The Armenian genocide launched by the so-called “Young Turks” in the last stages of the Ottoman Empire comes to mind as I watch the soft, seductive, silky smooth, and venomously evil AI political ad posted by a Republican congressional candidate in Florida.
As happened in Germany in the 1930s and Rwanda in the 1990s, the ruling ethnic group set the stage for murder by publicly demeaning the targeted minority. A century ago, Ottoman leaders referred to Christian Armenians as Gavur (Infidel) and Rayah (cattle). The Young Turks went further, declaring “Turkey for the Turks” and describing Armenians as dangerous microbes or tumors infecting the Turkish national body – and that the tumors needed to be destroyed to make the nation strong. Within a few years, the rhetoric turned into an ugly reality.
Starting in 1915, the Ottoman government killed more than 1 million Armenians and drove hundreds of thousands more, including Dan Bilzerian’s paternal ancestors, out of their homes,. To this day, no Turkish government has acknowledged that this genocide occurred.
Dan Bilzerian is a social media provocateur personality running for the Republican nomination to represent the 6th Congressional District of Florida. His opponent in Tuesday’s primary is incumbent Rep. Randy Fine.
A buff Navy veteran (his X profile features a macho shirtless picture) who is proudly not “politically correct,” Bilzerian describes marriage as a trap and says America has a “Jewish problem.”
Randy Fine is a married father of two boys, Boy Scout volunteer, Harvard graduate, and businessman who’s Jewish and has a dad bod.
Bilzerian apparently hates Jews, particularly overweight Jews, and especially Jews who support Israel. Rationality is not Bilzerian’s strong suit; his expressed reasons for hating Jews are an incoherent mish-mash of pseudo theology and geopolitical delusion that sounds about as coherent as the Young Turks’ reasons for hating Armenians.
Apparently, it’s never occurred to Dan Bilzerian that he lives in the United States for the same reason Israel exists: Each is a refuge for a religious and ethnic minority targeted for destruction and removal by a religious and ethnic majority where their ancestors used to live.
Bilzerian’s assertions about Jews and Israel in his postings are false and scurrilous, but I will leave it to others to dismantle his nonsense and lies.
Instead of focusing on Bilzerian’s personal failings, I want to drill down on why he has garnered 2 million followers on X espousing these noxious beliefs. He represents the surprisingly robust, ugly little corner of antisemitism that’s been emerging in the Republican Party over the last few years.
This strain of antisemitism differs from the even more widespread progressive strain of antisemitism, which is rooted in intersectional oppression theories premised on “white supremacy” and the bizarre idea that Jews are somehow the ultimate white oppressors. (Of course, there’s a strain of old-fashion Jew-baiting on the left, too: One source of virulent anti-Israel content comes from a podcast calling itself, without irony, The Young Turks.)
Ironically, however, antisemitism on the right is flourishing among the white men who are the targets of the intersectional rhetoric animating progressive antisemites.
These young men are alienated by institutions and progressive culture that traffic in tropes; they are calling BS on intersectionality, gender and queer theory, radical feminism, toxic masculinity and all the other wokisms they’ve been bombarded with over the last 25 years.
Influencers like Bilzerian embrace a masculinity that progressive antisemites consider toxic. Manliness is defined by muscles, fitness, and telling blunt “truth” about modern lies. Their view is that if it’s deplorable to reject ideas that are “politically correct,” then a real man should embrace the irony of being honest and deplorable instead of weak and good.
What Mr. Bilzerian and his acolytes miss is that starving Armenians and Nazi gas chambers were both real and singularly evil. The piles of emaciated bodies, victims of unbridled Jewish hate, shocked Western Christian culture into a consensus that anti-Jewish bigotry must be nipped at the bud: Never again!
So, yes: It became politically correct in the wake of World War II to oppose antisemitism because we saw the horror antisemitism begets. In this moment, Israel was reborn as a nation – and immediately attacked by its neighbors.
Good and evil are easy to discern in this realm, despite so many missing the obvious point: If Israel lays down its arms, Jews living there will be slaughtered in short order; if Israel’s many opponents lay down their arms and pursue prosperity instead of destruction, they will live in peace forever.
Israel pursues peace; it fights war to survive, but with greater restraint than American heroes have shown in our past wars.
Opposing antisemitism and supporting Israel became politically correct because it’s morally and practically correct; we have the receipts from the Holocaust and more recently from October 7 to prove it.
It’s also true that consciousness of the evils of antisemitism helped America turn the corner on racism, giving birth to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s. And yes – many of those leading the fight for equal rights for blacks and women were Jewish too.
From the 1970s onward, different groups for different reasons sought political power and social standing harkening back to these earlier movements – and the links became more tenuous and political correctness became more oppressive and less reasonable. Then, with DEI, intersectional oppression, and gender theories, PC jumped the shark.
So, yes – a backlash against woke political correctness today is reasonable, but rejecting everything that’s politically correct is not. The Armenian genocide and the Holocaust remain as stark reminders that truth and tolerance are both virtues in a civil society.
Finally, to Dan Bilzerian and his followers, a few suggestions: Improve your judgment about reality. Heroes aren’t assholes, so don’t be an asshole if you want to be a hero. Manliness is more than muscles; misdirected “courage” can be mean and malignant; and reflection, restraint, resilience, and regard for others are all male virtues.
