Notes from Upstream: Antisemitism Is the STD of Politics

And we need new treatments fast

Years ago, when we began to see the spread of the herpes and HIV viruses, we also saw the spread of ads warning about risky sex partners.

“Remember: when you have sex with someone, you are having sex with everyone they have had sex with for the last ten years, and everyone they and their partners have had sex with for the last ten years.”

Does politics work like sex? When a podcaster embraces his guest, is he also embracing everyone his guest has ever embraced?

When Carlson Embraces Fuentes, Is He Embracing Hitler?

By the way, embracing does not mean “just asking questions.”

Who Killed Charlie Kirk? Candace Owens knows—and it wasn’t Tyler Robinson—it was someone inside TPUSA

Those anti-STD ads told the truth: a sexually transmitted microorganism passes from person to person until it reaches you and takes up its destructive residence there and works its damage inside you until you die.

And until you die you are a carrier, not that different from Typhoid Mary Mallon, a twentieth century cook who infected as many as 122 people with her Typhoid Fever.

Typhoid Mary Mallon

I am not the first person to notice that Tucker Carlson has chosen to become the Typhoid Mary of antisemitism. Not coincidentally, according to the emails he sends me from his Tucker Carlson Network, he is also a Nine-Eleven Truther:

“Episode 4 of TCN’s new documentary series, The 9/11 Files, dives into this underreported angle of the deadliest attack on U.S. soil in history and asks other questions permanent Washington doesn’t want to answer. Why were foreigners visiting New York seen celebrating as the attack unfolded? Who profited from airline stock trades right before the hijackings? And why didn’t the 9/11 Commission adequately address any of this?”

“… Could whatever caused the 600-foot-tall structure’s demise also be responsible for the more famous implosions hours earlier?”

We wonder who Tucker thinks “profited.” His email is silent. To find out, you’ll have to pay the man. The answer will come from some other person, while Tucker nods and frowns, concerned and caught off guard by the surprising revelation, but never quite endorsing it. He’s “just asking questions.”

Dinesh D’Souza provides a succinct explanation of Carlson’s M.O.

I admit that my characterization of antisemitism as an STD resembles Elon Musk’s characterization of the “woke mind virus.”

It’s all about analogy. Musk himself compares his “woke mind virus” to the “Cordyceps fungus.”

Cordyceps

According to Musk’s own Grokipedia:

“When Cordyceps attacks a host, the mycelium invades and eventually replaces the host tissue…The ascocarp bears many small, flask-shaped perithecia containing asci. These, in turn, contain thread-like ascospores, which usually break into fragments and are infective.”

“Infective” is the operative word. Antisemitism is a transmitted disease which infects not only the “woke” but the anti-woke, or if you prefer, both the Woke Left and the Woke Right. In that sense, it is even more prolific than Musk’s woke mind-virus.

It is also more fatal. If you don’t believe me, check out Berlin in 1945.

Once Nicknamed Spree-Athen (Athens on the Spree River)

In fact, antisemitism may be the most destructive idea in history.

People who should know better ask, Why are Jews so intolerant? Why put together such a “venomous coalition”? Why do Jews insist on “canceling” people who want to kill them?

These sometimes well-meaning folk propose that Jews and others who object to antisemitism should “debate” or at least “détente” with their haters.

The answer is easy. Once a Jew (or any other target of bigotry) acquiesces and admits the need to prove he belongs in this country or on this planet, the bigots have already won.

I’ve been there. A Jew is expected not only to “debate” his hater by debunking easily debunked absurdities but by proving his right to exist.

Perhaps comedian Gary Gulman did the best job possible under the circumstances:

Obviously it’s not “canceling” to point out that someone hates you nor to choose not to use his stuff.

Our Founding Fathers enthusiastically welcomed Jews into their new country. George Washington wrote this in his ought-to-be-even-more-famous 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Providence, Rhode Island.

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

Jews don’t need your “toleration.” We have as much right to be here as you. Don’t even ask.

This uniquely American constitutional approach has worked wonderfully well, not only for Jews, but for the U.S. as a whole.

In August, 1945, after saving Western Civilization by helping win World War 2, British authorities carried out “Project Epsilon.” They locked up high-level German scientists and secretly recorded their private conversations, including German consternation after the Hiroshima atom bomb.

• Werner Heisenberg: Theoretical physicist and head of Germany’s own nuclear program, famous for articulating “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”

• Otto Hahn: Chemist who discovered nuclear fission (later awarded the Nobel Prize).

• Max von Laue: Physicist and Nobel laureate.

• Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: Theoretical physicist.

• Walther Gerlach: Physicist known for the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

• At least five others

Hitler’s Uranium Club: Transcripts of Secret Recordings of German Scientists

These scientists had been complicit in their country’s antisemitism. Most had taken personal advantage in their careers. Their regrets were practical rather than moral. (Relevant snippets start at about 9:30.)

“Hitler thought nuclear physics was ‘Jewish science.’ The Nazis had driven away their best minds. Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, dozens of others, all Jews, all exiled or escaped, and where did they go? America.

‘We gave them our greatest weapon,’ someone said. ‘Our own brilliant scientists, and Hitler let them walk away.’

“The irony was devastating. The very people who could have won Germany the war were the same people Hitler wanted dead. ‘He destroyed our own chances,’ Heisenberg said, ‘Through stupidity, through hatred, through arrogance.’”

Naturally, the critical role Jews played in defeating Japan and Germany irritates the STD sufferers and carriers.

Not a digression—here’s another movie worth watching:

Those who see Jewish participation in winning World War 2 a nuisance seek to quell the nuisance by minimizing that victory.

Thus Tucker Carlson tongue-bathes Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper as the “most important popular historian working in the United States today” and nods along when crackpot chemist David Collum says that he believes “we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.”

Definitely not a digression: On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Then Japan declared war on the United States. The next day, the United States responded by declaring war on Japan but not on its ally Nazi Germany. Several days later, on December 11, Germany declared war on the United States. Then and only then did the United States declare war on Germany.

War between Germany and the U.S. was Germany’s decision, not ours.

With respect to the antisemitism STD, no reasonable person can deny that Tucker Carlson is at least a carrier, or as President Trump labels him, “a kook.”

Scary fact to which people pay too little attention: all sorts of potentially lethal microorganisms reside in our bodies.

We have the medical technology necessary to defeat or at least suppress the symptoms of most of them.

We can do the same to antisemitism. Even if we can never eliminate the world’s oldest hatred, we can isolate it and suppress its worst symptoms.

The body’s best defense is health. A healthy body continues to function despite the presence of destructive germs. When other factors weaken one’s general health and immunity, that’s when the already present microorganisms seize their opportunity to spread and to destroy.

In American culture and politics, we will do better to focus not merely on suppressing the Jew hatred STD but on counterposing a healthy cultural and political vision of our own.

Trump works at that all the time. Hence his bold prediction of the American “golden age” he works to create.

Charlie Kirk also had the right idea. He didn’t cozy up to people like Fuentes. He called Fuentes “vermin.”

But he also spoke affirmatively of the greatness of “Judeo-Christian Civilization.”

I won’t tongue-bathe him; I’ll just let him speak for himself, in this case sharing insights with Jewish commentator Dennis Prager:

Here’s Kirk dealing with a Fuentes follower who claims that America is a “European nation for white men of good stock”:

[Still shot: click link above to see full X video.]

We need more people saying what Charlie Kirk said:

“You sir and your ideology is not conservative. It is right wing identitarian. It has no place in the conservative movement...Get out of Line! GET OUT OF LINE!”

All together now: “GET OUT OF LINE!”

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives with his wife in a dusty little village in Arizona in a house he expects to share in about ten days with two brand new cats.