Progressive “therapy”

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote a post yesterday about the preponderance of “woke” therapists, and today at Instapundit I see a piece with a link to this article in Commentary about social justice couples therapy.

Of course.

The Commentary piece refers to this article in The New York Times Magazine that quotes a clinical psychologist and professor named Orna Guralnik:

“In my practice, I’ve found that engaging with these progressive movements has led to deep changes in our psyches,” she writes. “My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being.”

Oh, we on the right have incorporated knowledge of these messages into our being, all right. We just reject them because we find them pernicious and destructive.

She adds:

“Coming to see the working of implicit biases on us, grasping that our views are contingent on, let’s say, our gender, class background or skin color, is a humbling lesson,” she writes. “It pushes us beyond assuming sameness, opening up the possibility of seeing our partner’s point of view.”…

Then there’s the mixed-race couple, James and Michelle, who came to Guralnik because they were fighting during the pandemic. She writes, “Her husband wasn’t consciously aware that whiteness was a perspective that was constricting what he could imagine or comprehend.” Fear not. His thinking was corrected. “Engaging with the question of systemic racism did not polarize Michelle and James but rather helped them do the important psychological work that I doubt I, as their therapist, could have inspired in them on my own.”

Being a therapist is hard, and working with couples is really really stressful and often unrewarding. How nice to have a slogan-filled political solution that some of your clients will buy, especially if they live in a blue city or state. It will make your life as a therapist easier. But as the author of the Commentary piece points out, that’s not therapy, that’s DEI training.

To give a little background, though, therapists have often come to the field with frameworks through which they view the world, and some of those ideas inform their work with clients. There are many many different approaches to therapy, some more touchy-feely-warm, some sterner attempts to emphasize “reality-based” thinking in their clients, some far-out, some psychoanalytic and Freudian (not at all popular these days, but which had its heyday), some what’s called “solution-focused.” When I was in family therapy school I had to write a lengthy paper – really, a thesis – on my own approach to clients and my own theory about how people change. Politics had nothing to do with it, but obviously we all choose approaches with which we are comfortable for a variety of reasons, and no one is immune to biases of various kinds.

My own approach was rather eclectic. Maybe some day I’ll dig the paper out of my ancient files and offer a few quotes from it.

Answering the recurring question of why the Jews didn’t leave Germany in time

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a reposting of an old piece of mine that I think could use another go-round. The reason is that I often see people reference the idea that the Jews of Germany ignored or rationalized or denied or excused what was happening in Germany during the 1930s, and didn’t sound the alarm and leave in time. I see that a number of people are espousing this idea today, this time in the open thread.

The idea is usually brought up here and elsewhere by different people to illustrate various points about Jews, such as for example a notion that they were/are smart but stupid or complacent or naive. But in fact for the most part the idea that the Jews didn’t leave Germany simply isn’t true. I’d like to try to clear that up once again.

I’ve also written or taken voluminous notes for drafts on clearing up other misconceptions about WWII and the Jews – for example, that the Jews went meekly “like lambs to the slaughter” and never resisted when in fact they might have or could have. Another topic for another time. So what follows is the original post, slightly edited.]

It occurs to me from a recent exchange in the comments section that it might be a good idea to visit the topic of the reaction of the Jews of Germany to Hitler.

First I’d like to clear up one thing: the question of what percentage of the German population was Jewish back then. I wrote a post about the topic in September of 2005. Here’s an except:

…[I]n the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany prior to World War II and Hitler’s rise.

Since then, every so often I will ask people if they can guess what it might have been, and no one’s ever gotten it right off the top of their heads, or even come close.

So, what percentage of the population of pre-WWII Germany do you suppose was Jewish? Take a moment and think about it. Then guess.

You can do that now.

Here’s the answer, and it will almost undoubtedly surprise you (unless, of course, you were reading this blog years ago and remember that previous post):

According to the census of June 1933, the Jewish population of Germany consisted of about 500,000 people. Jews represented less than one percent of the total German population of about 67 million people.

Now that we’ve got that cleared up, let’s go to the larger topic: did the great majority of these Jews naively and hopefully fail to see the Nazi menace, and did they stay in Germany too long?

The answer to that is: no. Actually, the majority of them left rather than wait it out. And many who waited it out did so because they could not leave—either because they were old and ill, and/or poor, and/or because all avenues of escape were closed to them.

Here are the statistics:

Increasing antisemitism prompted a wave of a Jewish mass emigration from Germany throughout the 1930s. Soon after their rise to power in 1933, the Nazis negotiated the Haavara Agreement between Zionist authorities in Palestine, which was signed on August 25, 1933. Under its terms, 60,000 German Jews were allowed to emigrate to Palestine and take $100 million in assets with them. Between 1929 and 1939, a total of 250,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, mostly from Germany. Of these, 174,000 arrived between 1933 and 1936. After that, the British Mandatory authorities imposed limits on Jewish immigration, which led to clandestine illegal immigration. This wave of immigration was part of the Fifth Aliyah, and saw many Jewish doctors, lawyers, professionals, and professors leave the country.

The United States was another destination for German Jews seeking to leave the country, though the number allowed to immigrate was restricted due to the Immigration Act of 1924. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 300,000 Germans, some 90% of them Jews, applied for immigration visas to the United States. By 1940, only 90,000 German Jews had been granted visas and allowed to settle in the United States…

Overall, of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, only 214,000 were left by the eve of World War II.

It was probably easier to leave earlier in the 1930s as opposed to later. But from the above numbers you can see that a lot of people were trying—and even succeeding—during the mid-30s. For example, by my calculations, one-third of the entire German Jewish population managed to get to Palestine by 1936, before things tightened up and it became much more difficult to emigrate there (but even before that, numbers were limited by law).

What’s more, some who did leave Germany early on got trapped in their supposed places of refuge as time went on:

Some 100,000 German Jews also moved to Western European countries, especially France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. However, these countries would later be occupied by Germany, and many of them would still fall victim to the Holocaust.

That’s what happened, just to take one example, to Anne Frank’s family, who had emigrated to Amsterdam from Germany when Anne was four. They were trapped there because of Hitler’s sudden invasion of The Netherlands in May of 1940 despite its neutrality till then – an invasion which led to Dutch surrender only five days later, after which escape for people like the Franks was blocked.

But even during the 1930s, in most cases emigration required more than the desire to emigrate. It usually required cunning, connections, and money, and even then it often failed due to the inability to get permission from any country to enter legally because few countries wanted the Jews.

The German Jews were generally more well-off and assimilated than Jews in countries where the Jewish population was much larger, such as Poland. I’ve talked mostly about Germany so far, but as is evident from the statistics, the Jews of Germany constituted a very small minority compared to the other Jews in Europe. However, German Jews were more directly affected early on by Hitler and the Nazis and their restrictive laws. In other parts of Europe, the Jews would have been alerted to the dangers only later. But they were subject to all the restrictions mentioned, and it’s actually quite amazing that many made it out at all.

For every person who managed to leave Germany, it is almost certain that there were many others all over Europe who tried very hard to leave their respective countries and yet failed. Some who remained committed suicide, including in Germany, as chronicled by a German Jewish diarist who lived through the war in Germany (Victor Klemperer), in part because he was married to a non-Jew and in part because of timing and luck.

A personal anecdote: I have read the translation of a series of letters written by a Polish Jew who was a relation by marriage. These documents are utterly heartbreaking and chilling. They begin in 1936 and continue to 1939, although there is one very brief one written in the early 1940’s. They consist of reports of what’s happening in Poland and requests for help in order to emigrate to America, where my ex-husband’s uncle (the recipient of the letters) was living at the time.

The writer was eventually trapped in Poland and murdered in the Holocaust. He was an ordinary man in the sense of having no particular wealth—as I recall, he had a small textile business—and he even had a brother in the US willing to help and pull every string he could find, including promising the US government that he would take financial responsibility for him. All to no avail.

The following excerpts will give you a flavor of the sentiments and thoughts expressed in these missives. Here’s a quote from the earliest letter that survived (from 1936):

Our situation here grows worse from day to day. A Jew here is worse off than a dog that runs about the streets…The burden of taxes is unbearable. Not a week goes by that there isn’t something new. And it is always on the Jew. It is truly indescribable. You Jew, you have money for everything. And on the other hand, the Jew is persecuted as a Communist. The whole story of the Middle Ages is being repeated.

…Polish Jewry is in a desperate state. Above all, there are no prospects in life for the young people. Very few marriages are taking place among Polish Jews, and so on. The young people see no future for themselves here. They want to emigrate, but unfortunately the world is completed closed to them…Above all, we are very frightened…These days, the people in high places speak openly about how they need to rid Poland of at least 100,000 Jews. Anti-Semitism is growing by leaps and bounds. They send free anti-Semitic newspapers into every village. The Jew is blamed for everything.

Here is one from 1939:

Now, my dear brother, let’s get down to business. You write that you spoke to a “lawyer” [in English] and he told you that he would find out everything that needs to be done. My dear brother, you should know that I dwell on this day and night; I simply don’t sleep.

Most importantly, you must understand what I write you. First, the American consulate here is very strict about the papers it receives. First, the papers must indicate that the person submitting them is in a good financial situation – mainly that his income exceeds his expenses, that he can support [the immigrants.]. If so, they grant a visa. I don’t know if you can show this. If your “boss” [in English] can provide certification that you are paid, for example, $70, and that you require only $40, and you can also show that you have a couple of thousand in the bank, that is good. My dear, I would very much like to rescue the children from this fire. I believe that there is sure to be a war in Europe, and you are well aware what the word “war” represents.

They do everything they can to get rid of the Jews. A young person, if only he has the wherewithal, wants to escape, as if from hell. Oh, my dear brother, we must do everything with great care and deliberation, to see that things go well, because in the American consulate in Warsaw they look to see who has better papers, and better guarantees, and those people get a visa sooner. That’s the thing you have to see to. There are people whose papers have been lying in the consulate for three years already, and still nothing has happened. And whoever has papers that show that someone can put up a lot of money as a guarantee, and also makes a good living, then it’s OK. May God help us get this done successfully.

Here is one from later in 1939:

If I had something happy to write, I would write to you twice a week. Unfortunately, such terrible things happen occasionally, they are indescribable. What times we are living in! People were mistaken in their belief that the aristocracy will win, and that courtesy and decency will rule. Instead, we have barbarism, ferocious violence, concentration camps and women buried alive with babies in their arms. This continues, and England still supports it and gives [untranslatable word] and so on.

…And it’s now clear that war is inevitable. Hitler has arms and people; he needs bread. All of world Jewry must be ready to fight all on fronts with strength and money and influence, to make sure that he fails. For he has decreed that Jews are bad and must be stamped out and their possessions taken.

Now, my dear brother, I know you are eager to know what has happened with the papers you sent. It is not a simple matter. Everyone loves the Jews but nobody wants them [as immigrants in their country]. The American consulate is inundated with [illegible word] and it goes with great difficulty.

From two letters late in 1939:

This week I got your letter with the [illegible word] that you wrote to the “senator” [word is in English]. I see that you are devoted and want to rescue my children from this powder keg. Today it said in the paper that America will be closed for 5 years…

America pities and sends wishes to the Jews. Can’t they let in a couple of million Polish, German, Rumanian and Austrian Jews?

It’s like the rich man who was very charitable. A poor man came begging at his door in winter. It was exceptionally cold. The rich man stood at the door and gave him alms. Shouts the poor man, I don’t want alms. It’s cold and I’m freezing. Let me in so I can warm myself a bit. No answer. The rich man gives him a couple more pennies, but doesn’t let him in.

There was a time when the Spanish and German Jews were chased out and Poland took them in. And now in such developed countries as America and England – they know how to give alms but they won’t allow you to come in and warm yourself.

I’ll stop there, but I’ll add that these represent only a few short excerpts from a much lengthier series of letters that show a man who knows that he and his children are almost certainly trapped and doomed, and yet is fighting with all his might to escape. It is inexpressibly sad to read these letters and know what happened.

How typical this man’s sentiments and knowledge were at the time I do not know. But to me they suggest that a substantial number of the Jews who stayed in Europe in the 1930s and died there in the 1940s were quite aware of the fate that awaited them, either in general or very specific terms, and had tried their best to escape. But for most of them there was no way to do it and nowhere to go.

Open thread 5/19/23

The New Neo Posted on by

This has long been one of my favorite photos of myself. It was taken at summer camp when I was fourteen years old. I like it because I am concentrating so intensely on the painting that I had no idea it was being taken. I also like the fact that I’d somehow gotten paint on my bare leg and foot.

Phishing must catch a significant amount of prey

The New Neo Posted on by

They keep trying, and I have no doubt some people fall for it. I got this in my email today:

Your account ********@*****com password will expire today
Please kindly use the button below to continue with the same password

[link] Keep the same password

NOTE: This is a one-time user verification carried out in purpose to provide a more secure platform and shut down robot or malicious users created for the purpose of spamming and other fraudulent activities.

See, they’re the good guys, just trying to protect you.

Politico didn’t run any articles like this about Jean Carroll, Trump’s accuser

The New Neo Posted on by

And they won’t be doing it about Noelle Dunphy, Giuliani’s accuser.

At least, I haven’t been able to find any such articles there in a search.

What sort of article am I talking about? This one from two years ago, about Tara Reade, Joe Biden’s accuser. It’s basically a hit piece on her general veracity as reported by some people who have known her. Here’s a sample:

Over the past decade, Reade has left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances in California’s Central Coast region who say they remember two things about her — she spoke favorably about her time working for Biden, and she left them feeling duped.

As part of an investigation into Reade’s allegations against Biden — charges that are already shaping the contours of his campaign against a president who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple women — POLITICO interviewed more than a dozen people, many of whom interacted with Reade through her involvement in the animal-rescue community.

A number of those in close contact with Reade over the past 12 years, a period in which she went by the names Tara Reade, Tara McCabe or Alexandra McCabe, laid out a familiar pattern: Reade ingratiated herself, explained she was down on her luck and needed help, and eventually took advantage of their goodwill to extract money, skip rent payments or walk out on other bills.

For those who think that Reade can sue Biden, much like Carroll did Trump or Dunphy is doing Giuliani – well, she can’t. Reade’s allegations are that her sexual assault happened in Washington, DC, in 1993. That’s thirty years ago. The DC statute of limitations can be found here, and her cause of action would be way too old. And unlike New York, DC hasn’t passed a special law to let her do it – nor would there be any motivation to pass such a law, unless Reade was trying to get Trump or another figure on the right.

And even if the statute of limitations weren’t an issue, there’s another problem for someone like Reade, which is that DC is something like 90% Democrat. If somehow she were able to sue, what DC jury would ever find for her? The situation would be the exact opposite of New York.

Whistleblowers and agency intimidation: IRS and FBI

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently, the entire IRS team that was investigating Hunter Biden has been taken off the case:

The IRS on Monday removed the “entire investigative team” from its long-running tax fraud probe of first son Hunter Biden in alleged retaliation against the whistleblower who recently contacted Congress to allege a cover-up in the case, The Post has learned.

The purge allegedly was done on the orders of the Justice Department, the whistleblower’s attorneys informed congressional leaders in a letter…

“On April 27, 2023, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel appeared before the House Committee on Ways and Means. He testified: ‘I can say without any hesitation there will be no retaliation for anyone making an allegation or a call to a whistleblower hotline.’ However, this move is clearly retaliatory and may also constitute obstruction of a congressional inquiry,” the lawyers went on.

Getting too close to the forbidden target?

More here from the NY Post.

If you’ve ever wondered why there have been relatively few whistleblowers, considering the extent of the corruption and partisanship in government agencies in recent years, wonder no more. I believe it’s a combination of self-removal (in other words, people who know how partisan the agencies have become and don’t like it tend to quit), fear, and the natural tendency of most people to not make waves.

And then we have reports from the FBI whistleblowers. It’s a chilling story:

FBI whistleblower Garret O’Boyle said during the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing Thursday that the organization has created an “Orwellian atmosphere.”
“Too many in the FBI aren’t willing to sacrifice the hard right over the easy wrong,” he said during his opening statement. “They see what becomes of whistleblowers-how the FBI destroys their careers, suspends them under false pretenses, takes away their security clearances and pay with no true options for real recourse or remedy.”

“This is by design,” he continued. “It creates an Orwellian atmosphere that silences opposition and discussion.”

More:

The lawyer for Intelligence Analyst Marcus Allen told Congress his client, a retired Marine, was once named the FBI employee of the year in his Charlotte, N.C., office but today has found himself without a paycheck and sidelined after raising concerns about the accuracy of Wray’s testimony during a Senate hearing.

In fact, FBI leaders even questioned Allen’s “allegiance to the United States” before suspending his security clearance even though Allen served tours of duty during the Iraq war after the Sept. 11 attacks, wrote attorney Tristan Leavitt, the president of the Empower Oversight whistleblower center that is representing the analyst.

What was Allen’s crime? He questioned the veracity of Christoper Wray’s Congressional testimony in which Wray “left the impression” that the FBI hadn’t infiltrated the Proud Boys and certain other groups involved in January 6th. The FBI’s response was to accuse Allen of “espous[ing] conspiratorial views both orally and in writing and promot[ing] unreliable information which indicates support for the events of January 6th.”

Much more at the link at Ace’s.

Woke therapists and the unwoke

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a long article on how therapists have become social justice warriors. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, although I intend to do so. But I’ll just point out that: (a) there have always been many bad therapists out there, although there are probably many more these days; and (b) the vast majority of therapists have been on the left for a long long time.

On a personal note connected with point (b), twenty or so years ago when I was newly divorced and newly conservative and wanted to discuss both issues with a therapist, I had an amazingly difficult time trying to find a therapist willing to deal with a client on the right. So this sort of ostracism is not a new phenomenon at all, although I’m virtually certain it is now far more common than it was back then, and it was already common back then. If anyone is interested, here’s a website which purports to list therapists willing to work with conservatives. I have no idea whether it’s reliable or not, however.

If anyone is looking for a therapist, I suggest being basically up-front about your politics when you first speak to each therapist on the phone. Explain that you are politically conservative and ask whether they’re comfortable working with a conservative, whether they come from an identity politics ideology, and that sort of thing. The therapist may be truthful in telling you yes or no. You can often get a good sense of this in even a brief conversation, and it doesn’t cost a cent.

But what a terrible mess.

A mind is a difficult thing to change: here’s the typical spin on the Durham Report from the left

The New Neo Posted on by

What was Russiagate? Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and a bunch of other federal government players, as well as the MSM, conspired to lie about Donald Trump in a manner designed to harm him in the election of 2016, as well as to hamper and cripple his presidency and his 2020 candidacy. This is election interference on steroids, and imperils their supposedly favorite cause, “our democracy.”

The vast vast majority of people should now be able to see this and acknowledge it. There should be consequences for the perpetrators, but since many of them are powerful and allied with leftist power, this will not happen. There should be apologies, too. But that won’t be happening, either, although there may be one or two people here and there who offer one.

But what actually is happening is spin. The goal is to get readers and/or listeners to dismiss the Durham Report and everything I wrote in the first paragraph of this post. If you wonder how that can be done, just imagine that this sort of thing is what you’re hearing on the subject, and what just about all your friends are hearing. It would make it very easy to shrug, carry on, and continue to believe what you’ve been believing since 2016.

It starts with the headline. In fact, the headline is the most important thing of all, because it is all a lot of people will read before they move on:

“A big fat nothing”: Legal experts say “bogus” John Durham report proves “he’s failed miserably”
“Combined with his lack of success in the courtroom, this investigation was a flop,” ex-prosecutor says

An excerpt from the text:

Despite the lack of new information or any criminal convictions, Republicans touted the report on Monday…[various criticisms from the right follow]…

But legal experts largely trashed the document.

“This is it? This is the grand summary? It’s Horowitz with some extra commentary,” tweeted national security attorney Bradley Moss. “They’ve got nothing. No grand conspiracy. No effort to take down Trump. It’s ‘you messed up surveilling Page’ and ‘be more careful next time with political-affiliated sources.’ What a flop.”

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said that Durham’s report is “full of ‘observations’ but does not present evidence of uncharged crimes, as Mueller did.”

“It reads more like Durham’s spin on the OIG report than a prosecutorial document,” he wrote. “Combined with his lack of success in the courtroom, this investigation was a flop.”

That’s followed by additional cherry-picked comments from legal minds on the left, such as Andrew Weissman (if you’re unfamiliar with Weissman’s history, take a look).

None of this is surprising. I offer it, however, to illustrate the ways in which a person who’s been believing Russiagate is true all these years can keep his or her belief system intact. It’s not difficult; all the person needs to do is continue to read sources on the left or the MSM in general, and there won’t be any serious challenge. A mind really is a difficult thing to change, and people tend to read and believe things that confirm their already-existing biases. A belief system is an edifice that usually is quite strong, made of hundreds or thousands of elements – and although for some people, removing one element can make the whole thing topple down, that’s not the case for most people. And of course most people resist having even a single brick of the structure removed.

[ADDENDUM: Matt Taibbi writes:

Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us “denialists” — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.

The sort of intensity Taibbi describes on the part of his friends and colleagues is recalcitrant to change. Nor is there any desire to change, which makes it even less likely.]