Redpill Zionism
26 Heshvan 5786 (Nov 17 2025)
Over the weekend, a redpill-adjacent “right-wing” Zionist influencer who goes by Nima Yamini had a tremendous crashout. It started with attacks on Ben Shapiro, one of the most successful Jews in American conservative politics, as being ineffective while promoting himself as his future replacement. Within a couple days, he was ranting about the domination of racist Ashkenazis in Israeli society and Zionist discourse as a whole. This type of anti-Ashkenazi slop is not new to Zionist circles, but in the past it has mostly been a product of leftists like Hen Mazzig, who spent years talking about “Ashkenormativity” back when wokeness was still in full swing.
Whenever I’m exposed to this type of anti-Ashkenazi discourse, I can’t help but think of one particular painting by the Russian-Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi. She, as far as I can tell, appears to be some sort of leftist commenting on the power dynamics of Israel which places Ashkenazis at the top, Arabs at the bottom, and the various shades of non-European Jews as some sort of halfway between the two. In her piece titled “The History of Violence,” she attempts to display this power dynamic at its most extreme and paradoxical point, featuring a scrawny, nerdy, awkward-looking Ashkenazi Jew holding two captive Arabs at gunpoint.
But allow me instead to provide an alternative interpretation.
The Ashkenazi nerd stereotype certainly has a grain of truth to it, but only insofar as the memetic “nerd” itself is a projection of Ashkenazi stereotypes. The archetypal “nerd” in the Western imagination exists in opposition to the archetypal “jock,” both products of Hollywood movies largely created, directed, and written by Ashkenazis. The nerd is an intelligent, meek, quiet, and cerebral fellow who is mercilessly tormented by the tall, handsome, popular jock. It’s not hard to see what dynamic is being commented on here as there’s little subtlety to it at all. In these narratives, the nerd is a stand-in for an Ashkenazi Jew while the jock is a stand-in for the Aryan. This should be obvious to anyone who’s actually been to high school, since most real bullying tends to happen within social circles and, when it doesn’t is usually done by the type of kids who are likely to die of overdoses in their 20s or become some other sort of deadbeat loser, not the types who are popular and good at sports. To speak from personal experience as someone who was a nerd in school, I engaged in much more bullying against other nerds than I received from the “jocks,” who were mostly quite friendly towards me.
Even though these movies don’t really reflect the reality of high school, there’s a reason why people find these types of narratives very compelling. Americans like an underdog, and are happy to cheer for an imperfect person who they may not want to be in any sense so long as they think they have something to offer the world. The willingness to persist and use your own ingenuity to come out on top is, in a sense, really what characterizes American masculinity. The most admired men in America aren’t the most blusterous, but the men who can put their own skills and interests to good use in a way that builds up themselves and people around them, in turn building something greater than just himself.
Zoya, however, is not American, nor is she from any other Western country where this type of success would be considered admirable. Zoya comes from Russia, a thoroughly third world country which is only perceived as being above such designation because the people there are white. Russians, much like the Arabs that Israel has fought since its inception, exist in a culture based on honor and shame. Being the “nerd” in these 3rd world cultures is not admirable, even if you win, because it runs in total defiance to the aesthetics of masculinity that these cultures put on a pedestal. The most admired men in these cultures are not the ones who solve their problems, but the ones who are the most blusterous, the ones who can pump their chest out the most even if they have nothing to back it up, the ones who scream and rant hysterically at the hooka bar, shouting louder than everyone else to show their own momentary dominance. Nobody finds them convincing, but that doesn’t matter because the point is not to be convincing or even correct. The point is to shout down everyone else in the room until you’re the only one talking. When everyone’s paying attention to you, that’s when you have the power. That’s when seemingly your masculinity has peaked.
Once you notice this with redpill influencers, you can’t un-notice it. Take Andrew Tate, for example. I am under no illusion that I couldn’t possibly win a fistfight against Andrew Tate. In terms of masculine aesthetics, Tate certainly beats me. But what is there to say about his personality and intellect? His style of argumentation consists of screaming like an hysterical woman over whoever he’s talking to, throwing around insults, and ad hominem attacks. Nothing about it is rational or reasonable in a grand sense of being correct or truthful or advancing society forward in a meaningful way, but it does allow him to dominate most conversations he engages in.
Tate, of course, is a highly successful internet influencer (despite his legal troubles), but the success he has is one-in-a-million. Most people you know who behave like Andrew Tate, showing off their muscles while being totally incapable of holding a rational conversation without resorting to screaming and shouting, are total losers. Nobody respects them, although they may not be aware of that because anyone who converses with them may quickly conclude that they’re so emotionally volatile that it’s simply not worth offending them through disagreement. Most of us interact with these types of “manly men” the same way we interact with hysterical women; nodding in faux agreement while strategizing in our heads about the most effective exit strategy from this conversation.
Unfortunately for most of these people, however, there comes a point where their own self-perception must confront reality. And what is that reality? The reality is that for the past 80 years, a culture built on bluster and, to borrow a term from feminists, performative masculinity has been totally and repeatedly dominated and outflanked by the foundational, archetypal nerd. For these types of people, war is the ultimate demonstration of strength versus weakness, and all they’ve been capable of showing is weakness despite their macho grandstanding.
I don’t say this to discount the immense contributions of Sephardim and Mizrahim to Judaism and the State of Israel, but it’s important to remember that it was not Eastern bluster, but Western ingenuity that ultimately built the state of Israel. It was a bunch of Ashkenazi “nerds” who took a bunch of sand dunes and turned it into one of the richest cities in existence in just 125 years. Even more impressively, they took a land with very few Jews and turned it into a Jewish state in just ~50 years. At the same time European Ashkenazis were doing this, American Ashkenazis founded the world’s most important cultural powerhouse in Hollywood, became a dominant force in American finance, and achieved a disproportionate foothold in the politics of the most powerful nation in the world. None of this was achieved by ranting in bars about how we’re going to defeat our enemies, but by meticulously contributing and working towards success.
Many people who identify with the Western right in recent years have adopted what is often described as a third world ideology. Many of these folks deride Western society as weak and effeminate, and believe that it will inevitably experience downfall against the more “masculine” third world and their “traditional” values despite the vast wealth they’ve accumulated, which many of these people see as decadent anyway. It was essentially inevitable that some right-wingers within the Jewish community would also fall into this farcical belief system.
But to quote Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, there is no nobility in poverty. The fact that Israel is significantly better in every metric than all of its neighbours; the fact that all of our tourist sites aren’t full of aggressive scam artists like in Egypt, the fact that our gas station bathrooms don’t consist of holes in the grounds where you’re expected to wipe with your hands like in Jordan, the fact that we haven’t devolved into endless sectarian feuds like in Lebanon, the fact that we haven’t turned our country into a full-blown warzone like in Syria - these are the accomplishments of our people we should be proud of, and not take for granted. Would you be proud to be born Jordanian? Maybe if you are a mindless tribalist, but I can think of endless reasons to be proud to be Jewish while I struggle to think of even a single significant Jordanian accomplishment. ChatGPT tells me that Jordanians have made significant technological contributions to something called “cement dust treatment plants.” Anyone who knows what these are may leave a comment below, but I’ll happily say I have no qualms giving the Jordanians their credit for their modest contribution to human progress.
And that’s before getting into Gaza, which has been transformed into a place of utter ruin by a death cult, whose hearts are more hardened than Pharaoh under the influence of G-d, continuing to wage war against Israel in the face of catastrophic consequences.
What many of these influencers are selling you is that Jews should become more like these people. That we should adopt a similar culture of hysterics, tribalism, arrogance, macho-ism, and blusterous stupidity that has reduced half of Israel’s neighbours to complete societal collapse (or impending collapse). They will try to highlight the differences between us versus them, but those differences will be almost entirely aesthetic.
To indignify themselves even further, many of these types of influencers will try to sell you this thinly veiled redpill garbage under the guise of Sephardic or Mizrahi identity. My experience with these groups here in Canada probably isn’t fully representative, but let me tell you about my experience with them. The ancestors of the main admin of Low Effort Zionist Memes moved from Iraq to India to become a powerful planting family during the British Raj. My best friend growing up had immense generational wealth going back to their time as an important diplomatic family in Morocco. If you’re Mizrahi and you don’t have this type of background, no problem. Neither do most Ashkenazis. But the reality is that Jews have always played the same role in Christian lands as we did in Arab ones, albeit with different levels of hostility between them depending on the time period. Jews from Arab lands aren’t less privileged than Ashkenazis because they’ve faced more discrimination either presently or in the past, it’s because the places they came from were not run by people who even knew how to create prosperity for Arabs, let alone their Jewish minority.
So don’t buy from these snake oil salesmen telling you that Mizrahim and Sephardim should feel some sort of ethnic obligation to engage in all the worst manifestations of Arab culture. It’s neither conducive to a functional Jewish nation nor is it an accurate reflection of any Jewish subculture. And beneath all of it is fundamentally just a disgust for the stereotypical Ashkenazi and the Western masculinity he represents–intelligent, thoughtful, calm, and calculated. These are the traits which allowed a nation of 10 million people to dominate the Middle East, and we abandon these traits at our own peril.
- Beau Chasse
**as of 10:49 pm, Ben Shapiro enthusiast Nina Yamini has blocked LEZM.