Cartoon racism and rumours of my secret Zionist agenda

This will be a somewhat personal post.

The Guardian is a British newspaper that bills itself as a bastion of fierce independent reader-supported journalism. In their unceasing efforts to live up to these lofty values, they’ve published an “investigation” doxxing my friend Lomez, who is best known as the founder of the alternative publishing house Passage Press. I won’t link to the piece; if you’re really interested, you can find it easily enough. Lomez’s crimes include running a successful business, publishing “scary ideas,” expressing sympathy for personalities like Donald Trump and Kyle Rittenhouse, and associating himself with “anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.” Unfortunately for his enemies, Lomez turns out to be an attractive, sporty and articulate former academic. It is as if somebody created him precisely to refute all those shopworn myths about uncouth and unkempt yet extremely dangerous “far right” thinkers, which leftoid automatic text generation machines like The Guardian will never stop peddling.

Among the personal details about Lomez pointlessly released by our fiercely independent reader-supported “journalist,” is the fact that he is an ethnic Jew. This has driven certain corners of the samizdat internet into an unusual state of excitation. They believe that The Guardian has uncovered further evidence of a “Talmudic network” bent on extending crypto-Zionist influence throughout “the right.” Because I am Lomez’s friend and I hail from the same electronic circles as he, these people have decided that I am also a Jew, and that many of my other friends are Jews, and that our main purpose in being online is to do a lot of very nefarious if poorly defined Jewish things. These are lazy attacks, and I mention them only to explain what has distracted me from my blogging routine these past days and to indicate the inspiration behind this post.

Ethnic identity and associated polemical narratives, whether about “racism” (on the one hand) or “Jewish subversion” (on the other), are important political topics, although they lie beyond what I’m normally comfortable posting about. The present freakout provides a useful occasion to address them – if only among friends and behind the paywall. If you want to come into my comments and call me a Zionist shill, the least you can do is sign up for a seven-day free trial.