Long before the African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates began vilifying Israel—which started right after Hamas massacred 1200 Israelis—and long before he began vilifying Charlie Kirk—which started right after Kirk was murdered—some commentators were expressing serious concerns about the celebrated status Coates had attained in elite American culture. Before 2020, for example, left-leaning black academic John McWhorter and right-leaning white columnist David French both said Coates’ ornate prose really just concealed an utter hatred of white people, which was unworthy of acclaim.
Finding hatred in Coates, who mused that the 343 firefighters and 72 police officers killed in the 2001 World Trade Center attack were “menaces of nature” and “not human to me,” was easy. It didn’t matter, though. Coatesmania reigned, and his books became best-sellers, the literary awards piled up, and his presence dominated high school syllabi.
Going unnoticed were familiar and vicious rings in Coates’ anti-white hatred that should have been alarming. Take two words in his 2015 blockbuster memoir Between the World and Me. One word, plunder, appears throughout the book, but the second, more illuminating word is used just once.
“White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.
Syndicate is not how racist whites describe black people. It is not a mass of humanity forming a “Great Replacement.” It is instead an entrenched criminal conspiracy—a Mafia—bloodsucking from innocent, productive communities. As Coates writes of the very term “white,”
[T]heir new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power.
Note also the present tense—“White America” is a syndicate. Coates is not decrying past policies like slavery or Jim Crow. Indeed, Coates has rejected the idea that white-black differences in matters like wealth and incarceration rates are “historical vestiges,” instead arguing “white supremacy” remains “one of the central organizing forces in American life.”
Coates, in sum, categorizes whites as an active “syndicate” using “criminal power” to “plunder” other races. This is, blatantly, how white supremacists describe Jews. Adolf Hitler wrote in “Volk und Rasse” (“Nation and Race”), the eleventh chapter of Mein Kampf,
[I]t is absolutely wrong to infer any ideal sense of sacrifice in the Jews from the fact that they stand together in struggle, or, better expressed, in the plundering of their fellow men.
The Jew is no nomad…but only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples.
With his thousand-year-old mercantile dexterity he is far superior to the still helpless, and above all boundlessly honest, Aryans…
Coates claims whites are a “syndicate” engaged in the “plunder” and “control” of “black bodies.” Hitler claims Jews are a “parasite” who “stand together” in “plundering” the “body” of “boundlessly honest Aryans.” One might suspect Coates, who wrote about Nazism in his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” deliberately employed Hitlerian rhetoric in 2015 to gauge how phony his white supporters were, only to discover it made them love him more than ever.
In Between the World and Me, Coates also says whites cohere as a group only because of their shared plunder.
[T]he power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons.
Hitler wrote the same of Jews.
The Jew is only united when a common danger forces him to be or a common booty entices him…
If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled struggle and exterminate one another…
Take also “the Dream,” Coates’s term for the charmed life of a white American. The Dream is material comforts of plunder (“perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways”) justified by “the lie of innocence” regarding white supremacy (“quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong”). Access to the Dream is denied by absurdities like the one-drop rule, making “Dreamers” not even “white” but merely “the people who believe themselves to be white.”
Coates, after the 2015 Baltimore riots, called nonviolence “a ruse” and “a con.” Hitler called pacifism “Jewish nonsense” and “as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid.” Even Coates’s obsession with redlining—a banking practice outlawed in 1968 that McWhorter has shown hurt substantially more whites than blacks—seems odd. Banking manipulation—Hitler wrote “The Jew… regards commerce as well as all financial transactions as his own special privilege”—is the basis of every historic anti-Semitic accusation short of the blood libel.
The anti-Semitic undertones in Coates reflect an especially extreme anti-white hatred. What Deborah Lipstadt, professor at Emory University, calls anti-Semitism’s “punching-up” nature allows an overturning-the-oppressor self-righteousness that often burns more intensely than other forms of racism, even among people with racial hatred for everyone. In “Volk und Rasse,” Hitler briefly derides Africans and Native Americans, then singles out Jews as “the mightiest counterpart to the Aryan” in an anti-Semitic rant lasting 11,000 words. That rage caused Auschwitz. Denver Parmenter, a co-founder of the murderous 1980s neo-Nazi group The Order, said The Order wanted to exile black Americans and “let them live their lives” in Africa, but that Jews were different and “they had to be killed.” A onetime member of the present-day Atomwaffen Division, which is linked to several homicides, said Atomwaffen considers Jews “the number-one enemy” because “Jews are the virus. And the people of color, the homosexuals, they were the symptoms.”
It might seem outrageous to link hatred of whites, America’s largest demographic group, with hatred of the Jewish minority. Coates would disagree, though. For one, in Between the World and Me he classifies Jews as white, writing
The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish…
suggesting that while Coates hates whites because they’re Jews, he hates Jews because they’re Jews too. Second, Coates ominously equated whites and Israeli Jews after October 7, saying his support for Palestinians stemmed from them being “basically the blacks” in the Middle East. Third, Coates’s comments about Jews themselves have amounted to overt racial vitriol. Not long after October 7, he said Jews expecting his sympathy had only promoted black civil rights out of a desire for a cynical “gang truce” with blacks based on an expectation that “I had your back, so you’ll have mine.” This meant Jewish support for racial equality was “transactional…not a moral alliance.” Coates then called the clash of his worldview and Israel a “fight,” saying, “I think we’re going to win.”
The 2025 murder of Charlie Kirk confirmed Coates as the thought leader of the entire American left. When New York Times center-leftist Ezra Klein wrote the late Kirk had practiced politics “the right way” in a civil society, Coates responded contemptuously, writing that the mainstream coalition-builder Kirk was a “hate-monger” who “reveled in open bigotry.” When Klein and Coates followed up with a podcast conversation, the overwhelming majority of commenters at the Times, YouTube, and even on Klein’s own Reddit fan page sided with Coates. The Kirk murder also prompted the institutional Democratic Party, which post-October 7 appeared horrified by the party’s identitarian left, to enter the final stages of Coatesification when the majority of House Democrats refused to endorse a resolution honoring Kirk and condemning political violence.
Coates claims to abhor violence (a gruesome lie, given his first two time-sensitive writings of the 2020s involved trashing 1,200 Israelis who’d just suffered violent deaths then doing the same to Kirk), but at some point Democrats like Klein, television host Chris Hayes—who guided Coates through early drafts of Between the World and Me—and those 95 House Democrats who supported the Kirk resolution should realize their party currently amounts to an ethno-racialist movement advertising a homicidal hatred of whites, Jews and anyone else who crosses it. A decade ago, Klein, Hayes and the rest stupidly praised Coates as a genius, and people believed them. Now the Coatesified Democrats are playing for keeps, and as Coates says of his anti-white, anti-Jewish fanaticism, “I think we’re going to win.”
Nation and Race and Ta-Nehisi Coates
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates onstage during the ‘Alight Align Arise: Advancing the Movement for Repair National Conference’ at Thompson Buckhead on June 7, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia
CAROL LEE ROSE / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
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Long before the African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates began vilifying Israel—which started right after Hamas massacred 1200 Israelis—and long before he began vilifying Charlie Kirk—which started right after Kirk was murdered—some commentators were expressing serious concerns about the celebrated status Coates had attained in elite American culture. Before 2020, for example, left-leaning black academic John McWhorter and right-leaning white columnist David French both said Coates’ ornate prose really just concealed an utter hatred of white people, which was unworthy of acclaim.
Finding hatred in Coates, who mused that the 343 firefighters and 72 police officers killed in the 2001 World Trade Center attack were “menaces of nature” and “not human to me,” was easy. It didn’t matter, though. Coatesmania reigned, and his books became best-sellers, the literary awards piled up, and his presence dominated high school syllabi.
Going unnoticed were familiar and vicious rings in Coates’ anti-white hatred that should have been alarming. Take two words in his 2015 blockbuster memoir Between the World and Me. One word, plunder, appears throughout the book, but the second, more illuminating word is used just once.
“White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.
Syndicate is not how racist whites describe black people. It is not a mass of humanity forming a “Great Replacement.” It is instead an entrenched criminal conspiracy—a Mafia—bloodsucking from innocent, productive communities. As Coates writes of the very term “white,”
Note also the present tense—“White America” is a syndicate. Coates is not decrying past policies like slavery or Jim Crow. Indeed, Coates has rejected the idea that white-black differences in matters like wealth and incarceration rates are “historical vestiges,” instead arguing “white supremacy” remains “one of the central organizing forces in American life.”
Coates, in sum, categorizes whites as an active “syndicate” using “criminal power” to “plunder” other races. This is, blatantly, how white supremacists describe Jews. Adolf Hitler wrote in “Volk und Rasse” (“Nation and Race”), the eleventh chapter of Mein Kampf,
Coates claims whites are a “syndicate” engaged in the “plunder” and “control” of “black bodies.” Hitler claims Jews are a “parasite” who “stand together” in “plundering” the “body” of “boundlessly honest Aryans.” One might suspect Coates, who wrote about Nazism in his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” deliberately employed Hitlerian rhetoric in 2015 to gauge how phony his white supporters were, only to discover it made them love him more than ever.
In Between the World and Me, Coates also says whites cohere as a group only because of their shared plunder.
Hitler wrote the same of Jews.
Take also “the Dream,” Coates’s term for the charmed life of a white American. The Dream is material comforts of plunder (“perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways”) justified by “the lie of innocence” regarding white supremacy (“quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong”). Access to the Dream is denied by absurdities like the one-drop rule, making “Dreamers” not even “white” but merely “the people who believe themselves to be white.”
Coates, after the 2015 Baltimore riots, called nonviolence “a ruse” and “a con.” Hitler called pacifism “Jewish nonsense” and “as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid.” Even Coates’s obsession with redlining—a banking practice outlawed in 1968 that McWhorter has shown hurt substantially more whites than blacks—seems odd. Banking manipulation—Hitler wrote “The Jew… regards commerce as well as all financial transactions as his own special privilege”—is the basis of every historic anti-Semitic accusation short of the blood libel.
The anti-Semitic undertones in Coates reflect an especially extreme anti-white hatred. What Deborah Lipstadt, professor at Emory University, calls anti-Semitism’s “punching-up” nature allows an overturning-the-oppressor self-righteousness that often burns more intensely than other forms of racism, even among people with racial hatred for everyone. In “Volk und Rasse,” Hitler briefly derides Africans and Native Americans, then singles out Jews as “the mightiest counterpart to the Aryan” in an anti-Semitic rant lasting 11,000 words. That rage caused Auschwitz. Denver Parmenter, a co-founder of the murderous 1980s neo-Nazi group The Order, said The Order wanted to exile black Americans and “let them live their lives” in Africa, but that Jews were different and “they had to be killed.” A onetime member of the present-day Atomwaffen Division, which is linked to several homicides, said Atomwaffen considers Jews “the number-one enemy” because “Jews are the virus. And the people of color, the homosexuals, they were the symptoms.”
It might seem outrageous to link hatred of whites, America’s largest demographic group, with hatred of the Jewish minority. Coates would disagree, though. For one, in Between the World and Me he classifies Jews as white, writing
suggesting that while Coates hates whites because they’re Jews, he hates Jews because they’re Jews too. Second, Coates ominously equated whites and Israeli Jews after October 7, saying his support for Palestinians stemmed from them being “basically the blacks” in the Middle East. Third, Coates’s comments about Jews themselves have amounted to overt racial vitriol. Not long after October 7, he said Jews expecting his sympathy had only promoted black civil rights out of a desire for a cynical “gang truce” with blacks based on an expectation that “I had your back, so you’ll have mine.” This meant Jewish support for racial equality was “transactional…not a moral alliance.” Coates then called the clash of his worldview and Israel a “fight,” saying, “I think we’re going to win.”
The 2025 murder of Charlie Kirk confirmed Coates as the thought leader of the entire American left. When New York Times center-leftist Ezra Klein wrote the late Kirk had practiced politics “the right way” in a civil society, Coates responded contemptuously, writing that the mainstream coalition-builder Kirk was a “hate-monger” who “reveled in open bigotry.” When Klein and Coates followed up with a podcast conversation, the overwhelming majority of commenters at the Times, YouTube, and even on Klein’s own Reddit fan page sided with Coates. The Kirk murder also prompted the institutional Democratic Party, which post-October 7 appeared horrified by the party’s identitarian left, to enter the final stages of Coatesification when the majority of House Democrats refused to endorse a resolution honoring Kirk and condemning political violence.
Coates claims to abhor violence (a gruesome lie, given his first two time-sensitive writings of the 2020s involved trashing 1,200 Israelis who’d just suffered violent deaths then doing the same to Kirk), but at some point Democrats like Klein, television host Chris Hayes—who guided Coates through early drafts of Between the World and Me—and those 95 House Democrats who supported the Kirk resolution should realize their party currently amounts to an ethno-racialist movement advertising a homicidal hatred of whites, Jews and anyone else who crosses it. A decade ago, Klein, Hayes and the rest stupidly praised Coates as a genius, and people believed them. Now the Coatesified Democrats are playing for keeps, and as Coates says of his anti-white, anti-Jewish fanaticism, “I think we’re going to win.”
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