Steve Sailer writes: Ron was motivated by both parties of the Sacramento legislature voting quietly to put on the ballot in 2016 a ballot measure in effect repealing his signature Proposition 227. This 1998 measure switched the default in California schools from bilingual education to English immersion, passing with 58% of the vote.
Ron’s intervention, although strongly opposed by the Spanish language TV network Univision, successfully ended the bizarre but worrisome possibility that the state of California was subsidizing its own Quebec-style language imbroglio by encouraging Spanish-speaking students to postpone grappling with learning English until they were too old to pick it up easily.
Small children quickly learn languages that they are immersed in, so the old bilingualist orthodoxy perversely (or intentionally) weakened English acquisition.
The government subsidizing massive levels of public school teaching in Spanish sent the message that the powers that be wanted Hispanics to remain linguistically isolated, much as the government of Quebec sends that message to Quebec residents. As we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter, ethnic activists tend to demand most loudly what the government, with its tax dollars to spend, is hinting it wants them to demand.
It turns out, however, that when the government tells the children of immigrants to learn how to speak English, they learn how to speak English.
After all, all over the 21st Century world, speaking English is cool. I’ve often pointed out that even in heavily Spanish-speaking Van Nuys, CA, the Plant 16 movie complex rarely shows a movie dubbed into Spanish or with subtitles. I don’t have to give a single thought to whether a movie playing there will be in Spanish or English. The throngs of Latino teens who show up to watch, say, Oscar Isaac (a Latino who speaks English superbly) in The Force Awakens almost all comprehend English well enough that they would never do anything so awkward as admit they’d rather see the latest blockbuster dubbed.
But even though the English-dominant system molded by Ron in 1998 is popular with the children of California, it’s unpopular with ethnic activists. So the legislature decided to encourage voters to break what doesn’t need fixing. But they did it in a very understated manner to keep the public from noticing what’s going on.
So that’s why Ron decided to jump into the Senate race at the last moment: to draw publicity to what the profiteers of linguistic divisiveness are up to.
Interestingly, Ron’s previous campaign for office – his run in the 1994 GOP primary against incumbent governor Pete Wilson — was strikingly successful. Ron earned 34% of the vote challenging Wilson, who was strong enough to go on to defeat Kathleen Brown by 15 points (one of only two defeats in eight runs for governor suffered by the Brown dynasty of California; the only other politician able to beat a Brown for governor was Ronald Reagan).
COMMENTS:
* Then in 1998 he backed Prop 227 which banned bilingual education and mandated English immersion. Unz was the principal financial backer and public face. It passed. Some time in 1999 or 2000 or thereabouts, The New Republic had him on the cover as the man who runs California or something like that.
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The Bengazi thing (thought personally I think this is a distraction).
Her advocacy of Syrian intervention
Her Ukrainian intervention
Her position on illegal immigration: no wall needed, no such thing as an illegal immigrant basically
Her history in favor of Nafta, Gatt, WTO, etc..
Her careless attitude towards US national security. as evidenced by her private email server, which she justified as a matter of “convenience.”
Her and Bill’s foundation accepting large donations from Saudis and other dubious Islamic sources in Middle East.
Dependence on the donor class, including Goldman Sachs, the poster boy for Wall St. misbehavior
Her once saying, “Fuck them!” in reference to Bill’s blue-collar constituency during his first term as President
Her enabling of Bill’s past sexual assault history, including credible accusations of rape; and her defense of a rapist back in Arkansas
Her failure with healthcare reform during Bill’s first term, a complete Rube-Goldberg disaster
Her full backing of the Obama administration, including bad relationship with Israel while she was Secretary of State
Her infatuation with Saul Alinsky back in her college days (including her honors thesis).
Her complete lack of any major achievements on her own, riding her husband’s coattails into national prominence, in contrast to a real female leader like Margaret Thatcher.
Can readers add to this list of vulnerabilities that Trump might exploit in the fall?
You have to feel sorry for, as well as worried about, for poor Israel, finding herself in the middle of an Islamic world seething in violence and hatred and basically at war with the West. The long-term survival of the state seems no longer quite the sure thing, or even the desirable thing, it did in the latter decades of the 20th century. Giving all Israeli Jews dual American citizenship would reduce American Jewish anxieties, which means a paranoia driven neo-conservative foreign policy might lose some of its steam. America would become world Jewry’s final refuge, their New Jerusalem, in case all else fails. But to prepare the ground American Jews need to be less hostile to the interests of working-class Americans, especially on the issues of trade and immigration.
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James “two-time winner of a National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Association Award!” Kirchick writes: I find Trump’s contempt for the basic functions of democracy—in particular the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—absolutely appalling. His call to ban all Muslims from entering the country is fundamentally evil. Naturally, Trump has also said he’s unsure whether President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was wrong, despite official condemnations by later American presidents. The casually dispensed threats to those who might challenge his authority as president, from the Speaker of the House (“he’s going to have to pay a big price”) to military officers who refuse his hypothetical illegal orders mandating commission of torture and war crimes (“They’re not gonna refuse me”), has literally kept me awake at night with visions of the country gradually transforming into a North American caudillo-stan. If a recent Washington Postarticle about therapists reporting an outbreak of “Trump anxiety” among their patients is any indication, I am hardly the only Jew dealing with such existential worry.
Trump’s Nuremberg-esque rallies, where entranced audiences obliviously raise their right hands in impromptu loyalty oaths, evince a frisson of seething aggression. One has come to expect that black and Latino protesters, not to mention fellow journalists, will be roughed up, behavior Trump has repeatedly and explicitly endorsed. His call for deporting 11 million illegal immigrants raises the prospect of nationwide nighttime raids and are the harbinger of a police state. His unapologetic mockery of the physically disabled—one of the Nazis’ earliest victims—resembles a CliffsNotes’ Nietzchean will to power. If Trump doesn’t get his way at the Republican National Convention this summer, that he will deploy some sort of organized paramilitary force—transforming Cleveland into a far-right phantasmagoria of Chicago 1968—is hardly idle speculation.
Watching the Trump drama unfold, I have felt a sense of being transported back to my earlier posting abroad as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in which capacity I covered upheaval across the former Soviet space and North Africa. This is the sort of candidate and the type of politics we associate with failed states and military dictatorships, not the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. If Trump wins the nomination and, God forbid, the presidency, I anticipate race riots in major American cities. Philip Roth’s alternate history novel, The Plot Against America, envisioning the narrow election of a President Charles Lindbergh who keeps America out of World War II and presides over a worsening climate of anti-Jewish persecution, is no longer the stuff of my Bubbie’s tsuris.
Given his wink-wink, nudge-nudge circumlocutions about the Ku Klux Klan, it’s easy to understand why Trump terrifies racial minorities. Yet Jews qua Jews have been left out of the discussion about Trump’s bigotry. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, after all, is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, having married the scion of another corrupt New York real-estate mogul, Jared Kushner, and Trump has accumulated an abundance of Jewish friends and business partners over his many years in the Big Apple. As he reminded the debate audience last Thursday night, he was once the Grand Marshal of New York’s annual Salute to Israel Parade. Indeed, as my Tablet magazine colleague Liel Leibovitz wrote last year, at a time when many still viewed the Donald’s campaign with a sense of curious bemusement rather than resigned terror, there is somethingof the macher in the “vaudevillian” Trump, an “heir to a precious Jewish tradition.”
These biographical details, meant to reassure Jews who may be on the fence about the billionaire, are cold comfort. From the cult of masculinity to the boastful anti-intellectualism, Donald Trump has unleashed ugly passions that any Jew with even the most tenuous connection to Jewish community, history, or tradition ought instinctively fear. Nativism, racism, populism, physical and rhetorical thuggery, blatant lying—these are things that should disturb all people of good will. But they are anathema especially to the Jewish “critical spirit,” that rich tradition of skepticism and humanism loathed by know-nothing anti-Semites throughout history. To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.
More disheartening than any of Trump’s individual policy pronouncements and behaviors is the fact that so many Americans are unbothered by them. According to political scientist Matthew MacWilliams, Trump supporters have an “authoritarian” disposition. They admire strength to the exclusion of any other characteristic including decency, consistency, and compassion, never mind respect for the rule of law. This trait has long eluded political pollsters because, like me, they didn’t think that a predisposition toward authoritarianism was a characteristic worth measuring in the American electorate. That it so clearly is does not bode well for the future of our republic.
***
If Trump has brought out the worst in the American right, so has he elicited the worst from a segment of the American left. To their everlasting credit, many conservative intellectuals have forthrightly denounced Trumpism, providing a moral example for the many spineless Republican elected officials (with the heroic exception of Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse) who have shamefully chosen to stand on the sidelines as their party moves closer and closer to nominating an authoritarian demagogue as its presidential nominee. This elite-level repudiation was most clearly expressed in “Against Trump,” a cover story symposium published by National Review, and an open letter lambasting the Republican front-runner signed by over 100 prominent GOP foreign policy and national security experts, many of them friends and colleagues and whose views I enthusiastically endorse. Both initiatives placed country over party, stressing the threat that Trump poses not merely to conservative values and the future viability of the GOP, but more importantly the fundamental tenets of America’s democracy and global standing.
To a certain species of left-wing pundit, however, these patently good faith sentiments are the result of darker, malign motivations. What really angers the conservative establishment, these commentators believe, is Trump’s refusal to bow before the “neoconservatives,” a political classification often indistinguishable from “Jewish foreign policy hawk.” MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews—who in a tirade last year attacked “piggish money people,” “a rotten crowd out there that is very hawkish,” and “wants to fight more wars”—believes that Trump’s condemnation of Operation Iraqi Freedom is what turned the “war hawks” against him. Never mind that Trump’s supposed heresy of GOP foreign policy dogma is as muddled and inconsistent as his views on any other matter, and reeks of opportunism. After National Review published its symposium, Matthews invited the magazine’s Washington editor Eliana Johnson onto his television program. There, the Father Coughlin of MSNBC demanded Johnson admit that Trump’s latter-day opposition to Iraq was the reason her magazine so strenuously opposed his candidacy. Matthews, who after the network fired Pat Buchanan ably assumed its designated slot for blowhard tribune of the lace-curtain Catholic, insisted of the contributors that “regime change is in their bloodstream” and that “every name on that list supported the Iraq War.” Not only is the latter claim demonstrably false; the word “Iraq” does not appear once in any of the 22 separate contributions.
Writing for Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, Zaid Jilani, last seen losing his job at a liberal think tank for calling various American politicians “Israel-firsters,” says Trump is “setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades.” Professional neocon watchers Ali Gharib and Jim Lobe, meanwhile, predict, “There’s little doubt that the neocons and their allies will, sooner or later, call for another Big War in the Middle East, and when they do, it seems President Trump will be wholly unresponsive.”
In the National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn singled out Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan, who has written two, bracingWashington Post op-eds denouncing Trump and declared his support for Hillary Clinton should Trump become the Republican nominee. “Kagan is an eloquent writer, but he elides the fact that many of Trump’s positions are not all that different from what the GOP has espoused in the past when it comes to domestic issues. It is on foreign affairs where Trump represents a marked shift and it is this that truly troubles the neocon wing,” Heilbrunn declares. Because the liberal media’s obsession with supposed neocon machinations is endless, the New York Times gave Heilbrunn an opportunity to repeat his case last week, arguing that neocons are “interlopers” terrified at the prospect of Trump’s rise bringing about an end to their iron grip over American foreign policy.
I have a simpler, not to mention more charitable, explanation for why so many Jewish conservatives—er, “neocons”—viscerally oppose Trump: He’s a fascist demagogue.
Heilbrunn, of all people, should understand. He wrote an entire book in which he quite properly identified memory of the Holocaust and a resultant heightened sensitivity to totalitarianism as crucial factors in shaping neoconservatism, the centerpiece of which was fervent, moralistic opposition to communism. Is it not more likely that it’s the aforementioned, objectively disturbing aspects of Trumpism—and not an absence of warmongering blood lust, which Trump actually displays far more than the neocons—that most disturbs Jewish hawks?
Undeniably, neoconservatives have much to loathe in Trump’s putative foreign policy. Praising Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” commending the Chinese communists for their “strength” in massacring thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, attacking free trade, slandering our close allies as freeloaders, promising to unwind the postwar international liberal world order that America constructed and has maintained for seven decades, and, yes, promising to be “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—all of these positions are ones that neoconservatives oppose.
But they are also positions that most Americans, never mind conservatives, oppose, and for good reason. “The neocons are right that a Trump presidency would likely be a foreign policy debacle,” Heilbrunn concedes, before divining the real reasons neocons loathe Trump. Not surprisingly, Heilbrunn’s argument drifts into incoherence, like when he describes a “belief in the exercise of unilateral military power” as a Trumpian conviction that used to reign within the GOP until the party was captured by the neocons, though elsewhere Heilbrunn (and others) have ascribed unilateralism as a fundamental tenet of neoconservative ideology.
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* Those two guys are making it tough for media shakedown artists just trying to make a living. Poor millennial media grifters like Michelle Fields and Ben Shapiro are going to run out of places to work their con.
* I was a WCW fan back in those days but, as always, Trump knew where the big money was even if Vince McMahon’s WWF had to shamelessly plagiarize a lot of the WCW’s style and steal its stars.
The WCW was pro wrestling for adults. Sophisticated story lines that culminated in attacks during interviews and assaults far removed from the TV studio to the point you worried that the wrestler’s ( dressed in street clothes) would be arrested by police for fighting in a convenience store parking lot etc! It got to the point where Ric Flair actually feigned an attempted rape during one episode and I’ll never forget Tully Blanchard punching out his girl friend “Baby Doll’ after his manager, James J. Dillon, accused her of consorting with the enemies of the Four Horsemen.
Hulk Hogan was a cartoon character who could never risk his image engaging in those kind of story lines. Ironic, in a way, that Hulk Hogan and Donald Trump’s real lives more closely resembled a WCW story line than Ric Flair’s.
* Steve,
Like you, I’m a big fan of McMahon and the WWE/WWF.
You have to wonder how badly Vince wants to support Trump, but he knows advertisers will pull from his company faster than Macy’s dropped Trump.
Wrestlemania IV and V were held at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City (with the latter posting a HUGE live gate, actually making more money than Wrestlemania III did in Detroit).
Trump was even at Wrestlemania VI and VII (in Toronto and Los Angeles).
There’s nothing I want to see more than Vince to come out and give a big speech at a Trump rally. He could probably convince the Iron Sheik to attack him, just for the nostalgia value…
* This is the first presidential election where the republican candidate has a substantial following among the young crowd who produce a lot of the amusing content we see online.
* Great speech, I can see why he is so popular. Good work too co-opting traditional liberalism against the open-boarders fanatics: “We shall not import into Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia, and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.”
I wish Trump could give such a speech this eloquent. Really he could lift about 90% of this with minor changes. Orban uses a lot of formal rhetorical techniques like parallelism and metaphor: “beams creaking” “migration is a slow stream eroding the shores” etc. Besides being effective, it also signals to educated voters that he is not an uncouth con man the media portrays him.
* It is nice that Trump can fine tune the level of left-wing nut protesters at his rallies. I think his crowds like at least some of it as pure spectacle, so he’ll never want to dial it down to zero.
For Arizona, which I think is voting fairly soon, he probably wants to keep it down and focus on organizing and turning out supporters.
For Illinois, where resentment at obnoxious far left types is much higher among GOP voters simply because such leftists are all over the place in Chicago and college campuses, it helped Trump to dial up the leftist thug factor.
* Why again is it bad that the frontrunner is famous? I agree that a worthy candidate should have a little more beyond that, but winning the election is a necessary condition to do anything else. He doesn’t run the whole thing, he just has to pick the people who can run whatever part of it is actually operable.
Gordon Crovitz’s column in the WSJ made a good point in spite of itself: the expected Democratic opponent is another mere lowly celebrity as well, with no accomplishments, no credibility, no moral fiber… She’s such a celebrity in fact, that she’s earned first-name basis like Cher or Madonna. Nobody’s support for her is derived from tangible metrics or recent job performance.
* I hope Trump dials back the Rick Flair/Fred Blasie school of persuasion and starts adopting Orban’s approach. It would certainly help him burnish his image as presidential material.
* I wish a lot of things about Trump too, or I used to, now I’ve come to peace with the realization that he is who he is and so, when I get down to an Expected Value Calculation Trump saying the correct things on immigration, deportation, trade outweighs all of his negatives and the positives of the other candidates, and this with me knowing full well that his “extreme” positions are bargaining chips.
If not Trump, then no one else will champion these issues. Trump busts down the door. Hopefully better statesmen will walk through the door and continue the path he is blazing.
* Imagine Trump’s favorability and chances if the media weren’t all in against him. I know he benefits from some of the media attacks. But I think it does hurt him with a large segment of voters. These are people who are not political junkies. These are working stiffs who come home and watch the news served up by the MSM. I personally know a few of these. Good people who work hard, but are hesitant about Trump because of the non-stop doomsday vitriol directed against him.
* Some idiot feminist was on NPR today, going on and on about how much Hillary has sacrificed over the years to play the part of the dutiful wife. Like being Bill’s wife hasn’t been the single biggest boon to her career.
* No, it’s exactly like how much Governor Lurleen Wallace of Alabama back in the 1960s had to sacrifice her own ambitions for those of her shiftless husband George Wallace. Without his political deadweight dragging her down, Lurleen would have been Galactic Overlordess.
* There are a lot of ways to make a living as a celebrity if you are a gregarious extrovert, which Fabio looked to be. Ordinary people like a chance to meet a celebrity for a few seconds, so if you like doing meets and greets, you can milk a moment of fame for a long time. For example, I used to track how long the amateur hockey player who scored the winning goal in the 1980 Olympic “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviets could go without having to get a real job beyond motivational speaker and golf tournament celebrity guest.
On the other hand, it’s a tiring life for an introvert. That’s kind of what Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” is about: Bill Murray plays an introverted movie star making a TV commercial in Japan, which he finds depressing.
* Obama and Clinton did their best to turn Egypt, Libya and Syria into Islamist states under the pretense of bring the people living there a better life. The European migrant invasion is a direct consequence of the contemptible convergence of Obama’s hubris and stupidity. Obama destroyed enormous social capital to indulge his messianic fantasy. Tens and hundreds of thousands died, millions have had their lives irreversibly changed for the worse, and Democrats pretend to be interested in helping the weak, dispossessed and downtrodden.
Trump may indeed be unreliable, but he is not a Leftist cuck-socking idiot. Trump would have to hire a troop of Obamanoid nitwits to get a running start on the massive fluster-cluck Obama foreign policy has been.
Trump will be unreliable, but Trump has not been deluded by Marxist superstition. Vote Trump, and kiss the unforced errors of the last sixteen years goodbye.
* Sailer: I try to acknowledge a celebrity walking by with a respectful nod and saying his last name preceded by “Mr.:” “Mr. Voight” or whomever.
But when I’m out of L.A., I turn into: “Joey! Joey Ramone! I’m your biggest fan!”
* Trump is a black swan event, which means it’s a now or never type of opportunity. It’s inconceivable that a future candidate, intent on destroying the existing order, will be financed by that same order so that he can win the nomination and proceed to destroy the cozy oligarchy. I doubt that Trump will live up to expectations regarding the destruction of the existing order but he’s the only one who presents some chance of significant reform. There’s no upside to waiting for a better candidate because no better candidate will ever get this close to being in a position to do damage to entrenched interests. Money really does talk.
* You misunderstand Arnold.
I first met him at an agency party (we had the same agent); he was then the strongest man in the world and that and Conan was all we knew about him. He was very pleasant, and by chance the next day he met my wife in Nieman Marcus — it was a pre-Christmas party, and she was shopping for a present for me, we just having made a big sale (may have been Hammer, it was that long ago). He spent half an hour helping her look.
I know other such stories, all true.
He ran for governor as a lark, and when he was elected he got a pretty damn good team together to draft some fundamental propositions and constitutional amendments. They were pretty damned good.
The campaign for governor didn’t get very bitter — most thought he was a joke and the pro’s didn’t bother spending any money smearing him.
But the long knives came out over those propositions. Nurses in uniform at rallies screaming curses at him although most of the health professionals I know thought his reforms were needed and good; but wow did the unions hate them. It was the same all over: organized labor in particular called him the Austrian Hitler. He hated it. It really hurt him — he has a thinner skin than you might imagine. It got uncomfortable at home, too, what with his wife being a Kennedy clanswoman.
So when his propositions failed, he said the hell with it. They want crony government and gemutlicheit they can have it. Never took the job seriously again.
I’m not excusing him; he took the job, and he didn’t resign when he lost interest in it. He spent the rest of his office years making nice with everybody. Sure he became a joke and knew it, but it was better than nurses in uniform screaming NAZI at him.
* Trump and Arnold are quite different, but still, Schwarzenegger is about as good a precedent for a unique figure like Trump as we are going to get.
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* Social Justice Warrior Millennials are quite violent for a group that has very low gun ownership. Can you imagine how even more violent Social Justice Warrior Millennials would be if they had gun ownership rates equal to that of Rednecks and Hillbillies.
If Social Justice Warrior Millennial Tommy DiMassimo was a gun owner, he would likely be trying to shoot politicians he disagrees with instead of trying to tackle them to the ground.
Social Justice Warrior Millennials would be using guns to shut down freedom of speech they disagree with, if they were 2nd Amendment supporters.
* But Cruz, as an ideologue, is the antithesis of the Sailer Strategy. Reliance on an increasing percentage of the white vote for GOP victory implies ideological moderation, and a pragmatic nationalist program to rebuild a gutted Middle America.
* Was also at the Phoenix rally. Was surprised by the amount of young people there as well. It was a good event, and seeing Trump in person gives you an idea that he’s going to win this big.
The impressions of Jeb and Hillary and Cruz were spot on tho even as they were kill shots, especially Cruz with his Bible.
* The utter lack of pretense at objectivity from media is astonishing. Forget hidden editorials we are getting screaming headlines that can only be described as lying. Protesters shutting down the highway in AZ was spun as “Trump rally violence”. It’s just bizarre.
The NYT has been running headlines that sound like the Huffington Post. The Washington Post has descended into a farce of SJW stories.
There is literally no somewhat objective, sober source of news anymore. Every story everywhere is an opinion piece and usually to the point of absurdity.
On a separate topic I was at Fountain Hills yesterday and heard something interesting. I walked by three young, bored looking African Americans. They were wearing NAACP t-shirts. One of them said “I don’t know I was just told to be here” and shrugged his shoulders. I don’t know what the question was but it is a good hint of how organic these protests are.
* Andy Grove was at Intel 30 years? He remembers when the computer components were made in America with a few made overseas. He saw all this off shoring going on. But back in his day it was Japan that was the leader in stealing our vital industries via trade wars and trade barriers. Also they had a gov’t agency MITI that coordinated Japanese industries to get established in important sectors then to climb up the technology ladder the way China is doing now. Japan is kind of enervated these days due to Fukishima, a blow to their pride, plus low birthrates. Actually Korea’s are lower but they are doing great in the tech world and business which is another blow to the Nips because they always feel superior to Koreans.
Taiwan is a super tech powerhouse. They were making laptops for Dell, HP and others 15 years ago. Now they design the tablets, laptops, smartphones in house in Taiwan and the manufacturing is done in China by their factories there such as Foxconn. Taiwanese owned.
* The litmus test is that anyone who supports more non-white immigration into a majority white country is a cuck. Anything else can be argued in good faith.
* Google for “Mormon General Conference.” It’s the big conference held every six months (the next one is the first Sunday in April) where many of the top leaders (“general authorities”) of the Mormon Church speak to the flock, who watch it via satellite, internet, or whatever. The top leaders are all mostly 60+ years old, and mostly all men who had careers in business. Watch a few score hours worth of it and you’ll get a feel for the kind of leaders Mormons tend to find acceptable. “Charismatic” is not considered a compliment, needless to say. Mormons will occasionally vote for charismatic legislators, but when it comes to executives the word to keep in mind is “staid.”
And that’s why Donald Trump in persona non grata in Utah (and large parts of Idaho and Arizona) – thank God.
* I wonder if any of the people calling for a return of manufacturing jobs to the USA have ever worked in a factory? Maybe each poster could put a little, yes I have, or no I haven’t, at the end (not that it is any proof).
Working in a factory is the worst experience I ever voluntarily endured. If needed to feed, clothe and shelter yourself, I would do it, otherwise, any other occupation is preferable. I even did physically hard groundskeeper one summer. You at least get different jobs, different places, variety and stimulation. Same for a stint in construction. One day one thing another something else.
In the factory you have a place to stand for 8 hours. Work arrives and it is frequently the same thing over and over for the eight hours with a few 15 minute stops, and an hour lunch. The lunch goes by like a New York minute. While working the boredom was bad. The time passed as slowly as a History class in high school (only 8 hours instead of 50 minutes). The surroundings were dirty, there could be danger (my father had a label machine trap his hand between a hot plate and a cradle for minutes while the heat cooked his hand – he was freed only when another worker stuck a bar in the jammed machine and pried his hand out; a coworker in a barrel factory has the tip of his finger caught in a machine that put bands around barrels, I watched him drop to his knees in pain in one second).
They are not good jobs. They were good next to farm jobs. They were good next to real poverty. They were good if there was no opportunity. You would not wish one on anyone. I support automation, freeing human beings from such extreme drudgery.
* I only worked in manufacturing for a month during one summer, but I know and have several relatives who did that kind of work.
The fact is that most jobs are repetitive and boring. The best jobs, in my opinion, are those that require a variety of different problem solving and not repetitive. However, such jobs are not common and furthermore I actually doubt that everyone would like that kind of a job. In fact, a lot of people want a very simple routine to their jobs.
As repetitive and boring as manufacturing is (it is a lot safer now), what exactly is the alternative? Long haul trucking is also boring and repetitive. Sitting in an office cube is also boring and repetitive, doing reports that no one reads or doing data entry. So is stocking grocery shelves or working a checkout. And so on.
The key is that manufacturing jobs put average and less than average people to work, and, thanks to unions, gave them the ability to have a real life.
I mean, bottom line, the vast majority of people have to work to survive, let alone raise children, most people’s jobs are boring and repetitive, and, just as most people spend a third of their lives sleeping, they spend a third of their lives in comparative soul crushing drudgery. Who’s gonna fix that? Especially since, from what I have seen, a lot of people spend the one third of their lives being bored out of their minds and/or getting involved in all kinds of bad sensually gratifying habits to chase their boredom.
I don’t know what the answer is, but making a large percentage of our population feel useless and keeping them in comparative poverty and/or dependence is not the answer.
* Factory jobs vary. The basic assembly, machine operator, etc. type jobs are mind-numbing and physically wearisome, but they generate the skilled labor positions that require intelligence and afford opportunity for creativity as well as build one’s skills. Toolmakers, die sinkers, millwrights, industrial electricians, welders, all-around machinists are all highly skilled people that would require a completely unskilled person several years to learn to the journeyman level.
It’s similar to IT/computer science positions. We call someone a “programmer” but there is a huge range from simple coders of easily taught languages to people who are systems architects capable of writing entire operating systems, designing whole languages, implementing compilers and assemblers and other tools. At the far end are people who are harder to train and require a rarer combination of creativity, drive, and IQ than board certified neurosurgeons, and whose work often generates orders of magnitude more money for their employers, and should make a lot more money. Most of the H-1B jobs are near to the first group and are desired for their willingness to be underhoused in places like Silicon Valley, their ability to be coerced into 80-100 hour work weeks, and their lack of potential to take the place over or leave and start a competing firm.
Stamp out H-1B and employers will be forced to hire Americans who want a solid middle class living for 40-50 hour work weeks and will either refuse to move to SV or will want pay commensurate with the living expenses.
Of course they could offshore. Then again, we could tariff.
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* From the perspective of the money interests behind the Republican Party, it is better that Ryan lose to Hillary than Hillary lose to Trump.
After all, Hillary can be persuaded to “see reason” as easily as Bush.
* Ryan impressed no one as a vice presidential candidate. As a result, he became speaker of the house. This is how things work.
* They’ll run him to stop Trump if they can, but more or less expect to lose with Ryan. the Republican establishment may prefer to lose than get Trump elected pres. The threat of president Sanders might have been too much, but Clinton is in effect on the left wing of the same party as Ryan.
Don’t assume the Rep establishment are totally venal by their own lights. The values that Ryan talks about may actually be more important than winning to the powers that be. Ryan, in that interview you linked to the other day, said Irish immigration was once considered the way Mexican is now.
* I suspect the biggest part of it is that the Republican establishment really truly accepts the leftist frame and worldview, and therefore is deeply, deeply embarrassed by Trump. The repub establishment views illiberal whites in precisely the same way that the left does. The establishment wouldn’t be able to look their liberal friends in the eye with Trump. Conversely, if Rubio were the nominee they’d have their own Obama, so they imagine, and all their lib buddies would be much less scornful. And why not, since the difference between a Rubio and a Clinton administration would be marginal.
That said, these morons thought that another Bush or the Pool boy were the answer for them, so I can’t pretend to understand their thought processes.
* 2/3 of the abortions in this country are to black and Hispanic women.
Meaning, Planned Parenthood has done more good for the Republican party than anyone in history.
Keep the funding going.
* I knew Ryan was a goof the moment I saw him; something about his looks. Now that Romney let the mask fall and Ryan has come into his own I see how my initial impression was correct, both now exposed as posturing phonies. To think they had all the hopeful people out there suckered into thinking they were something they weren’t, it’s just a shame. They didn’t deserve to win back then. Ryan should get off the government dole, he’s just a high class welfare recipient, and go get a real job somewhere.
* Paul Ryan’s brand of politics have gone completely rancid.
The thought of nominating Ryan is like finding an otherwise brand new food saver container in the back of the fridge with last Easter’s deviled eggs in it.
There is no way in hell you are going to risk stinking up the kitchen by opening it just to rinse out the container. Best throw the whole thing in the trash.
Funny thing is Paul Ryan just last summer was making the rounds giving interviews to NeoCon controlled Talk Radio networks like Emmis (“Truth” in Hebrew) Communications while promoting his book stating that he had seen the light on Open Borders and understood why the Republican base is so strongly opposed to it.
My thoughts at the time was this bastard is just trying desperately to forestall a primary challenge and ending up like Eric Cantor.
Of course Ryan has since backtracked back to being a Donor favorite because he was able to takeover as speaker from Boehner.
What a completely untrustworthy Cuck!
* GOP Establishment George Will said on Fox News Sunday that Donald Trump has turned The Republican Party into the White party and that will destroy the GOP. Since when was The Republican Party voter base ever Vibrantly DIEverse to begin with, when Mitt Romney ran in 2012? In some predominantly African American zip codes Mittens did not win a single Black vote. And Mittens did not even say anything racially controversial, he ran a 100 percent politically correct campaign. He also fared poorly among Muslim, Asian, and Hispanic voters.
Being nice and politically correct still does help the GOP win a significant amount of Nonwhite voters.
The number of Nonwhites who voted for Mitt Romney would not be enough to fill up every seat in Levi stadium, which hosted this year’s Super Bowl.
* If it’s a matter of an acquaintance, work friend, neighbor or other casual relationship, and his politics bother you that much, then drop him.
But if it’s a close friend, a relative, or someone you’ve known for a long time, think carefully. The older you get, the more you value and need close relationships. This is especially true for men, who tend not to make friends as easily as women. There is joy in shared memory and shared good times that should not be thrown away lightly.
I know I sound like a geezer here (perhaps because I am one), but there will come a time in your life when you’ll want to say “remember when?”; it’s more fun if you don’t have to talk to yourself.
On a related note, I think it’s terribly sad that we have become so polarized as a society that millions of people think they can’t be friends with anyone whose politics are significantly different from theirs. Why not? What’s wrong with people – on both sides of the fence – that they can’t have a civilized conversation with someone on a topic about which they disagree? What happened to the concept that honorable people can have different opinions on important matters?
* One wonders how much of the negatives against Trump comes precisely from the eagerness of the Republican establishment to demonize him, and along the exact lines the leftist media has chosen: Trump is the white supremacist who out-Hitlers Hitler. How might Trump be viewed by the larger public if he didn’t seem to have bipartisan revulsion against him, and if the standard Republican organs chose to defend him rather than pile-on in their attacks?
Will the Republicans ever be able to demand or even hope for loyalty toward their own, after what they’ve done to Trump and his followers?
Gone forever is Reagan’s 11th Commandment:
Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.
Never expect it in the future, elites. It has been dispatched by your own hand.
* Trump has remarkably moved the Overton window and exposed the establishment and their media and politician whores for what they are. My hope is that a grassroots movement will spring up so that regardless of what happens to Trump, we can continue to MAGA.
* Life is too short to waste around people on vastly different wavelengths.
Political differences are like annoying habits. If I have a friend with whom I’m entirely compatible except that he smokes and I hate the smell, it’s unlikely I will limit my time around him much.
But if he smokes, and is rude to waitstaff, and is a bad driver, and has halitosis, and disagrees with me about important issues etc etc then I probably will not give him high priority in my life.
Time you’re not spending around a friend who is constantly causing you annoyance is time that you could be spending meeting people that you’ll love.
* Paul Ryan is the new future of the Republican Party (and always will be) – in the same way that Jack Kemp was always the future of the Republican Party.
Outside of his upstate New York congressional district Kemp never won a single election. He bombed as Bob Dole’s running mate, and when he ran for president in 1988 he did no better than 3rd in any state primary, finishing 4th or worse in most states. That was the year that the moderate George H. W. Bush won overwhelmingly by talking about capital punishment, the pledge of allegiance, and Willie Horton.
So Kemp’s brand of “conservatism” – which is basically what we’ve had for the last 20 years, thanks in large part to George W. Bush’s adoption of it (governing, not campaigning) – was never very popular. It’s basically pro-Israel neoconservate on foreign policy, neofeudalist on tax and immigration policy, and effectively leftist on everything else, since it surrenders to the left on all of the cultural issues. It’s what Republican voters have been slowly coming to rebel against since the advent of the Tea Party, and are in open revolt against now.
Appropriately enough, Jack Kemp was Paul Ryan’s mentor. What policies has Paul Ryan most closely been associated with? Open borders and slashing social security – not exactly the policies rebellious Republican voters are demanding.
* We have a hostile anti-nationalist elite, which is bent on policies destroying the American nation–they just want it to be a random piece of real estate part of a “global market” that they can exploit. The Democratic Party and the Republican establishment are on-board, carrying water to outright cheerleading this nation wrecking.
I’m an old dude, but I want to leave something better–the American nation–behind for my kids and their kids. And so do a lot of other folks.
I don’t get to choose our standard bearer. Sure i’d prefer a guy who was say a successful governor of Ohio, a one-married family man, respectably rock-solid, still a tough talker on mocking policy stupidity–of which the establishment produces so much–but leaving out useless personal attacks.
But you know what? Trump is who we’ve got.
* But still, never forget: the job of politicians like Paul Ryan etc. is NOT to win. It is, by one means or another, to ensure that come November the American people have no real choice. For the donorist Republicans – who will cheerfully support joined-at-the-hip-to-Wall-Street Hillary Clinton if necessary – Paul Ryan accomplished the job he was entrusted with. So why wouldn’t they go with a proven and loyal servant?
* Trump is much smarter than we credit him for. Just wait and see. The thing is, he’s a rarity of sorts: highly extroverted but highly intelligent as well. He’s got social smarts unlike most intelligent persons.
* George Will today on Fox News Sunday:
WILL: Well, stylistically, Trump is in the George Wallace tradition. Wallace who famously said, there’s too much dignity in American politics. We have to have more meanness. Wallace got 46 electoral votes because he has a regional base. What makes Trump more interesting is he’s not a regional candidate. He has support all over the country, as he’s demonstrated.
The problem is this. Not only are his negatives 61 percent, almost doubled his positives, 32 percent, but he’s appealing entirely to white people. Now, in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush got 40 – 59 percent of the white vote, which was high. And that translated into 426 electoral votes. Mitt Romney, in 2012, got 59 percent of the white vote. That translated into 206 electoral votes. Romney got 17 percent, that’s all, of the non-white vote.
Trump, by every measure, would do worse than that, which means he would have to get not just the 65 percent of the white vote to win that Ronald Reagan got sweeping 49 states, he would have to get 70 percent of the white vote. A, it won’t happen, and, B, it would destroy the Republican Party by making it the party of white people.
I’ve not been particularly fond of the whole “cuckservative” meme, but this kind of explicit ethnic masochism or defeatism, from the senior national “conservative” pundit, is pretty shocking.
* Tom Tancredo had all of the right positions but couldn’t get any traction at all. It takes someone like Trump to do crazy stuff and get the press to cover him and then attack the press, and then violate the unwritten rules of public discourse and say what is popular, etc. Based on the sample size of two, the Trump model works better than the Tancredo model.
* My youngest son said that, “Trump is not a great, or best messenger, but he resonates with so many people.” You all would be so surprised that the generation of Millennials who think “everything is lame,” are eager to see Trump succeed…but they want him to shelve the “lame-speak,” stop saying incendiary things to rile people up, now that he is almost “home free.” Time to act presidential, or whatever.
For college and High School students who have been indoctrinated with the concept of diversity uber alles, since they had “circle time” in kindergarten, Trump is sort of a touchstone for them. Bernie is the other side of this weird coin we are seeing right now. Albeit, at least someone is peeling off the b.s. of what exactly both parties have been up to in DC for several decades (besides enriching themselves) before these very same Millennials are even able to vote.
Not only are the government and media people, 40 and older, dumping all the problems on the Millennials, they are trying to convince young people that things are gonna be fine as long as we continue the same course since Reagan or B. Clinton. The Millennials don’t care who Reagan was, btw – boring. And, they don’t “get” that the US owes Mrs. Clinton anything.
Millennials do know they will be stuck with the scourge and myriad problems of: EU migrants, illegal aliens in the USA, unaccompanied minors from Latin America, heroin from Mexico, Isis, jihadies wanting to blow stuff up from time to time while they’re figuring out their “reformation.”, global climate change, degradation of the environment, infrastructure collapse, a HUGE population of seniors needing support, mysterious growth of special needs people as autism becomes more prevalent, the achievement gap entropy…and, down the depressing road, probably Zika babies abandoned on the US border.
So, yeah, at least Trump is ripping the Scooby-Doo mask off of all the lamoes that have handed the Millennials this massive, massive, colossal national debt and all the other bummers mentioned above. Trump just needs to constantly, mention H1B, outsourcing, immigration, destruction (by both parties) of the once “fantastic” jobs by co.’s like Bethlehem Steel. The stereotype I always heard as child, “Americans only care about money,” is hard to dismiss as both parties are just in a rage to figure out how to stop Trump from ruining the gravy train for them.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Republicans Vs Republican Party Leaders
REPORT: Jerusalem – Activists demonstrated against a recent government decision to restrict Ethiopian immigration on Sunday, marching from the capital’s International Convention Center to the Prime Minister’s Office where they held a protest.
At issue is the government’s announcement earlier this month that it will limit the number of Ethiopians entering the country this year despite previously committing to bring over thousands of Falashamura remaining in transit camps in Gondar and Addis Ababa as expeditiously as possible.
Around fifteen hundred citizens of Ethiopian origin protested during this week’s cabinet meeting, decrying “racism” and “discrimination between Jews and Jews,” according to Hebrew media.
“Mr. Prime Minister, if your son wants to come to the state of Israel would you say you have no budget,” one protester told Army Radio, referring to the government position that there is currently not enough of a budget to allow the immigration of more than 500 people this year.
Last November the cabinet unanimously approved an Interior Ministry proposal to resume aliya from Ethiopia, which was suspended in 2013.
Around 9,000 people have been waiting in Addis Ababa and Gondar transit camps for the past several years in the hopes of making their way to the Jewish state. However, Jerusalem closed its doors in 2013 following a ceremony at Ben-Gurion Airport at which officials declared the “end” of Ethiopian aliya.
The fate of the prospective immigrants has been a matter of some debate, with Ethiopian- Israeli activists protesting what they portray as the breaking up of families.
When Ethiopian aliya “officially ended,” supporters of the decision, such as Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund chairman Eliezer Sandberg, described a radically different situation than that portrayed by the activists. He called those left in Ethiopia gentile relations of Ethiopians in Israel.
“I believe we all have relatives of relatives of relatives who don’t [meet] the criteria [for aliya]. I think it’s a mistake to blend together the joy of the return and the closing of the operation from Ethiopia with the personal issues of some people,” Sandberg told The Jerusalem Post in 2013.
According to the cabinet decision, any Ethiopian who moved to Gondar or Addis Ababa after January 2013, would be willing to convert to Judaism and has relatives here who can apply for his acceptance, would be eligible to move.
Since the government announced that it will limit Ethiopian immigration, MKs Avraham Neguise and David Amsalem, chairs of the Knesset Immigration and Interior Committees respectively have broken coalition discipline in a mini-legislative rebellion, accusing the Netanyahu administration of looking for an excuse not to bring the rest of the Jews of Ethiopia to Israel.
Posted inBlacks, Ethiopia, Israel|Comments Off on Ethiopians March In Jerusalem Over Aliya Stoppage
REPORT: As we prepare to mark the shloshim for the victims of the Egged 402 bus accident that claimed six lives, HaGaon HaRav Yitzchak Zilberstein, Rav of the Ramat Elchanan neighborhood of Bnei Brak speaks to the tzibur. The accident hit the chareidi tzibur particularly hard.
During a talk in beis medrash, Rav Zilberstein explained he has been approached by many people seeking an explanation that resulted in such tragedy for so many families.
Rabbi Zilberstein quotes the kuntres Rachmei HaRav from HaGaon HaRav Shmuel Halevy Wosner ZT”L, in which Rav Wosner writes women should not get a drivers license. He explains that while this is somewhat commonplace today, it is not advised for the actual process of obtaining the license results in compromising her modesty as does actual driving of a vehicle by a woman for this exposes her to sites in the streets and marketplace.
“וליבי אומר לי שהוא אחד הגורמים של האסונות הגדולים שנעשים בדרכים בארץ ישראל המפילים כל כך חללים והרגו כבר טובים וצדיקים וזה מצורף לכל העבירות הנעשים בדרכים שמולידים המחבלים שמסכנים הדרכים”.
The kuntres adds “My heart tells me this is one of the causes of major catastrophes on the roadways of Eretz Yisrael that claim so many lives including many fine people, tzaddikim, and this coupled with the many [traffic] aveiros that made the roadways so dangerous”.
Rabbi Zilberstein adds as Posek Hador, Rav Wosner is giving piskei halacha from Shomayim and this is one of the causes that so many good people are killed.
He adds Rav Wosner in some exceptional cases permitted women to drive, for example a sick child in one’s home and a child with special needs that requires transportation to and from an institution but these exceptions were rare.
Posted inRabbis|Comments Off on Rav Yitzchak Zilberstein Says Women Should Not Drive As It ‘Compromises Tzniyus’
The Orthodox Community Responds to Donald Trump at AIPAC
March 18, 2016
Dear Mr. Trump:
We are writing to you as you prepare to address the largest pro-Israel gathering in North America. We care deeply not only about America’s relationship with Israel, but the values and character of this special land. We hope you will use this occasion to articulate the values that friends of Israel hold so dear.
To begin, you should use this opportunity to categorically repudiate racism. There is simply no place for it in our shared discourse. As the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel enshrined in law its commitment to protect the rights all of its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. When the Jewish people returned to Israel after centuries of persecution and exile, they chose to pursue a path of inclusivity. Rather than perpetuate a culture of prejudice, they chose instead to create a culture of tolerance. Freedom of worship is sacrosanct in the Holy Land and upon its founding, Israel’s government vowed to safeguard the holy places of all religions. You should declare in no uncertain terms that bigotry is as dangerous as it is wrong.
We also call upon you to denounce the language of hatred and xenophobia. There is no mitzvah in the Torah repeated more often than the embrace of the stranger. The Jewish story is itself the history of exiles seeking shelter; of refugees seeking asylum. And since it became a sovereign nation, Israel has proudly stood by and supported peoples of all backgrounds in their times of need: From Haiti to Taiwan; from Sudan to Nepal. Jewish tradition demands that we look past what separates us and instead keep our eyes trained on our shared humanity.
Finally, you need to reassure our community that you understand that there can be no moral equivalency between a sovereign government acting in self-defense on the one hand and a terrorist organization committed to genocide on the other. The pro-Israel community is starving for peace. The notion of shalom represents one of our greatest aspirations – one for which we pray daily. But a lasting peace will only come with the help of a political ally who recognizes Israel’s right to self-determination. Let your listeners know that you would never strong-arm Israel into negotiating a peace deal when Israel has no partner for peace.
Mr. Trump: In these fraught times, make it clear to the pro-Israel community that you stand not only with Israel’s people, but with Israel’s principles. We cannot abide a discourse that inflames intolerance and foments fanaticism. The future of our people is too important.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein
Rabbi Herschel Billet
Rabbi Yisroel Ciner
Rabbi Daniel Cohen
Rabbi Mark Dratch
Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman
Rabbi Joel Finkelstein
Rabbi Barry Gelman
Rabbi Yaakov Gibber
Rabbi Yaakov Glasser
Rabbi Efrem Goldberg
Rabbi Zev Goldberg
Rabbi Moshe Grussgott
Rabbi Kenneth Hain
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld
Rabbi Joshua Hess
Rabbi Daniel Korobkin
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Rabbi Joel Landau
Rabbi Philip Lefkowitz
Rabbi Yosie Levine
Rabbi Marc Mandel
Rabbi Adam Mintz
Rabbi Jonathan Muskat
Rabbi Elazar Muskin
Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky
Rabbi Zev Reichman
Rabbi Shaul Robinson
Rabbi Zvi Romm
Rabbi Allen Schwartz
Rabbi Ronald Schwarzberg
Rabbi Mordechai Sevy
Rabbi Adam Starr
Rabbi Josh Strulowitz
Rabbi Mayer Waxman
Rabbi Jay Weinstein
Rabbi Neil N. Winkler
Rabbi Alan J. Yuter
Rabbi Dovid Zirkind
Are these rabbis aware of Israel’s restrictive immigration policy? Do they think Muslims can immigrate to Israel? Because I want the US to have the same restrictive immigration policy and the same type of walls that Israel has and I would hate to think that Modern Orthodox rabbis deem it normal to have one standard of acceptable behavior for themselves, and a totally different standard for the goy.
I have no objection to dual morality systems (where you have one ethic for how you treat members of your in-group and another ethic for how you treat outsiders). Most peoples have this, but it is a bit rich for exponents of a dual morality system such as Orthodox Judaism to lecture outsiders on the evils of racism, discrimination and bigotry.
A friend: “The rabbinate has not gotten the memo that the rest of the world is on to them and this is a perilous course for them to follow.”
My first response to these rabbis is that their letter is not, thank God, from the Orthodox Jewish community. It is a letter from a handful of Modern Orthodox rabbis who esteem themselves as representing Orthodox Judaism.
Come November, most Orthodox Jews will vote for Donald Trump, whether or not he does any of the things the rabbis urge in this letter. Fighting racism is not much of a concern to the traditional Orthodox Jew. He doesn’t usually recognize “racism” as a sin, rather, it is more like commonsense.
Rabbis: “To begin, you should use this opportunity to categorically repudiate racism.”
What is racism? There is nothing in Torah condemning racism. There is no such sin as “racism” in Torah. This is an entirely made-up moral offense. The term did not even exist prior to the 20th Century.
I’ve never heard a traditional Orthodox rabbi give a sermon against racism in America, against bigotry in America, against intolerance in America, unless he’s referring to Jews as victims of such. The more traditional the Jew, the less he’s concerned with gentiles.
What gadol (great rabbi) has ever written a book against racism? Short answer: None. What gadol has ever written a book about the “values and character of this special land [America]”? Short answer: None.
That no great rabbi has ever written a book on these themes reveals that the claims of this rabbinic letter are a lie. These rabbis are just posing. Their every word drips with deceit.
What gadol has ever written a book propounding beauty of the following: “Israel enshrined in law its commitment to protect the rights all of its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Short answer: none.
Contrary to this rabbinic letter, Torah contains many negative statements about blacks (just as the black tradition contains many negative statements about Jews). Here is Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 12:11: “I have known for a long time that you are of beautiful appearance, but now we are coming among black and repulsive people who are brothers of the Kushim (Ethiopians) and are unaccustomed to seeing a beautiful woman.”
I’m not ashamed of what Rashi wrote. I do not think he sinned because I do not believe there is any such sin as racism. It is normal, natural and healthy for members of one group to be less than thrilled with outsiders, and blacks from a white perspective, are outsiders.
I look forward to hearing that these Orthodox rabbis had the courage of their convictions and stood up in front of their congregations and denounced Torah for its bigotry, racism and xenophobia. Let them be consistent and start tearing out pages of Torah that do not comport with modern morality. Let them stand tall for what they believe by having bonfires filled with bigoted sections of Torah. Perhaps they should start with the injunction that non-Jews who steal from Jews should be put to death and as Torah is the property of Jews, goyim who study it should likewise be executed (this has never been practiced in Jewish history, but hey, it’s the principle of the matter).
The controversy surrounding journalist Max Blumenthal continues in the wake of the release of his video of intoxicated American Jews in Jerusalem insulting President Barack Obama, but he rejects the claims that the footage fuels anti-Semitism.
The video shows young American Jews, who are apparently very drunk, criticizing Obama for his Mideast policies and describing him in derogatory terms. It has also had more than 400,000 hits on YouTube.
“I have received death threats from people, mainly ones calling me a self-hating Jew. I am self-hating, but my self-hatred has nothing to do with me being Jewish,” Blumenthal told Haaretz this week.
Blumenthal says the ad hominem attacks against him and co-producer and cameraman Joseph Dana are being used to obscure the message of the video, and to ignore the statements made by young Jews who could be the relatives of any of us.
From a black website: “Dov Lior, a popular chief rabbi in Israel, recently called Obama a Kushi, which is Israel’s equivalent to nig*er. Most Americans are completely unaware of the general contempt that many Jewish people have towards blacks, as Max Blumenthal found out when he interviewed dozens of young people in Israel who reiterated the Rabbi’s sentiments about Obama. Blumenthal’s video titled Feeling the Hate in Israel was removed from YouTube, Vimeo, and the Huffington Post shortly after going viral.”
If you could do a secret poll of Orthodox Jews in America and ask them would the country be better or worse off without Muslims, what do you think the result would be? The overwhelming majority of American Orthodox Jews would prefer that America be free of Muslims and of blacks. They also would prefer that Israel be free of Muslims. Most Israelis wish in their hearts that all Palestinians would disappear and I suspect that most Israelis also wish that blacks in Israelwould leave.
Rabbis: “There is simply no place for it in our shared discourse.”
If the rabbis believe this, then they are saying there is no place for Torah in America as the Torah tradition contains many statements that would be widely considered racist. Orthodox Jews, more than any other Jewish group, are likely to say things the conventional morality will condemn as bigoted.
Rabbis: “As the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel enshrined in law its commitment to protect the rights all of its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. When the Jewish people returned to Israel after centuries of persecution and exile, they chose to pursue a path of inclusivity. Rather than perpetuate a culture of prejudice, they chose instead to create a culture of tolerance. Freedom of worship is sacrosanct in the Holy Land and upon its founding, Israel’s government vowed to safeguard the holy places of all religions. You should declare in no uncertain terms that bigotry is as dangerous as it is wrong.”
Israel is the Jewish state run primarily for the benefit of Jews. Non-Jewish citizens of Israel are keenly aware of being outsiders in the Jewish state, much more so than non-whites and non-Christians feel like outsiders in America. I am glad Israel is the Jewish state, and I think it is ludicrous to argue that the Jewish state has pursued “a path of inclusivity” and “a culture of tolerance.” Israelis routinely chant “Death to the Arabs.” Nothing like that goes on at Donald Trump rallies.
I don’t blame Israelis for wishing death to the Arabs, just as I don’t blame Arabs for wishing death to the Jews. Both groups are fighting over scarce resources. It makes rational sense that they would hate each other.
For all its inclusivity and tolerance, Israel is widely hated around the world. Such inclusivity and tolerance has not helped Israel’s safety and well-being. Should America wish to be as hated and vulnerable as Israel? The more tolerant and nice Israel gets, the more vulnerable it becomes.
Rabbis: “We care deeply not only about America’s relationship with Israel, but the values and character of this special land.”
Is anyone not revolted by this oily language? Rabbis do not care about America’s relationship with Israel except to the extent it redounds to the benefit of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Judaism does not have much to say about how Jews should try to shape the values and character of gentile lands. Judaism’s focus is on how Jews should perform its commandments, preferably in the Jewish state.
When minorities talk about American values, they’re usually looking to manipulate the majority into giving them more rights. You never find a large number of Jews fighting on the side of gentile majorities against minority rights, instead you usually find in the diaspora a disproportion of Jews fighting to expand minority rights at the expense of the majority. When it comes to the Jewish state, however, the Torah is clear. There is no room for non-Jewish citizenship and no non-Jewish should ever be in charge of a Jew, not even in charge of water carriers.
The values and character of America that these rabbis are fighting for are whatever they think is best for the Jews such as multiculturalism and mass immigration, things that are bad for America’s white majority. Different groups have different interests. Jews aren’t being un-American or perfidious in pursuing their group interests over the interests of other groups. They are following a biological necessity, without such self-interest groups die out. Every group seeks to maximize its own interests with little regard for other groups.
Groups such as Jews, latinos, blacks, white, Muslims are in constant conflict over scarce resources. Rarely does one group surge ahead without negatively affecting other groups. When Jews rise in power in America, for instance, other groups lose power. The United States used to be ruled by the Protestant ethic. Jews overcame that and now Jews compose much of America’s ruling elite and more than any other group they determine the Overton Window.
Rabbis: “When the Jewish people returned to Israel after centuries of persecution and exile, they chose to pursue a path of inclusivity.”
What gadol has written a book on this theme? Short answer: None. When thousands of books are produced each year by Orthodox rabbis and none of them see fit to write about the themes in this rabbinic letter, you can be sure that this rabbinic letter is a fraud and that all of its signers are paid liars willing to peddle the most outrageous deceit for an advantage.
Rabbis: “Freedom of worship is sacrosanct in the Holy Land…”
Which gadol has written a book on this theme? Short answer: None. Torah makes no provision for and grants no sanction to non-Jewish forms of religious expression in Israel. In a Jewish state run by Torah, there won’t be any churches and mosques.
Rabbis: “You should declare in no uncertain terms that bigotry is as dangerous as it is wrong.”
What gadol has written a book against bigotry? Short answer: None.
Rabbis: “We also call upon you to denounce the language of hatred and xenophobia.”
Because hatred is unknown in Torah? That’s nonsense. Torah is filled with hatred. I am not ashamed of that. If you love something, such as God, you must hate those who are the enemies of God. If you love your family, you hate those who threaten your family. If you love your people, you hate those who threaten your people. Hatred is simply the flip side of love.
What gadol has written a sefer (book) against xenophobia? Short answer: None.
Onkelos son of Kolonikos … went and raised Titus from the dead by magical arts, and asked him; ‘Who is most in repute in the [other] world? He replied: Israel. What then, he said, about joining them? He said: Their observances are burdensome and you will not be able to carry them out. Go and attack them in that world and you will be at the top as it is written, Her adversaries are become the head etc.; whoever harasses Israel becomes head. He asked him: What is your punishment [in the other world]? He replied: What I decreed for myself. Every day my ashes are collected and sentence is passed on me and I am burnt and my ashes are scattered over the seven seas. He then went and raised Balaam by incantations. He asked him: Who is in repute in the other world? He replied: Israel. What then, he said, about joining them? He replied: Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever. He then asked: What is your punishment? He replied: With boiling hot semen. He then went and raised by incantations Jesus [in Vilna edition: “the sinners of Israel”; “Jesus” appears in Munich 95 and Vatican 140 manuscripts and “he went and brought up Jesus the Nazarene” (Editions or MSs: Vatican 130)]. He asked them: Who is in repute in the other world? They replied: Israel. What about joining them? They replied: Seek their welfare, seek not their harm. Whoever touches them touches the apple of his eye. He said: What is your punishment? They replied: With boiling hot excrement, since a Master has said: Whoever mocks at the words of the Sages is punished with boiling hot excrement. Observe the difference between the sinners of Israel and the prophets of the other nations who worship idols. It has been taught: Note from this incident how serious a thing it is to put a man to shame, for God espoused the cause of Bar Kamza and destroyed His House and burnt His Temple.
— Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56b-57a
So when the Talmud pictures Jesus — the god of the goyim — suffering for eternity in boiling hot excrement, is that hate speech? Asking for a friend.
I’m not arguing that Jews and Judaism are bad or nasty or bigoted. I’m just arguing that it is normal, natural and healthy for all strongly identifying in-groups such as Jews and Muslims and blacks to have suspicion and negative feelings towards out-groups.
There are six things that the Torah commands us to remember. Optimally, these verses should be recited out loud each day and their meanings should be considered…
3. Amalek’s Evil Attack Remember what Amalek did to you on the journey when you left Egypt. They met you on the way and ambushed those who were lagging behind. You were tired and exhausted, but they did not fear God. Therefore, when Hashem your God relieves you from your enemies in the land that He will give you to possess, you must erase the memory of Amalek from beneath heaven. Do not forget. (Devarim 25:17-19) Amalek is different from other nations that attacked Israel in that we are commanded to eradicate them. Why should they be punished more harshly than Egypt, which oppressed the Jews for hundreds of years? One reason is because Amalek “did not fear God.” They dared to make war not just with the Jews, but with God Himself!
Is that hate speech?
I have no moral objection to hatred. I just want it properly directed. I have no moral objection to Torah, I just want to point out that there is no widely-used definition of hate speech that would not include much of Torah.
“Jewish tradition demands that we look past what separates us and instead keep our eyes trained on our shared humanity.”
Jewish tradition does not focus on training Jews to look past what separates us and to instead keep our eyes trained on our shared humanity. For instance, in the Havdalah prayer, we thank God for separating Israel from the nations. One of the commonly accepted arguments among Orthodox Jews for keeping kosher is that it separate you from non-Jews. This separation is a taken for granted virtue in Orthodox Judaism (and other insular traditional ways of life).
If rabbis keep lying like this, the nations are going to want to increasingly separate themselves from both the people of Israel and the nation of Israel.
Jewish elites can’t pursue their group interest through any means necessary while denying the same privilege to the goyim. If nationalism is good for Jews, it is also good for gentiles. If separation is good for Jews, then it is also good for gentiles. If Jews want to have sacred spaces reserved for Jews, gentiles should be allowed their own hotels and restaurants and clubs free from Jews (if the goyim wish).
Strong Group Identity Always Brings With It Group Contempt For Outsiders
I’ve been arguing with Orthodox Jewish friends who want an Orthodox Judaism that does not have contempt for non-Jews.
It’s not possible, I tell them. Sure, you can have individual Orthodox Jews who are strong in their Jewish identity and non-contemptuous to non-Jews, but as a group, Orthodox Jews are always going to feel varying degrees of contempt for non-Orthodox Jews and non-Jews. It’s inherent in group identity. If you believe that you are living God’s will, that your group is the best, by definition all other groups are not the best and not living out God’s plan as much as you are.
To have a strong group identity and to not feel contempt for outsiders requires a high IQ. It’s a unique combination of traits akin to juggling balls and discussing philosophy at the same time. Not many people can do it.
I grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist with a strong Adventist identity. Accompanying my strong group identity was the feeling and belief that outsiders were lost. Sure, some of them might still inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, but they weren’t among God’s elect, God’s Chosen. That was reserved for Seventh-Day Adventists.
There’s never been a strong group identity that did not carry with it general group contempt for outsiders. When Germans were strong in being German, they had varying degrees of fear, loathing and contempt for outsiders such as Jews and slavs and the French, etc. When the French felt strongly about being French, they had, as a group, a tendency towards contempt for the non-French. When the Commanches were strong in being Commanche, they had, as a group, contempt for outsiders.
When Jews say things like the following, it’s never a compliment for non-Jews:
* He’s thinking like a goy.
* That’s goyisha kup (Gentile thinking).
* What a goy!
The stronger a Jew feels about being Jewish, the more a Christian feels in Christ, the more a Muslim feels Islamic, the more contempt he is likely to feel for outsiders.
I have an Orthodox Jewish friend who decided to start wearing colored shirts on Sabbath. Normally, Orthodox Jewish men wear white shirts on the Sabbath. My friend was sick of the contempt he’s seen displayed towards non-Jews by Orthodox Jews and so he wants to make a statement that he is not like those contemptuous white-shirted Orthodox Jews. By dropping the uniform to express his universal tolerance, he’s reducing his group identity and has taken a step towards assimilation.
Uniforms are a kin component of group solidarity. Imagine how much weaker the KKK would be if they stopped wearing their uniforms. Imagine how much weaker the SS would have been if they dropped their uniforms. Imagine how much weaker Islamic identity would be without distinctive Islamic garb.
Liberal Jews omit the following lines from the Aleinu prayer: “For they worship vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god who cannot save.” Traditional Jews say the lines just as they were written hundreds of years ago. These lines express contempt for the prayers of non-Jews. Now, if I were doing Jewish apologetics, I’d say that these lines were composed with pagans in mind, not the righteous non-Jews of today, but between you and me, we know that this still expresses Jewish contempt for non-Jewish religions, just as non-Jewish religions express contempt in varying ways for religions different from their own.
Christians, Muslims and Jews have always, on average, despised each other.
Bigotry, racism, prejudice and anti-Semitism are not useful concepts. You will think more clearly when you replace such nonsense with the idea that different groups have different interests. Germans who loved being German prior to WWII saw that they had to get rid of the Jews if they wanted a truly Aryan state. Arabs and Muslims around Israel see that they have to get rid of the Jewish state for as long as Jews are around them and living free, they will excel them and that’s humiliating. As long as Jews were free in Germany in large numbers, they were going to affect society in ways that Aryan Germans would not like.
Organized Jewish life in the United States (including the Orthodox Union and Agudas Yisrael) has pushed for immigration amnesty because they see it (unconsciously in many cases) in the Jews’ interest for the white goyim to lose control of the United States. Organized Jewish life pushed for the removal of prayer in public schools in America because a weakened goyisha religious identity was thought to be in the Jewish interest. Jews have been at the forefront (through the Frankfurt school etc) of claiming that there is no meaning to race. This weakens the goy’s racial identity. Jews have been at the forefront of denouncing nationalism because that weakens the goy’s national identity and thus makes life easier for the Jews (who retain their own nationalism and Zionism).
All of these agendas pushed by the Jewish community (not by every individual Jew) have been contrary to the interests of white Americans. White Americans and black Americans and Mexican-Americans and Jewish-Americans have competing interests and this inevitably leads to conflict.
Over the past 600 years, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe have, on average, lived better than their non-Jewish neighbors (most have been in white collar jobs) because they had higher IQs and superior group solidarity.
Goy Philosopher emails:
I agree with almost everything you say here, and it’s terrible that only a few people are saying it. Yes, these statements are transparently dishonest and “oily”. Disgusting. At least, I find it impossible to believe that these guys really believe in the ‘inclusive’ or ‘anti-racist’ principles with which they try to confuse and manipulate gentiles. It seems insulting that they expect us to believe it. Here they are, practicing this blatantly ethnocentric (and arguably ‘racist’) religion, insisting on an openly alien national identity and openly divided loyalties — but at the same time they have the chutzpah to spew forth all this mush about open-ness and egalitarianism and universality, etc. Do they think the rest of us are really too stupid to notice the inconsistencies? Or is it a compliance test: will the goyim prove their subjugation by going along with obvious lies and double-talk? Or maybe they’re trying to humiliate us (or Trump) — not proving their power but just enjoying it, toying with us? I don’t know but I just can’t believe that they are really so dumb or unreflective that they really believe their own bullshit. As you said: it’s as if they will settle for nothing less than Hitler.
There are two places where I may disagree with your views. One has to do with ‘racism’. I wouldn’t use the word, but I do think that some very strong forms of ethnocentrism or double morality are morally wrong. Judaism, or some forms of Judaism, may be examples — e.g., the attitude that it’s fine to lie or cheat or steal from those not in the group, or that those outside the group have no real moral standing, don’t matter, etc. I think everyone has some basic moral importance and deserves some basic form of respect. Or almost everyone, at least. So rather than saying it’s okay for Jews to be that way but also okay for others to be that way, which seems at times to be your attitude (?), I’d say it’s unacceptable for any group to behave that way. And it’s especially wrong in the case of organized Jewry, since Jews are a lot smarter and more self-aware and more philosophical than many other groups; they really should know better, and probably do. So I don’t accept that we can regard conflicts between human groups as merely some kind of amoral struggle for survival. (Just as we can’t regard one individual murdering or exploiting another in that way.)
Another possible point of disagreement, relating to that last one: I take the passage you cited from the Talmud to reflect _very_ badly on Judaism, if that’s what Jewish authorities really think. Obviously Jesus was a very impressive and special person, and something must be very wrong with people who who try to demonize or ridicule him. Also, it seems pathetic and childish to imagine your enemies boiling in shit, let alone to write this down as part of some putative religio-philosophical commentary. It’s base and stupid. I would never be able to take seriously as a religious or moral authority someone who wrote about Jesus, or any other obviously superior person, in that kind of way. If most Jews are aware of this kind of thing but aren’t turned off by it, that makes me wonder about their character. I’m not aware of any important or canonical Christian texts that direct such base and stupid slander against Jews or Jewish heroes, etc. So rather than saying it’s only normal and perfectly fine for groups to think about the beliefs or character of outsiders in this way, as you seem to be saying, I’d hold everyone to a far higher standard.
Report: Bronxwood Home for the Aged could soon be required to pay $6.9 million in restitution to New York State and be kicked out of Medicaid for three years over administrative violations.
…OMIG found 133 documents provided by Bronxwood that had purportedly been signed by a doctor named Owen Golden and used to bill Medicaid. Yet Golden never saw patients at Bronxwood. According to OMIG, the evaluations may have been conducted by other doctors, or may not have been conducted at all.
Bronxwood’s attorney and Golden did not respond to multiple requests by the Forward for comment.
The conclusion of the Bronxwood probe was conducted in parallel to an unrelated federal investigation into fiscal abuse by Haredi Orthodox educational institutions. On Wednesday, dozens of FBI agents and detectives searched yeshivas and tech vendors in New York for records accounting for equipment allegedly bought by religious schools with millions in federal education technology dollars. They confiscated documents and hard drives from several locales.
Posted inAbuse|Comments Off on New York Nursing Home With Ties to ultra-Orthodox Charities Faces Medicaid Ban
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