The Horseshoe Theory of Politics is no longer theoretical; it's a fact
If you're someone who happens to be reading this who had read my article last week and was anxiously awaiting the second part of my column where I lay out my proposal for how education should be funded in this country, you have my apologies. I'd fully intended to write it for today, but I'm postponing it until next week since (as I'd indicated in that same column) I can no longer hold back my thoughts on the current crisis with the Israel-Palestine conflict as it's now unfolding in the US. But fear not, I will take it up next week, unless the world ends before then, which at this point I'm not entirely sure that it won't. That'd be just my luck.
What isn't fortunate in this instance though is a certain lucky charm that I've written on before as it pertains to politics: The Horseshoe Theory, which like a nightmare is rearing its ugly head to show just how factual this theory actually is. The Horseshoe Theory of Politics, if you aren't familiar with it, simply states that the further out one goes to the left or the right the closer those extremes bend back together like the ends of a horseshoe. This is most famously (or rather infamously) seen with two bitter enemies, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as the former Soviet Union, who despite having opposing ideologies were both quite similar as totalitarian dictatorships go. Now we're seeing it happening once again, only this time the scripts have flipped and it's the far right that's bending toward the old USSR and it's the far left that's embracing an old ally of the Nazis.
Let's start with the former since that's some low-hanging fruit courtesy of (un)professional congressional fruitloop Marjorie Taylor Greene or "MTG." So Empty G here, she of "Jewish Space Lasers" fame or infamy, just made news for triggering yet another vote to oust the Speaker of the House just as she'd been threatening to do for some time, but it unfortunately came at the same time that she outright repeated the millennia-old Blood Libel that "the Jews" killed Jesus.
Unfortunately because a tweet (are they still called tweets?) like the one she sent out earlier this week against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, saying it "could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews" shouldn't be overshadowed by her vain attempt to oust the speaker over aid for Ukraine. That's the rub of course, as even her own party is calling her "Moscow Marjorie;" if she's not on Putin's payroll, she's certainly doing some pro bono work for the madman who lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of its hegemony.
She'll never read this of course, but if she does – now look Marjorie, first of all it wasn't Herod, it was Pontius Pilate, every first grader in Sunday school knows that. Secondly, and this is important, it was the Roman Empire that did crucifixions, not "the Jews," and it's silly to think that a people under such brutal occupation would be able to direct one of the very worst brutes (Pilate was so bad he was recalled from his post by the emperor) to do their dirty work for them. Pilate could wash his hands a million times, but his ordering that a sign calling Jesus "The King of the Jews" hang above the cross shows exactly what he was up to. Now yes there's plenty of examples in the New Testament of antipathy between the early Christian community and the Jewish community from which it grew out, and there's plenty of room for debate over that topic, but no Marjorie you nut, Christians aren't going to be convicted and the Bible isn't going to be banned. Stop it.
The tougher nut to crack is what's going on with the college kids on campuses across the country. Tough because there are legitimate reasons for people wanting to protest the war, and US funding of the Israeli military is one of them. It's perfectly fine to be against that, and to exercise your First Amendment rights in doing so. I myself have been wanting the war to stop ever since it started. What's not fine is to do it in ways that break the law, but even then that's not the heart of the problem here. The heart of it is the elements within those protests – and elements outside of them that have inculcated this attitude – that acts like Hamas are the "good guys" and so to those elements, harassment and indeed violence against "the Jews," not even Israelis but any outwardly visible Jewish person, is a liberating act. It's painfully, obviously not, of course, and that it even has to be said in this day and age is unreal, but there have been so many instances of Jewish students on American college campuses being targeted for the "crime" of being Jewish that I'm starting to wonder if the talk about 1930s Germany that began with the Tiki Torch Mob at Charlottesville in 2017 might not be better suited for the TikTok Mob of 2024.
When one of these "globalize the intifada" types outright said that we're lucky he's not going around killing Jews and another was shown yelling at a Jewish person that "October 7 will be every day for you," and at the same time there's violence and destruction of property going on at these places, I'm starting to get some Kristallnacht vibes and I'm dreading what the summer will bring as these elements leave campus and need to find other targets to vent their rage upon. If that sounds hyperbolic, keep in mind that Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood was an ally of Hitler during World War II. People often forget, but the Nazis were all over the Middle East in the early stages of the war, and certain elements in society there welcomed them. Those elements remain in the militant fundamentalist movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and of course Al Qaeda, whose long-dead leader Osama Bin Laden recently went viral as I wrote last fall when the TikTok Mob had picked up on his manifesto against "the Jews" after 9/11 and, well, now here we are.
The political horseshoe has completely bent. The far right has people like MTG and Matt Gaetz (forgot to mention him earlier, but he spouted much the same nonsense) under the banner of Putin parroting the "Jews killed Jesus" line that's gotten millions of people killed over the centuries. The far left has people under the banner of Hamas calling for Jew-free spaces or "Judenrein" in the original German. The good people on both sides of the left and the right have to start standing up and kicking the extremists out of their movements, or that bent horseshoe is going to spell bad luck for the whole country.