Blaming the Jews Explains Nothing, Except to Those for Whom It Explains Everything https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2022/12/blaming-the-jews-explains-nothing-except-to-those-for-whom-it-explains-everything/

December 6, 2022 | Jonah Goldberg
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Addressing the former president’s recent dinner with two prominent anti-Semites, and the fallout in certain precincts of the far-right Internet, Jonah Goldberg reflects on the mental perversions that lead to, and grow out of, obsessive hatred of the Jews. (Free registration required.)

[T]he idea that a bunch of Jews “control” or “conspire to control” anything starts to sound really dumb the moment you start thinking it through. The only way it works is if you think of Jews not as people, but as an abstraction. Even then it doesn’t actually work because it can only make sense if it’s based upon conclusions you reached before reasoning. Jews are overrepresented in this industry or that profession, and so you start with the conclusion that it’s unfair, unjust, or rigged in some way and then reason backward from that conclusion.

Admitting that you failed because you weren’t good enough (or because you’re not that bright, or because you didn’t do your homework, or because “Your paintings are pedestrian, Herr Hitler,” or simply because no one likes you) is hard. But if you failed because the lizard people, the billionaires, or the bagel-snarfing Rothschilds conspired against you, that makes you not only a Very Important Person, but a kind of heroic martyr. Or at least that’s what losers tell themselves.

If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, conspiracy theories are the philosophy of losers.

Read more on Dispatch: https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/get-with-the-pogrom/