Heritage Foundation Plan To Fight Antisemitism Has Hilariously Ironic Problem
If your plan to fight antisemitism is itself antisemitic, you might have lost the plot.
The Heritage Foundation, that wingnut think tank run by people who spend all day playing with their toes, has done it again. The organization that brought us the execrable pile of crazy that is Project 2025 has a new plan to save all of us Jews from the scourge of antisemitism in America, presumably so we can then all go to Israel and bring about the Second Coming (something no one at Heritage has experienced before, wink wink), whereupon all the evangelicals get whisked off to heaven to sit at God’s right hand and yammer incessantly about how great Jesus is to Him, until even He gets tired of listening and tells them to all go watch Davey and Goliath for several eons and give Him some peace and goddamn quiet.
The plan is called Project Esther, named after the biblical Persian Jewish queen who saved all the Jews by sexing up her husband the horny king and then, while he lay sweaty and breathless and spent, convincing him to let her people take up arms and defend themselves against the forces of his adviser Haman who were about to slaughter them.
To quote Haman’s last words on the gallows: Chicks, man!
Project Esther proposes to save the modern Jews not by sexing up Persian potentates, but by attacking anti-Zionist and progressive groups that have been agitating for an end to the current war in Gaza and freedom for the Palestinian people. (The wingnuts call these groups the Hamas Support Network, hyuk hyuk.) The proposed tactics include deporting immigrant members of the group and siccing law enforcement on the other members.
Of course we all know, anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the exact same thing. Or at least that’s the case if, like the Heritage people, your brain is basically a glop of pudding coated in rat poison.
Heritage has been running around pitching this plan to Jewish organizations. The Forward got its hands on the pitch deck, and you’ll never guess who this plan to combat antisemitism blames for all the antisemitism in the first place!
Actually if you’re reading Wonkette, you probably will:
The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a conservative plan to counter antisemitism, sees the problem as one in which a handful of “masterminds” including Jews like George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are seeking to “dismantle Western democracies, values and culture,”
Let us get this straight: the plan to fight antisemitism relies on a claim that wealthy, shadowy Jews are manipulating the public in order to game public opinion and destroy America from within?
Seriously, we keep examining that sentence like it came out of the Talmud. We’re dying here, we are but atoms, load us into the Hadron Large Collider and send us zipping around a giant circular tunnel until we create a black hole that can suck us in and crush us into nothing.
The deck goes on to link these alleged masterminds to various groups that have been agitating against the war, including, uh, Jewish Voices for Peace. Apparently the 23,000 Jews that belong to that group are virulent anti-Semites. Someone should tell them!
Here, by the way, is one slide from the pitch deck. See if you can guess what almost all the non-Jewish masterminds of this alleged plot to destroy Western civilization have in common. Go on, guess!
We get why the wingnuts are throwing Soros in here — there is absolutely nothing on Earth for which they won’t blame him — but Pritzker? As The Forward notes, the governor of Illinois and his family are not exactly anti-Zionists. His sister, Penny, who served as President Obama’s Commerce Secretary, has compared pro-Palestinian protesters at Harvard to the KKK. Pritzker himself gently reproached the Chicago City Council when it passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza just before the Democrats came to town for their national convention in August. Not exactly the actions of a committed anti-Semite!
Yr Wonkette figures one of two possibilities: either Republicans see Pritzker as a viable presidential candidate in 2028 and are trying to bloody him up well ahead of the race, or Republicans are galactic idiots. Or both!
And what about antisemitism on the right? What about all those white supremacists who have been empowered by Donald Trump’s rise over the last nine years? You know, the right-wingers who statistics show commit anti-Semitic crimes at a vastly higher rate than any other group?
James Carafano, who runs the Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force, said in October that “white supremacists are not my problem because white supremacists are not part of being conservative.”
Oh, buddy. You might want to sit down.
Heritage has been pitching Project Esther for two months, but has found a cool reception among Jewish groups. And by “cool” we mean that no major Jewish organizations have endorsed it, or said anything about it at all. Wonder why:
The think tank, which also produced the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration, has struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups.
You don’t say.
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I myself am a past donor to JVP, and so are a number of friends of mine -- probably some of them still donate. I'd be happy to donate if I had the spare cash.
I know he's really old, but for the sake of the Heritage Foundation and their plans for world domination, I hope George Soros never dies.