Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff made a fool of himself this week by comparing school board meetings to the Holocaust.
Speaking at the trendy SXSW convention in Austin, Texas, the man who is married to Vice President Kamala Harris described visiting Auschwitz and meeting a Holocaust survivor before going on to claim that the “hate” he has allegedly witnessed at recent “school meetings” was “interconnected” to the Nazi hatred of Jews.
It was Emhoff’s second stupid comment this month.
Two weeks ago, he attacked “toxic masculinity”: “There’s too much … masculine toxicity out there, and we’ve kind of confused what it means to be a man, what it means to be masculine. You’ve got this trope out there where you have to be tough, and angry, and lash out to be strong.”
On the one hand, Emhoff didn’t apply for his current gig, so it is harder to fault him for being bad at it.
On the other, Emhoff is being held up by Democrats and the media as some kind of authority, both as a leader in the fight against antisemitism, and as a role model for American men in general.
He fails in both capacities.
It is not clear how seriously Emhoff took his Jewish identity before being thrust into the limelight. In late 2020, he and his wife recorded a video for Hanukkah that was hilariously spoofed by Ben Shapiro for its total vacuity.
That showed the risk of identity politics: if you celebrate people for being the “first” whatever — in this case, the first Jewish (and male) spouse of a vice president — you are stuck with them as representative of that group.
In December, Emhoff stepped into his new role as the Voice of the Jewish People by sharing that he was “in pain” at the resurgence of antisemitism, and blaming it on the growing prominence of antisemitic “tropes.”
“Tropes” are symbols that can allude to negative stereotypes. For example, associating Jews with money is often considered an antisemitic trope: there are plenty of poor Jews, and rich Jews don’t control the financial system.
But tropes are often subjective. When Ye falsely claimed Jews control the world, he meant it. When Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) criticized left-wing donor George Soros, that had zero to do with Soros’s background.
If “tropes” are the problem (as opposed to violent radicals, or the rise of street crime in urban centers where Jews tend to live), then the solution is to educate, or re-educate, the population — which appeals to Democrats.
And you can interpret tropes so broadly that they can include any idea you oppose — which is how Emhoff links moms and dads upset about transgenderism and Critical Race Theory to the murderous evil of the Third Reich.
In a world haunted by tropes — some of which inhabit core texts of Western Civilization, from the Bible to the writings of Karl Marx — Jews are condemned to be potential victims, which is how Emhoff seems to see himself.
He uses the Holocaust, the irrefutable example of Jewish victimhood, to smear fellow Americans and obscure legitimate views with which he disagrees.
Using your victimhood to win a fight is the ultimate beta male move.
Which brings us to “toxic masculinity.”
If a conservative comedian were to create a caricature of a liberal man, a “pajama boy” grown up, he would sound like Emhoff — a man who makes himself small to make his wife bigger.
But truly strong women don’t need weak men to feel good about themselves. And moms at school board meetings aren’t Nazis.
Man up! Be a tough Jew, respect the moms of America, and love your woman right.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.