(The Devil Wears Prada/20th Century Fox)
Twenty years ago, The Devil Wears Prada perfectly captured how powerful elites shape the choices of young people who believe they are resisting them — when, in fact, they are often being manipulated by forces they barely understand.
In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Andy Sachs, a young assistant at a fashion magazine, snickers as her colleagues obsess over two nearly identical belts. To her, the whole exercise seems shallow and absurd. Then her boss Miranda Priestly stops her cold. The “lumpy blue sweater” Andy is wearing, Miranda explains, is not some independent, anti-fashion statement. It is the endpoint of a vast cultural and commercial pipeline.
The sweater is not merely “blue.” It is cerulean — a shade that began in elite fashion collections, moved through designers and department stores, trickled down to discount bins, and eventually landed in Andy’s closet. The point is devastating: even people who think they are above fashion are still shaped by it. Their supposedly free choices are often downstream from decisions made by the very elites they mock.
The scene is less about fashion than about power. Culture does not simply happen. The choices people believe they are making freely are often illusions created for them by others far above them in the food chain. As Miranda derisively tells Andy, it is “sort of comical” that she thinks she has made a choice exempting her from the fashion industry, when in reality she is wearing a sweater selected for her long ago by “the people in this room.”
Today, the “lumpy blue sweater” hanging in the bargain bin of public discourse is antisemitism — only now it comes dressed up as anti-Zionism or anti-Israel sentiment. It is one of the few things both parties’ bases increasingly agree on. And while acolytes of Tucker Carlson and Hasan Piker may believe they are mortal enemies who arrived at their views honestly, many of them did not arrive there independently. Like the assistant whose illusion of free will Miranda Priestly so icily dismantles, they have been dressed in someone else’s ideology — manipulated into beliefs by forces they do not even realize exist.
This is not a column defending the Netanyahu government, which has become a stain on the nation of Israel, much as the Trump administration is a stain on the United States. Netanyahu has done incalculable damage, not only to Israel itself and to the region, but to diaspora Jews who are left to absorb the backlash from his cruelty, corruption, and disastrous choices. Nor is this a defense of AIPAC, which demands blind allegiance to a government that many Israelis — and certainly most American Jews — reject.
This is a column about something else: the forces that have quietly and relentlessly pushed public discourse beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and into something far darker — a nihilistic contempt for the existence of an entire nation, its people and, increasingly, Jews far beyond its borders.
For years now, the conversation has drifted well past the specific actions of the Netanyahu government in Gaza or the West Bank. It has moved into a much more dangerous place, where people often slide, without even realizing it, from debating foreign policy into blaming “Israel,” “AIPAC,” “Zionists” and Jews for everything broken in American life.
(And please do not tell me this does not happen. Almost every time I go Live, someone in the chat blames “AIPAC” or “Zionists” for whatever domestic crisis we are discussing in the United States, no matter how unrelated. That is not criticism of Israeli policy. That is an old conspiracy theory wearing new language.)
Let me explain how we got here — and what any of this has to do with Gulf State despots, the Trump family, and China.