Pittsburgh Jews Praised For Faith As They Double Down On Left-Wing Activism

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Luke Ford

There’s no mention in this LA Times story about Jews adding security. All the American synagogues that have had Jews murdered inside in the past five years have had zero security outside. Perhaps these shuls ought to man up and not leave their security to God?

If these Jewish congregations are “resolute in their defiance of the hatred that tried to destroy them,” they might learn how to legally carry guns to protect themselves.

What’s the best way of honoring the Jews who were murdered? Developing security so these attacks will be less effective in the future or doubling down on the left-wing activism that triggered the attacks?

As far as waiting for justice, even if the gunman is sentenced to death, there’s no justice possible in this life.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Faith lifted Pittsburgh Jews in long wait for massacre trial

PITTSBURGH — Three Jewish congregations, resolute in their defiance of the hatred that tried to destroy them, are still waiting for justice.

…But each in their own ways, members are finding renewed purpose in honoring those lost in the attack, in the bold practice of their faith, in activism on issues like gun violence and immigration, in taking a stand against antisemitism and other forms of bigotry.

…On Sunday, the day before jury selection, the Tree of Life Congregation is having a closure ceremony for its historic building. The congregation and a partner organization plan a major overhaul of the site, which will combine worship space with a memorial and antisemitism education, including about the Holocaust.

…Dor Hadash, founded 60 years ago, is Pittsburgh’s only congregation in the progressive Reconstructionist movement of Judaism. Many members are drawn to its interlocking focuses on worship, study and social activism.

It was that activism that appears to have drawn the shooting suspect — who fulminated online against HIAS, a Jewish refugee resettlement agency — to the address where Dor Hadash met. The congregation was listed on HIAS’ website as a participant in a National Refugee Shabbat, which wove concern for migrants into Sabbath worship.

…But the attack has only emboldened Dor Hadash members.

They were soon organizing what became a separate group, Squirrel Hill Stands Against Gun Violence, advocating for gun safety legislation. And they redoubled their support for immigrants, refugees and their helpers such as HIAS. The congregation has sponsored a refugee family originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And they have taken a strong stand against rising antisemitism and white supremacy.

“I think advocacy has been a huge part of our healing,” said Dana Kellerman, communications chair for Dor Hadash. Advocacy “isn’t just about making myself feel better,” she added. “It is about trying to move the needle so that this doesn’t happen to somebody else.”

“There are a lot of people who are seeking some way to help so that the world is a more compassionate place,” Recht said.

Compassionate for whom? Bringing in refugees is compassionate for the refugees but frequently is anti-compassionate for the Americans they hurt. You might want to watch the Boston Marathon bombing documentary on Netflix to reacquaint yourself with what refugees can do.

If this attack has only emboldened left-wing Jews in their left-wing activism, there will be more dramatic conflicts of interest in the future that tip into violence.

Rabbi Marc Katz of the Reform Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, N.J. writes in the New York Times:

One reason we were so resilient after the Molotov cocktail attack is that we had a plan of action in place. In the four years since the shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, American Jewish institutions have developed rapid-response playbooks to address concrete terror threats and best practices have been shared around the country. We have invested in our security infrastructure and communicated those changes to our congregants. Over the past few years we’ve added cameras, panic buttons, shatterproof film to our windows and boulders meant to keep cars from plowing into our building. In the days after the incident in January, we knew to reassure our congregants, gather worshipers back to the synagogue quickly and reach out to local police, elected officials and interfaith partners to firm up their commitment to allyship.

…When hate feels insurmountable and unpredictable, we have to shrink the problem. Even if we are treading a shaky path, we have to search for tiny patches of firm ground.

Together with neighboring rabbis, we educated our local towns to call us when there is an antisemitic incident first, so we can strategize with them about the right response. Some of our local Christmas tree lightings now include a Jewish presence: This past year, we used the event to talk about our collective fear and the need to bring light. In April, when we realized that Passover ended over Ramadan, we broke bread with a local Turkish community. That night in our sanctuary, a mixed group of Muslims and Jews gathered around one of our Torah scrolls and discussed the many things our faiths shared.

Our wider Jewish community has also reached across religious and racial lines to work toward social justice issues like bringing rent control to neighboring Montclair, to build bonds and trust.

Our local group of rabbis has begun working with schools to evaluate their Holocaust curriculums. We’ve also spent time in some of those schools, putting a face and personal story to that history. Equally important, we have worked to allow students to understand the connection between the hatred of the Nazi era and the hatred today — not just against Jews, but against all those who have experienced bigotry.

When there are genuine conflicts of interests between groups, they’re not going to be ameliorated by anti-bigotry education. Some of the reasons that people have negative feelings about groups such as Jews, Christians, Americans, Russians, whites, blacks, gays, Muslims, etc, are not irrational. Rather, these people usually have in-group identities that contain varying degrees of hostility towards out-groups, and these feelings of hostility will wax or wane depending upon circumstances. There are rarely in-group identities that don’t contain hostility towards out-groups.

In Season 7, Episode 2 of the TV show Seinfeld, Elaine makes a big mistake:

Elaine later confides in the rabbi that she feels bitter about George getting engaged, and wishes she were getting married instead. The rabbi talks about this to several people, including Jerry and a man who Elaine was attracted to, causing her great shame…

Susan and George watch the rabbi’s TV show. The rabbi recounts the story Elaine told him, referencing both Elaine and George by name, and mentions Elaine said George once argued that visiting a prostitute while engaged does not constitute cheating. The episode ends with the engaged couple watching the show in stunned confusion and shock.

Christians take it for granted that when they confide in their clergy, it will be kept confidential. There is no such assurance in Jewish life. Rabbis will typically dispense with confidentiality if they feel it is for the good of the community. This dramatic difference in priorities can have real world repercussions that lead some people to dislike some Jews.

Rony Guldmann writes in his work Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia:

* Contrasting their reason to the mere faith of conservatives, liberals believe that they have achieved a new level of existential and epistemic liberation. But conservative claimants of cultural oppression insist that the lines which liberals draw here are blurrier than they are prepared to acknowledge. For what liberals interpret as their liberated condition is actually their enslavement to religious impulses that they fail to recognize as such—but which conservatives, being securely anchored tradition, possess the sagacity and historical memory to recognize. What passes for enlightenment, a stance of critical reflexivity, is merely the medium for religious impulses that, having been eviscerated of substantive ethical content by the process of secularization, must now be expressed self-deceptively.

The difference between religious traditionalism and secular liberalism is not that one is sectarian while the other is cosmopolitan, but that one freely acknowledges its sectarianism while the other conceals it, projecting that sectarianism onto its political enemies.

* Meaning is first encountered in the world, not in any disembodied interiority…

* even the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity constitutes a form of engagement. For its actual contours are always precipitated and structured by shifts transpiring on the pre-reflective level of experience, whose reality will either slip or be accentuated in reflection of both chance and social conditions. The disengaged reflexivity of the strategic agent may produce the sensation that the self resides somewhere inside one’s skin. But that sensation presupposes as its unspoken backdrop a particular way of being outside one’s skin.

* Social meanings can constrain us because they are the grounds of our identities. To preserve identity is to contain freedom—to limit the range of life possibilities that one can seriously contemplate. For this narrowness is the sine qua non of taking oneself seriously, and what social meanings allow us to maintain. A field of social meanings not only confronts us as a force to be reckoned with, but moreover permeates us as the unspoken substratum of our very agency.

* Hero-systems are not idle “symbolic” luxuries, intangible “cultural” concerns, but rather a biological necessity.

* As emphatic as some conservatives may be in their warnings that same-sex marriage threatens the basic institution of marriage, they have always been at a loss to explain how precisely this should be. How could the presence of the same-sex couple next door possibly impinge on the stability of one’s own marriage? So the liberal reflex has always been to dismiss the conservative view as just thinly disguised mean-spiritedness, or else as the symptom of some unacknowledged fear or anxiety that is being “taken out” on those who have nothing to do with the conservative’s real problems, which are being disguised in ostensible worries about the preservation of the traditional family. This, after all, is one of the reasons why the benighted must “grow” and become “aware.” But many on the Left have in more sophisticated terms acknowledged that the destruction of the family is precisely their aim, and that same sex-marriage will, beyond extending legal rights to gay and lesbian couples, be tactically useful to this end. Lesbian activist Masha Gessen told a sympathetic audience: “Gay marriage is a lie. Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there. It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. … ‘Marriage equality’ becomes ‘marriage elasticity,’ with the ultimate goal of ‘marriage extinction.’”
She explained that “I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally… I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three… And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.”
If “marriage elasticity” has “marriage extinction” as its ultimate aim, the reason is not that the traditional 1950s-style nuclear family would become somehow criminalized, but that such elasticity would erode the hero-system that has historically underpinned that family, depriving that institution of its traditional social meaning. The “family” being targeted by the “homosexual agenda” is not the bare practices of cohabitation, financial interdependence, and child rearing by legally bound adults, but the hero-system of social conservatives, that thick structure of aspirational roles invoked by talk of traditional family values. And this is exactly what conservatives are referring to in warning that the family is under attack.
The institution of same-sex marriage can carry implications for heterosexual couples insofar as “traditional marriage” thereby becomes but one possible interpretation of a civil institution, rather than its intrinsic and uncontested meaning. It constitutes, not merely an expansion of rights, but also the regulation of social meaning, because it can upset the social plausibility, and therefore the personal resonance, of the traditional interpretation notwithstanding that no one is being physically disabled in their marital activities. To the extent marriage becomes socially understood as just another agreement rather than a sacrament, its value will have to be viewed as residing in individual sentiments rather than in a transcendent dispensation that ratifies these sentiments. Traditionalists are thereby threatened with a different interpretation of themselves, confronted with the possibility that the sacredness which they had imputed to their practices is but the reification of their own idiosyncratic emotions. Nothing prevents them from asserting that whatever the legal status of same-sex marriage may be, it is only marriages like their own that truly count in the eyes of God. But given 1) that this interpretation is now contested and 2) that social meanings are “forces to be reckoned with,” the meaning with which traditionalists would like to imbue their marriages will not necessarily be the meaning that their marriages actually end up carrying for them. Conservatives worries about liberals’ “attack on the family” are therefore more sophisticated than liberals are prepared to acknowledge.

* In “relativizing” the epistemically objective into the ontologically subjective, they hope to dissolve the power of heretofore taken-for-granted social meanings by highlighting their contingent origins in the coordinated meaning-generating activities of human beings—the recognition of which will compel people to then take these meanings less “seriously.”

* That outraged incredulity expresses, not mere moral disagreement, but the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity and the condemnation of those who have failed to realize it. It is intended to signal, not simply a different vision of the good, but the naturalistic lucidity of the disengaged subject, who is not “taken in” by the visceral, pre-reflective social meanings that beguile conservatives.

* The subtext of liberals’ outrage is that we can subtract the pre-modern layer of human experience and that conservatives are guilty of having failed to do so. But this subtraction is impossible, as we saw, merely a cultural fiction. And this is why conservatives’ “vague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” refer to the erosion and unraveling of something real, something on which human beings are genuinely dependent, which they do really encounter as an independent object—forces “to be reckoned with.” Yet this is exactly what liberals’ outraged incredulity is intended to deny. The purpose of this denial is not simply to condemn conservatives morally, but to impugn their basic competence as human agents, to highlight their failure to realize their human essence as strategic agents liberated from the confining horizons of a benighted past.

* Where the benighted traditionalist speaks of some ethereal “social fiber,” the post-modern sophisticate speaks of “social constructions.” But the underlying referent is the same, a hero-system, the socially sustained meanings that fortify individuals in their identities. This is what conservatives defend and what liberals attack.

* Following Martha Nussbaum, liberals will dismiss opposition to same-sex marriage as a symptom “narcissistic fear and aggression” awoken by “anxiety about change that eludes control, and the loss of control over cherished values.”113 But they can, upon adopting a suitably sophisticated sociological stance, recognize that this kind of narcissistic fear and aggression is not a weakness unique to social conservatives. On the contrary, it is a human constant that can work itself out in a great many ways, either crudely or subtly, and with or without any overtly religious or moralistic trappings. And yet what liberals can recognize in theoretical contexts is quickly forgotten in more heated political ones, where conservatives are judged according ideals of strategic agency that no one would be prepared to apply consistently. Conservatives’ visceral conviction that the liberal culture is holding them down through oppressive dualisms and double-standards originates in just this disingenuousness. This is why they urge us to recognize the human constants that would undermine the dualisms that this disingenuousness has facilitated, to recognize the symmetries that go unacknowledged by the liberal culture.

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Free Speech, Human Rights And The Nation-State

Posted on April 23, 2023 by Luke Ford

Prior to the 1970s, people understood that rights such as free speech were something the nation-state granted its citizens. More sophisticated people understood that these rights would wax and wane depending upon circumstance. For example, when America was fighting a war, certain rights would likely be reduced or eliminated.

Ian W. Toll writes in his book (Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945) about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s press conference on December 9, 1941:

For the previous forty-eight hours, the press had been scrambling to report what had happened in Hawaii. Apart from a small number of specialists who had covered the army and navy, most reporters were largely ignorant of military affairs and could not even name the nation’s top-ranking generals and admirals. Press secretary Steve Early had been providing regular briefings since Sunday, but there was much that he could not tell them. Bits and pieces of the truth had filtered back from Pearl Harbor through the rumor mill: hints of sunken battleships, airplanes destroyed on the ground, thousands of servicemen killed and wounded. Hysteria and fear were in the air. The Press Club on Fourteenth Street was humming with rumors. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had coordinated the first tentative steps toward press censorship. The army had warned newspapers that nothing was to be printed about troop movements, and the navy had taken control of international telephone and telegraph offices. But in those first hectic days of the war, the government had not yet disclosed how and when news from overseas combat theaters would be reported to the American people…

The issues of war reporting and censorship were not raised until the second half of the hour. When they were, it was evident that FDR and his advisers had barely begun to think about these issues.
“All information has to conform with two obvious conditions before it can be given out,” the president said. “The first is that it is accurate. Well, I should think that would seem fairly obvious. And the second is that in giving it out it does not give aid and comfort to the enemy.”
The reporters were evidently more than willing to abide by a censorship regime—the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor had dramatized the need to protect wartime secrets—but they were also eager to separate facts from rumors. If they received information from a nonofficial source, source, asked one newsman, what should they do with it? FDR said they must withhold it until the military censors could review it: “The papers are not running the war. The Army and Navy have got to determine that.”
The president was peppered with a series of questions about Pearl Harbor, and he answered with a minimum of detail. Asked to confirm that thousands of sailors had been granted leave and were in Honolulu on the morning of the attack, FDR shot back, “How do I know? How do you know? How does the person reporting it know?” 11 Rumors were bad enough in peacetime; in wartime they were potentially fatal to the war effort.
That night, FDR addressed the nation by radio in his first wartime “Fireside Chat,” reaching a record-breaking audience of 60 million. The speech repeated and amplified the points he had made in his lecture to the White House correspondents a few hours earlier. Rumormongering was an understandable impulse, he said, but it was potentially damaging to the morale of the American people. “Most earnestly I urge my countrymen to reject all rumors. These ugly little hints of complete disaster fly thick and fast in wartime. They have to be examined and appraised.” The enemy would spread lies and disinformation aimed at confusing and frightening the American people, and it was their collective responsibility to stand up to such propaganda tactics. Nothing reported by an anonymous source should be believed. He added a direct appeal to the news media:
To all newspapers and radio stations—all those who reach the eyes and ears of the American people—I say this: You have a most grave responsibility to the nation now and for the duration of this war.
If you feel that your Government is not disclosing enough of the truth, you have every right to say so. But in the absence of all the facts, as revealed by official sources, you have no right in the ethics of patriotism to deal out unconfirmed reports in such a way as to make people believe that they are gospel truth. 12
In those early stages of the war, when the shock of Pearl Harbor was still fresh, leaders in the news media adopted a constructive attitude toward censorship. No editor, reporter, or radio broadcaster wanted to be blamed for harming the Allied cause, whether intentionally or inadvertently. All agreed, at least in principle, that vital military secrets must not fall into the enemy’s hands through the medium of a free press. A popular trade journal told its readers: “As between an ethical professional requirement that a journalist hold nothing back and a patriotic duty not to shoot one’s own soldiers in the back, we have found no difficulty in making a choice. Freedom of the press does not carry with it a general license to reveal our secret strengths and weaknesses to the enemy.” 13
Mindful that the government had overplayed its hand during the First World War, FDR moved cautiously. He expressed his personal distaste for censorship. “All Americans abhor censorship, just as they abhor war,” he said in a statement shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “But the experience of this and of all other nations has demonstrated that some degree of censorship is essential in wartime, and we are at war.” 14
By January 1942, the federal government had established its basic policy. Reporting from overseas would be handled by “war correspondents” accredited by the army or navy, and their stories would be submitted to military censors prior to publication. But newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasters at home would be subject to a strictly voluntary regime, with no provisions for prior government censorship and no new enforcement mechanisms. They would be asked to abide by a “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press,” which listed categories of information to be withheld from publication for the duration of the war: troop movements, ship departures, war production statistics, the weather, the locations of sensitive military installations or munitions plants. No reference was to be made to information derived from intelligence sources, the effectiveness of enemy defensive measures, or the development of new weapons or technologies. For fear that spies or saboteurs might try to communicate through the American media, newspapers were asked to discontinue “want” ads placed by the public. For the same reason, commercial radio stations were to scrub open-microphone programs, call-in shows, and “man on the street” interviews. They would no longer take musical requests or broadcast local notices concerning lost pets, club announcements, or meetings.
A new federal agency, the Office of Censorship, was charged with implementing these measures. Byron Price, a veteran newsman who had most recently been executive editor of the Associated Press, was appointed director. Upon assuming his new post, Price vowed to resign before he allowed press freedoms to be curtailed, as they had been during the First World War, on such vague or capricious grounds as “public interest” or “national morale.”

Here are some highlights from this 2010 book (The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History) by Samuel Moyn:

* Historians of human rights approach their subject, in spite of its novelty, the way church historians once approached theirs. They regard the basic cause—much as the church historian treated the Christian religion—as a saving truth, discovered rather than made in history. If a historical phenomenon can be made to seem like an anticipation of human rights, it is interpreted as leading to them in much the way church history famously treated Judaism for so long, as a proto-Christian movement simply confused about its true destiny. Meanwhile, the heroes who are viewed as advancing human rights in the world—much like the church historian’s apostles and saints—are generally treated with uncritical wonderment. Hagiography, for the sake of moral imitation of those who chase the flame, becomes the main genre. And the organizations that finally appear to institutionalize human rights are treated like the early church: a fledgling, but hopefully universal, community of believers struggling for good in a vale of tears. If the cause fails, it is because of evil; if it succeeds, it is not by accident but because the cause is just. These approaches provide the myths that the new movement wants or needs.

They match a public and politically consequential consensus about the sources of human rights. Human rights commonly appear in journalistic commentary and in political speeches as a cause both age-old and obvious. At the latest, both historians and pundits focus on the 1940s as the crucial era of breakthrough and triumph. High profile observers—Michael Ignatieff, for example—see human rights as an old ideal that finally came into its own as a response to the Holocaust, which might be the most universally repeated myth about their origins. In the 1990s, an era of ethnic cleansing in southeastern Europe and beyond during which human rights took on literally millennial appeal in the public discourse of the West, it became common to assume that, ever since their birth in a moment of post-Holocaust wisdom, human rights embedded themselves slowly but steadily in humane consciousness in what amounted to a revolution of moral concern. In a euphoric mood, many people believed that secure moral guidance, born out of shock about the Holocaust and nearly incontestable in its premises, was on the verge of displacing interest and power as the foundation of international society. All this fails to register that, without the transformative impact of events in the 1970s, human rights would not have become today’s utopia, and there would be no movement around it.

* The best general explanation for the origins of this social movement and common discourse around rights remains the collapse of other, prior utopias, both state-based and internationalist. These were belief systems that promised a free way of life, but led into bloody morass, or offered emancipation from empire and capital, but suddenly came to seem like dark tragedies rather than bright hopes. In this atmosphere, an internationalism revolving around individual rights surged, and it did so because it was defined as a pure alternative in an age of ideological betrayal and political collapse. It was then that the phrase “human rights” entered common parlance in the English language.

* there is a clear and fundamental difference between earlier rights, all predicated on belonging to a political community, and eventual “human rights.”

* If the state was necessary to create a politics of rights, many nineteenth-century observers wondered, could they have any other real source than its own authority and any other basis than its local meanings?

* “Who will dare to avow that his heart was not lifted up,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exclaimed in 1797, “when the new sun first rose in its splendor; when we heard of the rights of man, of inspiring liberty, and of universal equality!” Unlike later human rights, however, they were deeply bound up with the construction, through revolution if necessary, of state and nation. It is now the order of the day to transcend that state forum for rights, but until recently the state was their essential crucible.

* [The human rights crusade emerged out of] “the distrust of utopia together with the desire to have one anyway.”

* Today it seems self-evident that among the major purposes— and perhaps the essential point—of international law is to protect individual human rights. “At the start of the new century,” one observer writes, “international law, at least for many theorists and practitioners, has been reconceived. No longer the law of nations, it is the law of human rights.”1 If that transformation is one of the most striking there is in modern law and legal thought, it is even more surprising that it really began only yesterday. Not only did the prehistory of international law through World War II provide no grounds for this development; for decades after, there would have been no way to believe or even to guess that human rights might become the touchstones they are today. Neither drawing from the humane spirit of founders centuries ago nor the recoil to World War II’s atrocities, human rights for international lawyers too are rooted in a startling and recent departure.

* one of the most fascinating testaments to the breakthrough of “human rights” in the late 1970s is the response of philosophers, who after a moment of confusion about their novelty assimilated them to natural rights principles that were themselves being revived.

In his April 4, 2023 column, Dennis Prager wrote:

Communism — or if you will, left-wing fascism and totalitarianism — is coming to America and Canada, and (a bit more gradually) to Australia and New Zealand…

Students at elite law schools such as Stanford and Yale behave as if they were members of Komsomol, the Soviet Communist Youth League. On the rare occasions that conservative speakers come to their campuses to give a lecture, students heckle, shout and curse at them, disrupting their ability to speak in ways reminiscent of the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany.

The greatest of all freedoms, that of speech, is disappearing.

The rights granted by a nation-state always wax and wane depending upon circumstance. Prager’s column seems hysterical.

In exceptional circumstances, or in what are claimed to be exceptional circumstances, all functioning democracies dramatically curtail and eliminate rights, such as during the Covid pandemic.

Here are some highlights from a 2010 paper in the Minnesota Law Review by two Yale University law professors, Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin:

“I’m the commander-see, I don’t need to explain-I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” – George W. Bush

If Americans know one thing about their system of government, it is that they live in a democracy and that other, less fortunate people, live in dictatorships. Dictatorships are what democracies are not, the very opposite of representative government under a constitution.2

The opposition between democracy and dictatorship, however, is greatly overstated.

* Carl Schmitt offers perhaps the most chilling analysis of all. Although he recognizes the possibility of commissarial dictatorships, where the ultimate goal of dictatorship is restoring the status quo, he assumes that elements of the sovereign dictatorship always lurk in the background, waiting to emerge and to transform any existing political order.74 No matter how well designed a constitutional system might be, the true sovereign will always be able to escape the confines of that design and make exceptions to it.

* Emergency, or at least claims of emergency, are the standard cause and the standard justification for creating dictatorships.

* Machiavelli argued that republics should plan for emergency allocations of power in advance. Does the American constitution meet Machiavelli’s test? Does it adequately build the possibilities of emergency into its design, to avoid the dangers of inertia, impotence, and deadlock yet still preserve republican government? Recall Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous statement in M’Culloch v. Maryland that “[the] constitution [is] intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” 95 Notably, the word “crises” is italicized in the original opinion. Nevertheless, the text of the American Constitution is remarkably devoid of specific clauses that give government officials emergency powers. The most relevant example is the Suspension Clause, which allocates to Congress (contra the views of Abraham Lincoln) the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, but only “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion [when] the public Safety may
require it.”96 Moreover, the Suspension Clause says nothing about other kinds of dangers, for example economic meltdowns, fires, floods and hurricanes, or even the invasion of a drug resistant virus. Nevertheless, constitutional emergencies may arise from many different sources.

* The first decade of the twenty-first century has made us all too aware of the various dangers that can plague our social orders; even the cost of terrorist attacks may pale in comparison to the damage wrought by tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, or dangerous viruses. Thus in 2009, the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, placed the entire country under a “state of emergency” because of the potential swine flu pandemic. As John Ackerman, chief editor of the Mexican Law Review has explained, this serves to: “concentrate political power in his hands…. [President Calderon] has authorized his health secretary to inspect and seize any person or possessions, set up check points, enter any building or house, ignore procurement rules, break up public gatherings, and close down entertainment venues. The decree states that this situation will continue ‘for as long as the emergency lasts.’. . . This action violates the Mexican Constitution, which normally requires the government to obtain a formal judicial order before violating citizens’ civil liberties. Even when combating a ‘grave threat’ to society, the president is constitutionally required to get congressional approval for any suspension of basic rights. There are no exceptions to this requirement.”

Ackerman notes that Latin America has a “long history of using states of emergency as ploys to … return to authoritarianism.”

* Nikita Khrushchev paid for his commendable caution [regarding the Cuban Missile crisis] with his job, which suggests a degree of accountability that made the Soviet leader significantly less of a full-scale dictator than most Americans assumed.

* John Yoo, the author of the notorious “torture memos,” has argued that, despite American objections to King George III, the President still enjoys the powers possessed by the English monarch at the time of the American Revolution. Although Parliament retained the powers of the purse, Yoo explains, the King possessed unbounded discretion over the use of military force.

* Schmitt’s “sovereign” is the person who can successfully define something as a “crisis” and then basically do whatever he or she thinks necessary to meet the crisis.

* Asserting that the President actually has control over the entire Administration is a bit like the courtiers of King Canute who tried to flatter him by claiming that he could direct even the progress of the ocean’s tides. King Canute, on the other hand, had no such delusions of grandeur.

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The Goyim Defense League are the logical result of Civil Rights (4-21-23)

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 The Goyim Defense League, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/florida-sheriff-hate-crimes/
02:00 The Eucalypti are an invasive species
10:00 The Goyim Defense League,
https://liddell.substack.com/p/social-media-freakshow-for-the-antisocial
33:00 Dennis and Julie, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shGGCmfhCBc
42:00 The end of humanity, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/20/hastening-the-end-revolt-against-humanity-adam-kirsch/
48:00 Greg Johnson on Tucker Carlson on White Identity Politics
54:00 Decoding the Gurus: “Mini” Decoding of Matthew Goodwin, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/mini-decoding-of-matthew-goodwin-interview-with-paul-bloom
1:09:00 Tucker Carlson
1:18:00 Social media is dominated by freaks, https://liddell.substack.com/p/social-media-freakshow-for-the-antisocial
1:24:00 Andy Nowicki analyzed, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/2023/04/whos-who-in-dissident-right-andy-nowicki.html
1:26:00 Schizophrenia, &The Mandela Effect; Living On The Edge Of Insanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTO-dvzMfso
1:33:00 Disco 29 Simple Moves – You Should Be Dancing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqwgCpwLZBs
1:35:00 DTG: Oprah Winfrey: Self Actualising Your Destiny, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/oprah-winfrey-self-actualising-your-destiny

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lol nothing matters (4-20-23)

Posted on April 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

00:30 Dennis Prager: ‘The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147484
01:00 Could It Happen Here?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147493
04:00 The best selling soprano, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Brightman
10:00 Bob Woodward and the Nihilism of “LOL Nothing Matters” Republicans, https://www.thebulwark.com/bob-woodward-and-the-nihilism-of-lol-nothing-matters-republicans/
20:00 Dennis and Julie is a sweet show, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Akgk5AsPQ&list=PLdO4YIywSHcm64SYIJ_iFoLBAdXxpf_7M
35:00 Luke’s walk of shame
41:00 Her mom reprimanded her for a lack of adventure
59:00 NYT: Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/republican-president-2024-heritage-foundation.html,
1:01:00 NYT: Signed Letters, Mar-a-Lago Dinners: Trump’s Personal Touch in Fighting DeSantis, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/trump-desantis-2024.html
1:03:00 NYT: ‘Prove Mike Wrong’ for $5 Million, Lindell Pitched. Now He’s Told to Pay Up., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/politics/mike-lindell-arbitration-case-5-million.html
1:08:30 Dennis Prager: ‘The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147484

Posted in America | Comments Off on lol nothing matters (4-20-23)

Could It Happen Here?

Posted on April 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

Some people look outside their window and see trees of green, skies of blue, and think, what a wonderful world. Dennis Prager looks outside his window and sees dead people stacking up by the millions. How does Dennis see what you don’t? Because he’s better than you. He’s wiser, smarter and more attuned to the signs of civil war.

Is there any pundit who does not constantly stress the importance of himself and his punditry? Is there any pundit for whom self-advancement is not their primary underlying theme? Is there any pundit who notes that election outcomes in America won’t noticeably effect 99% of Americans 99% of the time? Does any pundit say that your primary purpose, meaning, excitement and morality in life should come from your family (and if you have space after that, from your friends, community and pursuits)? If people get their purpose, meaning, excitement and morality in life from their relationship with their friends and family, then they have no need for pundits. Such people don’t need Dennis Pragers except as a hobby.

On March 30, 2023, former president Donald J. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan Grand Jury. Dennis Prager was outraged. 

In his April 4, 2023 column, Dennis wrote:

Communism — or if you will, left-wing fascism and totalitarianism — is coming to America and Canada, and (a bit more gradually) to Australia and New Zealand.

Our universities have become moral and intellectual wastelands — almost as ideologically pure as Moscow State University was in the Soviet era. As of December 2022, there were seven times more administrators (15,750) at Stanford University than faculty (2,288).

Our medical schools are embracing Soviet-like science. In more and more of them, incoming doctors are instructed not to use the terms “male” and “female.” Harvard Medical School officials use the terms “pregnant and birthing people” rather than “pregnant women.” And children’s hospitals are using hormone blockers (which, among other dangers, can impair future reproductive functioning) and mutilating perfectly healthy teenagers.

Students at elite law schools such as Stanford and Yale behave as if they were members of Komsomol, the Soviet Communist Youth League. On the rare occasions that conservative speakers come to their campuses to give a lecture, students heckle, shout and curse at them, disrupting their ability to speak in ways reminiscent of the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany.

The greatest of all freedoms, that of speech, is disappearing.

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the provincial agency in charge of education has announced that the notion that there is only one correct answer in mathematics is an expression of white supremacy. The Oregon Education Department has announced the same thing. The American Medical Association has declared that no American birth certificates should list the sex/gender of a child — the child will decide that later.

Teachers across the country are robbing children as young as 5 of their innocence. They are routinely taken to drag queen shows where men in women’s clothing dance for them (sometimes lewdly). Why? Because it is the aim of most American schools from first grade to postgraduate to have all American young people believe that sex/gender is “nonbinary” — that alone in the animal kingdom, human beings are not sexually divided into male and female.

In the COVID-19 era, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and virtually every other national medical and health agency largely abandoned science and even elementary decency (recall all the Americans who were forcibly deprived of any visitors and left to die alone in hospitals) and became tools of the Left. They and America’s Sovietized teachers’ unions ruined millions of American children by closing schools for nearly two years. In addition to the doomsday hysteria over climate change, the imposed gender confusion and the absence of religion, this has led to the highest rates of adolescent depression and suicide ever recorded in America.

Our justice department, about half of our judges and our security agencies are well on their way to becoming what the Soviet ministry of justice, Soviet security agencies and Soviet judges were: tools of the ruling party.

Our mainstream media, with few exceptions, are as uncommitted to truth as were the organs of the Soviet Communist Party, Pravda and Izvestia. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and PBS play the same role for the Left and therefore the Democratic Party.

It was only a matter of time until the Left would arrest a former president of the opposition party.

I suspect that people who suffered under Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would not find much of a parallel with the situation in the United States today.

None of the reasons Prager listed for how America is becoming more like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are unique to Nazi and Soviet regimes. None of the arguments that Prager lists for how America is becoming like Nazi and Soviet regimes stand up to examination. All of Prager's stated concerns about America have occurred in similarly in dozens if not hundreds of non-Nazi, non-communist nations. Hundreds of nations, for example, have restricted speech. Hundreds of nations have had institutions of higher learning decline. All medical schools have gone in false directions and have had to retract teachings. Medicine has never been a science. Justice has always been political because it has always been executed by human beings. Hundreds of nations have had people heckle and try to shut down speakers. Hundreds of nations have taught things about sex that many people today would find abhorrent. Hundreds of nations have had institutions supposedly dedicated to truth turn out to be not so dedicated to truth. Hundreds of nations have had their justice departments become tools of the ruling party. Dozens of non-communist, non-Nazi nations have had health departments operate as tools of the ruling party. 

If free speech is disappearing in America, than where is it flourishing? It not now, when? In reality, the United States today retains more free speech protections than almost any nation that has ever existed. Restrictions on free speech don't make America Soviet, they make America more like every nation that has ever existed because all nations have restricted speech. 

That the American news media is equivalent to Pravda is not an assertion that any knowledgeable person can take seriously. 

After Trump was indicted, I listened to Dennis Prager's radio show for the first time in years because I suspected it would drive Prager to revealing over-statement. Within a minute of tuning in, I found Prager's unhinged rhetoric about how life in America increasingly approximates life under Hitler and Stalin to be absurd.

Around this same time, I watched a video called "35 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Tools | Trauma Informed Counseling Skills" by Dr. Dawn Elise-Snipes, who has a PhD in Mental Health Counsel. Early in her video, she said: "The first and most basic tool is a behavioral one and that is to create safety."

A nationally syndicated radio host such as Prager telling his listeners they lived in a country increasingly akin to Nazi Germany is not a good way of creating an appropriate level of safety in listeners who take him seriously. I remembered my insight from more than 25 years ago that listening to Prager consistently filled me with rage even though I largely agreed with him and even though he was ostensibly all about happiness. It became clear to me that the man pours poison into the American soul. Enraging people is a great way of getting listeners but it makes people less happy and less effective in life. Outside of a few murder zones, life in the United States for Prager listeners is overwhelmingly safe and free (compared to other countries on this earth). Inculcating gratitude might be a wiser path for a man intent on doing good rather than inculcating rage. There are situations in life where rage is more adaptive than gratitude, such as when you are fighting for your life in a dark alley, but they are few and far between. 

April 3, 2023, Dennis said: "The USA Today is a rag sheet on the level of Pravda. 'Trump using anti-semitic rhetoric to raise money after indictment.' Let me say as a Jew who has done more to fight anti-semitism more than almost any living Jew… Who is on the Holocaust Memorial Board. Who has brought more good will to Jews than the entire Anti-Defamation League… This is a damn liar, Erin Mansfield, this piece of crap who writes this goddamn lie… [Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg] is a George Soros funded DA. That is enough to condemn him because George Soros is as close to diabolic as it gets on this planet. He doesn't even identify as a Jew… Soros has as much to do with Judaism, Jews and Israel as a rural Mongolian. And a lot of USA Today readers will believe this lie."

I doubt that many USA Today readers will change their mind because of this one op-ed. People weren't born yesterday. We haven't evolved to be gullible. The only minds that are going to be changed by an op-ed or a radio monologue are those minds looking for reasons to change. You can never change a man's mind against his will. 

"Alvin Bragg is as bad a human being to occupy that office as has existed. The man is 100% responsible for some of the murders and rapes in New York City because of his completely lenient view of violent crime."

"How do you become a bad human being? …You accept money from bad human beings. You think of yourself as a victim. There is nothing more guaranteed to produce a bad human being than the victim mentality. I got hurt, I can lash out. I am freed from normal moral demands because I am a victim."

"The indictment of an ex-president for no valid reason except that they are filled with hate, they are Third World thugs. You cannot overstate the significance of the evil that has taken place. It is immoral to tune out."

"Rampant evil is what the Left has engaged in… Twenty years ago at least, I said there was a civil war in this country. If this is not obvious to you, then bad news is not something you want to handle psychologically. The Left and the Right have nothing in common. Like Florida and California at this time have nothing in common. They might as well be different countries on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Whenever I went from California to Florida, I felt like I did when I went from Western Europe to Eastern Europe under communism."

"If you support the indictment, you are not on the side of truth or of concern for America."

April 4, 2023, Dennis said: "We are becoming like the Soviet Union. This is not in any way an exaggeration. I took a vow never to exaggerate because you lose your credibility. I try always to understate and to calm people's fears, but we are sliding into a Soviet system. The parallels are frightening. We have political prisoners [referring to January 6 protesters]. Joe Biden would be completely comfortable in a Soviet Union setting. So would Kamala Harris. So would most of the members of the Democratic party in Congress and in gubernatorial positions. The press functions the way the Soviet press functioned — as a mouthpiece of the ruling party… When you want to jail your opponents, you can find anything. It is difficult to overstate what the Left is doing to the United States in converting it into a Soviet-type country. Putin speaks of misinformation just the way the Democratic Party and the New York Times speak of misinformation — whatever we don't want you to know."

"Sorry to be this dark about the situation now. You have to two choices in life – to fight or to check out. Ideally, you get your kids out of the schools that are poisoning their minds, their souls, their hearts, their consciences, their ability to think. We sold our soul in the early 20th Century when we said the government should educate our children."

"People want to believe that we have more in common with our fellow American on the other side than what divides us. What do I have in common with the Left? I can think of one. A Leftist believes in taking care of his family and so do I… In the realm of ideology and ideas, what do we have in common? Nothing."

"I know from years of experience with home-schooled kids that overwhelmingly they turn out happier, finer, kinder and more intelligent…"

"Alvin Bragg [Manhattan DA] is a punk."

"What groups of Americans have been added to the list of Trump supporters? If there aren't any, then it is difficult [to see Trump winning the presidency in 2024]. Do you believe Trump has added any group? [Democrats may believe] that [indicting Trump] may make him so popular [among Republicans that he wins the nomination but loses the general election]."

Caller (Victor in Chicago): "With the media being so far to one side, how can our constitutional republic survive?"

Dennis: "That's a very fair question. You're listening to one of those chances — talk radio. Talk radio reaches more people than Fox News, for example. PragerU has over a billion views a year, 65% are under 35. The Daily Wire has an enormous reach. TPUSA has an enormous reach on college campuses. However, it is true that when the mainstream media are all in one direction, and with corporations giving hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing groups and almost nothing to conservative groups, the odds are against us. The worst is Big Tech suppressing us. The suppression of dissent is the road to the Sovietization of this country."

April 5, 2023, Dennis said: "The great lack in young Americans' lives is religion. It is the direct cause, not only cause, of all the depression, lost sense of identity…"

"Do you think the American government under the Democrats is less corrupt than the Ukrainian government? I don't. Thirty four counts [in the Trump indictment] with no crime."

To sum up the level of corruption in the American federal system of government with one indictment out of Manhattan is absurd. In a big country like the United States, there have always been hideous examples of injustice. How could there be otherwise when justice is delivered by flawed humans? 

March 27, 2023, Dennis said: "I have come to entertain the possibility of a devil. It has been so diabolic what I have experienced the past three years. It is hard to explain on rational grounds the madness that has taken over."

According to the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, the United States ranks 24th in the world while Ukraine ranks 116. 

April 14, 2023, Dennis said: "All of Leftism is secularized religion."

He plays a clip from Joe Biden: "The single existential threat to the world is climate change. We don't have a lot of time and that's a fact."

Dennis: "Whenever he says, that's a fact, I assume he's lying. It's a signal that what I'm saying is not true.

"[Climate change] is the single best way for me and the Left to overthrow Western civilization as we know it and destroy the economies of the Western world. That would be the truth."

"All of these great threats…to take away the rights of people. He said that in Ireland. Did you see the Irish prime minister's dog start barking at him? Remarkable. I'm not using this as proof that the dog knows what I know — that this is the scummiest human being to be president of the United States in our history, but dogs are sensitive to human meanness."

"The WSJ: Biden's EPA remakes the auto industry. His new car rules are de facto orders to make EVs. They call out Donald Trump as fascist. When the government tells businesses what to do, that is one of the truth sign posts of incipient fascism."

Thousands of non-fascist governments have told businesses what to do. It's hardly a sign of fascism. People with power frequently tell people with less power what to do. That's less a sign of fascism than a sign of being human. As Thucydides put it: The strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must. 

To those who take Prager seriously, his civil war talk has a significantly depressing effect. Prager's Youtube cohost, Julie Hartman, said December 19, 2022: "I have to tell you, Dennis, and this is a really depressing thought, and I can't believe I'm saying, I have really started to fear that I am going to see the demise and the downfall of the United States in my lifetime. I don't know if it is going to be around when I am forty. If we keep going down this path, it won't."

Dennis: "If we keep going down this road, there will be two United States."

Julie: "This will not impede my will to fight. If we descend into a civil war or if China comes for us… They are so much more technologically skilled than we are. They have a more robust military. We used to have the top military in the world and they have surpassed us."

Dennis: "I don't see China attacking us. I see China assuming we are going to commit suicide."

Julie: "China is trying to expedite the process. Look at what they're doing with fentanyl. They're trying to kill American citizens. They don't need to do much, we are self-destructing."

Dennis: "The left has been working to destroy this country for a century. They're an overnight sensation."

Jordan Peterson

On his March 6, 2023 show with Julie Hartman, Dennis said: "I asked [a major liberal] if he had ever heard of Jordan Peterson. No. I went through the list of the finest conservative minds and he had not heard of one of them."

January 30, 2023, Dennis said: "I think meat is the healthiest food there is. I got that from Jordan Peterson."

The Atlantic noted in 2018: “The famous psychologist and his daughter swear by a regimen of eating only beef. Restriction can provide a sense of order in a world of chaos—but at what point does restriction become a disorder?”

Why would anyone regard Jordan Peterson, who recently was suicidal because of a benzo addiction, as an excellent source for advice about healthy living?

Under the headline “Hastening the End“, Mark O’Connell wrote in the New York Review of Books April 20, 2023 issue:

It’s in the nature of apocalyptic movements, and of human beings, to think of history as a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end that is about to be revealed. And our current moment, with its rising sea levels and viral pandemics, its Mars-colonizing billionaires and fragmenting global orders, certainly feels apocalyptic. But there is something undeniably self-flattering in the idea of an imminent apocalypse, in that it places us—our generation, our time—at the very center of the meaning of things, as the ultimate protagonists of history.

And this is related to the somewhat grandiose appeal of the end of the world as a subject. …if you’re writing a book about the end of the world you can be confident that there is nothing more pressing to consider, and thereby be assured of your own intellectual seriousness.

By claiming he sees American in civil war and on a road to Nazi Germany, Dennis Prager places himself at the very center of things. He feels confident that “there is nothing more pressing to consider” than his ideas.

Posted in Dennis Prager | Comments Off on Could It Happen Here?