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.
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.
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.
…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.
