Luke Ford

More delicious hysteria.

Rabbi Matthew Soffer writes: And then they came for me” is not the phrase keeping me up at night. We hear so many people speaking out against Trump’s hate speech, including his fellow Republicans Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan. To say, “I did not speak for them because I was not Muslim” doesn’t reflect our reality – people are speaking out. Instead, the phrase that haunts me, the text that pervades my mind, is the title of Harvard Professor Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

Goldhagen’s thesis sent shivers down readers’ spines, as he argued against the dominant assumption that the devastation of the Holocaust can be attributed to the actions of Hitler and Nazi leadership. Instead, Goldhagen shined the flashlight on the “ordinary German,” who, he argued convincingly, was ready and willing to engage in the dehumanization and eventual extermination of the Jewish people. What could be more ominous and bleak than the realization that a modern, sophisticated, intellectually advanced society could be “primed” to engage in the most evil, barbaric campaign in the history of the mankind?

I am haunted by the possibility of “willing executioners” in our midst. Huge segments of our own population are receptive to the thesis that Muslims do not belong in America; that the enemy is Islam as a whole. Meanwhile a vast majority of devout Muslims in America live in fear, sandwiched between the radicals who claim to speak for Islam— and who wish to obliterate their allegiance to American freedom— and the growing segment of the American population, now telling them that they are the problem, that their religion and nationality are incompatible.

Last Friday, I joined the Muslim community at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, during their prayer service. With 1400 worshippers gathering, listening to the peaceful sermon by their Imam Sheikh Yasir, I was joined by a few of my Christian colleagues, as we offered words of solidarity and comfort to conclude their service. I said nothing overly profound— I affirmed the Jewish commandment “v’havta l’rei-echa kamocha— you must love your neighbor as yourself,” reminding them that the community of Temple Israel loves those who love peace; that our clergy are committed to fighting against hate speech; that they are not alone. Afterwards, people lined up to shake our hands, some of whom with tears streaming down their faces. I heard about their everyday experiences — the glances on the T, the unspoken fear they sense in the workplace from their colleagues, the comments they overhear not only in the news but in the streets. They are terrified.

And as I hear countless people around me scared to death by the statements of Trump and other popular figures, my attention turns to the minds and hearts of those who hear hate speech and respond: “Yes!” Is it fathomable that we could be witnessing a “phase 1” of “Trump’s willing executioners”? Will we even know what it looks like if- or God forbid when- history takes its first steps to circle back to lure humanity once again into its abysmal, homicidal propensity? Or will the American people pretend that the mandate to “never forget” is irrelevent when the victims are Muslim?

Steve Sailer writes: “I’m not sure if Scalia’s question is totally true, but, obviously, it’s essential to discuss it to have an intelligent debate on affirmative action. And that’s precisely why it was so shocking that Scalia dared bring it up. Respectability in modern America is proportional to the number of plausible and important ideas you would never dream of mentioning, even if you are a Supreme Court justice or a Presidential candidate.”

Comments:

* When the elite class is captive to a leftist narrative then it’s difficult, actually impossible, for the SC to rule outside of the Overton Window. Now comes Trump and he shifts the window. What do the “conservative” Justices make of what is happening? Can they actually gut AA completely and launch social change in society towards a different future? If they don’t, and if demographics continues to change at the same pace and in the same manner, then AA might very well be locked in forever because the constituent groups will become too powerful to cross.

* The top pro-white legal activist in America is Jewish.

Blum won the Shelby County case described in the news article excerpted below, and the result is that voter ID laws and redistricting maps no longer require federal government “pre-clearance.” Voter ID laws decrease NAM turnout by about 5%, and suck energy out of the Democrats who have to spend time and money getting people IDs to partially counteract the laws.

Fisher, depending on Justice Kennedy, could go as far as ending affirmative action completely. More likely it will be yet another rollback confined to public schools, ending the loophole used by TX and CA that autoadmit anyone in the top x% of their high school class, no matter how low their test scores.

Yet another Blum case, Evenwal v. Abbot, which was argued yesterday, would allow legislative districts to be done by voter population rather than by gross population. Shamefully, the Texas GOP establishment led by Greg Abbot is fighting against the lawsuit.

If Blum wins on this third case, the net result is the number of safe Hispanic and Asian districts Republicans would have to create would fall as much as 2/3%. So three Hispanic districts in San Antonio could be combined into one district, and two new suburban or rural white districts would then replace them elsewhere.

Blum has also worked against expansion of disparate impact theory and this.

Special Report: Behind U.S. race cases, a little-known recruiter
SOUTH THOMASTON, Maine | By Joan Biskupic

Sometime in the next few months, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide two cases that could fundamentally reshape the rules of race in America.

In one, a young white woman named Abigail Fisher is suing the University of Texas over affirmative action in college admissions. In the other, an Alabama county wants to strike down a law that requires certain states to get federal permission to change election rules.

If they win, the names Fisher and Shelby County, Ala., will instantly become synonymous with the elimination of longstanding minority-student preferences and voting-rights laws. But behind them is another name, belonging to a person who is neither a party to the litigation nor even a lawyer, but who is the reason these cases ever came to be.

He is Edward Blum, a little-known 60-year-old former stockbroker.

Working largely on his own, with the financial support of a handful of conservative donors, Blum sought out the plaintiffs in the Fisher and Shelby County cases, persuaded them to file suit, matched them with lawyers, and secured funding to appeal the cases all the way to the high court. Abigail Fisher is the daughter of an old friend of Blum’s – a man who happened to call when Blum was in the midst of a three-year search for a white college applicant who had been rejected despite solid scores. Blum eventually got Shelby County to file suit after trolling government websites and cold-calling a county official.

Blum introduced Fisher’s father and Shelby County officials to the same high-priced but politically sympathetic Washington lawyers, who agreed to work for a cut rate to be billed to Blum’s backers.

Over the past 20 years, Blum has similarly launched at least a dozen lawsuits attacking race-based protections. In addition to the Fisher and Shelby County cases, two other Blum-backed cases reached the Supreme Court. One struck down majority-black and majority-Latino voting districts in Texas. The other prompted the court to suggest it might eliminate a major portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the conservative-majority bench may now be poised to do in the Shelby County case.

Blum was born in Benton Harbor, Mich., and moved around as a child. His father, Joseph, was a salesman, mainly of shoes. …He speaks in plain-Midwestern tones sprinkling his conversation with the Yiddish word emes (pronounced “EM-ess”), which means “truth.” A 1973 graduate of the University of Texas, Blum said he started out as a Democrat, but by the early 1980s began reading the neoconservative Commentary magazine and changed his views.

* Scalia’s point is well supported by a large amount of data. Here’s an article adapted from a book on how affirmative action hurts blacks and hispanics by mismatching them with colleges where they can’t keep up, increasing their risk of dropping out, and making them switch to easier majors.

The article also supports the observations of Desiderius and Aristippus:

Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.

So a 120IQ black guy who might have earned a lucrative petroleum engineering BS from Texas A&M instead gets lured to Brown or Georgetown, can’t hack any sort of science major, and instead gets a worthless degree in Sociology or African American Studies.

* The elite is a PRODUCT of an educational system which has narrowed down what is acceptable opinion. In the Soviet Union not every member of the Communist Party nor every apparatchik nor every powerful party member believed in the official dogma but they were trapped by it for any deviation would allow their enemies to destroy them for not being Marxist enough.

When self-interest aligns with mouthing the official ideology, then truth telling or dissent comes at a very high price and many aren’t willing to pay that price, so they simply go along to get along.

To your point, there certainly are people in the elite who are true believers but there are also people who hold to private truths as they utter public lies in order to advance in a system where public lies color everything.

* Blacks are poor with low social status. Like immigrants they dream of their kids becoming professionals – doctors, lawyers and engineers – because these are careers that guarantee social status and entry to the upper-middle class.

I wonder how many black parents dream of their kid becoming an African-American studies major. I’d guess the number is not that high.