Kamala Devi Is To American Politics What Mentholated Cigarettes Are To American Negroes...,

Golddigger Prank Exegesis....,

This What You Want To Do?!?!?!?! - Reap The Whirlwind....,

🚨 #BREAKING: SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT TRUMP RALLY IN PENNSYLVANIA pic.twitter.com/eup5YTybS7

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 13, 2024

2021 Obama and Biden in a Secret Room in the White House...,

Obama: Now what i'm going to teach you is the Dap. 

This will gain you the trust and respect of the black male community. 

 Biden nods, wide-eyed. “Am I ready?” Obama looks at him for a long moment. 

“We can only hope.”

When you unexpectedly dap up the President at Waffle House 🫱🏾‍🫲🏻 pic.twitter.com/Fu5jsV46Gr

— IG: goodfeetatl (@4oh4dee) June 28, 2024

KC Gets KKFI Community Radio And Kultcha That Y'all Don't Get...,

pbs.org   |  [Cerrone's "Supernature" playing] Woman: The disco sound was just wonderful.

It was exciting, powerful, you know, spank you, and you just had a good time.

Barry Walters: Disco brought together Black Pride, women's liberation, and LGBT culture.

It was the coming together of that that made it so powerful.

Allen Roskoff: Listening to the music and letting yourself go, you become a different person.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ ♪ Supernature ♪ There was this powder keg chain reaction that happened that made it suddenly totally take over the airwaves.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ Jake Shears: It was, of course "Saturday Night Fever" that really, like, tipped everything over, that, like, tipped the scales.

It just set the world on fire.

Disco was on everybody's lips.

Clubs were packed every night.

♪ Woman: Studio 54, I created it as a playground.

Sex, drugs, disco, whatever you need.

Singer: ♪ Angry with the man ♪ ♪ 'Cause he changed their way of life ♪ Bill Bernstein: In the late seventies, the outsider became the insider.

Singer: ♪ Take their sweet revenge ♪ Woman: The Black disco diva was a breakthrough persona.

Someone like Donna Summer, she was a disco queen.

Don't forget Gloria in all her gloria.

Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ I think that era music allowed the disco diva to have this stage to be adored and celebrated.

♪ Candi Staton: Disco freed me.

It saved me.

[Cheering] ♪ Singers: ♪ Supernature ♪ [Protestors shouting] ♪ Richard Nixon: In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the nation.

Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me.

Woman: In the mid-1970s, the United States was not a happy place.

There was the Watergate scandal, and any faith that Americans had in government was shaken to its core.

What percentage of the American people do you think still have confidence in President Nixon?

Well, among young people, very few, I'd say less than 25%.

Nixon: Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

P.A.

announcer: Nixon has announced he will resign as president of the United States at noon tomorrow.

Roskoff: In my life and everybody I knew, Nixon was detested, but it was an intense period of time.

You knew you were living history.

You knew that this is monumental.

♪ [Machineguns firing] George McCrae: Was a hard time because of the Vietnam War.

Also a nuclear bomb threat And Russia, you know.

that they might drop a bomb any day.

"Oh, my God.

What we gonna do?"

♪ Farrington: The flip side of this dark moment is that when life gets hard, you party harder.

[Gloria Gaynor's "Never Can Say Goodbye" playing] ♪ I was living in New York in the 1970s.

All we wanted to do was dance to disco music.

Gaynor: ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ David Depino: There was a freedom.

It was like express yourself was so welcome and wanted, and music was the common denominator.

Gaynor: ♪ Heading for the door ♪ ♪ There's a very strange... ♪ Nicky Siano: I mean, it was just igniting people's dance souls.

Gaynor: ♪ It says, "Turn around, you fool" ♪ ♪ "You know love him" ♪ Man: Why is everybody rushing and flooding the doors of discotheque?

Oh, I think it's because with all of the hardships that are going on in the world today, people need a place to go and relieve tension and release their anxieties, and discotheques are a great place to do just that.

Gaynor: ♪ Say goodbye, boy ♪ ♪ Ooh, ooh, baby ♪ ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ No, no, no, hey ♪ ♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ Oh, no, I ♪ Reporter: Gloria Gaynor is a rock 'n' roll singer whose records have really never made it before until she decided to specialize in a brand-new rock 'n' roll musical style called disco music.

Gaynor: ♪ All gonna work out ♪ ♪ But there's that same unhappy feeling ♪ ♪ And that anguish and that doubt ♪ Depino: She made you raise your hands up and want to touch the ceiling while you were dancing and screaming.

When Gloria was doing her thing, I think she was the First Lady of Disco.

♪ Say goodbye ♪ ♪ It is so ♪ ♪ I don't want to let you go ♪ Vince Aletti: She was one of the earliest people to have a major presence in the clubs, was, you know, Queen of Disco before there was such a title.

Gaynor: ♪ No, no, no, no, no, ooh ♪ Gloria, did you ever think this would happen?

No, I really didn't.

Not like this, anyway.

I always thought I would sing eventually, but I never thought all this would happen.

♪ I never can say goodbye ♪ ♪ No, no, no, no, no, no, no ♪ Woman: I think disco means to most people, probably it means a lot of fun.

To me, it meant a change.

♪ Farrington: In the early seventies, Black women were caught between a rock and a hard place.

Statistically, they were at the bottom of the heap.

They earned less than most any other group, male or female.

They were victimized by a notorious government-sponsored report called the Moynihan Report.

It was a report that discussed what were the particular problems of Blacks and Jews and Puerto Ricans.

Black women were literally blamed for the problems of Black men.

Black women were heads of their families, too matriarchal, too strong, and unfortunately, when scholars produce a document that is government-approved, people tend to believe it, and so rather than fight against this, which was virtually impossible for a group that oppressed to do, they tried not to be like that.

Nona Hendryx: You had to work hard to fit in, and to fit in, you're gonna be quiet.

You're not gonna bring all your loud culture with you or whatever it is and make demands.

You're gonna try and fit in.

[Church choir singing] Ward: When I was growing up, the only time that people heard my voice, I was singing.

My father had been a minister, so we just had to kind of stick to what we were told to do.

I just wanted to sing.

Woman: ♪ I can hear Jesus calling me ♪ Choir: ♪ Calling me ♪ Staton: The pastor called me up on the stage, and I started singing, and the church people started shouting and screaming and standing up and waving.

"Sing, baby!

Sing that song."

That was the beginning.

♪ Ohh ♪ Woman: The gospel diva or the soul diva, that's a really powerful, full-bodied sound that moved into the mainstream in the sixties.

Man: Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, Patricia Holt, known as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

♪ Somewhere over ♪ ♪ The rainbow ♪ Hendryx: In the sixties, se were a traditional girl group, and we dressed alike.

We did the kind of, you know, lead singer with backing singers waving their arms and looking very nice.

Farrington: Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were fulfilling a vision of Black womanhood that was on the tail end of the early sixties Motown era.

They embodied that non-threatening persona that America wanted to place Black women in.

♪ Hey, hey, oh, oh, oh ♪ Hendryx: We were expected to carry ourselves a certain way in the public, you know, well-dressed, well-behaved.

That's how it was.

♪ Really do come true ♪ Staton: In the music industry, we were fighting, trying to get out of that box that we were put in in the sixties, so disco was wonderful.

Royster: Disco did offer Black women new opportunities.

Disco did give space for Black women to kind of add soul and funk and depth to a lot of different kinds of music to kind of take center stage like Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles.

[Labelle's "Lady Marmalade" playing] ♪ Woman: My next guest stars are the hottest girl group in America.

Man, they are truly hot, and they've got the hottest single, too, "Lady Marmalade," and here they are-- Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, and Patti LaBelle known throughout the music industry as Labelle.

♪ Go, sister, soul sister ♪ ♪ Flow, sister ♪ ♪ Go now ♪ ♪ Go, sister, soul sister ♪ ♪ Flow, sister ♪ ♪ He met Marmalade ♪ ♪ Down in old New Orleans ♪ ♪ Struttin' her stuff on the street ♪ Farrington: When Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles changed their name, they changed their look, and they changed it dramatically.

♪ Da da ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ ♪ Mocha ♪ ♪ Mocha chocolata, ya ya ♪ Hendryx: Patti LaBelle And the Bluebelles were a girl group, right?

Labelle were a girl band.

♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

♪ ♪ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

♪ Ana Matronic: Labelle looking like they just, like, beamed in from some crazy, funky galaxy.

It was just so over the top and so amazing and so out there.

That to me meant a certain kind of freedom.

♪ Oh, gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ The architect of the look of Labelle was Legaspi.

He also designed the look for KISS.

Patti LaBelle: ♪ Ahh ahh ♪ Farrington: He also designed the look for Funkadelic.

Labelle: ♪ Coucher avec moi ce soir?

♪ Larry was already sort of making things that looked like a futuristic look, and then with us being open to even going further, he began to design more.

♪ More, more, more ♪ Farrington: I was mesmerized and delighted to see my people in a way that was unlike any way anyone had ever imagined them.

Labelle: ♪ More, more, more ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya da da ♪ ♪ Gitchi gitchi ya ya here ♪ Hendryx: Just singing songs that felt right to us or mattered to us, and the audience were responding to it.

♪ Touching her skin, feeling silky smooth ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪ ♪ Ahh ♪ Royster: Lady Marmalade is talking about, I mean, basically sex tourism and sex work.

♪ Roar until it cried ♪ All: ♪ "More, more, more!"

♪ Royster: Women don't often get center stage, or if there is a story that's being told, it's also a story that's about titillation or about fetishization.

Hendryx: It's like a playwright, you know, someone describing something as opposed to judging it and in a way that-- not celebratory, but in a way that was not downtrodden and horrible and that this is just yet another aspect of life.

[Indistinct chatter] Royster: I really think that music is really important in terms of creating social change, and in this moment, you know, music was reflecting Black women's lives in a way that it hadn't ever been.

Staton: I was so glad disco came in.

You know, good music, good lyrics, songs that had a meaning to them.

In the sixties, we were known as R&B singers.

♪ I'd rather be lonely ♪ ♪ Than to lose you ♪ My songs were, like... ♪ I'm just a prison ♪ and begging men not to leave me and "Oh, God, if you leave me, I'm just gonna die," you know, I mean, this was the kind of songs they would play on us.

Women.

Women.

Men could sing anything they wanted to sing.

So to make a long story short, disco freed me.

It saved me.

♪ You know, I been married a few times, and I don't mind telling it because, you know, I was in one of those type of marriages, but it was dangerous.

It was a really a dangerous marriage.

So I was doing Las Vegas with Ray Charles.

I was opening for Ray Charles.

The last night, I decided I was gonna just sit in the audience and watch Ray do his show, and my ex-husband, he was looking for me, and he couldn't find me, and I was in the audience, and he kept walking up and down the aisle.

I saw him.

And that's the night when he went completely nuts.

My suite was on the--way up on the 20th-something floor, and he pushed me.

You know, he was pushing me all the way through the lobby to the elevator, and then we get to the floor.

He said, "I'm--I'm gonna kill you tonight.

"I tell you what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna throw you off the balcony."

20-something floors.

He picked me up, and had me--holding me over the banister like this, and I'm like, "This man is gonna kill me tonight.

"How in the world?

Well, how am I gonna get out of this one?"

I said, um, "You know you're in this hotel, "and it's owned by Mafia.

This is Las Vegas.

We're in Las Vegas now."

I said, "You got to get out of here.

"You got to walk out of here.

"How are you gonna feel with my body splattered at the bottom and my name is on the marquee?"

And I said, "You won't make it out of Vegas."

He thought, and he brought me back in, and he said, "I'll tell you what I'm gonna do.

I'm just gonna shoot you."

So I laid--I just, you know, I was so tired.

I just laid down on the bed.

I said, "OK.

Shoot me."

I went to sleep.

He had the gun like this.

I said, "Just shoot me.

I won't know it.

I just--forget it."

That's how "Young Hearts Run Free" came about.

Can It Be That It Was All So Simple Then....,

 

We Used To Have The Maestro - THEN POOF - We Got Hot Garbage Instead

 

Kang The Conqueror....,

 

Janet Jackson and Cyd Charisse, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam...Jes Dayyum!!!

 

 

Farmer Brown Gives No Kind Of Phuks About Bringing On Mass Psychosis

washingtonmonthly  |  A new study has documented a remarkable rise in Americans’ use of marijuana. Over the last 30 years, the number of people who report using the drug in the past month has risen fivefold from 8 million to 42 million. Through the mid-1990s, only about one-in-six or one-in-eight of those users consumed the drug daily or near daily, similar to alcohol’s roughly one-in-ten. Now, more than 40 percent of marijuana users consume daily or near daily. The increased use is important to recognize as President Joe Biden plans to reschedule marijuana from a Class I to a Class III drug.

At the nadir of modern marijuana use, in 1992, just 0.9 million Americans reported using marijuana daily or near daily. That number had grown twenty-fold to 17.7 million by the most recent survey in 2022. For the first time, more Americans report using marijuana daily or near daily than they do drinking that often (17.7 million vs. 14.7 million).

Legalization and commercialization have produced a spectacular rise in the potency of cannabis products. Until the end of the 20^th century, the average potency of seized cannabis never exceeded 5 percent THC, its active intoxicant. Now, the labeled potency of “flower” sold in state-licensed stores averages 20-25 percent THC. Extract-based products like vape oils and dabs routinely exceed 60 percent. Back in the 1990s, a person averaging two 0.5-gram joints of 4 percent THC weed per week was consuming about 5 milligrams of THC per day on average. Today’s daily users average more than 1.5 grams of material that is 20-25 percent THC, which is more than 300 milligrams per day. That is far more THC than is consumed in typical medical studies of its health effects.

This spike in marijuana usage and THC consumption might seem unimportant in an era when fentanyl and other synthetic drugs are killing over 80,000 Americans per year, but describing a drug as less dangerous than fentanyl is damning with faint praise. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole, daily marijuana use is neither health-promoting nor performance-enhancing for the typical daily user.

On the positive side, the kids are mostly all right. Just 2 percent of 12-17 year-old marijuana users consume daily or near daily. As a result, youth account for just 3 percent of the 8.3 billion annual days of self-reported marijuana use in the country. Adult (18+) daily and near-daily users account for three-quarters of those days of use—and a considerably greater share of consumption because they use more per day than weekend-only users.

Indeed, marijuana is becoming something of an old person’s drug. As a group, 35-49-year-olds consume more than 26-34-year-olds, who account for a larger share of the market than 18-25-year-olds. The 50-and-over demographic accounts for slightly more days of use than those 25 and younger.

Still, it is worth asking what the population effects are of so many people consuming high-strength cannabis regularly. Science has struggled to keep up with the new world of cannabis, but potentially concerning signs include increases in emergency room visits for both psychotic episodes and cannabis-induced cyclical vomiting, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and higher rates of automotive crashes involving impaired drivers. And gram for gram, smoking cannabis creates about as many carcinogens, tars, and other lung-damaging chemicals as tobacco—although grams consumed per day is only about one-tenth as great. For others, the effects might be the opposite of a cognitive enhancer, with intoxication adversely affecting short-term memory, concentration, and motivation, resulting in lost opportunities in schools and the workplace.

The biggest long-term medical health risk may concern serious and lifelong psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia. Early hopes—not to say hype—that cannabis would prove an effective medication for mental health disorders have been challenged as studies repeatedly find that use concurrent with conditions like depression and PTSD often predicts a worse course of illness.

Before Y'alls Time - But We Don't Have Any Voices Like Carl Rowen Any More...,

LATimes  |  If you’ve ever heard that soothing voice or read those scholarly sentences, you’d know it’s him. Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan has a signature style.

That jowly baby face and genial manner have been fixtures among the talking heads on PBS’ “Inside Washington” since 1965. His voice can be heard on 25 major-market radio stations broadcasting “The Rowan Reports,” a daily radio commentary. He has written seven books, some of them bestsellers.

But lately, Rowan, an elegant and polished black man of 69 years who writes and speaks in the terse and precise prose common among the well-educated of his generation, has become something of an attack journalist on a self-appointed mission to bring down the current leadership of the NAACP.

His bitterly critical columns, distributed by the King Features Syndicate and published in 100 newspapers across the land, are the major reason the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is facing its greatest crisis. NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis was forced to resign late in the summer amid allegations first raised by Rowan--that he used the organization’s money to settle a sexual discrimination suit brought by a former employee, opening the organization’s financial practices to unprecedented public scrutiny.

Rowan’s current target is NAACP Board Chairman William Gibson, who had been Chavis’ most ardent supporter. By repeatedly demanding that Gibson resign, Rowan has set himself apart from most mainstream reporters--black or white--who tend to steer clear of pointed and determined criticism of the NAACP. But Rowan relishes the combat of writing to incite change--regardless, he said, of whether his targets are white-led government institutions, such as the FBI under former director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, or the current NAACP leadership.

During a wide-ranging interview conducted recently in the living room of his rambling northwest Washington home, Rowan defended his hard-edged columns. He called them “a service,” written with the intention of educating the public and instigating reforms within an organization he views as necessary to the interests of African Americans.

Rowan rejected the argument that he is bent on destroying the NAACP. In fact, he says, the organization absolutely has a role in the post-civil rights generation. “Take this (recent mid-term) election. The NAACP in a good and normal time would have been out there for weeks trying to get blacks out to vote,” he said. “They have been virtually paralyzed by all their money troubles and could only do a little trifling stuff.”

Once Gibson is out of office, Rowan said, and a new management team is in place, he will use his column to urge supporters to send money back into the NAACP.

“There is a group preparing for the moment when (Gibson) steps down so they can say to the nation, as I will say, ‘The time has come to rush to the rescue to the support of this organization because the United States would be a lesser place without an NAACP,’ ” Rowan said. “But no way will I ask anybody to give a nickel as long as (Gibson) is there at the head of the NAACP because I know the extent to which the meager funds of the NAACP have been abused.”

Rowan also brushed aside suggestions he was an “Uncle Tom” or tool of the mainstream media, noting his 43 years as a Life Member of the NAACP. Among the highlights: Rowan “worked closely with (then NAACP attorney) Thurgood Marshall in the days way before Brown v. Board of Education.”

Class Not Race Is The Dividing Line In American Politics

realclearpolitics  |  Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy editor of Newsweek and author of the new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, speaks with RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon on Thursday's edition of the RealClearPolitics radio show.

"People don't talk about it like it is an outrage," she said about the transformation of the Democratic Party into something other than a party for the working class. "It is such a fait accompli at this point that we forget that it is outrageous for a party that used to represent labor, the little guy against big corporations and the rich, completely abandoned that constituency to cater to an over-credentialed college elite on one hand, and the dependent poor on the other. And it is double outrageous because that party still masquerades as the party of the little guy, even though it is not the case anymore."

"It started with the handshake agreement between both parties that we're going to become an economy that embraced free trade," she said. "That was Bill Clinton's contribution to this, signing NAFTA into law and trade agreements that resulted in the offshoring of 5 million manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico."


"And then President Obama showed up and said repeatedly those jobs are not coming back, and pioneered this idea that everyone was going to go to college and become part of the knowledge industry, and that was going to be the pathway to the American dream. And then it became the only pathway to the American dream!"

"Joe Biden played his part by effectively opening up the border, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and welcoming in 11 million new migrants to compete with working-class Americans for the jobs that remained here," she said.

"It's true that immigration raises the GDP in the aggregate. The problem is nobody lives in the aggregate. GDP is not equally distributed across the nation. We know the top 20% now has 50% of the GDP at its disposal. The very people who love to rail against the 1% are the people who have made the largest gains in the last 50 years, and they are the consumers of low-wage migrant labor, which is why, of course, they want more of it. It is an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the elites who consume that labor."

"If you bring in 11 million people and you know they are going to be employed as cleaning people, landscapers, and in construction, you have effectively stolen wages from the Americans who were employed in those jobs. It is just obvious supply and demand."

Carl Cannon asked: "Do they really hate the working class, or are they just in their politically correct bubble and don't see what they're doing?"

"They can not stand the idea that they will lose, even if they lose in a very obviously democratic way," Ungar-Sargon said. "They are very comfortable when they can sit there on cable news making millions of dollars to sneer at the working class. They're comfortable when the working class can't clap back."

"This was really Obama's revolution, the idea that the 'smart set' should run things. We should have an oligarchy of the credentialed. But when the working class has their audacity to vote in their own interest and clap back by putting somebody like Donald Trump in power, that sneering contempt turns to hate."

Why Is The Mainstream Media So Quiet About The Southern Border?

FAIR  |  The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers on a violent, racist closed-border policy.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (NBC, 1/14/24): “The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

In January, the Supreme Court, with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the US/Mexico border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).

In a statement (1/22/24), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS NewsHour (1/25/24) reported. PBS quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”

University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck (Houston Chronicle, 1/26/24) observed that Abbott’s position “has eerie parallels to arguments advanced by Southerners during the Antebellum era.”

For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war.  And 25 other states are supporting Texas in defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.

Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):

From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration.

Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24) said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.

Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of federal law over state law.”

But the New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The AP (1/27/24) framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president “lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for migrants illegally entering the US.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.

The “legal expert” quoted in Fox News‘ headline (1/25/24) works for America First Legal, a group founded by white nationalist Stephen Miller to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24) has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.

Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).

The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24) stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is “unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the election-year campaign,” it said.

The National Review (1/28/24) admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question. Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:

Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.

This is impressive by any measure.

The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.

Imagine Elise Stefanik Kwestioning Henry Kissinger...,

newrepublic  |  The question of Kissinger’s alleged antisemitism is a complicated one. Yes, he told a friend in the 1970s that Judaism “has no significance for me,” according to Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, and is also quoted as having said in 1972, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.” Another gem from that year: “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”

But to be fair, these views were not as uncommon among German Jews in the United States as one might wish them to have been. One can find similarly disturbing quotes in the private discussions of say, the great pundit and political philosopher Walter Lippmann and the longtime New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. When confronted with Richard Nixon’s frequently hysterical antisemitic rants about “dirty rotten Jews from New York” who dared to reveal the truth about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in the Times or some such thing, Kissinger usually tried to placate the president without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing. But when he felt Jews, whether American or Israeli, were refusing to cooperate with his plans, he was more than happy to join in, once complaining to Nixon that he had “never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest” as when American Jewish leaders supported Israel’s position over that of the Nixon administration. The Israelis at various times were “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “boastful,” “psychopathic,” “fools,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” As for American Jewish leaders, “They seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.”

Kissinger was a Jew who found other Jews exceptionally annoying—none more so than Israelis, with whom he frequently negotiated but failed to get to do things his way. The question is, was he worse about Jews and Israel than about anyone else who refused to genuflect before what he understood to be his genius? To be fair to someone who really doesn’t deserve it, Kissinger, like Nixon, would tend toward churlish, racist reactions when anyone rebuffed him. When, for instance, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to go along with his plans for a secret opening to China, he informed the president that “well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” and Gandhi herself was “a bitch.”

But Kissinger also engaged in explicitly antisemitic actions himself. When, in September 1973, Nixon appointed him to be secretary of state, Kissinger thanked him for saying nothing about his “Jewish background.” And as he doled out jobs to his aides, he made certain to count the Jews to ensure there were not too many of them. He explained that while he knew that it required 10 Jews for a minyan (Jewish prayer service), he could not “have them all on the seventh floor.” Kissinger also once removed a counselor, good friend, and fellow German Jew, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a list of aides scheduled to accompany the president to Germany because he said, “I don’t think too many Jews should be around.” But here again, he was likely not acting out of personal anti-Jewish animus. Rather he was behaving cravenly in the face of what he judged to be the Jew-hatred of others, especially Nixon, who famously ordered an aide to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For the purpose of history, the most important aspects of Kissinger’s hostility to Jews and Israel can be seen in his conduct related to the 1973 “Yom Kippur War.” Kissinger apologists have consistently attempted to give him the credit that belongs almost entirely to Jimmy Carter for the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Martin Indyk, a longtime diplomat and Kissinger acolyte, actually published a 688-page book titled Master of the Game, making exactly this comical claim.

The truth is that Kissinger’s machinations were at least partially responsible for the fact of the war itself. Egypt’s visionary leader Anwar Sadat made clear to Kissinger and company that he was interested in a peace agreement with Israel (and moving his allegiance from the Russians to the Americans). The Israelis expressed interest at the time, but Kissinger instructed them that they were “wasting time” in taking Sadat seriously. To make certain the Israelis went along with his plans, he secretly bribed them with a promise of over 100 U.S. Phantom fighter jets. His overture rejected, Sadat eventually decided that another war to avenge the humiliation of 1967 was his only choice to lay the groundwork for an eventual deal. Even Indyk, who treats Kissinger’s famous “shuttle diplomacy” between Israel and Egypt after the war as one of the great achievements of American diplomatic history, admitted in his book that Kissinger “might have averted the Yom Kippur War” by taking Sadat seriously earlier.

Kissinger also helped ensure that Israel would be unprepared for the Egyptian attack. According to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s secret testimony before Israel’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry, just before the war began, Kissinger warned Israel that if it wanted any help from the United States in the event of hostilities, then it should not make a preemptive strike against Egypt or Syria or to mobilize the reserve army before the war actually started. These warnings were given after Kissinger insisted that all other Americans leave the room and no notes be taken. Dayan then canceled his air force’s preemptive operation and objected to Golda Meir’s plan to mobilize the reserves. Kissinger is not known to have given any similar warning to the Egyptians. Indeed, according to Sadat’s memoirs, Kissinger actually encouraged the attack, via secret messages, in order to improve Egypt’s negotiating position in the war’s aftermath. To my knowledge, Kissinger never addressed this.

Kissinger wanted Israel to suffer a significant setback before it finally won the war. He succeeded at this at an enormous cost in lost lives on both sides. As the Egyptian army marched toward Tel Aviv, he informed Sadat and company that the United States was doing merely the minimum to aid Israel that was possible under the circumstances. After eight days of fighting, however, Nixon insisted, over Kissinger’s objections, on implementing a massive emergency weapons airlift. He did this despite Kissinger’s warning that victory would make Israel “even more impossible to deal with than before.”

Kissinger came in for extremely harsh criticism from some American Jews in this period. Hans Morgenthau, a respected international relations scholar whom Kissinger personally revered, went so far as to compare the pressure he was applying to Israel to the way the West had treated Czechoslovakia in 1938 when it was threatened by Hitler. To try to disarm such critics, Kissinger undertook a series of off-the-record meetings with Jewish writers and intellectuals and another with leaders of Jewish organizations.

The former group spanned the political spectrum, from the democratic socialists Irving Howe and Michael Walzer to neoconservatives such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Norman Podhoretz. There was no room for disagreement between the two poles, however, because the only issue discussed was Israel’s security and how to best ensure it. Kissinger posed as Israel’s savior and warned of a noticeable turn against all-out support for Israel in Congress. (Actually, the opposite was true. Congress was far more pro-Israel than Kissinger was.) He pointed out that, given the “critical opposition” to Israel within the international community, the perfidy of the “European vultures,” and the likely success of the “extremely effective” OPEC oil embargo, which would give the Arab world more leverage over the West and turn consumers in both the U.S. and Europe against Israel. Israel was “in great danger.” What he needed, he explained, was for influential American Jews to “privately … make clear to the Israelis that you understand the situation.” The meeting broke up, according to the notes taken by an aide to Kissinger, “with warm expressions of gratitude.”