Tzvi Adams writes: Many people today assume that leafy vegetables must be thoroughly washed and inspected before eating to ascertain that tiny insects such as aphids, spider mites and thrips are not present. Rabbi Moshe Vaye, in his encyclopedic Bedikat HaMazon KaHalacha (3 vol./Heb.), has educated the public to the fact that minuscule insects are common in nearly all greens and finds legal support for their prohibition from respected poskim from centuries ago to modern times. On the other hand, Rabbi Eitam Henkin’s Lechem Yehiyeh L’achla provides reasoning for a more lenient attitude. Using technical halachic argumentation, Henkin makes an excellent case for a more relaxed approach to bedikat tola’im. Perhaps the route to reaching the halachic truth is to step back and take a broad historical assessment of this topic. I argue that the rabbis of the Mishna, Talmud, and medieval era ignored these tiny insects and ate the greens without careful rinsing or inspection. This lenient halacha continued until the 17th century when some rabbis wrote of the existence of very small bugs in salad greens. I posit that this new trend in halacha was due not to a new phenomenon in nature but to new discoveries in science:
The Scientific Revolution of the 16th – 18th centuries which produced the compound microscope and improved magnifiers, the discovery of life at the micro-level, the study of entomology and biological pest control, made rabbis more alert for smaller creatures crawling on their food.
I will demonstrate that though many rabbis of the recent centuries clearly forbade even tiny lettuce bugs, many Jews ignored these warnings and continued to eat garden greens with no concern for the presence of small insects. This lenient practice changed only in the last several decades in the modern age of ‘chumra’tism.
Posted inOrthodoxy|Comments Off on The Scientific Revolution and Modern Bedikat Tola’im Trends
Chaim Amalek: “This entire movement to “diversify” the Academy Awards is really a not much more than an attempt to de-Judaize Hollywood. Only white liberals are unable to confront this from either end, so there is this. YIDDEN BEWARE! AN ATTACK ON HOLLYWOOD’S WHITES IS AN ATTACK ON US! THE DEFENSE OF YIDDEN BEGINS WITH DEFENDING WHAT IS OURS: HOLLYWOOD AND WALL STREET!”
With movie director Spike Lee much in the news for denouncing whiteness in the entertainment industry, my Taki’s Magazine column points out that Spike got in all sorts of trouble way back in 1990 for making too clear that his resentment of whites being in positions of power over black entertainers is especially focused on Jews.
Here’s a 1990 New York Times article that’s fairly explicit about what can and cannot be gotten away with:
In Spike Lee’s ”Do the Right Thing,” there is a scene he refers to in the published screenplay as ”The Racial Slur Montage.” One by one, a range of ethnic characters stare into the camera and spit out vicious, stereotypical descriptions of some other ethnic group. … The variety of types demonstrates that all bigotry is interchangable, all equally harmful.
There is nothing that reasonable in the stereotypical portrayal of two Jewish characters in Mr. Lee’s new film, ”Mo’ Better Blues,” the story of an obsessed and troubled black jazz musician.
Mo’ Better Blues from 1990 is probably my favorite Spike Lee movie. Here’s a pleasant musical interlude from the film:
Although, like most of Lee’s pictures, it’s chaotically plotted. (Spike has numerous talents, but plotting isn’t one of them.)
Denzel Washington plays a jazz musician (presumably inspired by Lee’s father), with the movie featuring lots of other star power, such as Wesley Snipes as a rival musician, and in a small but important role toward the end, a young Samuel L. Jackson. The film nominally takes place in the present, but looks like it is set in his father’s younger days. (That kind of ambiguity could be considered sloppy, but I like it.)
Because it’s a movie with an almost all-black cast, it has a conservative family values message.
However, the brothers John and Nicholas Turturro play two white club owners, and that wound up causing no end of trouble for Lee:
In creating the minor characters of Josh and Moe Flatbush, club owners who exploit the black musicians in the film, Mr. Lee has elicited charges of anti-Semitism from many critics, a charge the film maker disputes.
In his review in Newsweek, David Ansen called them ”Shylocks.” In Newsday, Mike McGrady said they are ”craven” caricatures. Garry Giddins in his review in The Village Voice labeled the roles ”undoubtedly anti-Semitic,” but went on to say, ”Don’t let that lapse keep you from seeing” the film. When I reviewed ”Mo’ Better Blues,” in The New York Times, I described the Flatbush brothers as ”money-grubbing, envious, ugly stereotypes with sharks’ smiles.”
The Anti-Defamation League said last week that the characterizations ”dredge up an age-old and highly dangerous form of anti-Semitic stereotyping,” and that the organization ”is disappointed that Spike Lee – whose success is largely due to his efforts to break down racial stereotypes and prejudice – has employed the same kind of tactics that he supposedly deplores.”
And so what began as Mr. Lee’s least overtly controversial film may become one of his most controversial nonetheless. The depiction of Jews in ”Mo’ Better Blues,” as well as remarks Mr. Lee has made in recent interviews, distills two questions: When does a fictional character become an offensive stereotype? How do an artist’s public remarks reverberate and shape an audience’s perception of a film? These questions are acute in the case of Mr. Lee, whose work always has a political undercurrent and whose career is rooted at the crossroads of art and publicity.
The difference between the intelligent analysis of bigotry among blacks and Italians in ”Do the Right Thing” and the disturbing Jewish stereotypes in ”Mo’ Better Blues” is more than the difference between an artistic success and a failure. It’s true that ”Mo’ Better Blues” is muddled in its conception of the musician-hero, who must lose his art to gain a family, and its portrayal of women is pathetically shallow. But Josh and Moe, mirror-images whose repetitions of each other’s opinions are meant to be comic, are not merely stylized or failed characterizations.
The Flatbush brothers (played by real-life brothers, John and Nicholas Turturro) are so loaded with despicable traits typically used to disparage Jews that they might have been invented by someone in the Racial Slur Montage. They become rich by gouging others; they are deceitful; when challenged they threaten to sue. In thick New York-Jewish accents they accuse the underpaid black musicians of ”trying to take food from my children’s mouth.” And when the hero is seriously injured in a back-alley fight, Moe demands that the rest of the band go back onstage. Josh objects, in a tone that has little to do with human sympathy and much to do with the businesslike recognition that the star cannot go on. These caricatures are wildly out of synch with the film’s other roles. …
But the Flatbush brothers are the film’s villains, their greed inseparable from their Jewish identity. And because there are no other Jews to offset them, they become tokens of an entire ethnic group. In ”Do the Right Thing,” the Italian characters are fully defined and represent a fair range of qualities, from Danny Aiello’s ambiguous pizza-parlor owner to his two sons, one an unbiased peacemaker and the other a trouble-making bigot played by John Turturro. In that broader context, Mr. Turturro portrays an individual who is Italian and who has offensive ideas – a clearly conceived role far from his simplistic stereotype of Moe. …
Mr. Lee, among others, has cited the black chauffeur played by Morgan Freeman in ”Driving Miss Daisy” as a demeaning throwback. The charge carries a great deal of validity. The chauffeur, Hoke, exudes an older generation’s sense of ”knowing his place” socially: it is far beneath that of his imperious employer, Miss Daisy, who is Jewish but indistinguishable from any Southern, Protestant white lady. Both characters, however, have sympathetic features that rescue them from being insulting stereotypes. Hoke has a strong sense of self-worth; Miss Daisy’s hidden emotions surface when her synagogue is bombed. They are simplistic throwbacks, but they were not conceived in one-dimensional or malicious terms.
… Whether the Flatbush brothers were born of artistic carelessness or intentional malice, they leap off the screen as such strongly offensive types that they have taken on meaning beyond the film itself. They have moved into the realm of public controversy, where Mr. Lee’s personal opinions come into play.
In a great flurry of interviews given before and after the release of the film, in newspapers and on morning, afternoon and prime-time talk shows, Mr. Lee has denied being anti-Semitic yet sent a contrary message about Jewish control of black artists.
Mr. Lee told Daily Variety that his father, the bass player Bill Lee, ”worked for a majority of jazz club owners who were Jewish; this is not an indictment of them.” He went on, ”When I wrote the film, I wanted to put in how black artists had to fight against being exploited.” But because the exploiters in ”Mo’ Better Blues” are stereotypical Jews, Mr. Lee does make an ethnic indictment. (He also ignores the fact that Jewish club-owners like Max Gordon and Barney Josephson were important promoters of black jazz performers).
In the same interview, Mr. Lee said: ”I am not anti-Semitic. Do you think Lew Wasserman, Sidney Sheinberg or Tom Pollock would allow it in my picture?” He was naming the heads of the parent company, MCA, and Universal Studios, which made the film. And when asked on ABC’s ”Prime Time” whether his films can express any message at all as long as they make money – a wide-open question that did not refer to ”Mo’ Better Blues” – Mr. Lee answered, ”I couldn’t make an anti-Semitic film.” Asked why not, he said that Jews run Hollywood, and ”that’s a fact.” In such statements, Mr. Lee is taking on an issue that heated up last month when a panelist at the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual conference charged that ”Jewish racism” is holding back blacks in the film industry.
Watching ”Mo’ Better Blues” with these comments in mind, viewers are likely to find that Mr. Lee’s sense of Jewish control informs the Flatbushes far more than his disclaimers about good intentions. The characters seem even more loaded with the weight of his public opinions, even less forgivable as misguided artistic failures.
Mr. Lee’s use of his public presence has sometimes been greatly effective; on- and offscreen, he has done a great deal to combat the racism that undoubtedly still exists in Hollywood. But in his remarks about Jews he seems on an inflammatory course. And ”Mo’ Better Blues” suggests that attitude has done his art no good.
Poor Spike had to reply in the columns of the NYT with an op-ed with the self-defeating headline:
In 2012, Spike looked back on this turning point in his career in a profile by Ariel Levy for New York:
“B’nai Brith and the Anti- Defamation League, they were on my ass,” he says. “You don’t know what it is for someone to get on your ass until B’nai Brith and Anti- Defamation League …”
Eventually Lee placated his persecutors by writing an op-ed piece for the Times, but the whole thing still makes him mad when he thinks about it. And the truth is, he’s not sorry about portraying Mo and Josh Flatbush as Jewish bloodsuckers, feeding off the talents of black musicians. “Here’s the thing, though: It’s more than being a stereotype,” says Lee. “In the history of American music, there have not been Jewish people exploiting black musicians? In the history of music? How is that being stereotypical? For me, that’s like saying, like the NBA is predominantly black. Now, if that makes me anti- Semitic …” For a minute, he actually engages and sort of laughs. “I’m not writing any more op-ed pieces,” he says. “I did it once. I’m not doing it again. Seriously. I’m not doing it again.”
My Taki’s column, “The Oscar Grouches,” puts all this in wider perspective.
COMMENTS:
* Wait a minute.
If one were to meet a couple of bad Jews, it would be wrong or ‘antisemitic’ to assume that ALL Jews are like that.
Fair enough.
So, how does it make sense to assume that Spike Flea believes that ALL Jews are bad because two Jewish characters in his film are negative?
So, if I make a movie with two nasty Japanese characters, it means I hate all Japanese?
If anything, the Jewish critics are the real bigots because they wouldn’t have raised a fuss if the two baddies in Mo Worse Jews were Polish, Irish, Italian, Chinese, or etc.
This stirs up some memories.
In my city school in 6th grade, there was one Jewish kid named Ted. Rest were black, white, Asian, and etc. Around that time, the Viet Boat kids were coming in.
And one had a name Chieu but he pronounced it as ‘Joo’.
One day, I did a cartoon where everyone’s killing and destroying one another, and I titled it “Jew’s World”. I really meant “Chieu’s World” but since he pronounced his name as ‘Joo’ or ‘Jew’, I just used ‘Jew’. Since Vietnam was associated with war and violence, my cartoon was all about people killing and blowing each other up in the most horrible way. Anyway, Ted sees my cartoon and gets all angry and starts fuming.
So, I tell him it’s not about his people. It’s about Chieu’s people. “Jew’s World” is really “Chieu’s World”. And then Ted was all smiles and thought the images were pretty funny. It no longer mattered that it was ‘offensive’.
We see the same pattern in all this bitching about Spike Flea.
Worse, didn’t Hollywood give us so many movies with bad Russians, bad Arabs, bad Asians, bad blondie ‘aryans’, etc?
* Spike learned well that attention must be paid.
* Spike Lee has always had a lot of animus against Italian-Americans. You can see that in “Do the Right Thing”, “Jungle Fever”, “Summer of Sam”, and “Miracle at St. Anna.” For some reason, that’s not brought up much.
Sort of how like Rev Jeremiah Wright said that Italians have “garlic noses”, but it was his comments about Jews and Israel that got him (and Obama) in trouble.
* I don’t care about some woman I’ll never meet sleeping with someone not like me. Thiugh Jungle Fever is a leading indicator f anti White behavior. Why would I since it doesn’t affect me?
I ***do*** care very much when White women move the culture so I am not hired, or given a raise, or fired simply because I am a White man. Anti Whitism was unthinkable in Jewish run Hollywood, back when Jews made Yankee Doodle Dandy and Holiday Inn and Miracle on 34th Street. So too in the 20s when Zane Grey and Dashiell Hammet pulps often contained unironically “mighty White of ya.”
There is a reason Tancredo, and Brimelow, and Sailer, and Coulter, and Sessions all failed to move public opinion on immigration/immavasion. Brimelow in articular has been failing, for almost thirty years. Why?
Because he failed to account for the female support for immavaders. Period. Trump moved the window because he’s been the funny Alpha male boss on tv for thirty years. That simple. Alphas can do nearly anything they want.
Bill Gates can buy or sell Trump. But its not money. Look at their respective wives. Alphadom is charisma, presence, persuasion.
And in six months a reality tv star with Alpha status dud more than Tancredo did in thirty years. But hey charge right into those machine guns. Pretend they are not there and they will go away.
* Spike Lee also including unflattering and stereotypical brief Jewish roles in Summer of Sam and The 25th Hour. Has he ever had a positive, or moderately human Jewish role in any of his films?
* Spike isn’t bad at dialog, but his plots are poor. That seems like a soluble problem, but he largely hasn’t solved it.
* The funny thing about Spike Lee and Jews is that he fits some Jewish stereotypes himself, being a short mouthy highly verbal quarrelsome art-house director. You could compare him to a black Woody Allen, although I think Woody Allen is a better auteur/director.
To some degree stereotypes of American Jews and stereotypes of New Yorkers align very closely; some characteristics we associate with being Jewish in America come from being a New Yorker and on occasion vice versa. Donald Trump is of course not Jewish but in his brash, aggressive personal he comes off as more ‘ethnic’ and ‘Jewish’ than e.g. someone like Ben Bernanke, who is a calm, quiet, polite Jew from the deep south.
* Some of Spike’s beef with Jews comes from his being similarly bourgeois. He’s a third generation college graduate.
* I think Lee uses Italians as stand-ins for Jews. He knows he can say negative things about Italians that he could never say about Jews.
* He shows Jews pretty much the same same way he shows whites. This is why he is called an anti-Semite. An anti-Semite is someone who refuses to believe that Jews are better than whites.
* John Turturro can play loathsome Jew “Bernie Birnbaum” in the Coen Brothers’ MILLER’S CROSSING without anyone having to mass-apologize via an op-ed because…..oh, I dunno….let’s say “Holocaust”. Because Holocaust.
Mystifyingly, however, the Coens can lovingly depict nearly every white middle-American gentile in all of their films as either vacuously tasteless boobs or jolly, affable psychopaths (capable of any atrocity in the twinkle of an eye), without feeling the need to explain themselves to the nation at large.
* My favorite of Spike Lee’s movies is 1992 Malcolm X.
Last year, Chris Hedges claimed that when it comes to understanding White racism against Black, Malcolm X was much smarter than Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice,” Chris Hedges says at Truthdig on February 1, 2015.
Chris Hedges says that Malcolm was against Capitalism (Usury). He quotes Malcolm X: “It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck,” Malcolm said. “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
However, for obvious reasons, Chris Hedges avoid to mention that for the above two reasons, Malcolm X was hated by the Organized Jewry. Rev. King on the other hand, was, and still is, loved by the Organized Jewry.
* Dylan’s “Dear Landlord” is a complaint to his manager, Albert Grossman. It’s fair to say that Dylan and Lee share some sentiments.
* The unvarnished truth is that exploiting black musicians is a long tradition. For years, most of the venues featuring blacks outside of the black-run juke joints and the chitlin circuit were mob connected, Jewish run, or both. Most of the small record labels that featured black musicians were also Jewish run. Herman Lubinsky (Savoy) and Bob Weinstock (Prestige) left a trail of resentment from black musicians over their business practices. We can be thankful for their role in distributing some great music that might have otherwise have never been recorded, while acknowledging that they were shysters. Portraying tightwad, grasping, coercive Jewish club owners was merely portraying a facet of reality that it is not politically correct to acknowledge. Spike Lee owed no apology.
My feelings about Spike Lee are kind of like my feelings about Miles Davis. Great artists, raised in comfort and privilege, with an obnoxious and inauthentic tendency to leverage star power to mouth off in a posture of racial resentment.
The first example shown is Sir Alec Guinness as Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia. Is that really the best leadoff example of how bad movies are because of all that white privilege?
Harvard University Police Department has not identified the perpetrator responsible for the November vandalism of black Law School professors’ portraits and shuttered its investigation into the incident, ending more than a month of interviews and forensic examinations.
On November 19, Law School students and faculty arrived in Wasserstein Hall to find pieces of black tape placed over the portraits of several black Law professors. The incident, quickly denounced by students and Law School administrators as racist, prompted HUPD to investigate it as a hate crime.
Are we supposed to believe there were no fingerprints or DNA evidence left from the interaction of sticky tape and glass picture frames? Sounds like Harvard University wasn’t trying terribly hard to solve this mystery. Maybe the fact that black activists that same night in that same place were defacing the HLS seal with the same black tape might have something to do with Harvard’s lack of zeal in uncovering the perp.
I guess even all the brainpower at Harvard can’t solve some conundrums.
By the way, whatever happened to the Black Autumn on American college campuses?
Winter?
Posted inBlacks|Comments Off on Steve Sailer: On Second Thought, Black Tapes Don’t Matter
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is always a somber time for Auschwitz survivor Irene Weiss. But this year’s observance had an additional layer of grief: For the first time, Weiss is worried about her adopted homeland.
“I am exceptionally concerned about demagogues,” the 85-year-old Weiss told me at Wednesday’s commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “They touch me in a place that I remember. I know their influence and, unfortunately, I know how receptive audiences are to demagogues and what it leads to.”
She knows better than just about any person alive. The Czech-born Jew lost her parents and most of her siblings in Hitler’s death camps. Now, when she hears about plans to register Muslims and to ban Muslims from entering the United States, “I’m worried about the tone of this country,” she said.
To Weiss, the ugly political environment in 2016 has an ominous precedent in Weimar Germany. “It has echoes, and maybe more so to me than to native-born Americans,” she said after lighting a candle for Hitler’s victims. “I’m scared. I don’t like the trend. I don’t like how many people are applauding when they hear these demagogues. It can turn.”
This year’s Holocaust remembrance comes at a time when Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, retweets to his nearly 6 million followers a message from @WhiteGenocideTM based in “Jewmerica,” and a time when his nearest challenger, Ted Cruz, brandishes the endorsement of a minister who says Hitler was a “hunter” sent after the Jews by God. There has never been a more important time for Americans to heed the moral authority of the Holocaust survivors still among us.
“It’s really frightening,” said Al Munzer, hidden as an infant in the Netherlands with a Dutch family and their Muslim nanny. “When you see these mass rallies that Trump is able to attract, you really wonder: How are they buying into this message of hate?”
Munzer, who lost two sisters and his father to the Nazis, said he never thought such things could happen in America, but now he’s not so sure. “Thinking that Germany was somehow unique is wrong,” he said.
Posted inHolocaust|Comments Off on If Donald Trump Is Hitler, Then You Are Saying Hitler Wasn’t So Bad
The conservative movement is starting to look a lot like Syria.
Baited, taunted, mocked by Fox News, Donald Trump told Roger Ailes what he could do with his Iowa debate, and marched off to host a Thursday night rally for veterans at the same time in Des Moines.
Message: I speak for the silent majority, Roger, not you, not Megyn Kelly, not Fox News. Diss me, and I will do fine without Fox.
And so the civil-sectarian war on the right widens and deepens.
And two questions arise: Will the conservative movement and Republican Party unite behind Trump if he is the nominee? And will the movement and party come together if Trump is not the nominee?
A breakdown of the balance of forces in this civil-sectarian war finds most of the media elite of the right recoiling from Trump, while Trump leads by a huge margin in Middle America.
National Review, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal and the conservative and neocon columnists on the op-ed pages at the Washington Post and the New York Times have almost all come out viscerally against Trump.
He, in turn, has trashed several by name. Wounds have been inflicted that will not soon be forgiven or forgotten.
But while columns and magazines appear in print twice weekly, weekly, biweekly and monthly, millions listen to talk radio every hour of every day. And though websites might be updated daily, radio, more than print, is a medium that moves people.
Among the top talkers, Trump gets more than a fair hearing. Some of the talk shows with the largest audiences are sympathetic, others are supportive. And the Drudge Report, the daily newspaper of Middle America, tracks Trump’s every move.
In the media battle, then, the media elite are being swamped by Trump. And Trump is winning the political battle as well. According to almost every poll, state or national, Trump is ahead of all rivals, with his closest challenger trailing by 10 or more points. Among the populist and tea party right, Trump has lapped the field, and he is now competitive among evangelicals.
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How will the civil war on the right end?
Because the differences are not simply about personalities and politics, but principles and policies, it may not end with this election.
There is talk of having the anti-Trump conservatives unite behind the one establishment candidate – Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie – who emerges strongest after New Hampshire, to storm through the later primaries and take down Trump.
Yet such a scenario seems implausible.
That audience of 24 million that tuned in to the first Fox News debate and the 22 million that tuned in to the CNN debate were drawn to Trump, and Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, because these men seemed to represent real change.
Democrats who support Bernie Sanders and Republicans who support Trump may disagree on where America should go, but both agree on the need for America to radically change direction.
Yet, if this battle for the GOP nomination should yield another establishment Republican, would not all the fire and energy of the campaign of 2015-2016 soon disappear?
Consistency not being their long suit, some among the conservative elites who denounced Trump’s walkout from the debate, threaten to walk out of the party should Trump win.
But walkout is an option open to populists as well. And if, after the rise of the tea party, the capture of Congress in 2014, the Trump-Cruz-Carson rebellion, the GOP offers the silent majority yet another establishment candidate, will populists and tea party types rally to him?
William Hare writes on Amazon.com: This is the daring book by former teacher Robert Kendall that blew the lid off an indifferent establishment within the Los Angeles City Schools system and resulted in legislation enacting standards for high school graduation.
“White Teacher in a Black School” surged to international bestseller status following the outbreak of the Watts Riots, which Kendall’s riveting book seemingly predicted as African American community leaders joined Kendall and other concerned educators in urging a reformed educational system imposing standards for passage from grade to grade and ultimately high school graduation.
“White Teacher” is written in the manner of a fast-paced novel with an agenda which surpasses in sociological sweep the popular film to which some people compare it, “Blackboard Jungle” starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. The events depicted in “White Teacher” were drawn from fact, encompassing two years Kendall spent in Los Angeles area minority schools. Kendall’s rapid-paced first person narrative has him telling the story as “Mr. Brent,” an idealistic young teacher posted to a trouble-ridden South Los Angeles school where “weapons check” is the first order of business when students arrive. When Brent seeks to immediately impose a solid curriculum to challenge students he is confronted by the school’s principal, Mr. Towers, who explains that “as long as it looks as if the student is trying, then that student should be passed to the next grade.” The class consists of one retarded youngster, Captain Smith, who crawls on his hands and knees, sits at one point on Brent’s desk and blows on his hair, and finishes the year by proudly showing his teacher his achievement, an illegible attempt to copy the Yellow Pages of the Los Angeles Telephone Directory. One student, George Washington, is a class leader who helps Brent overcome adversity by unruly students. The chief class disrupter is Billy Parish, who at one point pulls a knife on his teacher.
“White Teacher in a Black School” was a book ahead of its time, one which helped lead the fight toward the adoption of standard testing prior to obtaining high school diplomas. Not only did it sell briskly in the United States. The book was also a major success in England, France and Switzerland, where it was published by companies in those nations.
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This is not an election about who can check off the most boxes on a conservative policy list, or even about who is the best or nicest person. This is an election about saving the concept of America, an existential election like no other has ever been. Anyone who doesn’t grasp this is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The nitpickers are like the cartoon of Diogenes looking over the man before him, and saying: “I was hoping for a taller honest man.”
You’re not getting a “taller honest man.” Trump is our only shot to save America, if there’s still time.
Until Trump rose like a phoenix, Mitt Romney was the best we ever had on immigration. [VDARE.com: Andthat wasn’t very good.] Close your eyes and try to imagine Romney saying the things Trump is about immigration. It quickly becomes apparent why no one else could wage this campaign and survive the attacks—except Trump.
After endless betrayals on immigration, including by half the current GOP field, I trust no one. But Trump is starting to convince me!
At the three-day Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2013—about the same time the Republican National Committee was paying $10 million for a report instructing the GOP to “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform”—there were only two speakers who opposed amnesty: moi—and Trump.[Transcript | YouTube ] (And that was only because the organizers didn’t know what we were going to say, so they couldn’t stop us.)
Ted Cruz spoke at that CPAC. But not a word against amnesty.
In more than a dozen tweets that year—the very year that Marco Rubio nearly destroyed the nation with his amnesty bill, as the “conservative” media cheered him on—Trump repeatedly denounced the maniacal push for amnesty:
Again, immigration reform is fine—but don’t rush to give away our country. That’s what’s happening!
Can you remember a single speech from any of the other candidates? Quick: Within five, how many Republicans are still running for president?
Since that speech, I’ve felt like I’m dreaming. The networks are suddenly bristling with discussions of all the topics previously banned from television (unless I sneaked it in during a segment on ISIS). Manifestly, the voters are solidly with Trump. No wonder the networks never allowed immigration to be discussed.
Trump didn’t propose a “virtual” wall, something “better than” a wall, a “high-tech” wall or any of the usual deflections that mean: open borders. He said he’d build a wall. The more his Republican opponents claimed it couldn’t be done, the more details Trump gave about the wall’s precise specifications.
LLAMAS: That’s an offensive term. People find that hurtful.
TRUMP: You mean it’s not politically correct and yet everybody uses it.
LLAMAS: Look it up in the dictionary, it’s offensive.
TRUMP: I’ll use the word anchor baby. Excuse me, I’ll use the word anchor baby.
Now, everybody says “anchor baby.” It turns out that if Republicans don’t immediately go prostrate and apologize for failing to adhere to the Nation magazine’s stylebook, the word police don’t have a “Plan B.”
Trump keeps saying these things—and he’s not exactly getting kudos from the media. (Except on my webpage, where he’s a huge hit!) He’s never backed down. I’m beginning to think he believes what he says. Maybe it’s time to stop believing what the “conservative” media says.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Conservatism, Inc. To Trump: “I Was Hoping For A TALLER Honest Man”
Like many others, I’m not sure the latest Trump vs. FOX fight is quite over. (One obvious way to grease a face-saving deal is for Fox to agree to give a few millionin profits to a veterans’ charity.) But here’s my framework for thinking about it.
1. Fox isn’t a “news network” like other news networks. Never has been. The left is right about this. If the Obama White House calls CBS and says it doesn’t like commentator X, CBS will politely tell the White House to f— off. If a Bush White House (or, one suspects, a Rubio White House) calls Roger Ailes and says it doesn’t like pundit X, pundit X is likely to disappear from Fox.**
2. Fox favors immigration amnesty. Not uniformly, of course. But do you think it was an accident when every Fox primetime anchor, including Hannity, came out for amnesty after the 2012 election? See here for more of this argument. Since Trump is in the process of wrecking the GOP elite’s plans for amnesty, you wouldn’t expect Fox to be friendly to him.
3. In the first GOP debate, back in August, Fox appeared to make an executive decision to take Trump out. The tell wasn’t in Megyn Kelly’s questions, which were in-bounds, but the post-debate Fox spin, featuring bizarre repeated predictions that Trump was of course now finished.
4. Trump then picked a fairly nasty fight with Kelly, with Ailes basically backing down, embarrassing her. She has ample reason for animus against Trump. I leave it to viewers of her show to decide if she has given effect to that animus over the past months. Many kausfiles commenters seem to think she has, but others say no.
5. You ordinarily don’t want a candidate to be able to create a conflict of interest simply by attacking a journalist and then claiming the journalist is hostile. But Trump’s not guilty of “bootstrapping” because Fox started it (see point 3).
6. Whether or not Trump’s right to try to bounce Kelly at this late date–and the choice of debate moderators is often the subject of intense negotiations, at least in 2-person races– the statement Fox put out when he threatened to not show up was so juvenile and mocking that it, in itself, is proof of over-the-line bias on Fox’s part.
7. Trump doesn’t have to show up. But — even if he has a legitimate beef — is that prudent? I don’t know. I suppose it partly depends on what his “internals” say about the state of play in Iowa. In his online Twitter query today (about whether he should join the debate) I voted “yes.”
8. Even if a Trump boycott hurts Trump, it’s also likely to hurt Fox, a network that now has a deadening hold on conservative punditry because it is basically the only avenue of upward advancement. If Trump drives a wedge between Murdoch’s network and the GOP base — more accurately, deepens the division he’s already created — it could attract a competitor to try to steal that base away. Remember when the U.S. team didn’t show up at the Moscow Olympics? It drove the point home to ordinary Russians that yes, we were angry and serious about opposing Soviet expansionism. Likewise, if Trump doesn’t show up and wins the election anyway, in the teeth of Fox’s taunts, it will dramatically make the point that Fox isn’t as essential to non-Democrats as it once was. In the long run, that could be more important than whatever effect the debate confrontation has on the Iowa results.
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** — Some commenters note that CBS has become a little incestuous. Maybe not the best example! But I stick with the distinction: Even when Obama White House national security aide Ben Rhodes is talking to his brother, CBS News president David Rhodes, about obstreperous reporter Sharyl Attkisson, I bet the conversation is couched in conventional journalistic terms (e.g., hypothetically, ‘She got it wrong’) and not mutual-cause terms (e.g., hypothetically, ‘She’s not helpful’). More here.
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