Natalie Wynn and The Lonely Void of Deradicalization

I did not expect "ContraPoints" to come out as a proud supporter of Israel. And, though it may sound strange to say, I’m almost glad she didn’t.

A graphic of Natalie Wynn depicted as a Nazi, created by communist X account @jizzeringjezza, in reaction to Wynn’s commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict

So. There’s this gal on YouTube — Natalie Wynn, or as she is better known by her channel name, ContraPoints. I discovered Natalie in college. My roommate, a person whom I have since lost touch with on account of our, let’s say, “disagreements” on Israel, was in the early stages of gender transition at the time, and I remember hearing Natalie from the laptop placed on the shabby dorm room bed discuss all things gender — dysphoria, healthcare, and the politics and philosophy surrounding “the trans question.” My interest was piqued when I discovered that Natalie’s “role” on YouTube, what she was known for at least at this time (2018-2019), was “deradicalizing” young people who were flirting with the far-right. Indeed, commentators at the time hailed her as a kind of Nazi whisperer — a trans woman who, through well-produced, wicked smart, and often very funny video essays and skits, softened the edges of the “social justice warrior” stereotype. She made left-wing commentary digestible and even palatable to the very people most likely to call her an abomination.

2020 was the year that I, and I hope you will forgive the cringeworthy and overused expression, “left the left.” I had written my New York Times article about campus left-wing antisemitism in November of 2019, and had subsequently experienced the double standard the left imposes on Jews testifying to bigotry within their ideological camps. This experience primed me for “dangerous” and “contrarian” opinions, an ideological aesthetic which has already reached its peak, but was just forming in 2020, as the Democrats continued to misstep — on COVID, by enforcing policies that most Americans knew were doing little if anything to protect their families, and by going “all-in” on radical identity politics during the summer of the George Floyd protests. In my social circles, which, granted, had been dramatically thinning since I became a persona non grata amongst the leftie crowd at GW (or perhaps it was the opposite, considering they kept tweeting about me non-stop), things like prison abolition, Bernie Sanders, and Palestine became litmus tests on whether someone was a real advocate for racial justice. And so my flirtation with new, previously heretical voices began. Voices that told me they were “silenced,” “canceled,” “blacklisted,” just as I had been.

And these new voices fixated— often obsessively — on trans people. Now, granted, I still do believe that people like Abigail Shrier and J.K. Rowling do present some valid critiques of the “trans rights movement,” as even progressive trans people now are admitting that it has indeed gone too far and has hindered its own progress. I still am doubtful that prescribing hormones to children is a good idea. I still have sympathy for women who say that trans women sometimes are too entitled to women’s spaces. I still feel annoyed at the revisionist history of Pride by far-left ideologues, and, obviously, I can’t help but feel contempt for a subsection of the LGBT movement whose activist wing has made opposing the Jewish state’s very existence a central organizing principle. But in 2020, I was considerably more on the side of Shrier and Rowling than I was on the side of the social justice-oriented LGBT community, which was a major reversal of my opinions on the matter compared to just a year before.

Natalie Wynn changed that. In watching her video essays on J.K. Rowling and on The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, a podcast from The Free Press, I came to understand that these people, who claim to be militantly opposing the inclusion into public life of trans people, were not doing so under their professed guise of “protecting children,” or “protecting women.” Rather, they were recycling the same arguments that bigots of lore like Anita Bryant had made against gay people, eliciting the same unfounded fears from the general public, that “groomers” are coming for your families. This panic is perhaps crystallized best in such popular social media accounts like LibsofTikTok, whose leader, Chaya Raichik, makes no distinction in her accusations of pedophilia between LGBT people she may rightly characterize as going through some sort of mental health crisis, and regular run-of- the-mill LGBT people who want to live free, happy, unpersecuted lives.

All of this is to say that, while I was far in 2020 from being classified as a right-wing thinker, Natalie was able to scale back my growing affection for those who were spreading harmful and anti-liberal ideas. She pulled this off by showing compassion toward those who disagree with her, dissecting their arguments with precision, and warning against the totalitarian creep of radicalism.

In the last several years, fans of Natalie will have noticed that while she has continued her signature work of de-radicalization, her target is no longer solely the far-right. In wildly entertaining and erudite videos such as “Envy,” “Canceling,” “Conspiracy,” and “Voting,” Natalie has included the far-left in her critiques, warning them against the dangers of zero-sum, anti-intellectual, resentful, prejudiced thinking — which, as anyone reading this column knows, the left is certainly guilty of as well.

Natalie has certainly taken a lot of flak for this from hard-core leftists. And that continues. Which brings us to Natalie’s recent Reddit post, in which, after twenty-one months of little to no commentary on the matter, she wades into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I won’t paste the entire post here, because it’s quite long and detailed, but I’ll give you the SparkNotes.

First things first, Natalie acknowledges that many on the left feel “betrayed” by her decision not to release a video commenting on the conflict since October 7th. She then assuages these leftists by calling Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza a genocide. She says she has donated “quietly” to Palestinian aid organizations. She says, “Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are conceptually not the same.” She condemns “right-wing ghouls dismissing and censoring all criticism of Israel on the pretext of ‘fighting antisemitism,’” and presses that she hopes US foreign policy will shift someday in the Palestinians’ favor.

But that’s not all she wrote.

The majority of Natalie’s post reveals genuine, bitter feelings of frustration and disappointment with the left concerning their handling of the “Israel question,” or rather, the Jewish question. She says that it was politically infeasible for the US to withdraw aid from Israel after October 7th, citing “decades of bipartisan strategy and diplomacy.” She decries how “the leftist pro-Palestinian movement quickly decided that their primary goal was not merely opposition to genocide (sic), but opposition to Zionism in general; that is, opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.” She says, “Zionist is a very broad category. Most Jews are Zionists. Anyone who supports a two-state solution is a Zionist.”

She continues: “The vagueness of Zionism as a political Satan enables all sorts of rhetorical abuses… there is a long history of antisemites using the term ‘Zionist’ in deliberately equivocal ways… antisemites are happy for the opportunity to misappropriate the now popular ‘anti-zionist’ label to legitimize their agenda, and many people are not informed enough about antisemitism to recognize when this is happening.”

She then criticizes the left, arguing that the obsession with Palestine, the turning of Gaza into an “omnicause” in which all well-meaning people must respond with a certain level of fury and condemnation, has hurt their popularity, and probably helped elect Trump; by all their hysteria, she states, “Zero Palestinians were saved. Not one fewer bomb or bullet was fired by the IDF.”

And then, Natalie takes it home, with what I think is the best and most compelling part of her post. She writes: “The way Israel is perceived does seep into attitudes toward Jews in general. I don’t think Jews who feel isolated and wary in the current atmosphere are simply hysterical or hallucinating.” She continues: “There’s also a valid fear of historical antisemitism patterns recurring…does this mean Israel should not be criticized and sanctioned? Absolutely not. But it’s not something I want to risk contributing to if not outweighed by tangible benefits. So I approach the issue cautiously.”

Cautiously. That is the key word to this entire post.

Now, of course, there are points that Natalie raised that I strongly disagree with. Obviously, I do not believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As I have dedicated previous entries to, there is no such thing as a genocide that is predicated on an enemy army surrendering and releasing their civilian hostages. The Jews in Auschwitz, for example, had no political cards on the table; there was nothing they could do to alleviate their suffering, and of course, there had been no Jewish militia that had attacked innocent Germans, imprisoned their loved ones, and carried the ideology that the German state must be eradicated at all costs.

Secondly, I would not like to see American foreign policy “shift toward the Palestinians,” if that means that Israel is “sanctioned,” or more money is funneled into corrupt bodies that pay terrorists for their crimes and exist only to keep the dream of “from the river to the sea” alive. I also, though I am not a right-wing Zionist, object to the broad characterization of “right-wing Zionists silencing criticism of Israel,” because, most of the time, such “criticism” is nothing of the sort, but demonization of Israel, and a strong reaction to such demonization can come from centrist and left-wing Zionists alike. Also, as you all know, I do not believe that “anti-Zionism and antisemitism are conceptually not the same.”

Those disagreements aside, however (though I know how difficult it is for supporters of Israel and the Jewish people to put those disagreements aside), I found a lot to celebrate in this post from a well-known “leftist.” This post from Natalie is one of the only pieces of commentary I’ve seen since the beginning of the war in Gaza from somebody who falls on the other side of the ledger that is approached with compassion, with decency, and which takes into account Jewish suffering, Jewish history, and Jewish aspirations.

And she has been crucified for it.

From Twitter alone this past week:

“Natalie Wynn is a narcissistic liberal Zionist, anyone who still supports this genocide apologist is not an ally of Palestine solidarity.”

“Contrapoints is a genocidal Zionist scumbag who views Palestinians as subhuman and believes mean words online about Zionists are much more dangerous and evil because it makes Zionists like her and her close personal friends ‘feel unsafe.’ The most lowlife scum alive.”

“It's incredible to me how Contrapoints manages to be such a perfect distillation of everything wrong with white american ‘liberals’ and has been for a while now”

“contrapoints hates the left so much that in a statement that's supposed to be about israel's genocide of palestinians she spends more time airing out her grievances with the left and victimizing herself. exactly how privileged does a person have to be to center themselves in-”

“Contrapoints is a fucking Zionist and anyone who follows or promotes them are proxy Zionists”

And the list goes on and on. The internet erupted in hatred over Wynn’s statement.

Natalie Wynn is once again under relentless fire from her ideological compatriots (she was ripped to shreds in 2020 for inserting a voiceover in one of her videos from a man who criticized the modern trans-rights movement). The reason? She employed for the left the same tactics she used for the right for so many years to ease them out of insanity. She simply approached a contentious issue with nuance and kindness, even if some of it I felt was incorrect and offensive. Simply, she refused to conform to partisan, “terminally online” rigidity.

Natalie also committed the cardinal sin, as I mentioned above, of showing empathy with the Jewish community. The far-left does not want to empathize with the Jewish community. The far-left instead views the Jews as an inversion of how the Nazis viewed the Jews: instead of sub-white, they are hyper-white, instead of militant communists, they are bloated capitalists, instead of those who subvert and conspire to undermine the west, they are the poster-children of western racism, hegemony, colonialism, and imperialism. Any deviation from this flipped narrative is seen, as I have spent my entire professional career writing and speaking about, as a dramatic betrayal of progressive values. Natalie also raised the issue of antisemitism that comes from the left, which is always met not with compassion and understanding from those who claim to “listen” to minorities and “give them space,” but with sharp vindictiveness, and with conspiracy theories that the uppity Jew is a right-wing, reactionary plant, trying to infiltrate a “human-rights” oriented space with Israeli propaganda.

Natalie, in other words, banished herself from the good graces of the left by recognizing Jews as a legitimate people with legitimate grievances, not all concerning white nationalism and neo-Nazism. And take it from me, there is little room for forgiveness after taking such a “brave” stand.

I did not expect Natalie to come out as a proud supporter of Israel in her much-anticipated commentary on the conflict. And, though it may sound strange to say, I’m almost glad she didn’t. When Natalie works to de-radicalize the far-right, I’m glad that she doesn’t engage in angry moral handwringing, but rather, lays out her argument with humanity and caution, and usually a hefty amount of self-doubt, and allows her audience to sit, and breathe, with what has just been presented to them. This tactic has proved much more persuasive than the general tactic of hyper-partisans, which is to scream and kick and name-call until one’s heart rate has skyrocketed and conversation is impossible.

Natalie applied the same standard to the right as she did to the left, a compulsion noticeably lacking among political commentators on all sides of the spectrum today.

I very much hope that the people today flirting or perhaps already deep into the anti-Israel movement will view Natalie’s latest comments and have the same change of heart that I did on the “trans question” when I viewed Natalie’s videos on transgender people. They may realize, as I realized with figures like JK Rowling, that the loudest voices in their movement are doing a great deal more harm than good — by alienating potential allies, making marginalized people feel victimized, and doing nothing to help those you are supposed to be “advocating for” in the process.

I’m grateful for her statement. It proves that there is a light in the darkness, that among the anti-Israel left, there are still people, while they may erroneously call this war a genocide and may have the wrong opinions on US policy, who know that the “Israel question” is not black and white, and that the rhetoric and viciousness of its loudest activists is legitimately threatening to the Jewish community — if not to liberal society as a whole. And, of course, that it does nothing to help the Palestinians.

Natalie includes the Jewish community in the fold of the left. And I’ve enjoyed immensely watching the usual crackpots lose their minds over it, for I know that behind each crackpot are ten reasonable thinkers who have considered another way.