How did the "j-pill" phenomenon get so out of control?

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:02]I was never hyper engaged in this debate. I didn't really think very much about Israel. I certainly didn't think about Gaza. I don't know anything about these places. These are very tiny countries that are very far away from me. I don't know anyone who lives in any of these places. I do now. I know a few people who live in Israel. But, you know, this is completely disconnected from my life. So, why would I be thinking about this a lot? I never bothered to pay attention to the people who were thinking about this a lot. But, of course, it blew up and now we're all forced to talk about it all of the time because anytime we say anything about politics, somebody says, "Israel! Free Palestine!" You know, in Canada, there's I don't live in Canada anymore, thank God, but you know, there's just been never-ending Free Palestine, um, Praise Allah rallies every weekend in every major city, you know, Victoria, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal. Um, and it's just weird to me. I mean, even, you know, these young people are completely They they they say outright, "I've been radicalized by Palestine." And I'm like, "What are you even talking about? What do you know about Palestine?" It's It's like everybody's been brainwashed.

[00:01:27]I don't get it. How did this happen?

[00:01:29]What's going on? Well, they've been radicalized by Russian and Soviet and Iranian propaganda and maybe Chinese to a degree and they don't even realize it.

[00:01:40]Um, but yeah, so I was like you, okay?

[00:01:42]So, probably my first time I ever like Like I grew up kind of lapsed Catholic or whatever, right?

[00:01:49]It wasn't a religious issue for me to think or talk about Israel. So, it never was really like an issue in my life.

[00:01:55]Probably the first time I actually thought seriously, I just knew it was a like hotbed of, you know, conflict in a region in the world that I didn't know much about. And believe it or not, even when I was an arrogant libtard, I still had some sense of humility to not talk that much about stuff I knew I didn't know anything about. And I was like, that's complicated. I don't understand it. I was involved in the new atheist thing, so it's just like it's idiots fighting over religion and, you know, a piece of land that has religious significance and it's kind of dumb. And I didn't have any connection to it until I actually listened to a podcast, funny enough, by Sam Harris about the issue.

[00:02:31]It was It was a really short one. I want to say this was like a long time ago, like 2012 or 13. I mean, it's a long time ago. And he did a short podcast, maybe it's a little later than that. I don't know when he started. But it's only like 11 minutes long or something.

[00:02:42]And so he does this analysis that basically boils down to who's got a moral authority here. Like, let's give both sides nuclear weapons and guess what would happen. And it's very clear that the Arab side would wipe Israel off the map tomorrow as soon as they had the opportunity. And not only does Israel not do that, they actually have the weapon and don't do it. And so it's like there's a very clear, you know, this was very convincing to me very quickly and it just simple moral argument about which side of this conflict is standing on authoritative ground. But I didn't think much about the issue at all until about 2020.

[00:03:22]I was researching critical race theory for all the anti-woke research that I was doing. And I just noticed there's like you just keep seeing it, whether it's Angela Davis or whether it's half of these bell hooks, half of these people are talking about how they got a further radicalization not through Palestine but in Palestine. They went to Gaza or something like this and got trained to be radicals. Angela Davis actually talks about this substantially.

[00:03:48]These are communists. And And like, holy crap. And it's all through the CRT literature. All this really weird stuff about how like the Jews are settler colonialists. It's all written in like Edward Said post-colonial theory language, which I was also researching for cynical theories. Edward Said claims to have been a Palestinian-American.

[00:04:07]Um so, he's got this very weird, you know, theory of Orientalism and how it applies in the area and power dynamics.

[00:04:14]And it's all rooted kind of in this Frantz Fanon violent I'm like, what is this mess? This is all very kind of socialist, very communist. Yeah, Angela Davis saying this is a huge cause. It's all through the CRT literature. Then you got people arguing about whether Jews are white or brown, to count as people of color. And there's this book I get uh recommended to read called How Jews Became White Folks and What That Means About Race in America by Karen Brodkin.

[00:04:39]Of course, it's by a woman named Karen.

[00:04:42]It was written in the late '90s, '98 or '99.

[00:04:45]I read this book. And I'm like, holy It takes the whole Hitler, you know, uh Jews control everything conspiracy theory, but in a cultural sense rather than in a uh you know, banking and political sense. It's literally like, oh, the Jews helped black people like get they used black people to get their own liberation and equality in the 1950s and then threw black people under the bus.

[00:05:09]And they climbed up the ladder of other racial minorities to establish themselves as white. And once they became white, they got into all the jobs like media and Hollywood and started becoming the setters of white culture and hoarding extra white privilege to themselves while hiding behind the Holocaust so that they can't be blamed for, you know, being an oppressor group.

[00:05:29]And I'm like, holy smokes. So, I write this article in 2020, October of 2020, called Critical Race Theory's Jewish Problem. And I lay out those kind of two prongs, the Edward Said Orientalist um you know, post-colonial model of blaming Israel for being a American-British settler colonialist project in the region that was very unfair to these poor brown Arabs that are Muslims and then on the other hand this critical race theory bonkers stuff that I had just read in this book and I found these a couple of papers where people were arguing for those views and then a very good paper that was kind of taking them apart and the Karen Brodkin book. That's where I actually found out about the Brodkin book was this paper I came across. What I was actually doing by the way at the time was looking like I had done after the agreement studies affair. I was looking for papers that had like titles that just screamed like something insane to kind of share on social media. And there was this paper that I had found that was talking about like Jews being white or you know, white folks and hoarding privilege or something like that. I was like, "Holy crap." And so I ended up reading these papers and I ended up reading this and anyway, I write this.

[00:06:37]This was like I thought that was going to be it. Like critical race theory's toast now. It's anti-Semitic, you know.

[00:06:43]And that was a That was the forest.

[00:06:45]That's not how that worked. I got accused of being anti-Semitic for the for writing this. And um it was really a kind of a a hot mess, but I became very interested in the subject at that point.

[00:06:54]Like what's going on? And I started kind of, you know, I was in all these kind of conservative {slash} right-wing and at this point by early '21, I'm like able to tell the difference between conservative and right-wing. They're not the same. They're overlapping.

[00:07:09]Something's going on here. And I kept hearing stuff about, well, you know, people in the hallways would whisper "Oh, the Jews this. Oh, the Jews that.

[00:07:16]We need an inquisition." That sounds very anti-Jewish. I'm like, "What's kind of going on? Hey James, have you noticed?" I got a lot of the noticer talk, but in hallways at events, not on the internet. "Have you noticed the critical theorists were all Jews? Have you noticed the Crankfurt school's all Jews? Have you noticed the Bolsheviks were all Jews?" And I'm like, "Something bad's coming." And I actually called and this is January '21, I called my business partner on the phone and I said, "Mike, we got a problem." Like the right is going to be a bigger problem than the left soon and it's coming. And this was January of 2021.

[00:07:48]And as I started kind of paying attention to all this, um and then of course, you know, I was in these Well, I was about to say of course I got to where, you know, October 7th, but I want to not go that far yet. So then there's this period of time between '21 and '23 where I'm kind of watching this. I'm in these, you know, I go to these conferences. I'm going to a lot of right-wing slash conservative slash MAGA conferences and there's always like not always, there's sometimes this contingent of people that are doing the kind of notice-er kind of crazy right-wing thing and it just kind of kept growing. Like, there's this real current of blaming the Jews for stuff that's on the rise. Have you noticed this? Have you noticed that? Why won't you admit that the Jews are actually the communists, you know, this kind of thing. And it was it was really kind of, you know, alarming. It was very unsettling. I was watching the rise of Christian nationalism as kind of a movement in '22 and I thought, my gosh, you know, we've got a problem coming with this particular issue and some of these events, there were people that either were and I didn't know what that I didn't know that they were yet or that are now groypers that I was you know, they were kind of on that edge of going groper. And they were starting to listen to Nick Fuentes. They're hearing his blame the Jews for everything stuff.

[00:09:09]They're calling themselves J-pilled. So I ended up having some calls with some people. I got very concerned in '22 about the J-pill phenomenon and I'm trying to tell people like there's this thing a lot of young people are doing.

[00:09:19]They call it being J-pilled which is where they decide that the Jews is the cause of all the problems. Like, this is going to be a real problem. But nobody knew what to do about it and it was all kind of fringe, but it wasn't fringe enough.

[00:09:30]Then October 7th happened. The propaganda wave came hard from the left as I totally expected it would because I understand their argument uh about the settler colonialist nonsense. And then it came hard from the right immediately as well, kind of launching almost with Candace Owens. And I thought, "Oh, no.

[00:09:46]This is totally Like I already knew about the J Pill thing. I'd already seen this growing for like 3 years. I was like, this is going to go bad and it's going to go bad fast." And you can go back and see. I have tweets where I'm like, "You got to know when it's time to leave a party cuz it's about to go sideways."

[00:09:59]It's like, "This is all about to get real dark." And so, at that point, I decided to kind of get invested in the in the issue, started to learn about the issue, and I just watched as the propaganda grew. I decided to take a stand on the issue. I decided to take a side and just like not, you know, barrel in or buckle down or whatever prevent, you know, outside thinking, but to actually learn about the issue properly. And I started to look into it last year, end of '25. I went to Israel when again in January '26 and um kind of got to see the lay of the land and what's going on over there. They did not give me the Israel flag. Actually, an American church did recently.

[00:10:39]But, yeah, and that's it's a $7,000 flag, as you can imagine.

[00:10:44]>> [laughter] >> But, that's what $7,000 looks like, a cheap piece of fabric that uh somebody gave you uh for free at a church.

[00:10:51]That's all you get. Uh but yeah, anyway, I was like you. I wasn't invested in this and I feel kind of like I got pulled into the issue because I watched all the people around me make it the single focus issue of everything.

[00:11:06]Everywhere, all the time. The only foreign country anybody ever talks about. It's always somehow bad. It's like like the you know, you're not in Canada anymore, but Canada's making straight-up deals like it's going like China's the adult in the room. We are partnering with China, blah blah blah. And people are like, "Yeah, but Israel's really bad. It's the problem." Like, "Holy smokes, something is cooked here." And so, I kind of feel like I got pulled into this fight, but because, you know, whether we track back to the podcast with Sam Harris setting the moral foundation, whether we look at researching with the way the left looked at this issue from their research literature and critical race theory, post-colonial theory, the trauma not trauma, the drama with a D, the drama I went through after publishing an article pointing that out, watching this J-pill phenomenon grow, watching these noticers whispering in hallways and at dinner tables around conferences, and then finally, you know, post-October 7th, the full-blast propaganda, it just became very obvious. It was like somebody's got to like you know, no, it's not somebody has to do something. I'm not like that. It's I have to be clear about where what I think and where I stand on this issue.

[00:12:16]For myself in the the waters that I'm in, I have to know what I what what I what I think and believe on this. And I've got to be willing to stand in that on principle. So, I was like you. It was It's like I feel like I was around the issue sort of. It was irrelevant mostly to my life, and it became an extremely important issue as I watched people go bonkers. So, it's like that meme, who radicalized you for Israel, James? Well, you guys did cuz you didn't talk about it all the time.