Besides being dangerous, I have always found anti-Jewish conspiracies to be extremely dumb
Like giving it 30 seconds of thought and the logic of them falls apart. Probably shouldn't even take that long, to be honest
I don't know how a black person, a minority, a member of a marginalized group, or a white person that claims to reject racism can think they are something to be taken seriously
I have seen numerous black people that spew nonsense like Kanye, and legit thinking repeating a white supremacist talking point is somehow a pro-black stance
Conspiracy theorists don't want logic or diligence. They want a simplistic explanation for complex phenomena. They want a
target.
Give those so inclined someone to look down on and they'll feel uplifted. While conspiracy theories aren't unique to the far right, their naturalization of group inequality is uniquely dangerous.
Common among reactionary grievance politics is the perception of “line cutting." Any personal inadequacies or anxieties faced by members of dominant groups is not merely unjust, but a perversion of a natural (often divinely ordained) hierarchy.
The bedrock of Reagan-era resentment was this notion that native-born White people who worked hard and did everything right were being left behind because liberal politics like welfare and affirmative action were allowing those who
should have been lower on the food chain to cut in line and eat White people's lunches.
That same messaging has been adapted to try and pull progressive coalitions apart via relative privilege. If you're native-born, don't you resent those immigrants taking
your jobs? If you're cishet, don't you resent all these LGBTQIA+ people forcing society to accommodate them while you're asked to subsist on the scraps of symbolism and incrementalism? People like you have been voting for Democrats for decades. Where are
your big gains?
If you're a straight, painfully single middle-aged single man, don't you resent all these modern, “unaccountable” women who scorned you? You're biologically superior, but you've been emasculated by feminism!
The pull is doubly strong for narcissists who want to emphasize their perceived individual superiority and treat collective identity/responsibility as a liability. “I'm not like those others. The disgust me, too! I identify more with successful people like you! Tell me we're alike and I'll help you stomp them down!”
On a fundamental level, selfish people and narcissists
don't want equality. They will, thus, ally themselves with those who would affirm their purported superiority on one or more identity dimensions and seek to make an "exception" of themselves on others.
Lindsay Graham articulated this rather directly in saying, “If you’re a young, African American or an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state, you just need to be conservative, not liberal.”
Given how many people never bother to read beyond the headline, it's a shame that so many of them are recklessly constructed.
In a
televised interview on September 22nd, Kanye said, “I’m moving my money over from JPMorgan to Bank of America, possibly, because I go and move $140 million over to JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon never calls me."
Is it? Because he actually didn't say anything.
So the outrage comes from saying he's going to go death con 3 and not actually going death con 3, which proves the actual point vividly.
“The more conspiratorial discourse your society has, the more likely people will become anti-Semites,” Yair Rosenberg says.
www.theatlantic.com
Isabel: You write that because anti-Jewish bigotry is a conspiracy, it becomes a “self-sustaining cycle.” How does that cycle work?
Yair: In Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, he [implies] that he’s going to attack Jewish people, and his rationale is that they blackball and silence those who act against them. This is a very clever little paradox, because if you, as a Jewish person, then say, “I think this is anti-Semitic,” and as a result of that, Kanye or anyone else who voices anti-Semitic sentiments suffers any consequences at all, then the anti-Semite can turn around and say, “Ha, you see? That proves that the Jews do control the things I said they control. Because when I tried to say anything about it, people tried to shut me up.” It’s a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory that provides its own evidence and can never be falsified in the mind of the anti-Semite.