The Jewish Social Technology That (Used To) Mitigate Antisemitism Was Inverted

In this spicy Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle a sensitive but urgent topic: why Jews must stop defending bad actors within their communities — and why failing to do so is fueling rising antisemitism in America.

With 24% of young Americans now endorsing antisemitic tropes (vs. just 5% of those in their 80s), the Collinses examine welfare fraud in Orthodox Jewish communities, the ADL’s deplatforming of critics like Tyler Olivier, the Chabad-linked push to pardon a $33M healthcare fraudster whose actions killed elderly patients, and the collapse of historic Jewish self-policing institutions (kehillot and beit din) that once prevented exactly this problem.

They argue that protecting bad actors creates massive negative externalities, damages alliances with the new right, and threatens the long-term survival of Jewish communities — especially as ultra-Orthodox populations grow rapidly. A blunt, data-driven conversation about group accountability, cultural self-preservation, and why every community (Jewish, Somali, or otherwise) must police its worst members.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. Today is going to be a spicy conversation and it’s going to piss off a lot of people, but it is one that needs to be had right now in America. We, we mentioned this on another episode, but Jews need to be paying attention to this.

24% of young people in America today endorse anti-Jewish tropes, right? Like are what you would be seen as antisemitic. Oh, oh, no. If you go to people in the, their eighties, it’s around 5%. Oh. So it’s one in four versus one in 20. This is a massive generational change.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: And I would point out here that the sentiment against Jews among use higher than it is against groups like blacks in the United States.

Now where it is 17% have anti-black resentment in the United States where it’s 24% anti-Jewish resentment.

Simone Collins: That’s so [00:01:00] funny because I grew up on like seventies, eighties, and nineties content that pretty heavily made fun of Jews. Like, I’m thinking about Mel Brooks Films, the Princess Bride all these shows that would have like a ton of like, seen

Malcolm Collins: it as safe because nobody actually, when I used to, ‘cause

Simone Collins: no one believed it.

No one

Malcolm Collins: edgy fake humor, like racist humor. I would make racist jokes about Inuits. That was like the core commun Eskimos, you know, they, you know, make Oh

Simone Collins: right.

Malcolm Collins: Make, make fun of their fake kisses. They don’t even know how to love, you know, like, everybody thinks Eskimo jokes are funny because nobody is aware of Eskimo discrimination.

At least if you’re in the United States, like it’s not something that you are around or you see. So it comes across as funny. Sure. The idea of Jews being actually discriminated against in the eighties and the nineties was actually comical. It, it was,

Simone Collins: right. So we, we, we could make fun of them because we knew that they were [00:02:00] fine and they weren’t.

Doing anything

Malcolm Collins: sauce. It was so comical that when Jewish directors and producers were making the Star Wars prequels, they literally made this character

Simone Collins: Oh God, yes. No,

Speaker 14: My trick don’t work on, I make only money.

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: thought nothing of it. Yes. Alright. They didn’t think this could one day be a problem for our community. And the, the problem, like the thing that makes this entire conversation so dangerous for the Jewish community long term, like when I’m projecting what happens long term with Judaism

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Is that somebody comes out there and says, Hey it looks like antisemitism is exploding right now. And then the obvious next question is, is why. Right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And then the obvious next question is. Okay. Is it entirely due to some sort of external social contagion that has nothing to do with Jewish communities?

Simone Collins: Which could be possible, or

Malcolm Collins: it [00:03:00] could be possible, but that’s actually much worse for Jewish communities, if that’s true, because it’s much harder to change the behavior of people other than yourself, than in

Simone Collins: yourself.

Yeah, it’s preferable. And I, I’m, I’m giving the example because after I brought up a bunch of theories around why there’s so much Indian immigrant hate one person wrote to us, and I, I’m gonna try to put an episode together about it, but they wrote to us and shared fairly abundant evidence indicating that a lot of the.

Indian immigrant hate is actually AstroTurf by Muslim Indians and Pakistanis who just really freaking hate Hindi Indians. And

that and

Malcolm Collins: Canadians

Simone Collins: that like, even, like, not even so, I mean, there is some job resentment, but like, not nearly to the level that you see online.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simone Collins: But like, that’s, that’s an example of something that could be at least in large part external and not caused by internal activity.

‘cause you know, like there’s a very large immigrant community here that is Indian and [00:04:00] there’s not. There’s not a lot of like hate a about it, people like

Malcolm Collins: them. There is not I, but I can, yeah. I, and I can say this very concretely. So we live outside of Philadelphia. Mm-hmm. We live in a majority Indian neighborhood.

Our neighborhood is 70% Indian. Mm-hmm. And I have not seen any anti-Indian sentiment amongst any of my neighbors, any of the, the friends at Octavian school.

Simone Collins: Well, and keep in mind, I ran for office in our, in our area. Right. I attended a ton of conservative Republican events. I knocked doors on the houses of hundreds of Republicans who lived here.

Only once. Only once. ‘cause I will say that there was one time when one person said one thing and they’re just like, well, I don’t like all these kids running around in the streets. And that was it. It was, oh, God forbid that these people actually are happy and have children that run in the streets like I would want my kids to do.

And this is like a safe

Malcolm Collins: place. And keep in mind that you might be like, well, you don’t participate with the edgy conservative groups. No, we participate with the edgy. We, we are like friends with the people who ran a lot of [00:05:00] the Trump campaign stuff. Mm-hmm. And, and as we’re known as like rightwing influencers, we get and edgy rightwing influencers, we get invented to the edgy parties where people make.

You know, racialist jokes and stuff like that. Even, even just to be educated,

Simone Collins: anyone wanted to say something about resenting Indian immigrants in our Indian immigrant heavy community? They would’ve told me immediately because all of the like, attacks made against me were like, look at this evil, racist woman.

So they would’ve told me ‘cause they would’ve thought that, like the, the, the rumors were true. So I just wanna, I wanna illustrate that anyway. So, but this does not seem to be something, one thing where the Jew hate is endogenous or It