Luke Ford

From the Forward.com:

(JTA) — After the shooting death of Dwyane Wade’s cousin in August, Donald Trump tweeted, “Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”

The previous month, he posted to Twitter a six-pointed star containing the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” stamped on an image of Hillary Clinton and hundred-dollar bills.

A few weeks before that, the Republican presidential nominee responded to the Orlando nightclub massacre with a tweet saying, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

These tweets have more in common than just being ill-advised. They were also all blasted into the public discourse on Jewish holidays: Shabbat, Shabbat and Shavuot, respectively. And they suggest to at least one friend of Trump’s family that when the Republican candidate’s Orthodox Jewish daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are off observing the holy days, Trump loses two of his most important filters.

In her profile of Ivanka Trump published Wednesday in the Huffington Post Highline magazine, Hannah Seligson credits the theory to an anonymous friend of the would-be first daughter and her husband. (Seligson’s list also includes the example of a Shabbat tweet of an image of Donald Trump as a train, a meme “tangentially” associated with the white supremacist alt-right movement.)

According to Seligson, the friend’s observation was that “some of Donald’s worst tweets of the campaign” came on Jewish holidays when Ivanka Trump and Kushner were “off the grid.” The couple observes the rabbinic laws that proscribe work or the use of electronic devices, among other things, on Shabbat, Shavuot and other holidays.

“It could be a big problem if the people who make our president not crazy aren’t available one day a week,” the friend told Seligson.

Of course, Trump has sparked outrage on days with no special Jewish significance. This summer alone, he has said gun rights supporters could take action if Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, is elected; called President Barack Obama the “founder of ISIS”; suggested the mother of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action was not “allowed” to speak at the Democratic National Convention, and accused a “Mexican” federal judge of being biased by his background.

Amid public outcry, Trump went on to tweet about all these subjects, in some cases repeatedly. But the controversies didn’t start on Twitter.

If the theory about Jewish holidays is true, then, Ivanka Trump and her husband are most effective at reining in Donald Trump specifically before he gets himself into Twitter trouble. Ivanka Trump “is extremely scared of her father, like everyone else,” an anonymous Trump adviser tells Seligson. “She knows you can’t push him. She knows once he goes off on these things, he won’t back down.”

Kushner, a real estate tycoon in his own right, is “deferential” to Donald Trump too, according to Seligson.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I note in this Trump is getting probed hard by O’Reilly about white support and not taking the bait. Trump is citizenist, though citizenism is a step closer to white nationalism than the current system where white people must wear sackcloth and ashes for being white. That is why he is called a racist.

However, we are awakening. Maybe other identity politics is on the wane. But white identity politics will only strengthen over time. The “racist” epithet has lost currency. And we will need to fight harder to retain what we have.

* The alt-right is not a rejection of identity politics and an attempt to resuscitate the dead and dying 20th century style liberal-capitalist state. Rather it looks to pre-modern political forms (see alt-right proponents of an imperium) and early 20th century fascism and authoritarian nationalism, which were quashed in the West by the liberal-capitalist order. Furthermore, it’s not even a rejection of globalism per se. Aspects of the alt-right see themselves as a global movement, with global aspirations beyond “petty nationalism”.

* One of the things about our age that will puzzle future historians is how in the heck our priestly class came up with the idea that they could recklessly inflame and divide the public through identity politics while simultaneously keeping a tight lid on white identity politics — particularly white male identity politics.

Like the causes of the First World War, the chain of blunders leading to the inevitable crisis may seem reasonably clear (if misguided) to those who lived through them, but their posterity will find it all very baffling. How were so many people willfully blind to the larger picture?

Once again, we learn that hope is not a strategy, bleeding wounds are not healed by poetry, the tides do not bow before the magistrate’s solemnly sealed decree, and armies on the march are not halted by eloquent rhetoric.

* The only way to end the identity politics game is for Whites to pick up a racket and starting returning balls across the net. The only reason the non-straight, non-White, non-male, non-native, non-Gentile look so formidable is that we straight White men have been enormous good sports for generations. Thankfully that seems to be ending.

They want to play identity politics? Game on.

* The Brown family still holds the governorship of California in 2016, and office they first acquired in the 1950s.

* White identity politics is the result of the constant campaign by the multicultural Left to dispossess and demonize whites. The invariable white reaction is seen as proof of white evil; the Left will merely double down.

It’s like poking a caged dog with a stick and enraging it; then when it bites, having it put down for viciousness.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Whoever wrote this is a regular reader here. He name checks Ben Franklin, Invade/Invite, importing ringers, noblesse oblige etc. Shame he did not extend the courtesy to name the devil. Also a shame to not explicitly name whites. Only “white privelege”. It is a modern idiocy to think that culture is malleable across large ethnic gaps. And a conservative idiocy of the Washington General type.

* Decius: I tried to name Steve but the editors were … well, they … well I’ll stop there.

Anyway, I don’t want anyone to think I am stealing furtively. I know where these things come from and I am willing to give credit where credit is due.

In a prior article (now deleted), I referred to Steve as “perhaps the closest thing the blogosphere has to a political philosopher.” I will leave to readers to unpack the various layers of irony in that comment. But one genuine intellectual historian objected and said so. Steve has no such training, and so on.

[To the extent that the philosopher undermines belief in that common opinion, he undermines the basis of society. He also, not incidentally, puts himself in danger, as the fate of Socrates shows. Steve Sailer, perhaps the closest thing the blogosphere has to a political philosopher, enjoys pointing out the error at the heart of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” parable. In real life, the little child—whom we may analogize to the philosopher—would be torn limb from limb for exposing everyone’s ignorance.]

To be sure.

My comment was meant in jest, but only partly. I think Steve’s grasp of political theory is weaker than my own. However, a long time ago, we got into an argument about political theory and despite my book-learnin’, I lost. He was right and I was wrong. It took me a long time to understand that but eventually I did.

I also came to understand (or think I did; “all knowledge is provisional”) that Steve’s understanding is truer to the great thinkers I studied and cherish than my own had been. The larger question of the relation of the universal to the particular still looms (for me) but Steve has been a big help.

While Steve is not a political philosopher in any overt or obvious sense, he is one in the most decisive sense. He thinks about political life directly, not through the filer of any preconceived theory. Which is what Plato and Aristotle did. Plus, with maybe five exceptions, Steve is better than all those who are formally classified as political philosophers in our time.

* “Trump is the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen this point being made. He is the most anti-war Republican candidate in decades, and his concern about the displacement of American blue-collar jobs is something traditionally associated with liberals. His policies are everything liberals claim to believe in – apart from their desire for unlimited immigration.

* Decius very generously acknowledges Sailer’s talent as a political thinker.

Note that Steve also has great instincts as a rhetorician! Must be the background in marketing. He immediately spotted the passage that should have come at the end of the essay, and put it at the end of his excerpt:

“I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.”

That is very, very potent stuff. It cannot be followed by another twelve paragraphs of thoughtful analysis without dissipating the animal spirits that have been summoned up. The speech has to end there – except for the wild cheering that follows.

Stephen Miller, just in case you’re listening: you should bring Decius on board as a speech-writer, with Steve Sailer as his editor.

Comments:

* I also suspect that journalists know that a big downsizing is fast approaching for the entire journalist/media landscape. If Trump wins, how many billionaires decide that their discount propaganda outlets aren’t worth keeping afloat? The journalists have to announce their virtue to each other, but I suspect, they’re also advertising their loyalty as good thinking hacks to their de facto paymasters.

Or if Hillary wins, they’ll have served their purpose and there’ll be no need to keep them on staff anymore. I doubt Jeff Bezos or Carlos Slim care about the career prospects of the journalism grads in their employ.

A lot will end up unemployed so there’s an incentive to signal that you’re the most rabid attack dog against your sugar daddy’s corporate enemy. There’s no money in being reasonable or middle of the road if you know you’re dancing for your supper.

* Funniest part of the op-ed was this:

“Through his online writings and YouTube channel, Mr. Spencer is a key player in the social-media universe where this core group of Trump supporters get their “news,” from sources with which most people aren’t familiar”

Oh, no! Sources with which ‘most people aren’t familiar’! Mayday, mayday! Scare quotes around “news” – if only those idiotic Trump supporters weren’t so sub-literate and raaaaacist, they’d be tattooing Charles Blow’s prose on their body and awaiting the columns of our controlled opposition, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, like manna from heaven!

Blast the NPR and don’t you dare change the channel from PBS – the NYT editorial board’s mandatory re-education awaits!