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Joe Rogan, the host of the world’s most popular podcast, welcomed Ian Carroll as his guest this week.
Carroll is a crackpot conspiracist, known for sharing such chestnuts as “the Jews did 9/11,” and he regaled Rogan with tales of how Jeffrey Epstein was secretly a Mossad agent sent by the devious Israeli government to ensnare America’s unsuspecting elites.
Not to be outdone, Theo Von, another wildly popular podcaster, dedicated this week’s episode to a conversation with Candace Owens, who sweetly asked the host if he’d ever noticed how the Jews really only take care of their own.
Other examples abound.
Everywhere you look these days, you see throngs of influencers gaining fame and fortune posing as brave truth-tellers, unafraid to criticize the all-powerful, sinister Jews.
That these pronouncements are made freely, with no attempt at censorship, on some of the world’s most highly watched platforms doesn’t spoil the fun for these preening paranoids: In their minds, the Jews are always out to get them and everyone else.
And their millions of followers seem to believe this gunk, too: Having dispensed with the woke left, the woke right has now settled on the Jews as the villains that must be vanquished.
It’s understandable, then, that Jews everywhere this week rushed to ask what could be done about this surge of antisemitism on the right.
And the solution to the problem, hallelujah, is simple.
It’s one most of us alighted on some time in middle school, and it requires no particular resources.
Want to fight antisemitism?
Here we go.
First, instead of holding up pictures of your hostages and demanding that the world empathize over their barbaric captivity and murder, realize this: The world doesn’t care.
Never has, never will.
When you demand that people feel sorry for you, you just look weak.
This is where the wisdom we earn in high school comes in handy: Bullies savor the weak, because when they pester the weak, they’re guaranteed to get precisely the emotional response they crave.
The only way out of this cycle of degradation is being strong.
And, alas, these past 500 days or so, Jews everywhere have been very bad at doing just that.
In America, Jews held mournful vigils for the hostages, complete with Holocaust-era rhetoric.
None, sadly, considered a march, say, to celebrate the elimination of mass murderers like Hassan Nasrallah or Yahya Sinwar, to say nothing of 20 or 30 strapping young lads marching onto Columbia’s campus and making it understood that the Hamas encampments must now end or else.
Such actions would’ve sent a very clear message to the bullies that the Jews aren’t to be trifled with again.
That, of course, is precisely the point of Zionism.
A sovereign and strong Jewish nation is the ultimate answer to the world-doesn’t-care problem: We don’t need the world to care when we have nukes.
But the great tragedy of the last year and a half was the Israeli government’s inability to stand up to the moment and act as a sovereign and strong Jewish nation ought to have done.
While winning some tactical victories (see under: Beepers, exploding) and degrading Hamas’ fighting capabilities, Israel kept insisting, correctly, that it was hampered by a hostile Democratic administration kneecapping it at every turn.
But then came Donald Trump’s election, and the new president couldn’t have been clearer on what needs to be done in Gaza.
Instead of leaping into action, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent his emissaries to explain meekly why Trump’s plan was impractical, and continued equivocating over the next step of the cease-fire deal with Hamas.
Trump, meanwhile, was talking about the gates of hell opening should all captives not be released immediately.
Even with this unprecedented blank check from the Oval Office, Israel could not follow up with action.
And that is the epitome of weakness.
When the antisemitic freaks saw the big, bad Israeli state whimper and waffle, they knew their moment had arrived.
Where does all this leave us?
Thankfully, in a good place.
If you want to fight antisemitism, stop ululating about Joe Rogan, or Columbia University, or the left, or the right, or whoever.
Stop begging the world to understand you or feel sorry for you.
Stop finding any excuse you can to be perfectly swell while your enemies hack away at you.
In short: Stop being weak.
Leave bad institutions, bad leaders and bad habits behind, and spend your days doing wonderful, beautiful, constructive Jewish things: Have more Jewish babies.
Learn more Torah.
Build new Jewish institutions.
Become stronger in spirit and in flesh.
And when you do, take a break and look up: You’ll be surprised to see that the freaks who were picking at you when you were quivering have all disappeared.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.