TikTok Democrats and 4Chan Republicans

From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch

“Twitter isn’t real life,” it’s said. (Twitter isn’t even Twitter anymore, technically.) Social media is a funhouse mirror of reality where conscientious political activists get to pretend that the average voter feels more passionately about their pet cause than he or she does about, say, the budding romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

But social media can be useful for detecting political riptides before they’ve risen to the surface. The Trumpmania of late 2015 is an example: If you were on Twitter at the time, you knew better than to doubt the staying power—and unsavoriness—of his base of support. The influence of progressive identity politics over Democratic policy is another. Any American alarmed by the seemingly sudden mainstreaming of “woke” beliefs must not have spent much time tweeting over the past decade.

So no, Twitter isn’t real life, but it can give you a hint of where real life might be going. It’s a clearinghouse for expressions of people’s political id. And today’s id may become tomorrow’s dogma, which is how we ended up with the leader of one of the two major parties ranting about rooting out communist “vermin.”

Do you want to see what the political id of the left and right fringes looks like at this moment?

Maybe you don’t. I spent most of Wednesday gazing into the abyss and regret it in hindsight.

But it’s my solemn duty with this newsletter to leave you despairing for the future of Western civilization. And it’s my moral duty to warn American Jews, their friends and allies, and supporters of Israel that the two tips of the proverbial ideological horseshoe are starting to look like a pincer.

To quote investor Balaji Srinivasan, “The future is TikTok Democrats vs. 4Chan Republicans.”

The first thing to know about TikTok Democrats is that there are a lot of them. And as you’d guess, they skew young.

On Wednesday, Pew revealed that 14 percent of American adults now say they regularly get “news” from TikTok, an almost fivefold increase in just three years. Among adults between the ages of 18 and 29, the share that says so is 32 percent. That’s one-third of the leaders of tomorrow, a key cohort in the coming election, swallowing “news” from a Chinese propaganda platform like Homer Simpson being force-fed donuts in hell.

A few months ago, at a Dispatch event with Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, my colleague Chris Stirewalt mocked the idea of getting one’s “news” from social media. That’s not news, he warned. It’s more aptly described as “news loaf,” a “news-like product” that’s light on intellectual nutrition like facts, data, and rigorous accuracy yet calorie-dense with inflammatory nonsense designed to confirm one’s political biases.

As if to prove his point, a few hours after Pew’s poll data was published this clip of soup-brained Zoomers raving over their latest meal of “news loaf” began circulating. Belatedly, they’ve discovered the work of a now-deceased thought leader whose worldview jibes nicely with their own, particularly with respect to the United States and Israel.

Osama bin Laden, woke visionary.

It’s unclear how many TikTok users have taken to cooing over his “Letter to America.” TikTok claims the number of videos doing so is “small” (and has promised to remove them) but there was enough traffic to The Guardian’s website, which published the letter online in 2002, to persuade editors there to remove the text in order to stop more people from linking to it. You’ll find an archived copy here. Readers of a certain age will find it a familiar Chomsky-esque dirge blaming the United States for the world’s problems, the sort of propaganda that people who pride themselves on being immune from propaganda voraciously consume.

But there are some unfamiliar notes. Amid the progressive flourishes about how Americans allegedly believe in democracy for whites only, bin Laden says this: “We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.” There’s also a sustained argument for murdering American civilians. You elect the government that sends your war machine into battle and pay the taxes that fund it, he complains, which means none of you are innocent.

“None of you are innocent” also happens to be a fine summation of far-left reaction to Hamas’ “decolonization” exploits against Israeli civilians on October 7. Coincidentally, videos urging solidarity with Palestinians were viewed many more times on TikTok last month than videos professing solidarity with Israel were, feeding suspicions here in the U.S. that Chinese chicanery was responsible. Perhaps Beijing is putting a thumb on the algorithmic scale to try to influence American popular opinion, swaying younger adults toward the Palestinian side in hopes of undermining the White House.

There’s another possibility, though. It may be that young Americans are already so predisposed to take sides against Israel that the lopsided interest in pro-Palestinian videos is an organic user-driven phenomenon, not a Chinese psy op. Other online platforms are seeing the same imbalance between the two combatants, after all. Months before the present conflict began, a Gallup poll found Millennials to be starkly more sympathetic to the Palestinians relative to older generations of Americans. Go figure that social media sites might end up reflecting the biases of their most frequent users.

Here’s another video that was circulating on Wednesday night. Protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza descended on the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington and blocked the doorways to prevent anyone from entering or leaving. When the police showed up, things got spicy. No one believes these people would have been home watching Netflix if not for having stumbled upon the wrong TikTok videos, do they?

I’m sure there are “TikTok Democrats” who have been radicalized by content on social media. (bin Laden and his disciples knew something about using online video to win converts.) But they’re not purely a product of those platforms; those platforms are also a product of them and their native interests. It smacks of denial to believe that interest on TikTok in jihadists’ anti-American views must be a matter of Chinese manipulation rather than a product of sincere curiosity among leftists too young to have been personally stung by 9/11.

The hard truth, I think, is that hostility to Israel and its American ally is baked into a progressivism that prioritizes identity over class. (Progressives who prioritize class over identity, like Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman, don’t share the affliction. Class isn’t what motivates Hamas, needless to say.) The point of identitarian progressivism is to flagellate the Western liberal order for its crimes against oppressed peoples. And Israel is a quintessentially “Western” entity—democratic, wealthy, educated, teeming with immigrants from white-dominated regions like Europe and the United States.

It’s simply not foreign enough to warrant progressives’ sympathy, especially by comparison to the nations that surround it. If your politics boils down to an endless search for victims of the Pax Americana, you obviously won’t be well disposed to a key “colony” that was plunked down in the middle of “Arab land.”

I think that also partly explains why left-wing hostility to Israel sometimes metastasizes into hostility toward American Jews. The very fact that Jews have survived and thrived within a liberal order responsible for so much alleged injustice and persecution makes it impossible to view them sympathetically. In identitarian progressivism, you’re either being persecuted or you’re one of the persecutors. Jews are too successful, too educated, too darned assimilated with too many anti-Western enemies to be seen as a proper virtuous “other.”

They can’t be victims. They’re too familiar. And so they’ll always be suspect to “TikTok Democrats.”

They’ll always be suspect to “4Chan Republicans” as well, but for basically the opposite reason.

Another thing you would have seen if you’d stared into the abyss on Wednesday is the world’s richest red-pilled goblin rubber-stamping this sentiment:

“You have said the actual truth,” Elon Musk replied to the person who tweeted that. (He walked it back after an outcry, but only to a degree.) The “actual truth,” according to Musk, happens to be the same white-nationalist logic given by the mass murderer who shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, Yair Rosenberg noted in The Atlantic.

That isn’t the first time Musk has blamed Jews for the hostility they experience. Take, for example, his response a few months ago to the Anti-Defamation League complaining about anti-semitism on Twitter: “The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform!”

Mush-headed twentysomething randos admiring the pensees of Osama bin Laden is one thing. One of the world’s most influential people promoting the “Great Replacement” theory to 160 million followers is quite another. “Twitter isn’t real life” feels hollow when the guy who actually owns Twitter, and who has more influence over real-life events than most humans who have ever lived, goes full Tucker.

Speaking of which.

While Musk was busy amplifying the idea that Jews are too pro-minority to deserve sympathy, two of the biggest stars of “4Chan Republicanism” uploaded the video of a chat they had recently. It was a banger.

Amid their complaints about Americans being overly emotional about a massacre in which 31 Americans were killed and others kidnapped, Carlson and Candace Owens wondered why donors to Harvard were so outraged by recent anti-Israel activism on campus but not by years of woke “white genocide” being practiced there. They also had a laugh about Ben Shapiro being pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine, and pro-vaccine, which, per Tucker, placed him “on the left.”

Shapiro isn’t just one of the most well-known commentators in right-wing media, he is, at least for now, Owens’ boss at The Daily Wire. On Wednesday evening, shortly before the interview with Carlson was posted, a feud between the two of them that’s been simmering since October 7 finally boiled over in public.

Shapiro is ardently pro-Israel while Owens is more … cautious, let us say. She hasn’t tweeted anything overtly critical of Israel and its supporters, as far as I’m aware, but she’s been skirting around it for weeks. A few days after Hamas’ attack she observed that certain unnamed people were being too emotional and failing to put America first. Later, she wondered why conservatives were more eager to blacklist pro-Palestinian college activists than those who’ve tried for years to bar right-wing speakers from campus.

On Tuesday, again taking care not to mention Israel or its offensive in Gaza specifically, she tweeted the Beatitude that begins “blessed are the peacemakers” before concluding with this: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” With that, Shapiro had finally had enough and tweeted that she was free to quit her job if she thought taking Daily Wire money had come between her and God.

Owens responded by twice warning Shapiro—a proud Orthodox Jew—that she won’t stand for him admonishing her for quoting scripture. “Christ is King,” she concluded, an innocuous sentiment in any other context but one which carried a distinct odor under the circumstances. In the aftermath, some very fine people on Twitter began circulating a clip from an old interview in which Shapiro affirmed that he doesn’t believe Jesus was divine, which is Judaism 101 but seems newly relevant and noteworthy for some reason among his far-right detractors.

I sympathize with him. But only to a point.

Shapiro knew what he was getting when his company hired reactionaries like Owens and Matt Walsh. He went ahead with it because he believed they would extend the reach of The Daily Wire among the right’s enormous post-liberal constituency, and he was correct. It made him rich. But if he didn’t foresee how this would end, he’s an idiot—and I don’t think he’s an idiot. If he did foresee how it would end and went ahead with it anyway, I’m not sure what he is.

Come to think of it, there’s a poem about this. We’ve heard it enough since 2016 that you’d assume people would have taken it to heart by now.

Let me use this opportunity to set him and other conservatives straight before they invest any more hope in their repulsive “America First” allies. No nationalist movement will remain sympathetic to Israel or to Jews long-term. It can’t. Nationalism is a form of tribalism in which one tribe, usually the traditionally dominant one, asserts that it rightly defines the identity of the nation and should properly govern it. Accordingly, it’s obsessed with “outsiders” infiltrating and weakening its hold on power.

Trump-era nationalists have remained well-disposed toward Israel and Jews thus far for several reasons. The trauma of 9/11 bound America closer to Israel on “enemy of my enemy” grounds; some Christian voters feel a special duty to help protect the nation of God’s chosen people; antisemitism remains enough of a social taboo (although a weakening one) that nationalists feel obliged to soften their views in public for fear of financial consequences. Even the fact that Donald Trump’s beloved daughter is a convert to Judaism, with Jewish children, might temper certain atavistic populist impulses toward more aggressive scapegoating.

But it can’t last. A tribe consumed with purifying the nation by purging alien elements who threaten its dominance will never fully reconcile itself to Jews. Familiar antisemitic critiques will creep in: Jews are too distinct and insular a tribe in their own right to ever assimilate into another. And they’re waaaaay too influential in the nation’s culture and industry given their meager numbers. Why should the dominant tribe tolerate them having such a prominent role in a country that belongs to its rightful rulers? If they’re “real Americans,” why are they so defensive on Israel’s behalf? Why is our government so supportive of that country, anyway? Don’t most American Jews vote Democratic?

There was a whiff of the “dual loyalty” smear in Carlson’s and Owens’ complaints about people showing more “emotion” over October 7 than over certain American tragedies, like the fentanyl epidemic. But other commentators popular with populists offered more than a whiff.

Behold the paradox in which Jews find themselves. They’ll never be enough of an “other” to suit “TikTok Democrats,” but they’ll ultimately be too much of one to suit “4Chan Republicans.” They’re too Western to suit left-wing radicals yet not Western enough to suit the radical right. Their success within the wicked liberal order taints them in the eyes of the progressive fringes and taints the liberal order itself in the eyes of nationalist ones.

I’ll close with an image that’s been making the rounds among Dispatch staffers today. Not all humor is funny because it’s true, but some is.

Readers are invited to locate themselves on the spectrum there and consider who their actual allies are. Tucker Carlson may be “of the right” and Rashida Tlaib may be “of the left,” but many conservatives are closer kin to Joe Biden and many liberals are closer kin to Mitch McConnell. Post-liberals are the mutual enemy, on both sides. Bear it in mind during the brutal election cycle ahead.

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