For the first time in recent memory, large numbers of Americans
are openly questioning their country’s grand strategy. An April
2016 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans agree that
the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others
deal with theirs the best they can.” On the campaign trail, both the
Democrat Bernie Sanders and the Republican Donald Trump found
receptive audiences whenever they questioned the United States’
penchant for promoting democracy, subsidizing allies’ defense, and
intervening militarily—leaving only the likely Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton to defend the status quo.
Americans’ distaste for the prevailing grand strategy should come
as no surprise, given its abysmal record over the past quarter century.
In Asia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are expanding their nuclear
arsenals, and China is challenging the status quo in regional waters.
In Europe, Russia has annexed Crimea, and U.S. relations with Moscow
have sunk to new lows since the Cold War. U.S. forces are still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no victory in sight. Despite losing most of its original leaders, al Qaeda has metastasized across the region.
The Arab world has fallen into turmoil—in good part due to the
United States’ decisions to effect regime change in Iraq and Libya and
its modest efforts to do the same in Syria—and the Islamic State, or
isis, has emerged out of the chaos. Repeated U.S. attempts to broker
Israeli-Palestinian peace have failed, leaving a two-state solution further away than ever. Meanwhile, democracy has been in retreat worldwide, and the United States’ use of torture, targeted killings, and other morally dubious practices has tarnished its image as a defender of human rights and international law.
The United States does not bear sole responsibility for all these costly debacles, but it has had a hand in most of them. The setbacks are the natural consequence of the misguided grand strategy of liberal hegemony that Democrats and Republicans have pursued for years. This approach holds that the United States must use its power not only to solve global problems but also to promote a world order based on international institutions, representative governments, open markets, and respect for human rights. As “the indispensable nation,” the logic goes, the United States has the right, responsibility, and wisdom to manage local politics almost everywhere. At its core, liberal hegemony is a revisionist grand strategy: instead of calling on the United States to merely uphold the balance of power in key regions, it commits American might to promoting democracy everywhere and defending human rights whenever they are threatened. Read on.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on The Case For Offshore Balancing
* Michelle was in Maxim’s 100 Sexiest Women as well as People’s Most Beautiful People list, probably others as well. Even North Korean media can’t be more shamelessly in the bag for the ruling party than that.
* They call Serena Williams “beautiful” and “sexy,” so why not Michelle Obama?
* Sample question from the Federal Ministry of Truth Qualifying Exam for the Humor/Satire Endorsement to the Basic Journalism/Public Speaking License:
Which of the following is unacceptable as the basis for a satirical remark?
(a) Bush I: “Read my lips…”
(b) Clinton: “I did not have sex…”
(c) Bush II: “America is a nation with a mission…”
(d) Obama: “If you like your plan…”
(e) Both (b) and (d).
Answer: (d). Practice note: (b) forms the basis for mocking right-wing obsessions with invading personal privacy to prosecute normal healthy sexual practices, even to launching comically-unjustified impeachment proceedings.
* Reporting from the parochial backwater of the UK I can say that I have never seen Obama ridiculed, satirised or used as the butt of a single joke by any British comedian or comedy vehicle whether as prez or before.
By which I mean anywhere in the MSM. Not online or in some niche publication. I’ve never seen a stand-up mock him any way either.
* The SNL house brand for 40 years has been silliness for the sake of silliness. Lorne Michaels has explained many times that his goal is to hook adolescents who are just old enough to stay up late with their friends for the first time.
So, aiming the show at what 14 year olds think is funny, which isn’t hugely different from what 10 year olds think is funny, is the goal. Thus, Dana Carvey’s impression of the elder Bush was very funny in a silly way and thus is the most famous SNL presidential impression, along with Chevy Chase falling down.
* If Obama is such a funny fellow, one would think that within his two memoirs there would be any number of well known jokes or witticisms.
Yet I can’t recall a single one.
Why might that be?
* The single funniest thing I ever heard a president say was when W was sternly reading off a list of terrorists during a big speech and he stumbled on the name Ramzi Yousef and then said, “Sorry about that, Ramzi.”
* Obama is a self absorbed narcissist. His interpersonal life is centered around engorging himself with narcissistic supply, and just as importantly, protecting himself from narcissistic injury. I.e., his genuine mediocrity becomes exposed.
Obama gets his supply from his countless cheap grace political stunts like fronting for men in dresses to use women’s facilities so his sycophantic lackeys in the MSM mindlessly applaud his “courage”.
Obama’s “humor” such as it is, is almost entirely a deprecating form of crude narcissistic self-defense. I.e., he glibly attacks those who are not sufficiently deferential to the “smartest person in the room”. So his “humorous” comments equating Vladimir Putin to a bored schoolboy. Putin does not suck up to Obama, so Obama the narcissist hates him for it.
BTW, narcissistic avoidance is why Obama consciously ignores the hard issues like the imploding Obamacare. No supply and plenty of potential injury…
President Obama’s attributes have been inexhaustibly detailed by both his admirers and detractors. Not much, however, is much said about his sense of humor. The reason is painfully obvious: there is little humor in the man to detect. In this regard he bears resemblance to Jimmy Carter, the grim, parson-scold who lectured the nation about malaise in the 1970s. The humor that does emanate from the President is usually in the form of ridicule laced with sarcasm, humor at its meanest and nastiest. One is hard pressed to find anything funny or witty in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. The reader takes away from these pages a picture of an angry, alienated young man immersed in self-pity and resentment.
This absence of such a fundamental human quality one might suppose derives from at least three of Barack Obama’s qualities of personality and character.
First, one cannot help be struck by the extreme vanity of this President and an almost pathological need for self-worship. With such astronomical levels of vanity and conceit come thin skin and hypersensitivity and little room for a large and wonderful source of humor — self-deprecation. Devoid of modesty, he believes himself to be a person of unparalleled wisdom and rectitude – “the One, as he self-proclaimed – a fact that is evidenced by his relentless quest to impose himself, his wisdom, his superiority, pontifically…
Ironically, from the countless speeches he has given over the years with the constant, predictable self-referencing and self-righteous posturing, almost nothing insightful, witty or poignant can be extracted. Nothing he has said is particularly memorable, quotable, enduring, or funny. His teleprompter deliveries with their unintended Bobble Head doll effect in some way or other almost always tend to be about his favorite subject, himself, and how much better we will all be because of him. The one public forum for which he appears to have an aversion is the press conference. In his few forays into this venue it seems that aspects of his wisdom on occasion are questioned by members of the normally docile White House press corps, an impertinence that clearly annoys him.
Second, the absence of humor is a conspicuous mark of a jealous ideologue. An ideologue can neither be contradicted nor questioned, and Obama, as we have come to know, cannot bear to have his wisdom disputed or challenged. But humor, above all, contradicts – humor turns the strong into the weak, the serious into the silly and makes the somber appear ridiculous. Ideologues when stripped of their pretentious facades are fragile and sensitive often wrapped in multiple sheaths of vanity and conceit. Humor is the enemy of the pretentious, and ideologues are a pretentious, arrogant lot given to the constant exaggeration of their moral and cognitive superiority and their unquestioned indispensability to make the lives of the unwashed better. Thus, we observe the personality profile of our Ideologue-President who was given during his first campaign to the promise of such undertakings as “healing the planet,” “changing America and the world” and “slowing the rise of the oceans.” In these grandiose sallies he was generously assisted by the smitten members of the Fourth Estate who proclaimed his divinity — “a sort of god standing above us” and other similar declarations of apotheosis. (Evan Thomas, Newsweek)
Third, humor, particularly in a political context, is a coded way of speaking the truth. Humor exposes the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the powerful, and Obama, sad to say, is a profoundly dishonest man. His 2008 campaign of Hope and Change was a brilliant but deeply cynical ploy calculated to convince the a-political middle road American electorate that the former street organizer, tutored by an America-loathing pastor, was a sincere, wholesome wunderkind who would end the polarized politics of the Bush era. But the post-racial, bi-partisan, transparency campaign pledges were completely feigned. They had never been nor would ever be any part of his governing philosophy. The real Obama emerged after his election with such bi-partisan olive branches as, “if they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun,” and, as he told an audience in a Univision interview in 2010: “were gonna punish out enemies and reward our friends.” Here, succinctly stated is a distillation of Obama’s social instincts and the essence of his political style, very much Latin America-Caudillo, a toxic mix of garish personality cult, punish-the-rich demagoguery and union cronyism. Obama’s politics can be summed up as the “rule of the three Cs” – Coercion, Corruption, Collusion. His 2012 campaign was nothing like the first. Hope and Change succumbed to defamation and demolition.
Comments: * “[Joe] Biden is definitely the greatest VP for saying — in public, in apparently prepared remarks — that Jews control the media and are to be credited with leftist advances in this country such as abortion and, especially, homosexual marriage. He, a liberal, meant it as praise, but you know what Jews say: a philosemite is an antisemite who likes Jews. Thanks for speaking the truth, Mr. Veep! No Republican had the guts to do that.”
Jennifer Epstein reported for Politico May 21, 2013:
Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country’s founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights.
“The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential part of who we are that it’s fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage,” he said. “The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.”
“You make up 11 percent of the seats in the United States Congress. You make up one-third of all Nobel laureates,” he said. “So many notions that are embraced by this nation that particularly emanate from over 5,000 years of Jewish history, tradition and culture: independence, individualism, fairness, decency, justice, charity. These are all as you say, as I learned early on as a Catholic being educated by my friends, this tzedakah.”
“The embrace of immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social justice movements.
“You can’t talk about the civil rights movement in this country without talking about Jewish freedom riders and Jack Greenberg,” he said, telling a story about seeing a group of Jewish activists at a segregated movie theater in Delaware. “You can’t talk about the women’s movement without talking about Betty Friedan” or American advances in science and technology without mentioning Einstein and Carl Sagan, or music and Gershwin, Bob Dylan and “so, so, so many other people.”
“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage “apparently a little ahead of time.”
“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage,” Biden said.
“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said.
Jews have also been key to the evolution of American jurisprudence, he continued, namedropping Brandeis, Fortas, Frankfurter, Cardozo, Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan. “You literally can’t. You can’t talk about the recognition of … rights in the Constitution without looking at these incredible jurists that we’ve had.”
“Jewish heritage has shaped who we are – all of us, us, me – as much or more than any other factor in the last 223 years. And that’s a fact,” he said.
“We talk about it in terms of the incredible accomplishments and contributions” of Jews in America,” Biden added, “but it’s deeper “because the values, the values are so deep and so engrained in American culture, in our Constitution.”
“So I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish heritage. I really mean that. I think you vastly underestimate the impact you’ve had on the development of this nation. We owe you, we owe generations who came before you,” he said.
Thirteen Jewish groups, among them organizations representing the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative streams, were among the 25 joining the amicus brief the ADL filed in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The preeminence of Jewish groups among those backing the litigants was not a surprise. In recent decades, much of the Jewish establishment has embraced gay marriage as a right equivalent to the others it has advocated, including racial equality, religious freedoms and rights for women.
Multiple groups, in their statements, cited the passage in Genesis that states humans were created “in the image of God,” which has for decades been used by Jewish civil rights groups to explain their activism.
“Jewish tradition reminds us that we were all created equally, b’tzelem Elohim, in the ‘image of God’ (Genesis 1:27), and also shows us that marriage is a sacred responsibility, not only between the partners, but also between the couple and the larger community,” the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly said in a statement.
Groups also were looking to next steps in advancing LGBT rights, including in the workplace.
“You can now legally marry in all 50 states and put your wedding on your desk and be fired and have no recourse in the federal courts,” Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who directs the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, told JTA in an interview.
“We hope this will energize and inspire a bipartisan effort to end discrimination in the work place,” he said, specifying the “T” in LGBT – the transgendered. “People should not be discriminated in the workplace because of expression of gender.”
If same-sex marriage is such a Jewish value, how come it was unknown in Jewish life prior to the 1990s? How come the Jewish state of Israel does not celebrate gay marriage? If being transgendered is cool, how come the Torah prohibits a man from wearing a woman’s clothing?
If elites can convince much of the Western world to celebrate same-sex marriage, then is there nothing they can’t do in subverting traditional moral values.
* My favorite factoid about VP Johnson: “After his wife’s death, Johnson began an intimate relationship with another family slave. When she left him for another man, Johnson had her picked up and sold at auction.” (Courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Posted inAmerica, Jews|Comments Off on Who Was The Greatest Vice-President?
Comment: “Jews often say they’re for open borders because, after all, their grandparents were allowed to come here. Lawrence Auster, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, suggested that such people be told that if we had known that letting Jews in would mean that in the future we would never be permitted to have a rational immigration policy, we wouldn’t have let Jews in.”
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on ‘Are Jews anti-Israeli for saying Israel has a right to choose which immigrants it wants?’
* Trump has caused everyone to openly state a lot of their unspoken assumptions about immigration. It’s fascinating stuff.
A lot of Americans are guilty about shutting the door to poor, uneducated immigrants because they feel like that’s what their immigrant ancestors were like. From what I can tell, all my immigrant ancestors were fairly well-off petite bourgeoisie types, so I’ve never felt that sort of guilt.
Maybe part of this is that people are basing their impressions of their immigrant ancestors based on movies and TV, and don’t realize that by 1880s standards, immigrants from Europe to the United States were pretty well-educated and pretty well-off materially.
* I’m growing on the radical notion of local community sponsorship. If the local community is responsible for integrating and assimilating the newcomers, let the local community decide:
1 Whom to invite and using what criteria to select
2 From where and which cultures can be integrated
3 How many to accept and how much concentration from a particular origin is manageable
4 How to manage risks of loss, criminality or other dangers
5 How to finance integration until the newcomers are self-sufficient tax-paying members of the community
If the local community decides they can handle inviting and integrating a certain number of newcomers, great. They have to live with them and all the risks and costs that it entails. If the invitation and residence permit is limited to the community that has invited them all the costs are on them. Instead of dumping the immigrants or refugees on unwilling or unenthusiastic communities, only communities that have the resources and willingness to welcome and integrate the newcomers will extend invitations. Also rather than immigration becoming an endless cost dumped on the feds, local communities will have to pay for the immigrants and refugees they invite. In other words, you can have in your neighborhood all the taco trucks you want, but not at the expense of the nation at large. You and your neighbors will have to cough up.
* The following words demonstrate a lack of argument when uttered by an egalitarian:
And so on. These words are what ostensible adults use when they want to sound more than just a child going “you’re mean!” — Which is exactly what they are.
* Every time that I’m invited to a dinner party I take that invitation as an invitation for me to also extend an invitation for others to join me at the dinner party. The hosts always love it. Doesn’t everyone do this? Come to think of it, no one invites me to dinner parties any longer. I wonder what happened?
Idea of a commission to select "desirable" immigrants "with a high likelihood of success" is straight up alt-right push for Europeans only.
* This country is run like anybody can walk into Augusta’s locker room and have a locker and play for free and tear-up the course and none of the members are allowed say anything.
* The United States is a huge club. We don’t want our membership to be devalued and diluted by allowing in all kinds of noisy and worthless members with their stupid children who are going to drop turds in the swimming pool.
Taken collectively, US citizens are in the same situation as the Casino tribes who sure as heck are not admitting new members and are trying to eject tribal members who are not full enough Indian.
* Australia did a deal with Cambodia.
Of the five refugees transferred to Cambodia under resettlement deal, three have abandoned the country and risked returning home despite ‘well-founded fear of persecution.’
* Are Jews anti-Israeli for saying Israel has a right to choose which immigrants it wants?
* Took my two kids bowling the other day in a far flung suburb of a major Texas city. Of the groups on the 25 lanes, 25% were white or black. The balance was either from the subcontinent or Arab. The people next to me looked like a motley group of Muslims. The woman was wearing a burka and a hijab but looked Malaysian. The men and kids she was with looked like a mix of Muslims like from different background. Probably a youth group from the massive Saudi-funded mosque that just went up a couple of miles away. What was I saying? Oh yeah, we’re screwed.
* Jews often say they’re for open borders because, after all, their grandparents were allowed to come here. Lawrence Auster, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, suggested that such people be told that if we had known that letting Jews in would mean that in the future we would never be permitted to have a rational immigration policy, we wouldn’t have let Jews in.
* I live in a major West Coast city that has seen thousands of Chinese immigrants. They swamp the various “food banks” around town that hand out free food for the poor, to the point of effectively blocking access for most non-Chinese poor. Of course, due to cultural differences, the Chinese food bankers don’t actually want half the food they receive (boxes of cereal, canned goods, jars of peanut butter, etc.), so they go about selling them on the street. Very enterprising of them, but I don’t think that’s what the system intended.
Posted inAmerica, Immigration|Comments Off on Is Trump Un-American for Saying Americans Have a Right to Choose Which Immigrants We Want?
If you happen to live in a dangerous neighborhood, and/or you believe in ghosts, the word dark is likely to influence you more deeply that it does me.
I also recognized soon after Trump’s GOP convention speech that Clinton’s campaign had evidently coached its surrogates to simultaneously use the word dark to pre-suade voters to see Trump as scary. What I saw was weapons-grade persuasion technique. Those of you who are untrained in the techniques of persuasion probably heard the word dark and it automatically started the fear subroutine in your brains, as Clinton’s team planned. Keep in mind that 42% of Americans believe in ghosts, according to a Harris Poll. Another survey found that 57% of Americans – and 72% of African-Americans in particular – literally believe in Satan. And Satan likes to hide in the dark. With the ghosts.
If you ask Clinton supporters what scares them about Trump, they will say things about his temperament. It will sound quite rational. But rational thought is almost entirely an illusion. What is actually happening is that Trump reminds you of something scary (in the dark) and confirmation bias fills in the “evidence” where there is none.
As a trained hypnotist, and a student of persuasion, I see the world through a persuasion filter. My viewfinder shows me confirmation bias, whereas many people are seeing Trump as an irrational conflation of ghosts, devils, and bogeymen that hide in the dark. Team Clinton created that persuasion trap. I recognized the technique. Some of you did too. Most of the world did not.
I’m From New York
You know how Trump is always saying inappropriate and violent-sounding things? Most people see that type of language as offensive and even dangerous. The exception is people who grew up in New York. We see it as “talking.”
After college, when I moved from upstate New York to California, I had to relearn how to talk. My New York style offended nearly everyone. Let me give you an example of how a Californian talks compared to a New Yorker.
Californian: It looks like it might rain today.
New Yorker: Oh, shit. Fucking rain. I need that like I need a goddamned bullet in my head.
See the difference?
When Trump talks about roughing-up protesters, or shooting someone on 5th Avenue, people from New York don’t raise an eyebrow. But Californians start wondering how to have that guy involuntarily committed to some sort of facility that can fix whatever is wrong with him.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on ‘Why Trump Doesn’t Scare Me’
I heard this black guy in his 20s try to talk to a kid about life.
Guy: “You have to constantly try to get better. If you made five tackles in your last game, then you have to try to get six in your next game. If you only make four tackles, you know what that means?”
Comments: The excellent blog ‘Refugee Resettlement Watch’ has an entire category covering this — food stamp fraud — it is widespread and has been going on for many years — see the archive of stories at the link.
* Notice how it is – always – either Arab or subcon immigrants to the USA involved in ‘food stamp fraud’.
And its -always- black Americans being the other half the scam.
Two minorities combining against whitey and whitey’s altruistic welfare state, from both sides and screwing foolish whitey in the middle. (Alas, as always, with Merkel, New Labour, Sweden and the Democrats).
Reminds me of that old nursery rhyme.
‘Jack Spratt would eat no fat,
And his wife would eat no lean,
But together, they would get the whole plate clean.’
* I don’t know about Muslims, but Indians and Chinese are infamous for cheating. Its no coincidence that during the last few decades in which they have become a sizable portion of the scientific community, that fraudulent and irreplicable research findings have gone through the roof. Aside from the $$$$$ money that gets wasted on funding it, there’s further research that gets carried out in the wrong direction building off of it. It slows down true progress. Doubly so, if you can’t trust the results from other labs and have to repeat their experiments to verify them for yourself.
It can also at times lead to clinical trials where people are harmed, or, even worse lead to a harmful product hitting the general public. It also erodes the public trust in the scientific method, and may reduce overall funding for science, which hurts beneficial, real research.
And all that while blowing a hole in the wages and job opportunities for scientists in the west, as immigration in general does to so many other fields.
Joshua blogs at TheJewishRight.com: “For those of you who follow me on twitter, you will see that my account is gone. I felt the need to do this because many of the comments I’ve made on twitter are simply too controversial, now that they have a wider audience. Also, Twitter was simply taking up too much time, and keeping me away from my writing.”
Racism as a moral wrong has no reality because the concept was not in any moral lexicon prior to the 20th Century. Prior the last 100 years, you never heard about “racism.” Jesus never condemned it. No great rabbi has ever written a book against racism. There is no law in Torah or in Christianity against racism. None of the great Greek philosophers condemned it. The sin of racism was invented in the 20th Century along with the sins of sexism, ageism, lookism, Islamophobia and the like.
Rather than a sin, the judicious and moderate use of racism to prefer your own people to other people is adaptive in many circumstances.
On its face, inviting a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan onto your radio show is a risky proposition with very little upside. The situation gets even more precarious when you’re inviting this ex-wizard to dole out opinions on race. But these are wild times we’re living in, which is why David Duke — who has emerged as a top cheerleader for the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump — appeared on N.P.R.’s “Morning Edition” two weeks ago and defended the candidate from charges of racism.
The surprise was that Duke, now running for a Senate seat, actually had some perceptive things to say. The rising tide of buttoned-up Republicans who have spoken out against Trump’s ethnic belligerence, he said, were betraying both “the Republican Party and certainly conservatism.” He then managed to dismiss those Republicans and swiftly parse a complex national paradox. “These are just nothing more than epithets and vicious attacks,” Duke said. “Donald Trump is not a racist. And the truth is, in this country, if you simply defend the heritage of European-American people, then you’re automatically a racist. There’s massive racial discrimination against European-Americans, and that’s the reality.”
In positioning Trump as the victim of a smear campaign, Duke was defending him against claims of deep, personal, cancer-of-the-soul racism. Trump isn’t racist, said the ex-Klan boss (who, of course, also isn’t racist), because he doesn’t harbor hate in his heart for America’s racial minorities. But then he pivoted. The real problem, he claimed, is systemic racism, directed against European-Americans.
This is how David Duke, who most diverges from the stereotypical Klansman in that he wears suits, revealed an understanding that systems of race are more important than one person’s motives, reputation or emotional health — that there is racism, and then there is racism, and the two are not the same.
The first cited use of “racism” in The Oxford English Dictionary comes from 1902, during the well-intentioned Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian. There, a white man, Richard Henry Pratt, criticized government policy toward Native Americans. “Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow,” he said. “Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.” Pratt was what we might call “progressive” for his time; his version of destroying racism involved forcibly assimilating Native Americans into white culture. (As he put it, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”) Both of these options — segregation by force or assimilation by force — had disastrous effects for Native Americans. But for Pratt, racism was a matter of policy, not malice.
“Racism” spent the first half of the 20th century in competition with another word, “racialism,” though neither featured prominently in our national conversation. Then came the civil rights era, when the word took on for many a convenient new meaning, one that had more to do with the human heart than with practices like redlining, gerrymandering or voter intimidation. In 1964, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama — who just a year earlier promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” — explained the clear difference, in his mind, between a racist and a segregationist: “A racist is one who despises someone because of his color, and an Alabama segregationist is one who conscientiously believes that it is in the best interest of the Negro and white to have a separate educational and social order.”
Soon, nearly everyone could agree that racism was the evil work of people with hate in their hearts — bigots. This was a convenient thing for white Americans to believe. Racism, they could say, was the work of racists. And wherever you looked, there were no racists: only good men like Wallace, minding the welfare of their black fellow citizens, or the segregationist South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, defending states’ rights. Racism definitely existed, at some point — no one was out there denying that slavery had happened — but its residue had settled only in the hearts of the most unsavory individuals. Society as a whole didn’t need reform for the sins of a few.
Racism ceased to be a matter of systems and policy and became a referendum on the rot of the individual soul. Calling people racist was no longer a matter of evaluating their opinions; it was an accusation of being irrevocably warped at the very core. We can see how this plays out in news coverage of things that are, in fact, racist. “Racist” is seen as such a deep personal attack that it’s safer and more civil — particularly in the eyes of mainstream media organizations — to refer to things as racially charged, or tinged, or explosive, or divisive, or (when all else fails) just plain racial.
Posted inRace|Comments Off on NYT: ‘The Easiest Way to Get Rid of Racism? Just Redefine It.’
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
