Bari Weiss Deconstructs “Great Replacement” Conspiracy Theory

We should probably talk about your book. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. The way it opens is very... So we should tell people that you are from... We're really transitioning. Yeah, why not? No, I love it. We should tell people you're from Pittsburgh and you did your Bat Mitzvah at the temple where the Pittsburgh shooter. And so that was... Just tell people. Sure. So I grew up in Squirrel Hill, which is pretty much down the street from Mr. Rogers. It was quite literally Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. He's from there and was an amazing place to grow up. I became a Bat Mitzvah in 1997 and it happened at Tree of Life. I actually was a member of a different synagogue called Beth Shalom, but there had been this fire and so all of the kids who were becoming a bar Bat Mitzvah that year did it at Tree of Life. And in the same way that people think about 9-11 as a date, I think about also October 27, 2018, because that morning I was in Arizona to give a speech to a group and I looked at my phone around 10 in the morning to my family WhatsApp chat and my youngest sister had just said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life. And my thought immediately went to my dad because my dad is kind of what we think of as a promiscuous Jew. He goes to different synagogues. He pays membership dues at various ones. He likes the sermons at one and the scotch at another. And I thought that there was a good possibility that he was there. Thank God he was not there. But my mom wrote back, we're going to know people there. My dad knew most of the people, 11 people were killed. It was the most lethal anti-Semitic attack in all of American history. I knew several of the people that were killed. I was supposed to actually go to Israel the next day on a reporting trip to report on this fascinating archaeological dig, but I ended up putting that trip off, doing that story later and just spending the week to see what happens to a community when something like this goes down. Because we read about mass shootings all the time, so much so that they become kind of an abstraction. I don't report on this stuff, so I had never borne witness to what unfolds. And it was a really transformative week. And I write this in the book, but I feel like in retrospect I had spent my life on a kind of holiday from history, both because I'm a Jew of the post-war era, which is to say I'm part of the luckiest diaspora in all of Jewish history. The Jews since the end of World War II in this country have had it better than we've ever had it ever before. And all of the kind of mythology about what America could be, the idea that it's a shining city on a hill, the idea that it's a new Jerusalem, I was raised on those ideas. And even though anti-Semitic things happened to me, like speaking of Catholic school, I would wait for the school bus to my Jewish day school with my sister, and there was this Catholic school bus that would drive by, and they would scream, you know, kikes and dirty Jews and wear your horns. And I remember in high school someone telling me to pick up pennies. Like things happened, but it all kind of like didn't register. It really rolled off my back because I saw those as like vestiges from an earlier and uglier time, like something that those people should be embarrassed about, not something that said anything about me. And, you know, even after Pittsburgh, though, I was kind of like, you could still delude yourself into thinking like this is a one-off, it shouldn't change, you know, the fundamental Jewish American assessment of our experience here and our place of belonging here. But then six months later to the day, there's another white supremacist attack on a synagogue in Poway, California. And then we've had, you know, we've had this rash of violent anti-Semitic attacks happening in the New York area, which I hope we'll talk about. But, you know, it's weird because I grew up in a very political family, like my mom, my dad's a political conservative, my mom's a liberal, we're obsessed with politics, we're always talking about politics and we're always talking about like Jews, right? Like we're really proudly Jewish family. And so it wasn't that I thought anti-Semitism had died, like I was, you know, I watched anti-Semitism as it was sort of resurging in countries like France and England and Western Europe, but I sort of looked at all of that with some level of distance and maybe even a little condescension, like we're sort of inoculated from that disease in America, America singular, America is sort of separate from the tragedy of so much of Jewish history. And I have to say that like it sounds naive, but I was sort of shocked to see it, that it's here too, you know, and that we haven't escaped from it. And I mean, that awakening happened a little bit before Pittsburgh, which is, it happened, I think it was April 2017, you'll correct me, when was the Charlottesville March? Remember the Unite the Right March? Jamie, for now. But I remember being shocked right when those people were marching and they were shouting blood and soil, like Bluntenboden, which is a Nazi slogan. And the Jew will not replace us. Exactly, right? The Jew will not replace us. And when I heard the Jew, yeah, sorry, August 2017, when I heard Jew, like the Jews will not replace us, right? I heard it in like the plain meaning of that phrase, like the Jew is not going to take my job. The Jew is not going to like take my job in the corner office or whatever. But in fact, it was like a reflection of this replacement theory ideology, which is that brown people and black people and Muslims and immigrants are coming to replace our white civilization. And the Jews job is basically to pass as a white person, but in fact, do the bidding of these people that we deem to be not pure. Where's that come from? That is a deeply, deeply ancient anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, right? It's the idea of, well, let's go back to the New Testament. Let's go back to Jesus, right? What happens in that story? The story there is that the Jews go to Pontius Pilate and say, you know, like, this person's unacceptable to us. And in the mythology of that story, the Jews get what was then the most powerful empire in the world, the Roman empire, to do their bidding. And you have this line in the book of Matthew that is so, so, I mean, the bloodiness of this line cannot be quantified where he says, you know, his blood be on us and on our children, which goes, you know, down through the centuries to justify the killing of untold numbers of Jews. The idea of the Jew as sort of like the wily manipulator, as the Jew as having proximity to power, not being in power, but being able to sort of be the puppet master pulling the levers of power. You see that play out in lots of different iterations through time, right? You see it, I'm trying to think about useful examples for your listeners, but that is sort of the trope, right? And it is an ancient one, but it's being utilized in really new ways. So it's not literally that the Jew is going to replace us, is that the Jew who, the Jew in a way is sort of like the greatest trick the devil has ever played. And this is the language of Eric Ward, who wrote this amazing essay called Skin in the Game. And he talks, he's a black anti-racist activist. And he talks about figuring out how anti-Semitism is kind of the linchpin of white supremacy, because the Jew appears to be white, but in fact, he's not white. I mean, this is all based on this lie that race is not a social, that race is not a construct, right? It's, which it is. But they're saying that the Jew is not white, but he appears to be white, but in fact, he's loyal to these people who are coming to sully America. And so when you have someone like Congressman Steve King saying, we can't replace our civilization with someone else's babies, like what does that mean? What is that idea? It is so deeply anti-American, because the idea of America, right, is the idea that Americanness is not about bloodline. Americanness is about a shared set of values and ideas and fealty to those ideas. So the idea that someone else is, what does that mean? You know? Well, it doesn't make any sense because this entire country is based on immigrants. Of course. And, you know, as we talked about with the Native Americans, I mean, you want to, we have replaced our country. We've taken over their country. It was theirs first.