How often did the New York Times and other media accuse Barack Obama in news stories of repeating lies and falsehoods? I don’t remember the MSM doing this to any other politician with the regularity it does it to Trump.
An opening montage of news reports contains several references to Mr. Trump’s unpredictability, and the message of “Trump’s Road” is that his combination of improvisation and obsession makes it impossible for traditional methods of reporting to deal with him. We’re now seeing the news media’s delayed reaction to that, as mainstream outlets (including The New York Times) attack the truth of his and his minions’ statements in an unprecedentedly aggressive fashion.
WaPo: “A journalist had misreported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.”
So when Trump gets his facts wrong, he lies, but when journalists do, they “misreport.” Got it.
Posted inJournalism|Comments Off on NYT: ‘Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers’
A few years ago, my work on white supremacy led me to the neo-Nazi tract The New Order, which proclaims: “The single serious enemy facing the white man is the Jew.” I must have read that statement a dozen times. Until then, I hadn’t thought of myself as the enemy.
Women tend to take things personally.
She never considered that different groups have different interests? She thought every group would think of Jews as friends? What about the Palestinians who were displaced by the Jewish state of Israel? Did she ever think that they might consider Jews as enemies? In a Darwinian world, life is a struggle to survive.
Around 1995, in his first lecture on the Book of Exodus as part of his 18-year project to teach the Torah verse by verse, Dennis Prager said: “The Jewish dream is that the world not be based on blood ties. It is the only dream ultimately that will save humanity given the horrors of blood historically. Blood beliefs are the greatest source of cruelty in history because if you are not my blood, you are not valuable. That’s how people have lived.”
“The reason that Hitler so hated the Jews was a belief in blood. The Jews are the world’s polluters of blood purity. If you are into the purity of blood, the Jews are your quintessential enemy because wherever the Jews are, they assimilate in part and stay Jewish in part. They are part of you but not fully part of you because of their blood. If they fully assimilate, they are still dangerous… The assimilated Jew was the ultimate polluter of German purity. If you believe in the purity of the nation, the Jews are the quintessence of opposition to you.”
“The only nation to keep its identity and still be all over was the Jews.”
“He [Pharoah] doesn’t like that the Jews are all over Egypt, maintaining their identity but also a part of Egyptian life. He was interested in blood purity.”
And yet Jews are genetically distinct from non-Jews. So it seems that while Jews, according to Prager, are the enemies of blood purity, within their own kind, they value blood purity. In other words, they, according to Prager and Ferber, seek the opposite for the goyim than what they seek for themselves. They seek cohesion for me, multi-culturalism for thee.
When I began my research for a book on race, gender, and white supremacy, I could not understand why white supremacists so feared and hated Jews. But after being immersed in newsletters and periodicals for months, I learned that white supremacists imagine Jews as the masterminds behind a great plot to mix races and, thereby, to wipe the white race out of existence.
So she learned that what Prager said — “The Jews are the world’s polluters of blood purity.” She learned that some non-Jews value blood purity as much as Jews do!
The identity of white supremacists, and the white racial purity they espouse, requires the maintenance of secure boundaries. For that reason, the literature I read described interracial sex as “the ultimate abomination.” White supremacists see Jews as threats to racial purity, the villains responsible for desegregation, integration, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, and affirmative action — each depicted as eventually leading white women into the beds of black men. Jews are believed to be in control everywhere, staging a multipronged attack against the white race. For WAR, the newsletter of White Aryan Resistance, the Jew “promotes a thousand social ills … [f]or which you’ll have to foot the bills.”
Are there any groups that don’t value secure boundaries? Former Vice-President Joseph Biden seemed to have a similar view of Jews to the white supremacists Ferber read. Jennifer Epstein reported for Politico May 21, 2013:
Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country’s founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights.
“The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential part of who we are that it’s fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage,” he said. “The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.”
“You make up 11 percent of the seats in the United States Congress. You make up one-third of all Nobel laureates,” he said. “So many notions that are embraced by this nation that particularly emanate from over 5,000 years of Jewish history, tradition and culture: independence, individualism, fairness, decency, justice, charity. These are all as you say, as I learned early on as a Catholic being educated by my friends, this tzedakah.”
“The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements.
“You can’t talk about the civil rights movement in this country without talking about Jewish freedom riders and Jack Greenberg,” he said, telling a story about seeing a group of Jewish activists at a segregated movie theater in Delaware. “You can’t talk about the women’s movement without talking about Betty Friedan” or American advances in science and technology without mentioning Einstein and Carl Sagan, or music and Gershwin, Bob Dylan and “so, so, so many other people.”
“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.”
“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage,” Biden said.
“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said.
Jews have also been key to the evolution of American jurisprudence, he continued, namedropping Brandeis, Fortas, Frankfurter, Cardozo, Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan. “You literally can’t. You can’t talk about the recognition of … rights in the Constitution without looking at these incredible jurists that we’ve had.”
“Jewish heritage has shaped who we are – all of us, us, me – as much or more than any other factor in the last 223 years. And that’s a fact,” he said.
“We talk about it in terms of the incredible accomplishments and contributions” of Jews in America,” Biden added, “but it’s deeper “because the values, the values are so deep and so engrained in American culture, in our Constitution.”
“So I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish heritage. I really mean that. I think you vastly underestimate the impact you’ve had on the development of this nation. We owe you, we owe generations who came before you,” he said.
Ferber writes:
Reading white-supremacist literature is a profoundly disturbing experience, and even more difficult if you are one of those targeted for elimination. Yet, as a Jewish woman, I found my research to be unsettling in unexpected ways. I had not imagined that it would involve so much self-reflection. I knew white supremacists were vehemently anti-Semitic, but I was ambivalent about my Jewish identity and did not see it as essential to who I was…
I am reminded that my ancestors were expelled from the dominant race, persecuted, and even killed.
Could you not make at least as strong a case that Jews have always seen themselves as a people who shall dwell alone? Were they expelled or did they choose to isolate themselves and their gene pool?
Speaking out against the high rates of intermarriage among Jews and non-Jews, [Orthodox Jewish leaders] issue dire warnings. Like white supremacists, they fear assaults on the integrity of the community and fight to secure its racial boundaries, defining Jewishness as biological and restricting it only to those with Jewish mothers. For both white supremacists and such Orthodox Jews, intermarriage is tantamount genocide.
Posted inAlt Right, America, Jews, Nationalism|Comments Off on What White Supremacists Taught A Torah Scholar About Identity
Donald J. Trump campaigned as a populist rather than as a conservative, and won in the face of hostility from the conservative movement and Republican leadership. For all his faults, Mr. Trump recognized that the Republican path to the presidency was incompatible with many conservative shibboleths.
As the new leader of his party, Mr. Trump has the opportunity to change its ideological orientation. He should seize it.
If Mr. Trump makes peace with mainstream conservatives and defers to the likes of the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, by backing upper-class tax cuts, economic deregulation and reduced entitlement spending, he will be a failed president, and the energized voters who sent him to the White House will feel justifiably betrayed.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump threw out the traditional conservative playbook. He appealed directly to the demographic that, in the mid-1970s, the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American Radicals.” These voters are not persuaded by tropes about limited government, but they have little interest in the Democratic Party’s cosmopolitan egalitarianism. They identify with neither Wall Street nor Occupy Wall Street. They are frightened by the prospect of privatized Social Security, but roll their eyes at the far left. They are not against government; they want a government that works for their specific interests.
Yet the Republican Congress appears ready to disregard the voting bloc that has handed it power. Instead of secure Medicare and building projects, Mr. Trump’s supporters may end up with fewer banking regulations — which they never cared about. If Republicans push for a traditional conservative agenda, and Mr. Trump acquiesces, many of the Middle American Radicals will not turn out for them in 2018 or 2020.
This group has made political waves before, filling the ranks of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” and serving as Ross Perot’s base in 1992 and Pat Buchanan’s during his failed presidential campaigns in ’92 and ’96. Since that time, and especially since 2008, both parties ignored the Middle American Radicals, and it showed in their declining turnout rates.
Mr. Trump brought them back into the Republican coalition without suffering significant losses among ideological conservatives. He did not even underperform compared to recent Republican nominees among minority voters.
The conservative movement — the constellation of institutions, journalists, intellectuals and politicians who stand for limited government, traditional family values and a strong national defense — has dominated the Republican Party for a generation. But as Mr. Trump’s rise suggests, mainstream conservatism is a failed movement that has little to offer 21st-century America.
Steven Sugarman, the chief executive of fast-growing Irvine lender Banc of California, resigned on Monday, the same day the bank announced it is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The bank offered no explanation for Sugarman’s resignation but the move, and the SEC investigation, appear to be continued fallout from questions about insider relationships at the bank and connections between bank insiders and a convicted fraudster.
In an early morning announcement, the bank said that Sugarman, a board member since 2010 and chief executive since 2012, had resigned as chairman and CEO. In a separate announcement, the bank acknowledged it has received a formal investigative order and a subpoena from the SEC.
The bank said the subpoena demands information related to an October press release in which Banc of California laid out its response to a blogger’s allegations that the bank was connected to and possibly controlled by Jason Galanis, an L.A. financier who pleaded guilty to securities fraud charges over the summer.
Posted inCalifornia|Comments Off on Banc of California chief resigns amid SEC inquiry
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
