Hatred of Trump leads to liberal confusion about what to do: Bari Weiss gets it, and she also doesn’t
I think Bari Weiss’ new Tablet piece is an illustration of the kind of confusion a great many liberal Democrats feel these days.
For example, Weiss puts her finger squarely on the fact that leftist Democrats such as AOC are either anti-Semitic themselves or fully at the service of other anti-Semitic leftists. But after discussing that for a while, she reverts to reflexive Trump-hate [my emphasis]:
…[M]any smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.
There is also the X factor of Donald Trump, which is impossible to overstate. Understandable hostility toward him has prevented many Jews from seeing the problem on the other side. To even look away from the obscenity in the White House for a moment strikes many, as they have told me, as irresponsible or beside the point.
I share with the majority of American Jews’ disgust toward Trump and Trumpism, which has normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society. That truth doesn’t detract from another: There is another danger, this one from the left.
This way of thinking isn’t just an idiosyncrasy of Weiss’. It is typical of someone in the throes of a strong cognitive dissonance that he or she cannot easily resolve. She hates Trump, but hates the danger on the left as well. What to do?
In the second and third paragraphs of that excerpt, Weiss exhibits her Trump hatred. As is typical of the writing of Democrats, including others who think of themselves as old-style liberals, Weiss doesn’t seem to feel the need to give a single specific example of how Trump has demonstrated these terrible qualities she’s writing about. We are to take them on faith. Surely, we already know – the science, as they say, is settled. It’s a tautology that: (a) Trump is an “obscenity” (b) he is worthy of disgust (c) he has “normalized” bigotry and cruelty; and (d) that said normalization has “crippled” American society.
I think part of the reason Weiss says all of this is that she’s writing mostly for other Democrats who happen to be Jewish, although they’re not the only people who read Tablet. It’s telling that she says “I share” their supposed disgust for Trump; so she is saying “Hear me out, I’m one of you, not one of those dread Trump supporters.”
And it’s especially interesting to me that she says all of this despite the fact that the rest of her article is a lucid warning about the dangers of the far left and Critical Race Theory – which happens to actually be a huge and influential purveyor of “bigotry and cruelty” today, and to also be the force that has in fact “normalized” these things and is currently “crippling American society.”
Weiss follows up her warning about the danger of the left with this, which makes it clear she thinks the left is more dangerous than Trump, and that Biden would not be able to stop them:
And unlike Trump, this one has attained cultural dominance, capturing America’s elites and our most powerful institutions. In the event of a Biden victory, it is hard to imagine it meeting resistance.
So the only logical conclusion is to vote for Trump, right? After all, if the left is the bigger danger, and Biden won’t counter that danger, isn’t voting for Trump an obvious solution? But of course she can’t say that or even think it; she is focused on being able to fight “wokeness” from within the Democratic Party, and with Biden as president.
Good luck with that, Bari. You’ll need it.
Weiss follows that up with a recitation of liberal ideals. This is also interesting, because that list clearly tracks to the ideals of the right these days – only Weiss probably doesn’t know it.
She also (even after being booted off the NY Times because her type of liberalism no longer exists there) doesn’t seem to understand that she’s reciting ancient history, as far as the Democrats are concerned. It’s been a game of pretend for a long time, as the ostracism of Joe Lieberman many years ago should have made crystal clear:
[The ideals of America as a whole used to be] liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy…
…[T]his liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.
She adds:
American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.
I hate to tell Weiss, but adhering to that sort of “American liberalism” today makes her what’s known as “a conservative.” And I regret to inform her that the “new ideology” isn’t “vying to replace” that sort of liberalism among the Democrats. It did replace it quite some time ago. And the left has taken over nearly every cultural institution, including the press (as she obviously experienced at the Times).
So it’s late and getting later.
If Weiss and other old-fashioned liberal Democrats could take over that party, I would applaud them. But I don’t think there’s any chance of it happening, unless they are trounced in this election – and I’d give it only a very slim chance even if that were to happen.
The rest of Weiss’ rather long piece is quite good. It mostly describes things with which readers of this blog are very familiar, and which I’ll just summarize by saying that she discusses the philosophy and goals of the anti-racism movement and Critical Race Thoery, and how that plays out in society and also within the non-Orthodox Jewish community.
It’s pretty apparent that Weiss wrote the piece to appeal to those Jewish Democrats who can hear her and who might not know what’s been going on with the left and what it signifies. And that’s fine. But by demonizing Trump (which perhaps she must do, not only because she believes what she says but also because she thinks the readers to whom she’s appealing believe it, too), she is cutting off the only avenue to buy time for any kind of reversal of the dangerous and alarming trends on the left that she sees and describes so well.
Weiss does not see her own blind spot. Voting for Trump is a bridge too far and she cannot get there – although some people (such as Dave Rubin, for example) have. But I submit that, for now, it’s the sole option open to her and to other “liberal” Democrats.
And time’s a-wasting.
CLARIFICATION AND ADDENDUM:
I want to be very clear: the phenomenon that Weiss describes is neither specific to Jews nor limited to them. It is rife among virtually all liberal Democrats today. Weiss is primarily addressing Jews in her article, but Jews share her sentiments only insofar as they are liberals. American Jews trend liberal, particularly secular and Reform Jews, but Orthodox Jews vote majority Republican, and the more extreme Orthodox groups are more likely to vote Republican. The recent voting behavior of Jews in presidential elections has been at a ratio of a bit more than 2:1, Democrat/Republican.
Weiss, like Matt Taibbi, recognizes the psychosis of the contemporary left, but reflexively babbles out TDS cliches to insure that she’ll still be welcome at lefty dinner parties.
Bon Appetit Bari ! Don’t choke on the kale salad.
I saw Weiss’s cri de coeur, too, and was sickened but not surprised.
How can one—imploring people NOT to be so absolutely blind—be so absolutely blind?
But no go. The brainwashing is too deep, the ideology too entrenched. The perversity too profound.
That the Mainstream Corrupt Media and the Democratic Party have done their four-year hatchet job of Trump—as well as the eight years of hagiography and deception and covering up starting in 2008—so exceeding well is only part of the problem.
The other part of the problem, perhaps the biggest part, is that they succeeded in brainwashing people who were, and unfortunately in many cases still are, perfectly willing and eager to be brainwashed.
I expect that in all too many case, NOTHING can nor will make those people realize the false gods in whom they’ve placed their faith and to whom they pledge their loyalty.
Still, one must remain hopeful: perhaps, “ALMOST NOTHING”….
Excellent analysis. Weiss is perfectly able to see the Left for what it has become, but unable to understand what Conservatives believe (including Trump). Pity that so many Jews are the same.
Lenin’s quote about “selling the communists the rope” appears to finally be coming true.
The blindness is pathological.
Keep in mind that by continuing to believe the demonization of Trump, the Left can be as cognitively dissonant as it wishes—or so cognitively dissonant that it has no idea just how cognitively dissonant it is—as it continues to view itself as the Rational, Moral, Caring, Compassionate side on the one hand and the ONLY HOPE to save America on the other.
This is due to the absolute success—the Stalinist brilliance—of the Democratic Party-MSCM 24/7 deception/cover-up/smear operation over the past four or so years.
(Anyone who has denied that this has been occurring should be getting a good look at it in the current sickening fiasco. Perhaps.)
Because of this, I’m not sure why anything should really change in the next two weeks.
To be sure, the polls are part of the deception campaign.
In the end the biggest explosion will likely be caused the Democrats’ “hail Mary” phony mail-in balloting strategy and the aftermath of that relentless, criminal effort.
I’m so old, I remember when Joe Lieberman was allowed to be a Democrat.
Thank you, thank you for this article responding to Bari Weiss’ article in Tablet! I read hers with high hopes of reading some sanity, logic and common sense from a liberal who had been unfairly vilified for her opinions. Sadly she seems to exhibit Stockholm Syndrome more than independent thinking.
The vast majority of those Americans who believe themselves the Chosen People of YHWH are Democrats. And they are mostly anti-Israel, the most stalwart defenders of which are Evangelical Christians.
The Jewish unreason boggles the mind.
After 2000-plus years of pogroms and ghettos, they still do not get it. In fact, they refuse to get it. Reminds me of German Jews docilely getting onto freight cars for “resettlement” in 1941, having had every job, every possession taken from them by the Reich and still obeying.
I suppose Weiss is beginning to realize the people like her will be the first against the wall, come the Revolution. But she can’t make the logical leap and see who are the real enemies of what she holds dear. Rather than examine her assumptions she clings even harder to them, since they’re all she has left to give her comfort.
I suppose I should feel some pity for her, but knowing that she’d throw me to the mob given the chance I can’t muster any.
Incredible. Wonderful analysis, Neo.
Let’s seeee…. Biden & Comrade Kamala win (Please, God, NOOOO..!!) and how long will it take to grovel to Iran with apologies and restoration of Obama’s horses**t agreement? Climate Kill the Economy Agreement? Move the new American Embassy out of Jerusalem & back to Tel Aviv and sneer at Israel?
And… Restore a Vast Testicular Concavity to the Oval, missing since 2016…???
Our country stands at the Edge of
Great Danger. And that understates
it by miles.
With the exception of a few neocons, American Jews vote solidly Democrat. This has been the case since the academic affection for Stalin and Soviet Communism in the 1930s. As a voting block they appear to be a lost cause.
Weiss and all of her ilk, are nearly at the end of their ‘usefulness’. Their willful blindness to their having been manipulated for decades has led to the precipice they face.
But even now, they will not face the truth and in that refusal, they continue to enable their future; enslavement or elimination.
For in their pride, they find it impossible to conceive that the man they unjustly vilify as evil and sub-human is the only one capable of offering a way out of the madness they have long enabled.
Geoffrey B: Yes, and “Useful Idiots” on steroids!! (Thank you, Comrade Lenin.)
Related:
https://jewschoosetrump.org/
…but who knows how many people such an organization will influence?
(Also, I think that most if not all of their focus and emphasis should be placed on the need to support Trump for the sake of America’s future…)
There are in fact quite a few prominent “voices in the wilderness” out there, e.g., Mark Levin, Dershowitz, William Jacobson, Caroline Glick, Dennis Prager and others.
One can only hope that voters on the Left of center will finally be able to open their eyes and see beyond the last 12 years of endless deception…. I hope that’s not hoping for too much.
As Wretchard has so often stated, the “FRAMING” of the narrative is of vital importance.
Someone said a ways back that the left takes Trump literally, but not seriously And the right takes him seriously but not literally. The Weiss article is welcome and valuable because it does not demand unconditional surrender — keep your negative views of Trump, but have a very close look at the alternative. Trumps impulses are restrained by the power and influence of the institutions Weiss mentions and by his supporters deference to the constitution. None of these restrain the nameless ideology howling under your window. Copy Weiss’ article. Give it to a thoughtful friend.
Neo:
A friend in her 80s, a Sephardic Jew from Morocco, has voted Democrat all her life. She is voting for Trump this year. Likewise her children. The primary reason for her vote change is the way that Democrat-governed cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle have tolerated the riots and mayhem. A secondary reason may be Trump’s Israel-friendly policies. When I pointed out Trump’s policies towards Israel to her, her reply was why should she be concerned about another country? I pointed out that her sister and her son and family live in Israel.
She isn’t an intellectual, watches more TV than she reads, but an astute businesswoman who owns three properties outright.
So sad to see Weiss get partway there, but not all the way. Her blinders can’t be removed at this point, apparently. But perhaps others who have gone partway may break through.
The bigotry and hatred on the left will by no means exempt liberal Jews, who have been redefined as “white” despite not being accepted as such for a long time when movements like the KKK dominated Democrat circles.
I think the Democrats are really just showing who they’ve always been. They’ve always had a love affair with the various totalitarian regimes and they’ve always been welcoming to racists. They just did a much better job of hiding it from the general public.
What is playing out is the same thing that happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s. All of those radical student groups were aligned with the Democratic Party and all of that agitation culminated with the destruction of Jimmy Carter. Poor Jimmy was a southern Democrat and when he was elected in 1976 he went to Washington where the “Democrats” controlled everything so Jimmy probably thought he was in tall cotton. But they weren’t just “Democrats”, they were New York and California Democrats and they implemented policies that absolutely destroyed Carter’s Presidency, his reputation, and you’ll note that Jimmy is now a raging anti-Semite because he blames Israel for his failures rather that the policies of the loony Democratic Party.
Then came Reagan, the elder Bush, and Clinton “triangulated” his way to the Presidency by shoving the California and New York Democrats into the background. They slowly moved into the foreground and then destroyed the Obama Presidency, with the very willing assistance of Obama, by implementing the same polices that destroyed the Carter Presidency. In 2016, they thought that they were just a few short months away from putting all of their opponents in death camps but the people said “no”. We elected somebody to represent us, somebody to actually fight for us. And President Trump is fighting for us and for the future of the country.
What you see today is the same thing that I saw during the Reagan Presidency but with cable TV and internet. The newer technology just makes the hate easier to see.
As for Bari Weiss, she’s remembering a Democratic Party that never existed. She remembers the talking points and speeches but doesn’t recall the policies and results.
Jewish guy making his seventh contribution to the Trump campaign. I’d go out and knock on doors if I wasn’t disabled, of course in my neighborhood you’d be beaten into a coma for doing it
Weiss is just one of those unbearable old people whose mind is ossified, they babble on endlessly, their mind like a ball of string after three cats have played with it.
I want to be very clear: the phenomenon that Weiss describes is neither specific to Jews nor limited to them. It is rife among virtually all liberal Democrats today. Weiss is primarily addressing Jews in her article, but Jews share her sentiments only insofar as they are liberals. American Jews trend liberal, particularly secular and Reform Jews, but Orthodox Jews vote majority Republican, and the more extreme Orthodox groups are more likely to vote Republican. The recent voting behavior of Jews in presidential elections has been at a ratio of a bit more than 2:1, Democrat/Republican.
When I lived in Dallas my wife and I owned a fountain pen store for a number of years and had a great time working with doctors, lawyers, accountants and various executives and a number of our customers and friends were Jewish, lots of pen collectors. Our store was in the right part of Dallas and a great place for people to take time out and hang out visiting for an hour or two every week or so and we would discuss current events including 9-11 when it happened and what I saw was a strong conservative streak in Texas folks including on nice Jewish lawyer friend who was amazed when Hillary did her senator thing. I thought he might actually support some of the Republicans until during Obama’s first race he was head of the North Texas Democrat fund raising and I knew he was smart enough to know every damn thing about the Obamas. I saw the same reactions with some Jewish doctor friends who disliked the Obamacare stuff yet continued to support the Democrats. Now down here in the Texas Hill Country my Jewish doctor friends seem to like guns and shooting and their politics are more conservative.
I don’t know where I heard this phrase, I think I read it in a book but I might have read it on your Neo site. “Jews earn money like Episcopalians then they vote like Porto Ricans.”
Juden4Trump:
Bari Weiss is 36 years old. Not exactly what I’d call geriatric.
Gringo…”The primary reason for her vote change is the way that Democrat-governed cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle have tolerated the riots and mayhem.”
Riots don’t usually work out very well for Jews…not for anybody, really, but especially not for Jews.
Most American Jews are dependent upon a coalition of fundamentalist Christians and ultra orthodox Jews to save them from themselves. Their fervent desire for suicide via politics has become reflexive.
Well, yes, Neo, it’s not just Jewish liberals who can’t see the light. Others don’t see, either, that they are targets for the hatred they won’t acknowledge. Like the pathetic shopowners in big cities who put BLM signs in their windows, they’re shocked to find they’re not exempt.
ChrisS:
Carter was very much to blame for his own lousy decisions, particularly regarding Iran.
Liberals have long held a deep contempt, to the point of hatred, of Republicans. Even Truman characterized Dewey as Hitler in the 1948 election. It’s part of how liberals know they are liberals. It’s an identity issue.
Of course Trump has put that contempt on steroids. While it’s disappointing that some liberals can see some of the light that the Democrat Party is moving liberalism in dangerous directions, it’s quite another matter for liberals to give up their contempt (and the flip-side — their superiority) towards Republicans.
9-11 turned me against Democrats and liberals but it took me years before I could call myself a conservative or Republican.
It’s a step at a time process.
Professor
You have nailed my sentiments EXACTLY and expressed them clearly.
When I read Weiss’ piece all I could think of was that — she still doesn’t get it!
The Nita Lowey and Eliot Engel Israel supporting Democrats are no longer the Democratic party. They have been replaced with woke, BLM and BDS loving Democrats.
You are correct: Liberalism loving Democrats have to face their cognitive dissonance.
I just read two different posts on FB from women (both of whom have a lot of conservative friends here in a strong GOP county in Tenn) that said they were so happy they voted today against hatred, racism, bigotry and evil. Really ugly stuff.
Democrats know their voters are idiots. The relentless slanders over the last few decades have embedded in their voters’ brains. They truly believe that anyone who votes differently is evil. Jonathon Haidt’s research is instructive.
I don’t see any way that this kind of nastiness doesn’t escalate to violence. I know that my conservative friends and family have put up with it for decades and they are sick and tired of it. They’ve had all they are going to take. Patience and understanding didn’t work. The vile ugliness has just accelerated. Any ideas for an effective Plan B?
Another perceptive column by someone whose writings I admire. American reform Jews are hopeless. They believe they are chosen to serve as moral leaders based on the intrinsic social justice nature of their religion. They have no fealty to their brethren in Israel. They will align themselves with anti semites so long as their views on socialism converge.
Not going to dust off the hobby horse too much. Granted this cognitive dissonance is a thing on the moderate Left and not *just* a Progressive Jewish Thing.
But it IS a Big Thing.
A Very Big Thing with implications for everyone given present Ashkenazi dominance of the gate keeping heights of our cultural and intellectual life.
One of the many reasons I’m an Israel Fan is that Leftist fury in response to the continued existence of same is one of the very few things which bring at least some Progressive Jews face to face with Contradictions. Not nearly enough of them, and they rarely seem willing to extrapolate beyond the self-interested Israel Issue, but one can hope.
Yes, yes… Zaphod Bad. Zaphod go room now.
Eppur Si Muove.
Not sure that Progressive (so-called) support for Israel is as strong as you seem to imply (or to hope….).
Neo, or anyone who may have insights, do you think that the attitude of Weiss reflects that of the bulk of the American Jewish community, or simply a certain class who consider themselves liberal elites?
She is obviously blind to the obvious oxymoron in her position. No President in memory has done more for Jews than Trump. Now, when saying that, I am making some assumptions that may be questionable. The most significant is that the American Jewish cmmunity, in general, identify with and support Israeli Jews.
Trump’s consistent support for Israel seems to carry very little weight with vocal portions of the community.
My own opportunities for direct input from the Jewish community are limited. Close members of my family had very close Jewish friends in their younger days. But, to my knowledge they did not discuss politics, and time and physical separation now limits communication–certainly for me. My one routine contact in the community is my Ophthalmologist. I know that he he has ties to family in Israel (coincidentally his name is Israel) and that he visits periodically. Whenever he returns, or when there are developments that affect Israel, as recently, we discuss his opinions, and and any feedback that he is getting. His comments are routinely favorable to Trump’s initiatives, and to the results that follow. I have no idea how he feels about Trump’s personality; he judges him on results.
Obvious aspects of Trump’s personality have been lamented many times by many people on this forum. Yet, most can tolerate those while acknowledging the positive aspects of his performance and applauding his successes; many of which should be seen as non-partisan. This begs the question; are we more, or less, sophisticated than the Bari Weiss types?
If you have a higher IQ than a head of cabbage and an attention span longer than a gnat’s than you know that Trump didn’t normalize “bigotry” or “hatred” or “anti-Semitism” or any of the other “isms” or “phobias” the left keeps inventing. They are part and parcel of leftism and have been fully on display for decades.
https://thenewamerican.com/anti-semitism-in-the-occupy-wall-street-movement/
“Anti-Semitism in the Occupy Wall Street Movement
by Daniel Sayani October 11, 2011”
We all remember that Donald Trump was President in 2011, right? No, wait. It’s starting to come back to me. I recall a very liberal “light worker” was President then. Just by virtue of his nomination, he told us, the rise of the oceans ceased, the planet began to heal, and for the first time in human history we began to provide health care to the sick. He was still months away from being elected but Chicago Jesus could work these miracles merely by his healing presence on the national stage. Indeed, the international stage; just ask the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Why wait, award the prize to “The One” that “we have been waiting for.” Who cares if he kicked over buckets of gasoline on every fire of conflict from Libya to Afghanistan. Who cares if he flooded Europe with a hostile population, and almost single handedly (he had help from Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton [who said of the Desert Duck, “We came, we saw, he died.”] restarted the Islamic African slave trade*…
https://eastwestreporters.com/2020/06/14/does-black-lives-really-matter-black-men-sold-for-200-per-head-slave-trade-happening-in-libya-in-2020/
(“When Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was in charge of Libya, Slave Trade was punishable by death.
Blacks were treated equally and he employed and surrounded Himself with them.
After his Government was toppled and he was killed by The Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton administration…Libya has become a humanitarian d?saster.
…a black man sells for the sum of $200 Per Head.
…Women are sold into sex slavery and forced Labour.
Libya was one of the best African Countries when Gaddafi was President before Barack ?bama and Hilary Clinton happened to Libya.)
https://lasentinel.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/12/INT-Libyan-Slave-Trade1-700×470.png
Can’t you feel all the racial healing Obama brought to the nation, and then the world? I’m feelin’ it.
I mean Barack Obama brought us something no U.S. President has ever given us before. His “kill list” of drone targets, including American citizens.** Give the man a second Nobel Peace Prize!
But I digress:
“In addition, however, the Occupy Wall Street movement has also included a fair deal of anti-Semitic protesters, who rely on classically leftist and communist anti-semitic arguments associating Jews with capitalism, and who are informed by the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rhetoric espoused by those leftist coalitions fueling the Occupy Wall Street movement.
As the protests enter their fourth week, centered around Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, several videos of participants spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric have surfaced, sparking new concerns about the groups and ideological positions represented at the protests. In addition, there are inexorable ties between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the “Arab Spring” protests threatening geopolitical stability in the Middle East…”
Who normalized all the hatred, “isms,” and “phobias?” mainstream leftists like Obama, Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi. By pretending nothing of the sort exists on the left. Biden’s still doing it. Antifa is “just an idea.” Funny; that idea sure loots a lot of stores, sets a lot of buildings on fire, beats a lot of people up, and even murders a number of people.
Then blaming a non-existent White supremacist movement for leftist violence.
Because they can’t afford to offend their base. Bari Weiss may not be running for office, and therefore doesn’t have a base to offend, but that doesn’t make her any more capable of seeing the world as it is. She blames Trump for all the leftist hatred she made herself willfully blind to for years before “President Trump” was remotely even a possibility.
*The Quran is, to Muslims, the eternal, uncreated word of Allah. It has no human input but has existed for eternity with Allah engraved on tablets in heaven. And according to the hadith collections, the eternal Quran can even talk. Two eternal beings (actually more according to the ahadith) with distinct personal characteristics and abilities, but never forget Islam is strict unitarian monotheism, infidels. And according to Allah slavery is among the “good things” he permits to the Muslims, particularly sex slavery:
Surah (chapter) 4 Aya (verse) 24: “Also ?forbidden are? married women—except ?female? captives in your possession.1 This is Allah’s commandment to you. Lawful to you are all beyond these—as long as you seek them with your wealth in a legal marriage, not in fornication. Give those you have consummated marriage with their due dowries. It is permissible to be mutually gracious regarding the set dowry. Surely Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.”
I’ve debated Muslims who flat out deny the plain meaning of these words. They claim that the Islamic State was un-Islamic for taking Christian and Yazidi girls and women captive and using them and/or selling them to others as sex slaves. The plain meaning of the text says that is exactly what Allah told the Muslims to do. The next line of retreat for Muslims is to claim there is some sort of context that means Islam doesn’t really allow what Allah plainly allows.
The direct textual context demonstrates that slavery, in this instance sex slavery, is exactly what Allah is authorizing. The overall scriptural context demonstrates that Allah approves of slavery. The historical context demonstrates that Islam has always approved of slavery (Muslims particularly in the west are convinced that Islam was supposed to end slavery; good luck finding that in their own texts as there is zero support for that, and Islam never developed an abolitionist movement since Allah and Muhammad both approved of slavery, and in the case of Muhammad and the four “rightly guided” Caliphs who followed him all owned slaves, had sex with their slave girls, and bought and sold slaves). The ahadith, or reports of Muhammads teachings and sayings, provides the direct historical context for 4:24:
SAHIH MUSLIM, VOLUME 2, #3432
Abu Said al-Khudri reported that at the Battle of Hunain Allah’s messenger sent an army to Autas and encountered the enemy and fought with them. Having overcome them and taken them captives, the Companions of Allah’s messenger seemed to refrain from having intercourse with captive women because of their husbands being polytheists. Then Allah, Most High, sent down regarding that: “And women already married, except those whom your right hands possess (Quran – 4:24), (i.e. they were lawful for them when their Idda (menstrual) period came to an end).
The two Sahihs (Sahih al Bukhari and Sahih Muslim) are after the Quran the highest authorities in Sunni Islam. All the ahadith in these collections are sahih grade. This is the highest grade, and the normal English transliterations such as “reliable” or “authentic” don’t really convey the weight they carry in Sunni Islam. Sahih ahadith are beyond question. Sunni Muslims are heretics if they don’t accept them without question. I’m not sure if they are heretics if they question the next lower grade of Hasan (good), and they are free to reject Da’if (weak) ahadith (indeed Da’if ahadith aren’t legal for use in Islamic jurisprudence). But I can cite Quran verses where Allah tells Muslims they are heretics if they question anything once Allah and his prophet Muhammad have decided a matter.
In the historical context provided by the canonical Islamic texts Muslims already knew they could rape the unmarried or widowed women they captured after killing all the men, but at Autas for the first time they captured husbands along with their wives. And they went to Muhammad for a ruling on this; they didn’t want to commit adultery. Allah “sent down” Surah 4:24. Married women are haram (forbidden for sexual use) except for their captive and slave women (“those that your right hands possess” is a euphemism that some though certainly not all English language transliterations use and that Muslims cling to as if means anything other than a man’s possession, just like any of his other property; other verses in the Quran that make use of that euphemism make it clear these women are slaves, and wives for all effective purposes are too).
If the Libyans didn’t make things clear enough, when Obama effectively overthrew Hosni Mubarak and installed the original Muslim terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, in power in Egypt they put their enthusiasm for the divinely ordained institution in clear written terms. The “Freedom and Justice Party,” the Ikhwan’s or Brotherhood’s deceptive name for their political party, held a constitutional convention. In addition to reinstating the dhimma or Zuma (third class status for non-Muslims) the reinstituted slavery. All the while the Democrats under Obama were running around claiming that Republicans secretly wanted to put black Americans “back in chains, y’all,” they were openly supporting a Sharia supremacist party in Egypt that openly wanted to enslave black Africans. After all, Saudi Arabia didn’t formally abolish slavery until 1960 (formally; it still exists) and Mauritania didn’t make slavery nominally illegal until 1980 (again, it still exists and virtually nobody gets prosecuted despite the law). But, but, you say it’s the “Freedom and Justice” party. Who can be against freedom, or justice, and it’s right there in the name of the Brotherhood’s party name. Ah, my friends, you may have heard of the divinely ordained form of Islamic lying called taqiyah. But you aren’t familiar with the other forms of lying that Allah permits, sometimes requires, Muslims to partake in. In this case tauriya. This is the use of terms which Muslims understand will give the uninitiated a false impression. The words “freedom” and “justice” mean one thing to outsiders. Which is why they use them; to throw outsiders off. To them it means “freedom from man’s law,” such as the old Egyptian constitution. And the “justice of Allah’s law,” or Shariah. And Shariah expressly permits slavery. It’s blasphemous to prohibit anything that Allah approves of. So they put it in writing.
**I’m not saying that Anwar Al Awlaki shouldn’t have been killed. We are too promiscuous with birthright citizenship. Still, it’s hard to justify the later killing of his unimplicated teenage son, also an American citizen, considering no actual worthwhile targets were within blast range of the kid.
Oldflyer:
You ask, “Do you think that the attitude of Weiss reflects that of the bulk of the American Jewish community, or simply a certain class who consider themselves liberal elites?”
I can’t answer your question except with my impressions. The Jewish liberals I know and the non-Jewish liberals I know are just about identical in their politics, so I see nothing inherently Jewish about the politics of the Jewish liberals.
Regarding Israel and Trump, the liberal Jews I know are either lukewarm in their support of Israel or uncaring about Israel, or they support the Palestinians like most leftists. Probably fewer of the latter. But they are for the most part also secular Jews and only identify ethnically and culturally as Jewish rather than religiously.
However, I know Jews who are politically conservative, and although some of them are religious they are not all religious. I’m not sure what differentiates them to make them politically conservative, but they are somewhat more likely to be business people rather than elites or intellectuals.
I read Weiss’ book on how to fight anti-Semitism, and was very disappointed. She repeated anti-Trump tropes like “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville. The TDS is strong with her. Neo is right—-she seems more focused on getting progressives to like the American Jewish community, than on asking we conservatives for help. I get the sense she thinks we’re icky. Ok, Bari—-good luck. Neo is right—-you’ll need it. You’re giving we conservatives the Heisman—-did you think we wouldn’t notice?
My reaction to Bari’s article was this: for crying out loud, are you just figuring this out now??!! I’m looking forward to the article she writes 10 years from now praising Trump for his support of Israel, assuming the 1st amendment hasn’t been repealed by then.
As Neo says, Weiss–like so many–failed to provide as many as one example of the sins of which she accuses Trump.
As a general matter, no progressives do. They take a vile adjective and pretend–and insist you believe–that it’s an objectively valid noun.
If you question it, or ask for examples, it’s “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU……” whatever.
There is none, absolutely, nothing to be gained by discussing with these people, except if it helps you to have an object for your frustration If you’re interested, you can maneuver them into more and sillier excesses, but you’re the only one who would notice.
The Democratic party in Minnesota is funded in large part by Jewish money. It was always interesting watching them with Ilhan Omar. It really came down to, “Could you please not say something else anti-Semetic until the check clears?
And they still write the checks this year. There’s a successful black Republican businessman running against her, but he gets none of that money. The Star Tribune said that his belief in “self-reliance and limited government” is not a fit for the district.
Juden4Trump–
Instead of knocking on doors, you can sign up with the GOP to make calls for Trump with your computer:
https://trumptalk.gop
Great Essay. No kidding. As a former cotton picker, corn husker, and pig pen shoveler who got a degree in French literature at Columbia, I have always wondered how Trump could excite such hatred. I don’t know how many times someone has been stupefied when I have said that he doesn’t excite that kind of hatred in me or how many times I’ve been met with disbelief. I just have to keep my mouth shut on politics these days. I don’t have an answer to this question, but this hatred smells of class hatred an awful lot. Trump’s biggest deficit, the one that makes him untouchable, seems to the the lack of smooth manners, politesse. He’s too much like a working class slob. Democrats by and large just won’t go near that, no matter how dangerous, law-breaking or repulsive the left acts.
There is a lot of good writing in Weiss’ article, but you are correct that the glaring blind spot is that she detests “Trumpists” primarily for seeing and fearing exactly the same things that she wants Jews to see and fear.
The late, great, but recently —and outrageously— de-platformed “Chateau Heartiste” blog, which assuredly didn’t have much of a soft touch/soft spot for the Jooooos, published an allegedly credible statistic based on exit polling from the 2016 presidential election indicating that about 60% of “self-identified married Jewish men” voted for Trump! Bari Weiss’s TDS was probably exacerbated by the corresponding figure for “self-identified Jewish women” (married or otherwise?) of about 8%.
Steve57 – Great comment. But Obama was no common thug with a “kill list.” He had a fancy, Harvard Law (where he protested for it to hire Derrick Bell, the father of Critical Race Theory that’s done so much to tear apart the country) name for it. His kill list was entitled the “disposition matrix.” How’s that for sanitizing it?
I appreciate the critique of Ms. Weis’ article. There is none so blind as he who won’t see, or words to that effect.
Progressive Liberals used to be the spiritual lead for the Democratic Party; its best feature was its idealism and an optimistic desire, even if it didn’t amount to much. But they are no longer driving the bus; they’re passengers now, near the back and viewing with some alarm that the route is taking them into a bad part of town. But many of them are still happy to be along for the ride.
Matt Taibbi has an article out tonight on the dawning age of Social Media censorship. I found its tone striking; I put his awakening at about 65% now. Bari, she’s still in the low 40’s. But for people who can perceive and are willing to think critically, once started the path is not one that is forsaken.
Since all of Biden’s public appearances seem to consist of a Jumbo-tron teleprompter and a scattering of people (most of them event staff), it looks like all the Democrat enthusiasm is relegated to people in black, burning buildings and beating up other people. All of Trump’s rallies, on the other hand, are packed with people in bright colors, having a ball, smiling and happy and singing along with the Village People. But Joe is leading in the polls, so…..he has that going for him.
huxley
Liberals have long held a deep contempt, to the point of hatred, of Republicans. Even Truman characterized Dewey as Hitler in the 1948 election.
Truman in 1948 wasn’t the first. Consider Henry Wallace in 1940, running as FDR’s Vice Presidential candidate. From The New Dealers’ war: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the war within World War II, by Thomas Fleming (page 77):
Note that Henry Wallace claimed that “every appeaser is a Republican.” Undoubtedly, Henry Wallace would also have claimed that every Congressman who voted in 1941 against extending the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was also an appeaser. The extension passed Congress by one vote . Footnote 4 cites the NYT for the vote tallies.
Note that a quarter of the Democrats voted against the extension. Republicans who voted against extending the draft were undoubtedly “appeasers ” according to Vice President Wallace, but so were the quarter of Congressional Democrats who also voted against extending the draft. So much for Henry Wallace’s claim that “every appeaser is a Republican.”
While decrying critical race theory, Weiss lets critical race theory frame her views on Trump.
“both the American and Russian revolutions were part of the march of freedom of the past 150 years.” V.P. Henry Wallace speaking to a crowd at Madison Square Garden
There is a continuum. Some like Ms Weiss have taken only a couple steps. Candace Owens, Brandon Straka and others have gone further.
Here’s an interesting case:
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2020/10/campaign-2020s-missing-issue-wall.html
“Gujral, a registered Democrat, said the stories of a homeless veteran, an illegal alien, a dead six-year-old girl, and the mother of a law enforcement officer killed by an illegal alien — all featured in her film, America’s Forgotten — are representative of those impacted by illegal immigration. In her investigation into their stories, she ‘discovered the truth behind immigration fraud,’ she said.”
“I set out to make a film that was going to be very pro-illegal immigration, pro-caravans, pro-migrants, that’s where I started. The film ended up completely different, and I think it was because I stuck with the investigation.”
I would imagine there were plenty of nice old Mensheviks who were great friends of good old Bolsheviks until they weren’t.
(a) Trump is an “obscenity” (b) he is worthy of disgust (c) he has “normalized” bigotry and cruelty; and (d) that said normalization has “crippled” American society.
Trump is a gentleman. He is worthy of respect. He has stood against normalization of sanctimonious hypocrisy and cruelty #PoliticalCongruenceExclusion #DiversityBreedsAdersity #HateLovesAbortion. That said, he has mitigated progress of cruel and unusual, saving American society from acute liberalism. He has ended Obama’s wars and confronted first-order forcings of catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform. He has exposed Obamacares and progressive prices that assure unaffordable and unavailable medical care. Trump is all American: Pro-Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
“I set out to make a film that was going to be very pro-illegal immigration, pro-caravans, pro-migrants, that’s where I started. The film ended up completely different, and I think it was because I stuck with the investigation.”
Good for her. Immigration is normal. Immigration reform (e.g. catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform a.k.a. refugee crises) is evidence of a clear and progressive problem in their native nations. Emigration reform to mitigate collateral damage at both ends of the bridge and throughout. That said, the tell-tale hearts at the clinic of the unknown child are beating ever louder.
Weiss has an important section on that Man of the Year, Ibram X. Kendi (long excerpt for context).
It is hard not to believe that someone in some Universal Karmic Bureaucracy has a wicked sense of humor.
The whole essay was, as pointed out, an amazing feat of seeing the elephant in the room and yet complaining about the mahout trying to get remove it.
However, that shows the insidiousness of interminably repeated propaganda.
Jewish community leaders sabotaging their own people is at least as old as the writings of Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Speaking as a person who identifies as a Jewish woman and is a registered Democrat in New York State, I’m voting for Trump for all of Bari’s reasons— I’m terrified of Left-wing anti racist, anti Zionist, anti American ‘socialists.’ But unlike Bari, I don’t have TDS
In a normal world I would have switched my party affiliation years ago, but I feel like I have to keep it all secret. People with TDS are nuts and they’re thick on the ground.
The situation reminds me of the time my parents, typical NY liberal Jewish Democrats, quietly and angrily, voted for Reagan with great relief.
I would join my wholehearted agreement to the chorus of praise above. And add simply that the confusion of left-liberal Jews did not start with Trump. Virulent anti-semitism on the left has been building for a long time, just like CRT didn’t come out of nowhere. In the face of this, left-liberal Jews take refuge from their “cognitive dissonance” as the author called it in an idealized version not just of liberalism but of the glory days of the Revolution, which in places like the Soviet Union appeared to promise Jews full participation in society before it went terribly wrong. This idealization seems to be a big part of what liberals do these days as a way out of the impossible contradictions squeezing them and threatening their well-being. But it is also the source of their increasing intolerance for disagreement. Perfection leaves no room for empirical reality. Which explains why the left has become a comfortable place for them. The left doesn’t squirm over challenges to its paradigms; it simply represses them. All of this is to say that Trump is blamed not because he created this discomfort but because he has made it impossible to ignore. Personally, I think we as conservatives and conservative Jews need to keep pressing the contradictions, without, on the other hand, demonizing them the way they do, us. Hence I applaud this essay as well as the thoughtful comments from experienced readers that follow.
Gringo: When I wrote, “Even Truman characterized Dewey as Hitler in the 1948 election,” the “even” I had in mind was more that Truman is a Democrat whom present-day Republicans sometimes admire for his plain-spokenness and toughness towards the Soviets.
Henry Wallace is an interesting character — something of a forerunner to today’s Democrats for being quite left-wing, sympathetic to the Soviets, and New Age.
Wallace was FDR’s Vice-President 1941-1945. The Party replaced him with Truman for VP in the 1944 election. Truman fired Wallace as Sec. of Commerce in 1946 for a conciliatory speech to the Soviets.
I’d say we missed a bullet that Wallace wasn’t VP in the 1944 election and therefore didn’t become President when Roosevelt died.
She closes her eyes to reality. She will thank the “liberals” for killing her. Good night, My Dear. Those of use who want to resist are.
I’m not an orthodox Jew, just a man considering being a Jew with a functioning mind. These people are after us. We need to fight back. Hard.
Arm yourselves.
Writes Neo:
Neo is right. Weiss pontificates:
To which we have to reply, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Donald Trump is the Classical Liberal of our time, determinedly on the side of Freedom and the Dignity of the Individual, working against the Leftist forces of Tyranny. Where but on the Marxist Left have “bigotry and cruelty” reared their ugly heads? Who is rioting in our cities and attacking the police? Who is espousing ‘critical race theory’ and polluting the minds of our youth? Not Mr Trump, for sure.
President Trump represents our best hope of returning to the Common Sense of our Founders, who understood, long before Marx, the unalloyed danger posed by the forces of the Mob and the Tyrants who would turn one group against another, and demand allegiance or death to their serfs.
Ms Weiss understands the enemy. She just doesn’t understand who is on her side.
/L.E. Joiner (Walking Creek World)
Bari Weiss is Word Person: she approaches politics and political action with words. Thus saying the right words in the right way has a gigantic influence over her — but saying the right words in the wrong way, as Trump does, causes her great mental angst. She also thinks that saying the right words in the right way can rearrange reality though the power of argument.
That was true once for all of American politics. But today’s Left has shown that (1) words mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at a given moment, and (2) when the Left doesn’t get its way with words, they’ll turn to actions: burning, looting, murder.
Bari Weiss is trying to stop an oncoming train by arguing with it.
Hers is one of the clearest cases of cognitive dissonance I’ve encountered, but she’s not the only one in the commentariat to display the same symptoms. Rod Dreher is another example, although reality has made some inroads in his anti-Trump thinking. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher
My hopes for this election hinge on these people either holding their nose and voting for Trump, or at least sitting out the election.
I think American Jews would benefit from living in a matrix where public policy is animated by the idea that accomplishment is personal, that law is to be administered impartially, and that we have a common citizenship where the privileges and immunities of people who have reached their majority are more-or-less the same for all. There’s only one political party whose office-holders generally assent to these notions. Taking that to heart would suggest Jews in Manhattan vote the same way as evangelicals in Jackson, Tn. And that’s a bridge too far for most of them.
Bari Weiss is Word Person:
good point
Anyone who wants to see what a full conversion from far Left to the sensible Right looks like should read David Horowitz’ autobiography, “Radical Son”. After being raised as a communist by communists in NYC, in 1984, as he puts its, he saw no alternative but to pull the lever for Reagan. That is a move Weiss will never make, out of fear for her position in Jewish life. She must hate Trump to feel good about herself. When the Left herds her and hers into the cattle cars, she’ll still be raving about “the Right”.
Pathetic.
“the “new ideology” ”
There is nothing new about the ideology Bari Wiess describes and doesn’t name. It’s called Marxism. (Frankfurt school of Marxism if you want to go into nuances).
Maybe Weiss’ knowledge of Marxism isn’t good enough to identify it when she sees it.
America is in the midst of a Bolshevik revolution.
Smells like the 1920’ies.
As a Jew ™ and pretty secular at that, it is my belief that it is time for her and her ilk to move aside. No sympathy for them on any level. Go with self-preservation or throw in with those that hate you. Don’t care if it’s the feelings of the majority of non-Orthodox.
Basically, at this time, it’s every man for themself.
Secular and Reform Jews might want to consider the possibility—or probability—that conservatives are getting tired of getting their hands bitten by secular and Reform Jews, every time we reach out to the American Jewish community.
There’s not much politically in it for conservatives. Jews are less than 2% of the American population, and are clustered in urban areas that are very unlikely to vote GOP anytime soon. No, most of us support Israel and the American Jewish community because it’s the right thing to do.
But, at some point, you can’t help but saying to yourself “OK, we’ve done enough.” Israel’s 75th anniversary is a few years away. Conservatives can say “OK, we sheltered and supported Israel long enough for it to become a viable state that can defend itself. Well…mission accomplished! Time to move on to other things.” Especially if most American Jews keep giving you the Heisman.
You can’t help someone who won’t help themselves. As Rod Stewart sang in “Young Hearts,” there ain’t no point in talking if there’s nobody listening. Secular and Reform Jews aren’t listening.
OK, then. Good luck, y’all.
Years ago I watched on TV some sci-fi movie (maybe based on an HG Wells book??) where folks lived an idyllic existence, wanting for nothing, no crime, no conflict, etc.
And when summoned by their ruler – whom the denizens considered an all knowing, generous , perfect God – they willingly marched into some sort of underground cavern from which nobody ever returned.
I don’t recall the exact mechanism of their demise once in there.
Those folks who had not yet been summoned for that one way trip ( you can check in, but you can’t check out) into that subterranean “heaven” realized that nobody ever returned .
But when it was their turn to be summoned, they all went like a bunch of lemmings.
Bari Weiss, and folks that think like her, would have jumped to the front of that line if she had been in that movie.
The “intellectual” liberal progressive (as opposed to the non-thinking voter) is so concerned with retaining their membership in their exclusive, upper-west-side cocktail party milieu (or equal) , they will never, ever leave it and like a bunch of lemmings, will only act or say whatever they believe their group – their BORG – would find acceptable.
They are so frightened of being excommunicated from their upper-crust, correct thinking group of arrogant, close minded lemmings they have to gently tip-toe to that “line in the sand,” to even pose a question.
They are close minded, intolerant, and supremely arrogant.
In this regard they are no different than members of the KKK or Nazi Party or ANTIFA; they refuse to think independent of the “correct thinking” demanded by their membership of their BORG.
Frankly, I think Bari Weiss is a total idiot, a moron.
She can write very well and probably scored an 800 on her verbal SAT score, but she is incapable of thinking.
She refuses to believe that history can repeat itself, despite 5000 years of history repeating itself.
A big, fast moving, Lignum vitae 2×4 (a wood so dense it does not float) is approaching her face, but she refuses to believe her face is the target because it is being swung by folks who she believes, in her stupidity and contrary to all the evidence, think like her.
She refuses to believe that these folks want her dead.
And the same folks that want her dead, want all of us dead as well (us being the deplorable’s).
But if history is any guide, they will come first for the canaries in the coal mine.
And we all know which group that is.
The Weiss article, Neo’s post and the comments remind me of the saying that
Reform Judaism is the Democrat Party at prayer.
WOW! Like negroes all Jews think alike? Say bye to the 1950’s, people.
This article does not refer to religious (Orthodox) Jews, it’s referring to JINO’s. You know, the shrimp eating, non-kosher, gay, sabbath driving, pro abortion, blm supporting hypocrites that are strictly Jewish in name only.
JINO’s do not speak for religious Jews. They are bereft of the mindset and scruples to do so.
Perhaps they should try screaming helplessly at the sky. I’ve heard that it’s cathartic.
“Liberal confusion”:
No confusion here:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/pro-trump-rally-attacked-in-liberal-ithaca-ny/
Or here:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/free-speech-rally-marred-by-violence-as-counterprotesters-storm-event
Could it be that “We’re all Antifa now!!”?
Bari Weiss is 36 years old. She’s been out of school about 13 years. Can anyone explain to me what Weiss has done as an adult professional to justify her status as a public intellectual, let alone one occupying the position of New York Times contributor?
I’m not saying she’s stupid or untalented or is wrong about everything, but what has she actually produced/accomplished in her life that anyone should pay the slightest bit of attention to her?
Because that’s why our elites hate Trump. Because they are largely made up of people of no particular merit whose value and standing are built on nothing more than the social class to which they belong. They are a member of the elite because they are a member of the elite.
So when Trump comes along and not only flaunts but doesn’t even acknowledge the cultural shibboleths of the elite, he’s not just being crude or vulgar. He’s attacking their very sense of self-worth.
Someone else brought up Rod Dreher, who is significantly more accomplished than Weiss, is really no longer even a participant in modern elite society, believes Christians are facing a new age of persecution, and acknowledges that Donald Trump is a primary defender against that persecution right now. Yet Dreher can’t help but heap scorn on Trump nearly every time he mentions his name. Dreher can’t even stop paying to read the New York Times after publicly branding it as one of the chief champions of anti-Christian bigotry.
That’s because even though Dreher has basically left elite society behind, he still defines himself as an elite who is better than those grubby little people he grew up with. What’s that old Groucho Marx line? “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would have me as a member?” People like Weiss and Dreher can’t leave their “club” because if they’re not a member, they’re NOTHING.
Mike
I read that Tablet piece yesterday and I wanted to write to her and say, Bari, please, listen to me with everything you have. I am an evangelical Christian Texan with six children who did and will vote for Trump and I am telling you, I and every Trump voter I know would literally die for the liberal ideals you so eloquently outline. We are the best friends you have if you love classic American liberalism. Please understand this before it is too late.
It really wouldn’t shock me if Weiss has feet of clay in public because of the blow-back she knows she’d get for outwardly supporting Trump, after being branded an Enemy of the People from the moment she moved from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times.
(i.e. — she pulls the lever for Trump in the voting booth, while making the case for why his positions should be supported in the latter part of her essay. But Bari also thinks she’s giving herself plausible deniability with her anti-Trump rant early in the piece, because an essay warning other Jews about the dangers of the current Democratic Party ideology without including some form of Trump-bashing would, she believes, make her a pariah in the New York-Washington social and political world she wants to live and work in. It’s a form of virtue-signaling lite, where she knows all too well what the problem is, but wants to keep her options open, just in case she really is in the minority of Jews who can’t see things like The Squad gaining influence, or don’t care what’s happening within the Democratic caucus.)
“ the ideas this country is based on truly are exceptional, worthy of our relentless defense and more. They are under siege by Trumpism” says Weiss.
Quite the opposite. Trump is working to preserve the very things that make us exceptional. The woke Democrats just can’t see past their hatred and offense.
Weiss is trying to be one of those “cool kids“ that she is simultaneously making fun of. You just can’t have it both ways.
I empathize with her struggle because I was there myself for too long. But you eventually realize you can’t remain in the middle ground because there is no middle ground in this fight.
For so-called Reform Judaism and its adjacent denominations, and has been remarked upon by others (see Podhoretz), the religion for these Jews is often (but not exclusively) socialism.
In my adolescence I was part of a Labor Zionist youth group. We were inculcated with socialist doctrine (we even learned ” The Internationale.”)
For Ms. Weiss and those like her, they cling to the notion that “Tikun Olam” is duly religious and not actuated socialist dogma.
Ms. Weiss has already been put against the metaphorical wall and eliminated.
Similarly, “good” Jews like Harvey and Jeffrey are also being eliminated as their usefulness is gone.
Just as Labor Zionism is defunct (and an oxymoron), so too are liberal Jews a thing of the past.
For now, the usefulness of progressive Jews will continue. They will be used like the Capos they are.
Their time will no doubt come, as it did in the Camps.
The hope and salvation of the Jews (and Israel) lies in the fortunes of people like Netanyahu and Trump – men our liberal and Progressive coreligionists loathe.
No One @ 11:24 AM
You mean Kapos, not Capos.
You bring up salvation and Jews and Israel.
I’ve read that Israeli Jews generally support Trump.
IMHO it takes only one missile exploding in your living room that forces one to see, feel and hear reality; quite a bit different than some “intellectual” conversation held in the confines of your own safe space.
Like others, excellent analysis! Anne Applebaum’s latest book — really, an extended Atlantic piece in large print — similarly alleges the growth of dangerous international populism, verging on totalitarian Super-Duper Power domination!
Apparently, she’s married a Jewish Pole, and alarums doubled do not enlightenment create. David P. Goldman (“Spengler” columnist) disabuses her of her ritual ad hitlerum delusions in his review. Or at least us, at lawandliberty.org
Conclusory triple jumps by intellectuals are not at all as entertaining as the athletic Olympic version.
In Biden crime family news, let’s widen our focus to include the Deep State that created this decisive 2020 election scandal.
Before Biden’s Corruption and Ukraine, There Was Serbia and Iraq and ‘Colour Revolutions
So, the Biden family was engaged in a corrupt web of international graft? Surely, they aren’t alone. The collapse of the Presidential Debate Commission into scandal has exposed a web of corrupt Trump hating bipartisanship sinecures steelmaned by the Deep State.
This piece at Zerohedge sums up the investigatory findings at RevolverNews and will catch you up: a web of NGOs, rich foundations, and US government agencies have been running destabilisation campaigns, with George Soros at its Center for 20 years. Therefore, the Biden’s political play for international wealth.
(Are they also running BLM and the Red fascist Antifa campaigns and riots against police and Trump?)
Who else did and does the same thing? Selling out the USA to foreign interests?
Check it out. The Deep State Swamp Waters are stinky and manure filled, indeed: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bidens-did-ukraine-there-was-iraq-and-serbia
Thank you, Mr President Trump! Without your admirable audacity and timely, capacious courage, libraries of corruption and treason would have remained shuttered for maybe decades.
Now, we are tasked to fill up the prisons with the guilty!
What’s darkly hilarious is that those of us who’ve long been on the right-leaning side of the aisle saw this Leftist Insanity coming (not in all the details, but in a roundabout way) about thirty years ago.
It was obvious that this sewage would eventually spill over, although the lag-time was unknown, for the simple reason that Ideas Have Consequences, and the ideas which have blossomed into a psychotic superstition dominating the Democratic party, the universities, the HR departments, the entertainment industry, and the news-media were already well-ensconced in left-wing thought by the late 80’s. The death of Sam Nunn was probably the end of that brief, shining moment in which it was possible for Democrats to not despise patriotism, either clandestinely or openly.
That’s why we started describing the Democratic party in these terms, all the way back in the early 90’s. Bari Weiss et alia are finally climbing to the top of the mountain, expressing surprise at all the unexpected things they can now see. But if they’d turn slightly to their right, they’d see a passel of historians, economists, social conservatives, philosophy majors, and graduates of conservative seminaries, just sitting there around a now-well-aged campfire, eating from forty-year-old canned beanie-weenies and griping, “What took you people so long?”
The other belated recognition we find obnoxious is this one: The GOP in the 80’s and 90’s and early-00’s wasn’t any more hateful or bigoted than it is now. That crap was always exactly what it is now: A Democrat-party slander abetted by the news media for the purpose of controlling minority voting blocs. We’re happy all these #WalkAway folk are finally recognizing that it’s currently a big lie. But those of us who’ve been entirely righteous in our love-of-fellow-man since we were teenagers sure would love it if they’d stop saying, “Gee, I remember that Republicans were all homophobes and racists back in the 80’s, but now they seem to be nice people, so I feel better about associating with them.” The idea that the Democratic party was the party of “the nice people” was a lie back then. The notion that the GOP coddled racism was utter horseshit, back then.
Frankly I think we longstanding classical-liberal/libertarian/conservative/so-con types deserve huge kudos for the way we’ve been patiently putting up with all the insults and blood-libels all these years, rather than blowing up neighborhoods and lynching our political opponents in the streets every five years like the Left does.
Steve Balser/1:02am:
‘Mensheviks..and Old Bolsheviks..’
Worth remembering too that nearly all the Old Bolsheviks were devoured and then those who’d devoured were given a one way ticket to execution cells in the Lubyanka, Lefortovo, etc, etc.
Aaahhhhh… The Left’s perpetual ability to devour ALL: 40-million in the Soviet Union and 60-million in China and millions tossed in at fuzzy places like N.Korea, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Laos, Cuba….
But, these current vacuous dweebs of the West are gonna be gentler… Stalin & Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel, Che… Well intended, but we just need more empathy & high minded/generous EQUALTY!!
Right…?? It’s all on my bookshelves but NONE of theirs.
I Love Liberty. It is in Breathtaking Danger.
Cognitive dissonance is inherent to the liberal ideology bent on divergence (e.g. generational, factional, sectarian). She needs to lose the facade of tolerance, open mindedness, discover principles, and find her way home. We can leave a candle to guide her journey, but the choice… Yeah, her choice, not to be conflated with Choice (i.e. wicked solution), is hers.
As for socialization, organization, convergence… religious/moral philosophy to keep honest people honest, and competing interests to mitigate the progress of others to run amuck.
That’s because even though Dreher has basically left elite society behind, he still defines himself as an elite who is better than those grubby little people he grew up with. What’s that old Groucho Marx line? “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would have me as a member?” People like Weiss and Dreher can’t leave their “club” because if they’re not a member, they’re NOTHING.
Dreher is one to spill his guts in print. For 19 years he’s been making the case that he’s self-centered, other-directed, anxiety-ridden, and emotionally labile in ways unbecoming for someone who is roughly male. To some extent, its a function of having had the sh!t kicked out of him as an adolescent. The thing is, (1) if he were an ordinary man, we wouldn’t know that and (2) if he were an ordinary man, that would be a vector of modest significance in defining his personal odyssey.
What’s interesting about Dreher is how weird his self image is. He thinks of himself as this person who went off to the big city for a life of achievement. Then you realize that: over a period of twenty years, he changed jobs a half-dozen times. He did go from a 3d tier city to a 2d tier city to 1st tier cities (FWIW) and may have had some raises along the way, but the mechanics of what he did for a living hardly changed. He never moved into management and his field work was limited to things like visiting cinemas and restaurants. He never worked abroad. His education begins and ends with a J-school degree from LSU. His sister was the issue of the teacher’s college at LSU, he admits she got better grades than he did, and the smart money says she got more community respect than he ever did and had a better pension plan. His father was also an LSU graduate, employed as the public health officer in the West Feliciana Parish. He’s lived his life in the same social class as his father and sister; it’s just that he’ll never be as capable as either one with a hunting rifle or a fishing pole. Oh, but he can cook bouilliabaise.
Note, Dreher’s posturing is what your editors expect at The American Conservative, which has always been a collecting pool of sectarians. Dreher has fewer conceits than most of their contributors and is better at provoking a discussion, so he maintains an audience. (I was banned from his comment boxes, btw).
The core problem is yet unaddressed. Those despising Trump have their open laundry list of reasons, and then their real reason. That is, Trump was elected by people who *refuse* to recognize the value of their college degrees, in securing their identity, their status, and their financial security.
The last 140 years have seen the rise of the academicized elites, at the persistent demand of the ideology created in and for Universities, … progressive ideology. At any one moment that ideology will favor racism, from 1890-1924, or socialism, from 1930-present, or environmentalism, or multiculturalsim, all now mixed with “Critical Theory” marxism.These are ideologies in which 2 connecting threads are always intertwined. The promise of more jobs for college grads, in administering changes in society, and the increased control of society by government, increasing the importance in society of the community of the academicized.
When speaking of Jews, Bari Weiss neglects that college degrees have been the primary ladder by which they have risen in society, from the pre-1924 list of undesirables, to pre-eminent recognition in the world. It is natural that Jews should cling to their college degrees, and to every new ideology progressivism comes up with. This is so, even when the new ideology is stained with epic amounts of Jew-hatred.
Bari Weiss still clings to her college degree, refusing to understand that the institutions offering those degrees are now deeply hostile towards her and fellow Jews, because being so benefits each University’s growth and status.
“…sewage….”
But when you’re on the leading edge of the “arc of history”, don’t you deserve a few perks?
– A corrupt media totally in your corner, totally willing 24/7 to extol your virtues, cover-up your crimes and misrepresent your achievements while vilifying, smearing, slandering and totally misrepresenting your political opponents?
– The right to destroy those political opponents by launching a sustained, intricate and complex intercontinental hoax against them? (Along with an appropriately massive, cover-up not only to hide your crimes but to, with masterful creativity, pin those same crimes on your opponents?—all amplified and covered by same said corrupt media?)
– Substantial and concerted electoral hanky-panky by those counting the ballots?
– Some sweetheart “deals” to make your life a bit more bearable? (Along with another appropriate, massive, corver-up?—by same said corrupt media)… in exchange for just a bit political influence, which you may decide to honor or not, depending on whether you can remember what you promised to whom?….
– Your own private nation-wide militia of violent anarchists (which you can breezily dismiss as a myth, an idea? (Once again covered up by that uber-reliable, eager-to-please, corrupt media?)
– Weaponizing government agencies and the judiciary so that they protect you and your “associates” from any perceived political, um, difficulties? (So that along with a corrupted media, the country can now boast a corrupted IRS, a corrupted DOJ, a corrupted CIA and a corrupted judiciary?…But why stop there? I mean we’re on the leading edge of the “arc of history”?)
– A nice house on, say, Martha’s Vineyard?
– International popularity, international prizes, etc.
Is that too much to ask? Really?
Turn down the volume … it is SO astonishing how Dems/Progs have such little insight. It is all projection.
Thirty secs of insanity.
https://twitter.com/SVNewsAlerts/status/1317643731374383104?s=20
When speaking of Jews, Bari Weiss neglects that college degrees have been the primary ladder by which they have risen in society, from the pre-1924 list of undesirables, to pre-eminent recognition in the world. It is natural that Jews should cling to their college degrees, and to every new ideology progressivism comes up with. This is so, even when the new ideology is stained with epic amounts of Jew-hatred.
See Steven Sailer’s hypothesis. Sailer’s thesis is that American Jews in sum have been of above-the-median affluence since about 1925 and the experience among Ashkenzic Jews of collective immigrant penury lasted less than a generation. If Sailer’s right, the move into higher education among Jews post-dated their initial economic advancement and was a conduit from the strata of skilled labor, artisanship, and merchantry to the fancy professions. See, for example, Bernie Sanders. Eli Sanders (ne Eliasz Gitman) didn’t have much education and billeted his family in a 3 1/2 room apartment in Brooklyn. He earned his living as a salesman. When the census enumerator came a callin’ in 1940 and (among other things) asked the residents what their household income was, the man was given an answer (true or false). The answer the enumerator was given put the Sanders household at about the 85th percentile of the income distribution in this country. Other examples: Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t grow up working class. She was the daughter of a merchant / artisan. Another example: Joseph Epstein, retired of the Northwestern faculty. His father (born in Montreal) never completed high school; his mother did, but she followed what was called ‘the commercial course’. His parents weren’t erudite; there were magazines in their house, but no books. His father was already employed in sales at age 22 and later built his own business.
THANK YOU FOR THE HISTORY REMINDER, steve57, much needed now after the beheading murder brought to us by uncontrolled immigration and the Religion of Peace(-s, TM).
Likewise, R.C.. And then Barry reminds us all of the lengthy prosecution agenda we face in the next Trump term.
We will need more such reminders every month or two ahead. Stick to a Trumpian Reform Agenda. Complacency is the enemy of of accomplishment. There is much that needs to done to secure and expand Liberty.
I hope Trump can get to school choice and defunding the Citadels of Subversion, the Marxist Mafia of the Universities and Ed schools.
So much needs to be done. Herculean labor’s and Augean stables and all that.
With Trump there will be further riots. With Biden there will be further riots but the rioters will certainly get their way then riot more to get more of their way. For a nontrivial fraction of BLM/antifa their way includes arson, violence, looting and intimidating squares. Seems like Jews might suffer disproportionately and that’s before you consider the ostentatious anti-semitism both historical and on current display.
@ RC,
Yeah, about 30 years and a little more. Over a period of 15 or so years as the Red Army Faction and Red Brigade lunatics were either sending themselves to Hell or being sent there by police and military; and, as the Berlin Wall fell, all had seemed poised for the 80s resurgence of classicall liberalism to move from strength to strength.
But a PC movement had already arisen in the United States: built around “the myth of heterosexual AIDS”, as one author put it.
Essentially then, an anal receptive minority of the American population used advertising and unrelenting propaganda to make sure that their disorder that dared not speak its name, was never clearly spoken of; lest the female allies who they assiduously cultivated, send the entire republic into paroxysms of social hysteria.
The process then, of crucifying essential political liberty, speech, and truth, for the sake of so-called compassion, destigmatization, inclusion and acceptance, might not have begun there, but certainly reveived its major impetus there.
The truth could not be spoken. A social fiction took its place; enforced by ideological stormtroopers spouting slogans of, science, tolerance, compassion, understanding, essential diversity, and inclusion. And the truth and the costs and the spill-over effects be damned: and you along with them if you dared to notice and ask ” Why am I paying?”
But ultimately, you cannot live in the same political space with such self-destructive types unless you can keep them at arms length, ensure that they do not open the civic gates to the barbarians out of spite, and finally, make sure that they bear the costs of their own insistently indulged dysfunction. .Otherwise, it will eventually end up killing you.
Not to say that there are not plenty of ass-sniffing masochists who seem quite alright with that denouement, as long as in the moments leading up to their launch into oblivion, they can roll around and deleriously writhe in their own emotional ejecta, like a dog in its own shit.
But, why then should anyone defend such people from the outcomes they so obviously crave?
Some crap about “a shared fate” and “better together”, I hear.
“I want to be very clear: the phenomenon that Weiss describes is neither specific to Jews nor limited to them. It is rife among virtually all liberal Democrats today.”
I understand why Neo added this part. The cultural rot at the top extends far and wide among the “elites” both Jews and Gentiles. It is a problem that such a high percentage of those “elites” are Jewish. Fortunately, people like Neo are on our side and that counts for a lot. Most of my favorite blogs are by conservative Jews.
A more fruitful search for the source of the rot would probably be refugees from the Frankfurt School of the Goethe University in Frankfurt. I’m curious what Neo’s thought are on that subject. One explanation is that the people from the Frankfurt School fled for their lives. Instead of appreciating the culture which had taken them in, they spent the rest of their lives plotting to overthrow the USA.
Years ago I watched on TV some sci-fi movie (maybe based on an HG Wells book??) where folks lived an idyllic existence, wanting for nothing, no crime, no conflict, etc.
And when summoned by their ruler – whom the denizens considered an all knowing, generous , perfect God – they willingly marched into some sort of underground cavern from which nobody ever returned.
I don’t recall the exact mechanism of their demise once in there.
JohnTyler: That was the George Pal version of HG Wells’ “The Time Machine” which came out in 1960 and drove me mad when I was 8 years-old trying to figure out how time travel could work.
In the Pal film (as opposed to the book) the gentle, effete Eloi would march into the Morlock’s underground kingdom as a conditioned response to air raid sirens leftover from the era of human wars. In the film and the book the Eloi would be butchered for meat.
Leonard Nimoy and some Star Trek friends did a wonderful radio drama adaptation of the original Wells story. Highly recommended.
The death of Sam Nunn was probably the end of that brief, shining moment in which it was possible for Democrats to not despise patriotism, either clandestinely or openly.
Nunn is still alive.
I usually ignore NeverTrumpers by now but it is frustrating when people like Weiss, or Joel Kotkin, write long pieces where everything supports the reasons and sentiments that caused Trump to be elected, then say “That Trump is such a horrible person!!!” etc.
For a contrast there is an interview with Fred Siegel in the WSJ this weekend entitled, “An Ex-Liberal Reluctantly Supports Trump”. Siegel finally broke down and came out for Trump. Probably won’t agree with everything he says but the title of his 2014 book, “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class”, which presumably elaborates on the comments in his interview, shows he gets the big picture right. Have not read it yet myself.
And—drum rrrollll—it gets even worse (as it so often does):
(Or should that be “more beguiling”? Or perhaps, “more intriguing”? Probably just “more freakin’ unbelievable”…)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/does-explain-why-facebook-was-so-quick-suppress-hunter-biden-revelations
File under: Crawling out of the woodwork.
….except that it’s perfectly believable. (At this stage of the game, everything is, alas.)
But you really gotta love all those Soros-wellian names. (The man has a tremendous talent. Sheer poetry.)
One of my favorites is the “Democracy Alliance”. A close second, depending on what kind of mood I’m in, is “Center for American Progress”. Then there’s the “Transition Integrity Project” (TIP)—though not Soros, I don’t believe—and LO AND BEHOLD, here we have Facebook’s “election integrity program”—there’s that “integrity” again!! Gosh, who’dathunkit?
It’s raining Integrity!! The stuff’s all over the place….
And then there’s “the usuaL” stuff, you know, like Shelby Steele being muzzled by Amazon…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/amazons-attempt-muzzle-shelby-steele-speaks-volumes-about-race-america-wirepoints
…and Turley making a few corrections here and there over “fragrant lies” told by both interviewer and interviewee:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/meet-press-chuck-todds-flagrant-lies-gretchen-whitmer-interview
(Note: Seven lines down in the Turley article, it looks like there’s a typo: “The roughly 50 opinion…” should probably be, “The roughly 50-page opinion…”)
You know, the usual stuff…. The MSCM doing what it does best!
Better than an Argentinian soap?
Quite possibly. Though one might wish we could have been spared. (And spared him and everyone around him and everyone connected with him.)
https://twitter.com/alexsalvinews/status/1316950202910232577
H/T Lee Smith twitter feed
But these mafiosas are gluttons for punishment. (Because they JUST KNOW that they’ll never HAVE TO face any of it.)
And so, forward.
P.S. And right on cue, we have the NYT weigh in!
https://twitter.com/DarrenJBeattie/status/1317489663150612482
Hopefully the current liberal confusion and recognition that the Democrat Party has lost control to the extreme left will dampen voter turnout. Admittedly it appears that there is only a small minority that seeks to weigh facts and votes based on reason rather than emotion.
Olbermann Wants to Defeat ‘Terrorist Trump,’ Convict and Remove Supporters From Society (e.g. Barr, Hannity, Pence, Giuliani, Rittenhouse), see
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/keith-olbermann-wants-to-defeat-terrorist-trump-convict-and-remove-supporters-from-society/ .
“…dampen voter turnout.”
Makes sense but it’s probably not relevant given the current situation.
I don’t believe they’re relying on “voter turnout”.
The reason for this is that according to “the plan”, they don’t have to worry about “voter turnout”. They don’t NEED voter turnout.
That’s where voter fraud comes in.
Mail-in balloting is the goose that will continue to lay golden eggs. All over the place. For the Democrats.
They likely look at it as though it’s a blank check.
Which is essentially what it is.
One key will be how much violence they will be able to generate in the lead-up to and ON election day.
Anyway, some hopeful items (I hope):
https://twitter.com/JohnJamesMI/status/1317243928601628674
https://twitter.com/SusanStJames3/status/1317692024578035712
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/steve-bannon-behind-roll-out-plan-hunter-biden-emails-says-multiple-stories-multiple
In the end, though, we’re still left with a “tree-that-fell-in-the-forest-but-no-one-saw-it” problem.
Except that even if the proof is clearly presented in this case—that a tree did fall in the forest—the response may well be a concerted, “So what? We don’t care.”
“We don’t give a toss if a tree fell in the forest.
“And we certainly wouldn’t believe any proof if it came from you.”
The always-classy Nancy Pelosi explains why there will NOT be a deal.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-says-she-doesnt-want-to-sweep-up-dumpings-of-this-elephant-after-trump-presidency
This should always have been clear to anyone who understands what kind of game Pelosi has been playing.
The belief that someone with her level of insane hatred would ever have enabled Trump to declare victory is pure fantasy.
“But what about the people?” one might ask.
A good question, but unfortunately, a non sequitur in this particular Battle Royale:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/10/14/nancy-pelosi-has-a-testy-exchange-with-wolf-blitzer-that-well-known-republican-apologist/
Related:
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/amid-historic-absentee-voting-rejected-mail-ballots-could-have
The recent voting behavior of Jews in presidential elections has been at a ratio of a bit more than 2:1, Democrat/Republican.
“Jedem das Seine”
The literal German translation of Latin suum cuique, a fundamental juridical concept meaning “to each his own” or “to each what he deserves”.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/MK38040_Buchenwald_Lagertor.jpg/1920px-MK38040_Buchenwald_Lagertor.jpg
That would make the gate over the entrance to Buchenwald a kind of twisted truism.
Which is why the sign faced inwards to those behind the gate, not outwards to those entering…
The point being that if you invite the devil to dinner dont be surprised at what happens at dinner
He was not just talking of wine, but of power… there is power in choice, and those drunk on the power of the freedom to choose, end up drunk.. .
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Hillel the Elder
The full quote [“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I care for myself only, What am I. And if not now, when?”]
A very controversial quote… but it has worlds to do with what is going now and the choices they are making as what to believe, and what to pick… not like they had not picked the golden calf before…
From Chabbad
In siding so strongly without real reason, and so without real choice, they abnegate choice…
This isn’t about financial status, it’s about social status and class. Which we’re not supposed to have in the USA but, if course, we do. Backing Trump makes you a traitor to your class, whether you class yourself by race or ethnicity, sex, sexuality, or financial status. Whatever box you’ve been assigned. God forbid you should leave whatever box you check, and the unearned tribal privileges that comes in the box, and align with the great deplorable unwashed lower class.
Intellectuals (hah! Hacks!) who can’t reconcile with reality because it threatens their class standing privileges are equivalent to RINOs who can’t reconcile with their party’s platform because it threatens their perquisites and standing in DC. It’s the exact same thing, actually. They think they’re better and have worked out a system that allows that fiction to flourish. It’s delicate ecosystem and Trump is just RUINING it!
Hello, and greetings to all new or rare commenters. 🙂
A couple of folks having brought up Mr. Dreher over at TAC caught my eye, as his new book and the story of its development (with the requisite higher-order effects and implications) have been very much on my mind lately. I haven’t been reading his blog as long as a couple of others of you have, I guess, but I take a more generous view of the man and his thought process. It is somewhat interesting, perhaps, to compare and contrast him and Weiss insofar as their social and intellectual situations are related.
As I see it, one major reason that Dreher holds Trump at arm’s length, so to speak, is that he (Dreher) is trying to look at the bigger sociopolitical picture in terms of what to do about it all and has come to the conclusion that the trends represented by cancel culture, CRT, and all the other Leftist garbage are here to stay for a while and those who wish to preserve what needs preserving are going to have to find ways to tough it out. Bear in mind that his concept is also quite explicit that Big Business is not your friend, so he’s also not counting on the establishment GOP for anything. For example, he has a chapter about the CCP’s social credit system and how a form of it is taking shape in the US even now via corporations, which I find extremely relevant and follows along with some of my own thinking, such as it has been.
I didn’t really mean to write an advert for Dreher’s new book, even though I suppose it seems that way, although I will be ordering it shortly and am quite impressed with the excerpts. I never read his first one, The Benedict Option, but I’m not convinced that it’s necessary. But the main point of what I’m saying is that Dreher sees no reason to expect a miraculous political salvation from the Woke brigade if Trump should win, even win spectacularly, because for Dreher, this whole thing is bigger than politics. His new book is really an attempt to draw a kind of spiritual lesson from how dissidents lived in Communist-controlled places back in the day (and maybe how some are living now in the PRC, for example, but if those are in there, then they’re touched upon only tangentially).
It’s interesting to note that his premises are basically the same as those of a number of you all here, such as that cancel culture is an existential threat to a functioning society, etc. But the conclusions that he draws go in a different direction – away from armed resistance, for example; away from putting one’s hopes in the outcome of elections. He tried to write essentially a book of applied spirituality for a new totalitarian age. I think it possible that those who have less appreciation than he seems to for the spiritual side of life (“theism! are you kidding?!”) see little point in his perspective. That such folks have no use for Dreher’s outlook doesn’t surprise me, but I think they are a little bit blinded by that to the value of what he brings to the table.
(I could wish that he had drawn on more Orthodox Christian examples in his book – it’s long puzzled me that he, though being Orthodox himself like me, seems to have so little to say about them in any of his published work in spite of the many, many examples of martyrs and confessors in the last century. But that may be an issue for another time and is definitely tangential here. Yes, I know he’s ex-Catholic, which is no doubt part of the explanation.)
One thing that Dreher said in his little chat with Tucker hit the spot quite rightly for me: when he said we need to learn “how to suffer better.” It’s not something that would make sense to a purely secular person, but with my knowledge of the Church’s teachings on things like this, I had instant sympathy for what he was saying. Part of my interest in Live Not By Lies stems from the fact that I’m trying to gear myself up mentally to do exactly that.
All of this I bring up partly to defend Dreher, but also to point out that if a Bari Weiss doesn’t have a spiritual foundation – which in the realm of liberal or cultural Judaism seems likely, from what folks are saying – then it’s no surprise that she and those like her would fold like a cheap suit. But what does ‘resistance’ really mean for a conservative person? There are different approaches – one is modelled by the Gadsden flag, another by the martyrs. There are yet other concepts in circulation, but these are the main contenders here, I believe (‘here’ meaning in our chat most immediately, but also in the US generally).
FOAF, there seems to be something about Siegal/ Siegel which brings good things (incl. about class issues), see Jacob Siegel., at
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-truth-rationalism-religion (exposing Post-mods as intellectual snobs/ scamers:
“Practitioners of the new argument bolster their rationalist veneer, with constant appeals to forms of authority, that come in equal parts from biology and **elite credentialing**.”
Also, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/left-heretics-jilani-taibbi-tracey (about “an emergent **ruling-class** social consensus, that justifies itself in large part by the claim that Donald Trump’s presidency is an existential threat….”);
and
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fully-automated-culture-war (on N. Sandmann and social media).
“As I see it, one major reason that Dreher holds Trump at arm’s length, so to speak, is that he (Dreher) is trying to look at the bigger sociopolitical picture”
Yeah…no. Go look at Dreher’s comments on Trump. How many of them have any substantive basis and how many are about Trump being “icky?” How many times has he joined in on baseless smears of Trump and how many times has he refuted such smears? What has he had to say about his friends and colleagues who joined in on those smears?
Dreher’s problem with the world is he lost the gay marriage argument and can’t accept it was his own fault. He’s the sort of Christian/conservative who always prided himself on his cosmopolitan view of things like homosexuality, then was gobsmacked at the inevitable consequences of that view.
Seriously. Go back and read Dreher from that time. Donald Trump is a sober and dispassionate voice of reason in comparison.
Mike
Wow, lots of comments about lots of stuff, first of all for the Jews, Trump likes Israel, recognized Jerusalem that should be worth a vote, second guns, if they come for our guns they will get the bullets first ~ Trump likes us ~ every brand new gun purchaser should vote for us. Next, abortion is with us and will be with us but we don’t need to kill our new-borns fresh out of the oven, let states decide this one. Furthermore bring all of our troops back home, Trump is working on that and he will back up our police when they are just trying to keep the peace on Saturday night and then put bad guys back in jail and prison. This is all common sense stuff and lets move on and vote for Trump and win in a few weeks.
The problem started long ago when the Nazis were labeled “right wing” by socialists hoping to keep their ideals intact. That made it impossible for them to recognize the most diagnostic traits: mobs, censorship, violence, secret police, imprisonment, and execution. Now we have a movement trending in that direction, and Jews and other progressives cannot properly diagnose the disease or recommend a treatment.
Dreher is an alarmist, to say the least, writes constantly in an immediate-reaction vein, and changes his mind a lot. All that said, he has been giving an accurate and extensive warning of the coming totalitarianism for some time now. And as for his views of Trump, in recent months he’s come pretty close to saying he’ll vote for Trump.
Art+Deco: Sam Nunn alive. I had to look that up. 82 now and had been considered for Kerry’s and Obama’s VP. Amazing.
Since huxley covered the HG wells point (we share the same birthday), which just passed recently… sigh… and why Huxley is mad, mad i tell you… it was that day the TV did it.. 🙂
i will handle this one:
Mensheviks..and Old Bolsheviks..’
Worth remembering too that nearly all the Old Bolsheviks were devoured and then those who’d devoured were given a one way ticket to execution cells in the Lubyanka, Lefortovo, etc, etc.
The bolsheviks are the ones who got rid of the menshiviks…
IT started with the social democrats… which is what Lenin was..
then after several revolutions of which we and others only regard one
there came a kind of government and two factions
The Bolsheviks (Russian: ??????????, from ??????????? bolshinstvo, ‘majority’),[a] also known in English as the Bolshevists, were a radical, far-left, and revolutionary Marxist faction founded by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov that split from the Menshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898, at its Second Party Congress in 1903.
as a bonus people like Tim Pool dont understand Antifa… thinking antifa is acting fascistic… which is because he thought the fascist germans beat the communists… which was not the case… the part they dont get is that antifa is the communist strong arm faction that fought in the beer halls and drove the fascists into more mainstream politics… also what is not understood is that fascism is not corporatism, as tim surmized… but that its the marriage of communism and capitalism… the evil child often referred to as “the third way”… and that everything other than leninist maoist communism is to the right… so there really is no right, there is just the left (communism) and not left (everything else)…
To truly understand all this one has to not focus on germany but understand the history of the russian revolution and other countries… because we only think we know about germany… go ahead and ask people… what was said by Goebbles that started the fight in the beer halls? bet you wont find anyone that knows or even knows they lost the fights… for the record he said “Lenin is the greatest socialist since Marx, second only to Hitler”
Here, read it yourself… 🙂
https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/28/archives/hitleriteriot-in-berlin-beer-glasses-fly-when-speaker-compares.html
by 1972, they got it all twisted up and had everyone confused and not understanding even when they thought they did
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/29/archives/hitler-and-the-beer-hall-putsch-by-harold-j-gordon-jr-illustrated.html
till now, when no one can tell anything from anything given all the twisted wrong definitions based on people making up definitions for things when there was none… the thing i pointed out a while ago… ie. people fill inthe blanks rather than say they dont know… this creates a process that when something is not properly defined in the public sphere, it ends up confused and twisted because its defined by appearances and half views of people trying and not willing to say they dont know, lets go look it up and find out!!!
we do it in Neos blog all the time… totally frustrating when you DO go through the time to learn and read all those key old books and try to get others to do the same, and instead they rather be confused and confident over it..
here is wiki on third way… notice it tries to start things inthe 70s, when third way goes back before FDR
The Third Way is a political philosophy and political position akin to centrism that attempts to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of centre-right and centrist economic platforms with some centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state and the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularised by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
note how they hide that third way is fascism, the marraige of comunism and fascism… by using right and left instead… funny in a dark way.. it also shows a yellow flag that indicates liberalism…
Criticism of Roosevelt as a “fascist”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Franklin_D._Roosevelt
After 1945, the term “fascist” conjured up images of Nazi death camps, but in the 1930s it had a very different connotation, meaning the centralization of political power as in Benito Mussolini’s Italy and of a “third way” between communism and capitalism.
ta-dah…. if you didnt know that point of 1930s history, you would not know that the latter thing in wiki was tripe that hides and confuses what it is, while still reflecting what it is without saying so… a kind of word game..
they are fond of that… and i just watch the confused try to unconfuse themselves without any means to do so… quite interesting… even more so that they dont want help to get unconfused either…
which is why all this stuff works to make the changes…
we forget what we need to know to defend ourselves.
like a deer forgetting what a predator is…
I mostly read Dreher off Instapundit links. As I recall, Dreher’s big crisis was when he was sent to report on an Eskimo village in which a Catholic priest had abused something like half the children. This crushed Dreher so terribly that he felt compelled to leave the Church and become Orthodox. (Correct me, if I’ve got this wrong.)
My armchair psychologizing is that Dreher remains in crisis and seeks a sort of “clean well-lighted place,” as Hemingway once put it, for refuge from a painful, complicated world. Hence, the Benedict Option; hence, his remark to Tucker Carlson about learning to “suffer better.”
For a deep Christian, for whom the physical world can never be home, this makes sense. However, it’s not the way of Americans, generally speaking.
___________________________________________________
Talk about suffering here below
And let’s keep a-loving Jesus.
Talk about suffering here below
And let’s keep a-following Jesus.
Oh, can’t you hear it, Brothers?
And don’t you want to go?
And leave this world of sorrow
And trouble here below.
–The John Renbourn Group, “Talk About Suffering” (Traditional Shape Note hymn)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE61vOWt9wo
Dreher’s problem with the world is he lost the gay marriage argument and can’t accept it was his own fault.
It wasn’t his fault and no one ‘lost the argument’. A ‘solution’ was imposed by the appellate judiciary.
I want to add my views to this exchange. I am truly angry that Bari Weiss felt a need to mark out her anti-Trump credentials within the text of this article. The article is in every other respect excellent and profoundly important. However, I believe it is badly undercut by her virtue-signaling swipes at Trump, which are a form of exactly the sort of group identify politics she otherwise skewers so effectively. It turns the article into a plea for only certain people, the right people, to listen and pay heed. I am a Trump supporter. I understand how Trump’s abrasive personality grates on many. Nevertheless, does not Ms. Weiss understand that Trump supporters were among her strongest admirers in the showdown she bravely mounted against the Times? It is truly bad faith and betrayal for her to take a potshot at them so unsupported by evidence and so sweeping and contemptuous. I find it very sad.
The Democratic party in Minnesota is funded in large part by Jewish money.
Jews account for 0.8% of the population of Minnesota. I don’t think so.
In re Omar (in Minnesota) and Tlaib (Detroit), my hypothesis would be that Jews may be governed by their aversions. There have to be a critical mass of Omars and Tlaibs to counterbalance the extant aversion to evangelicals.
What’s stunning about Omar’s success is that she’s an unprepossessing person to begin with and steeped in scandal. Yet, she recently defeated in a primary a passably sensible black lawyer. It’s a white majority district, btw. I cannot figure what explains voter preferences there bar the joys of vandalism.
The Nita Lowey and Eliot Engel Israel supporting Democrats are no longer the Democratic party. They have been replaced with woke, BLM and BDS loving Democrats.
Nita Lowey is 83 years old and has held political offices in New York for 45 years. She’s retiring from Congress this year, something she should have done a dozen years ago. Her successor will almost certainly be a lawyer named Mondaire Jones, whose platform is liberal boilerplate and who expresses no hostility to Israel. That’s a white majority district which is only 11% black, so Jones candidacy is not a function of demographics.
Engel represents a multi-racial district where no segment has a majority. He’s 73 years old and has been in Congress since 1989. Again, he should have retired a half-dozen years ago. He was defeated by Jamaal Bowman, who is the issue of this nation’s teacher’s colleges. Bowman’s shtick is an objection to standardized tests as impersonal performance standards are disrespectful to blacks. He makes temporizing noises about the Near East and it’s a reasonable wager he couldn’t find Israel on a map.
“A ‘solution’ was imposed by the appellate judiciary.“
A similar solution was imposed on abortion but conservatives are still fighting it 40+ years later. Yet gay marriage is a dead issue politically.
Dreher is the sort of Christian who prides himself on never having ANY problem with the lesbian couple down the block. He’d have them over for dinner. He’d let his kids hang out at their house. But then he demands that lesbian couple not be allowed to marry…why?
And in case anyone wonders, my gay marriage view is more libertarian. I’m just describing the paradox in Dreher’s persona.
Mike
And in case anyone wonders, my gay marriage view is more libertarian. I’m just describing the paradox in Dreher’s persona.
There is no such thing as a ‘libertarian’ gay marriage view.
“libertarian gay marriage view” = TMI. As if anyone cares.
Bari Weiss on Joe Rogan.
She calls Tulsi Gabbard an ‘Assad toady’.
Rogan asks her what that means, and she has to look up the word toady, though she spells it ‘toadie’
She, a journalist at a major newspaper, doesn’t know the meaning of the words that she parrots.
https://youtu.be/jS-sxJFn6O0
“Backing Trump makes you a traitor to your class…”
While these things are complex and not monolithic, I don’t see it this way, at least not primarily.
Trump has been maligned, misrepresented and lied about for the past four-plus years. He has been cast as an indiscriminate racist, as an unrepentant fascist, as a lethally dangerous white supremacist. He’s the president, but he’s illegitimate, an imposter. An impossibility. An obscenity.
The same is true of his supporters.
(He’s also a traitor to his country because he’s in bed in Putin—not proven BUT EVEN “TRUER” because of that. After all, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, etc., etc. So that the Obamanites have covered all the angles, here.)
All this has been built up over four years and repeated “ad infinitum”, “ad nauseum”, magnified and exaggerated so greatly so that IT MUST BE TRUE.
The only possible conclusion, therefore(!), is that no NO SANE AND NO MORAL PERSON SHOULD EVEN THINK OF SUPPORTING HIM.
And should one happen to understand the kind of subversion and perversity that’s been exhibited by the Democratic Party and the MSCM over the past four years and if you are cognizant of the eight horrific years of Obama’s subversive presidency—IF YOU SUPPORT TRUMP as the only person able RIGHT NOW to defend America—-then you are not so much “a traitor to your class” so much as you are, essentially, a NAZI.
This is what all too many decent liberal finds himself or herself thinking. Liberal Jews, in particular, are susceptible given the definitions of which they have convinced themselves—even if, given the behavior of the Democratic Party over the past 12 (and more) years, such a definition is NO LONGER SUSTAINABLE. But these things (definitions, assumptions, affiliations, unsupported views of reality) die hard and for some, they never do.
This is why Bari Weiss CANNOT make that leap even IF—IF—she realizes that at this point in American history, TRUMP IS THE ONLY ANSWER. As they say, she’s drunk the kool-aid and she simply CANNOT, given the assumptions she’s working under—the assumptions of which she’s been entirely persuaded, and has persuaded herself as being TRUTH—even imagine supporting TRUMP except perhaps—PERHAPS—as a last ditch, rear guard, awful, desperate no-alternative measure. For her and those like her, it’s an impossible “choice”.
And it’s not because she’s stupid. She is, in fact, extremely intelligent, and caring, and moral and bright.
Except that there is this ideological blindness….
So that in fact she’ll probably decide not to vote at all rather than vote for Trump.
(Certainly, one’s mileage may vary….)
Weiss is over rated and is not brave. Traditional liberals are like David Rubin who realise ‘liberal values’ are now owned by Republicans. All you have to do is read about the Republican candidates that are running for office this year. Many of the candidates have the liberal sensibilities of a Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
I listened to Weiss on Joe Rogan call Tulsi Gabbard a ‘toadie’. Seriously? She needs to mature quite a bit and stop caring about what her peers think. It is better to think for yourself. Dave Rubin is a good example and I will add Tim Pool and Joe Rogan. All three of them understand what is going on with the left, they have liberal values, and will vote for Trump. Weiss is fairly weak to believe the lies about Trump.
I think this gentleman gets the facts about Trump;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbozDBM67lY&feature=share
“There is no such thing as a ‘libertarian’ gay marriage view.“
Libertarians would disagree.
Hint: When someone demonstrates a flaw in your thinking, don’t try to manufacture a way to continue the disagreement. Just recognize it and move on.
Mike
“As if anyone cares.“
Everyone is well aware of how much you care. I was simply trying to make clear that I was talking about Dreher’s views and not my own.
Mike
“…‘liberal values’ are now owned by Republicans. ”
Exactly, given what’s happened to the Democratic Party and the Orwellian—Stalinist—turn they’ve collectively taken (along with all too many of their supporters) towards a fetishist “perfection”, sense of “required morality” and elitist attitude, and hence destruction, insanity, civil war and perdition.
They must be stopped decisively and kept far away from power until they come to their senses.
(That they do so as quickly as possible is essential to the entire body politic. Alas, given the current zeitgeist and the pernicious, pervasive toxins engendered, encouraged and spread by social media, I’m not sure how this might happen….)
Democratic Party “ideas” and “myths” are ramping up just a notch (after all, the elections are 16 days away):
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/the-brownshirts-are-back.php
To be sure, “the brownshirts” (or whatever antifa—and friends—wear these days) have been back for quite a while.
Barry Meislin wrote:
“The only possible conclusion, therefore(!), is that no NO SANE AND NO MORAL PERSON SHOULD EVEN THINK OF SUPPORTING HIM.“
Yes, of course, the constant media drumbeat reinforces this ridiculous conclusion but what makes this the only possible conclusion in the first place? This woman is supposedly an intellectual. A thinker. Someone who can see through the conventional wisdom. Why is this the only possible conclusion?
Bari Weiss has not taken an adequate dose of red pills; therefore, she has come down with a bad case of cognitive dissonance.
They’ve ideologized, idealized and—most importantly—EMOTIONALLY bricked themselves into a philosophical cul de sac, which they’ve decorated, embellished and rationalized as the only moral place (or position) one could possibly occupy (i.e., justify)…
And it’s practically impossible for them to get out…especially since it so satisfies, and feeds, their elevated moral—and aesthetic—sensibilities, of or towards which Trump (and his supporters) have been “constructed” and cast as the ultimate polluters, the biggest danger, the consummate threat.
Think of it as being inside a reinforced bunker (survivalists!!)—where beauty, caring, loving-kindness and morality reign—under dire threat from the forces of darkness and sheer evil.
…which FANTASY—it should be emphasized—therefore “justifies” any and every form of response and manner of behavior, which in their view is “self-defense”. They’re probably, in many cases at least, not even aware of what they’re doing or the level of their depravity….
(Should be added that there’s not a little paranoia there. Then again, Obama and Co. do have a bit to fear….)
Hint: When someone demonstrates a flaw in your thinking,
You haven’t done that.
Libertarians would disagree.
And they’d be wrong. Matrimonial law has nothing to do with liberty except to the extent which assumed obligations put constraints on what people can do without penalty. The question in re marriage law is what sort of human relations the civil state recognizes and what form the architecture of enforceable obligations takes. The gay lobby made war conventional matrimonial law not because homosexuals were constrained in any way, but because of the status distinction found in marriage. A lot of narcissism is abroad in that population.
Note, the political class in this country tells much larger minorities to bugger off all the time. The gay lobby got what they wanted because of the cultural dynamics in the elite bar and in the intelligentsia generally and the professional-managerial class generally.
“Libertarians” support homosexual pseudogamy not because such arrangements are consistent with a particular sort of social theory, but consequent to the sort of character type[s] drawn to libertarian ideas after about 1965.
Bari Weiss has not taken an adequate dose of red pills; therefore, she has come down with a bad case of cognitive dissonance.
The problem is that she’s navigating between tribal attitudes (which inhibit her from regarding Trump congenially or fairly or even with some critical detachment) and the reality that her social ideology (which would have nestled comfortably in the Democratic Party in 1995) is evaporating among people active in politics. What we have is the grossest sort of college campus shizz now invading practical politics. It’s a witches brew of social mythology, group libel, status jonesing, rhetorical feints. It ruins just about any institution where it gets the upper hand. There was lots of asininity incorporated into the liberal mainstream ca. 1995, but you could still muddle through and live with it. Not so anymore. This will not end well.
And this tiresome, supposedly “clever” tripe, from someone else reputed to be smart:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/media-isnt-biased-against-trump-biden-liberal-news.html
H/T Instapundit
What has happened to these people?
It’s as though the past four years were an extinction event for practically anyone on the Left that was supposed to have more than an iota of intelligence, wisdom and/or judgment. Or principles.
File under: “How have the mighty [That’s right! Just ask us!] fallen?”
These are not “thought leaders,” they’re thought followers.
Parrots.
We need (and have needed for a long time) a better class of intellectuals than these swamp parrots.
They lack plasticity of brain, they are incurious, and they only complain when it happens to them. They see other people getting screwed over and it’s a joke or a lesson those people should have learned. And then they really complain when it happens to them and theirs (whatever tribe is relevant to them) again and again, even as they acknowledge they should not be surprised.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
Neo,
If you’re wondering one reason Jews in America don’t much like Trump note that a year ago Trump said this:
“In my opinion, you vote for a Democrat, you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people, and you’re being very disloyal to Israel,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, “and only weak people would say anything other than that.”
He questioned their smarts, too. “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” Trump said from the Oval Office.
That is possibly the most pathetic attempt at outreach for the Jewish vote you can have. It’s rather offensive. One of this biggest mistakes [and this shows his lack of knowledge] is that he thinks that because he treats Israel really well somehow American Jews will suddenly be loyalty to him. He doesn’t seem to realize that a good many Jewish people in America are Americans and not Israeli – are not really loyal to Israel. Or that their loyalty does not translate to love for Trump.
It is possible to dislike the far left AND dislike Trump and in both cases want something more moderate. I don’t think there is a cognitive dissonance in holding that view. That said, many Jewish people I know are further to the left than I am.
Barry Meislin —
“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
A classic for the ages.
Montage the mind reader of President Trump.
Montage your problem is you don’t seem to think, so cognitive dissonance is not a problem you have to deal with. How does your “argument – mind reading” work when applied to you?
Take a day and walk around
Watch the Nazis run your town
Then go home and check yourself
You think we’re singing
‘Bout someone else
–Frank Zappa, “Plastic People”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oITN5JPSiWI
_________________________________
Don’t those lyrics sound different today.
Back then Zappa tended to sing against the conventional “establishment” but he could be just as withering towards plastic hippies. He devoted an entire album, “We’re Only In It for the Money,” to savaging that breed.
Zappa opposed anyone not thinking for themselves and attempting to close down others from doing so. It’s a shame he’s not around today. I doubt he would be voting for Trump, but he sure wouldn’t be backing Antifa/BLM/SJW.
If the new allegations regarding Hunter Biden’s adventures in Lolita Land [which at this moment is a story Neo is probably struggling with how to handle] are irrefutably confirmed with photographic and other evidence, does anyone think it will have an election impact?
Probably not. Unless that is, Hunter Biden is immediately after found hanging naked and dead in a closet: his nose full of cocaine, a cucurbit inserted into some unmentionable place, and the floor papered with child pornography.
In which case it is even money that Biden would get a sympathy vote boost from the usual suspects.
The Democrat Party as instantiated by its leading members, has decended into such a state of generalized, nihilistic, demonically grinning depravity, that it has seemingly reached amost metaphysical significance. You can be an atheist and still be awed by the sheer scale of the moral dissolution manifest.
It is virtually impossible to explain it rationally.
To turn a epigram: If Lucifer did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him …
Art Deco —
You seem to be determined to drive away the faction that would be, if not your ally, then certainly your co-belligerent. Trust me, we’re not all dissolute potheads.
Art,
Can you please provide a link to the Chabad passage on G?d/Reality. I would like to keep it in my ‘philosophy’ file.
Montage:
Nope.
Jews didn’t vote for Trump long before he said that. That statement certainly isn’t the reason Jews don’t vote for him.
And by the way, he was basically correct, IMHO, for exactly the reasons Weiss mentions in her piece. The Democrats are now the left, and the left hates Israel and all Jews who are not leftists.
I’ve written a great deal on the subject of who is a Jew in America. Are secular Jews “Jews” in anything but the ancestry sense? Of course many are not loyal to Israel and many don’t support it at all. Some are and do , however, and I believe he was trying to address them – although I agree his attempt was futile.
In particular, the left hates Orthodox religious Jews. Or religious people in general, unless they’re members of the religious groups that have become synonymous with advocating leftist causes and voting straight Democrat.
“…a year ago Trump said…”
OK, it may not have been the smartest thing for him to have said. (Indeed, expecting anyone to show you gratitude, especially if you’re a politician, is often a mug’s game.)
But you seem to be implying that before Trump made that statement “a year ago”—i.e., from 2016 up until 2019—he was sitting pretty with Liberal American Jews.
And that is simply NOT the case. In fact nothing could be further from the truth.
So I’m afraid you’ll have to try harder.
As for it being “possible to dislike the far left AND dislike Trump and in both cases want something more moderate”, indeed that is very sweet of you (though some may object to equating Trump to “the far left” while others might reject it outright as ludicrous—as mere “talking points” of the “Narrative”).
I can only respond to your heartfelt aspiration by introducing you to Mitt Romney AND then asking you, “WHAT PLANET ARE YOU LIVING ON?!”
Trust me, we’re not all dissolute potheads.
Bryan Lovely: Speak for yourself!
The recent voting behavior of Jews in presidential elections has been at a ratio of a bit more than 2:1, Democrat/Republican. –ArtflDgr
Is this correct? I find it encouraging. I assumed it was 4:1 or worse.
huxley:
You’re dissolute?
neo: I aspire to being dissolute, but I keep wanting to get stuff done…
huxley: well, I’m not a pothead, anyway. No comment on the adjective in that statement, though. 🙂
DNW,
I would tend to agree with your general drift (but the next time you engage in such graphic pyrotechnics, could you , if I may be so bold to ask—for the sake of your gentle readers—preface said pyrotechnics with some sort of warning, e.g, PG-13 or R18, or in my case, R64).
Thanks….
Having said that, I’m beginning to wonder if, in fact, Hunter Biden’s “antics”—crack pipe, appreciative eye for (some of) God’s creatures, spiritual attitude towards things material (e.g., the money he burns through “sans souci”)—are actually a step up when compared to the venal, criminal, depraved and vituperative mafia that informs the government of which his dear father played a significant role, not to mention some of the latter’s, um, “missteps” and “unfortunate” lapses…though, granted, one might argue, in his favor, that he was groping for the Truth…(and one should always give one’s fellow the benefit of the doubt. Well, try to. Most of the time).
In the general scheme of things, of course.
Neo,
I didn’t say that Trump’s remarks last year were the reason they didn’t vote for him initially since that would chronologically be impossible. I primarily am saying if Trump wants to get the American Jewish vote he needs to work a lot better on his outreach. But he holds to a very old standard, which is that all Jews should somehow be alike because they are tied to Israel. It’s just not accurate.
I disagree with the fact that the left hate all Jews who are not leftists. That would be like saying all Trump supporters hate Jews who are not conservative. Can one say that or is that too extreme? The left hate the right and the right hates the left. It has nothing to do with being Jewish. There are exceptions, of course but it’s not the norm. The left doesn’t like black people who are Republicans but it would be wrong to claim they hate black people. They hate the political position. Both sides think the other side is extreme and stupid, which of course, gets us nowhere.
Barry Meislin
My last sentence above is partly my response to yours. Some people are unable to realize that just because there are only two big political parties there are more than two political position one can take. There are actually a whole lot of people who fall in between somewhere. We have in that group moderates, libertarians, old time Republicans, Blue dog Democrats, Old liberals, Reagan conservatives, old neocons, new neocons and the like. However, all the focus is on the extremes. So it seems like America is made up of only far left socialists and far right racists. Newflash! It’s not true.
I’ll grant you the future of the Democratic party is further to the left. But it’s mainly because Trump is seen as being further to the right… because Obama was seen as being further to the left. Perception is driving the parties further to the extremes. For the record I would vote for Romney over Trump. He is closer to Obama, actually. A moderate.
huxley:
That “a bit more than 2:1” figure is from the last sentence of my addendum to the post. Go there and you’ll also see a link to this chart. The Jewish vote varies quite a bit. Reagan got 39% in 1980 and 31% in 1984, and Bush One got 35% in 1988 but only 11% in 1992, with 9% going to Perot. Gore did well with Jews in 2000 (Bush Two got 19%), but in 2004 Bush got 24%. Obama did well with Jews but probably not as well as you might think: McCain got 22% in 2008 and Romney got 30% in 2012. And in 2016, Clinton got 69%, Trump 24%, with the rest (I imagine, anyway) going 3rd party.
New polls (September 2020) indicate about 30% of Jews plan to vote Trump. Orthodox Jews support Trump to the tune of 83%.
Monage:
You wrote “If you’re wondering one reason Jews in America don’t much like Trump note that a year ago Trump said this”. That implies causation.
The majority of Jews don’t like Trump or any Republican. That’s been true for many decades. What he said last year is irrelevant. In fact, the polls I cited in the comment I wrote right above this one indicate that Trump’s support from Jewish voters in 2020 is greater than it was in 2016.
I feel as though I’m floating through the Tunnel of Cliches at the local amusement park….
Right, where was I? Right, well, your admiration for Romney is certainly touching. A fine man. A great man. (Though his selection of blog handles leaves a bit to be desired.) Let me remind you that this paragon of moderation was called some very, very nasty names by his “moderate” political opponents in the Democratic Party (though I admit, being labeled a “Never Trumper” may well be worse than being called a Nazi).
But do you seriously believe that Romney had/has/will-ever-have a chance to be elected President?
You also seem to have some kind of unrealistic expectations of the thugs in the Democratic Party, which I suppose is also touching in a way.
As for moderation, it’s a really great idea, but let me introduce you to the collapsing middle…and then ask, why do you think the “middle” has in fact collapsed?
(You don’t have to answer me right now. Actually, you can wait until after the elections. Probably better that way….)
You seem to be determined to drive away the faction that would be, if not your ally, then certainly your co-belligerent.
Libertarians of the 1940 cohort might have been your co-belligerent. You think Tyler Cowen is your co-belligerent? How about Bryan Caplan? Patrick Frey?
Huxley, a worthy aspiration; but I think the original expression goes something like:
“Lord, make me dissolute, but not yet”
(Note that this may be copyrighted so you’ll have to check. Probably just have to pay a small royalty, if anything, I think to Harvey Weinstein who, IIRC, may have used it in one of his films. Anyway, you’re a good guy; and from what I hear he could use the money.)
Barry Meislin:
Whom are you addressing at 4:12?
I looked up “tikkun olam” and found an article with this quote:
The ’50s, eh? I’d really like to know who specifically started propagating that meaning.
And whether they got their money from the KGB.
Thx, Montage, for some real value added Trump criticism that help reduces the echo chamber here.
I really admire Neo, and think she’s half correct:
“That statement certainly isn’t the reason Jews don’t vote for him.”
They didn’t like him before he said that.
They were, and are, prejudiced against him.
For the math challenged, I meant Neo is also half wrong.
They, and all Trump haters, look for reasons to more objectively justify their emotional distaste. Like Rod Dreher’s distaste, Trump is icky.
Such quotes, even if they are mostly true, can and are taken to be insults. Like Romney’s accurate 47% don’t pay (income) tax remark. And Clinton’s “deplorable” comment — most Jews and other Dem voters really do believe Trump supporters are deplorable. Because, … reasons. (icky).
My other top two blog had a post on Brooks & Fukuyama talking about liberalism:
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/thoughts-on-the-state-of-things/#comment-510917
Brooks talking about lack of trust, insulting Trump without specifics, not mentioning any lies of Dems:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/
Fukuyama similarly blah blah Trump bad, with liberalism under siege from both Left and Right, and being more afraid of the Right
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/liberalism-and-its-discontent/
No intellectual honesty about Dem lies and Dem crimes.
Weiss here is at least, finally, talking about one Dem disaster that’s developing in the increasing Jew-hate of the Dems. Because of their hatred for the American Way, which she puts quite beautifully:
“Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength*; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy.”
Thanks, Bari. Better than David B. or Francis F. despite similar themes. Far better.
Such future ex-Dems will be useful allies to those who support individuals, after this final Trump election. Win or lose in Nov. Biden, then Harris, as Presidents will be terrible, but America won’t fail and become Venezuela in 4 years. And when the Trump-hating Dems don’t have Trump to hate on any more, who they gonna hate next? Pence hate? It won’t be as strong (tho also not so strongly fought back against)
The Hunter Biden – Joe Biden corruption October surprise will allow lots of folk to keep hating Trump, yet vote for him.
Those who oppose current Dems and Dem hatred should be encouraged, and their Trump-hate tics should be lightly laughed at, if noticed at all.
(*OK, I’m not fully on board with pluralism as strength, except when it is joined to assimilation, which is not mentioned.)
Echo chamber in your head? Reverb from Slovenia? Easy to feel copacetic when across the great water/pond?
You ask who they will hate post-Pence? Don’t worry Marxists/leftists have never had a problem finding victims/wreckers/kulacks/….. Sheesh.
Neo,
My comment was not meant to be about why Jewish Americans don’t like Trump. I know they tend to vote for Democrats more than Republicans. It was meant to be one example as to why they don’t like him; Because he views them as Israeli’s who happen to be in America. But my main focus is that Trump’s attempt at getting Jewish votes is pathetic. Insulting the people whose vote you want is as dumb as Hillary calling Trump supporters ‘deplorables’.
The polling I’ve seen for Jewish support is negligible. Sure, a few more Orthodox Jews have a favorable view of Trump but it’s almost anecdotal. As far as how Jewish Americans will vote in the future it will be interesting. I agree the Democratic party is moving further left. [Although I do not think Biden is far left – since he beat both Warren and Sanders].
Barry Meislin was addressing my comment.
But do you seriously believe that Romney had/has/will-ever-have a chance to be elected President?
I didn’t say that. I said I would vote for him over Trump and I’ll add over a far left candidate like AOC. But Romney didn’t lose in 2016 because he was a moderate Republican. He lost because Obama was the better candidate.
Tom Grey
I’m not sure the Hunter Biden story has the legs you want. Even Fox News declined to take the bait when Rudy first promoted it. Now, if you are talking about a perception that some voters might have about Biden’s alleged dealings then you could be right since perception often has more power than fact but the perception of Trump’s dealings with many issues has taken quite a hit as well. I would say Biden is more well liked than Hillary. We’ll see in two weeks.
Neo,
At 4:12 pm, I was addressing Montage (at 3:55 pm).
At 4:21 pm, I was addressing Huxley (at 3:50 pm).
Or I thought I was. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell in these pre-apocalyptic times.
Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the transposition of numerals would seem to indicate that something sinister is afoot. Wonder who could possibly be behind that….
On the other hand, it might just be a coincidence; or perhaps it’s the birth pangs of my painfully self-conscious conscience, as it slouches, figuratively, toward Bethlehem. All very confusing. Will have to consult Ymar….
Huxley, a worthy aspiration; but I think the original expression goes something like: “Lord, make me dissolute, but not yet”
Barry Meislin: Yeah, me and St. Augie — two peas in a pod!
One of my fave Gillian Welch songs contains a similar aspiration:
__________________________________________________
Oh me oh my oh, look at Miss Ohio
She’s a-running around with her rag-top down
She says I want to do right but not right now
Gonna drive to Atlanta and live out this fantasy
Running around with the rag-top down
Yeah I want to do right but not right now
–Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, “Look At Miss Ohio”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NPEj63d0jY
__________________________________________________
Welch is plenty brainy. I bet she knows her St. Augustine. Lawsy, can she and Dave play together!
Huxley, you have GOT TO write a book.
With all your experiences and expertise, observations, movies, songs, etc. It’s phenomenal…
Maybe something along the lines of “Cults for Dummies”. (Just a suggestion—not even sure I like it.)
Perhaps “Search Me” would be better….
Yes, Barry …
Why thanks, good buddy!
Ah oh …
Yeah sure, no problem. I have been slingling it a little too casually recently, if I do say so myself. Upon reflection and by my own count, I have consigned at least three Democrats and one Republican to the fires that quencheth not; referred derisively and with contempt to persons addicted to unnatural sexual acts at least four or five times; made fun of short bespectacled men who emit moans of pleasure at the dining table at least twice; and habitually expressed disgusted bewilderment at those who would find a role for the expression of tender maternal feelings in the administration of our laws and the performance of our civic duties. Pretty bad, I do admit. And that does not include the scatology per se.
Yes, I am aware that I have surely sinned. I’ll try to use less graphic language and evaluate more charitably in the future.
In fact, I was already making a stab at it, when I refrained from commenting on Rod Dreher in any manner at all. I shudder to think of what I might have said about him. Have you seen the images of that guy? What an effen wimp … he looks like a leprechaun version of Stuart Smalley and … and … ah … oops.
Seriously though, I do get your point.
Regards …
DNW: “The Democrat Party as instantiated by its leading members, has descended into such a state of generalized, nihilistic, demonically grinning depravity, that it has seemingly reached almost metaphysical significance. You can be an atheist and still be awed by the sheer scale of the moral dissolution manifest. It is virtually impossible to explain it rationally.”
This.
AppleBetty
Just so. Well put.
” I aspire to being dissolute, but I keep wanting to get stuff done…” – huxley
That “J” will get ya every time.
I am limiting my dissoluteness to staying up much too late reading Neo’s blog.
(Q: How do Mormons celebrate special events?
A: We put cranberry juice in the ginger ale.)
“Bari Weiss has not taken an adequate dose of red pills; therefore, she has come down with a bad case of cognitive dissonance.” – Mad Max
IMO the dissonance came first — recognizing that Trump is actually accomplishing positive things for Jews and Israel that she supports, even though he is an icky Nazi — and so she is looking at the bottle of red pills, but hasn’t opened it yet.
Barry Meislin,
My name is sorta like Heyl-El’s or Satan’s. We know when you are calling, even as a joke.
Barry Meislin on October 19, 2020 at 2:42 pm said:
And this tiresome, supposedly “clever” tripe, from someone else reputed to be smart:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/media-isnt-biased-against-trump-biden-liberal-news.html
H/T Instapundit
What has happened to these people?
* * *
Just..wow.
But if you are like Bari Weiss and Co., you just read past Chait’s faulty logic and nod agreement, because he’s telling you again what you already know.
OrangeManBad.
Mongo on October 19, 2020 at 1:55 am said:
Bari Weiss on Joe Rogan.
She calls Tulsi Gabbard an ‘Assad toady’.
Rogan asks her what that means, and she has to look up the word toady, though she spells it ‘toadie’
She, a journalist at a major newspaper, doesn’t know the meaning of the words that she parrots.
* * *
But does she have a pet hampster?
Urban Dictionary can’t spell either; it’s a trend.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=toadie
A side kick, a tag-a-long, one who is sent to do the dirty work.
Merriam-Webster is more old skul.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toady
plural toadies
Definition of toady (Entry 1 of 2)
: one who flatters in the hope of gaining favors : SYCOPHANT
We clearly have another case of using the plural noun applied to the singular case.
They just can’t help themselves.
However many there are.
“also what is not understood is that fascism is not corporatism, as tim surmized… but that its the marriage of communism and capitalism… the evil child often referred to as “the third way”… and that everything other than leninist maoist communism is to the right… so there really is no right, there is just the left (communism) and not left (everything else)…” …”what was said by Goebbles that started the fight in the beer halls? bet you wont find anyone that knows or even knows they lost the fights… for the record he said “Lenin is the greatest socialist since Marx, second only to Hitler” “– Artfldgr
Thanks for the history lesson – you are an amazing “Wayback Machine”!
Right off the bat I noticed the neat trick Weiss pulled: Note that she shifts from “Trump” to “Trumpism”. The former is a real, tangible thing that does things. The latter, not so much. So when she makes accusations, and if you ever had the opportunity to ask her for one example of Trump doing X, she might (or might not) shift uncomfortably before saying, “Well, not Trump specifically, but *Trumpism* does that.” It’s unfalsifiable.
I am a 75 year old Jewish male and an ardent Trump supporter. My family is split down the middle Dem/Rep and many of my Jewish friends are staunch Democrats. I have been asked by my Gentile friends, “Why is it that Jews Keep voting Democrat when the Democrats treat Israel so badly?” My answer is that they are F-ing crazy, and I cannot figure out why so many otherwise smart Jews are so stupid when it comes to politics. Unbelievable and beyond comprehension!
Huxley, you have GOT TO write a book.
Barry Meislin: Thanks for the kind compliment … or curse! God knows, I’ve written a half-million words or so on blogs and bulletin boards.
I have a friend who has been on me to write a book on cults. I do find them interesting.
BTW, the book on Werner Erhard, the Landmark Forum and Heidegger, I mentioned before, is fascinating.
I wonder if Bari Weiss has given any thought to why Orthodox Jews and Israelis overwhelmingly favor Trump? (They even named a town for him in Israel!) I recently read that for Jews under 30, Israel’s survival is no longer a priority. (The same is true of the Miami Cubans — those over 30 are vehemently anti-Castro and support Trump; the younger ones have been Americanized, which is to say, brainwashed, by the education system.)
Unfortunately, TDS is much more widespread among Jews than among Cubans. Jews under 40 at least have an excuse — they didn’t live through the 1967 or 1973 wars, when Israel’s survival was really in question. The older Jews who are wedded to the Democrats still believe that Roosevelt is President. (Why they should love Roosevelt so unreservedly is another mystery, given his actions and non-actions during the Holocaust — cf. the St. Lewis — but that’s another story.)
Jewish lefties are as or more willing as any other lefties to turn off their brains. A shul (synagogue) friend of mine (whether he’ll still be a friend after the election is unknown), when I pointed out that it was Antifa and BLM, not right-wing militias who burned and looted the stores on Fairfax Ave., a traditional Jewish shopping street, and attacked synagogues there, replied, “Well, they didn’t attack the synagogues, they only sprayed grafitti on them.” And this guy is literally the smartest guy I know — he has the entire Torah and most of the Talmud memorized and at the tip of his tongue, to say nothing of his success in business; he was one of the inventors of computerized stock trading.
Ms. Weiss, and my lefty Jewish friends, should remember what the Chief Rabbi of Moscow said to Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein): “It’s the Trotskys who make the revolutions, but it’s the Bronsteins who suffer.”
The Judge Amy Coney Barrett has dropped off the list of recent threads here — completely understandably, given the torrent of Bidegate news.
But this Facebook censorship story of the Babylon Bee for mocking the inquisition of ACB by the ever Dim Dem Senator Hirono of Hawaii deserves some attention! I confess to having a three minute LOL episode while reading this!
Why? What’s controversial about this most ridiculous humor sent to the online gallows? Facebook claims that a classic Monty Python movie joke re-aimed at the Senator is likely to induce VIOLENCE! rather than the LOL spasms of joy at her satirical skewering…A—f ing—amazing, such Masie oats and dotes “protecting“ Mazie (sp?) Hirono.
https://notthebee.com/article/again-facebook-is-censoring-the-babylon-bee-for-the-most-ridiculous-story-ever
Let’s applaud our imprisioners for protecting us from getting VIOLENT! Violently laughing at the Senator and at our High Tech Overlords (TM).
The Bee is on the case.
https://babylonbee.com/news/finally-facebook-to-require-all-content-moderators-to-watch-monty-python-and-the-holy-grail
(They responded similarly when Snopes fact-checked them some time ago.)
I guess 181 comments on one blog aren’t enough – this great post is now up on LI (where New Neo often has things to say).
Related new info on Jews supporting Trump:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/leading-ultra-orthodox-jewish-rabbis-issue-letter-effusively-praising-trump/
Most Orthodox Jews support Trump.
Many Jews never quite understand how much, and why, the Nazis hated the Jews.
The “progressive” and science-loving Nazis were told by all the German media that the Jews were evil and disgusting. And all good Germans should hate all Jews. So, often starting with the college educated Germans, hatred of Jews was supported and encouraged.
Today, many Jews hate Trump & Trump supporters in the same way Germans of the 30s hated Jews. First emotionally – then using their brains to rationalize the emotional hatred.
It’s so sad, yet sort of so obvious.
Glad that the B. Bee is making fun of the Nazi-lite (-like) Dems.
We all need to tell funnier jokes.
My son likes to avoid bedtime with jokes, like this 2 min video about computer protection:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSvBFm_MuXw