Lee Smith, senior editor at the neo-con Weekly Standard writes:
Ann Coulter’s ‘F—ing Jews’ Comment and The Degradation of American Political Discourse
Ann Coulter went off the rails Wednesday night during the Republican presidential primary debate. Apparently angry that several of the candidates kept referring to Israel, Coulter tweeted: “How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?”
The response on social media was mixed. Some defended Coulter’s remarks—“America has interests that aren’t Israel’s interests,” one Coulter supporter tweeted under the hashtag #IStandWithAnn—while others sharply criticized her. It seems that for many, the issue wasn’t the idea she was apparently trying to convey—that the candidates seemed perhaps overly focused on Israel —but rather the particularly ugly and vicious modifier she attached to “Jews.” It seemed to indicate either some sort of meltdown, or a very dark and angry corner of her mind.
Coulter has made questionable statements about Jews previously, in particular during a 2007 interview when she said that Christians “just want Jews to be perfected.” In fact, lots of Christian denominations have renounced replacement theology, or the belief that the followers of Christ have replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people. Thus, many Christians see the Jews not as a pool of potential converts but rather, in the words of Pope John Paul II, as “elder brothers.”
…American society, like all modern societies, is governed by a set of conventions and models established and enforced by its public elites, including policymakers and journalists, who identify those things that are to be prized and those that are to be detested. This is what coin of the realm means. If an issue is not denounced and identified as hateful and instead proves useful then it may enter the mainstream of political discourse and risk becoming an organizing tool.
So who are these public elites who determine what we say in public without getting shunned? Who are the elites who run the media who set the Overton Window?
Steve Sailer wrote in 2006: "Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms."
To quantify the statement that "Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration," in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.
Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.
This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.
John Derbyshire wrote: "I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT—not ever again—be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently."
