Update, April 9th 2023: See this thread on how Siegel’s Tablet Mag published the main CIA agent in charge of propaganda mere days after Siegel’s supposed “expose” of the “disinformation complex”, which happened to receive fawning reviews from elite media class centrist liberals and right-wingers.
Over the past few days the right-wing liberal and conservative faction of the media class has been going wild over an essay published by a guy called Jacob Siegel in Tablet Mag. I won’t link to it, if you care enough you can find it, but I’m always fascinated when these kinds of events happen, when the prominent members of the media elite like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi unite to sing the praises of one of their tribe. These people are highly selective in who they praise and denounce, who is lifted up to the heavens as a Genius, and who is thrown onto the ground as a vulgar reactionary Stalinist monster. The choice reflects their ideology, which they hide behind a thin façade of anti-establishment rhetoric and posturing, while of course being deeply ensconced in the establishment. Recently a Financial Times piece on Bari Weiss revealed that she is getting millions in funding from a Silicon Valley right-wing venture capitalist creep who famously has a head shaped like an egg (Marc Andreessen, for the curious). This is alongside the tens of millions in funding she receives from her “subscribers”, who have been accumulated through a lucrative career of constantly failing upwards from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to becoming Elon Musk’s PR agent and getting at least 5 million easy from that boost alone. Very salt of earth proletarian stuff.
Anyway, back to Siegel. The collective orgasm over him struck me with skepticism, as I saw the place it was published in: Tablet Mag. For those unaware, Tablet is an arch-Zionist Israeli supremacist rag that is funded by the lobby. Their cottage industry is to hire Ivy league apartheid state lovers to talk about how the only true victims in the world are pro-Israeli Jews, and that the only racism in the world is directed at them, and that every other kind of oppression and marginalization against black people and Latinos and other minorities is fake and a distraction from that only actual racism. Of course anti-Zionist Jews are high up the ladder of evil as well for Tablet, they are the traitors to The Cause, who have committed the ultimate sin of choosing values like believing Palestinians are humans above fidelity to a genocidal apartheid project.
So when I see a Tablet Mag piece being collectively masturbated over by members of the elite media class, I have my misgivings. Now Siegel is not someone who just randomly wandered into the offices of Tablet Mag. He’s a Zionist fanatic like the rest of them, as a quick search for his name alongside Jeremy Corbyn’s quickly revealed. This supposed anti-establishment reason-loving anti-cancel culture classical liberal moderate intellectual has written thousands of words about how Corbyn is a modern-day Hitler who presents a grave threat to the world. You can see why Bari Weiss and the rest of the elite media class love him so.
The particular mode in which Siegel operates is in that of the right-wing pseudo-intellectual. Let me elaborate: For at least the past half-century if not longer right-wing conservatives and liberals have basically given up on any pretense of having deeper principled thought-out arguments for their worldview. They began to see such endeavors as a waste of time, something done in the academy that has no bearing on the “real world”, where only brute force matters, as reflected by cold hard cash. You don’t need to sit in your study and think about how you can justify your first principles and respond to critics of it, you only have to set up a think tank and request funding from some billionaire and then write “policy papers” that are surface-level pronouncements about X or Y policy being necessary because it aids the cause of freedom. “We need to end public education because it inhibits freedom.” “We need to destroy welfare because it inhibits freedom.” “We need to enforce stricter criminal penalties because it promotes freedom.” Throw in some references to “agency” here and there and you have yourself the modern right-wing as an “intellectual” force. This is why conservatism no longer produces Heideggers, only Jordan Petersons.
Back to Siegel. He is a guy who is a “veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars”. Now when you advertise yourself as such in the American and Western media class, that’s seen as totally normal and even admirable. To me it denotes that he is a likely mass murderer, torturer and enabler of pedophilia. At a minimum it indicates a deep level of sadistic depravity on the part of someone who participated in these illegal genocidal wars, and has never expressed any regret for it, like others have. Just to be clear and to avoid a possibly lawsuit: I am not saying that I have knowledge of Jacob Siegel personally being involved in murder and aiding and abetting pedophilia in specific concrete instances, but I know for a fact, and this is indisputable, that Siegel’s participation in these wars as a member of the US military by itself enabled these things to happen. Morally he is certainly culpable for it, especially given that he has remained a steadfast admirer of the military industrial complex. Some of his obsessive focuses as he turned his hand from destroying the lives of Afghans and Iraqis to writing for Zionist rags was admonishing Obama for not invading Syria and instead “dithering” on it while manufacturing consent for war against Iran during a stint at the Daily Beast. In a piece last year reflecting on the causes of the Ukraine proxy-war Siegel does not say a word about NATO expansion, Trump’s breaking with Obama and sending advanced weaponry to Ukraine and making it a de facto NATO state, the 2014 coup, the breaking of the Minsk agreements by the Kiev regime, the war in the East run by Azov Nazis, Zelensky’s election on a peace platform and being forced to abandon it by the aforementioned Azov Nazis. No, Siegel’s answer for why the war began is very intellectual, scholarly, edgy and anti-establishment: It was because the US didn’t launch a full-scale war against Syria. What a surprise that the guy who ended up moving to Tablet Mag and is fanatically devoted to the Israeli apartheid regime was and remains obsessed with Syria and Iran, the main targets of Israeli neo-con hawks over the past decade, and sees the failure of the US to launch full-scale genocidal wars against them (like it did against Afghanistan and Iraq, which he proudly participated in) as the key to understanding all the world’s ills today.
So this is who the person Jacob Siegel is. But he wants to be more. He wants to be what is desired most among right-wing liberal and conservative media elites: he wants to be an intellectual. So he reads actual intellectuals, or rather he skims through their popularizing articles for the purpose of peppering references to them in his own pieces. He adopts a rhetorical register that teeters on the edge of the academic, but remains firmly on the grounds of the “simple” language that his colleagues in the media class think in. All this combines to create the appearance of profundity, of intellectualism, of scholarship. “Wow, look at the references to this philosopher, that scholar, and look at that prose, it’s almost like an academic paper but not quite! What a brilliant man! What an intellectual!”
Bingo. That is what they’re after. The appearance of serious scholarship and intellectualism, deployed in the service of laundering their ideology. Bari Weiss can’t do it. She’s too talentless and just fundamentally lazy. She went to Columbia and instead of spending even a little time honing her skills at pretense she devoted all of it to trying to get her professors fired. Taibbi can’t quite hack it either. Now I admit he is a much better writer than I am. But he’s not a great writer by any means. Compared to a Sartre, a Marx, a Hemingway, Orwell, he doesn’t even come close to fourth-rate. He’s a tribute act to his idol Hunter S. Thompson, and a particularly bad one at that, but certainly enough to rise to the top of the elite media class that is populated by talentless hacks who can’t even pull that off. But the key ingredient missing in Taibbi that Siegel does possess is being able to concoct the appearance of intellectualism. No one reads Taibbi and thinks, “wow, I’m reading serious scholarship!” They all know it’s low-tier garbage that will be forgotten as soon as it is read. It doesn’t make them feel intelligent or smart. For that they need a Siegel-like figure, they need the mirage of the right-wing intellectual.
I looked him up on YouTube out of curiosity to see how his writing persona matches up with his speaking persona. This gap often reveals their true selves, for they have only developed their pseudo-intellectual mode in writing and not spoken rhetoric. And sure enough that is the case. In a talk on “The Return of the Jewish Question”, Jacob Siegel argues, as he desperately tries to read off his pre-written notes to avoid speaking extemporaneously, that both the left and right are mired in anti-Semitism, and always have been and will be. This is the core element of the fanatical Israeli-Zionist worldview: We are perpetual victims of everyone everywhere always, and this condition will never change. It won’t change when we develop nuclear and chemical weapons. It won’t change when we have the most technologically advanced military of the region. It won’t change when we have the world’s sole superpower funding and arming us as we function as their outpost in this region. Nothing will ever change our status as victims, and by “our” is meant specifically that of supporters of the genocidal Israeli apartheid state. The category of “Jews” is carefully stripped of its intrinsic pluralism by Siegel. There are no socialist, secular, communist, Marxist, Soviet, leftist Jews. That long tradition going back to Marx himself is completely erased from existence in Siegel’s frankly Nazi-esque attempt at formulating an intellectual history of his personal ideological fetishisms. Being Jewish means only one thing to Siegel, and given that it is defined in this narrow and reductionist manner, virtues and vices can be assigned to it without any care for what Jewish life and history in all its rich complexity has and still does actually represent. Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Sara Roy, Miko Peled, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Judith Butler, and so many others are erased from existence. Siegel is merely doing a pseudo-intellectual version of Ben Shapiro’s deeply anti-Semitic “JINOs” schtick, “Jews in Name Only”, defined as those who vote for Democrats and are critical of Israel.
After doing the typical Farrakhan stuff, Siegel concludes his “intellectual history” of “Left anti-Semitism” with Marx. Now do you think he will do something original here, provide some new reading of something, some new interpretation, some obscure footnote he found in this or that text, something that at least requires a little effort? Of course not. As befits the right-wing pseudo-intellectual, he merely rehashes the widely and long debunked smear of Marx based on a mangled, dishonest, cynical misreading of his early essay “On the Jewish Question”. But Siegel doesn’t even bother to repeat the more sophisticated version of that smear, wherein Marx is presented as “wallowing in age-old anti-Semitic tropes that led to Mein Kampf”. Instead he does the most banal, trite version of the smear, and just blatantly lies. Amazingly he lies right after he reads a quote from the essay that is supposed to sound bad, but in fact directly contradicts what he says immediately after: that Marx identified Jews as the sole barrier to modernity and enlightenment, hence their elimination was required for the advancement of society toward revolution and communism.
Now this is not a possible misreading given the nature of the text and language Marx deploys, and it is not a small lie. It is a blatant, shameless, Hitlerian lie, one that is intentionally so extreme in its deception that the person who hears it thinks to themselves: “There must be some truth to it. Why else would anyone, let alone this seemingly sane, normal, reasonable man Jacob Siegel say it?”
A perusal of the Wiki on Marx’s essay is enough to debunk this grotesque lie, but Siegel, like all right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, is so profoundly lazy and uninterested in anything but the pretense of seeming intelligent and scholarly, that he didn’t even bother to do that. To be clear: the context of Marx’s essay was to do exactly the opposite of Siegel’s claim. Marx was writing it in opposition to Bruno Bauer’s polemic with various Jewish interlocuters wherein he argued that Jews had to abandon their identity as Jews in order to achieve political emancipation and become part of the modern, enlightened world that was being born. Siegel’s claim about Marx is actually about the person Marx was arguing against. Do you see how disgusting and vile these cretinous scumbags really are, and why they end up becoming beloved by the elite media class as they obtain a sinecure as Israel lobby funded rags like Tablet Mag?
I’ll conclude with some sources from the Wiki to provide the context to that essay, and I recommend following up on the referenced works for more details. Something Siegel didn’t even bother to glance at for 1 minute before he wrote down his depraved Hitlerian lie about Marx as a pathetic sleazy “gotcha” about “Left anti-Semitism” and attempt to appear scholarly and smart to his equally ignorant and banal colleagues in the elite media class byhaving namedropped an essay from the 1800s by this guy called Marx that you surely must have heard of once or twice in one of Jordan Peterson’s deranged rants.
David McLellan argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx's essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer's expense".[9]
Wendy Brown argues that "On the Jewish Question" is primarily a critique of liberal rights, rather than a criticism of Judaism, and that apparently antisemitic passages such as "Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist" should be read in that context.[11]
Yoav Peled (1992)[36] sees Marx "shifting the debate over Jewish emancipation from the plane of theology... to the plane of sociology", thereby circumventing one of Bauer's main arguments. In Peled's view, "this was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer, but it enabled Marx to present a powerful case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation". He concludes that "the philosophical advances made by Marx in 'On the Jewish Question' were necessitated by, and integrally related to, his commitment to Jewish emancipation".
Francis Wheen says: "Those critics, who see this as a foretaste of 'Mein Kampf', overlook one, essential point: in spite of the clumsy phraseology and crude stereotyping, the essay was actually written as a defense of the Jews. It was a retort to Bruno Bauer, who had argued that Jews should not be granted full civic rights and freedoms unless they were baptised as Christians". Although he claimed to be an atheist, Bruno Bauer viewed Judaism as an inferior religion.[37]
The political-scientist Professor Iain Hampsher-Monk wrote in his textbook: "This work ["On The Jewish Question"] has been cited as evidence for Marx's supposed antisemitism, but only the most superficial reading of it could sustain such an interpretation."[38]
I know Glenn Greenwald is a hero of yours, but he has to named and criticized. He is constantly promoting Jacob's work on Twitter recently, even having him on his Rumble show.
Pardon me for being wrong about who is in who's tribe, but these people are so easily swayed by powerful people. When the liberal establishment denied Trump a platform, and Russia today gladly gave them one, they quickly became fans of Putin. And now when Zionists publish the work of someone in their camp they don't disown and treat them as selling out. This wouldn't go well for someone who's white and on the Left who decides on making a guest appearance on fox or msnbc, they rest of us would rightly suspect them of being a liberal