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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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deleted

It sure was lucky for the left that the Kochs aren't Jewish.

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Honestly I'm not sure how many of his opponents even know he's Jewish. It seems like the median right winger thinks of Soros as "billionaire from something or other, eastern european but I don't know what country, uber-liberal views and supports lefty organizations in a way that isn't really fair and I couldn't explain why". Sort of like a less specific version of Bill Gates(who they also don't like).

The Rothschilds are the same thing; I'm not sure if they people ranting about their influence even know they're Jewish, or anything about what they are other than "vaguely wealthy family with vaguely sinister behavior".

My estimate is "about as many as those who know there is such a thing as Jews".

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Thank you, I think you've well-put a lot of my frustrations over how people responded to Greene, latching so quickly onto anything that seemed like it could be used to tar her, when it's not quite so clear. When I first looked into what exactly she said, I also thought "wait... she didn't really mention Jews, exactly, why is everyone taking this stance in opposition to her?"

Because the Rothschild family features in a lot of conspiracy theories due to being enormously wealthy and influential during the 19th century. You really don't need any additional explanation for why a family that had that level of wealth and influence over governments for a century accumulated conspiracy theories exaggerating their power further. Look at the conspiracy theories that have accumulated about Bill Gates in just a couple decades. Someone did the usual conspiracy-theorist thing of playing Six Degrees of Separation and noticing they were connected to PG&E, and then MTG read and repeated it.

For fans of irony - Despite being super into any conspiracy as a kid, I used to mindkill anyone who mentioned any antisemetic conspiracy (this is back when I was a good boy, 11 or 12 or so). That was until I got accused of trying to spread antisemetic conspiracy theories for doing a history report on the amazingly cool (to a poor stupid x files fan) Rothschilds, who were so awesome back in the day that people still thought they ran the world. Apparently I was trying to dog whistle antisemetism despite not actually knowing they were Jewish (the term dog whistling wasn't used back then, the teacher just called it being sneaky).