A tarantella for Edward Villella

The New Neo Posted on by

Edward Villella used to be the most famous male dancer in the US. He slightly predated Nureyev’s defection and Baryshnikov’s later arrival, and they eclipsed him to a certain extent. But he was quite a star, and I saw him dance in person many many times.

I absolutely loved Villella, and it was partly because of the way he looked, as well as the fact that he exuded a sex appeal that was different from the Apollonian quality of Baryshnikov and the exotic aura of Nureyev. I also happened to once take a class from Villella when he was in his 40s, and I can safely say that his magnetism was even more marked close up and personal.

Is he forgotten these days? Perhaps, at least somewhat, and certainly with young people. There aren’t even that many videos of him in his prime. The other day I was looking for some and found, among other things, a video of him doing “Tarantella,” a short and frenetic dance choreographed for him by Balanchine although not one of my favorites. In the video, it first shows Villella doing the two short solo variations, then Baryshnikov doing them, and then a series of other later dancers doing the same thing.

Fascinating, including the comments, only a few of which liked Villella and many of which criticized his loosy-goosy manner and casualness, especially his relaxed upper body. But what they didn’t get is that the piece was originally made for him and the carefree happy-go-lucky style was intentional in this piece and it’s something that has been lost with modern dancers. It’s very playful. Even Baryshnikov, who may have been the greatest ballet dancer of all time, doesn’t quite pull it off for this particular ballet. Let’s just say that Baryshnikov gives us the intense Russian version, very perfect but not the original artistic vision.

Here’s the clip. Unfortunately, the quality of the video for Villella and Baryshnikov is poor. Villella is shown until 1:54, and then Barishnikov, and then the rest of them. But I think despite the poor quality of the first two, it still shows what I’m talking about. Note also that as the years go by, the tempi get slower and slower, although never slow:

Here’s a short Villella documentary. The still thumbnail at the beginning gives you some idea of why so many women (me included) were drawn to him. It also has a few very short excerpts from Tarantella that are in color and of much better quality than the previous ones. He narrates some of this documentary; I think he was in his early 80s at the time, but he’s 89 now:

Another political changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting political change story (hat tip: commenter “Ilana”). The author is a lifelong Democrat, and the proximate cause of his change to Independent was the Democrats’ recent stance on Israel, but it goes deeper than that. The piece is described thusly at the link:

Lifelong Democrat Brad Goverman has finally left the Democrats. His views haven’t changed. It’s the Party that’s left him. Yet he hasn’t become a Republican. Instead he’s politically homeless, reflecting the position of many American Jews and Liberals in this new radical, political landscape. This piece shows America at a tipping point

From the piece itself:

The Democratic Party no longer feels like home. I never imagined I would write those words. …

I was a Democrat because I believed the party represented something larger than itself. It championed civil rights, religious liberty, pluralism, and the belief that Americans from every background could build a common democratic future. It believed government could improve people’s lives without becoming the center of them. It believed that immigration and pluralism wasn’t a weakness to be tolerated, but a strength to be celebrated.

For most of my life, I believed the Democratic Party best embodied those values. That is why this decision has been so painful. I’m not walking away from a political label. I’m walking away from a place that shaped my understanding of public life.

Sound familiar? I understand the sentiment. What is harder to understand at this point is his holding onto his identity as a Democrat for all these years in the face of so much evidence for so long that the Party isn’t what he thought it was (or what it was closer to being long ago). This is especially true because he seems to have been someone interested in politics and not someone utterly disengaged. It took the Democrats’ reaction to 10/7 to get him to see what I think had already been obvious.

On the other hand, I know how very very difficult it can be to admit to oneself, after decades of support for a certain party, that one was either wrong all that time or that things have changed now. It almost doesn’t matter which; it’s the change that matters.

Goverman makes it crystal clear, though, that he’s not a Republican. That is very common as well for left-to-right changers. It’s a bridge too far for most changers to declare a switch like that, even to themselves. Will he vote Republican? I don’t know, although in Massachusetts – where he lives – it doesn’t matter all that much. He may just not vote, or vote third-party.

It’s a start.

You may not be interested in Third-Worldism, but Third-Worldism is interested in you

The New Neo Posted on by

In recent weeks I’ve heard the term “Third-Worldism” more and more often. Or maybe I’ve just noticed it more. Perhaps you’ve had the same experience. But what is it?:

Here’s a piece on the topic [my emphasis]:

… [T]oday’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

That is why the unity between Islamists and young white leftist westerners was immediately apparent after 10/7, a unity that puzzled some people but not those who had been paying particular attention to what’s been taught in US colleges for at least the last thirty years. And that is why Israel is merely the proverbial canary in the coal mine and the larger target is western civilization in general.

Strangely enough, the idea of Israel as colonist is historically inaccurate, since the Jews inhabited the land long before the Arabs arrived. The Arabs were the actual “colonizers” (after the Romans, and followed by Ottomans, British – well, you get the idea). But “colonizers” has changed its meaning:

Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology—applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict.

This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

That helps to explain why neither logic arguments nor historical ones matter to those who espouse these ideas. Logic and historical facts might change a few minds, but just a few.

A short history of the settler/colonizer framework, including how flexible it has become [my emphasis]:

Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.

Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.

Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine.If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.

I really can’t summarize the richness of the article; I suggest you read it yourself. But here’s an excerpt describing how the ideas evolved over the years, and while you read this, remember that this is what our university-“educated” young people have been taking in for a long long time. It will help make it clear why so many of them believe what they believe so fervently [my emphasis]:

This expanding catalog [of the evils of which Israel is supposedly guilty] rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.

Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.

By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.

The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. …

This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.

That’s at least how long this has been building and spreading in universities – and beyond, as generations of students graduate. The article doesn’t deal with the influence of Soviet Russia, which beginning in the 1960s also began to spread the word that Israel was a settler colonial power; I’ve described some of the process in this previous post. The Soviets spread propaganda that indicted Israel as a racist and colonialist state, knowing this would target western sensibilities and help turn them against Israel.

But back to Third-Worldism and October 7:

Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.

The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”:

When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.

In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.

All of which need to be destroyed.

I also think it’s instructive to see Obama as the first president subscribing to Third-Worldism, and to interpret his “fundamental change” as a pivot towards that point of view. His attempt at rapprochement with Iran, his turning away from Israel, his apology tours, much of his presidency and in particular his foreign policy can be seen that way. Nowadays, it is the potent worldview behind the DSA, who are not just socialists but socialists with a Third-Worldist framework and Third-Worldist goals.

[NOTE: You may or may not recall the 2016 debate in which Chris Christie tangled with Rubio and made the latter look somewhat incoherent. At the time, I did a deep dive into their exchange and found that Rubio actually came out way better than most people perceived, although at the time the perception of ineptitude had won out. I was revisiting that post on the 2016 debate the other day – I may end up writing another post on it – and re-read this statement Rubio made during the exchange, which seems to fit into what I’ve just been saying about Obama. Here it is:

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America.

Obama and his political heirs (and those who are even more leftist than he) want the US to be more like the appeasing European First World, and more like the rest of the Third World.]

Mangione pleads guilty

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe his reasons were purely strategic:

Mangione faced those charges in connection with the December 2024 shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

“I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died,” Mangione said in court Friday. “I knew what I was doing.”

Thompson’s family was in the courtroom sitting in the front row watching as Mangione entered his plea. Mangione voiced no remorse and repeatedly referenced his concerns with the U.S. health care system.

So he pleads guilty but admits nothing but the facts already known; there really wasn’t a scintilla of doubt that he stalked Thompson and murdered him in cold blood, shooting him in the back. He’s only sorry he’s been caught; he still is grandstanding to his leftist admirers.

Here’s the strategic part:

Mangione still faces murder charges in a state trial set to begin next month, but his guilty plea in federal court is expected to have significant impacts on the state trial. New York state’s strict double jeopardy law could potentially upend those proceedings. That law says that a defendant can’t be tried twice for the same thing.

Mangione’s defense team cited that law in a motion filed Friday, shortly after his federal guilty plea, urging state court Judge Gregory Carro to dismiss state charges against him, including a count of 2nd degree murder. If successful, that legal maneuver could spare Mangione a longer prison term.

Personally, I think even if he faces the state trial the jury will be hung, because some Mangione supporter or supporters will lie in order to get on the jury and hang it. In federal court that was far less likely, and that’s part of why he copped a plea.

State prosecutors aren’t giving up:

State prosecutors have argued their case is distinct, and that double jeopardy should not apply. In a statement to NPR, a spokesman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said they would fight efforts by Mangione’s defense team to derail the state’s prosecution.

With guilty pleas, the sentencing is usually somewhat lighter than it would otherwise have been. The death penalty had already been ruled out for Mangione. Will he now get less than life? It’s certain possible, and sets a terrible precedent. If there was ever a cold-blooded and political assassination, it was this one.

Mangione cites his back pain as a motive:

“After years of enduring severe pain from a broken back and navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system, I learned that UnitedHealthcare would be holding its annual investor conference in New York City,” he said.

What a poor excuse. I have some experience with this; in my early forties I had a severe back injury and was in very significant chronic pain for at least twelve years. I spent a lot of money despite having health insurance, and most of the interventions did not work (unlike what happened to Mangione, whose back was fixed a couple of years after his injury by a fusion surgery). I was a participant in several chronic pain groups and listened to some very sad stories, and some angry people who were having major problems with the health care system. But never was anyone contemplating murdering some random health insurance executive. And by the way, Mangione’s insurance problems, whatever they might have been, did not involve Thompson’s company United Healthcare:

Luigi Mangione, the suspect accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City last week, was not a customer of the private health insurer, but police say he had identified the company as one of the largest corporations in America in his “manifesto” writings.

Neither Mangione nor his mother were insured by UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest private health insurer, a UnitedHealth Group spokesperson told CNN.

“We have no indication that he was ever a client of United Healthcare, but he does make mention that it is the fifth largest corporation in America, which would make it the largest healthcare organization in America. So that’s possibly why he targeted that company,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said in an interview with NBC New York.

When Mangione first surfaced. I wrote a post comparing him to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. I still consider the analogy a good one, except that Raskolnikov ultimately showed remorse and understanding. I don’t think Mangione is even close to that redemptive arc.

The Democrat Trojan Horses

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve often thought that one of the defining characteristics of many Democrats these days, particularly since 2008, is that they often hide their true intentions in order to get elected. I don’t just mean simple things such as keeping their associations with NGOs or lobbyists a secret. I mean their basic intentions regarding policy and their attitudes towards the philosophical pillars of this country.

I first noticed this with Obama, and I wrote about it at the time (for example see this). Bernie Sanders’ problem – aside from the fact that he didn’t have Obama’s smoothness and charisma – was that he was more upfront about his far-leftist goals. That’s why in 2016 and 2020 the Democrat establishment decided he had to go, even though he was doing well in the primaries. Their fear was that he would become the nominee because he appealed to the Democrats’ far-left base, but that he would lose soundly in the general election because he was too extreme for the country as a whole. So they called on the superdelegates in the case of Hillary in 2016, and forced some of the challengers to Biden out in 2020, to try to engineer Sanders’ downfall.

Sanders dropped out of the race against Biden in April of 2020, but he was already significantly behind in the primary voting. Was he promised a loud voice in the Biden administration in return? That is pure speculation on my part. But there is little question that the Obama and Sanders wings did have a say in the Biden administration, perhaps more of a say than the elderly doddering Biden had. Although the Party used Biden’s earlier reputation as a moderate to help him gain victory (let’s leave out for now the question of fraud), he did not govern as a moderate.

How aware was Biden of all of this? I believe he was fairly aware, at least for the first couple of years, and faded more later. I’m not saying he was sharp as a tack at the outset; he clearly was not. But I think he got the drift of things, and was okay with it. Why? One reason is that, when he was of relatively sound mind and body from 2009 to 2017, he served as Obama’s VP and seemed perfectly fine with what Obama was doing. So I think that in his 2020 campaign, Biden was somewhat of a conscious dissembler, although he had a lot of assistance.

I’ll leave out Kamala Harris. Her campaign was so ditsy and so disjointed it’s hard to say what she was presenting as or whether it was authentic. Nothing she did or said seemed authentic.

Now we have a proliferation of far-leftists, and they run the gamut as far as how transparent they’re being about their plans. Mamdani occupies a kind of middle ground; he wasn’t really lying about his far-left affiliation although he may have been silent about his ultimate goals. But he was running in a deep blue city and primary turnout was low and mostly consisted of the more extreme elements. Once Mamdani had won the primary in a deep deep blue place like NYC, it was highly probable he would win the election, because his opponents simply weren’t popular (Cuomo and Sliwa). And so Mamdani didn’t need to be especially mendacious about his leftism in order to win; just a little bit mendacious.

Contrast that to Abigail Spanberger of Virginia in 2025. That state is not as deep blue as NYC, and it was coming off a Republican governor. So Spanberger pretended to be someone utterly different than who she is, in the political sense; she posed as a moderate. Once elected, she pivoted to far-leftism.

This is the template for some of the contenders in 2026 races: pretense. But like a Trojan Horse, once inside the gates they can use their power to destroy.

But there’s a dilemma. Someone like El-Sayed, the Democrat Senate nominee from Michigan, has a history that screams leftist extremism and Islamist tendencies. He is trying to backtrack from that history (something like Platner did with a different history, unsuccessfully), by saying that his views have evolved or by pivoting when asked pointed questions. But for El-Sayed, it may be too late to pull off the switch convincingly.

The failed candidacy of Francesca Hong for the governorship of Wisconsin has alerted other far leftists and told them they must dissemble, and that their past can haunt them. But that’s only in purple-ish states or cities. In far blue ones it won’t matter and they can be somewhat more honest.

The Democrat nominee in Wisconsin, Crowley (who beat Hong only by a hair), has learned the lesson. He’s a leftist, too, although described as a “center-leftist” (whatever that is). He is avoiding any association with Hasan Piker:

Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley said he will not campaign with controversial left-wing streamer Hasan Piker — who previously backed his rival, Francesca Hong, in the primary. …

“I don’t want to lend credibility to platforms, if you will, that I believe further divides us as a community, further divides Democrats,” Crowley told WISN when asked about the prospect of campaigning with Piker.

Whatever he may actually think of Piker, he doesn’t want to be seen with him.

In Michigan, however, El-Sayed won the primary while still associating heavily with Piker. Now that he’s in the general, he’s avoiding having to answer any questions about Piker. For example:

Michigan and Wisconsin are both purple states, so these candidates have to be careful. But once in, all bets are off.

Jason Arday has died

The New Neo Posted on by

This is terrible news:

“At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s Central South Command Unit. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”

He cited an “unrelenting level of public scrutiny” as his reason for resigning.

I find it suspicious until proven otherwise. Suspicious of suicide, to be exact. But there are more innocuous possibilities. All of it is extremely sad.

One thing that seems clear and has seemed clear from the start: whether or not Arday’s backstory of mutism till 11 because of autism was true, it seemed fairly certain that he was both a liar and a fragile person who both used and was used by the DEI system. Then, when the unraveling occurred, it was overwhelming to go from the heights of adulation to become basically a joke.

Apparently it was too much for his system to handle, however he met death. This is an extremely sad sequel to the story, and if suicide was involved I suppose that, in retrospect, it should have been predicted as a possibility. Was he getting any sort of psychological help with the fallout of his fall from grace? I haven’t a clue, but it seemed indicated.

His latest book is titled Great and Unfortunate Things. His death is a highly unfortunate thing and I think an extremely sad one.

RIP, Jason Arday.

Nathan Cofnas and accusations of racism

The New Neo Posted on by

Nathan Cofnas was the academic responsible for the beginning of the major fact-checking of Arday’s biography and in particular the plagiarism involved in his PhD thesis. But one of the excuses given by the Cambridge crowd and others for not paying much attention, and for saying these accusations were vile racist slurs on Arday, was that Cofnas had been labeled a racist a few years ago for some of his own writing.

So Cofnas was an imperfect messenger, to say the least. I noticed some discussion of Cofnas in the comments here a few days ago, and I’ve been curious about who Cofnas is and what he’s been saying that’s so controversial. I found this recent interview with him, and this is the most relevant part. You don’t have to go by what other people say that he’s saying. Make your own decisions about his message:

The entire interview can be found here:

And if you want to read more of the details from a source defending free speech, there’s this. An excerpt:

You don’t have to agree with what Cofnas wrote to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom. If people believe he is wrong, then they are perfectly within their rights to say why and how and to explain the flaws in his arguments. Instead, the principal claim levelled against Cofnas has been that some find his ideas ‘offensive’ and ‘distressing’. That may well be so, but if universities are to successfully fulfil their truth-seeking mission, academics’ right to explore offensive or controversial topics must come before considerations of hurt feelings. This vital principle must always be defended – especially when it comes to hard cases. Nathan Cofnas must be free to speak.

What’s behind the sudden emergence of a host of Muslim DSA-backed candidates?

The New Neo Posted on by

Like many phenomena, it seemed to come suddenly and out of the blue: all of these far-leftist Israel-hating candidates, many but certainly not all of them Muslim, many but certainly not all of them immigrants or first-generation children of immigrants from third-world countries.

Here’s an article at RealClearInvestigations that purports to explain the history. An excerpt:

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democrats’ U.S. Senate primary in Michigan last Tuesday was the latest sign of an emerging kingmaker in U.S. politics – a little-known super PAC that has tapped the wealth of a new cadre of Muslim-American mega-donors to support far-left candidates.

Since it was launched just six months ago, American Priorities has channeled millions of dollars, primarily from donors with Arab, Muslim, and/or Middle Eastern backgrounds, to a string of winning candidates in high-profile races.

Most of the entity-supported candidates are running on various democratic-socialist policies, such as single-payer health care, abolishing ICE, and slashing the military. But one area in which all candidates are aligned, consistent with the PAC’s mission, is in their antagonism towards Israel.

Because so much of the Democrat voter base is anti-Israel, this is now a requirement for most races. It’s not new, either. It began to be visible in politics with Barack Obama, although it was more subtle. The four members of Congress known as “The Squad” – two of whom, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, were openly Muslim and Israel-hating – were elected in 2018. Seems like longer ago, doesn’t it?

The Muslim population of the US has been growing in recent years, and it may have reached a critical mass to take more political power – especially if the group votes as a bloc, and especially in areas where the Muslim population is highest (that would be NY, NJ, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan, by percentage of population; note that only Michigan is not a deep blue state already).

This isn’t much different from other immigrant groups who have come to this country. It’s a natural progression to get more involved in politics and to run for political office. But a larger proportion of this group isn’t interested in the values and principles on which this country was founded, and in this it’s a natural fit for the far left which has the same desire to “transform” the US into something quite different:

A recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing convened by Sen. Ted Cruz raised a more chilling issue. The Texas Republican alleged, and witnesses concurred that – in a parallel to what has transpired in countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – the Muslim Brotherhood, a subversive transnational Islamist organization, has cultivated an “entrenched institutional network” in America of NGOs, advocacy groups, and political organizations to advance its leaders’ recorded mission to “destroy … Western civilization from within.” That network, terrorism expert Kyle Shideler found, has actively partnered with the Democratic Socialists of America, as part of what Cruz called a “Red-Green Alliance,” that Shideler said is “united around a revolutionary objective advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution.” Democrats on the panel boycotted the hearing in protest, claiming in a statement the Texas senator was “[s]capegoating Muslims.”

Of course; “Islamaphobia,” that all-purpose term to attempt to quell any criticism of this group.

More about the funding that is enabling this:

American Priorities was founded in February as a self-styled “countervailing force” to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though the largest such group, it is just one of several relatively new PACs with overlapping donors centered on opposition to Israel (see sidebar). The super PAC is led by Hannah Fertig, a strategist self-identifying as Jewish who figured prominently in the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish and a backer of staunch anti-Zionist candidates. The group’s treasurer is Mark Hanna, an assembly district leader in New York who began his political career as an organizer focusing on Muslim-related issues, including through forming Yalla Brooklyn, an NGO dedicated to mobilizing Arab and Muslim voters. American Priorities has pledged to put up $10 million this cycle to elect Democratic candidates who believe the party establishment is too pro-Israel. AIPAC and its affiliates have also poured tens of millions of dollars into recent election cycles as support for the Jewish state generally has declined – a long-term trend among Democrats correlating with the rise of the anti-Israel progressive left. To support its political claims, American Priorities cites polls showing a majority of Democratic voters oppose U.S. military aid to Israel, are more sympathetic to Palestinian Arabs than Israelis, and shun candidates who accept AIPAC support.

Many of the super PAC’s top donors are first-generation Muslim immigrants who have made their fortunes in the U.S. They include …

The article then goes on to list some of them, with descriptions.

I will also point out that their anti-Israel message appeals to the Tucker wing of the ex-right (I don’t call them “right” anymore, because they have come to resemble the left so much that the differences have become more and more minor). But the attitudes are rife among Democrat politicians and Democrat voters. In 2024, Kamala Harris was well aware of this and did not choose Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania because she knew many Democrat voters would turn away from her if she chose a Jew who wasn’t of the Bernie Sanders variety: secular, virtue-signaling, Israel-hating. There are just a few Democrats who have spoken out against these attitudes (for example Fetterman, Goldman who lost his primary, and NJ’s Josh Gottheimer). In contrast, despite Tucker and company, the vast majority of Republican office-holders are on the pro-Israel side.

Here’s one interesting Democrat who has offered an opinion:

Joel Rubin, the Jewish outreach leader on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, has likewise said that “I think what Sanders and the Sanders operation have done is shove into our system the most categorically anti-Israel, antisemitic candidates that we’ve seen in a generation – if ever, certainly within the Democratic Party” – a reference to the Vermont socialist’s leadership on the left.

In 2020, Sanders had a softer line on Israel that mostly centered on criticizing Netanyahu. That’s probably why Joel Rubin felt it was fine to work for him, but no longer holds that view as Sanders has moved into the “Israel is committing genocide” camp. These days Sanders not only sees which way the Democrats’ wind blows, he wants to be part of the push.

On Mamdani, whose election has been a high point of the movement:

These candidates are following in the footsteps of, and in some cases with the blessing of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani – whose rise captured the attention and support of several of American Priorities’ donors prior to its launch, including its two biggest backers, Mohamed Waqas Javed and Omer Hasan. Both have contributed over $1 million to the super PAC to date. While little is publicly known about them, they and a third donor, Tariq Afaq Ahmed, who has contributed $500,000, were pre- and post-IPO employees at AppLovin, today one of the world’s most valuable ad tech companies, from which they likely made a fortune. AppLovin has come under scrutiny for, among other things, its funding from Chinese Communist Party-linked individuals and entities. …

American Priorities’ treasurer, Hanna, previously served alongside Mamdani in the 2017 campaign of Palestinian-American Rev. Khader El-Yateem. Mamdani said that El-Yateem “transformed” his life, in part by connecting him with “a political movement that understood Palestine as being a central part of the struggle, which is something that I had often struggled with…all of these politicians I had admired…found every way to not address Palestinians when it came to their seemingly universal struggles.”

The Mamdani campaign, which emerged from the city’s Muslim Democrat establishment and made Israel and the Palestinian Arabs a major focus, appears to have catalyzed Muslim donors nationally, while demonstrating a proof of concept for how targeted contributions could dramatically increase their political clout going forward.

Mamdani has been both an inspiration and a catalyst for more donations.

The article cites polls of American Muslims that indicate support among them for the Muslim Brotherhood is especially high, and support for Hamas is quite high too. Also:

The Pew poll also showed that Muslims have a more favorable view of Palestinian Arabs than any other religious cohort at 78%, and a less favorable view of Israelis than any other religious cohort at 26% support. Following the October 7 attack, nearly 58% of American Muslims surveyed found that Hamas was at least somewhat justified in carrying out the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust “as part of their struggle for a Palestinian state.”

The following may be the most important part of the article:

Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam, the son of Muslim immigrants, has identified what he sees as two problematic “ideological tendencies” among American Muslims that are of increasing relevance as Islam is set to surpass Judaism as America’s second largest religion within the next generation, and as Muslims’ political power grows. The first is “Islamism” and its violent manifestation in jihad. The second that he hypothesizes persists among upwardly mobile, educated, and often relatively secular Muslims is their rejection of “the quiet gratitude that one associates with immigrants and their children of earlier eras.” This, he says, is not so much due to the dictates of their faith as they understand it, but due to “‘anti-West westernization’ or ‘adversarial assimilation’: a process by which incorporation into American institutions produces not attachment to patriotic narratives of American freedom, individualism, and benevolence but hostility toward them.” He says that this cohort is in thrall to “Third Worldism,” which Salam defines as “a fusion of anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalism that places the sacralized victimhood of Palestinian Arabs at the center of a larger struggle against American imperialism.”

Of the two tendencies, “in important respects,” he argued recently in Sapir Journal, Third Worldism “presents the more consequential long-term ideological challenge.”

“Where jihadism targets American civilians as part of a larger struggle to overthrow ‘apostate’ regimes in the Muslim world, Third Worldism endeavors to transform the nation’s ideological-intellectual milieu, shaping how Americans – well beyond the Muslim minority – understand their country and its place in the world.”

I have heard the term “third worldism” more and more lately. I plan to write a post on the subject soon. It’s one of the main ideas that binds Islamists and the left, an alliance that some find strange but that makes perfect sense in many ways. They share the goal of destroying the west as we know it, and although each wants to be the one ultimately in charge of the Brave New World that follows, only one will succeed. But that’s for later. Right now destruction is the proximate goal.

So the SPLC was in bed with neo-Nazi informants – literally

The New Neo Posted on by

We already knew that the allegations were that the SPLC was paying informants to drum up “business” – the race-hatred business that is – in order to help convince donors that racism was very active in the US. We already knew that the organization created dummy entities to receive payments, in order to hide the fact.

But we didn’t know these details about Heidi Beirich, who was the CFO of the SPLC and was recently arrested for fraud [my emphasis]:

A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of White supremacist groups, one of whom she was allegedly living with and had a romantic relationship with at the time. …

Beirich allegedly “oversaw payments of donors’ money” to people inside of these hate groups, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday. She also allegedly shared a bank account with one of those sources, which included funds from the SPLC’s payments. …

Despite her role in overseeing the payments — some of which were directed to an Imperial Wizard in the KKK — Beirich allegedly had a romantic relationship with one source who infiltrated a White Supremacy group and stole documents for the SPLC, according to the indictment.

That person, prosecutors say, was paid over $1 million by the SPLC since 2007 – $140,000 of which was put into a bank account that Beirich and the person shared. Beirich allegedly used that money to pay for their personal living expenses.

The documents that person allegedly stole were used as part of an article that the SPLC later published. Beirich then allegedly paid a second informant $6,000 to take the fall for the stolen documents.

“Dr. Beirich is innocent, and this case is without merit,” her attorney, Michael J. Proctor said in a statement. “We believe the charges against her and the SPLC are politically motivated …

The SPLC itself is above politics, of course, dedicated only to truth, justice, and the American way.