Joe Lonsdale
For the first time in my lifetime, a lot of successful Jewish friends called me worried this week - names we all know - asking what is going to happen as these libels re-enter the mainstream, and are shared by millions. Sadly, Tucker, Rogan, Candace Owens, and others platformed slanderous conspiracies and blood libel to tens of millions of followers - maybe they all know it, maybe one or two of them are just naive and don't get it. Personally, I'm not a victim, I'm a fighter, but we know our family history, and we didn't just die in the Holocaust. Jews as a successful "outsider" minority have been hunted and murdered for centuries based on libelous anti-Semitic tropes that implied that we wanted to hurt Christians or were scheming against them. My great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents and their siblings around eastern Europe each grew up facing commonplace rape and slaughter fueled by similar lies, long before our grandparents' generation was systematically exterminated. Lucky for me, the Jewish branch of my family escaped to the USA by 1920. If you don't believe we're dealing with extreme anti-Semites and insane conspiracy theorists, just look at this quote tweet from an account with more followers than me and the replies - or the replies my post is sure to garner. Or thousands of other accounts this week, innocently asking why Jews don't care about Christian deaths around the world (we do, and Israel has worked to protect Christians, as should the USA). Many accounts are obsessed with Jews being tied to communists. I'm about as strong a fighter against Communism as you can find, not least with my work with the Reagan Library, but it's true, in response to being beat the crap out of by various regimes including the Tsar in Russia (it was once said of him he had no religion, but if he did, it was anti-Semitism) - many Jews ~120 years ago became communists. I don't excuse it - Communism is not just misguided, but applying it is evil and wrong. But it's not some wacky conspiracy, the history makes it obvious what happened and how this reaction occurred. Today, the majority of Jews have learned why that philosophy was evil, as have others: and millions of us fight for liberty and our constitution in the USA as fellow citizens. As did many Jews at the founding of the USA. It's a red herring to say you can't criticize Israel. I criticize them all the time, as do most Jews, in fact; we have a lot of opinions, and it's a horrible, complex situation that Israel as a whole generally faces with dignity and strength. But age-old blood libels of Jews wanting to hurt Christians are false, totally inappropriate, and also weird in the context of the fact that it's Islamists slaughtering hundreds of Christians and forcing them out of many areas as we speak. Jews and Christians are natural allies, and our civilization prospers when we stand up for each other and our shared values. Our enemies hope to drive us apart, but our shared understanding of the radical equal dignity of all human life and associated values led to the enlightenment and to our prosperity in the west. Our alliance is too strong for any of this nonsense to destroy.