Semitical Thinking
A number of own goals by the Trump administration led to Democratic resistance finally stiffening in April. Yet Trump’s impressively aggressive war on wokeness continues to steamroll along at a remarkable pace, considering how, until last November’s election, diversity seemed almost universally proclaimed to be America’s most sacred fetish.
As an example of how times have changed, consider The New York Times’ tongue-tied coverage of Trump’s April 23 executive order against civil rights enforcement actions based on the disparate impact theory. In a couple of weeks, the Times has only managed to utter one sentence about Trump’s attack on disparate impact:
Another [executive order] restricts the use of the so-called disparate impact rule, which civil rights groups have long said is an important tool for showing discrimination against minorities.
Yet, rather than a minor matter, the EEOC’s theory of disparate impact has been a key driver of racial preferences in the United States ever since the Supreme Court’s 1971 Griggs decision placed the burden of proof on employers in discrimination lawsuits where there was no evidence of racist intent to prove that their objective hiring practices aren’t unfairly burdening the legally privileged races. In contradiction of all the findings of the best modern social science, the Supreme Court ordered judges to assume that the races would perform equally well on the job if hired at random, unless the employer could strongly (and thus expensively) demonstrate otherwise.
“It’s hard to understand how America works in the 21st century without thinking hard about what Jews are thinking.”
Disparate impact thinking is a load-bearing element of America’s vast system of affirmative action, but in the brand-new zeitgeist the leading liberal newspaper appears stumped at how to defend it persuasively.
We know how the NYT would have responded in 2019: by hollering about Trump’s racism 24/7. After all, that was the plan B that executive editor Dean Baquet announced to his newsroom in the wake of the collapse of the newspaper’s plan A for getting rid of Trump: Russiagate.
But in 2025, the Democratic establishment seems burned out over accusing Trump of racism. Why?
One reason is likely that white liberals were gobsmacked by how many nonwhites voted for Trump in 2024. Here, the nice whites had been carrying out the Great Replacement for decades to take power away from the nasty whites, and then it turns out that an increasing number of the replacers really like the deplorable leader of the replacees.
That’s gotta be depressing for white Democrats.
Another reason that I’ve been wondering about ever since Oct. 7, 2023, has been whether Jews are changing their minds about wokeness.
That might seem like a fairly world-historical question. But if you aren’t Jewish, well, then, you aren’t supposed to wonder about it because the question presumes that Jews have money, power, and influence in the United States in disproportion to their insignificant couple of percent of the population.
And, of course, because Jews have earned themselves remarkable amounts of money, power, and influence per capita, then it’s imprudent for you to worry them by mentioning it.
Still, it’s hard to understand how America works in the 21st century without thinking hard about what Jews are thinking.
So, did the string of events beginning with the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli citizens 19 months ago, followed by Israel’s brutal retribution and anti-Israel protests on scores of American college campuses, cause American Jews to have second thoughts about who their real friends are?
The Great Awokening was in sizable measure about whether the Great Replacement was wise. Did all the anti-Israel and/or anti-Semitic protests raise questions in the minds of Jews about whether the increasing diversity they long championed is going to be good for the Jews?
Most American Jews couldn’t complain too much about all the support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris gave Israel in its crisis. Yet Kamala was in a coalition with a lot of people who really don’t like Israel, which could raise Jewish concerns about the future direction of the Democratic Party.
One way to begin to get an answer to these questions is to look at major political contributors by ethnicity, since they put serious money behind their views.
In a study for the Ruderman Foundation, Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal, wrote:
In the 2016 presidential race the Jewish financial vote remains disproportionately important—with estimates that Jewish donors contribute 50 percent of the funds to the Democratic Party and 25 percent to the Republican Party.
You can estimate the ethnic background of the biggest donors for yourself. A fine website called OpenSecrets.org lets you look up who gave how much to whom in every federal election since 2010.
So, I looked up the top 100 donors in 2024 versus in 2020 and then estimated their ethnicities from online sources. (Note that looking at the top 100 donors will overstate the Jewish share of total contributions, large and small, because Jews are so heavily represented among the very rich: e.g., about one-third of the richest 100 Americans in 2019 were Jewish. Still, the top 100 donors get listened to by important politicians.)
Among the biggest few dozen donors, it’s not that hard to figure out ethnicity. Wikipedia often has a line like “X was raised in a Jewish family.” After that, the going gets tougher. Still, the Jewish press loves reporting on Jewish zillionaires. And there are countless prestigious Jewish charities.
Gentiles can be a little less forthcoming, but the task is mostly pretty straightforward.
For example, in 2020, the biggest donors were casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam ($218 million to Republicans), followed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg ($153 million to Democrats) and financier Tom Steyer ($72 million to Democrats).
The Adelsons and Bloomberg are obviously Jewish. Steyer identifies as a Jew through his father but is also a practicing Episcopalian through his mother, so I listed him as 50 percent Jewish and 50 percent gentile. (Larry Ellison is, biologically, half Italian and half Jewish, but he was raised by his mother’s Jewish uncle and aunt. Therefore, on the theory that nature and nurture are of equal importance, I list him as 75 percent Jewish and 25 percent gentile. Your estimate may vary.)
In fourth place are packaging magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($68 million to Republicans). Although there is a stereotype that anybody high-achieving with a Germanic surname must have Yiddish-speaking ancestors, a plethora of evidence shows that Mr. Uihlein is a gentile German-American.
In 2024, the top position with $291 million was, of course, held by the gentile Elon Musk. He was followed by Timothy Mellon, whose WASP grandfather was Secretary of the Treasury under three GOP presidents ($172 million), the Widow Adelson ($148 million), and the Uihleins ($143 million).
This time, the top seven donors were Republicans, with Mayor Bloomberg in eighth place as the most generous Democrat ($61 million, down $92 million from 2020). Note that Bloomberg was elected mayor of NYC once as a Republican and twice as an independent, defeating the Democratic candidate all three times. Hence, he represents the right wing of Democrats: He still ponied up a vast sum for Democratic candidates in 2024, but he was notably less forthcoming than in 2020.
The smallest donor on the top 100 list in 2024 was Haim Saban—owner of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and a famous backer of Hillary Clinton—who gave $3.3 million to Democrats.
There are a few rules of thumb for ethnicity-estimating that I’ve learned over the fifteen or twenty years that I’ve been making up these kinds of lists of high achievers like the Forbes 400 billionaires or the Atlantic 100 pundits.
I assign ethnicity based on family background rather than on the personal matter of current degree of faith. Under my system, for instance, Jews get both credit for Einstein and blame for Marx.
Seems fair.
A lot of contributions are legally attributed to husband and wife, but I pay more attention to the husband’s ancestry than to the wife’s, unless it’s the wife’s money. Similarly, widows can be big donors, but it’s often easier to find out the background of the late husband, so I’ll use that unless I see positive evidence of the widow’s ethnicity.
I’m only counting non-Hispanic whites as Jewish or gentile, so I’m leaving out the three Cubans (the Reyes brothers and Jeff Bezos’ stepfather) and the one African-American (Wayne Jordan) in the top 100.
This time, I outsourced making the first draft of my tables to ChatGPT 4o artificial intelligence, which was an interesting learning experience.
This particular brand of AI has been optimized for intuition, so it was outstanding at understanding what I was asking for. On the other hand, it sometimes notoriously “hallucinates” wrong answers at random.
And at just $20 per month, ChatGPT 4o can be forgiven for not being all that hardworking. For example, it didn’t appear to delve into genealogy websites for ancestors with telling first names like “Christian” or “Moshe.” (By the way, ChatGPT is notorious for using the word “delve” a lot, but I like “delve” too. I recommend using AI to write your bureaucratically mandated texts, but I’m too proud of my own prose style to use it for what I publish.)
At estimating ethnicity, ChatGPT was pretty good. Not great, but not bad. I wound up asking it to list its confidence in its assignment of ethnicity as high, medium, or low. It responded by suggesting it also give me a summary of the evidence it used for each name, which was helpful in checking up on its work.
I then laboriously checked by hand all its low- and medium-confidence names and some of its high-confidence names.
Overall, it got about 90 percent right.
I’m not sure that AI saved me all that much time, but it felt good to have a second set of eyes on each name.
I’m sure the top 100 donor lists I came up with aren’t perfect, but they appear to be fairly accurate. If the errors are unbiased, then these summary numbers are likely to be in the ballpark:
As you can see, among the top 100, Jewish donations to Democratic candidates (for all federal offices) declined 33 percent from 2020 to 2024, while Jewish contributions to Republican candidates went up 29 percent.
So, among rich, politically engaged Jews there was a sizable (although not huge) swing from 2020 to 2024 away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans. I’d say these data points support, but do not quite triumphantly vindicate, the October 7th theory for why the media is less obsessively woke today than in 2022.
Among the top 100 donors, Jews still contributed 68 percent of Democratic funds, down only slightly from 2020’s 76 percent.
Among Republican donors in the top 100, Jews fell from contributing 49 percent of the money in 2020 to 31 percent in 2024 due to the striking influx of Republican money from big-giving gentiles, up 179 percent. Granted, over three-eighths of that came from Elon Musk’s famous irruption into electoral politics. But a lot was due to massive contributions coming from more obscure Republicans like Timothy M. Dunn and Rob Bigelow.
Contrary to countless recent think pieces, I don’t see all that much Silicon Valley money pouring into the GOP outside of Elon Musk, who is, in some ways, an old-fashioned industrialist making his wealth off assembly-line construction of cars and rockets (while spending it on social media).
Among other Silicon Valley figures, venture capitalist partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (son of the late David Horowitz) gave a lot to nonpartisan PACs but split their limited partisan giving between Republicans and Democrats.
Jan Koum, the Ukrainian Jew who sold WhatsApp to Mark Zuckerberg for $19 billion eleven years ago, has recently entered the political arena, giving $21 million to the GOP in 2024.
Patricia Perkins-Leone, wife of Italian-immigrant venture capitalist Douglas Leone, gave $7 million to Republicans.
But 4.5 is not all that many GOP donors in the Bay Area. A sizable majority of the Northern Californians on the top 100 contributors list in 2024 are Democrats: I count eleven, about nine of whom appear to be in tech.
Overall, 2024 was a bad year for Democrats among big donors, with their haul among the top 100 dropping 25 percent during an era of high inflation. In contrast, top 100 donors gave Republicans 105 percent more than in 2020.
Among the top 100 in 2020, Jews accounted for 61 percent of contributions to either party, but that share fell to 39 percent in 2024, due in part to Jewish giving to both parties dropping 6 percent. But the shift in share was mostly caused by giving by rich gentiles booming 130 percent. It could be that gentile zillionaires are finally learning lessons from their Jewish peers about the value of political donations.
Perhaps Trump, with his obsession with William McKinley’s tariffs, could be assembling a coalition that could win seven of the next nine presidential elections, as Republicans did from 1896 through 1928.
Or 2024 could be a one-time fluke.
We shall see.