When Hypocrites Disappear, Society Is in Trouble

Be grateful for hypocrites. The moment they disappear, you have a real problem.

That's not a paradox—it's a warning. A hypocrite pretends to be good because they still believe society rewards goodness and punishes wrong. The day wrongdoing stops needing a disguise is the day impunity has fully arrived. By that measure, the events of the past 18 months in the Western world deserve careful attention.

What Happened in Michigan—and What It Fits Into

On March 12, 2026, a man drove his car into a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He was armed. Security officers shot him dead before he could harm anyone inside. The children were unharmed.

The relief is real. So is the context. Since Hamas's October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and the war that followed, anti-Jewish violence has been erupting with alarming regularity across the world. Two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered in Washington, D.C. A Molotov cocktail hurled at a hostage-release rally in Boulder, Colorado, injured 12 people. A synagogue attack in Manchester, England killed two. And in Australia, a Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach became the deadliest terror attack in that country's history. All of this in 2025 alone.

These aren't isolated incidents. They are data points in a trend that polling is now capturing with uncomfortable precision.

A recent Manhattan Institute study found that nearly half of Republican voters under 50 believe the Holocaust did not occur as historians describe. One-quarter of that group openly expresses antisemitic views; another 30 percent decline to reject antisemitic individuals outright. A 2024 University of Maryland poll found that 7 percent of Americans under 35—across party lines—would not vote for a Jewish candidate. A Yale University survey last fall found that voters under 30 were roughly twice as likely as the general population to say Jews have a negative effect on America. More than 40 percent of 18-to-22-year-olds agreed with at least one antisemitic statement read to them by pollsters.

The Algorithm Isn't Neutral

These numbers don't emerge from a vacuum. They surface from a vast, churning sea of online content in which antisemitism has become a reliable engagement strategy.

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Across TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, and X, creators have discovered that espousing anti-Jewish views—or simply platforming those who do—reliably spikes interaction. Whether this is an organic product of opaque recommendation algorithms or something more deliberately engineered, particularly at TikTok and X, remains contested. What isn't contested is the outcome: audiences are being reshaped.

The most common defense of this reshaping is that it's a reaction to Israel's military conduct in Gaza. Young people see disturbing images on their phones and respond with outrage. Antisemitism, under this reading, is Israel's fault. There's a surface plausibility to the argument—and then there are the awkward facts underneath it. Some of the most widely circulated "Gaza" footage has turned out to be recycled from Syria's civil war. A Hamas rocket that struck a Gaza hospital was widely described as an Israeli airstrike. Meanwhile, footage of Hamas's own documented atrocities—shared in real time by Hamas itself—failed to generate comparable outrage.

The asymmetry is hard to explain through the lens of consistent moral concern. It makes more sense through a different lens: confirmation bias. Human beings don't build beliefs from evidence. They select evidence to confirm beliefs they already hold. A growing number of people in the West want to hold anti-Israel, anti-Jewish beliefs. They find their evidence accordingly—and discard what doesn't fit.

The Line Between Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

"Criticizing Israel is not the same as hating Jews." This distinction is invoked constantly, and in principle it holds. But the history of comparable distinctions should give us pause.

Anti-feminism without misogyny. Opposition to desegregation without racism. Theoretically separable. Practically, they almost never stay separate. The project of ending Israel's existence as a Jewish state—implied by calls to erase it "from the river to the sea"—would require killing, subjugating, or re-exiling more than half the world's Jewish population. There is no gentle version of that goal. Hostility toward Jews tends to travel with almost every effort to pursue it or justify it.

This doesn't mean every critic of Israeli policy is an antisemite. But it does mean the rhetorical infrastructure of eliminationist anti-Zionism is not a neutral foundation. Holocaust denial is not a historical theory. Inverting the Holocaust—casting Jews as the new Nazis—is not a political opinion. Both function as advance justifications for violence not yet committed. In Australia, that future arrived at Hanukkah. In Michigan, it nearly arrived again.

The Hypocrite's Unexpected Role

When antisemitic terror strikes, politicians who have spent months amplifying anti-Israel narratives typically rush to condemn the violence. This is hypocrisy. It is also, paradoxically, a reason for cautious hope.

They condemn the violence because they still believe—or believe their constituents still believe—that violence against Jews is wrong. That social pressure is what produces the hypocrite. And the hypocrite's existence means the standard is still alive. The truly alarming moment comes when no one feels the need to pretend.

In the United States, antisemitism now cuts across partisan lines in ways that defy easy political categorization. White nationalist antisemitism has found a home in parts of the right. Left-progressive antisemitism has found a home in parts of the left. Republicans have, to date, moved more decisively to confront the problem within their coalition—though that may reflect how much further advanced the disease became there first. After Michigan, the claim that this is someone else's problem is no longer sustainable for anyone.