As soon as I opened this article, I thought to myself, “I BET the example schools in this piece are all going to be from ultra-progressive urban areas in cobalt blue states.” Sure enough, we got midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, Santa Anna, San Francisco, Queens, with mentions of New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota.
How is this any different from everything else we’ve been reading? Is anyone surprised? Does anyone think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that leftist schools in blue state urban centers (or ANY city in any state, for God’s sake) *won’t* employ the most capital-P Progressive intersectional brainwashed graduates of all the schools of “education” in this country?
This was the 9,418th article that can be summed up as “leftism is ruining the country.” And yet progressives keep getting elected, social media ideological pathogens continue unabated, hundreds of leftist Substackers are calling for removal of “Nazi” content (read: anything to the right of AOC), people still watch SNL and all the late-night propaganda comedy shows, and on and on.
It’s only getting worse, and at this point I don’t see any way out, except on the individual level. Don’t live in those places. Don’t send your kids to these places. Find normal people in whatever pockets of suburban/rural society that you can, and just spend your life holding fast to your values while we watch everyone on the Blue Team turn into a pod person.
Addendum: for heaven’s sake, can we please get past this notion that an adequate sampling of the population of the United States can be accurately taken from New York City and California?? This isn’t a Hollywood rom-com; other people’s lives, thoughts, actions, and values are worth reporting on. Those places are crazy and *everyone knows it.*
I agree! Those blue states do not represent the majority of the country, IMO. I am a Pre-K teacher at a small private church preschool in North Alabama. Yes...Alabama.. and guess what??? We have black and white children and they all love and care about each other! Even the parents! The horror! Can you believe it? My 4 year olds, (some have already turned 5), care about learning to write their names(they are so proud when they do so), learning their letters, playing in center time, going to PE, going outside for recess, going to music, acting silly with their friends at lunchtime, music, etc. We are teaching the Pledge of Allegiance. We are interactive with them, i.e, during Halloween and Thanksgiving we carved a pumpkin, sampled pumpkin pie. We are teaching them life skills: how to compromise with each other with sharing, how to problem solve, how to love one another. My point is that my little ones would not care about the size of someone's nose. That is ridiculous.
My people go back to Alabama from the very early 1800s and one line further. I grew up in North Alabama. It is a beautiful place and to this day Alabamans are some of the best, most noble people I have ever known.
Yup. The highly educated have become the most unprogressive ppl in our country. They teach hate, intolerance, exclusion, division and really think they are on the noble side!!
Also - it's insane to assume that people in leftist, urban areas are generally the "highly educated" people in the country. That's a wild myth - walk down the streets of NYC - you're not looking at math PhDs for the most part. (Gender studies PhDs don't count as "highly educated", nor do people who left school nearly illiterate.)
Funny ( strange….. not ha ha ) that you say that. Being a Liberal most of my entire life - until 3 years ago- in Canada. That is my impression of Alabama, somewhat to full of hate between Blacks & Whites.
Very happy to hear of @EllesStratt experience. I feel bad for having that belief & it certainly isn’t a result of any personal experience.
Eric...the city in which I live has a minor league hockey team. One of our dearest friends used to play and he is from Canada. Obviously, he loves living here because he has been here over 25 years. He and his family are some of our favorite people 😊
Lynne, I love that! There is so much that is misunderstood and misinterpreted about the South, esp Alabama. I’m very thankful that the community in which I live is situated between two mountains. It’s beautiful. People should take the time to research Huntsville in the northern part and Gulf Shores/Orange Beach in the southern part of the state and everything in between. Honestly, we also have all of our teeth AND running water out of the tap but I digress. 😄😄😄
I am from Tuscaloosa, but grew up in Huntsville when von Braun was there. My dad was an independent contractor for Space Craft Incorporated. I have climbed over the mock-up for the Apollo capsule (think I Dream of Genie) and seen the monkeys up close. Really, really stellar times. We have a pretty good size trawler that I need a deep water dock for. I think we may end up in either Bayou le Batre or Pickwick. Both of my brothers are in Huntsville.
Wow!!! That is amazing that you were able to observe the space program as it grew and grew. We live in Huntsville and love it...you probably won't believe how much it has grown(in case you haven't been back). My husband and son are Univ of Alabama alum's and our daugher is a senior there...we are in Tuscaloosa a good bit...Roll Tide!
We moved to North Alabama for my husband's engineering job (high tech city - highest percentage of PHDs in the country - yes - Alabama) and we have called it home for over 20 years now. We love this area and I taught in the city school system when it was one of the best in the state. A few years ago the new superintendent basically turned the school system over the the Obama justice department and I no longer recognize the system where I taught. CRT training and gender driven training is common now and the academics and discipline are not what they were 10 years ago. Private schools are growing at an amazing rate as parents' leave the public schools. It makes me sad.
I also appreciate what you are doing for these children. Teaching them to love and care about each other is far more valuable than teaching them to hate and be suspicious of one another. We need more of this, especially in early education.
Btw, middle aged life-long southerner here. I was never taught that one race was superior to another in all my public education nor in my home. And while a certain commenter likes to hang on to history, as if it is more important that the present or the future, I believe the divisions being sown in our schools now are doing great harm to all people that will be felt for generations. Your way is much better. Keep teaching and loving your students. They will be better off for it.
Thank you. That is very kind of you. My sweet school isn’t the only place, in my city, where these things are taught! I have many friends who are teachers. By the way, I was also never, ever taught at home or school that one race was superior to the other.
Same here in South Carolina. Normal Yankees are fleeing here by the thousands. They’re welcome here in my book as soon as they indicate their appreciation for why they took refuge here and their understanding that they won’t vote to mess it up.
I've had this conversation with them in a roundabout way. "Why is the cost of living here lower, do you think? Or rather, why was it so high back in NJ?" In particular, property taxes and other taxes and fees. It all comes down to voting.
Going to school without fighting or parents not coming to blows during PTA meetings does not mean "they all love and care about each other." Just like having a black co-worker does not mean you have a "black friend."
This is the premise behind Walter Kirk’s County Highway, that what happens in “flyover country” goes mostly unreported. We subscribe, and really enjoy the in depth reporting on the culture and history of the ENTIRE country. I myself grew up and have only lived on the East Coast, mostly NYC/NJ, and it’s so easy to fall into this kind of provincialism. Nevertheless, good article, I think!
I think it's a worthwhile article to read, if only to further confirm what I already know. I very much appreciate the response and the engagement, so this isn't a push-back. But even thinking about the United States in terms of 1) hip, elite urban centers of NYC and SoCal versus 2) Armpit Township, Nebraska ("flyover country") I think is detrimental. Yes, NYC is densely populated and thus a lot of cultural elements have their origin in places like that. And yes, Armpit Township, NE, has a population of under a thousand, and it's a sleepy town where nothing happens.
But what about every 50-mile radius of every moderately-sized population center in the country? I live in *not-Boston* suburban New England. We have schools and highways and strip malls and concert halls and clubs and all other manner of cultural trappings. We're nothing like goofy NYC or flyover country. Ditto for the hundreds of beltways, exurbs, outskirts of metro areas, and small cities across the country.
Does anybody want to see what those people are doing? Or is Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Brooklyn all we're every going to get?
As an aside, I think those cheeky articles that the Free Press publishes that feature the fish-out-of-water story with the hip, urban, progressive reporter joining the "country rubes" for a day or two only to find--gosh!--these hayseeds are actually kind of nice... only *reinforces* this NYC vs. Hicksville mindset. They come off as sympathetic to the "unwashed masses" at first blush, but anyone with a discerning brain can see right into the smugness.
It IS very frustrating to watch how slowly people are awakening to this and other pernicious trends in our society. But I am grateful that they are. And I too live in a pleasant suburb where people just want to be left alone. In order to do that, they politely parrot the standard left-leaning views, and try to ignore the ugliness happening in all our cities and universities right now. They are afraid--afraid of being labeled “Trumpists”, of being seen as working class/uneducated, of being targeted by the random aggressive progressive (sometimes their own children) because of an innocent remark. I know because I am one of them! I remember when Breitbart, many years ago, asserted that all political is cultural, and that the left understands this is a culture war, not a war of ideas. He was truly prescient. The culture gives these children permission to spew such vile hate. History has been erased or altered with false narratives. So many forget that the culture here--and in England and Europe--allowed the rise of National Socialism and the German Worker’s Party in Germany. These movements, along with eugenics, were heartily endorsed by the intelligentsia, academics, and “elites” everywhere. Not much has changed. (That’s all just an aside, to say I agree with you that the smugness can be infuriating. Recent case in point: the “discovery” that a two parent marriage is better for children, and is a predictor of success, the recent subject of Bari Weiss’ podcast.)
Unless a smug progressive journalist from New York or Los Angeles stumbles upon the concept during his long walk through the elite institutions, it’s not *actually true,* or at least not important.
Bari and Nellie ARE smug progressive journalists from New York. They are in recovery; but it has been an uphill struggle for them. Its a work in progress(hah!); but they are having their minds concentrated wonderfully.
You’re right about the British origins of eugenics, and America took it up very quickly. Woodrow Wilson was a proponent. I believe some states even still require blood tests to be married? So barbaric. And so many great minds fell for it--Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, etc. I think your point about white and white adjacent is important too. I was a little surprised at the implication in the article that it’s ok to divide a training session into white and non-white, but not ok to group Jewish people with white. When/where does it all end? Everyone needs to have a little imagination and empathy BEFORE they themselves become the object of persecution. Identity politics will eventually divide us all into us/them if we let it.
Mengele and his attorneys were reaching way past anything those people suggested. Mengele broke every ethical guidance known in his time. I wrote a paper on medical ethics and this is one of the things I found. Nobody in those British intelligentsia proposed what Mengele did.
As a Texan, I do want to know the craziness coming from California because so many Californians are loving to Texas. I want to be prepared to defend my Red State from incoming progressives that may seek to bring their crazy ideas with them.
Also, to some extent, young people look to the culture-making areas of NYC and SoCal, so it’s good to understand what to try to protect them from too. But I do take your point. Time to start developing our own culture right where you are so that youth don’t feel the need to look to these far-off elitist places for culture.
Yes, Steven, Austin is a VERY Blue, WOKE city and a main draw of CA Democrats..
The irony is they left a Blue state whose political policies have nearly destroyed CA. They move to our BIG Red state of TX to get away from those ruinous policies, all while trying to relocate to cities with THE EXACT SAME WOKE Blue ideologies & policies!
As a lifelong Texan (middle Right of Center), I can only hope my Texas Red can survive this “Blue attack” - NOT to mention the millions of illegals flooding our border under the Biden Crime Family Regime open border policy!
Thankfully, yesterday our Gov Abbott + State Legislators past & signed into law SERIOUS border control policies!
I’m in Austin, so I do know this. Parts are as bad as you say, but not all of it. AISD (Austin Independent School District) is bad, I know lots of people who pulled their kids out after Covid. But so far the surrounding suburban school districts are fine. Keeping an eye on them though. Downtown you get some crazies— like, I know a women’s event was recently terrorized by trans activists pounding on the doors, but most of the neighborhood areas are reasonable people. My child learned about Hanukkah at school, the downtown light show had a menorah and a driedel sculpture that were left alone. So def not as bad as this article (thank God!)
Also, I grew up outside DC, so my perspective might be skewed somewhat. Compared to the conformity of progressive ideals in Maryland suburbs (which could rival NYC at this point), Austin seems refreshingly mixed as far as politics go!
Kennedy picked Johnson in ‘60 for the “Boston to Austin” connection (well, also primarily because he thought Johnson wouldn’t sabotage the administration if he was in it), then Dukakis did the same in 1980 with Bentsen. Austin has had Democrat bona fides for quite some time, but it was the Boll Weevil Democrats, not the stupid Beto-crats.
it's not just Texas. Boise is turning blue thanks to the huge influx of Californians and Seattleites relocating there. Bozeman, Denver and Colorado Springs have already been lost to California transplants.
Idaho is also turning bleeding red, and angering local Republicans who are not Edgelord fanatic Christians. What I call the Edgelords are also thundering in from California, polarizing politics. California is blue only in the SF and LA areas. The rest of California is red, and it's where you find some of the more dingbat versions. What those have done to a once highly respected University system in Idaho is not good.
OTOH - Idaho militias have a rare black Trump dude or two these days. Some of those types are ... ahem. But most of them are pretty ordinary folks.
Shocking to hear that Colorado Springs is now leftist. Like San Diego, 30-35 years ago, it was a conservative Republican bastion.
Bozeman and Missoula are University towns so I am sure they were pretty liberal to begin with. Bozeman was also traditionally Democrat because of the strong presence of unions.
Haha.. funny you mention this. I'm actually a Texan (who lived in California previously) and recently moved back to California. I don't live in a costal area or a big city, I live in an unincorporated town in San Diego county, that has a strong conservative base and values family. But, it's true, I don't send my kids to the public school down the street, I don't trust them. I don't really trust the ones where we were at in Texas either. People complain about progressive politics, and I agree. But it's funny how California as a whole gets lambasted for the ultra-progressives, who don't at all represent the large amount of conservatives in the state. You have to support conservatives in all areas of politics, including schools, to keep the progressive stuff out. They've been given the keys to the kingdom because they live and breathe DEI ideology. It's goofy.. sadly despite being a native Texan, if I had to leave California again, I'm not sure I'd move back to Texas. My leaving Texas doesn't have anything to do with politics, I just never found a place that I really loved there.
Not that it matters b/c it's just my experience, but I lived my 1st 18 years in Texas. Then moved to CA- eventually married, and raised kids there (Orange County). Once the kids flew the nest and I saw California was falling into a woke nightmare, I picked up and moved back to Austin. I Did Not Like It. Just California but with shittier weather and no beach or mountains. So I picked up again and moved to the west coast of Florida two years ago. (As a remote worker, I have these luxuries.) Not moving again. SW Florida ain't perfect but it's a hella lot better.
A sister of mine lived in Bonita in a small subdivision amidst horse farms in the 70's. It was beautiful and the living was good. No state has the combination of great climate and sheer beauty like California. Then again, being an oenophile, I am a little biased. I agree its politics suck.
Bingo. If Ukraine had remained neutral and developed a government with integrity it could have been the modern Switzerland I think. Sort of the best of all worlds scenario, but noooo, corruption reigns supreme.
I agree with much of what you say here. That said, it simply does not bode well for the whole country when these large urban and progressive areas are behaving in these ways. They tend to be the trendsetters--and we can all agree that the trend of anti-semitism is pretty bad.
Plus they make no bones about wanting to seize ALL the political power and silence those in the middle of the country forever. We have a Congress designed as it is and an electoral college for a reason. I think that is why Liz Cheney is so bitter - she is banished to hold the fort in little old Wyoming when she is desperate to be back East
Don't think so, but even if, don't care. Tired of hearing small, midwestern or southern or Appalachian or whatever non-elite communities are being described being the butt of this kind of characterization. Just simply tired of it.
I appreciate your comments, The Rogies. As I read the article I thought "I can't wait to get to the comments where there will be broad viewpoints as some articles can be so mono-think".
One thing though, you cannot entirely escape the Marxist oppression/oppressor ideologies outside of the Deep Blue places in America. And, that is because it is also pushed from the Federal Government, the media, all of our institutions....
I am not a bit surprised to hear about antisemitism taught in schools because we already had the GenderBread LGBTQIA+++WTF person taught K-12 as if it were science. The Military and the American Academy of Pediatrics are good examples among our nations institutions:
And, Blue States & cities are "Sanctuaries" for criminal illegal aliens and other people's run away children. If a kid in Nebraska is lured to CA by a glitter mother he/she can be treated with a whole lot of "care" in the form of drugs and surgeries against the will or even the knowledge of parents under the state sponsored Gender Religion.
So, if we are not concerned with what Blue pushes it just takes over like a cancer. WSJ type Liz Cheney and Nikki Haley Republicans do not even care about it.
This stuff is all the same thing. The point is destruction.
I don't think you do. Once a country gets past a certain side, you need to understand that culture becomes regional. In this case, assuming that Antisemitism is in America's schools, because it is in schools in certain areas is the problem. If it is an America problem, then there need to be more examples across the country, not just in specific areas. If the issues are limited to certain areas, then the problem is regional, not country-wide.
I was thinking the same thing . Surprisingly there are people who live in other states. I’m going to guess some of them read and write and do journalism.
I have been thinking about this for the last week or so. Despite living in the Information Age we might as well be living in the Dark Ages and getting our information from the Town Crier.
The problem is that the media that dominates is controlled by the left. Ditto for academia that will continue to churn out the graduates who will take over the media that dominates.
Except that everyone does NOT know it. There are still millions upon millions of useful idiots who self-describe as "moderate" and think Republicans are all white supremacists. These people genuinely think that none of the Left's absurdities are real; they're all right-wing "misinformation", and the Democrats are actually a sane, centrist party.
Opening their eyes is crucial, and highlighting the evidence against their delusions is how we do that.
I do not think so. There is some contamination sure. But I think of the middle of the country like those massive deposits of granite or other impervious stone that simply does not erode no matter how fierce the wind.
The real "rock" is the God of the Bible. That is what our country was built on. If we all believed we are made in the image of God, we would not treat anyone with hate. The Jewish people are the Chosen ones and represent those who believe the teachings of the Word. The basic rule of the Bible it treat others as you want to be treated. The further away we get from Judeo/Christian values, the more chaos. It's funny how some people here comment and say things that are Judeo/Christian values, but are quick to say I am not religious or I don't believe in God, as if that would be bad. God is Love. No one who even uses the Bible as more of a reference tool, would act with such hate.
I agree. But not everyone does believe. Or are at a point of lapsed faith or not yet discovered faith. Maybe that is a consequence of being a very diverse population. I think up until relatively modern tines people who came here assi.ilated into American culture and as part of that embraced as you say our Judaeo-Christian foundation. Now we have people coming to establish colonies of their country of origin without any attempt to assimilate into the larger society. And yes, as Christians we are supposed to love all others. Even those who do not believe as we do. And I can love the person and despise the conduct.
The Bible was basic reading material. It was in every hotel room. Whether you believe in it or not, most people were exposed to it. Just like young people are taught to hate the Jews, they are taught to hate God and the Bible. The same can be said of all the great books - schools are getting rid of all the classics because they were written by old white men. My point is, you don't have to be a practicing Jew or Christian to be a good person, but if you are taught that being one is awful, you will never be exposed to the Bible's wisdom. Almost all religious people are potrayed as idiots and science deniers.
Yea but it still matters and is unacceptable. In 2018 my daughter had a classmate lean toward her and say Hitler should have finished the job. She told her teacher who did nothing.
We live in a relatively rural area but it’s nestled between big urban ones. She is on the spectrum and was routinely harassed about everything. Antisemitism has been alive and well since I was a kid in the 60’s. Nothing new but this being incorporated into school curriculum is. It’s unacceptable and I thank the FP for exposing how bad this has gotten. Indeed damage has been done but we can and must do better. Get rid of DEI, CRT, and maybe the next gen won’t be as poisoned.
We're doomed to require dealing with the fact that "climate" is whatever one can see out any given window in midtown Manhattan. And much else; no matter how amorphous the distribution becomes, the Okie from Muskogee as well as anyone else in Actual Human Country remains wholly invisible .
Many of the Okies from Muskogee prefer it that way though. They are only upset now because of the cost of fuel, food and energy. But most of them could go back to hunting/fishing, firewood and horses. The urbanites would perish though.
Those places may be crazy but right now, they control the culture, the media, the educational system, the government bureaucracies, and through legal and H/R, most corporate boardrooms.
I thought the same thing as I read. The point of the piece is to demonstrate a crisis of antisemitism in the country, so the writer went to where there is antisemitism and not elsewhere. It's bad journalism, but also just what happens nowadays.
I believe there’s a crisis of antisemitism, and it was on the march long before Hamas attacked Israel. Cultural Marxism in the form of DEI has been creating this monster for more than a decade. Should the writer have waited until antisemitic beliefs were the norm across the US to call it out?
Antisemitism should always be opposed. But (a) consulting the actual data on it and (b) balanced reporting instead of mere advocacy would have been a good idea, IMO.
I will continue to point out that the solution for all of this is the same as the solution The Bobs came up with for Milton Waddams in ‘Office Space’.
Fix the glitch.
Just make it so they won’t be receiving a paycheck anymore. All of this can be fixed overnight by someone with the balls to turn off all of their funding. All of this shit collapses back down to reading and math if all they have is state funding.
Fix the glitch.
Oh and when all of the useless college-educated administrators and educators and compliance regulatory blah blah blah parasite sacks of shit who don’t do anything…….when they lose their paychecks, housing prices will go back to normal.
Oh and housing prices will return to normal also when the pukes at Black Rock and other financial scams are taxed to the max for owning private homes. What the hell is Wall St doing buying private homes? Make them divest and tax their profits at 90%.
I've worked in the institutional investment world. I won't call them parasites. The boards of public and union pension funds have one incentive only: maximize the value of the fund so they can fund the pensions. No different than any organization with a mission and agenda. Just like you and me.
Oh yes I understand. What I’m saying is the primary reason they have trillions of dollars to manage is because of parasitism on the part of the people giving them the money to invest. Would have to go through case-by-case obviously but government pensions, for example, are pure parasitism.
I believe that *most* pension funds were required by law to make investment choices with maximizing return as the sole criteria, but I've read that states - liberal ones, are passing laws that now allow ESG criteria to be used. Notably to divest in energy/fossil fuel industry that has provided reliable returns, but is not in line with the new green agenda.
And other states have responded to that by banning those policies. Reportedly Vanguard drew back sharply on its push for ESG investments. And reportedly the Larry Fink has pulled the term from BlackRocks literature and presentations. But in my opinion the folks worried about how Musk spends his money should be really concerned about how Fink is using other people's money. We all should.
I’ve heard Rick Rieder on CNBC regularly and he seems like a nice guy doing his job well. Larry Fink not so much but again Blackrock is more a symptom.
I’m sure they have funds from entities I would support but I doubt they’d have trillions and move markets without the parasitic sources of funds.
No you and I have a variety of missions and agendas. And morals and ethics. We are complex creatures without the luxury? curse? short-sightedness? of being a single issue entity. Time to put the complex organisms capable of reason and evolution back in control.
Worse I think, BlackRock is using its position as majority shareholder of strategic companies to seize control of boards. And anyone who thinks corporate dollars do not already , or is VERY close, to control of American elections is very, very uninformed.
I really can't see that. Heck, Yanks and Rebs didn't even talk the same, much less live the same places. The differences are possibly deeper, but the entities are no more identifiable or separable than are the constituents of concrete.
Of course Yanks and Rebs lived in the same areas and spoke the same language. The US was a tiny place. Families were divided. Brothers against brothers. It was horrific.
You do not want to get into a discussion of the War Between the States with me. I have strong opinions and you would be here all night. I do not know how old you are but my grandparents, both of whom I knew, were born in 1886 and 1893 and I had great-uncles I knew who were older. So I have heard the lore, or at least some of it, from the source. There were Union sympathizers down South and Confederate sympathizers up North. Most oc the south was not suitable for plantations. Much of it is hilly and much of it is coastal. So there were many southerners who had nothing to do with plantations. Do you realize that northern financiers financed slavery? Do you know northern shipping companies transported much of the cotton overseas? Do you know cotton was the principal US export back then? It was far from simple.
While I very much appreciate this in theory, if I remember correctly didn’t Milton ultimately burn the entire place down? Not sure the response would be much different here.
We must recapture or government and train kids on the constituional and federalist papers. Teach truth about Israel history existed before 1940. Teach the bible, a lot of good history their. Israel was a British colony and Jews were invited by the UN. Many bought their homes. Apartheid? What about Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, ..... How many Jews are in those governments? There are large numbers of Arab muslins living and working peacefully in Israel. We must teach truth. America was not built by slaves. Most did not own salves, many came after slavery. Do we teach about those that came to the plains states and lived in dirt huts and battle weather and storms to build the nation? We need truth in education rather than lies to capture power. The educational agenda of the left is for evil takeover. That is why they fear school choice.
it starts in the colleges, especially schools of education, which leads those radicalized to teach their students what they learned. Teachers are taught to be activists and "mold young minds," instead of actually educating students. I worked on college campuses for 15 years and my sister is the product of the Progressive takeover of schools of education, I've seen it all first hand.
I agree schools themselves are not the original source but the schools highlighted in this article are absolutely tools thereof. Which is stunning to me. As is the attitude of the Jews interviewed as the victims thereof. Not one what did I do to usher this in? Was I so tolerant, loving and kind that I tolerated and welcomed those who hate me and seek my destruction? And why am I afraid to confront it, even within myself? Talk about martyrdom.
"The first time I heard about Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, did I say 'wait a minute! This is just pitting groups of people together over perceived power dynamics! This is completely contrary to a free society that protects individual rights! How long until Jews are the oppressor class?' Or did I just nod my head and feel the warm progressive fuzzies, because as we all know, conservatives are all Nazis?"
It can but in recent years it’s part of the curriculum. Also promoted by leftist leaning social media. That has an enormous impact on youth here in the USA.
I was just reading about the story of Jacob and Esau. With Jacob being the father of the 12 Tribes of Israel, we forget that Jacob DECEIVED HIS FAMILY to get his brother's inheritance. Not only did he use deception on his own father, he dug down and LIED TO HIS FATHER when asked.
Questions that come to mind are:
1) How is this in anyway positive or a manner that we should praise?
This is a fairly superficial summary of the story. Jacob buys his birthright from his brother, who doesn’t care about it. He also gets blessed by his father after the “theft”. His mother is the one who tells him to do it and she also, unlike his father, had a direct prophecy from god in the text about how the younger would supplant the older. Finally- the echoes of the deception haunt him for much of his adult life and he has to face the consequences (deception by his father in law) until he can make amends. That is an important lesson. But more importantly: The power of Jewish scripture is not that it is simplistic or moralistic; it is complex and demands debate, reflection, humility, and faith — the seeds of wisdom. Laban tries to take advantage of Jacob’s fissure from his family and ends up facing the consequences of losing his daughter’s trust and love. If anything, this story should warn against hyper simplistic moralizers trying to profit off a foreign conflict.
Correct. Rebecca knew that Esau was not worthy to get the blessing that meant he would be the progenitor of the future nation of Israel. She acted in the best interest of her family.
Imagine a modern retelling, where she’s the sassy, smart wife who cooks up a plan to deceive her bumbling husband who’s partial to the dumb frat boy/jock son, in order to benefit the smart, sensitive bookish son. She’d get a resounding “YOU GO, GIRL!” from all the progressives.
Hey Elizabeth, so that's my point when Jacob hammered down on his deception by now lying to Isaac. So many questions arise as to: 1) why did God tell his wife the prophecy vs telling the father Isaac?
Totally agree these stories are complex and demand debate -- which is what we are doing now :) -- but the fact remains that deception was the factor which started this whole thing and that deception has created a spiral of turmoil since that day (e.g., deception by his father in law and so forth)
Saying deception was “the factor that started this whole thing” is hypersimplistic and itself quite deceptive. What whole thing? Judaism? Israel? Our patriarchs are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We didn’t start with Jacob or his stealing Esau’s blessing. You could say that overcoming jealousy, rivalry, and family strife — radically powerful healing and wisdom — “started this whole thing”. Sibling rivalry is rife in the Torah (Cain and Abel etc) and it is only in Jacob’s children that we stop seeing the people divide among siblings and all his children form the nation. You could argue that Jacob’s deception and the way it severed his family taught the wisdom of experience of consequences, demanded of him bravery to repair his family when he meets Esau again, and taught him to apologize and make amends (as he does to Esau). These acts of forgiveness, apology, unity, repair, embracing diversity of tribes within one people “started this whole thing”
Although I am a big believer in the spinning a tangled web when we practice to deceive thing I am going to have to revisit it in light of your position. But in response to why Sarah instead of Isaac, I think He speaks to all of us, some listen, some don't. So maybe Isaac just did not listen.
This is a typical example that demonstrates why one must study the Oral Torah -- the lexicon of the Written Torah, both handed down from antiquity. The lexicon (Oral Torah) was redacted during the first five centuries CE to preserve it.
Rebecca (Rivka) orchestrated her husband's deception, recognizing from her twins' gestation, as Shem (still living) explained to her, that the younger was the rightful heir of Abraham's legacy. The wicked Esau repudiated this inheritance preferring a bowl of lintels.
You’re confusing the birthright and the patriarchal blessing. The deception with the goat skins took place over the blessing.
As for the birthright, Esau willingly sold it to Jacob for a bowl of lentils. Do you think someone so short-sighted as to throw away his future financial security to satisfy his immediate appetite was worthy to be the next patriarch and builder of the people?
But Hamas, the current battle, is with the descendants of Ishmael. This is an existential conflict, where there will never be a two-state co-existence solution. Peace will require the descendants of Ishmael repenting. It will take a profoundly open revelation of God for this.
May I guess that you’re not the youngest child in your family? If that is the case, maybe you never noticed that many folk/fairy tales feature the youngest son as hero. In this instance, the Torah needed to explain why the tradition of primogeniture was broken
Hahaha - Yep Grace, I'm not the youngest, but you're exactly right. I've always wondered why the younger was always favored. To me, there's some contradictions here. For example, youngest seems to win out, but the oldest deserves the birthright.
Why not just start giving the birthright to the youngest? lol
That may well be the influence of the patriarchy. In my experience good fathers are devoted to their children but especially the eldest. I think because the birth of the first child is such and eye-opening, mind-opening experience. Whereas you know what to expect with the subsequent children.
This is part of the reason Mohammed believed that the promises of God were to the Arab people but were stolen from them by Ismael and then Esau.
That flies in the face of scripture. Abraham and Sarah began to lose faith that they would bear a child who would become this great nation. Ishmael was told by the angel who met him and his mother in the desert that he would also be a father to a great nation but that they would live and die by the sword. Fast forward a few thousand years and oila, the prophet rewrites the Hebrew Scriptures with some big reversals and you have a murderous cult that kills tens of thousands of people for the crime of having a different faith.
The promises of God were to Abraham and his son, Isaac. Esau forfeited his blessing for a bowl of food. Jacob tried to make things right with his brother even though he exemplified a higher degree of integrity, responsibility and worked diligently to free himself and his sons from his derelict father in law.
Now if you don’t believe in the Bible, then I guess none of it should matter. But if you do then understand that the will of God was fulfilled in both Isaac and Jacob (Israel). Jesus (Yeshua) was a devout Jew who came as per the promises of God to provide atonement once and for all to anyone who would accept it. I think that if God had wanted Esau to receive his fathers blessing, God would have interceded centuries before Jesus arrived. Jacobs sons became the twelve tribes of Israel.
Imma go with God on this, not Allah, a name the ancient Arab tribes attributed to a moon deity.
Coincidence that the crescent moon is the symbol of Islam?
Holy shit. You read a Bible story. Guess what. There is a lot of deception in Genesis. So what? Do you think the Joos are deceiving you? Go rot in hell antiSemite
You left off WESTPORT CT. A town where I have a home, raised my kids and of which I am now deeply ashamed. There was a November schoolboard election where Democrats won all three open seats. Against two decent parents who wanted to end the leftist equity agenda.
And now the BOE is mum and can't summon up the courage to oppose rampant anti-Semitism. I am publicly calling for the sacking of the School Superintendent and the resignation of the entire BOE. This is beyond shameful.
Bruce, was everything legitimate with the election? IMO lax election practices in local races are putting some candidates at a disadvantage. Perhaps all was well in Westport, but after 2020, we can’t assume that our elections are free and fair. Regardless, the story of Westports BOE is playing itself out around the country. Thankfully you are bold enough to call it out.
Local elections are pretty legit. What was NOT legit was the smear campaign against the Republicans,, led by the school tool moms, who called them extremists for opposing the leftist DEI initiatives that had been instituted by the School Board and Superintendent. One can only imagine the howls of outrage if you substituted a black kid for the Goldberg's boy and replaced the death camps with plantations and slavery taunts.
Same with my town. Liberals become obsessed with getting on school boards after 2020. If a conservative runs for office, they're labeled a racist, transphobe or book banner.
It also happens when the Federal Government took over the education system. The cost of education went up, and the quality went down. The indoctrination continues.
it's not just in Progressive enclaves where this is happening. My buddy is in Colorado and one of his kids' teachers (elementary school) told him "it's best they not celebrate Hanukah" and even recommended they not bring "Jewish" food to school, for their own safety. He works at a prestigious liberal arts college and has been the victim of repeated harassment and threats, even by the Title IX director who told him he is not entitled to protection from such harassment and threats because he's a "colonizer." Yep, the people whose job is the protect staff and students are leading the charge to harass them.
And the reason progressives keep getting elected is that "the academy’s pied-piper hold on the ambitious young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life. And an Academia-Media Complex - a feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM – has softened up enough of what used to be called ‘the workers’ to keep the Progressive show on the road." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
"As soon as I opened this article, I thought to myself, “I BET the example schools in this piece are all going to be from ultra-progressive urban areas in cobalt blue states.” Sure enough, we got midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, Santa Anna, San Francisco, Queens, with mentions of New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota"
I live in mpls, How Blue is it? On the City Council the opposition party is The Green Party.
It’s not leftism per se. Antisemitism lies at the heart of Islam. But there is some hope that more American Leftists who support the Democrat Party might wake up. Today on Fox News there was a clip of Alec Baldwin of all people taking on the ignorant pro Hamas protestors. He was wisely accompanied by body guards.
I suppose it depends on your definition of "leftism." I define it as an ideology of intersectional power dynamics wherein group identity is primary and life is perceived as a struggle for power between various collectives. Anyone who implicitly or explicitly behaves within the dictates of that ideology is a leftist. It's not simply "someone on the left." (on the left *of what,* exactly?). If that's your definition, then I could be considered a leftist.
I sincerely hope that what you say about American Leftists waking up is true. You do see isolated moments of normalcy and positive surprises, such as Baldwin and other famous leftists suddenly talking sense. However, I suspect most of them don't really think in terms of principles and thus, are only reacting to an isolated situation that "feels wrong," without any integration of that feeling into their wider political worldview. If in a year from now the antisemitism dies down but the world in general is just as left-dominated, the Baldwins of the world will be going on TV and social media to espouse collectivist progressive nonsense like nothing happened.
WWII did nothing of the sort -- no atheists in fox holes and all that; nonetheless,. the"Ivy Leagues" and many others still have quotas. And the list of otherwise "greats" who were antisemitic is endless -- you can look it up.
Oh Casey I am not a fan of elites or "the greats". And I think you misunderstood me, WWII cured WASPs, at least regular people WASPs, of anti-semitism. Those you describe as "the greats" I do not give credit for their faux faith. I think an altogether different entity has their allegiance.
Maybe so; regular people are not readily measurable. The most obvious data point is Mar a Lago baring Jewish members until Mr Trump bought it. I suppose that's irregular people? (Grin)
Well said. And perhaps, stop doing business with brands that promote this progressive non-sense. There is a new thing coming called the Red Referral network (don’t know much details just heard it in passing) but it’s supposed to be kinda like a Rotary Club where you can refer people to other businesses that hold conservative values.
You don't see any way out? You just wrote it. The other Americans.
The article is childish pablum. Noses? Virtually everybody in the Middle East has that nose. A Semite is a Semite is a Semite.... Free Press, you're dredging in the floatsam for writers like this.
Have you no understanding of history? Those pictures are almost exact copies used by the Nazis to dehiumanize Jews before WWII. To see something like that in public schools is unbearably chilling. It is one of the first steps to legitimizing pogroms and then genocide of the Jews.
I liked the article. I would have no knowledge of this otherwise. But I am with you on the noses. How about everybody just embrace what they have. Love yourself. That makes others' disparagement powerless. That applies to all physical characteristics.
Your comment has nothing to do with my comment. Virtually all people original to the Middle East have the Semitic "hooked" nose, (see Osama Bin Laden), which denotes the absurdity of the article's author, to mention it.
There is also the fact that this is what you tend to get when you don't pay teachers. You get people from the bottom of the barrel who want to be teachers because they have a political axe to grind. And you get districts desperate to hire them.
This is also a phenomenon stemming from the war on the USA declared by islamist organizations (literal declarations of war) and the invasion of islamists. CAIR and several other organizations have scared secular muslims into silence and conformance. They preach (rant) and harangue weekly in those cookie cutter mosques built across the USA with Saudi and Qatari money.
Jewish, Christian and unaffiliated communities are going to have to band together to fight this type of racist and antisemitic nonsense by organizing, showing up and raising hell. There is no other way that this indoctrination will stop in our schools, but it goes well beyond calling out blatant antisemitic teachings and language.
DEI at its core is antisemitic and racist and needs to be smashed into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind. These teachers are poisoning the minds of our youth and should be fiercely and unmercifully called out for who they are and demand that they are removed from our schools.
The Jewish community and leadership must be the ones that lead this effort, otherwise christians and unaffiliated won't feel the urgency of this existential threat IMHO.
This article is just appalling. I can’t believe the level of hatred and antisemitism. Yet my Jewish neighbors who believe the narrative worry about the far right and never said a word against the crt curriculum in our schools. I hope they are waking up because we do need to band together and fight this.
I know. I checked in on some Jewish neighbors last month, and they went on about “white supremacy neo-Nazis” being given license to hate. And I almost choked. I don’t say anything to that, but I problem should have said, “Interesting. I actually haven’t seen much hate coming from those types people. Where are you seeing that?” And in head I was saying “white supremacists? You mean white progressive liberals?”
There are competing strains of ‘White Supremacy’ as defined by and practiced in leftthink. In their world the WS beliefs of right wing extremists-more commonly known to them as Republican voters-are driven by hatred of minorities.
The more nuanced WS beliefs of the leftist elitists is that minorities are too dumb and helpless to survive without their help. They like to call this ‘compassion’.
“The Jewish community and leadership must be the ones that lead this effort”
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If they do they need to have a tight screening process to exclude the 70% of American Jews who vote for Democrats. Democrats ARE the ones who caused all of this.
So if that 70% of the Jewish population doesn’t apologize sincerely and show that they are willing to reverse their ideology totally, then they should be treated equally and fairly and exactly the same as the rest of the Democrats: as the problem.
Democrats caused this.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if many in that 70% were smiling as the Orthodox Jews got attacked first because they hold them in contempt the same way elites dislike rural old-fashioned people)
Jews began voting Democrat because they sincerely believed that the dems champion the common man. Trust me--some of them are starting to wake up. And I, a former Dem voter who woke up in 2008, stand here to welcome them to the right side.
I picked up on it long ago. Chana picked up on it. And there’s (or at least was) Jexit. Hopefully this is the kick in the pants that’s needed to wake people up.
Most Democrat ideology is driven by character and personality disorders so I doubt there will be an awakening. Narcissists and megalomaniacs are far more likely to just exploit this to benefit themselves.
Most likely Israel will use this as a reason to get rid of Netanyahu and they will go right back to trying to reenact Sodom and Gomorrah while holding hands and singing ‘Imagine’ with people who own swords.
In the US we will probably put some antisemitism advisers in place and let the universities go right back to doing communism that primarily targets whites and Christians.
Or… given Geert Wilder’s win in Denmark, Javier Milei’s in Argentina, as well as other conservative, newly elected leaders, Netanyahu will survive as PM and his coalition will get stronger. Here’s hoping.
More unvarnished truth. Truth hurts but there it is. Just as our Constitution is not a suicide pact, our Jewish friends need to wake up to the fact that Democrat leftism is a suicide pact. With Satan himself.
the turning point for me was Obama's speech in Egypt. I could feel he wasn't what he campaigned on... and it's been downhill ever since. I'm a moderate and would love to find a stable home... was ready to vote Trump but now he's talking like a nazi too... so it's not all hearts and flowers on the republican side either. but yes- I take your point and you're not wrong.
Please consider that your ‘stable home’ as a free person is to always aim to restrict and kneecap the government at all costs with whatever is at hand.
Currently the best thing you have is Republicans, who are mostly failed morons.
That Cairo speech was nothing short of treasonous.
Vote for Trump, though. Don’t buy into the “he’s a Nazi” stuff. Look at what his policies were as president and how he made good on every campaign promise. Everything he did was good for this country, its people and its allies. Put aside your feelings about his personality (I’m not crazy about it either). Many of us will be right beside you.
thats what I'd do if I have to. I'm a huge Nikki Haley fan- really hoping she continues gathering steam. I've liked her from before Trump was a thing- she also has a history of delivering and I love her simplicity and clarity. I watched how tough she was while ambassador to the UN- amazing backbone without all the drama.
I agree with the battle, but what is the alternative narrative that those battling are for? Let's come up with a series of buzzwords, like responsibility, Merit, and Character, to battle DEI - It's the collective communist agenda mixed with a racial worldview. To complain about what they are thinking is not enough; to offer another set of values will put them in the position of attacking the unassailable and begin the process of defanging them into irrelevance. Thanks for the great post.
I'm also starting to tell my leadership how asinine it is to be talking about "studies show DEI leads to innovation" but when we ask for the time, tools, and people we need to innovate, leadership explicitly says no.
Important point, we can’t fight for a vague notion of “how America uses to be.” But I think we can define some critical values that are being attacked from the left, things like merit and hard work. Integrity and honesty. That HOW we act matter, the ends don’t always justify the means. Self-control and personal responsibility. Personal agency. Values of dialogue and debate. Valuing religion, valuing the rule of law. Etc.
I agree. I want change, evolution, and innovation. I think that is/was the American way and made America great. But I want it to incorporate the past so as to have consistency in the transition. I do not want idiots who have never worked or produced a damn thing "reimagining" social, environmental, or scientific systems. Imagination is important. But what is imagined needs to be subjected to the scientific method or something akin to verify its feasibility. I think a lot of this has come out of the climate and preservation of animal species hysteria. This is so stupid. This planet is not static. It has never been static. It is not a good idea to try to make it so. And it is the height of arrogance to insist on it. Now we have Rulers - Rulers not leaders - who think they can mandate policies like green energy not because they understand it and have insight, but because some egg head somewhere imagined it was a good idea.
Hahaha, interesting observation about the climate panic. I do find it odd that many atheists are ardent environmentalists. There have mass extinctions throughout all of Earth history, and if people are only another animal and there is no God giving us purpose, then why do I have to take responsibility for another species decline? Isn’t that just survival of the fittest? Makes no sense.
No it does not make sense. I sometimes feel like I live in a world run by lab puppies - high energy, all over the place, sweet as can be, very little knowledge. At least with lab puppies though knowledge does come later. But my sense is that everybody needs something to believe in. Some people believe in a deity or deities so they can shrug off/accept unpleasantness by thinking that the deity is or deities are in control. But if what you believe in is humanity then you think you can and should have an impact on the unpleasantness. Thst the existence of unpleasantness is our fault and/or responsibility. Our world, not the world at large, but our species' world is a human world. Humans should strive to better it but should also understand that there are things unknown and unknowable (quantum computing notwithstanding). Otherwise we have reached the end of our evolution and I do not like that notion. Because the condition at this time and place sucks.
That seems to be the thinking, but I find it completely backwards. Again, if no god exists, then we have no responsibility for anything, because we are just mammals. But if God of the Bible exists, then He gave us a responsibility to steward the Earth. Stewardship implies that it does not belong to us, so we have good reason to take care of it and all other species in it. (Note that humans have been selfish and many “Christians” have grossly misunderstood this mandate to me we can do whatever we want with earth’s resources as if we own them. No, when you have stewardship over something you take more care of it because you recognize it’s not yours and you will have to bear responsibility to the owner one day for how you took care of the things being stewarded to you.) I suppose if you are agnostic, believe in some god but that god doesn’t demand anything from you, then you would be stuck in this place where you have responsibility for the unpleasantness of the world because god is distant, but no hope that God will one day put it right.
Thank you for expressing that. Its the values we fight for that will pusuade and put their empty and useless positions on full display which a strong majority will reject.
You’re on the right track Evan. Regardless of faith,we need to step up and call out evil where we see it. As the old saying goes, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
The anti-Jewish indoctrination won’t stop unless Muslim immigration is stopped. Muslim immigration won’t stop unless Republicans are elected in sufficient numbers to end Muslim immigration.
I cannot put a whole lot of faith and trust in Republicans. They have ignored education my whole lifetime and when they have gotten involved they have been unwitting dupes helping support this crap that we are talking about here.
I have a faint glimmer of hope that we are seeing a new generation of Republicans. Every time you see one demonized - Gaetz, Green, Johnson, etc. - do your own research. Do NOT just but what the Town Crier is selling.
There are decent Muslims. Some do speak out - Hirsi for example. And we need those people because Muslims worldwide number what 7 billion? But I do not know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
For what two weeks now? Before that she was a long-time atheist. I am unwilling to condemn every one of the earth's 7 billion Muslims because to do so would make me no different than the radical Islamists. And you are right it is about ideaology, not theology. That is true of every religion. IMO radical Islamic ideologies- Wahabbism, et al - is inconsistent with western values. But many Muslims have successfully acclimated here. I think that is the trick - do you want to come here and remain insular and distinct? Or do you want to come here and be parted of the melting pot?
CRT & DEI are part of the problem but not sure what you can do about the “regressive” Tim Wises of this world. Anti semitism is a terrible problem amongst non Jews but hearing Jews like Tim Wise talk you don’t need any enemies.
I was meditating this morning and felt clearly how anger dispels anxiety. If you can find another person who is willing to be angry with you at a third person, then you not only no longer feel fear, you feel connected and empowered. But only as long as that anger is shared, directed and expressed.
Jews have long made a good target for this sort of irrational anger for several reasons.
First, for a long time they were blamed for Christ's crucifixion, never mind that Christ himself was a Jew also, as were all his followers, who en masse created what we call Christianity.
Second, they have always been a minority EVERYWHERE, until the nation of Israel was created by the UN. It's much easier to bully the relatively weak. And for the cowardly--and remember I am arguing anger is a means of dispelling fear--the weak make the most satisfying targets.
Finally, in the modern era, Jews have been unwilling to fit as blocks, as a bloc, into a programmatic, childish oversimplification of the world--also based on using anger to dispel anxiety, which I will call Triangulation, in one aspect of the term--which sees all groups as Oppressed or Oppressor. Jews were the targets and victims of the largest mass murder in modern history. They should be the Oppressed. Yet they are vastly overrepresented in every field where motivation and intelligence matter.
Since all this scapegoating is irrational, so too are the reactions against modern Jews. On an unconscious level, we are simply reverting to something old and well tested culturally. We are engaging in atavistic hatreds that in the end cannot be prohibited, but for which the only solution is emotional growth and social maturity.
Given that nearly every force in our culture is causing people to regress into childish petulance and helplessness, we should not wonder that Jew hatred has come back into the very places where it should be most alien: groups who call themselves Liberal.
I am Jewish and have a pretty good anti semitism antenna. None of this comes as a surprise and has been going on for decades. We see the results at places Iike Penn Harvard and other colleges. The indoctrination of course also comes from other sources as well including many politicians. But this is not just about Jews and Israel. The left as exemplified by these teachers and schools also hates America and the kids are being force fed that hatred .
Their hate is their solution to an emotional problem: how to manage anxiety without growing up.
Individualism, which judges all individuals AS individuals and has no truck with or patience for collective judgements, is the creed of a mature, individuated society.
Collectivism is its inverse. It has reality distortions that are clinically schizophrenic, rejects individual moral judgement and agency, and acts to infantilize the whole society so that all members are reduced to the overall immaturity of the leaders of the criminal syndicate that seeks control.
Nazism was a Collectivist ideology. The German people were a monolithic bloc. So too were the Jews. So too were gays, those judged mentally defective, Slavs, Gypsies, and others. Everybody had their slot on what were literal hierarchies.
Communism is a Collectivist ideology, but for a hierarchy it substitutes just two classes: the elite, and everyone else. The elites have a hierarchy of sorts--a constantly shifting one--but the "Everyone Else" is supposed to be exactly equal, poor, and miserable. The whole emotional energy of Communism comes from the thrill the elites get from the relative advantages they enjoy.
But in both cases individuals disappear, both figuratively and literally. Children do not want adults in the room disrupting their psychotic delusions.
Big Picture, the real underlying problem in our nation is our pervasive childishness. Most Americans never grow up. It was interesting to me that Huxley actually described this in his Brave New World, when he said that people were expected to act as adults at work, and children everywhere else. That's pretty much American society today.
They also sexualized their children early, although the possibility of pedophilia--which in my view is extreme immaturity coupled with the sexual instinct--seems not to have occurred to him.
Well said. I do wonder how we can leverage collective action (when needed) without becoming a mob.
Sometimes collective action is necessary - for example, in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, workers were paid subsistence wages to work grueling and often deadly factory shifts. Those abuses were addressed by unionization and government intervention - ie collective action.
We as a public might (*might*) need to employ similar strategies if AI is used to automate vast swaths of working- and middle-class jobs.
“Jews have long made a good target for this sort of irrational anger for several reasons.
First, for a long time they were blamed for Christ's crucifixion, never mind that Christ himself was a Jew also, as were all his followers, who en masse created what we call Christianity.”
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I will take ‘Explanations that do not account for even 0.00001% of this’ for $500, Alex.
This reminds me of how DHS says the Oath Keepers are the primary threat to America.
If you look at history, say the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, it was certainly highly relevant for a thousand years or more.
Most people don't know this, but much of the Spanish Inquisition was devoted to tracking down and discovering Jews who remained in Spain, said they converted, but were lying. There was actually a whole drama with sausages that should be fiction but isn't. Good Spaniards were expected to make and eat pork sausages and would often hang them on balconies or windows for curing. Anyone who didn't have pork sausages would be suspected, so observant Jews (some actually were lying) had to make do with chicken (or veal: I don't remember) sausages that looked the same.
The word ghetto was first used with respect to Jews in Italy, where I think the motivations were the same.
“Most people don't know this, but much of the Spanish Inquisition………”
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Most people don’t know this but this is not the Spanish Inquisition.
This is a communist revolution caused by Democrats who hate God and Jesus.
Going back to the ‘root causes’ and pointing at Christians is a very Democraty thing to do and it is abundantly clear we need to stop doing all of the Democrat things right away.
We need to build a wall and also build a trebuchet to launch Democrats over the wall.
There's actually a pretty strong comparison to be made between the Spanish Inquisition and Communism. Dostoevsky of course made it in the Brothers Karamozov.
Childishness is the enemy. Childishness is either/or thinking. Childishness is unhelpful--and obviously the polar opposite of the best direction if the best direction is adulthood, as I argue it should be.
Not all people who voted for Joe Biden hate God and Jesus. Many do, perhaps most, but not all. Are there awful narratives swirling around all our college campuses, and most primary and secondary schools? Yes, I think there are. Is violence the answer? No, I don't think it is.
As I have said here before, Murray Bowen offered a potential template for dealing with all this: mature people need to stand their ground. They need to stay connected with the hysterics without either fighting them directly, or withdrawing, and all while continuing to speak obvious truths as clearly and plainly and as often as they can.
In this process, which he witnessed on a micro scale in the families of schizophrenics, who were his main interest as a psychiatrist, what happens is the childish people fight back. They struggle HARD to get the more adult person to back down and join them in their childishness. This action, obviously, is the defining trait of authoritarian Collectivist regimes.
But IF the people who are standing as adults continue to stand as adults, the winds eventually blow themselves out, and the WHOLE SYSTEM advances in maturity.
This is what we want. Civil wars are awful, and when one exhausted party or the other can claim victory, it is never worth what was paid. Not at least by those who paid it. Peace and negotiation and ADULTING are always the best path. Violence is easy to start, but very, very, very difficult to stop.
Even if Christians did the first communist revolution and the Spanish Inquisition was just like this (false) the only reason to introduce that into the discussion is standard Hermeticist wizardry; erasing distinctions and universalizing blame and confusing the subject so we can have a robust discussion dominated by covert feminized manipulators.
Democrats are at fault. This is pagan collectivist utopianism. Actual Christianity is 0.0% involved and 0.0% at fault. It is the opposite of that. These exact forces have also infiltrated and corrupted Christianity but that just proves my point further.
Blaming “the Democrats” is in my view already a form of Collectivism. They are not all lost, and most of them seem to genuinely think they are defending the weak and that their people are righting wrongs
Those people can be reached, in my view, and that is a worthwhile effort make harder by blanket demonization.
If you want to talk Democrat LEADERSHIP, and complicit media and social media moguls, we agree.
But outside a core elite, and the perhaps ten percent of our population that is fully hypnotized, most Democrats are just IGNORANT, and ignorance is cured by patient teaching.
Our nation is in serious danger, on many fronts, but fear never makes anybody smarter. Which, of course, is why the internet has little else.
But while readily admitting my many failures in this regard, I still believe patience and calm remain our best strategies.
I will add that the history Christian anti-semitism is long and nearly ubiquitous. It was a feature of many members of the hard Right as recently as the 60’s and seemingly exists in a diluted form in some places even now.
Today, MOST Christians have evolved past all of that and en masse tend to be the strongest supporters of Israel, but the history should nit be ignored.
I agree mostly with your “adulting” thesis, however, by all accounts this approach does not appear to be working in Israel. When violence is imposed upon you, you have a choice to either use violence in return or perish. Millions went to their untimely and unjust deaths in the Nazi concentration camps because it was imposed upon them and the adults in Germany who knew better were intimidated into silence lest they and their family be executed as traitors. It was violence in the form of military operations against Nazi Germany that ended the madness. I fear it may be too late for the adulting approach here in America. Things are too far gone and will get much worse before they get better. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
Yes, violence is sometimes needed, but it is always a failure.
I had a friend long ago whose father was a more or less literal gangster, and he always told him “Violence is the last recourse of an exhausted mind.”
But even though “the Jews” never didi anything to anyone, Nazi propagandas of Collective Guilt convinced most Germans they had to attack “the Jews” in SELF DEFENSE.
This whole farce, of absurd charges, leveled at innocent—and even exemplary—people, is being waged now against pretty much all Americans who vote for any traditional American values, like free speech, equality before the law, and the sanctity of elections.
Yes--Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll paints a clear picture of how supercessionist theology led to the Holocaust in Europe. The difference is that the vast majority of the Christian/Western world saw the aftermath in the concentration camps and reconsidered their position.
Islam has never reconsidered its position. And while Jews did live more peacefully for centuries in Arab countries than their European brethren, post-1948 that changed radically because of a similar theological underpinning: the idea that no land ever occupied by Muslims should be surrendered to the infidel. This is at the heart of the Palestinian conflict. It is a religious war, not a land issue. The concurrent rise of radical Islam has been gasoline on the fire.
And here in this country, because of intersectionalism and other general idiocy, Muslims can never be wrong, lest someone think we’re blaming innocent Muslims for 9/11.
“Given that nearly every force in our culture is causing people to regress into childish petulance and helplessness...”
This really echoes my own conclusions about what we’ve been seeing since the 1960s, but with an incredible acceleration since Covid/Floyd. There was clearly a strong element of primal, childish rage (the terrible twos) to the 2020 “summer of love”. The recent societal prevalence of “dark triad” traits is also a form of childishness: children are naturally narcissistic and egocentric, and prone to “acting out” anger and frustration when things don’t go their way.
Tantrums have become widespread: on airplanes, on the streets, in the schools, and even in the halls of government. Like children, we lack self-control in our behaviors -- from the way we eat to the way we govern, from taking what we want when we want it (shoplifting, smash and grab) to physically lashing out whenever we are frustrated.
Never mind the “blue pill” or “red pill” -- we need a maturity pill!
"If you can find another person who is willing to be angry with you at a third person, then you not only no longer feel fear, you feel connected and empowered."
Excellent insight. It applies when it's literally two people angry at a third person, and at every scale up to billions.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Because the teacher was Jewish, it feels like society doesn’t care. If there was a black teacher and students tried to corner her and beat her up because she’s black, you know very well how different the situation would be. There’d be riots. People would be fired. There’d be all sorts of sensitivity trainings.”
I have. Pre-MLK Jim Crow.
And you know what shocks me the most is that the liberalism which stopped that ended up as DEI and now open attacks on Jews clearly supported by public officials.
I’ve never heard Jews referred to as colonizers and Palestinians as the oppressed until all this new leftist lingo came to be. I won’t be surprised if a dictionary comes out with their new terminology that the rest of us are forced to use.
And as a Christian Middle Eastern former teacher, I’m appalled at the actions of Sirianna Aboud and those who awarded her. Who are these people??
What bothers me the most is how intellectually lazy these terms are. The subject is much more complex and reducing it to these lazy terms cheats the students.
Ms. Aboud is part of the problem, but the lazy so called professors who taught her this are the real source of this simplistic world view. They are lazy, echo chamber sycophants. The universities that enable them should be held accountable.
I’m definitely familiar with their bs language over the past several years, but I suppose we never had reason to label Jews and Palestinians til the past couple months.
LOL - I had to google this, I may have to buy the book (unless the spineless publisher stopped printing it). Maybe abebooks.com - always a good source.
But who would have thought that a terrorist attack in Israel could result in a cultural earthquake in American?
I maintain that DEI is intellectually lazy. It is built on a foundation of victimhood. The damage to the young people who have been educated by it is incalculable.
But one prominent example of its poor results is the CEO of Harvard sitting in front of Congress and trying to excuse her feckless leadership as a matter of "context".
The past four years have been strange to say the least but this intellectual decline started decades ago. It’s just now trickling into primary schools.
Liberty sacrificed for security leaves you with neither. Life is risky business and death is certain no matter how hard we try to escape it. Of course it’s best to do what is reasonable to live long and prosper though it should not be at the expense of inhibiting others from doing the same. At least that’s just my humble opinion.
You are correct. The problem comes when weak leaders convince people that "prospering" is a zero sum game. It's not. When everyone has the incentive to produce, everyone benefits. But, of course, anything worth having takes a lot of effort. (Someone famous said that better than I can, ah...but senior moment.)
This is so awful and sad. Now The Free Press needs to do a report about how this isn't happening in Florida schools, because Ron Desantis put a stop to it, well before October 7th. Yet, I've only seen criticism of him in The Free Press. See below for the most recent legislation passed in April 2023.
“In 2019, I had the opportunity here in Israel to sign into law groundbreaking legislation to root out antisemitism from our public education system, establishing Florida as a leader in protecting religious liberty,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Four years later, the threats faced by religious Americans of all faiths have evolved. Through this legislation, we are ensuring that perpetrators who commit acts of antisemitism and target religious groups or individuals will be punished.”
"HB 269 builds upon Governor DeSantis’ record of safeguarding the free exercise of religion in Florida by:
Prohibiting a person from intentionally dumping litter onto private property for the purpose of intimidating or threatening the owner, resident, or invitee of such property;
Prohibiting a person from willfully and maliciously harassing, threatening, or intimidating another person based on the person’s wearing or displaying of any indicia relating to any religious or ethnic heritage;
Creating a new prohibition against displaying or projecting, using any medium, an image onto a building, structure, or other property without the written consent of the owner of the building, structure, or property;
Creating a new trespass offense if a person who is not authorized, licensed, or invited willfully enters the campus of a state college or university for the purpose of threatening or intimidating another person, and is warned by the institution to depart and refuses to do so; and
Prohibiting a person from willfully and maliciously interrupting or disturbing any assembly of people met for the purpose of acknowledging the death of an individual."
I'm so thankful to live in the freest state in the nation, Florida. I'm so thankful to no longer live in least free city and state in the nation, NY, NY.
That’s a good start. I would also like the law to address other types of harassment that causes inconvenience and harm to the public, such as “protesters” cornering people at restaurants, or --especially -- harassing people at their homes.
I cannot envision a scenario where it is OK to scream and occupy my neighborhood because of something one of my neighbors may/may not have done! Ditto for disturbing all paying diners in a restaurant who have the bad luck to be present while someone these people don’t like is eating there.
Isn’t it odd that these techniques seem to be so much more prevalent on the left?
Absolutely. I was hoping some political adult in the room here in New York City would call out the National Guard during the George Floyd riots, and the pro-Hamas "Shut It Down for Palestine" makes me hope for the same -- a futile hope, I know.
Some people get to scrawl graffiti on our monuments and iconic buildings, break windows, clog our major thoroughfares and bridges, and disrupt the goings-on of hardworking citizens.
Some people have to be a bit more careful:
There's a nearby bar that very deliberately blasts its music out open doors all night despite complaints from neighbors and the CB. The bar owner seems to enjoy tormenting people who actually get up and go to work at 5:00 and six in the morning. Now, I'd like to break his windows, but I know I'd be caught and hauled in.
“Yet, I've only seen criticism of him in The Free Press.”
He and everyone else in the Republican Party and even Independents like RFK are just punching bags to TFP, with the exception of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger-both currently out of office. They continue to stroke Biden and Newsom to a nauseating degree. It’s Democrats or bust here. Don’t let them fool you into thinking otherwise.
I live in NJ an am becoming more and more interested in FL. Not least because of the weather. But also, too, the political climate. And the governance. I figure I can get used to the humidity eventually lol
Depressing reading. It just underscores that our public education system has become almost rotten to the core. School choice may be the most urgent cause the American people must pursue to begin to reverse the damage on so many fronts. School choice may indeed be the only way to save public schools from themselves. Once they have to actually compete for students, they may abandon brain-dead activism and try their hand at educating.
“51% of those aged between 18 and 24 years old stated that they believe the long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict would be for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians...". This did not happen overnight and it will take a generation or more to reverse into a minority view. It has to start with strict laws as enacted in Germany after WW2. Jews being scapegoated is very old and it seems to be an indicator of “bad” days coming. Is it the canary of another “empire” collapsing from within?
We have allowed our schools to be captured by leftists with predictable results. A generation of little Pavliks, hot to sell out their parents to the collective. We need to dig this madness out by its roots and burn all the malignant growth.
I saw the same poll. I took some hope - only some - from the fact that the numbers holding those radically anti-Israel views dropped significantly in the next group up. It could be respondents got less stupid the further they were removed from being in school or it may simply reflect that this sort of radicalism has really gone into overdrive in the last decade. Either way, your canary metaphor is apt.
In almost every poll on Israel, the numbers drop significantly with each successive age group. I see that as a clear indicator of how this indoctrination has crept into our schools over time.
Steve, I’ve seen these demographic breakdowns too, and I think the more accurate explanation is that the group who believes in the Holocaust and is pro-Israel, ie, those over age 65, are the people currently alive who were alive closest to the event. In other words, people in their 90’s had fathers and older brothers who fought in WW2 and were stationed in Europe and maybe even liberated one of the camps. People in their 80’s had family members with direct experience of same, heard it talked about at the kitchen table. People in their 70’s had parents who were teenagers during WW2, like my mother, whose father was a ships captain in the Merchant Marine and sailed across the Atlantic in convoys delivering materiel to the troops, dodging German submarines and watching their buddies get torpedoed and killed before their eyes. My mom told stories about the blackouts in New Orleans when they had to turn out all the lights in the city at night when they knew there were German subs in the Gulf of Mexico.
As you get younger, people in their 50’s and 60’s saw these things depicted in movies and books and heard them talked about. People now in their 40’s had little exposure and those in their 30’s and below, maybe no exposure at all. By the time you get to kids in high school and college, you’re lucky if they’ve read The Diary of Anne Frank and realized it was a true story. So yeah, the crazy school system is partly to blame, but more important is the loss of experiential knowledge that past generations had. The further away from the Holocaust we get, the harder it’s going to be to make people remember who would rather forget.
That probably has something to do with why younger groups are more susceptible to the indoctrination. That doesn't mean the indoctrination isn't happening.
I suspect that a lot of parents are unaware of all the things their children are taught at school. It's easiest and most comfortable to believe that kids are being taught pretty much the same things we were taught in school ourselves.
It was only when the Covid restrictions brought the classroom into the home, where parents could see and hear what was being taught, that many parents came to the realization that their children were being taught very different things than they had been themselves. Not just Common Core math and phonics-less reading, but "social justice" and "identity" education being built into every aspect of the curriculum.
A huge amount of damage was done before parents ever found out.
Not at all surprising that higher age groups see it differently. All it takes for these 18-24 yr old kids is to set foot in the world of adulthood where reality sets in and where they at some point are forced to grudgingly acknowledge the previous generations with whom they were arguing were much smarter than they thought.
Have you not been paying attention. This does not happen to any meaningful degree.
For 20 years people have been saying “wait until these college kids get to the real world” and now the “real world” is just a big college campus. Look at giant and boring corporations going full pronouns and land acknowledgment.
Stop thinking there is something or someone that is going to stop this for us. There isn’t. It requires work and diligence.
Here in the huge swathe of flyover country between the coasts, far removed from Cambridge, Stanford and other ‘hotspots of hatred and calls for genocide’ we have zero fear of chanting, sign waving, bullhorn wielding mobs of college students and their like minded professors driving us out of our homes and spreading fear across the country, as much as an increasingly paranoid TFP would like us to believe it could happen. They would be met with tremendous resistance. Much like when a handful of black men repelled a large mob of BLM protesters rolling up on their neighborhood, telling them to “get the f**k out” and to “go tear up your own neighborhood.” That’s what real adults do and they far outnumber the arrested development types.
Since becoming a US citizen in 2016, school choice has always been my #1 issue when it comes to who I vote for. During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden clearly stated that he was against school choice. Game over. Even though I wasn't a big fan of Trump I voted for him, and will do so again if that is the choice.
Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of young black men who graduate from CÁ public schools are functionally illiterate--but let’s concentrate on teaching them that they’re victims and nothing is ever their fault.
Well it seems like that might be part of the longer game plan. If they remain relatively uneducated they’ll be easier to manipulate. If they get taught how to think rather than what to think they might come to the wrong conclusions.
The War on Jews is akin to Nazi Germany invading Poland as a beta test for what the rest of the world will do. No one should be under the illusion that this stops with the Jews. It did not stop with Poland.
Put in a politically correct way, this is a war against western values. Put in a politically incorrect way, this is a war against whites. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is merely an opening salvo.
I understand and agree with the thrust of your argument, but I must quibble. It's not a war against "whites." As in white individuals. Not true.
It's a war against what they refer to as "whiteness." It's a shorthand for "cultural products of the Enlightenment." Anything that gave rise to Western civilization is the enemy. Case in point: all a black person has to do is *not* be progressive and s/he is cast into the same lot as those "far-right fascists." Hard-working Latinos who come to America, live their lives in peace, and *don't* vote for progressives?? They are the "Latin face of white supremacy." Any person of any skin color who does not spout fealty to intersectional leftism is the enemy. And what about all these white people who are carrying leftism forward? As long as they prostrate themselves and say the incantations and perform the correct rites and say the correct chants, they're in the club!
Thinking about this in terms of individual people is itself a faulty premise. This is about collectivist thinking.
I agree --in part. Without a doubt, this is a war against post enlightenment values, but it is also a war against White people. No matter how faithful an “ally” a White person may be, they are always outside the circle, and must constantly prove their fealty with ever-increasing burdens of obligation and sacrifice. And they can never overcome their skin color. There is no possible path to redemption.
They also don’t like Asians. Older Asians have been beaten up in the streets, especially during Covid and the media didn’t report it. And now the Left wants to get rid of tests for special schools bc. too many Asians pass.
It absolutely is a war against whites. They're starting with the Jews first, the weakest of the two "colonizers". Once whites are disarmed, they are next.
It's no longer a wacky conspiracy theory. It's happening in real time.
I think that if that is true it’s because most, but not all blacks, have been duped into thinking that they will then get their turn being the oppressors. What they are missing is that most anti-black racism in the world today comes from the MidEast and Asia. The west is the only place blacks have thrived.
Black slavery still exists in Islamic countries and the Chinese have always considered blacks to be subhuman.
If this is a war against western values, blacks, like Jews, have to choose sides. Sadly, most of the leadership of both groups have been co-opted so I don’t expect much help.
As a tactician I would substitute the word values for spiritual. I know many people who are not personally very religious but who strongly support JudeoChristian values. Tom Holland has written good books on that.
People conflate "spiritual" with "religious"; I use the word as "pertaining to the spirit or to a spirit".
Ideologies and human corporate powers behave like living things. I perceived them as lifelike, having spiritual agency.
When people regurgitate brainwashing like "systemic racism" and "social justice" they are not speaking with their own voice, but with the voice of a spirit they adopted.
What "ethnic identity" correlates with a ring in your nose? My 3rd daughter has a ring in her nose, but nobody else in the family does. Does that mean she's a different ethnicity, maybe not our child at all?
I have a nose ring, and that’s the only one of the three true about me. I think nose piercings are ubiquitous enough not to be a signifier of being infected by the woke mind-virus. Now, if you said artificially-colored hair, then you might be on to something… 😆
I have a nose stud. I’m 62 and staunchly conservative. So I think we can assume that nose piercings are too mainstream to indicate political affiliation. Since my hair is gray, I was thinking of dyeing it a fun color. With pink hair, a nose stud and my Stevie Nicks wardrobe, I wonder how many radical feminist groups I could infiltrate and subvert.
As recently as 5 years ago, I loved putting a streak of purple dye in my largely white hair. But wild hair colors have become too strongly associated with the mind-virus. Sadly, not planning to do that anymore.
You may believe they are ubiquitous. Heck, they may be, especially depending on where you live, but that doesn't mean that people don't think you lean a certain way based on it. Or that statistically there are more that have it and happen to also be left leaning.
Anecdotally (which I know is not evidence of anything) both my time in CO and now NC, nose rings seem to largely be a thing of the young and liberally minded. A tiny sample set would be an office in a small town. Only 2 women there have face piercings. Both are unabashedly liberal surrounded by conservative women with no piercings or non-human hair colors.
I find it interesting that several posts here seem to say "It isn't a liberal thing, because I also have a nose piercing, but wild hair colors? That this a lefty thing."
These things may in fact be purely cosmetic and have no statistical significance. Or there may be statistical significance but not correlation or there may be some link in general. None of those things should lean to individual judgements. But that isn't how humans work. Our brains like to simplify the world, not complicate it. So we make assumptions based on our limited observations. The news shows far more women with dyed hair and/or piercings for people on the left than right. Which unfortunately could mean that when people see those things, they make assumptions.
I was mostly kidding about the hair color, I once dyed my own hair green while simultaneously being a volunteer for the local Republican party. But that was in the 1990s! You may also be correct about regional differences. I live in a blue city in a red state, and my conservative Baptist church is full of pierced and tattooed folks. Not so much dyed hair tho. At age 42 I still love my nose ring, I look back on the green hair and cringe. 😅
In my example of the 2 liberal gals, I will say that I have never noticed anyone treat them differently. So even if there are judgements going on, people are at least trying not to act on them. And I suspect that if they did have a bias, they were able to push it aside to get to know the individual and alter their bias based on that.
As a personal question, I have to ask what it is about your nose ring that you enjoy so much. I have never understood piercings or tattoos. The semi-permanence and often lack of symmetry confuse me as far as a fashion statements go. Then again, I don't generally understand most fashions :)
I just like the way it looks! It’s not any more deep or meaningful than that. I will say that I don’t care for an overload of piercings, or piercings in certain spots. I think most tattoos are ugly, but a well-designed and well-placed tattoo is incredibly cool and attractive. While in some contexts, symmetry is beautiful, I also find asymmetry beautiful and interesting as well. I do believe there are some aesthetic universals, but there is also truth to the fact that you can’t argue personal tastes and preferences! 🤷♀️
Many young people go through a goofy-hair-color phase. My daughter had hers sea-green once. It was supposed to make her look like a mermaid, but she appeared to be decomposing. Fortunately, it washed out fairly quickly.
I was mostly kidding (sort of) - I myself dyed my hair emerald green in high school, while simultaneously volunteering for the local Republican party. So I know you can’t always judge a book by its cover!
my guess is they are referring to the septum piercings, not the traditional stud in the nostril which has gone mainstream. My wife is a VP and has a stud in her nostril and nobody bats an eye.
Thanks for clarifying, I hadn't noticed that. As I said, my wife has one and she's colored her hair many times as it's fun to do when one is young (she no longer does it as it damaged her hair). She has a couple of tattoos too, one on her forearm (the horror!). People on the right can be just as judgmental as leftists when it comes to appearance and that just pushes people away who feel abandoned by the left but unwelcome by the right.
Some of these trends are kinda cool. I had pierced ears but my body never liked that so I eventually gave up wearing earrings. Piercings are no longer considered unusual, weird or in poor taste. Things have changed.
Though I like some of the tattoos I think some ppl go overboard. I don’t care for foul imagery or language on ppl or bumper stickers. Even tattoos are main stream as what do you care if a person has one. They offer little evidence of the kind of person they are on.
I wouldn’t get too concerned about that. Kids mostly want to rebel but someday, if they’re raised in homes where they get enough of a voice of reason and know they are loved, they’ll become good people, maybe have kids if their own, and discover you were right about a whole lot of things.
When they’re teens to young adults you’re stupid, when they hit somewhere between 25-27 they start to understand maybe you weren’t as dumb as they thought.
This article leaves me with very little hope for the future. I feel like other nations are waging war against us via social media and money. It's working so well they don't need to attack. They just have to patiently wait for us to destroy ourselves from the inside. I fear for what the next 25 years looks like.
I've said for the last decade, virtually every evolution in our country is consistent with long term strategies for destabilization.
Open borders, assaulting police, rejecting tradition, ethnic divisions - even a political party that openly declared itself as a revolution and has explicitly said they will not accept a Republican victory.
Our country is being dismantled to make way for globalism and Democrat traitors are helping it happen as fast as possible.
The very people who claim to be against oppression of any kind are only too happy to become the oppressors when the opportunity presents itself. Funny how that works.
This seems to be built into human nature, based on how we've seen it play out historically. Most "oppressed" people, once they overthrow the oppressors, turn around and become oppressors themselves. It takes real strength of will and strength of character to resist that urge.
The U.S. is notable counterexample. Rather than setting up a dictatorial monarchial system of their own (although there were some people who wanted George Washington to become the king of our new country), our Founders intentionally set about creating a system designed to ensure the most freedom for the most people of any governing system ever invented.
> Donalda Chumney, a former deputy superintendent of District 2 who is not Jewish, told me that within the Department of Education, Jews “fade into whiteness, in a way that makes whiteness a monolith.”
So basically, "It's OK to hate white people for being born any time after the year 2000... jury's still out on whether or not it's OK to do that to Jewish people."
Chumney is the prototypical self-loathing white woman that is at the epicenter of this hate movement. Without enablers like her, none of this would ever happen.
Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that he wasn't interested whether the adult population embraced his "philosophy" because, in his words, "We have your children". I cling to the hope that the majority of Americans will find this detestable and out these blue state demagogues.
The press conference on the Hillcrest incident was really disturbing, especially when Banks gave the microphone to two Muslim students to justify the antisemitic "protest" against the teacher and to defend the students, as if they were somehow the victims. The perspective of the Jewish students and teachers wasn't presented.
And how-after 9/11- did this country elect Obama, a half-Muslim whose pastor screamed “God damn America”? I’m starting to wonder if the Dems stole that election. Maybe that’s why they were so ready to accuse Trump of stealing the 2016 election- because they knew it could be done!
This is all hauntingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany and the coming of the third reich. Teaching anti-semitism in public schools, associating Zionism with Judaism (aka Jews are not “real” Germans or “real” Americans). Educating people an incorrect history to justify antisemitism (Jews have been in that part of the world for thousands of years -- aka see Jesus as a Jew living in the Jerusalem area not simply since post WW2.
Currently, the main difference is that Nazi Germany preached hatred of all but the “aryan” race. Here, hatred is only preached against Jews currently, not Blacks, Hispanics, Asian, etc. Of course, once a society embraces hate, they move from Jews to other minority groups. It happens in history over and over again.
It is probably worth nothing that every great, dominant, rich society has been brought down by their hatred of Jews.
One of the differences today is that if (when?) the US pushes the Jews out, there is a country willing, able and desirous to taking in these Jews -- Israel. Unlike the 1930’s when jam-packed ships full of Jews went from port to port hoping to be welcomed and never were -- today Jews have the historic land of Israel waiting to embrace them.
As soon as I opened this article, I thought to myself, “I BET the example schools in this piece are all going to be from ultra-progressive urban areas in cobalt blue states.” Sure enough, we got midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, Santa Anna, San Francisco, Queens, with mentions of New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota.
How is this any different from everything else we’ve been reading? Is anyone surprised? Does anyone think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that leftist schools in blue state urban centers (or ANY city in any state, for God’s sake) *won’t* employ the most capital-P Progressive intersectional brainwashed graduates of all the schools of “education” in this country?
This was the 9,418th article that can be summed up as “leftism is ruining the country.” And yet progressives keep getting elected, social media ideological pathogens continue unabated, hundreds of leftist Substackers are calling for removal of “Nazi” content (read: anything to the right of AOC), people still watch SNL and all the late-night propaganda comedy shows, and on and on.
It’s only getting worse, and at this point I don’t see any way out, except on the individual level. Don’t live in those places. Don’t send your kids to these places. Find normal people in whatever pockets of suburban/rural society that you can, and just spend your life holding fast to your values while we watch everyone on the Blue Team turn into a pod person.
Addendum: for heaven’s sake, can we please get past this notion that an adequate sampling of the population of the United States can be accurately taken from New York City and California?? This isn’t a Hollywood rom-com; other people’s lives, thoughts, actions, and values are worth reporting on. Those places are crazy and *everyone knows it.*
I agree! Those blue states do not represent the majority of the country, IMO. I am a Pre-K teacher at a small private church preschool in North Alabama. Yes...Alabama.. and guess what??? We have black and white children and they all love and care about each other! Even the parents! The horror! Can you believe it? My 4 year olds, (some have already turned 5), care about learning to write their names(they are so proud when they do so), learning their letters, playing in center time, going to PE, going outside for recess, going to music, acting silly with their friends at lunchtime, music, etc. We are teaching the Pledge of Allegiance. We are interactive with them, i.e, during Halloween and Thanksgiving we carved a pumpkin, sampled pumpkin pie. We are teaching them life skills: how to compromise with each other with sharing, how to problem solve, how to love one another. My point is that my little ones would not care about the size of someone's nose. That is ridiculous.
My people go back to Alabama from the very early 1800s and one line further. I grew up in North Alabama. It is a beautiful place and to this day Alabamans are some of the best, most noble people I have ever known.
And, unfortunately, are often demonized or mocked in tv, movies, books for being backward.
Yup. The highly educated have become the most unprogressive ppl in our country. They teach hate, intolerance, exclusion, division and really think they are on the noble side!!
Like WTF?
Also - it's insane to assume that people in leftist, urban areas are generally the "highly educated" people in the country. That's a wild myth - walk down the streets of NYC - you're not looking at math PhDs for the most part. (Gender studies PhDs don't count as "highly educated", nor do people who left school nearly illiterate.)
Funny ( strange….. not ha ha ) that you say that. Being a Liberal most of my entire life - until 3 years ago- in Canada. That is my impression of Alabama, somewhat to full of hate between Blacks & Whites.
Very happy to hear of @EllesStratt experience. I feel bad for having that belief & it certainly isn’t a result of any personal experience.
Everyone likes to demonize an entire state or city or ??? I have met racists in blue states and hippie-hippie-love-all in red states.
Eric...the city in which I live has a minor league hockey team. One of our dearest friends used to play and he is from Canada. Obviously, he loves living here because he has been here over 25 years. He and his family are some of our favorite people 😊
True but fortunately we understand that it is a reflection on the demonizers and mockers to do so.
Yeah but when your tear stained kid comes home feeling the pain it makes you want to be rash right back. Mother bear gets all fluffed up.
Well, documented history tends to cause that.
Clarify. I think teaching a slanted and incomplete picture of it can but history is just facts. Teachers add the context and their own bias.
Lynne, I love that! There is so much that is misunderstood and misinterpreted about the South, esp Alabama. I’m very thankful that the community in which I live is situated between two mountains. It’s beautiful. People should take the time to research Huntsville in the northern part and Gulf Shores/Orange Beach in the southern part of the state and everything in between. Honestly, we also have all of our teeth AND running water out of the tap but I digress. 😄😄😄
I am from Tuscaloosa, but grew up in Huntsville when von Braun was there. My dad was an independent contractor for Space Craft Incorporated. I have climbed over the mock-up for the Apollo capsule (think I Dream of Genie) and seen the monkeys up close. Really, really stellar times. We have a pretty good size trawler that I need a deep water dock for. I think we may end up in either Bayou le Batre or Pickwick. Both of my brothers are in Huntsville.
Wow!!! That is amazing that you were able to observe the space program as it grew and grew. We live in Huntsville and love it...you probably won't believe how much it has grown(in case you haven't been back). My husband and son are Univ of Alabama alum's and our daugher is a senior there...we are in Tuscaloosa a good bit...Roll Tide!
We moved to North Alabama for my husband's engineering job (high tech city - highest percentage of PHDs in the country - yes - Alabama) and we have called it home for over 20 years now. We love this area and I taught in the city school system when it was one of the best in the state. A few years ago the new superintendent basically turned the school system over the the Obama justice department and I no longer recognize the system where I taught. CRT training and gender driven training is common now and the academics and discipline are not what they were 10 years ago. Private schools are growing at an amazing rate as parents' leave the public schools. It makes me sad.
Huntsville!!! I hate to hear that about the schools. I went to school there in the 60s and early 70s. My public school education was stellar.
Documented history says otherwise.
Perhaps you and all the goons at the SPLC should have a bigotry healing retreat.
Move on man.
I also appreciate what you are doing for these children. Teaching them to love and care about each other is far more valuable than teaching them to hate and be suspicious of one another. We need more of this, especially in early education.
Btw, middle aged life-long southerner here. I was never taught that one race was superior to another in all my public education nor in my home. And while a certain commenter likes to hang on to history, as if it is more important that the present or the future, I believe the divisions being sown in our schools now are doing great harm to all people that will be felt for generations. Your way is much better. Keep teaching and loving your students. They will be better off for it.
Thank you. That is very kind of you. My sweet school isn’t the only place, in my city, where these things are taught! I have many friends who are teachers. By the way, I was also never, ever taught at home or school that one race was superior to the other.
Amen.
Same here in South Carolina. Normal Yankees are fleeing here by the thousands. They’re welcome here in my book as soon as they indicate their appreciation for why they took refuge here and their understanding that they won’t vote to mess it up.
So many of our neighbors are from different parts of the country...Chicago, Seattle, Buffalo to name a few. They love it here esp the cost of living.
I've had this conversation with them in a roundabout way. "Why is the cost of living here lower, do you think? Or rather, why was it so high back in NJ?" In particular, property taxes and other taxes and fees. It all comes down to voting.
I am very happy to learn about your teaching and North Alabama. Please keep up the good work!
Going to school without fighting or parents not coming to blows during PTA meetings does not mean "they all love and care about each other." Just like having a black co-worker does not mean you have a "black friend."
So, no. I don't believe.
No one cares what trolls think.
This is the premise behind Walter Kirk’s County Highway, that what happens in “flyover country” goes mostly unreported. We subscribe, and really enjoy the in depth reporting on the culture and history of the ENTIRE country. I myself grew up and have only lived on the East Coast, mostly NYC/NJ, and it’s so easy to fall into this kind of provincialism. Nevertheless, good article, I think!
I think it's a worthwhile article to read, if only to further confirm what I already know. I very much appreciate the response and the engagement, so this isn't a push-back. But even thinking about the United States in terms of 1) hip, elite urban centers of NYC and SoCal versus 2) Armpit Township, Nebraska ("flyover country") I think is detrimental. Yes, NYC is densely populated and thus a lot of cultural elements have their origin in places like that. And yes, Armpit Township, NE, has a population of under a thousand, and it's a sleepy town where nothing happens.
But what about every 50-mile radius of every moderately-sized population center in the country? I live in *not-Boston* suburban New England. We have schools and highways and strip malls and concert halls and clubs and all other manner of cultural trappings. We're nothing like goofy NYC or flyover country. Ditto for the hundreds of beltways, exurbs, outskirts of metro areas, and small cities across the country.
Does anybody want to see what those people are doing? Or is Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Brooklyn all we're every going to get?
As an aside, I think those cheeky articles that the Free Press publishes that feature the fish-out-of-water story with the hip, urban, progressive reporter joining the "country rubes" for a day or two only to find--gosh!--these hayseeds are actually kind of nice... only *reinforces* this NYC vs. Hicksville mindset. They come off as sympathetic to the "unwashed masses" at first blush, but anyone with a discerning brain can see right into the smugness.
It IS very frustrating to watch how slowly people are awakening to this and other pernicious trends in our society. But I am grateful that they are. And I too live in a pleasant suburb where people just want to be left alone. In order to do that, they politely parrot the standard left-leaning views, and try to ignore the ugliness happening in all our cities and universities right now. They are afraid--afraid of being labeled “Trumpists”, of being seen as working class/uneducated, of being targeted by the random aggressive progressive (sometimes their own children) because of an innocent remark. I know because I am one of them! I remember when Breitbart, many years ago, asserted that all political is cultural, and that the left understands this is a culture war, not a war of ideas. He was truly prescient. The culture gives these children permission to spew such vile hate. History has been erased or altered with false narratives. So many forget that the culture here--and in England and Europe--allowed the rise of National Socialism and the German Worker’s Party in Germany. These movements, along with eugenics, were heartily endorsed by the intelligentsia, academics, and “elites” everywhere. Not much has changed. (That’s all just an aside, to say I agree with you that the smugness can be infuriating. Recent case in point: the “discovery” that a two parent marriage is better for children, and is a predictor of success, the recent subject of Bari Weiss’ podcast.)
Unless a smug progressive journalist from New York or Los Angeles stumbles upon the concept during his long walk through the elite institutions, it’s not *actually true,* or at least not important.
Bari and Nellie ARE smug progressive journalists from New York. They are in recovery; but it has been an uphill struggle for them. Its a work in progress(hah!); but they are having their minds concentrated wonderfully.
Waiting for the “discovery” that, “aha! There are only 2 sexes after all!”
🤦♀️
Good comment!
"So many forget that the culture here--and in England and Europe--allowed the rise of National Socialism and the German Worker’s Party in Germany."
That is a spot-on observation. Please do not parrot what the progressives say to "get by". That is how ugliness happens/progresses through society.
https://www.pittparents.com/p/echoes-of-eugenics-what-the-doctors
https://www.pittparents.com/p/eugenics-in-california-never-again
Newsom, Bonta - cough cough...
You’re right about the British origins of eugenics, and America took it up very quickly. Woodrow Wilson was a proponent. I believe some states even still require blood tests to be married? So barbaric. And so many great minds fell for it--Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Graham Bell, etc. I think your point about white and white adjacent is important too. I was a little surprised at the implication in the article that it’s ok to divide a training session into white and non-white, but not ok to group Jewish people with white. When/where does it all end? Everyone needs to have a little imagination and empathy BEFORE they themselves become the object of persecution. Identity politics will eventually divide us all into us/them if we let it.
Mengele and his attorneys were reaching way past anything those people suggested. Mengele broke every ethical guidance known in his time. I wrote a paper on medical ethics and this is one of the things I found. Nobody in those British intelligentsia proposed what Mengele did.
Ahhh, Joe Mengele at Nuremberg. I think I've seen film clips of that trial. Wasn't that the one with O.J.?
As a Texan, I do want to know the craziness coming from California because so many Californians are loving to Texas. I want to be prepared to defend my Red State from incoming progressives that may seek to bring their crazy ideas with them.
Also, to some extent, young people look to the culture-making areas of NYC and SoCal, so it’s good to understand what to try to protect them from too. But I do take your point. Time to start developing our own culture right where you are so that youth don’t feel the need to look to these far-off elitist places for culture.
I've heard Austin has been doing a very passable imitation of LA for some considerable while, I'm surprised you don't know this. :-)
Yes, Steven, Austin is a VERY Blue, WOKE city and a main draw of CA Democrats..
The irony is they left a Blue state whose political policies have nearly destroyed CA. They move to our BIG Red state of TX to get away from those ruinous policies, all while trying to relocate to cities with THE EXACT SAME WOKE Blue ideologies & policies!
As a lifelong Texan (middle Right of Center), I can only hope my Texas Red can survive this “Blue attack” - NOT to mention the millions of illegals flooding our border under the Biden Crime Family Regime open border policy!
Thankfully, yesterday our Gov Abbott + State Legislators past & signed into law SERIOUS border control policies!
I’m in Austin, so I do know this. Parts are as bad as you say, but not all of it. AISD (Austin Independent School District) is bad, I know lots of people who pulled their kids out after Covid. But so far the surrounding suburban school districts are fine. Keeping an eye on them though. Downtown you get some crazies— like, I know a women’s event was recently terrorized by trans activists pounding on the doors, but most of the neighborhood areas are reasonable people. My child learned about Hanukkah at school, the downtown light show had a menorah and a driedel sculpture that were left alone. So def not as bad as this article (thank God!)
Also, I grew up outside DC, so my perspective might be skewed somewhat. Compared to the conformity of progressive ideals in Maryland suburbs (which could rival NYC at this point), Austin seems refreshingly mixed as far as politics go!
Since the founding of UT, Austin has always been a bright blue spot in a red state, even before we used those terms. Nothing new.
Kennedy picked Johnson in ‘60 for the “Boston to Austin” connection (well, also primarily because he thought Johnson wouldn’t sabotage the administration if he was in it), then Dukakis did the same in 1980 with Bentsen. Austin has had Democrat bona fides for quite some time, but it was the Boll Weevil Democrats, not the stupid Beto-crats.
it's not just Texas. Boise is turning blue thanks to the huge influx of Californians and Seattleites relocating there. Bozeman, Denver and Colorado Springs have already been lost to California transplants.
Same for the Carolina's. The liberal cancer is spreading rapidly, with the invasion from the Northeast.
Idaho is also turning bleeding red, and angering local Republicans who are not Edgelord fanatic Christians. What I call the Edgelords are also thundering in from California, polarizing politics. California is blue only in the SF and LA areas. The rest of California is red, and it's where you find some of the more dingbat versions. What those have done to a once highly respected University system in Idaho is not good.
OTOH - Idaho militias have a rare black Trump dude or two these days. Some of those types are ... ahem. But most of them are pretty ordinary folks.
Shocking to hear that Colorado Springs is now leftist. Like San Diego, 30-35 years ago, it was a conservative Republican bastion.
Bozeman and Missoula are University towns so I am sure they were pretty liberal to begin with. Bozeman was also traditionally Democrat because of the strong presence of unions.
Oh man, sorry to hear that!
Haha.. funny you mention this. I'm actually a Texan (who lived in California previously) and recently moved back to California. I don't live in a costal area or a big city, I live in an unincorporated town in San Diego county, that has a strong conservative base and values family. But, it's true, I don't send my kids to the public school down the street, I don't trust them. I don't really trust the ones where we were at in Texas either. People complain about progressive politics, and I agree. But it's funny how California as a whole gets lambasted for the ultra-progressives, who don't at all represent the large amount of conservatives in the state. You have to support conservatives in all areas of politics, including schools, to keep the progressive stuff out. They've been given the keys to the kingdom because they live and breathe DEI ideology. It's goofy.. sadly despite being a native Texan, if I had to leave California again, I'm not sure I'd move back to Texas. My leaving Texas doesn't have anything to do with politics, I just never found a place that I really loved there.
Not that it matters b/c it's just my experience, but I lived my 1st 18 years in Texas. Then moved to CA- eventually married, and raised kids there (Orange County). Once the kids flew the nest and I saw California was falling into a woke nightmare, I picked up and moved back to Austin. I Did Not Like It. Just California but with shittier weather and no beach or mountains. So I picked up again and moved to the west coast of Florida two years ago. (As a remote worker, I have these luxuries.) Not moving again. SW Florida ain't perfect but it's a hella lot better.
A sister of mine lived in Bonita in a small subdivision amidst horse farms in the 70's. It was beautiful and the living was good. No state has the combination of great climate and sheer beauty like California. Then again, being an oenophile, I am a little biased. I agree its politics suck.
That’s a fair point, not all of California has fallen off the deep end.
Sorry you feel that way about Texas, my family loves it here!
Bingo. If Ukraine had remained neutral and developed a government with integrity it could have been the modern Switzerland I think. Sort of the best of all worlds scenario, but noooo, corruption reigns supreme.
What does chasing Americans east accomplish? And how exactly are they doing that? Who is they?
Scary thought. But probably spot on.
I agree with much of what you say here. That said, it simply does not bode well for the whole country when these large urban and progressive areas are behaving in these ways. They tend to be the trendsetters--and we can all agree that the trend of anti-semitism is pretty bad.
Plus they make no bones about wanting to seize ALL the political power and silence those in the middle of the country forever. We have a Congress designed as it is and an electoral college for a reason. I think that is why Liz Cheney is so bitter - she is banished to hold the fort in little old Wyoming when she is desperate to be back East
“Armpit Township, NE?” Seriously? I’m sick of insulting, degrading characterizations like this.
Think it was /sarc
Don't think so, but even if, don't care. Tired of hearing small, midwestern or southern or Appalachian or whatever non-elite communities are being described being the butt of this kind of characterization. Just simply tired of it.
I got it, but I think it reflected the author’s beliefs as well. Very poor choice of words.
I appreciate your comments, The Rogies. As I read the article I thought "I can't wait to get to the comments where there will be broad viewpoints as some articles can be so mono-think".
One thing though, you cannot entirely escape the Marxist oppression/oppressor ideologies outside of the Deep Blue places in America. And, that is because it is also pushed from the Federal Government, the media, all of our institutions....
I am not a bit surprised to hear about antisemitism taught in schools because we already had the GenderBread LGBTQIA+++WTF person taught K-12 as if it were science. The Military and the American Academy of Pediatrics are good examples among our nations institutions:
https://nypost.com/2023/12/13/news/detransitioner-suing-american-academy-of-pediatrics/
https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/10/Ayala-v-AAP-Complaint_stamped.pdf
And, Blue States & cities are "Sanctuaries" for criminal illegal aliens and other people's run away children. If a kid in Nebraska is lured to CA by a glitter mother he/she can be treated with a whole lot of "care" in the form of drugs and surgeries against the will or even the knowledge of parents under the state sponsored Gender Religion.
https://www.pittparents.com/p/oregons-state-assistance-encouraged
https://www.pittparents.com/p/attorney-call-to-parents
So, if we are not concerned with what Blue pushes it just takes over like a cancer. WSJ type Liz Cheney and Nikki Haley Republicans do not even care about it.
This stuff is all the same thing. The point is destruction.
Walter Kirn.
Where do you find this culture and history of the entire country? (A serious question.)
I don't think you do. Once a country gets past a certain side, you need to understand that culture becomes regional. In this case, assuming that Antisemitism is in America's schools, because it is in schools in certain areas is the problem. If it is an America problem, then there need to be more examples across the country, not just in specific areas. If the issues are limited to certain areas, then the problem is regional, not country-wide.
My point exactly -- you don't. But as B S notes, St George Floyd became close enough for government work -- and not just his ghost.
I was thinking the same thing . Surprisingly there are people who live in other states. I’m going to guess some of them read and write and do journalism.
Yup. And their local newspaper -- if it still exists -- got Hoovered up by a faceless conglomerate 20 years ago. Sorry.
I have been thinking about this for the last week or so. Despite living in the Information Age we might as well be living in the Dark Ages and getting our information from the Town Crier.
The problem is that the media that dominates is controlled by the left. Ditto for academia that will continue to churn out the graduates who will take over the media that dominates.
Rogies! Thanks for an excellent comment man! "I don't see any way out except on the individual level" is the message I've been broadcasting for years! (i.e., why we need to stop voting: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-stop-voting-in-presidential )
And you're 100% right as in all these left states do NOT make up the whole of the US. I talk about that here as well in my review of Netflix's new movie "Leaving the world Behind" (https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/an-unorthodox-review-of-the-netflix )
Thanks for this insightful post man! Glad to see it resonates a lot with the audience as well.
Except that everyone does NOT know it. There are still millions upon millions of useful idiots who self-describe as "moderate" and think Republicans are all white supremacists. These people genuinely think that none of the Left's absurdities are real; they're all right-wing "misinformation", and the Democrats are actually a sane, centrist party.
Opening their eyes is crucial, and highlighting the evidence against their delusions is how we do that.
They are hotbeds of HATRED!
Negative energy expands and poisons the well.
It’s an Asian belief.)
We can stick our heads back in the sand though.
Unfortunately, what begins on the coasts eventually spreads to fly-over country. No area is immune.
I do not think so. There is some contamination sure. But I think of the middle of the country like those massive deposits of granite or other impervious stone that simply does not erode no matter how fierce the wind.
The real "rock" is the God of the Bible. That is what our country was built on. If we all believed we are made in the image of God, we would not treat anyone with hate. The Jewish people are the Chosen ones and represent those who believe the teachings of the Word. The basic rule of the Bible it treat others as you want to be treated. The further away we get from Judeo/Christian values, the more chaos. It's funny how some people here comment and say things that are Judeo/Christian values, but are quick to say I am not religious or I don't believe in God, as if that would be bad. God is Love. No one who even uses the Bible as more of a reference tool, would act with such hate.
I agree. But not everyone does believe. Or are at a point of lapsed faith or not yet discovered faith. Maybe that is a consequence of being a very diverse population. I think up until relatively modern tines people who came here assi.ilated into American culture and as part of that embraced as you say our Judaeo-Christian foundation. Now we have people coming to establish colonies of their country of origin without any attempt to assimilate into the larger society. And yes, as Christians we are supposed to love all others. Even those who do not believe as we do. And I can love the person and despise the conduct.
The Bible was basic reading material. It was in every hotel room. Whether you believe in it or not, most people were exposed to it. Just like young people are taught to hate the Jews, they are taught to hate God and the Bible. The same can be said of all the great books - schools are getting rid of all the classics because they were written by old white men. My point is, you don't have to be a practicing Jew or Christian to be a good person, but if you are taught that being one is awful, you will never be exposed to the Bible's wisdom. Almost all religious people are potrayed as idiots and science deniers.
Happened here in Cincinnati: https://www.wlwt.com/article/pro-palestine-rally-cincinnati-high-school-students-walk-out/46032393
Yea but it still matters and is unacceptable. In 2018 my daughter had a classmate lean toward her and say Hitler should have finished the job. She told her teacher who did nothing.
We live in a relatively rural area but it’s nestled between big urban ones. She is on the spectrum and was routinely harassed about everything. Antisemitism has been alive and well since I was a kid in the 60’s. Nothing new but this being incorporated into school curriculum is. It’s unacceptable and I thank the FP for exposing how bad this has gotten. Indeed damage has been done but we can and must do better. Get rid of DEI, CRT, and maybe the next gen won’t be as poisoned.
We're doomed to require dealing with the fact that "climate" is whatever one can see out any given window in midtown Manhattan. And much else; no matter how amorphous the distribution becomes, the Okie from Muskogee as well as anyone else in Actual Human Country remains wholly invisible .
Many of the Okies from Muskogee prefer it that way though. They are only upset now because of the cost of fuel, food and energy. But most of them could go back to hunting/fishing, firewood and horses. The urbanites would perish though.
".” And yet progressives keep getting elected "
That's the Trump winning effect
Those places may be crazy but right now, they control the culture, the media, the educational system, the government bureaucracies, and through legal and H/R, most corporate boardrooms.
I thought the same thing as I read. The point of the piece is to demonstrate a crisis of antisemitism in the country, so the writer went to where there is antisemitism and not elsewhere. It's bad journalism, but also just what happens nowadays.
I believe there’s a crisis of antisemitism, and it was on the march long before Hamas attacked Israel. Cultural Marxism in the form of DEI has been creating this monster for more than a decade. Should the writer have waited until antisemitic beliefs were the norm across the US to call it out?
Antisemitism should always be opposed. But (a) consulting the actual data on it and (b) balanced reporting instead of mere advocacy would have been a good idea, IMO.
I will continue to point out that the solution for all of this is the same as the solution The Bobs came up with for Milton Waddams in ‘Office Space’.
Fix the glitch.
Just make it so they won’t be receiving a paycheck anymore. All of this can be fixed overnight by someone with the balls to turn off all of their funding. All of this shit collapses back down to reading and math if all they have is state funding.
Fix the glitch.
Oh and when all of the useless college-educated administrators and educators and compliance regulatory blah blah blah parasite sacks of shit who don’t do anything…….when they lose their paychecks, housing prices will go back to normal.
Don't sugar coat it Kevin. lol
Oh and housing prices will return to normal also when the pukes at Black Rock and other financial scams are taxed to the max for owning private homes. What the hell is Wall St doing buying private homes? Make them divest and tax their profits at 90%.
Blackrock gets most of the money they have to invest from unions, government, universities, and various other parasites!!
Good point. Parasites enabling parasites.
I've worked in the institutional investment world. I won't call them parasites. The boards of public and union pension funds have one incentive only: maximize the value of the fund so they can fund the pensions. No different than any organization with a mission and agenda. Just like you and me.
Oh yes I understand. What I’m saying is the primary reason they have trillions of dollars to manage is because of parasitism on the part of the people giving them the money to invest. Would have to go through case-by-case obviously but government pensions, for example, are pure parasitism.
I believe that *most* pension funds were required by law to make investment choices with maximizing return as the sole criteria, but I've read that states - liberal ones, are passing laws that now allow ESG criteria to be used. Notably to divest in energy/fossil fuel industry that has provided reliable returns, but is not in line with the new green agenda.
And other states have responded to that by banning those policies. Reportedly Vanguard drew back sharply on its push for ESG investments. And reportedly the Larry Fink has pulled the term from BlackRocks literature and presentations. But in my opinion the folks worried about how Musk spends his money should be really concerned about how Fink is using other people's money. We all should.
I’ve heard Rick Rieder on CNBC regularly and he seems like a nice guy doing his job well. Larry Fink not so much but again Blackrock is more a symptom.
I’m sure they have funds from entities I would support but I doubt they’d have trillions and move markets without the parasitic sources of funds.
No you and I have a variety of missions and agendas. And morals and ethics. We are complex creatures without the luxury? curse? short-sightedness? of being a single issue entity. Time to put the complex organisms capable of reason and evolution back in control.
Wanna buy a bridge?
Maybe the entities you name mandate max returns on your planet. You might search on "ESG."
Worse I think, BlackRock is using its position as majority shareholder of strategic companies to seize control of boards. And anyone who thinks corporate dollars do not already , or is VERY close, to control of American elections is very, very uninformed.
Kevin....yeahh...I'm going to need you to produce that TPS report on all of this...yeahh
That’d be great
On this one, Kev, I don't think you understand how deep are the waters. Remember America, 1860-1864? That's what I'm seeing, merely different motive.
I really can't see that. Heck, Yanks and Rebs didn't even talk the same, much less live the same places. The differences are possibly deeper, but the entities are no more identifiable or separable than are the constituents of concrete.
Of course Yanks and Rebs lived in the same areas and spoke the same language. The US was a tiny place. Families were divided. Brothers against brothers. It was horrific.
Hairsplitting. Some did; in general, it was the North vs the South.
You do not want to get into a discussion of the War Between the States with me. I have strong opinions and you would be here all night. I do not know how old you are but my grandparents, both of whom I knew, were born in 1886 and 1893 and I had great-uncles I knew who were older. So I have heard the lore, or at least some of it, from the source. There were Union sympathizers down South and Confederate sympathizers up North. Most oc the south was not suitable for plantations. Much of it is hilly and much of it is coastal. So there were many southerners who had nothing to do with plantations. Do you realize that northern financiers financed slavery? Do you know northern shipping companies transported much of the cotton overseas? Do you know cotton was the principal US export back then? It was far from simple.
While I very much appreciate this in theory, if I remember correctly didn’t Milton ultimately burn the entire place down? Not sure the response would be much different here.
Correct. And then the protagonist went and worked construction and did something useful…..
I about choked on the reference to the teacher's union. I think the "critical work" of the young children needs a lot of connect-the-dots worksheets.
We must recapture or government and train kids on the constituional and federalist papers. Teach truth about Israel history existed before 1940. Teach the bible, a lot of good history their. Israel was a British colony and Jews were invited by the UN. Many bought their homes. Apartheid? What about Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, ..... How many Jews are in those governments? There are large numbers of Arab muslins living and working peacefully in Israel. We must teach truth. America was not built by slaves. Most did not own salves, many came after slavery. Do we teach about those that came to the plains states and lived in dirt huts and battle weather and storms to build the nation? We need truth in education rather than lies to capture power. The educational agenda of the left is for evil takeover. That is why they fear school choice.
“We must recapture our government and train kids on the constituional and federalist papers.”
——————————————-
Replace the word “recapture” with “delete” and you are correct.
Much to be desired. But i remain unconvinced that the schools are the source of antisemitism.
it starts in the colleges, especially schools of education, which leads those radicalized to teach their students what they learned. Teachers are taught to be activists and "mold young minds," instead of actually educating students. I worked on college campuses for 15 years and my sister is the product of the Progressive takeover of schools of education, I've seen it all first hand.
Totally agree Hopcat!
I agree schools themselves are not the original source but the schools highlighted in this article are absolutely tools thereof. Which is stunning to me. As is the attitude of the Jews interviewed as the victims thereof. Not one what did I do to usher this in? Was I so tolerant, loving and kind that I tolerated and welcomed those who hate me and seek my destruction? And why am I afraid to confront it, even within myself? Talk about martyrdom.
"The first time I heard about Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, did I say 'wait a minute! This is just pitting groups of people together over perceived power dynamics! This is completely contrary to a free society that protects individual rights! How long until Jews are the oppressor class?' Or did I just nod my head and feel the warm progressive fuzzies, because as we all know, conservatives are all Nazis?"
Well put. I am contrary and by nature so it came pretty easy to me.
God what planet are you on! How much more evidence do you need
The threads get tangled -- antisemitism starts at home.
It can but in recent years it’s part of the curriculum. Also promoted by leftist leaning social media. That has an enormous impact on youth here in the USA.
It’s a toxic brain scramble at best.
I was just reading about the story of Jacob and Esau. With Jacob being the father of the 12 Tribes of Israel, we forget that Jacob DECEIVED HIS FAMILY to get his brother's inheritance. Not only did he use deception on his own father, he dug down and LIED TO HIS FATHER when asked.
Questions that come to mind are:
1) How is this in anyway positive or a manner that we should praise?
2) Is there an Israel deception going on now today? I discuss that in the following podcast: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-gnosticism-is-the-christianity#details
This is a fairly superficial summary of the story. Jacob buys his birthright from his brother, who doesn’t care about it. He also gets blessed by his father after the “theft”. His mother is the one who tells him to do it and she also, unlike his father, had a direct prophecy from god in the text about how the younger would supplant the older. Finally- the echoes of the deception haunt him for much of his adult life and he has to face the consequences (deception by his father in law) until he can make amends. That is an important lesson. But more importantly: The power of Jewish scripture is not that it is simplistic or moralistic; it is complex and demands debate, reflection, humility, and faith — the seeds of wisdom. Laban tries to take advantage of Jacob’s fissure from his family and ends up facing the consequences of losing his daughter’s trust and love. If anything, this story should warn against hyper simplistic moralizers trying to profit off a foreign conflict.
Correct. Rebecca knew that Esau was not worthy to get the blessing that meant he would be the progenitor of the future nation of Israel. She acted in the best interest of her family.
Imagine a modern retelling, where she’s the sassy, smart wife who cooks up a plan to deceive her bumbling husband who’s partial to the dumb frat boy/jock son, in order to benefit the smart, sensitive bookish son. She’d get a resounding “YOU GO, GIRL!” from all the progressives.
Outstanding! But, of course, she was Jewish -- that complicates things.
I shared the idea with my husband and his response was, "Yeah, but she'd have to be played by a sassy black woman."
Loved this. The devil is in the details.
I love this Elizabeth. Things are neither simple nor as the appear, huh? A powerful lesson for this time and place I think.
Hey Elizabeth, so that's my point when Jacob hammered down on his deception by now lying to Isaac. So many questions arise as to: 1) why did God tell his wife the prophecy vs telling the father Isaac?
Totally agree these stories are complex and demand debate -- which is what we are doing now :) -- but the fact remains that deception was the factor which started this whole thing and that deception has created a spiral of turmoil since that day (e.g., deception by his father in law and so forth)
Saying deception was “the factor that started this whole thing” is hypersimplistic and itself quite deceptive. What whole thing? Judaism? Israel? Our patriarchs are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We didn’t start with Jacob or his stealing Esau’s blessing. You could say that overcoming jealousy, rivalry, and family strife — radically powerful healing and wisdom — “started this whole thing”. Sibling rivalry is rife in the Torah (Cain and Abel etc) and it is only in Jacob’s children that we stop seeing the people divide among siblings and all his children form the nation. You could argue that Jacob’s deception and the way it severed his family taught the wisdom of experience of consequences, demanded of him bravery to repair his family when he meets Esau again, and taught him to apologize and make amends (as he does to Esau). These acts of forgiveness, apology, unity, repair, embracing diversity of tribes within one people “started this whole thing”
Although I am a big believer in the spinning a tangled web when we practice to deceive thing I am going to have to revisit it in light of your position. But in response to why Sarah instead of Isaac, I think He speaks to all of us, some listen, some don't. So maybe Isaac just did not listen.
Whoa. Very well said. The Bible is a fluid letter from God to us and (I believe) the living word. That applies to every book, not just the gospels.
This is a typical example that demonstrates why one must study the Oral Torah -- the lexicon of the Written Torah, both handed down from antiquity. The lexicon (Oral Torah) was redacted during the first five centuries CE to preserve it.
Rebecca (Rivka) orchestrated her husband's deception, recognizing from her twins' gestation, as Shem (still living) explained to her, that the younger was the rightful heir of Abraham's legacy. The wicked Esau repudiated this inheritance preferring a bowl of lintels.
Lentils, not lintels. Lintels (and doorposts) are mentioned in the Passover story. :-)
Thanks Rosey - I've written extensively about the translations of the Christian faith so I am thankful for this comment.
Questions: 1) what made Esau wicked? because of the lintels? 2) the fact remains that there was deception in the birthright, right?
That's my point here - a deception occurred to claim a birthright.
You’re confusing the birthright and the patriarchal blessing. The deception with the goat skins took place over the blessing.
As for the birthright, Esau willingly sold it to Jacob for a bowl of lentils. Do you think someone so short-sighted as to throw away his future financial security to satisfy his immediate appetite was worthy to be the next patriarch and builder of the people?
Esau was not approved to fulfill this role. God appoints who He will to bring about the fulfillment of His plans.
Apparently He’s in charge.
Interesting question. I have wondered why Cains offerings were rejected by God. There is no in depth explanation in Genesis about it.
Thanks Maureen! These are the kinds of questions I like to explore on my substack: the deeper meanings of biblical teachings
Here's a one page summary about Esau: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4937157/jewish/14-Facts-About-Esau-Everyone-Should-Know.htm . It is helpful to understand and anticipate the descendants of Esau and Israel will make peace in the end.
But Hamas, the current battle, is with the descendants of Ishmael. This is an existential conflict, where there will never be a two-state co-existence solution. Peace will require the descendants of Ishmael repenting. It will take a profoundly open revelation of God for this.
But why are you obsessed with Israel? Why not any other country in the world? It's odd.
My three countries are the US, UK and Israel and ironically these three have the biggest impact on the rest of the world. Here's some work I've done on the UK: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/the-man-behind-the-british-empire
JJ Everybody obsessed with Israel!
May I guess that you’re not the youngest child in your family? If that is the case, maybe you never noticed that many folk/fairy tales feature the youngest son as hero. In this instance, the Torah needed to explain why the tradition of primogeniture was broken
p.s. yes I was the youngest child ;)
I’m annoyed I’m the oldest, Jewish, white and a woman, I had much more responsibility than anybody else in my family Grace 😄😄
Hahaha - Yep Grace, I'm not the youngest, but you're exactly right. I've always wondered why the younger was always favored. To me, there's some contradictions here. For example, youngest seems to win out, but the oldest deserves the birthright.
Why not just start giving the birthright to the youngest? lol
That may well be the influence of the patriarchy. In my experience good fathers are devoted to their children but especially the eldest. I think because the birth of the first child is such and eye-opening, mind-opening experience. Whereas you know what to expect with the subsequent children.
This is part of the reason Mohammed believed that the promises of God were to the Arab people but were stolen from them by Ismael and then Esau.
That flies in the face of scripture. Abraham and Sarah began to lose faith that they would bear a child who would become this great nation. Ishmael was told by the angel who met him and his mother in the desert that he would also be a father to a great nation but that they would live and die by the sword. Fast forward a few thousand years and oila, the prophet rewrites the Hebrew Scriptures with some big reversals and you have a murderous cult that kills tens of thousands of people for the crime of having a different faith.
The promises of God were to Abraham and his son, Isaac. Esau forfeited his blessing for a bowl of food. Jacob tried to make things right with his brother even though he exemplified a higher degree of integrity, responsibility and worked diligently to free himself and his sons from his derelict father in law.
Now if you don’t believe in the Bible, then I guess none of it should matter. But if you do then understand that the will of God was fulfilled in both Isaac and Jacob (Israel). Jesus (Yeshua) was a devout Jew who came as per the promises of God to provide atonement once and for all to anyone who would accept it. I think that if God had wanted Esau to receive his fathers blessing, God would have interceded centuries before Jesus arrived. Jacobs sons became the twelve tribes of Israel.
Imma go with God on this, not Allah, a name the ancient Arab tribes attributed to a moon deity.
Coincidence that the crescent moon is the symbol of Islam?
Just sayin’....
Holy shit. You read a Bible story. Guess what. There is a lot of deception in Genesis. So what? Do you think the Joos are deceiving you? Go rot in hell antiSemite
Exactly.
Read some history on the air of slave trade. It is much more horrific than anything that happened across the Atlantic.
Excellent post. Thanks.
You left off WESTPORT CT. A town where I have a home, raised my kids and of which I am now deeply ashamed. There was a November schoolboard election where Democrats won all three open seats. Against two decent parents who wanted to end the leftist equity agenda.
And now the BOE is mum and can't summon up the courage to oppose rampant anti-Semitism. I am publicly calling for the sacking of the School Superintendent and the resignation of the entire BOE. This is beyond shameful.
Bruce, was everything legitimate with the election? IMO lax election practices in local races are putting some candidates at a disadvantage. Perhaps all was well in Westport, but after 2020, we can’t assume that our elections are free and fair. Regardless, the story of Westports BOE is playing itself out around the country. Thankfully you are bold enough to call it out.
Local elections are pretty legit. What was NOT legit was the smear campaign against the Republicans,, led by the school tool moms, who called them extremists for opposing the leftist DEI initiatives that had been instituted by the School Board and Superintendent. One can only imagine the howls of outrage if you substituted a black kid for the Goldberg's boy and replaced the death camps with plantations and slavery taunts.
Yip can you imagine “the shit will hit fan” italics because they my own words - don’t plagiarize them 😄
Yup
Same with my town. Liberals become obsessed with getting on school boards after 2020. If a conservative runs for office, they're labeled a racist, transphobe or book banner.
But if there were enough independent thinkers/conservatives, they wouldn’t fall for that. Bottom line: most parents are idiot woke liberals!
Name calling- the go to tactic for rules for radicals.
Andrew Goldberg cried “but but DEI!!!” When his son was attacked. I hope he’s waking up and voted red next time. - a New Canaanite
Beyond shameful Bruce I was shocked!
It also happens when the Federal Government took over the education system. The cost of education went up, and the quality went down. The indoctrination continues.
You're 100% agree -- not many people know about the origins of education and the General Education Board in 1901 and how that was created solely as an indoctrination camp (https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/origins-of-modern-education).
I've covered that extensively, but many others have called it out like Seth Godin and how it affects millennials (https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/how-millennials-were-setup-to-fail)
it's not just in Progressive enclaves where this is happening. My buddy is in Colorado and one of his kids' teachers (elementary school) told him "it's best they not celebrate Hanukah" and even recommended they not bring "Jewish" food to school, for their own safety. He works at a prestigious liberal arts college and has been the victim of repeated harassment and threats, even by the Title IX director who told him he is not entitled to protection from such harassment and threats because he's a "colonizer." Yep, the people whose job is the protect staff and students are leading the charge to harass them.
One day native Coloradans will rue having let the lefties take their weapons and homes.
I got out early in the invasion and have watched from afar as my home state crumbles.
Clever human.
And the reason progressives keep getting elected is that "the academy’s pied-piper hold on the ambitious young minds of the future ‘opinion-forming’ elite – including crucially the teaching profession - has proceeded unchecked, such that its seductive virtue-signalling mentality has now taken hold in most graduate-entry professional walks of life. And an Academia-Media Complex - a feedback loop between an overwhelmingly left-wing academy and a largely left-wing MSM – has softened up enough of what used to be called ‘the workers’ to keep the Progressive show on the road." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
"As soon as I opened this article, I thought to myself, “I BET the example schools in this piece are all going to be from ultra-progressive urban areas in cobalt blue states.” Sure enough, we got midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, Santa Anna, San Francisco, Queens, with mentions of New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota"
I live in mpls, How Blue is it? On the City Council the opposition party is The Green Party.
Minnesota just changed its state flag to mirror the nation of Somalia.
The Flag is supposed to change in Jan. God only knows what these clowns will come up with.
The Rogies
It’s not leftism per se. Antisemitism lies at the heart of Islam. But there is some hope that more American Leftists who support the Democrat Party might wake up. Today on Fox News there was a clip of Alec Baldwin of all people taking on the ignorant pro Hamas protestors. He was wisely accompanied by body guards.
Terence
I suppose it depends on your definition of "leftism." I define it as an ideology of intersectional power dynamics wherein group identity is primary and life is perceived as a struggle for power between various collectives. Anyone who implicitly or explicitly behaves within the dictates of that ideology is a leftist. It's not simply "someone on the left." (on the left *of what,* exactly?). If that's your definition, then I could be considered a leftist.
I sincerely hope that what you say about American Leftists waking up is true. You do see isolated moments of normalcy and positive surprises, such as Baldwin and other famous leftists suddenly talking sense. However, I suspect most of them don't really think in terms of principles and thus, are only reacting to an isolated situation that "feels wrong," without any integration of that feeling into their wider political worldview. If in a year from now the antisemitism dies down but the world in general is just as left-dominated, the Baldwins of the world will be going on TV and social media to espouse collectivist progressive nonsense like nothing happened.
Uh, inconvenient fact: Antisemitism is, if not at the heart, pretty damn close to the heart, of WASPism, too.
Maybe at one point. But WWII cured that. There were many American protestants on the front-lines.
WWII did nothing of the sort -- no atheists in fox holes and all that; nonetheless,. the"Ivy Leagues" and many others still have quotas. And the list of otherwise "greats" who were antisemitic is endless -- you can look it up.
Oh Casey I am not a fan of elites or "the greats". And I think you misunderstood me, WWII cured WASPs, at least regular people WASPs, of anti-semitism. Those you describe as "the greats" I do not give credit for their faux faith. I think an altogether different entity has their allegiance.
Maybe so; regular people are not readily measurable. The most obvious data point is Mar a Lago baring Jewish members until Mr Trump bought it. I suppose that's irregular people? (Grin)
Wasps are not trying to conquer the world.
Rogies speaks for me. We need a cultural revolution that begins in the schools.
At home, actually.
Cause the village has failed at raising the children. We need parents to rise up.
"The Village" should never have been ceded that power in the first place.
Agreed. I remember first hearing it from.the odious Hillary Clinton and thinking man the 2nd Amendment encroachment pales in comparison to this.
Well said. And perhaps, stop doing business with brands that promote this progressive non-sense. There is a new thing coming called the Red Referral network (don’t know much details just heard it in passing) but it’s supposed to be kinda like a Rotary Club where you can refer people to other businesses that hold conservative values.
Thanks for this info.
You don't see any way out? You just wrote it. The other Americans.
The article is childish pablum. Noses? Virtually everybody in the Middle East has that nose. A Semite is a Semite is a Semite.... Free Press, you're dredging in the floatsam for writers like this.
Have you no understanding of history? Those pictures are almost exact copies used by the Nazis to dehiumanize Jews before WWII. To see something like that in public schools is unbearably chilling. It is one of the first steps to legitimizing pogroms and then genocide of the Jews.
I liked the article. I would have no knowledge of this otherwise. But I am with you on the noses. How about everybody just embrace what they have. Love yourself. That makes others' disparagement powerless. That applies to all physical characteristics.
You have to be kidding me. Look up arab cartoons of jews? They all have the hook nose. Don't be cute and act like you don't know what she was dong.
Your comment has nothing to do with my comment. Virtually all people original to the Middle East have the Semitic "hooked" nose, (see Osama Bin Laden), which denotes the absurdity of the article's author, to mention it.
I agree with you, however the "Free Palestine" crowd are the ultimate gaslighters. They often refer to jews by hook nosed.
There is also the fact that this is what you tend to get when you don't pay teachers. You get people from the bottom of the barrel who want to be teachers because they have a political axe to grind. And you get districts desperate to hire them.
This is also a phenomenon stemming from the war on the USA declared by islamist organizations (literal declarations of war) and the invasion of islamists. CAIR and several other organizations have scared secular muslims into silence and conformance. They preach (rant) and harangue weekly in those cookie cutter mosques built across the USA with Saudi and Qatari money.
This is the war that is islam in America.
True. But. (Anti) Social Media is a far more powerful cancer-spreading agent than was Network TV -- and that was bad enough.
Come look at the books in our rural southern Virginia schools. It isn't just NY/CA.
No TR, I have it on good authority that it is the far right that are antisemitic. That is of course dripping sarcasm.
Jewish, Christian and unaffiliated communities are going to have to band together to fight this type of racist and antisemitic nonsense by organizing, showing up and raising hell. There is no other way that this indoctrination will stop in our schools, but it goes well beyond calling out blatant antisemitic teachings and language.
DEI at its core is antisemitic and racist and needs to be smashed into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind. These teachers are poisoning the minds of our youth and should be fiercely and unmercifully called out for who they are and demand that they are removed from our schools.
The Jewish community and leadership must be the ones that lead this effort, otherwise christians and unaffiliated won't feel the urgency of this existential threat IMHO.
This article is just appalling. I can’t believe the level of hatred and antisemitism. Yet my Jewish neighbors who believe the narrative worry about the far right and never said a word against the crt curriculum in our schools. I hope they are waking up because we do need to band together and fight this.
I know. I checked in on some Jewish neighbors last month, and they went on about “white supremacy neo-Nazis” being given license to hate. And I almost choked. I don’t say anything to that, but I problem should have said, “Interesting. I actually haven’t seen much hate coming from those types people. Where are you seeing that?” And in head I was saying “white supremacists? You mean white progressive liberals?”
I'm Jewish and I would never vote left.
🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
There are competing strains of ‘White Supremacy’ as defined by and practiced in leftthink. In their world the WS beliefs of right wing extremists-more commonly known to them as Republican voters-are driven by hatred of minorities.
The more nuanced WS beliefs of the leftist elitists is that minorities are too dumb and helpless to survive without their help. They like to call this ‘compassion’.
Jordan Peterson calls it "Narcissistic Compassion".
I think it is the same "strain" (I like that term BTW ) that incorporates both beliefs. One just needs to be destroyed and the other controlled.
Jews are a tiny minority, historically very vulnerable. So they deserve special protection.
But this is only one manifestation of a much broader problem.
I know it is utopian but I want a world where special.protection is neither needed nor justified.
True.
“The Jewish community and leadership must be the ones that lead this effort”
———————————————-
If they do they need to have a tight screening process to exclude the 70% of American Jews who vote for Democrats. Democrats ARE the ones who caused all of this.
So if that 70% of the Jewish population doesn’t apologize sincerely and show that they are willing to reverse their ideology totally, then they should be treated equally and fairly and exactly the same as the rest of the Democrats: as the problem.
Democrats caused this.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if many in that 70% were smiling as the Orthodox Jews got attacked first because they hold them in contempt the same way elites dislike rural old-fashioned people)
Jews began voting Democrat because they sincerely believed that the dems champion the common man. Trust me--some of them are starting to wake up. And I, a former Dem voter who woke up in 2008, stand here to welcome them to the right side.
They should have picked up on how Democrats are trying to build the Tower of Babel earlier tbh but I will allow it.
I picked up on it long ago. Chana picked up on it. And there’s (or at least was) Jexit. Hopefully this is the kick in the pants that’s needed to wake people up.
Most Democrat ideology is driven by character and personality disorders so I doubt there will be an awakening. Narcissists and megalomaniacs are far more likely to just exploit this to benefit themselves.
Most likely Israel will use this as a reason to get rid of Netanyahu and they will go right back to trying to reenact Sodom and Gomorrah while holding hands and singing ‘Imagine’ with people who own swords.
In the US we will probably put some antisemitism advisers in place and let the universities go right back to doing communism that primarily targets whites and Christians.
Or… given Geert Wilder’s win in Denmark, Javier Milei’s in Argentina, as well as other conservative, newly elected leaders, Netanyahu will survive as PM and his coalition will get stronger. Here’s hoping.
Democrat, noun, as in, « he is a Democrat. » Democratic, adjective, as in « he voted Democratic. » (not, « he voted Democrat. »
I woke up in 2016. Glad to be here finally! So many are lagging sadly.
Baruch HaShem may they come in drove🇮🇱🇮🇱
Their belief may have been sincere but they were wrong. For decades now, at least.
More unvarnished truth. Truth hurts but there it is. Just as our Constitution is not a suicide pact, our Jewish friends need to wake up to the fact that Democrat leftism is a suicide pact. With Satan himself.
If Trump doesn’t win this election and fix the major harm that Obama and his lacky Biden have done, we are doomed.
Signed, a Jewish woman
This Jewish woman agrees!
the turning point for me was Obama's speech in Egypt. I could feel he wasn't what he campaigned on... and it's been downhill ever since. I'm a moderate and would love to find a stable home... was ready to vote Trump but now he's talking like a nazi too... so it's not all hearts and flowers on the republican side either. but yes- I take your point and you're not wrong.
Please consider that your ‘stable home’ as a free person is to always aim to restrict and kneecap the government at all costs with whatever is at hand.
Currently the best thing you have is Republicans, who are mostly failed morons.
OMG- you crack me up, and I learned something. You sell yourself short. I'd pay $82.99 a month for your newsletter...
😂😂🙏🙏
That Cairo speech was nothing short of treasonous.
Vote for Trump, though. Don’t buy into the “he’s a Nazi” stuff. Look at what his policies were as president and how he made good on every campaign promise. Everything he did was good for this country, its people and its allies. Put aside your feelings about his personality (I’m not crazy about it either). Many of us will be right beside you.
thats what I'd do if I have to. I'm a huge Nikki Haley fan- really hoping she continues gathering steam. I've liked her from before Trump was a thing- she also has a history of delivering and I love her simplicity and clarity. I watched how tough she was while ambassador to the UN- amazing backbone without all the drama.
I agree with the battle, but what is the alternative narrative that those battling are for? Let's come up with a series of buzzwords, like responsibility, Merit, and Character, to battle DEI - It's the collective communist agenda mixed with a racial worldview. To complain about what they are thinking is not enough; to offer another set of values will put them in the position of attacking the unassailable and begin the process of defanging them into irrelevance. Thanks for the great post.
Integrity, excellence and innovation. IEI
That's what conservatives believe in. It's what our companies are missing.
I like it - When you have a competing narrative, it makes them say these things are wrong, and they are not, so we win.
I'm also starting to tell my leadership how asinine it is to be talking about "studies show DEI leads to innovation" but when we ask for the time, tools, and people we need to innovate, leadership explicitly says no.
Idiots. DEI makes leaders stupid bigots.
Important point, we can’t fight for a vague notion of “how America uses to be.” But I think we can define some critical values that are being attacked from the left, things like merit and hard work. Integrity and honesty. That HOW we act matter, the ends don’t always justify the means. Self-control and personal responsibility. Personal agency. Values of dialogue and debate. Valuing religion, valuing the rule of law. Etc.
I agree. I want change, evolution, and innovation. I think that is/was the American way and made America great. But I want it to incorporate the past so as to have consistency in the transition. I do not want idiots who have never worked or produced a damn thing "reimagining" social, environmental, or scientific systems. Imagination is important. But what is imagined needs to be subjected to the scientific method or something akin to verify its feasibility. I think a lot of this has come out of the climate and preservation of animal species hysteria. This is so stupid. This planet is not static. It has never been static. It is not a good idea to try to make it so. And it is the height of arrogance to insist on it. Now we have Rulers - Rulers not leaders - who think they can mandate policies like green energy not because they understand it and have insight, but because some egg head somewhere imagined it was a good idea.
Fauci and Covid another case in point
Oh yes. Transitioning children as well.
Hahaha, interesting observation about the climate panic. I do find it odd that many atheists are ardent environmentalists. There have mass extinctions throughout all of Earth history, and if people are only another animal and there is no God giving us purpose, then why do I have to take responsibility for another species decline? Isn’t that just survival of the fittest? Makes no sense.
No it does not make sense. I sometimes feel like I live in a world run by lab puppies - high energy, all over the place, sweet as can be, very little knowledge. At least with lab puppies though knowledge does come later. But my sense is that everybody needs something to believe in. Some people believe in a deity or deities so they can shrug off/accept unpleasantness by thinking that the deity is or deities are in control. But if what you believe in is humanity then you think you can and should have an impact on the unpleasantness. Thst the existence of unpleasantness is our fault and/or responsibility. Our world, not the world at large, but our species' world is a human world. Humans should strive to better it but should also understand that there are things unknown and unknowable (quantum computing notwithstanding). Otherwise we have reached the end of our evolution and I do not like that notion. Because the condition at this time and place sucks.
That seems to be the thinking, but I find it completely backwards. Again, if no god exists, then we have no responsibility for anything, because we are just mammals. But if God of the Bible exists, then He gave us a responsibility to steward the Earth. Stewardship implies that it does not belong to us, so we have good reason to take care of it and all other species in it. (Note that humans have been selfish and many “Christians” have grossly misunderstood this mandate to me we can do whatever we want with earth’s resources as if we own them. No, when you have stewardship over something you take more care of it because you recognize it’s not yours and you will have to bear responsibility to the owner one day for how you took care of the things being stewarded to you.) I suppose if you are agnostic, believe in some god but that god doesn’t demand anything from you, then you would be stuck in this place where you have responsibility for the unpleasantness of the world because god is distant, but no hope that God will one day put it right.
Thank you for expressing that. Its the values we fight for that will pusuade and put their empty and useless positions on full display which a strong majority will reject.
Agreed.
RMC. I like it.
You’re on the right track Evan. Regardless of faith,we need to step up and call out evil where we see it. As the old saying goes, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Evans W
The anti-Jewish indoctrination won’t stop unless Muslim immigration is stopped. Muslim immigration won’t stop unless Republicans are elected in sufficient numbers to end Muslim immigration.
I cannot put a whole lot of faith and trust in Republicans. They have ignored education my whole lifetime and when they have gotten involved they have been unwitting dupes helping support this crap that we are talking about here.
We have no choice Chris we have to get these mad men and women out.
I have a faint glimmer of hope that we are seeing a new generation of Republicans. Every time you see one demonized - Gaetz, Green, Johnson, etc. - do your own research. Do NOT just but what the Town Crier is selling.
I cannot argue with that!!
They are mostly all talk.
There are decent Muslims. Some do speak out - Hirsi for example. And we need those people because Muslims worldwide number what 7 billion? But I do not know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Hirsi Ali is now a Christian. In any event, it’s the ideology that counts. I am sure there were decent Germans during the Holocaust of the Jews.
For what two weeks now? Before that she was a long-time atheist. I am unwilling to condemn every one of the earth's 7 billion Muslims because to do so would make me no different than the radical Islamists. And you are right it is about ideaology, not theology. That is true of every religion. IMO radical Islamic ideologies- Wahabbism, et al - is inconsistent with western values. But many Muslims have successfully acclimated here. I think that is the trick - do you want to come here and remain insular and distinct? Or do you want to come here and be parted of the melting pot?
CRT & DEI are part of the problem but not sure what you can do about the “regressive” Tim Wises of this world. Anti semitism is a terrible problem amongst non Jews but hearing Jews like Tim Wise talk you don’t need any enemies.
I was meditating this morning and felt clearly how anger dispels anxiety. If you can find another person who is willing to be angry with you at a third person, then you not only no longer feel fear, you feel connected and empowered. But only as long as that anger is shared, directed and expressed.
Jews have long made a good target for this sort of irrational anger for several reasons.
First, for a long time they were blamed for Christ's crucifixion, never mind that Christ himself was a Jew also, as were all his followers, who en masse created what we call Christianity.
Second, they have always been a minority EVERYWHERE, until the nation of Israel was created by the UN. It's much easier to bully the relatively weak. And for the cowardly--and remember I am arguing anger is a means of dispelling fear--the weak make the most satisfying targets.
Finally, in the modern era, Jews have been unwilling to fit as blocks, as a bloc, into a programmatic, childish oversimplification of the world--also based on using anger to dispel anxiety, which I will call Triangulation, in one aspect of the term--which sees all groups as Oppressed or Oppressor. Jews were the targets and victims of the largest mass murder in modern history. They should be the Oppressed. Yet they are vastly overrepresented in every field where motivation and intelligence matter.
Since all this scapegoating is irrational, so too are the reactions against modern Jews. On an unconscious level, we are simply reverting to something old and well tested culturally. We are engaging in atavistic hatreds that in the end cannot be prohibited, but for which the only solution is emotional growth and social maturity.
Given that nearly every force in our culture is causing people to regress into childish petulance and helplessness, we should not wonder that Jew hatred has come back into the very places where it should be most alien: groups who call themselves Liberal.
I am Jewish and have a pretty good anti semitism antenna. None of this comes as a surprise and has been going on for decades. We see the results at places Iike Penn Harvard and other colleges. The indoctrination of course also comes from other sources as well including many politicians. But this is not just about Jews and Israel. The left as exemplified by these teachers and schools also hates America and the kids are being force fed that hatred .
Their hate is their solution to an emotional problem: how to manage anxiety without growing up.
Individualism, which judges all individuals AS individuals and has no truck with or patience for collective judgements, is the creed of a mature, individuated society.
Collectivism is its inverse. It has reality distortions that are clinically schizophrenic, rejects individual moral judgement and agency, and acts to infantilize the whole society so that all members are reduced to the overall immaturity of the leaders of the criminal syndicate that seeks control.
Nazism was a Collectivist ideology. The German people were a monolithic bloc. So too were the Jews. So too were gays, those judged mentally defective, Slavs, Gypsies, and others. Everybody had their slot on what were literal hierarchies.
Communism is a Collectivist ideology, but for a hierarchy it substitutes just two classes: the elite, and everyone else. The elites have a hierarchy of sorts--a constantly shifting one--but the "Everyone Else" is supposed to be exactly equal, poor, and miserable. The whole emotional energy of Communism comes from the thrill the elites get from the relative advantages they enjoy.
But in both cases individuals disappear, both figuratively and literally. Children do not want adults in the room disrupting their psychotic delusions.
Big Picture, the real underlying problem in our nation is our pervasive childishness. Most Americans never grow up. It was interesting to me that Huxley actually described this in his Brave New World, when he said that people were expected to act as adults at work, and children everywhere else. That's pretty much American society today.
They also sexualized their children early, although the possibility of pedophilia--which in my view is extreme immaturity coupled with the sexual instinct--seems not to have occurred to him.
Well reasoned. And said.
Well said. I do wonder how we can leverage collective action (when needed) without becoming a mob.
Sometimes collective action is necessary - for example, in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, workers were paid subsistence wages to work grueling and often deadly factory shifts. Those abuses were addressed by unionization and government intervention - ie collective action.
We as a public might (*might*) need to employ similar strategies if AI is used to automate vast swaths of working- and middle-class jobs.
No group hates like "The Left". Hate is the raison d'etre of "leftism".
“Jews have long made a good target for this sort of irrational anger for several reasons.
First, for a long time they were blamed for Christ's crucifixion, never mind that Christ himself was a Jew also, as were all his followers, who en masse created what we call Christianity.”
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I will take ‘Explanations that do not account for even 0.00001% of this’ for $500, Alex.
This reminds me of how DHS says the Oath Keepers are the primary threat to America.
If you look at history, say the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, it was certainly highly relevant for a thousand years or more.
Most people don't know this, but much of the Spanish Inquisition was devoted to tracking down and discovering Jews who remained in Spain, said they converted, but were lying. There was actually a whole drama with sausages that should be fiction but isn't. Good Spaniards were expected to make and eat pork sausages and would often hang them on balconies or windows for curing. Anyone who didn't have pork sausages would be suspected, so observant Jews (some actually were lying) had to make do with chicken (or veal: I don't remember) sausages that looked the same.
The word ghetto was first used with respect to Jews in Italy, where I think the motivations were the same.
“Most people don't know this, but much of the Spanish Inquisition………”
————————————-
Most people don’t know this but this is not the Spanish Inquisition.
This is a communist revolution caused by Democrats who hate God and Jesus.
Going back to the ‘root causes’ and pointing at Christians is a very Democraty thing to do and it is abundantly clear we need to stop doing all of the Democrat things right away.
We need to build a wall and also build a trebuchet to launch Democrats over the wall.
There's actually a pretty strong comparison to be made between the Spanish Inquisition and Communism. Dostoevsky of course made it in the Brothers Karamozov.
Childishness is the enemy. Childishness is either/or thinking. Childishness is unhelpful--and obviously the polar opposite of the best direction if the best direction is adulthood, as I argue it should be.
Not all people who voted for Joe Biden hate God and Jesus. Many do, perhaps most, but not all. Are there awful narratives swirling around all our college campuses, and most primary and secondary schools? Yes, I think there are. Is violence the answer? No, I don't think it is.
As I have said here before, Murray Bowen offered a potential template for dealing with all this: mature people need to stand their ground. They need to stay connected with the hysterics without either fighting them directly, or withdrawing, and all while continuing to speak obvious truths as clearly and plainly and as often as they can.
In this process, which he witnessed on a micro scale in the families of schizophrenics, who were his main interest as a psychiatrist, what happens is the childish people fight back. They struggle HARD to get the more adult person to back down and join them in their childishness. This action, obviously, is the defining trait of authoritarian Collectivist regimes.
But IF the people who are standing as adults continue to stand as adults, the winds eventually blow themselves out, and the WHOLE SYSTEM advances in maturity.
This is what we want. Civil wars are awful, and when one exhausted party or the other can claim victory, it is never worth what was paid. Not at least by those who paid it. Peace and negotiation and ADULTING are always the best path. Violence is easy to start, but very, very, very difficult to stop.
That's my two cents, in any event.
Even if Christians did the first communist revolution and the Spanish Inquisition was just like this (false) the only reason to introduce that into the discussion is standard Hermeticist wizardry; erasing distinctions and universalizing blame and confusing the subject so we can have a robust discussion dominated by covert feminized manipulators.
Democrats are at fault. This is pagan collectivist utopianism. Actual Christianity is 0.0% involved and 0.0% at fault. It is the opposite of that. These exact forces have also infiltrated and corrupted Christianity but that just proves my point further.
Blaming “the Democrats” is in my view already a form of Collectivism. They are not all lost, and most of them seem to genuinely think they are defending the weak and that their people are righting wrongs
Those people can be reached, in my view, and that is a worthwhile effort make harder by blanket demonization.
If you want to talk Democrat LEADERSHIP, and complicit media and social media moguls, we agree.
But outside a core elite, and the perhaps ten percent of our population that is fully hypnotized, most Democrats are just IGNORANT, and ignorance is cured by patient teaching.
Our nation is in serious danger, on many fronts, but fear never makes anybody smarter. Which, of course, is why the internet has little else.
But while readily admitting my many failures in this regard, I still believe patience and calm remain our best strategies.
I will add that the history Christian anti-semitism is long and nearly ubiquitous. It was a feature of many members of the hard Right as recently as the 60’s and seemingly exists in a diluted form in some places even now.
Today, MOST Christians have evolved past all of that and en masse tend to be the strongest supporters of Israel, but the history should nit be ignored.
I agree mostly with your “adulting” thesis, however, by all accounts this approach does not appear to be working in Israel. When violence is imposed upon you, you have a choice to either use violence in return or perish. Millions went to their untimely and unjust deaths in the Nazi concentration camps because it was imposed upon them and the adults in Germany who knew better were intimidated into silence lest they and their family be executed as traitors. It was violence in the form of military operations against Nazi Germany that ended the madness. I fear it may be too late for the adulting approach here in America. Things are too far gone and will get much worse before they get better. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
Hard to know.
Yes, violence is sometimes needed, but it is always a failure.
I had a friend long ago whose father was a more or less literal gangster, and he always told him “Violence is the last recourse of an exhausted mind.”
But even though “the Jews” never didi anything to anyone, Nazi propagandas of Collective Guilt convinced most Germans they had to attack “the Jews” in SELF DEFENSE.
This whole farce, of absurd charges, leveled at innocent—and even exemplary—people, is being waged now against pretty much all Americans who vote for any traditional American values, like free speech, equality before the law, and the sanctity of elections.
Yes--Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll paints a clear picture of how supercessionist theology led to the Holocaust in Europe. The difference is that the vast majority of the Christian/Western world saw the aftermath in the concentration camps and reconsidered their position.
Islam has never reconsidered its position. And while Jews did live more peacefully for centuries in Arab countries than their European brethren, post-1948 that changed radically because of a similar theological underpinning: the idea that no land ever occupied by Muslims should be surrendered to the infidel. This is at the heart of the Palestinian conflict. It is a religious war, not a land issue. The concurrent rise of radical Islam has been gasoline on the fire.
And here in this country, because of intersectionalism and other general idiocy, Muslims can never be wrong, lest someone think we’re blaming innocent Muslims for 9/11.
“Given that nearly every force in our culture is causing people to regress into childish petulance and helplessness...”
This really echoes my own conclusions about what we’ve been seeing since the 1960s, but with an incredible acceleration since Covid/Floyd. There was clearly a strong element of primal, childish rage (the terrible twos) to the 2020 “summer of love”. The recent societal prevalence of “dark triad” traits is also a form of childishness: children are naturally narcissistic and egocentric, and prone to “acting out” anger and frustration when things don’t go their way.
Tantrums have become widespread: on airplanes, on the streets, in the schools, and even in the halls of government. Like children, we lack self-control in our behaviors -- from the way we eat to the way we govern, from taking what we want when we want it (shoplifting, smash and grab) to physically lashing out whenever we are frustrated.
Never mind the “blue pill” or “red pill” -- we need a maturity pill!
Agreed.
Touche
"If you can find another person who is willing to be angry with you at a third person, then you not only no longer feel fear, you feel connected and empowered."
Excellent insight. It applies when it's literally two people angry at a third person, and at every scale up to billions.
which is exactly what Social Media algorithms are designed to do
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Because the teacher was Jewish, it feels like society doesn’t care. If there was a black teacher and students tried to corner her and beat her up because she’s black, you know very well how different the situation would be. There’d be riots. People would be fired. There’d be all sorts of sensitivity trainings.”
I have. Pre-MLK Jim Crow.
And you know what shocks me the most is that the liberalism which stopped that ended up as DEI and now open attacks on Jews clearly supported by public officials.
Publish all names of those public officials.
Sue them all until there are none left.
Oppressors. What a sophomoric, pointless classification.
Maybe we should divide people into Elves and Gnomes?
And they're going to train AI from the Source of All Knowledge with pablum like this?
I’ve never heard Jews referred to as colonizers and Palestinians as the oppressed until all this new leftist lingo came to be. I won’t be surprised if a dictionary comes out with their new terminology that the rest of us are forced to use.
And as a Christian Middle Eastern former teacher, I’m appalled at the actions of Sirianna Aboud and those who awarded her. Who are these people??
What bothers me the most is how intellectually lazy these terms are. The subject is much more complex and reducing it to these lazy terms cheats the students.
Ms. Aboud is part of the problem, but the lazy so called professors who taught her this are the real source of this simplistic world view. They are lazy, echo chamber sycophants. The universities that enable them should be held accountable.
Who are these people? An evil fifth column bent on America's destruction. Wake up.
I asked the question, but believe me, I know!
I’ve heard this language in the last few years. Sorry to say it’s been around for a while.
I’m definitely familiar with their bs language over the past several years, but I suppose we never had reason to label Jews and Palestinians til the past couple months.
Star-belly Sneeches and Plain-belly Sneeches?
LOL - I had to google this, I may have to buy the book (unless the spineless publisher stopped printing it). Maybe abebooks.com - always a good source.
Thank you!!
I hope you can find it!! It’s my favorite Dr. Suess story.
I was also referencing The Dead Kennedys' song "Holiday in Cambodia". Don't listen near your boss or small children lol.
Yeah that oughta work out really well. Seeing as how wonderfully we’ve handled just about everything else...
We used to say seeing is believing, but now we get told not to believe our lying eyes.
Now even math has been deemed racist, the single most ignorant idea I’ve heard to date.
Here come the dark ages 2.0.
No outcome is guaranteed, that's for sure.
But who would have thought that a terrorist attack in Israel could result in a cultural earthquake in American?
I maintain that DEI is intellectually lazy. It is built on a foundation of victimhood. The damage to the young people who have been educated by it is incalculable.
But one prominent example of its poor results is the CEO of Harvard sitting in front of Congress and trying to excuse her feckless leadership as a matter of "context".
Amen.
The past four years have been strange to say the least but this intellectual decline started decades ago. It’s just now trickling into primary schools.
Liberty sacrificed for security leaves you with neither. Life is risky business and death is certain no matter how hard we try to escape it. Of course it’s best to do what is reasonable to live long and prosper though it should not be at the expense of inhibiting others from doing the same. At least that’s just my humble opinion.
You are correct. The problem comes when weak leaders convince people that "prospering" is a zero sum game. It's not. When everyone has the incentive to produce, everyone benefits. But, of course, anything worth having takes a lot of effort. (Someone famous said that better than I can, ah...but senior moment.)
This is so awful and sad. Now The Free Press needs to do a report about how this isn't happening in Florida schools, because Ron Desantis put a stop to it, well before October 7th. Yet, I've only seen criticism of him in The Free Press. See below for the most recent legislation passed in April 2023.
“In 2019, I had the opportunity here in Israel to sign into law groundbreaking legislation to root out antisemitism from our public education system, establishing Florida as a leader in protecting religious liberty,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Four years later, the threats faced by religious Americans of all faiths have evolved. Through this legislation, we are ensuring that perpetrators who commit acts of antisemitism and target religious groups or individuals will be punished.”
"HB 269 builds upon Governor DeSantis’ record of safeguarding the free exercise of religion in Florida by:
Prohibiting a person from intentionally dumping litter onto private property for the purpose of intimidating or threatening the owner, resident, or invitee of such property;
Prohibiting a person from willfully and maliciously harassing, threatening, or intimidating another person based on the person’s wearing or displaying of any indicia relating to any religious or ethnic heritage;
Creating a new prohibition against displaying or projecting, using any medium, an image onto a building, structure, or other property without the written consent of the owner of the building, structure, or property;
Creating a new trespass offense if a person who is not authorized, licensed, or invited willfully enters the campus of a state college or university for the purpose of threatening or intimidating another person, and is warned by the institution to depart and refuses to do so; and
Prohibiting a person from willfully and maliciously interrupting or disturbing any assembly of people met for the purpose of acknowledging the death of an individual."
I'm so thankful to live in the freest state in the nation, Florida. I'm so thankful to no longer live in least free city and state in the nation, NY, NY.
That’s a good start. I would also like the law to address other types of harassment that causes inconvenience and harm to the public, such as “protesters” cornering people at restaurants, or --especially -- harassing people at their homes.
I cannot envision a scenario where it is OK to scream and occupy my neighborhood because of something one of my neighbors may/may not have done! Ditto for disturbing all paying diners in a restaurant who have the bad luck to be present while someone these people don’t like is eating there.
Isn’t it odd that these techniques seem to be so much more prevalent on the left?
Absolutely. I was hoping some political adult in the room here in New York City would call out the National Guard during the George Floyd riots, and the pro-Hamas "Shut It Down for Palestine" makes me hope for the same -- a futile hope, I know.
Some people get to scrawl graffiti on our monuments and iconic buildings, break windows, clog our major thoroughfares and bridges, and disrupt the goings-on of hardworking citizens.
Some people have to be a bit more careful:
There's a nearby bar that very deliberately blasts its music out open doors all night despite complaints from neighbors and the CB. The bar owner seems to enjoy tormenting people who actually get up and go to work at 5:00 and six in the morning. Now, I'd like to break his windows, but I know I'd be caught and hauled in.
“Yet, I've only seen criticism of him in The Free Press.”
He and everyone else in the Republican Party and even Independents like RFK are just punching bags to TFP, with the exception of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger-both currently out of office. They continue to stroke Biden and Newsom to a nauseating degree. It’s Democrats or bust here. Don’t let them fool you into thinking otherwise.
That’s not true of the readers. Read our comments.
I was not at all referring to the readers.
I live in NJ an am becoming more and more interested in FL. Not least because of the weather. But also, too, the political climate. And the governance. I figure I can get used to the humidity eventually lol
I loved the people in Florida.
Hated the heat, humidity, gators and water moccasins
And the bugs!!
Ahh that's right. Florida wildlife. Good point. I did 2 weeks in SC this year in August so maybe I can survive.
Thank you Lauren for posting this.
Depressing reading. It just underscores that our public education system has become almost rotten to the core. School choice may be the most urgent cause the American people must pursue to begin to reverse the damage on so many fronts. School choice may indeed be the only way to save public schools from themselves. Once they have to actually compete for students, they may abandon brain-dead activism and try their hand at educating.
I saw a poll this morning:
“51% of those aged between 18 and 24 years old stated that they believe the long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict would be for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians...". This did not happen overnight and it will take a generation or more to reverse into a minority view. It has to start with strict laws as enacted in Germany after WW2. Jews being scapegoated is very old and it seems to be an indicator of “bad” days coming. Is it the canary of another “empire” collapsing from within?
We have allowed our schools to be captured by leftists with predictable results. A generation of little Pavliks, hot to sell out their parents to the collective. We need to dig this madness out by its roots and burn all the malignant growth.
The article mentioned one teachers union. All of them have to go.
I saw the same poll. I took some hope - only some - from the fact that the numbers holding those radically anti-Israel views dropped significantly in the next group up. It could be respondents got less stupid the further they were removed from being in school or it may simply reflect that this sort of radicalism has really gone into overdrive in the last decade. Either way, your canary metaphor is apt.
In almost every poll on Israel, the numbers drop significantly with each successive age group. I see that as a clear indicator of how this indoctrination has crept into our schools over time.
Celia, please read what I just wrote to Steve. I think the explanation is more complicated.
Yup.
Steve, I’ve seen these demographic breakdowns too, and I think the more accurate explanation is that the group who believes in the Holocaust and is pro-Israel, ie, those over age 65, are the people currently alive who were alive closest to the event. In other words, people in their 90’s had fathers and older brothers who fought in WW2 and were stationed in Europe and maybe even liberated one of the camps. People in their 80’s had family members with direct experience of same, heard it talked about at the kitchen table. People in their 70’s had parents who were teenagers during WW2, like my mother, whose father was a ships captain in the Merchant Marine and sailed across the Atlantic in convoys delivering materiel to the troops, dodging German submarines and watching their buddies get torpedoed and killed before their eyes. My mom told stories about the blackouts in New Orleans when they had to turn out all the lights in the city at night when they knew there were German subs in the Gulf of Mexico.
As you get younger, people in their 50’s and 60’s saw these things depicted in movies and books and heard them talked about. People now in their 40’s had little exposure and those in their 30’s and below, maybe no exposure at all. By the time you get to kids in high school and college, you’re lucky if they’ve read The Diary of Anne Frank and realized it was a true story. So yeah, the crazy school system is partly to blame, but more important is the loss of experiential knowledge that past generations had. The further away from the Holocaust we get, the harder it’s going to be to make people remember who would rather forget.
That probably has something to do with why younger groups are more susceptible to the indoctrination. That doesn't mean the indoctrination isn't happening.
Oh, the indoctrination is happening. But there’s no one at home to counteract it.
I suspect that a lot of parents are unaware of all the things their children are taught at school. It's easiest and most comfortable to believe that kids are being taught pretty much the same things we were taught in school ourselves.
It was only when the Covid restrictions brought the classroom into the home, where parents could see and hear what was being taught, that many parents came to the realization that their children were being taught very different things than they had been themselves. Not just Common Core math and phonics-less reading, but "social justice" and "identity" education being built into every aspect of the curriculum.
A huge amount of damage was done before parents ever found out.
Not at all surprising that higher age groups see it differently. All it takes for these 18-24 yr old kids is to set foot in the world of adulthood where reality sets in and where they at some point are forced to grudgingly acknowledge the previous generations with whom they were arguing were much smarter than they thought.
Have you not been paying attention. This does not happen to any meaningful degree.
For 20 years people have been saying “wait until these college kids get to the real world” and now the “real world” is just a big college campus. Look at giant and boring corporations going full pronouns and land acknowledgment.
Stop thinking there is something or someone that is going to stop this for us. There isn’t. It requires work and diligence.
Here in the huge swathe of flyover country between the coasts, far removed from Cambridge, Stanford and other ‘hotspots of hatred and calls for genocide’ we have zero fear of chanting, sign waving, bullhorn wielding mobs of college students and their like minded professors driving us out of our homes and spreading fear across the country, as much as an increasingly paranoid TFP would like us to believe it could happen. They would be met with tremendous resistance. Much like when a handful of black men repelled a large mob of BLM protesters rolling up on their neighborhood, telling them to “get the f**k out” and to “go tear up your own neighborhood.” That’s what real adults do and they far outnumber the arrested development types.
In answer to your question, yes.
Since becoming a US citizen in 2016, school choice has always been my #1 issue when it comes to who I vote for. During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden clearly stated that he was against school choice. Game over. Even though I wasn't a big fan of Trump I voted for him, and will do so again if that is the choice.
"Almost" rotten to the core?
Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of young black men who graduate from CÁ public schools are functionally illiterate--but let’s concentrate on teaching them that they’re victims and nothing is ever their fault.
Well it seems like that might be part of the longer game plan. If they remain relatively uneducated they’ll be easier to manipulate. If they get taught how to think rather than what to think they might come to the wrong conclusions.
They might realize the emperor has no clothes!
Much higher than 1 quarter. Much higher.
The War on Jews is akin to Nazi Germany invading Poland as a beta test for what the rest of the world will do. No one should be under the illusion that this stops with the Jews. It did not stop with Poland.
Put in a politically correct way, this is a war against western values. Put in a politically incorrect way, this is a war against whites. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is merely an opening salvo.
Call it what you will, the goals are the same.
I understand and agree with the thrust of your argument, but I must quibble. It's not a war against "whites." As in white individuals. Not true.
It's a war against what they refer to as "whiteness." It's a shorthand for "cultural products of the Enlightenment." Anything that gave rise to Western civilization is the enemy. Case in point: all a black person has to do is *not* be progressive and s/he is cast into the same lot as those "far-right fascists." Hard-working Latinos who come to America, live their lives in peace, and *don't* vote for progressives?? They are the "Latin face of white supremacy." Any person of any skin color who does not spout fealty to intersectional leftism is the enemy. And what about all these white people who are carrying leftism forward? As long as they prostrate themselves and say the incantations and perform the correct rites and say the correct chants, they're in the club!
Thinking about this in terms of individual people is itself a faulty premise. This is about collectivist thinking.
I agree --in part. Without a doubt, this is a war against post enlightenment values, but it is also a war against White people. No matter how faithful an “ally” a White person may be, they are always outside the circle, and must constantly prove their fealty with ever-increasing burdens of obligation and sacrifice. And they can never overcome their skin color. There is no possible path to redemption.
They also don’t like Asians. Older Asians have been beaten up in the streets, especially during Covid and the media didn’t report it. And now the Left wants to get rid of tests for special schools bc. too many Asians pass.
Yeah but the CRT proponents point to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII as further proof all white ppl are oppressors.
Now who’s the oppressor?
Agreed. See my other comments on this thread.
Truth. Amazing as it seems. Conservative ppl of any stripe are dismissed as Nazis/bigots/ homophobes etc.
Yeah. That.
It absolutely is a war against whites. They're starting with the Jews first, the weakest of the two "colonizers". Once whites are disarmed, they are next.
It's no longer a wacky conspiracy theory. It's happening in real time.
I think that if that is true it’s because most, but not all blacks, have been duped into thinking that they will then get their turn being the oppressors. What they are missing is that most anti-black racism in the world today comes from the MidEast and Asia. The west is the only place blacks have thrived.
Black slavery still exists in Islamic countries and the Chinese have always considered blacks to be subhuman.
If this is a war against western values, blacks, like Jews, have to choose sides. Sadly, most of the leadership of both groups have been co-opted so I don’t expect much help.
It's a war against the entire Judeo-Christian tradition and everything born of it.
It is fundamentally a spiritual war first and foremost.
As a tactician I would substitute the word values for spiritual. I know many people who are not personally very religious but who strongly support JudeoChristian values. Tom Holland has written good books on that.
People conflate "spiritual" with "religious"; I use the word as "pertaining to the spirit or to a spirit".
Ideologies and human corporate powers behave like living things. I perceived them as lifelike, having spiritual agency.
When people regurgitate brainwashing like "systemic racism" and "social justice" they are not speaking with their own voice, but with the voice of a spirit they adopted.
What "ethnic identity" correlates with a ring in your nose? My 3rd daughter has a ring in her nose, but nobody else in the family does. Does that mean she's a different ethnicity, maybe not our child at all?
Nose rings remind me of livestock. Add in a numbered ear tag and the picture is complete.
Absolutely, Art. They think they look cool, but many of us think they look absolutely ridiculous. (So you WANT to look like a cow? Well, it's working)
😂IKR?
Regarding nose rings: If you make a Venn diagram of three circles:
1. Wears a nose ring
2. Enthusiastically supports DEI
3. Is anti-Semitic
How do these three circles overlap and underlap?
Got me. My daughter sings in a punk band. I know some people at church with nose rings. They seem normal, except for being young.
I have a nose ring, and that’s the only one of the three true about me. I think nose piercings are ubiquitous enough not to be a signifier of being infected by the woke mind-virus. Now, if you said artificially-colored hair, then you might be on to something… 😆
I have a nose stud. I’m 62 and staunchly conservative. So I think we can assume that nose piercings are too mainstream to indicate political affiliation. Since my hair is gray, I was thinking of dyeing it a fun color. With pink hair, a nose stud and my Stevie Nicks wardrobe, I wonder how many radical feminist groups I could infiltrate and subvert.
As recently as 5 years ago, I loved putting a streak of purple dye in my largely white hair. But wild hair colors have become too strongly associated with the mind-virus. Sadly, not planning to do that anymore.
I just feel like it wouldn't last long enough to make it worth the effort.
You may believe they are ubiquitous. Heck, they may be, especially depending on where you live, but that doesn't mean that people don't think you lean a certain way based on it. Or that statistically there are more that have it and happen to also be left leaning.
Anecdotally (which I know is not evidence of anything) both my time in CO and now NC, nose rings seem to largely be a thing of the young and liberally minded. A tiny sample set would be an office in a small town. Only 2 women there have face piercings. Both are unabashedly liberal surrounded by conservative women with no piercings or non-human hair colors.
I find it interesting that several posts here seem to say "It isn't a liberal thing, because I also have a nose piercing, but wild hair colors? That this a lefty thing."
These things may in fact be purely cosmetic and have no statistical significance. Or there may be statistical significance but not correlation or there may be some link in general. None of those things should lean to individual judgements. But that isn't how humans work. Our brains like to simplify the world, not complicate it. So we make assumptions based on our limited observations. The news shows far more women with dyed hair and/or piercings for people on the left than right. Which unfortunately could mean that when people see those things, they make assumptions.
I was mostly kidding about the hair color, I once dyed my own hair green while simultaneously being a volunteer for the local Republican party. But that was in the 1990s! You may also be correct about regional differences. I live in a blue city in a red state, and my conservative Baptist church is full of pierced and tattooed folks. Not so much dyed hair tho. At age 42 I still love my nose ring, I look back on the green hair and cringe. 😅
In my example of the 2 liberal gals, I will say that I have never noticed anyone treat them differently. So even if there are judgements going on, people are at least trying not to act on them. And I suspect that if they did have a bias, they were able to push it aside to get to know the individual and alter their bias based on that.
As a personal question, I have to ask what it is about your nose ring that you enjoy so much. I have never understood piercings or tattoos. The semi-permanence and often lack of symmetry confuse me as far as a fashion statements go. Then again, I don't generally understand most fashions :)
I just like the way it looks! It’s not any more deep or meaningful than that. I will say that I don’t care for an overload of piercings, or piercings in certain spots. I think most tattoos are ugly, but a well-designed and well-placed tattoo is incredibly cool and attractive. While in some contexts, symmetry is beautiful, I also find asymmetry beautiful and interesting as well. I do believe there are some aesthetic universals, but there is also truth to the fact that you can’t argue personal tastes and preferences! 🤷♀️
Many young people go through a goofy-hair-color phase. My daughter had hers sea-green once. It was supposed to make her look like a mermaid, but she appeared to be decomposing. Fortunately, it washed out fairly quickly.
I was mostly kidding (sort of) - I myself dyed my hair emerald green in high school, while simultaneously volunteering for the local Republican party. So I know you can’t always judge a book by its cover!
I put hydrogen peroxide on my hair in high school. The resulting color is rarely found in nature.
my guess is they are referring to the septum piercings, not the traditional stud in the nostril which has gone mainstream. My wife is a VP and has a stud in her nostril and nobody bats an eye.
The image from the "lesson," shown in the article, was a little ring in the nostril, like my daughter has.
Thanks for clarifying, I hadn't noticed that. As I said, my wife has one and she's colored her hair many times as it's fun to do when one is young (she no longer does it as it damaged her hair). She has a couple of tattoos too, one on her forearm (the horror!). People on the right can be just as judgmental as leftists when it comes to appearance and that just pushes people away who feel abandoned by the left but unwelcome by the right.
My daughter has given up on hair weirdness for the same reason. And I agree with your point.
Some of these trends are kinda cool. I had pierced ears but my body never liked that so I eventually gave up wearing earrings. Piercings are no longer considered unusual, weird or in poor taste. Things have changed.
Though I like some of the tattoos I think some ppl go overboard. I don’t care for foul imagery or language on ppl or bumper stickers. Even tattoos are main stream as what do you care if a person has one. They offer little evidence of the kind of person they are on.
I wouldn’t get too concerned about that. Kids mostly want to rebel but someday, if they’re raised in homes where they get enough of a voice of reason and know they are loved, they’ll become good people, maybe have kids if their own, and discover you were right about a whole lot of things.
When they’re teens to young adults you’re stupid, when they hit somewhere between 25-27 they start to understand maybe you weren’t as dumb as they thought.
Amazing!
This article leaves me with very little hope for the future. I feel like other nations are waging war against us via social media and money. It's working so well they don't need to attack. They just have to patiently wait for us to destroy ourselves from the inside. I fear for what the next 25 years looks like.
I've said for the last decade, virtually every evolution in our country is consistent with long term strategies for destabilization.
Open borders, assaulting police, rejecting tradition, ethnic divisions - even a political party that openly declared itself as a revolution and has explicitly said they will not accept a Republican victory.
Our country is being dismantled to make way for globalism and Democrat traitors are helping it happen as fast as possible.
💯So sad
The very people who claim to be against oppression of any kind are only too happy to become the oppressors when the opportunity presents itself. Funny how that works.
This seems to be built into human nature, based on how we've seen it play out historically. Most "oppressed" people, once they overthrow the oppressors, turn around and become oppressors themselves. It takes real strength of will and strength of character to resist that urge.
The U.S. is notable counterexample. Rather than setting up a dictatorial monarchial system of their own (although there were some people who wanted George Washington to become the king of our new country), our Founders intentionally set about creating a system designed to ensure the most freedom for the most people of any governing system ever invented.
How far we have fallen from their goals!
As my daughter would say, ONE HUNDO!
> Donalda Chumney, a former deputy superintendent of District 2 who is not Jewish, told me that within the Department of Education, Jews “fade into whiteness, in a way that makes whiteness a monolith.”
So basically, "It's OK to hate white people for being born any time after the year 2000... jury's still out on whether or not it's OK to do that to Jewish people."
My thought exactly. The implicit attitude here is just... so wrong.
Chumney is the prototypical self-loathing white woman that is at the epicenter of this hate movement. Without enablers like her, none of this would ever happen.
Yep, you got it.
Jewish people are the only ones allowed to point out the folly of current 'diversity' initiatives.
Anyone else doing so will be labelled a white-supremacist and/or nazi.
Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that he wasn't interested whether the adult population embraced his "philosophy" because, in his words, "We have your children". I cling to the hope that the majority of Americans will find this detestable and out these blue state demagogues.
Majority of Americans are still asleep at the helm
The press conference on the Hillcrest incident was really disturbing, especially when Banks gave the microphone to two Muslim students to justify the antisemitic "protest" against the teacher and to defend the students, as if they were somehow the victims. The perspective of the Jewish students and teachers wasn't presented.
I have no words.
How did the deification of American Muslims post-9/11 become so mainstream?
And how-after 9/11- did this country elect Obama, a half-Muslim whose pastor screamed “God damn America”? I’m starting to wonder if the Dems stole that election. Maybe that’s why they were so ready to accuse Trump of stealing the 2016 election- because they knew it could be done!
I hate that the button to endorse this story is a heart emoji. (edit: or even a thumbs-up, depending on your device/page - both options suck.)
I vote to replace the "heart" with "applause".
I applaud the article; I don't love it.
I’ve been thinking that constantly lately.
This is all hauntingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany and the coming of the third reich. Teaching anti-semitism in public schools, associating Zionism with Judaism (aka Jews are not “real” Germans or “real” Americans). Educating people an incorrect history to justify antisemitism (Jews have been in that part of the world for thousands of years -- aka see Jesus as a Jew living in the Jerusalem area not simply since post WW2.
Currently, the main difference is that Nazi Germany preached hatred of all but the “aryan” race. Here, hatred is only preached against Jews currently, not Blacks, Hispanics, Asian, etc. Of course, once a society embraces hate, they move from Jews to other minority groups. It happens in history over and over again.
It is probably worth nothing that every great, dominant, rich society has been brought down by their hatred of Jews.
One of the differences today is that if (when?) the US pushes the Jews out, there is a country willing, able and desirous to taking in these Jews -- Israel. Unlike the 1930’s when jam-packed ships full of Jews went from port to port hoping to be welcomed and never were -- today Jews have the historic land of Israel waiting to embrace them.
Huh? "...associating Zionism with Judaism..."? Zion is Israel, more precisely Jerusalem. Jezzez kriste, read the Bible, the Olde part.
Unless I misunderstood your meaning.