* Re the Wachowski Bros. becoming the Wachowski Sisters – is this good for the Jews?
Chaim Amalek: BH: The Wachowskis, the Jenners, the Kardashians – not a Jew among them. Also not Jewish: Robert Mapelthorpe, the homosexual artist, and Angela Merkel.
* “When you marry your college sweetheart instead of the crackwhore by the club dumpster, you are practicing eugenics.” (Anatoly Karlin)
WASHINGTON — The gathering on the eighth-floor rotunda of the federal government’s Ronald Reagan Building looked, at first glance, like any other Saturday-evening D.C. cocktail party.
But this was no ordinary affair.
The 50 or so people in the room were there for the winter conference of the National Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Arlington, Virginia. On its website, NPI describes itself as a group “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”
In NPI’s telling, white Americans are increasingly under siege in their own country, doomed to be a hated minority as people of color grow ever more numerous and politically powerful.
And Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has given the group’s members more hope than ever that help is on the way.
A solid majority of the formally dressed men at Saturday’s event were sporting a hairdo known as an “undercut,” which consists of a buzz cut on the bottom with longer hair on top, combed across to hang over one of the shaved sides of the head. It’s not a style you see often on the Beltway cocktail party circuit, and as it turned out, it’s a telling feature.
The conference’s ubiquitous undercut hairdo was of a piece with the well-coiffed, respectable face of today’s white nationalist movement. At the same time, it pointed up the communal, almost spiritual, role that the movement plays in the lives of its adherents. Huddled together with drinks in their hands, the attendees with matching undercuts had the appearance of religious cult members standing in formation — or maybe just an especially tight-knit college debate club from a bygone era.
And like any other quasi-spiritual movement, the young, overwhelmingly male white nationalists have their very own charismatic leader in Richard Spencer, NPI’s president.
Spencer was sporting the sharpest undercut in the room, a distinction that has prompted his comrades on the alt right to rename the haircut “the Richard Spencer” — at least, according to Spencer himself.
A tall and preppy graduate of the University of Virginia with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, Spencer manages to make even the most extreme white nationalist ideas sound like innocuous talking points. He is also a master of obfuscation and sophistry, evading questions about his real agenda by dismissing policy prescriptions as irrelevant (despite the name of his organization).
“Talking about policy is meaningless until you have a starting point,” Spencer said.
The starting point he has in mind is getting white people to openly embrace their “white” identity, and to organize as a group with common interests. Spencer and his peers maintain that creating an intellectual community of white activists is an essential step toward making America white again.
“I think it is important to dream, and you can look into the past for inspiration or you can think about the future,” Spencer said. “But I don’t know how history is going to unfold. All I know is, we need identity no matter what happens.”
Although Spencer claimed on Saturday that his ideal scenarios are so theoretical they’re hardly worth spelling out, he’s been more forthcoming in the past. Spencer told Vice in 2013 that his dream was “an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.”
Spencer has also expressed an openness to the idea of some kind of nonviolent ethnic cleansing. “Today, in the public imagination, ‘ethnic-cleansing’ has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so),” he said at the American Renaissance conference in April 2013, according to Salon. “But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution — done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.”
Other interim policies that Spencer and many NPI members support resemble standard conservative positions, albeit with race more explicitly in the foreground. They want to deport all undocumented immigrants, for example, and eliminate affirmative action in university admission and hiring for black and Latino people.
They also advocate a non-interventionist foreign policy, something they believe Trump supports as well.
***
The white nationalists share Trump’s penchant for trafficking in conspiracy theories, but they indulge in a brand of anti-Jewish prejudice that Trump himself has not exhibited.
One of the speakers scheduled at the NPI event was Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, who’s notorious for his incendiary ideas about Jewish people. MacDonald has argued that Jews are “genetically driven to destroy Western societies” by promoting liberal immigration policies as part of their “group evolutionary strategy,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many of Saturday’s attendees made comments about Jewish people, and about their supposed role in efforts to undermine white nationalism, that would have sounded familiar to anyone with knowledge of MacDonald’s work.
“Do [Jews] present a challenge to us?” Richard said. “I would say yes, because they overwhelmingly support liberal causes.”
It is something Jews have done throughout history, Richard argued, and it’s one reason they’ve so often clashed with the communities around them.
Jews “were basically advocating war against Germany before the war actually started,” he said.
Richard added that the Jews’ actions in Germany did not warrant genocide. But he’s not certain that a genocide actually occurred.
If the Holocaust “really happened, then of course it wasn’t justified,” he said. “If it happened differently than what the story we’ve been told [is], then I think that needs to be let out.”
A man who gave his name as Jake later elaborated on why Jews are not white, and why, in his view, they present a fundamental problem for the white nationalist cause.
“The main people who are stunting white interests are Jewish people,” Jake said. “Every time a white nationalist, or group that claims to represent the interests of white Americans, appears, it is destroyed by groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, and those are Jewish groups.” (The SPLC is an Alabama-based anti-racist nonprofit that does not identify as a Jewish organization in any way.)
Jews support multiculturalism, Jake said, because they are not racially white, and therefore feel threatened by white identity.
John, another attendee, argued that it was in Jews’ nature to be “subversive” as a survival strategy. As he and other attendees spoke, an African-American server would interrupt us at intervals to offer miniature seafood tacos, sliders and other appetizers.
“Basically Jews, as outsiders in society, in order to become any part of it, to exploit it in any way, had to work in subversive ways, which is why they have a high verbal IQ,” John said. “This is why you’ll find that Jews have this kind of behavior wherever they go.”
Mike, an attendee from Massachusetts, said that the willingness of Jewish neoconservatives to abandon the Republican Party if Trump is the nominee is more evidence that Jews put their own interests ahead of the country’s.
“It’s a good example of Jews basically backstabbing an entire portion of the political spectrum with their own perceived interests,” Mike said.
Neoconservatives’ support for foreign policy interventions, including the Iraq War, is driven by their loyalty to Israel, Mike and his friends argued.
I asked whether it was possible that Jewish neoconservatives, like non-Jewish neoconservatives, simply support those policies because they believe they’re what’s best for the country.
They chuckled at my suggestion.
“Are you Jewish?” Jake interjected.
“I actually happen to be,” I said, “but I’m here as a reporter.”
Jake then confronted me with what he said is the hypocrisy of Jews promoting multicultural acceptance in the United States and other Western countries, even as they insist on having an explicitly ethno-religious state of their own in Israel.
“The only reason it is not brought up is because people are scared and because the Jews own the mainstream media,” Jake said.
“They are opposed to us having our own Israel, a state that is for us exclusively,” Karl added.
Talk turned to Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News’ parent company and who argued last year that only “proven” Christian refugees should be allowed into the U.S.
“Rupert Murdoch pretends not to be Jewish,” Mike said.
“If he’s not, he’s a shabbos goy,” Karl said. “He’s just so Zionist. He’s part of the billionaire class.”
A shabbos goy is a gentile who does things for a Jewish person on Saturdays that are prohibited on the Sabbath. Karl appeared to be using the term to describe non-Jewish sellouts who are beholden to Jews.
Karl argued that Trump is the rare billionaire who is neither Jewish nor beholden to Jewish people.
Trump has indeed rankled some of Israel’s Republican supporters by saying he would pursue a role as a “neutral” broker between Israel and the Palestinians. He also told the Republican Jewish Coalition in December that he didn’t expect them to back him, “because I don’t want your money.”
Trump would likely bridle at the open anti-Semitism of these supporters, however. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 and raises her two children in an observant Jewish home.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign also did not respond to a request for comment on how Trump feels about supporters saying anti-Jewish things.
Spencer, for his part, concedes that Jews are not monolithic, though it’s not clear whether he thinks they are capable of being part of the white race.
“I agree there is a great deal of Jewish assimilation,” he said. “I don’t want to get into a [discussion of] ‘who is white.’”
Evan Thomas, a student from Michigan, offered his own perspective.
“Jews tend to be involved in all levels of society,” Thomas said. “There are Jews who are leftists, there are Jews who agree with us, there are Jews who are Zionist. There are Jews who are doctors and apolitical.”
I feel like I can usually guess someone’s politics by looking at them. Muscular men, for instance, tend to be more right-wing and skinny men tend to be more left-wing.
A friend says: This is similar to the use of stereotypes in jury selection.
You cannot always be certain but stereotypes are true for a reason; a large number of persons of that type (anything that can be ascertained through observing someone be it race, ethnicity, religion, body type) share that characteristic.
I remember in the late 60’s and early 70’s it was easy to assume someone held a particular group of beliefs if they looked and dressed like a “hippie.” Then more and more non hippies started wearing their hair long and dressing more in that style and often they didn’t share those beliefs.
Since 90 percent of blacks support the democrats, that is an easy call. You only have a 10% chance of being wrong and you can probably narrow that down by observing their personal appearance, carriage, grooming, way of dressing and way of speaking.
Pundits hate being rendered irrelevant. I think that is the primary source of much of their rage against Donald Trump. He has shown that they are out of touch with the historic American nation. Trump doesn’t want their advice. Their stock has never been lower.
A friend says:
Howard Kurtz wrote an article for Fox about how the MSM is just going after Trump. The attacks on Trump from Liberals, Conservatives, the Republican establishment and the media is truly unprecedented. Many of these articles, such as the ones that Rod Dreher posts and comments on at his website are insightful about the basis of Trump’s appeal.
However the way in which Trump is casually labeled a Fascist or Nazi, or racist or white supremacist, but persons who don’t know what those terms mean and are just slinging them around to tar Trump, especially by persons in the media is worth examining.
I think that what is happening is that the reporters, editors, op-ed columnists, pundits both in the main stream media and in their conservative counterparts, believe that they have both a “gatekeeper” function, deciding which news stories to print, and also a public opinion shaping function, through the opinion pieces and more and more through slanted news reporting or advocacy journalism. For those in that position, they have usually risen through the ranks of elite schools, prestigious news outlets and rewarded with the plum job of being the white house reporter or assigned to a political campaign or that most treasured of all, regular columnist. In addition there is the entire stable of op ed contributors.
Trump has shown them to be unable to influence public opinion about him. Any previous candidate would have backed off on positions, apologized, or been run out of the race. This hasn’t happened with Trump. They intuit that if Trump succeeds, their ability to influence politics or policy will be greatly diminished. Every politician is able on some level to manipulate the press, especially if the press needs access to the politician, or if the members of the press’s orientation is similar to the politician. The press also has the power because the politician wants the coverage and wants his message to get out.
What we are witnessing is the collection of journalists and pundits trying to salvage what they believe is their obligation as members of the fourth estate to exercise a check on a politician who won’t come to heel. If Trump is taken down, its back to business as usual for the press. If Trump wins, it is not clear how this will play out.
If, as looks likely at this moment, the presidential nominees of the two major parties of the United States in 2016 will be Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we may be witnessing the lowest point in American electoral history. We have never had two candidates of such low stature running for president…
Trump is a real estate tycoon who has lived a life dedicated to making money. A lifelong pursuit of money is not a crime, nor does it mean Trump is as crooked as Hillary Clinton. But he does share her lifelong preoccupation with self.
And he is mean-spirited. His assertion that John McCain, a man tortured for years while a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, was not a war hero because he had been captured after being shot down; his mockery of a reporter’s physical disability; his cruel comments about Carly Fiorina’s looks; his lying about George W. Bush; his lowering of the discourse at every Republican debate in which he participated to the level of a high school food fight; and his constant use of personal insults are some of the examples of this mean-spirited — and immature — nature.
He is also prone to wild exaggeration and outright dishonesty. For example, his claims to have seen bodies flying from the World Trade Center — from his apartment more than 4 miles away — and thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks, and to have opposed the invasion of Iraq before the invasion, are either highly improbable or demonstrably false.
* Twitter is a fantastic equalizer and game-changer. The old mass media setup allowed pundits to comfortably sit in their seats on cable news shows and pound away at us like naval guns firing from offshore. The rest of us just had to hunker down and take it. Twitter forces them to come fight us on land in an even match. They lose their invulnerability and everyone learns how thoroughly second-rate they always were. “Never get off the boat man!” as Chef said in Apocalypse Now. Wise advice indeed.
* [James] Fallows, who loves strongmen government, is basically pissed he created a system where a strongman from the opposite side can take power?
Cry me a river.
Also, look for more and more wild and direct threats against Trump by the left as the election marches on. They will be openly encouraging assassination—-most especially those lefties who claimed that the right’s “culture of fear” some how lead to Gabby Giffords being shot up by a schizophrenic.
All I can say is I hope Trump: (1) stays safe; and (2) gathers the names of people like Fallows encouraging assassination. He should arrest them immediately after being sworn in, and try them for incitement of murder.
* Fallows was on Fareed Zakaria last Sunday. His leg was tingling about Sudanese and Somali women working in the pork meatpacking industry in Sioux Falls, SD. Fallows from the transcript:
For example, a place like Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s a largely white city, largely upper Midwest, plains, Protestant city, Lutherans and German. German and Norwegian residents there. They became one of the main places for absorbing refugees. Along the streets in Sioux Falls you see Somali and Sudanese people walking along to their jobs to the gas stations or the malls, in a beef, in a pork packing house in downtown Sioux Falls. They worked tens of thousands of pigs and meet their maker every day. Most of the people doing the dispatching, a large number of them are Muslim women refugees from the rest of the world, who are there sometimes wearing their head gear and working in this pig slaughter house so their kids can go to high school and college, join ROTC, do all these other things.
* Hillary is a false favorite. She had the same machine in 2008 when she lost to a novice, this time she’s struggling to beat an obscure old man from Vermont. Even though Democrats have a hard time liking her supposedly voters who aren’t Democrats will rush to back her in the general election.
* All the “Establishment” types who are so afraid of Hillary are idiots. NOBODY likes Hillary, even her own party. But the talking heads and Establishment fools insist on taking her seriously. Trump is the only candidate who will stand up to her and call her a liar and a fraud to her face. Like him or not, Trump is the ONLY guy who can beat her. The Establishment has it totally backwards. They actually think Rubio can beat her? I’d like to know what kind of drugs they’re on…
* I know Trump asked Obama for it in 2015 and Obama granted it.
Now, I mentioned this a while ago, but Trump must have a lot of expertise in security. He’s got major celebrities living on his property as well as foreign dignitaries, and he himself has been a major media celebrity for 40 years. He’s probably as well versed and expert on security as anyone not in the SS, CIA, or running Blackwater would be. And he’s got the coin to pay for the best for himself—meaning ex-special forces type dudes and Blackwater types.
And then add to that how abysmally awful the Secret Service has been in the last eight years in protecting the president (Obama Inauguration gate crashers, hooker scandal in Colombia, letting a schizophrenic nutcase fake “sign language interpreter” on stage next to Obama during the Nelson Mandela, the dude who climbed into the white house and ran over the affirmative action Secret Service chick….) —
and I’ll bet Trump’s personal security force is still around—both providing security jointly with the SS and watching the SS closely. Trump’s no fool when it comes to dirty tricks, either.
* With Fallows, his intellectual bias is showing.
People like him prefer politicians who are urbane and ‘thoughtful’. Such politicians lend an ear to thinkers, and intellectuals feel flattered. Philosopher-kings who seek the advice of philosophers.
If such politicians are absent, intellectuals prefer the empty suits. While empty suits like Rubio are total zeroes, they still go through the motion of listening to experts and deferring to them. Empty suits are bogus but they do as experts advise them. So, think-tankers win. At the bare minimum, empty suits maintain the decorum and outward appearance of ‘thoughtful leader who listens to the best advice’.
But Trump? His style is, “I know what’s right, and I don’t need know egghead telling me what’s what.” You gotta break some eggheads to make America great again.
People like Fallows feel left out when a man like Trump comes along.
I like the idea of intellectuals giving advice, but given the total takeover of think-tanks by lobbyists, special interest groups, the GLOB, and Zionist interests, most ‘experts’ are shills and gangsters of globo-supremacism.
Fallows ought to know that.
It is not Trump who’s pushing for policy that will drag the world to war. People who are doing it are the ‘thinkers’ and ‘experts’ who advised other GOP candidates to call for more tensions in Middle East and with Russia.
* If we just look at the turnout in the primaries, all the Republican primaries are showing record turnouts, and the Dems are lackluster at best. Neither of their candidates are energizing anyone. Particularly if Hillary wins a squeaker based on her superdelegate pledges, half of the Dem voters will sit out the general. Obama barely managed to get by Romney (Romney!) with a near lock on the black vote. The black and hispanic vote is going to see a massive reversion to the mean in 2016, I wager.
* I don’t doubt there is a Deep State, but it’s either not that powerful or is unbelievably good at covering its tracks. No, even in the freewheeling CIA you have to get your drones from somewhere, and they aren’t trained and indoctrinated by old men in back rooms with cigars.
The real power in this country isn’t elected officials, either. Nixon was brought down by the frickin press. Presidents don’t run the White House, let alone the executive branch. There is some power in committee chairmanship in Congress, and certain congressmen have sinecures, with 98% probability of reelection. Administrative law outweighs congressional law by a billion to one (not a precise ratio), and congressmen don’t write or read laws anyway.
No, the real power is the part of government that never leaves. This is the Permanent Government, or so-called Civil Service. It includes some appointed positions, like SCOTUS. Mostly it’s drones. They make actual law, they carry actual, ultimate decisions. They’re where policy meets reality.
The real power behind this power are the bodies that tell the civil service what to think. They also tell us what to think by telling educators and journalists what to think. These are universities and NGOs.
I don’t care who gets elected president, with how big a mandate. Even if they could replace the civil service with their own people, which isn’t possible anymore, they couldn’t control the outcome. Because they wouldn’t have trained the new people what to think. Eventually they would regress to the level set by the educational system, the MSM, etc.
* If he’s outside their frame if reference it’s partly because he’s on their side. He’s on both sides, or all sides. This is so because we’re stuck in am Age of Ideology and Trump lives in the World of Action.
The left has this idea that he’s on the far right, but he’s not. He’s got a couple of “extremist” positions–on immigration and trade–that’s all. Establishment conservatives think he’s not A True Conservative. First of all, that doesn’t mean much considering how muddied is that term. But they’re correct, in a way. Trump is more conservative than he is anything else, which is to say he’s to the right of the mainstream . I believe that. But he’s to the left of establishment conservatives on enough things to see where they’re coming from.
Point is, he straddles ideological lines because he’s not an ideologue. He’s not an idea man. He’s a doer. Lots of presidents aren’t idea men, I assume. Did Bush the Younger ever think for himself, I wonder? They have people to think for them. Trump doesn’t, at least not so far as I know. Or else his idea men are an eclectic bunch.
He will have people thinking for him eventually. I wonder how much and to what extent he’ll be controlled. Doesn’t matter all that much because presidents don’t matter all that much. But I’m curious. In the meantime Trump is beyond or above or below ideas. None of that sissy stuff for him.
* If you watch tv shows like ‘COPS’ or ‘The First 48″ you’ll see another side to the Somali immigrant. The one who strangles woman in the laundry mat raving that that he is lion or the one who guns a white teenager down in an alley during a drive by shooting. I suspect there are more young Somali men in the Minnesota Department of Corrections than in ROTC programs.
* You can defund NGOs and universities to a certain degree. No power is permanent. By its very nature, it’s fickle. The whole cathedral or hive, as you choose to call it, can come crumbling down in months. Look at the old USSR for an example.
There are many measures that can be taken to slaughter the beast. And civil servants aren’t particularly reputed to be brave. They’ll follow orders, no matter who gives them.
Having said that, Trump if elected can only take some small steps in this direction. I hope he has a good team behind him. Younger guys who’ll do the long and dirty work ahead.
Comment: Kris Kobach endorses Trump. Buried in the details of the endorsement is the fact that Kobach is in touch with Trump and explaining to Trump legislative mechanisms which can be used to compel Mexico to pay for a wall.
This guy needs to be the VP. Here’s a local profile on him. This should shut-up conservatives worried about Trump’s liberalism. His wife even home schools their kids.
* The Soros-backed “Secretary of State Project” (SoSP) has already has some successes, most notably in the first “election” of Al Franken to the US Senate. He and incumbent Norm Coleman were within about 1000 votes of each other initially, but each time there was a recount, Franken got more votes and Coleman fewer, until Coleman lost for good. I think there were seven or eight recounts and in one of them a poll worker “found” some ballots in the trunk of her car, all of them votes for Franken naturally.
The Dems have great chutzpah accusing the Rs of suppressing black votes with such racist requirements as an ID when they have been stealing elections for years. See also Mary Landreau’s first election, Tim Johnson in South Dakota, and Ellen Sauerbrey’s loss as Maryland governor in the 90s when 15000 votes from Baltimore showed up just after midnight.
Comment: What intrigues me more than someone’s biological ancestry is the fact that socio-economic class tends to be rather well conserved from generation to generation. How many RCA salesman from the Canary Islands were there in Cuba in 1939?
I’ve always been keenly conscious of this, having been rather base-born myself. Wealth and status have to be built up from one generation to the next. I think the hardest thing any family lineage has to accomplish is completing the transition from wage-slavery to petite bourgeoisie, i.e. the middle class. It is the most difficult step on the whole spectrum, as it involves a fundamental shift in one’s basic notions of money, property, honor, and a host of other things. The gap between the middle class and the variously described poorer classes beneath them is the widest gap in the world.
However, once that step is taken, it’s relatively easy to see how a child who begins his life in a middle class milieu has a reasonable chance at climbing into the professional class—e.g. the MBAs, doctors, lawyers, accountants, FIRE trades, and other credentialed professions—provided that his own talents and intelligence are worthy of the the task. But if you start out in the lower class, it sometimes doesn’t matter how hardworking and intelligent you are. The barriers to entry really are quite high. Your early formative experiences will not condition you to function in the middle class world, exemplars will be lacking, and family support will be nonexistent. The best a man can do is hope to make enough money to shield his children from the harsher realities, and to send them to a school were children from the next higher rung up the ladder go, in the hopes that new milieu will take over in them, and it’s a very hard task. It presupposes a great deal of patience and long-term thinking which the daily realities of a lower class life are constantly attempting to subvert. It requires the choice of a good and sympathetic woman as a wife, and such women are hard to find anywhere, especially among the lower classes. It also requires a strong Church to serve as the moral governance of the community. If I didn’t already think Ted Cruz to be a truly nasty individual, I would disqualify him from further consideration solely on the ground that his father apostatized from the Catholic faith.
Anyone who feels at home in the middle class needs to recognize that he is in possession of a great inheritance that was dearly bought with the labors, tears, and humiliations of an earlier generation. If you’ve never been without it, you will never realize what a sweet thing it is to grow up with that background, that culture, and those opportunities. I know this sounds a lot like the “White Privilege” argument, but it I am not intending to tear anyone else down or advocating for any kind of redistribution. I’m just saying that, considered in the broad sweep of human history, a middle class lifestyle is a rare thing indeed and it ought to be cherished.
* One of the upsides of living in SWPLville is that the Uber drivers tend to be retired white guys. The guy who has picked me up a half-dozen times is a retiree whose wife still works and he was bored. He lives 3 blocks from my house. Fine by me.
The last cab I took from the airport was piloted by an incoherent African whom I had to direct to my destination, 20 minutes and 3 towns away.
* The reason the Japanese are so innovative is because their land is so poor in resources, the only thing they had in quantity was wood, even stone was relatively rare. This forced the Japanese to pay attention to the detail and innovate to save on the use of the rare resources. They are genetically close to the Han people that populated all of China and Korea, but not everything (even in the HBD world) is about genes, the environment also plays a role.
On that topic, many Americans believe they are superior because of their constitution or other such universal abstractions, but if Japan and America swapped lands then the Japanese would have easily won any conflict with America.
Here’s a hysterical op/ed in Haaretz from a Jewish woman in New York:
When pressed about his Jewishness in the most recent democratic debate, Senator Bernie Sanders said he was not only proud to be Jewish, but that because of his own family history, he himself was aware of the dangers of radical and extremist politics.
Now that one Jewish question of this election has been addressed, what about the second? Given that Donald Trump has large support from the white nationalist movement, support he relies on not only to mobilize votes, but also to help police his increasingly violent campaign rallies, why aren’t more Jews, and specifically, more Republican Jews, sounding the alarm about Trump? Are they too afraid of Hillary Clinton, too convinced of their own safety, and all out of political ammunition?
It is no secret that white nationalist groups have delighted in and supported the rise of Trump. Their support has been well documented. Their leaders openly endorsed Trump and make robocalls for him in advance of primaries, warning about the preservation of the white race. (“Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.”) They turn out in large numbers to vote for him and attend his rallies in droves, often acting as an informal security force. For his part, Trump has wobbled on disavowing this support. (His son recently gave a radio interview to a noted white nationalist and his campaign has given press credentials to a white supremacist radio station.)
To be sure, Republicans who happen to be Jewish are upset about Trump, but mostly because he’s bad for the brand. He’s not a true conservative, they say. He could have just as easily run as a Democrat, they say. He’s ruining the party, they say, and he’ll ruin the country while he’s at it. But much of the criticism stops there. As we have seen this past week, if Trump is going to be stopped, it is going to be from within. Given this, and given that Republican Jews are well-positioned to take on Trump, why the alarming silence?
If you go to the website of the RJC, the Republican Jewish Coalition, you can click on links to contact your representative to complain about the Obama administration’s “flirtation” with the BDS movement and you can still read all about the votes on the Iranian nuclear deal. As for the man who is running for president, the one whose supporters recently raised their right hands and pledged to vote for him, the one who called minority protestors “disgusting,” the one who has openly mocked the disabled – nothing.
Even some Republican Jewish pundits are afraid to attack Trump without qualifying their attack. For example, a recent photograph showed Trumps supporters all raising their arms in what looked like a Nazi salute, but pundits are quick to remind us of a picture of Obama supporters holding their hands to their hearts and similarly pledging loyalty. And while many have agreed that years of race baiting and birther politics have created the movement that Trump wishes to ride all the way to the White House, we are told that we must also blame Obama’s cult of personality for Trump’s success.
No, Republican Jews were hoping to get into bed with Marco Rubio. Turns out though, that Senator Rubio still sleeps in a toddler bed. Give him eight years or so and he may be ready for prime time. In the meantime, there is no candidate they feel comfortable with (Ted Cruz scares just about everyone), and in the absence of a candidate, speaking out against Trump in an unqualified way, is a vote for Hillary.
Second, it’s possible that American Jews no longer see themselves as the target of these white nationalist groups. Trump has not openly attacked Jews in the race. In fact, his worst comments were made in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition, when he said that it was good to be in a room full of dealmakers and told them he knew they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” Many American Jews of all political denominations see themselves as white and while they may abhor supremacist groups, they aren’t scared by them, even if a prominent white nationalist is on the record as saying that while he supports Trump, he is still bothered by Trump’s Jewish daughter.
Then there is the Ivanka factor. It is hard for many to believe that a man from the world of New York real estate, a man whose daughter converted to marry a Jew, a man whose grandchildren are being raised Jewish and will likely attend Jewish schools, could ever really be bad for the Jews. (After all, one tabloid showed a picture of Ivanka Trump and her husband walking down the street carrying flowers that turned out to be a lulav.) This man may be abhorrent, but how bad could he really be for us?
Finally, it’s possible that American Jews wonder if they have blown all their political capitol on the Iran deal. Prominent American Jews and the entire Jewish Republican establishment screamed themselves hoarse about the deal. While they distanced themselves from Mike Huckabee’s comment about President Obama marching Israelis to the door of ovens, now that there are actual Nazis in American presidential politics, now that we are talking about David Duke again, now that there are loyalty pledges and raised arms at rallies, where are all the Nazi analogies, and why can’t we make them without tempering them? Why aren’t our organizations doing more, saying more? Do we not have any voice left?
From the Forward, Feb. 10, 2016: Standing on an improvised stage and wrapped in the black, red and gold German flag, Rotem Ahituv stared out at thousands of protesters spread below him and offered the demonstrators a kind of absolution that only someone like him could give.
“I am Jewish,” he told the crowd. “My family has lived here in Germany for 700 years, and I can tell you that I see here no Nazis.”
In a short and passionate speech that quickly went viral on the Internet, Ahituv, an Israeli immigrant to Germany, spoke about the threat of a Muslim takeover of Europe and declared that Germany’s Jews stand with Pegida, the populist right-wing movement that had organized the January 26 demonstration in Frankfurt.
The group, whose name is a German acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, has organized similar demonstrations in cities across Germany. The largest have been in Dresden, Pegida’s base, where as many as 25,000 people have taken part. The protesters say they support Pegida’s call for more restrictive immigration policies and for the right to preserve and protect a Christian-Jewish dominated Western culture.
Ahituv told the crowd in Frankfurt that mainstream politicians and media, who have labeled Pegida as xenophobic, racist and even Nazi, are wrong and misleading. “Right here I see only Germans who love their country and want to save Germany from the Islam that wants to take over, to take your traditions, to take your beliefs, to take all of this down,” he said. “But we will not let it!”
In taking his stand, Ahituv was not just opposing Germany’s leadership and all its mainstream parties; he was standing, too, against Germany’s Jewish establishment. Communal leaders have strongly backed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s description of Pegida as a group led by individuals whose hearts “are cold and often full of prejudice, and even hate.”
Josef Schuster, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has condemned Pegida as an “immensely dangerous” movement that consists of neo-Nazis, parties from the far right and citizens who think that they can finally let out their racism and xenophobia.
“The Pegida-movement definitely doesn’t serve the interests of Germany’s Jewish community,” he wrote to the Forward in an email. “They want to exclude the Muslims and foreigners [from] German society. Somebody who roots against one minority is also able to root against other minorities”
Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, voiced the same fear. “Their actions — racially, religiously, socially, economically or otherwise justified,” he told the Forward, “are directed today against one group, and tomorrow against another.”
“Since the Second World War, Germany has been a place of democracy, pluralism and freedom,” Hadas-Handelsman noted. “These values should be treasured…. Those who incite racism and anti-Semitism use the democratic rules of the game to hurt democracy.”
But Ahituv is not the only Jew in Germany who thinks Pegida might be good for the Jews. The once unthinkable idea of a Jewish alliance with the German far right wing has gained some traction, especially following the recent terror attacks in Paris.
Jews are terribly afraid of the Muslims, according to Henryk Broder, a well-known journalist and outspoken personality in the German-Jewish community. Broder said German Jews should support the anti-Islamization movement.
“The Muslim community in Germany is the only threat to the Jews,” Broder said, adding that he does not agree with everything Pegida says, but thinks the Jewish establishment should listen to the movement instead of just demonizing it.
According to Rabbi Walter Rothschild, Pegida is raising important questions that mainstream politics has avoided. Rothschild, who is chief rabbi of Schleswig-Holstein, a federal state in northern Germany, said that there was a need in German society to discuss to what extent a minority should be allowed to maintain cultural norms that override core principles of Western civilization. Within the Muslim minority — which amounts to 5% of Germany’s population of 82 million — there are some communities, Rothschild said, that disregard Western values like women’s rights or freedom of speech and preach anti-Semitism.
“If you are going to have a mosque, then don’t teach hatred in it,” he said. “Yes, you can have a school, but don’t teach people to be terrorists. Yes, you can have your own political opinion about the Middle East, but don’t walk up and down [in street demonstrations] saying, ‘Kill the Jews!’ — which is what they did in Berlin.” Rothschild was referring to pro-Palestinian protests that took place in the German capital during Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in Gaza last summer.
”This is a cultural issue,” Rothschild concluded. “Jews in Europe are mostly on the side of modern Western values. There are some Muslims who are against modern Western values. Why should I support the right of Muslims to be against what I believe in?”
Much of Pegida’s popularity can be attributed to the organizers’ efforts to appeal to mainstream Germans. The movement has been strictly nonviolent, and its main battle cry is “We are the people!” — a slogan used by pro-democracy activists who protested against East Germany’s authoritarian regime in the 1980s.
From its early days, Pegida presented itself as pro-Jewish, and Israeli flags have been a common sight in demonstrations. When a photo showing Pegida’s founder, Lutz Bachmann, mugging in a Hitler costume was revealed, Bachmann was forced to resign from the movement’s leadership. Pegida’s spokesman, Christian Mayerhoff, recently gave an exclusive interview to the Israeli news website Ynet, in which he said Jews should stand together with Pegida “against Islamism and jihadism.”
Pegida’s pro-Jewish terminology is less about recruiting Jews — who account for less than 0.2% of Germany’s population — and more about advertising their regard for the boundaries of German political correctness. For some Pegida supporters, being Jew-friendly is a way to whitewash their radical ideology, explained Nathan Gelbart, chairman in Germany of Keren Hayesod, the Zionist fundraising organization.
Economists Howard Richman and Raymond Richman write:
On Thursday, Governor Mitt Romney gave an anti-Trump speech in which he called upon Republicans to vote for anybody but frontrunner Donald Trump so as to produce a brokered convention. Romney claimed that Trump's economic plans would cause a recession. He said:
If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished. Let me explain why[.] … His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war and that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs and lead entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes to flee America.
On Friday, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the U.S. goods and services trade deficit was $45.7 billion in January, up one billion dollars from $44.7 billion in December. January exports were $176.5 billion, $3.8 billion less than December exports. The reduction in U.S. exports predicted by Romney just happened, but Trump is not yet president. On February 26, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that U.S. economic growth slowed to a measly 1.0% during the last quarter of 2015, but Trump is not yet president. Billionaire investor Jim Rogers predicts a 100% chance of a U.S. recession within a year. If he is correct, a recession will occur, whether or not Trump is elected president.
It is true, as Romney claims, that Trump has called for tariff-like penalties to prevent American factories from moving abroad and also to bring currency-manipulating countries (including China, Japan, and Mexico) into trade-balancing negotiations. But would Trump's tariff threats slow U.S. economic growth? No! Exactly the opposite!
Trade-surplus countries have a lot more to lose from a trade war, so Trump's negotiations would likely succeed. For example, in 1981, Congress threatened trade-balancing import restrictions against trade-surplus Japan, which resulted in President Reagan negotiating "voluntary restraints" on Japanese automobile exports. As a result, Japanese automobile companies built factories in the United States that continue to employ American workers and to buy American-made auto parts, greatly increasing American incomes.
Positive Effects of Tariffs
Even if Trump's negotiations did not succeed, the American economy would benefit if he imposed his tariff-like penalties. First, government revenues would increase, which would reduce the budget deficit. Second, American consumers would be encouraged to switch their purchases to American producers and to the products of those countries, such as Brazil and Canada, that buy more from us when we buy more from them. America would become more attractive to foreign manufacturers and to American manufacturers who had moved their factories abroad. American factory production would increase, and so would the employment and incomes of American workers.
Romney's current attacks are ironic, because during the 2012 campaign, Romney talked tough on Chinese currency manipulation and other trade violations. Romney said that the U.S. should tell China, "You can't keep on holding down the value of your currency, stealing our intellectual property, counterfeiting our products, selling them around the world, even to the United States." But Romney's attack on Trump reveals Romney's stance as the sham that many of us suspected it was at the time. Trump is right to propose imposing significant tariffs on China precisely because of the litany of trade violations 2012 Romney claimed to be exercised about. But now Romney claims that if Trump does anything about China's rampant mercantilism, it will lead to a depression. Clearly he planned to go no farther in his China trade policy than another ineffectual round of asking China to stop its mercantilism.
In short, Romney doesn't appear to understand the economics of trade. Economic research about the "tariff-growth paradox," including one of our own academic papers, has found that tariffs hurt economic growth only when trade is relatively balanced. But periods of history during which world trade has been relatively balanced (such as 1840-1865 and 1950-1973) have been followed by periods during which world trade became more and more unbalanced. The world is once again experiencing a period of high trade imbalances (like the 1890s and the 1930s) in which trade-deficit countries can grow more rapidly simply by increasing their tariff rates. Anything that Trump does to balance the enormous U.S. trade deficits will be economically beneficial.
How Trade Deficits Have Been Hurting the U.S.
When countries run trade surpluses with the United States, they give us trade deficits. Those trade deficits reduce aggregate demand for American products, American incomes, and investment in American factories. In his speeches, Trump has focused upon the three countries that have large trade surpluses with the United States: China, Japan, and Mexico.
Effect of Trump's Trade Balancing on the U.S.
So if Trump succeeds, how much would his trade balancing help the U.S. economy? Doing so would cause businesses to locate new factories within the United States. Since R&D gets located near factories, new innovations would be invented in the United States. Since workers learn by doing, American workers would gain on-the-job skills, increasing their pay over time. Since American workers buy services from American service providers, American entrepreneurs would prosper. In sum, Americans would get more pay, more factories, more R&D, more innovations, and a more prosperous country.
Trump is the only candidate who has consistently opposed TPP. Although he voted against fast-tracking it on final passage, Senator Cruz had helped TPP get momentum by co-authoring an op-ed with Paul Ryan in its favor. The other Republican candidates have always supported TPP, and Hillary Clinton was part of the administration that negotiated it. All are members of the Republican/Democrat establishment consensus, which supports overseas production in return for campaign contributions.
And TPP is not just about trade. It is also part of the open borders agenda, to which the establishments of both political parties subscribe. Under TPP, foreign service providers will be able to recruit cheap workers in Mexico and Malaysia and bring them legally to the United States to take American service-sector jobs. The destruction of the American middle class will accelerate. The popularity of socialist candidate Bernie Sanders tells us where this is going.
The economic case for Donald Trump is clear. If any other candidate is elected, U.S. economic growth will continue to stagnate in the 1% to 2% range. In contrast, Trump's trade policies would return the United States to its normal 3% per year growth. If any other candidate is elected, median U.S. family income will continue to decrease, but if Trump is elected, it will return to its normal increase. Under Trump, the U.S. middle class, a bulwark against socialism, will gradually be restored.
The Richmans co-authored the 2014 book Balanced Trade: Ending the Unbearable Costs of America's Trade Deficits, published by Lexington Books, and the 2008 book Trading Away Our Future, published by Ideal Taxes Association.
