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American Jews perplex the hell out of me. I like their food, I like their humor, I like their culture in general, and most of all I like their IQ distribution. If you're a gentile but you select your friends for being bright, it is statistically inevitable that a lot of them are going to be Jewish.

(Full disclosure: genetic assays on my family suggest that we have a few percent of Ashkenazic markers. But my family has never thought of itself as Jewish and I don't self-identify that way.)

The recent wave of virulent public anti-Semitism would greatly disturb me even if I didn't, in general, like Jews as individuals. Because I consider the Jews the canary in the civilizational coal mine - any society that treats them increasingly badly is probably in the process of flushing itself down the toilet of history and will certainly become a hostile environment for brainy gentile me before very long.

But I said that American Jews perplex me, and here's why. They seem to be incapable, for all their above-average intelligence, of grasping how large a hand they themselves had in creating the monster that is now stalking them.

There's this concept of tikkun olam in Judaism, repairing the world as a religious duty. It's expressed in both religious and secularized Jews as a persistent attraction to social-reform causes. Jews want to fix what's broken about society - which, in the abstract, is quite admirable. But...

They keep buying into Marxism, either directly or as critical theory and "social justice". Jews disproportionally give their money and their leadership abilities to collectivist ideologies which will inevitably turn on them - because to a would-be totalitarian, the thinker and the Jew and the cosmopolitan are always a disruptive threat.

I've been watching this colossal, self-destructive error play out all my life. It doesn't take much study of history to see that Jews, especially secularized Jews, have been repeating this mistake almost en masse since the mid-19th century if not earlier.

Why? Why? You guys are smart enough to dominate the Nobel prizes and yet you keep failing to see the bloody obvious. For your individual and tribal self-preservation, you ought to be the staunchest anti-Communists and anti-socialists anywhere. Collectivism isn't good for anybody, but it's especially deadly to Jews.

Instead, when Stalinists stuffed you in boxcars you failed to connect the dots so comprehensively that the red-diaper Communist families in the U.S. are still predominantly Jewish generations later.

Nazis murdered six million of you and you still don't get that racial identity politics is poison? How can you be so blind?

Today, it's the hard left in the US, again, organizing "anti-Zionist" demonstrations that are working themselves up to become pogroms, and judging by your voting and donation patterns you still don't get it.

Can anybody honestly tell me that American Jews are waking up? I'd like to think so, because we need you on the side of liberty and individualism. History doesn't make me optimistic, though, and that colossal blind spot continues to puzzle me exceedingly.