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Saturday, March 09, 2024

Channeling James David Manning....,

 NYTimes  |  Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, has for some reason not bothered to take down his old Facebook posts about the Jews.

 “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, wrote in one 2017 post. (The reason was left unsaid, but the scare quotes spoke loudly.) He regularly argued on Facebook that focusing on the evils of Nazism obscured the greater danger: the one represented by the Democratic Party. “George Soros is alive. Adolf Hitler is dead,” he wrote in one post, and in another, “Who do you think has been pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years?”

 In 2018, Robinson, who is Black, offered some thoughts about what he seemed to see as a Jewish plot behind the hit movie “Black Panther.” The title character, he wrote, was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxist,” calling the movie “trash” that was “created to pull the shekels” from the pockets of Black people, whom he referred to using a Yiddish slur. He has refused to apologize for these statements, though he called them “poorly worded” and has denied that he’s antisemitic.

 None of this appears to have hurt Robinson with the Republican electorate in North Carolina, where on Tuesday he won nearly 65 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial primary. (In November, he will face the Democratic state attorney general, Josh Stein, who is Jewish.) Donald Trump enthusiastically endorsed Robinson, calling him “better than Martin Luther King.” We’re in the middle of a wrenching national discussion about antisemitism on the left, and where it overlaps with anti-Zionism. But Robinson is a reminder that in electoral politics, there is far more tolerance for antisemitism in the Republican Party than the Democratic one.

 I don’t want to downplay the problem of left-wing antisemitism or its closely related cousin, a jejune anti-imperialism that treats Hamas as heroes. Both phenomena have shocked me in the months since Oct. 7, and shouldn’t be rationalized as understandable reactions to Israeli savagery in Gaza.

 In an Atlantic cover story, Franklin Foer recently reported on anti-Jewish bullying, vandalism and conspiracy-mongering in Northern California. “In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing antisemitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain,” he wrote. The fact that this kind of antisemitism more often comes from random civilians than public officials or authority figures is unlikely to comfort most Jews, who’ve inherited a deep fear of the mob as well as the autocrat.

 Still, we should be clear about which political faction is willing to give antisemites power. And even if you believe that the Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib’s use of the anti-Zionist slogan “from the river to the sea” is obviously antisemitic — I don’t — it’s worth asking why it received so much more coverage than Robinson’s apparent Holocaust denial, or for that matter, the promotion of antisemitic websites and social media posts by Republican congressmen like Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Mike Collins.

 According to NBC News’s Ben Goggin, this year, white nationalists had an unusually easy time penetrating the Conservative Political Action Conference, keynoted by Trump. “At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” Goggin wrote. If this caused a national uproar, I missed it.

 There are several reasons that anti-Jewish attitudes on the right — including Robinson’s — often don’t get the attention they should. For one thing, they’re old news. Back in 2022, the scholars Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden debunked the idea that antisemitism is a similar problem on both left-and right-wing ideological extremes, writing, “The data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.” Antisemitism at Columbia University, located in a city with the largest Jewish population in the world, is surprising in a way that antisemitism among, say, Trump supporters no longer is.

 And like Trump — who, let’s remember, had dinner with the antisemitic rapper Ye and leading white nationalist Nick Fuentes in 2022 — Robinson has many other terrible qualities that can overshadow his history of anti-Jewish rhetoric. Chief among them is his misogyny. The lieutenant governor is in the news for a recently unearthed video from 2020 in which he said, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.” (His somewhat incomprehensible argument was that in those halcyon days, Republicans led on issues including women’s suffrage.) “The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place is a man who doesn’t know his,” he wrote in 2017.

 There’s also a tendency for some in the Jewish establishment to overlook antisemitism among supporters of Israel. That’s how we ended up with the end-times preacher John Hagee, who has said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their rightful home in the holy land, speaking at a major November rally against antisemitism, and the Anti-Defamation League praising Elon Musk, despite both Musk’s own antisemitic posts and the platform he’s given to virulent Jew-haters.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

America's Elite Disconnect

darkfutura  |  The one seeming contradiction is that these elites predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000 people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large cities like New York, where they would in fact be forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream of society. 

In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc., and note how they exclusively mainline the most mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off from the real outside world of human experience.

As the earlier NYPost article described:

If America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.

This explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential ‘threat’.

The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:

The Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.

Women are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to the ‘Longhouse’:

This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:

As everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting ways:

As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:

Most of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite political opinions

But one of the most revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual culture war issues:

 

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Jewish Identity With And Without Zionism

thenewyorker  | Although the prospect seems scarcely imaginable now, there was a time, not very long ago, when American Jews were free to have no particular thoughts or feelings about Israel. This was true not only of run-of-the-mill Jews but of intellectuals and writers as well. And it wasn’t merely that assimilation—an act at once idealistic, pragmatic, and mortifying—was more pressing to a Philip Roth or a Saul Bellow than one’s relationship, one way or another, to the nascent Jewish state. It’s that Israel, and Zionism, didn’t seem like relevant objects of concern. This is no longer a tenable position. Joshua Cohen’s novel “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2022, is a revisionist history that needed little more than a year to lie in wait for its time. The book is premised on a counterfactual: What if the American Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period—that is, between the end of the Second World War and the Six-Day War—had been forced to wrestle with Zionism? And what if their Zionist challenger hadn’t represented the ostensibly liberal, humanist, kibbutznik wing of the movement that was then in ascendance, but the expansionist, chauvinistic, Messianic contingent then in retreat? These aren’t idle questions.

Cohen’s novel is narrated from the present but takes place in 1959, to coincide with the publication of Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,” a book with only a single glance over its shoulder at Israel—a reference to the fact that the American Jew, when he thought about Israel at all, then considered it a place that didn’t have enough trees. Very loosely based on a personal anecdote relayed to Cohen (who, I should probably note, is a friend of mine) by the late Harold Bloom, “The Netanyahus” tells the story of an encounter between Ruben Blum, a first-generation scholar of taxation—“I am a Jewish historian, but I am not an historian of the Jews,” he warns, defensively—and Benzion Netanyahu. At the time, Benzion was a largely unknown and quasi-mystical interpreter of the Iberian Inquisition—which, for him, represented the perennial efflorescence of antisemitism as a racialized (and hence ineradicable) phenomenon. Much later, he became known as the (spiritual and, incidentally, actual) father of Bibi, the current Israeli Prime Minister, and as, in Bibi’s retelling, the patriarch of American-Israeli relations. Blum, as the lone Jew on a rural campus that stands in for Cornell, is asked by his Waspy, alcoholic department head to host Benzion for a job talk. Benzion, who believes that the Jewish people can only be safeguarded in perpetuity by Jewish state power, has become persona non grata in Israel in part for the extremity of his views—the territorialist belief, for example, that Jewish sovereignty ought to extend over “Greater Israel.” He has been invited to interview for a joint appointment in the college’s history department and its seminary. The rationale is budgetary, but Benzion, despite his secularism, exploits the irony of the occasion to try out the kind of end-times ethnonationalism that will soon drive Religious Zionism and the settler movement.

Monday, January 22, 2024

A Handful Of Bad Apples Making It Hard On Everybody Else....,


wsws  |  To better understand the narrow social basis of the campaign to silence opposition to Israel’s genocide, it is useful to understand who is leading it. This campaign of censorship and intimidation is being led by an alliance of billionaires, Zionists, the far-right and top government and political leaders of American imperialism. 

The first major group involved are a handful of multi-billionaires and economic power players whose stranglehold over the global economy positions them to control the political and cultural leadership of the major universities and other significant institutions.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted in an article written by an anonymous Harvard employee:

Just as inequality in general is increasingly incompatible with what remains of democracy, so is the subordination of universities to wealthy donors incompatible with academic freedom. The right-wing, pro-Zionist “donor revolt” is a qualitative development in big-money university donors attempting to use their power and influence to shape campus discourse. That these donors wield such influence—and that many of them seek to do so publicly—is an indication of how deeply compromised academia already is.

Indeed, universities are largely reliant on this stream of cash. According to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, in 1980 private donations to US colleges and universities amounted to $4.2 billion. Today they have surged to $59.5 billion.

These are some of the major billionaires whose “donor revolt” is leading to the attack on basic rights of free speech and protest on US campuses.

Les Wexner – One of the most important capitalists in retail sales, Wexner has amassed $10.6 billion, and is the 192nd richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg. Wexner founded L Brands, which controls, or previously controlled, Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Express, and several other major brands. While Wexner no longer controls L Brands, his foundation, the Wexner Foundation, donated tens of millions of dollars to Harvard over the last few decades and has now pulled millions of dollars of future support. (He is also the billionaire who became the launching pad for convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner’s personal holdings for nearly two decades).

Idan Ofer – Idan and his brother Eyal are the 77th and 87th richest people in the world, owning $42 billion, according to Bloomberg. Together they control Ofer Global, the Zodiac Group, Quantum Pacific Group and Global Holdings, each of which are massive industrial, energy and real estate investment firms. They own about half of Israeli Corp., Israel’s largest holding company. Collectively their companies take in hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue through shipping, fertilizers, industrial chemicals, energy and real estate. Miller Global Properties, one of the various “small”’companies that they have a leading ownership in, is notable for controlling various landmark properties, such as the Pebble Beach golf course, the Aspen ski resort and the Bevely Hills Hotel. Idan Ofer and his wife Batia both quit the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Executive Board in an attempt to pressure the university to crack down on the outcry of pro-Palestinian sentiment on the campus. Idan Ofer’s companies have been at the heart of multiple chemical leak and environmental scandals in Israel. Eyal was formerly an intelligence officer in the Israeli Air Force; he now resides in Monaco.

Bill Ackman – Ackman is an American billionaire who runs Pershing Square Capital, a hedge fund with about $20 billion under management. Ackman owns $4 billion personally. Pershing Square Capital holds significant shares of major US companies, including a 10 percent ownership of Target, one percent of Procter & Gamble, 10 percent control of Chipotle, a 7 percent share of Universal Music Group, and over a billion dollars in Netflix. Ackman is currently leading a vicious campaign to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay. Previously Ackman fought to get Harvard to release all the names of students who signed a pro-Palestinian statement, demanding that employers refuse to hire these students.

Ken Griffin – Griffin is the 35th richest person in the world, with over $37 billion in assets. He is the CEO of Citadel, a massive $52 billion hedge fund based in Miami. Citadel owns a significant share in some of the largest technology and bioscience companies, including Microsoft, Activision, Boston Scientific, Nvidia, Humana, Apple, Comcast, Merck, and Adobe. Griffin has donated over half a billion dollars to Harvard and is pressuring the university to adopt a stronger pro-Israel stance.

Cliff Asness – Asness is an American billionaire who founded AQR Capital Management, which has over $100 billion under management. Asness severed all his donations to the University of Pennsylvania and has publicly begun a campaign to pressure the university to stop “support[ing] evil.” In a diatribe published in the Wall Street Journal, he described the pro-Palestinian protests as a reflection of the “deep and systematic rot on elite college campuses.”

Marc Rowan – Rowan is co-owner of Apollo Asset Management, one of the largest private equity firms. He has over $6 billion in personal wealth. He halted his donations to University of Pennsylvania, using “Wall Street tactics to ‘strong-arm’” the university, in the words of Business Insider. Apollo has sprawling investments in real estate, cruise companies (Norwegian, Regent), hotels (Harrah’s Entertainment), education (McGraw Hill), entertainment (Chuck E. Cheese), private security (ADT) and retail (Smart and Final). Apollo co-founder Leon Black was formerly CEO of the company before revelations emerged that he had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $100 million for tax planning and consulting services. 

Zionists, antisemites and ethno-nationalists

Complementing this group of billionaires are a series of ethno-nationalists, both Zionists and MAGA Trumpers, who are more closely coordinating the effort to censor outrage against Israel’s genocide.

A recent, 2023 film, Israelism, made by two Jewish filmmakers, provides a window into the mechanisms used to promote Zionism in American culture and equate it with Judaism. One central figure in the film is Abe Foxman, an American lawyer and multi-millionaire who was the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 1987 to 2015. Foxman and the ADL are major fixtures in the American Zionist lobby, heavily promoting organizations such as Birthright.

 

 

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

The Deep Problems Are The HARVARD CORPORATIONS Problems

yahoo  |  During the weekend that the corporation met to decide Gay’s future, she participated in some of those discussions and had the opportunity to review the corporation’s Dec. 12 statement in her defense before it became public, two people involved in the process said.

According to a person consulted by the corporation, the body discussed but opted against releasing a detailed, public independent review in the style of Stanford University, whose president resigned this summer.

Harvard’s board is led by Pritzker, who was an early backer of Barack Obama’s presidency and later served as secretary of commerce under his administration. Despite her leadership role, Pritzker, a champion of Gay’s, has not spoken publicly since the controversy began, leaving the corporation to communicate through a single public statement.

The other 10 members, in addition to Gay, include relatively unknown financiers, donors, a former justice of the Supreme Court of California, a former CEO of American Express and former presidents of Princeton University and Amherst College.

The board meets several times a year, and members serve six-year terms that can be renewed once. How it identifies and chooses its members, who are known as fellows, is something of a mystery. Outgoing members help select their own replacements.

Pritzker has been the principal point of contact for major donors and others seeking to counsel Harvard on the path forward.

The board seeks to build a well-rounded group of people who have complementary expertise to help govern the university, said Richard Chait, a professor emeritus at Harvard who studied governance in higher education and was an adviser when the Harvard Corp. expanded in size more than a decade ago.

Even after expanding, the panel is still smaller than the boards of many other leading universities, according to Chait, who said the average private university has about 30 or more board members.

Board members are not paid for their role. “Not only is it unpaid, but there is an expectation of a reverse cash flow — all trustees have an expectation that the institution will be a philanthropic priority consistent with their means,” Chait said.

The corporation has weighed in on key questions — for example, in 2016, it approved a change to the shield of Harvard’s law school, which was modeled on the crest of an 18th-century enslaver.

In the past several weeks, more faculty members, donors, alumni and outsiders have raised questions about the corporation’s apparent failure to vet Gay’s scholarship before promoting her to the presidency in July and for its subsequent silence in recent weeks.

“The corporation should have done their homework, and apparently they did not,” said Avi Loeb, a Harvard science professor who has been publicly critical of the school’s response after the Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed.

“They don’t engage in criticism the way they should,” Loeb said of the corporation. “They don’t want the people who disagree with them to speak with them.”

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

The Three College Presidents Were Right

popehat  |  Stefanik’s purpose was transparent. No matter how the college presidents answered, she won. If they answered accurately — that the question depended on the context - she could shriek neeeeeerrrrrrdddd like a football player bullying a kid with glasses, and credulous people would eat it up. If the presidents answered inaccurately but simply “yes,” she could make her next point: then why aren’t you punishing people who advocate intifada? Why aren’t you expelling students for saying “from the river to the sea”? Why aren’t you punishing people for accusing Israel of genocide? That was her express, explicit purpose:

Congresswoman Stefanik: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?  

President Kornbluth: If targeted at individuals not making public statements. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? 

President Kornbluth: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you've heard chants for Intifada. 

There’s the rhetorical trick. Calling for Intifada is not the same as calling for the genocide of the Jews, and it’s just dishonest to say it is. Not all Jews are Israeli. Arguing that a particular group has a moral right to violent revolution against the power over it is not a call for the genocide of a group. The argument about when violent revolution is morally justified is ancient. Whether or not you agree that Israel is tyrannical or the Palestinians are unjustifiably oppressed, you can’t outlaw arguments that they are and pretend you’re anything but an absolute censor. The hearing was full of gripes like that — contentions that the slogan “from the river to the sea” should be outlawed and complaints that colleges had invited speakers with radical pro-Palestinian views. The crystal clear message was we think protecting Jews from antisemitism requires suppressing a broad range of speech from Them.

And many people bought it, and now it’s being used as part of the culture war against higher education, and too many of you fucking fell for it.

You might say I am being more than usually uncharitable in this post. That’s because I think people falling for Stefanik’s gambit have been more than usually gullible. They’ve become useful idiots for evil. They’ve become the dupes of people who will wave the banner of “fight antisemitism” while pushing Great Replacement Theory. They’ve become the patsies of people who transparently want to use Jews as an instrument and excuse to suppress speech they don’t like. They’ve become the creatures of cynical, dishonest politicians who want to treat hard things like they are simple to rile up mobs.

Thursday, December 07, 2023

The U.S. House Of Representatives Equates Anti-Zionism With Anti-Semitism

yasha  |  It might sound like I’m describing a cult or something. But actually zionism was actually pretty normal by 19th-early 20th century European standards. It’s just nationalism — Jewish nationalism. It came out of Europe and the Russian Empire and gained popularity as one solution to the Jewish Question that was being debated there at the time: Are Jews a religious group? A race? Should Jews assimilate and become part of the societies in which they live — to become Russian or German? 

Why does antisemitism exist? 

Jewish nationalism offered an answer: Jews are a race. And because the only natural and healthy way to organize society is for every race to have its own state, the Jews need also need a state of their own where they can live and flourish and control their fate— like the English, the French, the Italians, the Germans. Without this Jewish state, Jews in Europe and all over the world are doomed. They’ll remain hated minorities and suffer bouts of violence. Or even worse, the race will continue to degrade spiritually and culturally and will eventually disappear altogether. To zionists, a Jewish state is the only path to survival of the Jewish race.

This wasn’t unique to zionism. Nationalism was a popular notion in Europe at the time — and it led to some horrible results, Nazi Germany being one example. One thing that made Jewish nationalism stand out was that it wasn’t about defending land that Jews currently occupied from inferior races. It was about transporting millions of Jews from Europe to a place called Palestine — and once there purging the land of the locals and restoring what zionists believed is their rightful ancient Jewish home.

Here’s how Vladimir Jabotinsky — a journalist originally from Odessa who played a big role in setting up the militant rightwing flank of zionism that ultimately produced Israel’s Likud — wrote about about European Jews and the Land of Israel. The two were one:

…the true kernel of our national uniqueness is the pure product of the Land of Israel. We did not exist before we came to the Land of Israel. The Hebrew people was created from the fragments of other peoples on the soil of the Land of Israel. We grew up in the Land of Israel; on it we became citizens; we strengthened the belief in one God; we breathed in the winds of the land, and in our struggles for independence and sovereignty, its air enwrapped us and the grain that its land produced sustained us. In the Land of Israel the ideas of our prophets were developed and in the Land of Israel the “Song of Songs” was first heard. Everything Hebrew in our midst was given to us by the Land of Israel. Anything else in us is not Hebrew. Israel and the Land of Israel are one. There we were born as a people and there we developed.³

The zionism had all sorts of rifts and fissures. But at its core, the movement believed in the same goal and sought to speak collectively for all Jews. It wasn’t about individuals. It was about the race.

So that’s been the main obsession of the movement ever since: the creation and protection of a Jewish state in Palestine. The existence of this state is linked to the survival of the Jewish people. Get rid of one and the other will follow. A Jewish state — a government of Jews, by Jews, for Jews — is the base on which all zionism rests.

Ideologies impose structure on the way people see the world. They condition reactions and assumption and interpretations. That’s why zionist Jews are so freaked out right now. For them October 7 was a shock. The surprise Hamas attack, the killing of innocents, the hostages dragged back to Gaza, the powerlessness of Israeli military — to them this had nothing to do with violence that the zionist quest for land foisted on Palestinians, it was a reminder of the atavistic horror that always plagued Jewish people: Jews are hated for just being Jewish. Existence is never guaranteed.

And as they looked around after the attack, they saw more sympathy for Palestinian suffering than they ever have before: pro-Palestinian protests and marches, college kids on Instagram and TikTok posting about Israel’s occupation and apartheid. All over the world, people were criticizing Israel. In their minds, they saw this as people going after the Jews. This only reaffirmed their fears and deepened their convictions: The ancient hatred is still there. Israel is our only refuge, the only thing that can protect us.

Survival of the Jews. That’s what they believe Israel is fighting for in Gaza. They think they’re warding off a mortal enemy, an enemy that seeks to destroy the Jewishness of Israel. And so nothing is off limits to them — no number of babies or children killed is too high, no destruction is too great. There are no innocents in a war of survival between competing races. The innocent baby of today will grow into a fierce enemy who will want to exterminate them tomorrow. It’s a zero-sum world. They really do believe it. The survival of the race is at stake.

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

Did Neocon Vermin Robert Kagan Call For The Assassination Of Donald Trump?

WaPo  |  This is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you choose.

What is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles to it have been cleared and only a few are left. If eight years ago it seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected, that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that an American president would try to remain in office after losing an election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.

Alexandra Petri: I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose

Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?

Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.

Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.

A paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016, the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography, Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today. But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?

We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.

Friday, December 01, 2023

Chuck Schumer Laments The Global Disdain For Zionist Apartheid

epochtimes  |  Mr. Schumer warned that the rise in anti-Semitism is "a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished." This comes amid the latest conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, which started on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 in Israel, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed.

He lamented anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States ranging from protests on college campuses to coverage in the media to boycotting and vandalism of Jewish businesses. He also cited examples of Jews being persecuted throughout history, from the Crusades to pogroms to expulsions from countries including England and Spain.

In the United States, there was a 388 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents between Oct. 7 and Oct. 23, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Additionally, Jews are the leading target for religious-related hate crimes in the United States, according to the FBI.

Mr. Schumer emphasized that there is a difference between criticizing Israeli government policies and demonizing Israel.

"This speech is not an attempt to label most criticism of Israel and the Israeli government, generally, as anti-Semitic," he said. "I don't believe that criticism is."

Double Standard Applied to Jews

He also criticized double standards regarding Israel compared with other countries, such as people celebrating when a new country is founded but being against the formation of the Jewish state, which occurred in 1948. He even referenced the 1947 United Nations partition plan that would have created a Jewish state and an Arab state in what was the British mandate of Palestine—which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected.
 

"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.

"The double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else."

"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.

"The double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else."

"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.

"The double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else."                  

 

 

 

 

Monday, September 11, 2023

THEY Tryna Kanye X And Its African American Owner Elon Musk...,

Slate  | To get this out of the way: I am still using the site formerly known as Twitter.

I have been posting regularly on what is now known as X since December 2011. The site brought me many things over the years—close friendships, news from around the world, a husband—but these days I mostly use it for one reason. That reason is that I am a freelance journalist, and Twitter—excuse me, X—is still the most useful place to share and get work. In other words, it helps me get paid.

But there is a certain tension in this. I regularly write on Jewish history and politics. This includes politics around antisemitism, and the threat posed by antisemitism. Increasingly, that means that in order to potentially have the professional opportunity to cover the threat of antisemitism, I use a social media platform owned by someone who, I would argue, is using the same platform to make the threat of antisemitism actively worse.

Twitter has long had its issues, but Elon Musk, since taking over late last year, has made existing problems more pronounced—for example, in allowing accounts that had been previously suspended for hate speech to come back—and has invented problems that didn’t need to exist, including by getting rid of check marks that verified identity (and also firing thousands of staff). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, top advertisers have left the platform and ad sales have reportedly fallen dramatically.

But Musk has found someone other than himself to blame: the Anti-Defamation League, which he has now threatened to sue.

“Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” Musk posted on Monday. He added, “If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League.”

The Anti-Defamation League dates back to the 1910s, and per its founder, attorney Sigmund Livingston, exists “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” Today, the organization tracks hate-crime laws in the United States and provides legal services, such as serving as co-counsel in a federal lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for their role in attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

That doesn’t mean the ADL is above reproach. Increasingly, it has come under criticism from the left for putting the fight against antisemitism and for civil rights second to the desire to defend Israel and Zionism. In 2021, progressive outlet Jewish Currents published a report based on interviews with former staffers that charged that “CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has repeatedly chosen to support crackdowns on criticism of Israel over protecting civil liberties, putting him in conflict with his own civil rights office.” Earlier this year, the New Republic ran a piece that took Greenblatt to task for not doing enough to tackle white supremacy, noting that his keynote speech at the ADL’s annual leadership summit this year “had virtually nothing to say about the rise of white Christian nationalism. … Instead, he focused his ire on what the ADL calls ‘hostile anti-Zionist activists groups’ like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which loudly criticize and protest against Israel on America’s college campuses, calling them ‘the photo inverse of the extreme right.’ ” Ironically, Greenblatt faced backlash last year when, on television, he said, “Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator. He’s the Henry Ford of our time.”

But one does not need to think that Greenblatt is good at his job, or even to think that the ADL has any credibility as an institution, to be concerned that Musk appears to share with Henry Ford not only ownership of an automobile company, but also a penchant for blaming Jews. In looking for someone to blame for his troubles, Musk is lashing out at a Jewish institution that, at least in theory, exists to push back against antisemitism.

This encourages others to join in: Right-wing figure Charlie Kirk, who days earlier had posted that the ADL today is “a hate group that dons a religious mask to justify stoking hatred of the left’s enemies,” tweeted out a video of Greenblatt on MSNBC that Kirk said showed Greenblatt “bragging” about “how the group extorts every single tech company in Silicon Valley to censor Americans and ‘ban’ hate speech.” Stephen Miller, the former senior adviser in the Trump White House who was called an immigration hypocrite by his uncle, also chimed in, offering: “Speaking as a Jew: ADL is NOT a Jewish organization,” which was then reposted thousands of times. The idea that a person (or, in this case, institution) can be deemed “not really Jewish” and thus fair game for an antisemitic smear is a not uncommon one.

 

Friday, August 25, 2023

Are Fraudulent Covid Control Measures About To Be Reinstated?

SummitNews  |   In response to reports of COVID restrictions, including social distancing and masking being reimplemented by colleges and offices, Senator Rand Paul asserted that those pushing the measures again “have no shame.” During a Fox News interview, Paul described the move as “hysteria” being pushed by the leftist media to financially benefit their corporate pharma owners. “These people are so conflicted,” Paul said, adding “It’s so dishonest to put people like that on the air to promote a product that they make more money from … promote this hysteria. This defies all logic. It defies science, and it defies common sense.” “To see this coming up again, these people have no shame,” Paul continued, pointing to Morris Brown College in Atlanta, a black private liberal arts college that has reinstated the measures as part of a “precautionary step.”

“That university that’s wanting to mask up and do all this testing — zero cases,” Paul urged, adding “But even worse than that, even when COVID was really more potent in 2020, the death rate for young, healthy people turned out to be close to zero.” “We don’t know for sure because the CDC won’t release it, but we do know that Germany released all of their data, and not one young, healthy person died. So, it’s a crime to mandate masks. It’s a crime to mandate vaccines, which do have some risks for young, healthy people,” Paul further noted. The Senator urged that Americans are “not going to lay down and take it again,”adding “there will be more resistance” this time. “We will fight back, and we will point out that they are making money off of this. These are not high-minded people. They are making money off of us and making money off of generating hysteria,” the Senator asserted.

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

The Profound Irony Of David Brooks Sermonizing On Moral Formation In Collapsing America

theatlantic  | A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.

The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.

Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.

I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.

Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.

There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)

Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.

These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.

Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.

In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.

Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.

Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.

When Zakharova Talks Men Of Culture Listen...,

mid.ru  |   White House spokesman John Kirby’s statement, made in Washington shortly after the attack, raised eyebrows even at home, not ...