Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety.
One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government.
Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”
Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”
Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)
Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism.
Mike Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”
In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does.
“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.
Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him.
In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”
Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”
Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”
Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.
Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement.
More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
Netanyahu needs to borrow Putin's book on ethics.
“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.”
It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.
That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.
When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.
So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.
The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business meant preventing a man from making all the money he could; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.
That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”
But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”
The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”
After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her own husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”
Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.”
In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled.
As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway.
Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”
“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”
Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu
1h
On Thanksgiving I'd like to express my thanks for
@HC_Richardson
and her daily series, 'Letters from an American.' https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
Even when the news is bad, the history horrific, something about it calms me down.
Or Obama's book. He reckons he never had a plan for Libya's people, after using IS to destroy that nation.
‘Soldiers started shooting at my feet’: Palestinians describe fleeing northern Gaza
People trying to escape Israeli bombardment have to cope without the most basic life necessities
Dogs biting at a human corpse. An exhausted, heavily pregnant woman carrying a toddler on her back. A seemingly lifeless body pushed on a cart. The sights of the Salah al-Din road, the main highway that runs like a spine through Gaza, remain with those who’ve walked it.
“What we experienced cannot be seen in horror movies,” said Nahla from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza.
Under siege, hungry, thirsty, and encircled by Israeli troops, her family had been determined to stay in their homes. But one night the intense Israeli bombing campaign left their house in ruins. “Miraculously, we escaped death and sought refuge in our neighbours’ house,” she said. At 6am the next morning, Nahla and her four children began the slow walk south.
Israel’s war has split the territory of 2.3 million people in two, with the military telling Palestinians to move below the Gaza river to what it calls “safe zones”. Still, it has continued to bomb the entire strip, wiping out families it says are unfortunate causalities in its targeting of militants.
To get people to move, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have often advertised what they call “humanitarian corridors” along the Salah al-Din Road for four hours a day, which they say is to help civilians to flee. UN rights experts warn, however, that demands for civilians to leave while under bombardment, and with no guarantee of safe return, amount to a forcible population transfer, which is a crime against humanity.
Speaking from the al-Maghazi camp in the central Gaza Strip, Nahla described walking past Israeli soldiers, holding up rags of white clothing in the hope they would not be shot. “We were thousands of people, with children crying, women screaming, and many disabled people who could not walk,” she said.
One of her daughters, Yara, 16, said soldiers were pointing their guns straight at them. “I saw Israeli tanks for the first time in my life on the ground.” The soldiers told people to raise their hands and hold up their identity documents, which would be inspected at a checkpoint.
At one point, Yara’s ID card fell out of her hand. “I bent down to pick it up, and the Israeli soldiers started shooting at my feet. They told me that I was prohibited from picking up anything on the ground.”
Young Palestinian men were singled out from the crowds. Israeli soldiers told them to line up, calling them out using a megaphone, and then detaining and stripping them naked.
Now living in an abandoned school, the small family are getting cold as winter sets in. They had slept in a tent in the schoolyard, but moved into the corridor once the rain started. “There is no room for us in the classroom,” said Nahla. “My two daughters, Yara and Asmaa, are trembling with fear to this day. They refuse to sleep except next to me.”
In the same building, 15-year-old Saja sits beside her injured mother on a worn-out mattress. She made the journey south after being bombed out twice in northern Gaza.
The family of six had lived in the Jabalia refugee camp for the past two decades. “We are a peace-loving family that cherishes life,” said Saja.
The IDF called her father one day on his phone, telling him their home would be a target. They then moved to her grandfather’s place, but a strike on a neighbour left shrapnel in her mother’s leg.
They moved to the Indonesian hospital but it too came under heavy bombardment. “Entire neighbourhoods in Jabalia camp were obliterated,” said Saja. “When we decided to evacuate we joined hundreds of Palestinians … moving in groups, pushing wheelchairs carrying my mother and sister. With us, we only had a minimal supply of canned food and our identification documents.
“Upon reaching Salah al-Din street, we encountered tanks and occupation soldiers who shouted at us. Some even laughed.
“We were not allowed to deviate from the prescribed path, constantly holding up our IDs with our right hands,” she added. “As we walked past a soldier, we moved slowly due to my mother and sister’s critical condition. The soldier shouted at us: ‘Run quickly.’”
Eventually, they crossed the river, and paid for a donkey cart to take them to Bureij camp. “Our initial attempt to seek shelter at the [UN] school there was met with refusal.” They boarded another donkey cart and headed to Maghazi camp.
“Upon our arrival, a compassionate displaced woman took pity on our situation and provided a mattress for my injured mother,” said Saja.
Sitting beside her, her leg wrapped with metal poking out of it, Saja’s mother, Maha, spoke in a weak voice: “Here, there are no necessities for life – no food, no treatment, no healthcare, nothing humane,” she said. The days, she said, “resembles life in a forest, where we fight even for water”.
Israel’s offensive, launched in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attack that killed 1,200 people, has killed more than 14,000 people, and thousands are still missing. A four-day ceasefire that begun on Friday has allowed more aid to reach Palestinians struggling to survive with shortages of water and other essentials. Aid has also reached northern Gaza for the first time in a month.
Aya Hammad, 23, was at home in the Sabra area of Gaza City in early November when her father and two sisters received calls from the IDF, instructing them to evacuate.
“We didn’t have the luxury of contemplating the supplies we might need,” she added. “We carried only our identity documents and a small bag containing a single piece of clothing to mitigate the harshness of the impending winter cold.”
Once across the Gaza river, her family found shelter in the abandoned house of a friend in the southern city of Khan Younis. “The temporary refuge we currently occupy resembles a ghost town, devoid of any human presence,” she said.
“There is no electricity, no internet, no water, and no food. Our neighbours provide us with a small amount of water to prevent us from dying of thirst.”
The awful horror of the Hamas-Israel war is creating deep divisions close to home
Eva Wiseman
What a mad old horrible time to be a Jew. Part of me feels my whole life as a liberal Jew in Britain has been leading here, to this sharp and ragged point, where families are cracking apart and fears are being mongered.
Even by writing this, I know I will draw criticism and abuse from both fellow Jews and the people who hate them, a fact that is undoubtedly leading to uncomfortable silences from many other people like me, dealing with a grey complexity of feeling that is tricky to articulate, even inside our own heads. We were brought up on a story of Jews fleeing persecution to return to a sacred homeland, a story that rarely acknowledged the Palestinians already living there, but one that was central to British Jewish identity, and one that many of us have spent our adulthoods painfully unpicking. Unpicking at a time when antisemitism is rising, which is terrifying, and when that rise is being weaponised, which is horrifying. People like me who find themselves wading daily through weeds, trying to find a home.
In Paris two weeks ago, thousands marched to show their rejection of antisemitism – since the Hamas attacks on 7 October and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip, the number of antisemitic acts recorded in France, as in Britain, have increased dramatically – there the figures are already triple those recorded across the whole of 2022. But among those marching against antisemitism were far right leader Marine Le Pen and National Rally president Jordan Bardella. This is the party whose founder once called the Holocaust a “detail of history”; these people despise Jews, but it seems they hate Muslims even more. In the UK, the founder of the English Defence League, Stephen Lennon (better known as Tommy Robinson), is doing the same, inviting his far right followers to join him on a march against antisemitism in London. It’s chilling, but it’s smart. Not just the cynical and strategic cannibalisation of a peaceful protest by people who routinely sport swastikas, which is smart in that uniquely painful kick you in the throat kind of way – he’s working to legitimise hate by hitching himself to a mainstream movement (we’re seeing a similar scramble for legitimacy by Nigel Farage, currently celeb-washing his reputation in the jungles of ITV). Not just that. It’s also a smart way of sowing yet more division within Jewish families across Britain, some of whom will inevitably drift guilelessly towards him, “He can’t be all bad”, towards racism, away from solidarity and peace, thereby weakening communities, amplifying fears and making all our lives 50 years worse.
But divisiveness is all I see right now – society is like a broken mirror. Reality is distorting under the weight of fragmenting identities. It’s this sort of thing that makes me feel unsafe – it’s larger than antisemitism, it’s people turning inwards, twisting and splitting the world to orchestrate and exploit its impact. When 250 graffitied Stars of David appeared around Paris at the end of October, some investigators presumed it to be an antisemitic campaign, while others thought it was pro-Israel. But now, having questioned two Moldovan nationals, French intelligence services think the graffiti is a piece of Russian dezinformatsiya, intended solely to sow division and anxiety. People will see in the graffiti what they’ve been primed to see, and bad actors, like Tommy Robinson, will dance merrily through the space between.
The march he’s supporting is organised by the Campaign Against Antisemitism. I am against antisemitism. While I don’t walk through London in fear, as many claim Jewish people routinely do, I am aware of it and like all Jews always have been, and I resent the way it must be built into Jewish culture, like the safe room at my nephew’s Jewish nursery in London. So I clicked through to the campaign’s website. My people, I thought, then stopped.
The organisers of this campaign, it turns out, have a very different idea of what antisemitism is from my own. On the recent pro-Palestine protest, in which many thousands of people marched peacefully for a ceasefire, these campaigners concentrate now on the few in the crowd who held antisemitic placards. And, “Even the marchers who did not engage in this conduct still knowingly and readily marched alongside those who did,” they write. “They are just as complicit.” Jews like me, who are opposed to Israel’s policy and who condemn its war on Gaza, are complicit in antisemitism, they say, and therefore are unwelcome on the march. A march which aims to make Jews feel safe and heard and seen. Well, some Jews.
It is boggling to me. I can see why the far right want to exploit our anxieties in order to split alliances and gain power, but it is maddening to see minority groups do it from the inside, too – maddening to see the impulse, when in fear, to build barriers, seek difference, reject nuance and push each other away. When I read articles about how Jews in Britain are feeling today, I read a lot about that fear, the panic about walking through cities, the fear of other people, but I’m hearing less about the churning disquiet inside our bodies or the alarm and dread at murders committed in our name. Or the sudden rootlessness that comes from being told we’re not the right type of Jew. Or the noisy struggles inside our communities and families, where the impact of violence happening 3,000 miles away will leave lasting scars.
Email Eva at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
Antisemites supporting Israel is weird. Jewish support of them is even weirder
Sam Wolfson
Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of the past month has been watching some of the world’s most wretched antisemites lining up to give their unalloyed support to Israel. Even more jarring has been their embrace by those who are supposed to advocate for Jewish safety.
These people include the radical US pastor John Hagee, who previously claimed that Adolf Hitler had been born from a lineage of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews” and sent by God to help the Jews reach the promised land. (He apologized in 2008 for some of his remarks.) He was invited to speak last Tuesday to an audience of thousands at the March for Israel in Washington, organised by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, to help “condemn the rising trend of antisemitic violence”.
Tommy Robinson, a leading member of the British far right, recently called on people to go to the Cenotaph, a war memorial in central London, to “protect” it from pro-Palestinian protesters. Last year Robinson defended Kanye West, saying it was obvious that “there are powerful Jewish people, claiming to be Zionists, who have their fingers on buttons of power in the entertainment industry, in big tech … and in governments” and that Jews “generally speaking, at least the white European Jews, have an average IQ of 110, so inevitably those Jews will rise to the top of corporations”.
Despite Robinson’s history of inflammatory and conspiratorial remarks, a 2019 Guardian investigation found that many of the groups bankrolling or supporting his organisation were rightwing pro-Israel think tanks in the US, including Middle East Forum and the Gatestone Institute.
Then there’s US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, who earlier this year repeated the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was “targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people. When he was accused of propagating antisemitism, which he denies, Kennedy chose to blast representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for insufficient support of Israel, saying that “criticism of Israel is a false narrative” and “Israel is a shining star on human rights in the Middle East”.
Kennedy was rewarded with an op-ed in Jewish Journal, a pro-Israel publication, titled “RFK is an Ally, not an Antisemite”, which argued that despite his comments “RFK’s unwavering commitment to Israel as a Jewish state is sincere and integral to his political values”.
Europe’s far-right political parties have a long history of promoting antisemitism. Yet Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the AfD in Germany and Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary all have given unequivocal support to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Indeed, Netanyahu considers Orban a close ally and often tweets support for him.
In the US, there is Donald Trump, whose election was heralded by antisemites’ biggest public rally in the US in a generation, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet because Trump was also demonstrably pro-Israel in his foreign policy stances, notably moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, he receives ongoing support and endorsements from many pro-Israel pressure groups. Some of them were nervous when he criticised Israel’s lack of military preparedness for the Hamas attacks, but he’s now back in the fold, adding “#IStandWithBibi”to his Truth Social posts.
This month Elon Musk agreed with a post on Twitter that said Jewish people have been pushing “dialectical hatred against whites”. The owner of the account, which had fewer than 6,000 followers, went on to say he was “deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest **** now about western Jewish populations”.
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk said. This was not an unusual stance for Musk, who denies that he is antisemitic. He has flirted with white nationalism many times, and earlier this year he remarked that the Jewish billionaire George Soros “reminds me of Magneto” (the evil X-Men villain, who, like Soros, is a Holocaust survivor).
As expected, Musk was admonished by the Biden administration, advertisers on X and Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, the world’s most prominent pressure group in protecting Jews from antisemitism. Musk has attacked Greenblatt and the ADL many times, threatening them with lawsuits, saying the group over-polices language on social media and calling them “ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform”.
Netanyahu didn’t bother to admonish Musk at all – the pair are friends, and Netanyahu has called him the “Edison of our time” even after many examples of Musk giving a platform to antisemites.
Musk did not remove the original post; instead he denied he was an antisemite and promised to come down hard on those who defended Palestinian rights on X, saying he would remove users who posted phrases like “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea”, which he said were “euphemisms” that “necessarily imply genocide”.
Greenblatt was thrilled: “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”
Over and over again, alleged antisemites or those who give platforms to antisemites have had their offenses chalked off by some in the pro-Israel movement, as long as they show sufficient deference to the Israeli project.
For decades, groups like the ADL have made it clear that one can only go so far in criticising the actions of the Israeli state before that critique can be dismissed as antisemitism – that some hand-wringing over settler violence in the West Bank is permitted, but that anything beyond that is in the danger zone of hate speech. Greenblatt said in a speech last year that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”, a statement he only slightly qualified in a tetchy New Yorker interview.
This is an idea promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), whose definition of antisemitism, adopted by many organisations, states and legal frameworks, includes examples that conflate Judaism with Zionism and suggest the state of Israel embodies the self-determination of all Jews. The IHRA definition has been used in many cases to label groups and movements like the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic.
This straitjacket definition of who is antisemitic apparently includes some Jews themselves who are horrified by the inhumanity of Israeli violence and apartheid. Compare the ADL’s reaction to Musk with their words last month when an alliance of Jewish Americans met in New York and Washington DC to protest the relentless and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
I was at the New York event and was incredibly moved by speakers who talked about the importance of Jews coming together, in spite of our collective trauma, to say that violence will not be carried out in our names. Greenblatt responded to these tender protests by saying that the protesters were “hate groups” that “don’t represent the Jewish community” – essentially, that we are not real Jews.
Greenblatt’s remarks echo similar claims he made last year, that groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “radical actors [who] indisputably and unapologetically regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews”.
The rationale behind these reactions is twisted and wrong: Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jews from the horrors of the pogroms, the Holocaust and antisemitism. Yet we are now reaching an illogical conclusion where organisations supposed to protect Jewish rights turn a blind eye to antipathy towards Jews as long as proponents support Israel.
This does not make Jews safer. It does not even make sense.
It’s the year 2023 and…
How did you expect the year 2023 to be, anyways, way back when? Not…like this…I’d bet.
Here we are, and the world is now beginning to crumble around us, in earnest, accelerating, going off the rails, imploding, so fast now that sonic booms of ruin now emanate around the globe in a constant, never-ending hum. I say this kind of thing, and perhaps, sometimes, you might think I say it for effect. But I don’t. I say it because…sigh. Why do I say it? Is it meant to exasperate you? Depress you? Scare you?
These things are better left unsaid. But let’s come back to that, because it’s the way we’re supposed to (not) talk about the world these days. Gaslight me, quick, someone, put me out of my...
“Crumble around us.” What do I mean? Let’s consider just the last few days in history. Not one but two countries embraced the far right in less than a single week. Now, when I say that, and of course the implication is “that’s not a very good thing,” it’s not a “political” point. It’s just a fact. We have never once seen anywhere in history fanatical right wing choices lead to anything positive, really, economically, socially, politically. Go ahead, feel free to shoot me down with counterexamples. The Weimar Republic ended wonderfully, I’m sure. Caesar totally fixed up Rome for another thou—Oh wait.
One of the great global trends of our age is an ominous one. Democracy’s in steep, sharp decline. This should worry all of us intensely. Does it? Do we notice it as much as we should? Democracy is of course modernity’s crowning achievement. And yet. One week. Not one country but two, throwing it into the dustbin. That ominous trend is now accelerating out of control.
One of the countries which embraced the far right was the Netherlands. That, too, is particularly troubling. It’s one of the first times that a mature European social democracy has turned its back on….so much. History. Truth. Modernity. Reality. And succumbed to the global anti-democratic wave. And no, just because we “elect” fanatics doesn’t mean in the slightest that we’re exercising democracy, which is about freedoms, rights, certain modern values of equality, liberty, truth, and justice, all of which, of course, are under severe, sustained assault now. A mature European social democracy is the last place we should see the anti-democratic wave cresting. It is—it’s already hit the rest of the world. And yet this moment, too, tells us that there’s no immunity against this contagion, and also, that the wave of folly, hate, and rage isn’t…
Over.
There it is, still spreading. Again, let me emphasize, this isn’t “about politics.” There is a very good reason that thoughtful people think of the far right as a menace and a danger—does it really have to be spelled out? Are we in such a profoundly stupid age that we have to say the words that history etched out in blood and bones, time and again, for those who seem to have gone deaf, dumb, and blind? Is this really where we are, that Europe forgets what the far right made of it, not so long ago, a human lifetime, the blink of time’s eye. The last time, only ashes were left.
There’s a reason. We should all know the reason. I think we all do know the reason. That such movements, moments, mistakes are precisely what’s warned about and against. And yet here we are, watching history repeat itself. In so many awful, thoughtless, foolish ways. We confront the sheer unbelievable weight of human stupidity itself. Stare not into its abyss, but at it’s rictus grin. They call Milei in Argentina "El Loco." We all know. Even, especially, those of us making these foolish choices.
Do you know that sinking feeling you have? What it means? Why you have it?
We are watching a civilization self-destruct.
What else happened, just in the last few days? “The world is on track for a “hellish” 3C of global heating, the UN has warned before the crucial Cop28 climate summit that begins next week in the United Arab Emirates.” And meanwhile? “The mean global temperature briefly crossed a critical threshold of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels likely for the first time.” In human history, that is.
What does all that mean? We know the lessons of history, but willfully ignore them, seduced by demagogues, treading on our better angels in rage, until their tender spines snap. But the lessons of futurity? They promise to be even more…terrible.
The world is on track for three degrees of warming. Only it’s not, because of course, three degrees isn’t a stable equilibrium. Well before that, closer to two and a half degrees, perhaps, more or less every single planetary tipping point we know of is hit. There’s just one exception, the Antarctic ice. But the rest of them, from permafrost melting, to boreal forests gone, to ocean currents a tangled, broken mess—all tipped. And that takes us into a place we don’t understand, can’t comprehend, and aren’t prepared in any way for, which is four to five degrees of warming. At those temperatures, civilization itself as we think of is unlikely to be possible.
You should know the score by now. Water, clean air, food—at those temperatures, good luck supplying them to ten billion people, let alone habitable zones, public health, or anything resembling a modern social contract. We don’t have any idea what life looks like at such temperatures, but what’s for sure is that it doesn’t look anything like this. Do we turn into Frank Herbert’s Fremen, conserving every last drop of water, jealously? That was a deeply intelligent future. Perhaps there’s a dumber, more brutal one—the Purge meets Fahrenheit 451 by way of the Hunger Games.
What’s for sure is that any notion of a positive future is obliterated, right down to the last iota, by this trajectory. No form of human progress is possible whatsoever—all that’s left is conflict on a dying planet, and that means that fascists, authoritarians, lunatics, and crackpots surge to the top, as bewildered masses flee from reason, truth, sanity, and democracy in fear and bitter rage. Just like…I didn’t even have to end that sentence, did I?
That brings us to the resurgence of Donald Trump. He just promised to “maximize fossil fuels” if he’s re-elected. No, don’t laugh yet, the real punchline’s this: Americans trust him on the economy. With it. Think about that for a second. Insurance companies are already pulling out of states because they can’t afford climate damages now. Go ahead and ask yourself what ten more years of fossil “maximization” does to economies. I’ll tell you, so you don’t have to guess. As damages intensify way past breaking point, which is where we already where last summer, and insurers fled, banks crash, economies convulse, businesses pull back investment, and this stagnant economy turns into something closer to a Greater Depression.
Not my opinion.
I know what it sounds like this when I write words like those above. Who am I? I don’t know who I am anymore. Does anyone? But I know who I’m not. I’m not an activist. I don’t have a political bone in my body, really—I don’t belong to a party, or lobby, or advocate, or volunteer. I’m just a guy. Like so many others. I don’t want to write any of this. What good does it do me? None whatsoever. But what I feel I have is a sort of moral duty, I suppose, to at least share with you the facts.
All we are discussing above are facts. There’s nothing complicated about them. I can complicate them, sure, by talking about how instabilities intersect, and complex systems interact—but there’s no need to. Just the facts themselves should trouble us all deeply these days, because they say the same thing, more or less all of them. I can keep going with facts: the immense concentrations of wealth and power, which only grow, and serve no real purpose other than vanity, or hierarchy, if you like, the dismal state in which we find ourselves emotionally—traumatized, savaged, beaten, bloodied, betrayed by one another, bearing witness to the stupidity of history repeating itself, in all the worst ways.
Just the facts, please ma’am. Who am I? Who are you? Who are any of us anymore? What’s been taken from us, and what do we have left? Do we retain our humanity, anymore—isn’t even that much contested, too, now, in the most awful, pathetic, and disgraceful ways? Just the facts are enough to set my hair on fire, and maybe you can be a carrier of this flame too, even though none of us want to be.
They all say the same thing, only it’s a message that’s many things, in many ways. It’s tragic, but not just that. It’s also wince-inducingly stupid. It’s mind-shatteringly pathetic. We should have been better than this. We deserve more from each other than this. We needed to give more to the future than this, but all we had was taken from us in the present, and what was left?
It’s the year 2023, and things are going quite badly in the world. That’s a polite way to say it, that even a pundit could crack a grin over.
We’re watching a civilization begin to self-destruct. Convulsing in hate, rage, fear, and despair. That’s the impolite way to say it, which I suppose, is the kind of thing I shouldn’t say, because, after all, what do you with that terrible knowledge?
Who am I? Who are you?
I don’t know who I am anymore, in the old ways. The guy that transformed marketing and branding. The guru. The dude you’d see on TV every once in a while. Gone. Poof. And I’d bet you feel that way, too, about yourself, a lot these days, because we all do. As the old world crumbles, our old selves disappear, too, like they were never really there at all. But hidden in every apocalypse is a revelation.
I know who I am. I know who you are, too. We’re keepers of the flame. A flame has many hues. Truth, beauty, goodness, mercy, faith, hope, courage, kindness. All the names of love. We keep the flame burning, even if it’s with our souls, turning to dust and ashes, as they bear witness. To the tragedy of all this. The stupidity of it. The futility, the folly, the disgrace, the pathetic justifications, the everyday horror, the banal idiocy of it all. Tell me you don’t feel some measure of that these days, and I’ll show you a liar.
You and me. Now. In this moment. This juncture. In the human story. Who are we? What are we? All the other titles, roles, selves, disintegrate. Keepers of the flame. It’s kept alive only in a secret place, called the human soul. What dies, when civilizations crumble? Is everything lost? What’s our job, task, challenge, purpose? Somehow, my friends, it’s come down to this. The wind roars. There’s a candle in a pair of lonely, trembling hands, flickering at midnight. And the path winds through the valley of the shadow of death. We might not make it. But will something remain of the flame?
Gerontocracy: the exceptionally old political class that governs the US
Joe Biden and members of Congress are increasingly long in the tooth – and more and more out of step with a much younger US public
It is the year of the octogenarian. American TV viewers can find Patrick Stewart, 82, boldly going in a new series of Star Trek: Picard and 80-year-old Harrison Ford starring in two shows plus a trailer for the fifth installment of Indiana Jones.
And a switch to the news is likely to serve up Joe Biden, at 80 the oldest president in US history, or Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who turns 81 on Monday. But while action heroes are evergreen, the political class is facing demands for generational change.
“America is not past our prime – it’s just that our politicians are past theirs,” Nikki Haley, 51, told a crowd of several hundred people in Charleston, South Carolina, as she launched her candidacy for president in 2024.
It was a shot across the bow of not only Biden but former US president Donald Trump, who leads most opinion polls for the Republican nomination but is 76 years old. Haley, notably, mentioned Trump’s name only once and avoided criticisms of him or his administration, in which she served as UN ambassador.
Instead, the former South Carolina governor called for a “new generation” of leaders and said she would support a “mandatory mental competency test for politicians over 75 years old”. It was a clue that in a party long shaped in Trump’s image, where ideological differences are likely to be slight, his senior status could offer primary election rivals a line of attack.
Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “She said what a lot of people are thinking, or are maybe afraid to say, and for that she deserves a lot of credit. The basic foundation of her argument, which is that we need to turn the page and find a new generation of leadership, is 100% right.”
Gerontocracy crept up on Washington slowly but inexorably. Biden, elected to the Senate in 1972, has been a public figure for half a century and, if re-elected as president, would be 86 at the end of his second term. At a recent commemorative event at the White House he hosted Bill Clinton, who was president three decades ago – but is four years his junior.
The octogenarian McConnell is the longest-serving leader in the history of the Senate and has offered no hint of retirement. Chuck Schumer, Democratic majority leader in the same chamber, is 72. Senator Bernie Sanders, standard bearer of the left in the past two Democratic primaries, is 81.
But there are finally signs of erosion in the grey wall. Last month Patrick Leahy, 82, a Democrat from Vermont, stepped down after 48 years in the Senate. Last week Senator Dianne Feinstein of California announced her retirement at 89 after months of difficult debate about her mental fitness.
Most profoundly, last month saw Democrats’ top three leaders in the House – Nancy Pelosi, 82, Steny Hoyer, 83, and 82-year-old Jim Clyburn – make way for a new generation in Hakeem Jeffries, 52, Katherine Clark, 59, and 43-year-old Peter Aguilar, as well as the arrival of Maxwell Frost, now 26, hailed as the first Gen Z congressman.
Presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle may now seek to harness this hunger for change in the contest for the world’s most stressful job in 2024. A CNBC All-America Economic Survey in December found that 70% of Americans do not want Biden to run for re-election, giving his age as the principal reason.
Chen, who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for California state controller last year, commented: “He has exhibited some of the manifestations of somebody who probably has seen better days and that’s hard to hide on the campaign trail. There’s a big difference between running for president at 70 or 75 – and what was possible in the 2020 election when Covid was still raging and a lot of the interactions were different – than running in 2024. I do think his age is going to be an issue.”
Biden typically brushes off such talk with the simple refrain: “Watch me.” The president underwent a routine medical checkup this week and Dr Kevin O’Connor, his personal physician since 2009, concluded that Biden “remains a healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency”.
Karine Jean-Pierre, 48, the White House press secretary, said: “If you watch him, you’ll see that he has a grueling schedule that he keeps up with, that sometimes some of us are not able to keep up with.”
Noting Biden’s string of legislative achievements, she added: “It is surprising that we get this question when you look at this record of this president and what he has been able to do and deliver for the American people.”
After a strong performance in the midterm elections, a serious challenge to Biden from within the Democratic party still looks unlikely. Defenders say the obsession with his age merely illustrates his lack of other vulnerabilities after two years in which he has done much to win over moderates and progressives.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, asked: “Did anybody watch the State of the Union? Joe Biden is fully capable of executing his job as president of the United States. He’s in better shape in some people half of his age. So they need to start focusing on the positives because repetition creates reality: perception is reality in politics.
“It’s a distraction and it undercuts the successes that Joe Biden actually has as president of the United States. There is much more concern over Donald Trump’s mental acuity and physical presence than Joe Biden. Joe Biden can run circles around Donald Trump.”
A White House doctor once memorably proclaimed that Trump has “incredible genes” and could have lived to 200 years old if only he had been on a better diet. But on the Republican side he could face challenges not only from Haley but Florida governor Ron DeSantis, 44, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, 59, former vice-president Mike Pence, 63, and 57-year-old Senator Tim Scott.
Each has previously endorsed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra and may now struggle to disavow it. No-holds-barred attacks on Trump himself risk alienating his fervent base. But as Haley showed this week, the promise of generational change might serve as a coded rebuke in party that is no stranger to dog whistles.
Drexel Heard, 36, who was the youngest executive director of the biggest Democratic party in the country (Los Angeles county), said: “Hypocrisy is a weird thing in American politics. It’s going to be interesting to see if Nikki Haley only talks about Joe Biden’s age and doesn’t talk about Donald Trump’s age and how the media calls her out on that. She’s going to say things like: ‘Well, you know, I’m just saying that we need generational change.’ She’s never going to call Donald Trump out.”
Trump will not be the first Republican candidate to face questions over his age. At a debate in 1984, the moderator reminded Ronald Reagan that he was already the oldest president in history at that time. Reagan, 73, replied: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, laughed at the line. Reagan won re-election in a landslide.
Trump, for his part, will have an opportunity to silence Republican doubters at his raucous campaign rallies. Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Clinton, said: “If he can’t do that, if he seems older and less energetic, then I can imagine the generational appeal sticking. But if his juices start flowing and he is able to do what he did seven years ago, then the generational appeal will be likely to fall somewhat flat.”
Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, and a 77-year-old grandfather, added that it is not the “consensus view” among Republicans that Trump is too old to move back into the White House. “There’s a lot more support inside the Democratic party for the proposition that Biden is too old than there is inside the Republican party for the parallel proposition that Trump is too old,” he said.
Of all the Congresses since 1789, the current one has the second oldest Senate (average age 63.9) and third oldest House of Representatives (average age 57.5). Critics say the backup of talent puts it out of step with the American public, whose average age is 38. One example is around the tech sector and social media as members of Congress have often struggled to keep pace with rapid change and its implications for society.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I’m 70, so I have great sympathy for these people: 80 is looking a lot younger than it used to, as far as I’m concerned. But no, it’s ridiculous. We’ve got to get back to electing people in their 50s and early 60s.”
“That’s the right time for president. You have a good chance of remaining reasonably healthy for eight years if you get a second term. Everybody knows that makes more sense but here we are. What can you say? This was the option we were given in 2020 and we’re going to get essentially the same one in 2024.”
Gaza truce extended for two days - Qatar foreign ministry
The Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson, Majed al Ansari, has announced that an agreement has been reached to extend the humanitarian truce for an additional two days in the Gaza Strip.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2023/11/26/biden-trump-2024-election-battleground-polls/71667419007/
In part:
Perhaps nothing illustrates Joe Biden’s presidency better than a photo his team posted to celebrate his 81st birthday on Monday.
Biden is shown gripping the sides of the table, while a mass of candles (presumably 81 of them) rages on the cake in front of him.
It’s symbolic of how he’s clinging to the hope of winning a second term, regardless of the dumpster fire of his low approval ratings and the dissatisfaction among the American people with his job performance.
And no matter how much Biden and his administration dismiss concerns about his age (or joke about it), voters are worried.
On Biden’s birthday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “we have to judge him by what he’s done, not by his numbers.”
“I would put the president’s stamina, the president’s wisdom, ability to get this done on behalf of the American people, against anyone,” Jean-Pierre said. “Anyone, on any day of the week.”
Biden staffers can play make-believe all they want, but voters are smarter than that.
Is Biden too old? President is acting old and Americans are concerned. The good news? We're talking about it.
The numbers don't lie
Poll after poll has shown voters – even the majority of Democrats – are worried about Biden’s age and continued ability to carry out the country’s most important job. In September, a Wall Street Journal poll showed that 73% of voters said Biden is too old to run for reelection.
The front-runners in the presidential race, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, would be well into their 80s before one or the other left office in January 2029.
It’s not Biden’s age alone – it’s how he acts. For example, at 77, former President Donald Trump is just a few years younger, but only 47% of voters said Trump’s age was an impediment to running again.
In general, voters aren’t happy with the quality of their lives under Biden. A new NBC News survey showed that the president’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest point – only 40% approve of his performance.
Other warning signs include a drop-off of support among Black voters, a generally loyal Democratic bloc. Several polls have shown that at least 20% of Black voters say they'd support Trump, who is the current GOP front-runner, if the election were held now. That's a significant increase from the 12% who voted for Trump in 2020.
Similarly, young voters who overwhelmingly backed Biden in 2020 are showing less enthusiasm this time around now that they’ve seen him in action. Biden has continually tried to woo this group with taxpayer-funded “freebies” like student loan forgiveness, but even that pandering might not earn their vote.
C'mon man! SCOTUS put kibosh on Biden's loan forgiveness. That's not deterred him one bit. (Not believed by the general public—PS)
If it's Trump vs. Biden, odds are looking bad for Joe.
Democrats started out feeling pretty smug about their odds in a Biden-Trump rematch, but that confidence is waning. Or it should be. Even with all the baggage and criminal indictments, Trump remains a force – at least when compared with Biden.
When it comes down to it, voters will make their decisions based on what’s best for them and their families. And a growing number say they trust Trump more on the economy, foreign policy and immigration.
Out of 12 national polls in November, 10 of them have Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical matchup.
Poll after poll has shown voters – even the majority of Democrats – are worried about Biden’s age and continued ability to carry out the country’s most important job.
This is mirrored in battleground states that will be key to winning the White House in 2024.
A recent Michigan poll conducted by EPIC-MRA found that Trump leads Biden by 46% to 41% in the key Midwestern state. Biden’s support is eroding quickly. In August, the same polling firm showed Biden with a 46% to 45% lead over Trump.
America needs real leaders: Surely Republicans can do better than Trump. Right?
And a New York Times/Siena College poll released this month had Biden losing to Trump in five of six battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania) by 4 to 10 points.
So what are Democrats supposed to do? There’s no clear alternative. Biden shows no signs of bowing out voluntarily. And the other obvious choice – his Vice President Kamala Harris – is disliked even more than he is.
Other Democrats are interested, however, in leading the party and the nation. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is clearly running a shadow campaign. For instance, Newsom will debate Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis later this month.
(Balance of article at link)
