I am not just non-tribal, I'm anti-tribal. And my parents knew better than to try to force me to be bar mitzvahed (at age 12 I spent after-school hours in full lotus position, wailing in Sanskrit. Not that my family paid the least attention, but even they got the idea and smartly gave me a pass). And I am a Muslim-loving race traitor. And I don't have a paranoid bone in my body, even when the world goes all Kafka on me.
So...that's where I'm coming from. You'll understand that I don't say the following in a knee-jerk way. It's not how I naturally think. This is not my intellectual groove:
The infectious smoldering of economic populism, of xenophobia, of white supremacy, and of vitriol at "coastal elites", media, "Wall Street types", etc., is not being pushed forward, I don't believe, primarily by anti-Semitic people (though plenty of rabid anti-Semites are, of course, conveniently enjoying that tide). However, The Jewish Problem is like super-dry, crackly, hyper-flammable kindling, lurking adjacently to it all, just out of frame.
Bring the intensity levels up just 20 or 30%, and anti-semitism will flash in a chain reaction so suddenly and so brightly that your retinas will scorch. It will arc, like lightning, through people who are not particularly anti-Semitic; who never quite connected their anger and bitterness to this particular scapegoat; who have Jewish friends and are generally decent people.
Millions lack clear awareness of the Nazi-ish mindset into which they've been gradually stirred. There's one essential chunk missing. Add it, and there will be a widespread, galvanizing sensation of fullness, momentum, and inevitability.
Re: my dire recent Puerto Rico prediction, I may, alas, have been right. See this.
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