The Woke Right: From Plague Rats to “Dirty Jews!”

In the 1970s a teacher split her classroom into arbitrary groups and declared one superior and the other inferior. Within hours the hierarchy felt real. The favored kids grew sharper and more punitive; the others withdrew. Nothing intrinsic had changed. Only the story about them had. What changed was how they were seen.

COVID did something similar, but at global scale. For a period of time, a large minority of people were reclassified as contaminating. The language was blunt: plague rat, grandma killer, selfish, irresponsible vector. The moral focus narrowed to a single imperative — stop the spread — and everything else receded behind it. Tradeoffs, proportionality, civil liberties became suspect.

Risk perception inflated far beyond the data. Large portions of the public believed catastrophic percentages had already died. Fatality rates were imagined at levels detached from age-stratified reality. Once contamination becomes the frame, magnitude stretches to match the fear.

From there, exclusion felt justified. The unvaccinated were barred from travel, barred from restaurants, barred from work. In some settings they were denied medical procedures. The shift was not simply policy disagreement; it was moral demotion. They were not merely wrong. They were dangerous.

Many on the Right lived through that reversal. They saw how quickly a society can settle on an out-group and how little dissent survives once that settlement occurs. They were treated as unclean. The mechanics of scapegoating were laid bare: inflate the threat, personify it, isolate it, then authorize extraordinary measures.

Instead of rejecting that machinery, some concluded the hysteria must have been engineered — and that the engineers were located in the usual place. The structure did not change.

~ Inflate the magnitude of harm

~ Attribute diffuse failures to a small minority

~ Describe that minority as uniquely malevolent

~ Treat exclusion or boycott as morally necessary

~ Filter nearly every event through that lens

During COVID, the unvaccinated were said to be killing millions. Now Jews are said to be behind wars, immigration flows, financial systems, cultural change — even protests against the Islamic Republic become manipulations. The accusations vary, but the architecture is the same: compress a complicated world into a face and fight the face.

As before, the reaction produces more destruction than the alleged contaminant. During COVID, much of the damage followed from the interventions. Historically, devastation linked to Jews has followed from anti-Jewish hysteria itself — expulsions, pogroms, cycles of violence that degrade the surrounding society.

Large systems are hard to reason about. It is easier to collapse them into a single agent who explains everything. Once chosen, every anomaly confirms it.

Those cast as the unclean during COVID saw how fast that labeling happens and how resistant it is to correction. And yet some now speak about Jews in exactly the same key — the same inflation, the same total explanation, the same certainty that one minority sits behind every failure.

Five years ago they were furious at being treated like moral pollutants. Today they speak as if the real mistake was only that the wrong people were being labeled. They were shown how leper-hunts work from the inside. Instead of rejecting the hunt, they changed the target. If you lived through COVID and still talk this way about Jews, you learned nothing: you just decided that next time you’d rather be the one pointing.