Luke Ford

00:00 The spiritual lessons of the Super Bowl
05:00 Eldritch Dennis Prager (feat. Dave Rubin), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbwE5zLiWNY
10:00 Luke interviewed in 2015 about sex and Orthodox Jews, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH7gHuh86l8
15:00 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
16:00 Dooovid on Week in Review breaks out his pimp hand, https://t.co/fhUCX8MbFu?amp=1
16:40 Abraham J. Twerski died, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_J._Twerski
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship
18:00 New York Times obit on Abraham J. Twerski, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/science/abraham-j-twerski-dead-coronavirus.html
19:00 R. Abraham J. Twerski combined Hasidic Judaism with the 12 Steps, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Americanization+of+Mussar%3A+Abraham+Twerski%27s+Twelve+Steps.-a059120281
27:30 Elias Davidsson: I Sued a Zionist Wikipedia Editor for Slander—and Won!
29:00 Many Jews look at Christianity as akin to QANON
29:30 The Noahide Covenant, Christianity and Idol Worship, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHm_VSnqHts
33:00 Michael Cohen’s Prison of Choice: Well-Known to Jewish Offenders, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/nyregion/michael-cohen-otisville-prison.html
34:00 Rabbi Pleads “Stupid” For Trying To Blackmail Steve Cohen Because He’s “Rich” And “Jewish”, https://www.businessinsider.com/rabbi-pleads-stupid-for-trying-to-blackmail-steve-cohen-because-hes-rich-and-jewish-2010-11
40:00 Trump Lawyer Asks to Pause Impeachment Trial if It Runs Into Sabbath, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/us/politics/trump-impeachment-trial.html
1:00:00 Greg Gutfeld commentary on column: What can you do about the Trumpites next door?, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-02-05/trumpite-neighbor-unity-capitol-attack
1:08:00 Steve Sailer back from Twitter jail, https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1358900796339884033
1:11:00 CPAN video of Luke in 2007 asking Christopher Hitchens a question about religion, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=255
1:15:00 US-China relations, https://www.rollcall.com/podcasts/cq-future/cq-future-us-china-relations/
1:31:00 Richard Spencer on Tom Brady being a god
1:36:20 Defying COVID restrictions | Thousands of Orthodox Jews attend rabbi funeral
1:44:00 What is the source of transcendent morality?
2:10:00 The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows, https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship
2:18:10 Mark Steyn on the new attempt to impeach Donald Trump
2:58:00 The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

David Sacks writes:

First, the digital distribution platform Discord banned the WallStreetBets account after the close Wednesday for “hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation.” (For a moment, it looked like Reddit had also banned the group, but they resisted pressure to do so.) If the quoted justification sounds familiar, it’s nearly identical to the one given by Google, Apple, and Amazon for deplatforming Parler just three weeks earlier. Echoing Amazon, Discord said it had sent the group repeated warnings about objectionable content before deciding, on that day of all days, to shut them down.

Meanwhile, WallStreetBets investors were locked out of their trading accounts by online brokers such as Robinhood on Thursday morning. Based on new collateral requirements that it says were imposed by an industry consortium, Robinhood forbade its users from buying GameStop and other stocks that WallStreetBets had identified as short squeeze opportunities. Users were allowed only to “close their positions”—in other words, to sell to the shorts desperate to buy. When angry users registered their disapproval by leaving over 100,000 one-star reviews of the Robinhood app in the Google Play Store, Google deleted them.

Normal trading was allowed to resume Friday, but the hedge funds used their 24-hour sole ownership of the battlefield to fortify their positions, covering the most vulnerable shorts. Wall Street then sent in reinforcements, as new short positions were taken at these high price levels, virtually guaranteed to pay out when, inevitably, the air leaks out of the balloon. Faced with a game that, for once, they couldn’t rig in their favor, it appeared that the insiders tipped the board over and started a new game. As a massively decentralized online group of scrappy outsiders, the only tools at WallStreetBets’ disposal were online trading and social networking. Both were frozen at the crucial moment, and the hedge fund insiders were let off the hook. The weaponization of censorship is a big part of the reason why.

Down the Slippery Slope

Some of us warned of a slippery slope when Parler was taken down and a sitting president was systematically ghosted from every online speech platform. But we could not have foreseen how slippery the slope would be, or how fast we would slide down it. We were told that the curbs on speech of President Trump and his supporters were necessary to prevent further “insurrection” and protect the peaceful transition of power. However, much like the troops and barricades that still ring the Capitol, these speech restrictions remain in place well after the transition of power has occurred. The censorship power is always justified in response to a genuine outrage or crisis, but it is rarely relinquished once the threat passes. Rather it gets weaponized to protect powerful, connected insiders, as the GameStop fiasco illustrates.

How do we suppose Discord chose that moment to enforce its “Community Guidelines” against WallStreetBets? Almost certainly, one of the hedge funds whose ox was being gored combed through their message boards looking for anything that might violate the terms of service. And surely they found it, as these boards contain the same raunchy language you would hear if you visited any trading floor or boiler room on Wall Street. They presumably reported the content to Discord, which took the group down.

Dissident Right Twitter lit up Friday with commentary on this Time magazine piece to the effect that it proved the 2020 election was fixed. I wonder if anyone who said anything like this actually read the article? There’s not a word in here about the election being fixed. Instead, it shows that diverse groups worked together to insure the integrity of the election in difficult circumstances that included Donald Trump’s unhinged attacks on the integrity of the process.

Molly Ball writes for Time Feb. 4:

A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

From the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 2021:

Remember the “coalition of the ascendant”? National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein invented the phrase in 2008 to describe the “growing elements of American society” that had elected Barack Obama and given Democrats commanding majorities in both congressional houses: “young people, Hispanics and other minorities, and white upper-middle-class professionals.”

Republican successes in 2010, 2014 and 2016 called the coalition’s durability into question. But the 2020 election— Joe Biden’s victory notwithstanding—may provide the greatest reason to doubt it. Compared with 2016, President Trump and congressional Republicans improved their standing significantly among Hispanic voters and made smaller strides among other groups, such as Asian-Americans, blacks and Muslims.

“The majority minority narrative is wrong,” says sociologist Richard Alba, referring to the idea that nonwhite Americans will outnumber whites by 2050 or so. In his recent book, “The Great Demographic Illusion,” Mr. Alba, 78, shows that many “nonwhites” are assimilating into an American mainstream, much as white ethnic groups did before them. Government statistics have failed to account for this complex reality, partly for political reasons, and in doing so they’ve encouraged sloppy thinking about the country’s future…

The difficulty started as the federal government prepared for the 2000 census and sought to recognize the small but growing number of multiracial Americans. The Census Bureau decided to let people like Mr. Woods check off more than one racial box on their forms. Leaders of liberal civil-rights groups lobbied against the change. They feared a recognition of multiracialism would dilute the numerical strength of minorities and make it harder to enforce antidiscrimination laws.

The Office of Management and Budget devised an ironic solution to the dilemma. The OMB, whose responsibilities include maintaining the consistency of data across federal departments and agencies, revived a version of the old “one drop” rule from the Jim Crow era, according to which a single African ancestor made a person entirely black. The OMB decided that Americans who designated themselves as white and something else on their Census forms would be classified as nonwhite.