invoking him in this series’ opener - and my continued affection for his memory.
The “Southern California conservative” tradition of this period was especially weird for many reasons, and I’ll unpack them all in greater depth another time. For our purposes, there are two key factors to consider. First, Southern California conservatives have a tendency toward feeling rather under siege, since they’re such a political and cultural minority. California is infamously dominated by “the Left,” both practically, in the dominance of the Democratic Party, and also “culturally,” via the progressive-dominated city hubs of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
Second, and more importantly, the leadership of this media wing of Southern California conservatism was, at the time, uniformly of the “ex-leftist” variety. All three publications - FrontPage, Pajamas, and Breitbart - were founded and run by ex-leftists. Thus, major editorial time and focus was spent on stories and coverage of all sorts of left-wing activists, writers, TV hosts, intellectuals, artists, professors, politicians, and general troublemakers.
And for years I was immersed in this world. Every day I was editing articles, doing in-depth research, and writing blog posts dedicated to analyzing or critiquing some component or another of “the Left.” I came to know a little too much about socialism, Marxism, Communism, espionage during the Cold War, and all the various strains, histories, personalities, causes, and sub-groups of “the Left.”
At this point, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been putting “the Left” in quotes throughout this piece. That’s because I’m largely sick of those who frame their worldview around the concept; I would even go so far as to dispute its very existence. Why? Because there isn’t a singular the Left. Yes, there are many groups of people who could classified as being part of left-wing movements, progressive causes, and liberal political parties. But the truth is that these various people are not at all as unified as they may sometimes appear. People in one segment of “the Left” may totally disagree with, or even detest, those in another part of it. People who care passionately about one cause in “the Left” might not be bothered at all by other causes.
Talking about a single “the Left” suggests that there is much greater unity and strength than there is in real life. Far Left communists are not the same as center-left moderate Democrat partisans. Noam Chomsky-style anarchists focused on war and foreign policy are not teachers-union activists or pro-choice feminists or “woke” defund-the-police BLM activists or gender-centric transgender advocates or trendy Hollywood film producers or campus antisemites proclaiming their support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) cause. There is often some cross-over, but actually, these are many different, distinct movements and causes. Squishing them all together into “the Left” and then claiming “the Left” wants this or “the Left” supports that ends up creating an oversimplified fiction of a political world that does not really exist.
And what happened to my cherished Southern California Conservative movement in the years since I departed it in 2015 to refocus on Islamism, antisemitism, and fiction book publishing? Its anti-Left focus went national. The editors and leaders of PJ, FrontPageMag, and Breitbart became loud Trump-boosters, with Breitbart’s Steve Bannon infamously becoming the Trump White House’s “chief strategist.” Trump, in turn, embraced their rhetoric. He’d frequently frame his rants against “the Left” and regurgitate the sorts of things my old bosses used to bellow at me in editorial meetings, and in the wild phone calls I’d grown accustomed to taking at random hours throughout the day.
So nowadays, through Trump’s overwhelming influence among conservatives, Republican partisans, and right-wingers, this framing of everything against “the Left” is much more commonplace than it was when I stumbled into all this in 2009. Focusing so much on “the Left” used to be the territory of those of us on “the fringe” out in the wilds of California. Now it’s the standard coin of the right-wing realm.
And oh, dear Lord, am I absolutely fucking sick of it. I am so tired of hearing repeatedly that, oh no, we can’t use that word because “that’s the Left’s language”! Or we can’t support one idea or another because that’s a “cause of the Left.” Oh no, we can’t condemn some right-wing minor celebrity narcissist spewing cultural garbage because he’s someone “in the Left’s target” and thus we on the Right must rally behind him or else “the Left” gets a victory.
I’m growing more angry about this stuff, though. Since 2016, my focus has largely shifted away from researching and writing about Leftists and moved instead toward the many varieties of antisemites, with several years focused on American Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. And now it’s more clear to me than ever that this tunnel-vision obsession with “the Left” has now poisoned many conservatives’ ability and moral clarity to confront the antisemitism on the rise in American politics and culture.
In my previous article in this series I pointed out some of the right-wing pushback my initial article in this series has received. So-called conservatives objected on four counts: wanting to minimize the problem, mocking the strangeness of the antisemites, insisting that covering antisemites in media empowers them, and finally, worrying about supporting any variety of “cancel culture,” lest they, themselves, ever face “cancellation” for their own unpopular ideas.
Now, though, I’ve got another even more disturbing example of why many on “the Right” don’t want to talk about or even acknowledge hate crimes committed against Jews. According to some right-wingers I’ve conversed with about my article, hate crimes don’t exist. According to them, we can’t call swastikas spray-painted on Jewish graves - along with the slogan “Kanye was Rite” - a “hate crime.” According to them, doing that would be using “the Left’s language” and thus adopting an idea of “the Left.” According to many right-wingers, “crime is crime.”
It’s at this point that I tend to drop a few angry expletives and excuse myself from the conversation. Once someone has made clear that they are more worried about fighting “the Left” than protecting Jewish people from violent antisemitism, they’ve revealed how deeply morally confused they are. There’s no reasoning with them on the issue.
And unfortunately, that’s simply what “the conservative movement” has largely become at this point. Right-wing activists today are more concerned about “drag queen story hour” and keeping transgender people out of bathrooms than they are shutting down antisemitism. They’re more devoted to defending Trump’s every constitution-shredding utterance than defending Jewish lives.
But apparently it’s weird of me to write and publish such things.