RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://wokecapital.org/scapegoating-netanyahu-then-and-now/

Benjamin Netanyahu is not fit to be the Prime Minister of Israel.

You don’t have to take my word for this, of course.  No less a luminary than the Senate Majority Leader said as much the other day.  That’s right.  The Majority Leader.  Of the Senate.  Of the United States of America.  Not the Knesset, mind you, but the U.S. Senate.  Moreover, he said that the United States should do everything it can to ensure that Netanyahu is pushed out of power.  Seriously (emphasis added):

In a landmark speech, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost his way,” urged new elections in Israel, called for a two-state solution and said the United States should use its “leverage” to push for its goals in the region if Netanyahu remains in power….

[S]aying he spoke for a “silent majority” of American Jews, Schumer said many were “horrified” that Israel was falling short of upholding Jewish values due to its far-right coalition members and the way it is prosecuting the war in Gaza. And he castigated Netanyahu for actively opposing a two-state solution.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d like to see the crosstabs of the survey showing that the “silent majority” of American Jews agree with Schumer on this.  I have a long and notorious history of underestimating American Jews’ loyalty to the Democratic Party, but I still think Schumer is mistaken here.  In fact, I think that he is full of male cattle excrement.

Schumer’s rant – which would be classified as “election interference” if it came from anyone other than a Democrat and were directed at anyone other than Netanyahu – was less about finding a solution to the current problems plaguing Israel and more about finding a scapegoat for the failure of the Democrats’ decades-long delusions about Middle East “peace.”

My American Greatness column tomorrow is about the millennia-old tradition in the West of scapegoating Jews for all the world’s problems when those problems get especially burdensome.  This is a familiar topic in these pages.  As it turns out, scapegoating Netanyahu is the Democrats’ version of this medieval antisemitism.  It allows them to blame “the Jews” without actually having to blame the Jews.  It gives them a handy, ready-made explanation for the failure of the two-state solution that enables them at least to try to play both sides of the issue.  In public, they say things like “of course I support Israel and its right to defend itself,” even as they nod and wink at their agitated Arab and identitarian supporters, whispering, “We know, we know.  It’s really the Jew’s fault.”

https://www.racket.news/p/why-the-tiktok-ban-is-so-dangerous

It’s funny how things work.

Last year at this time, Americans overwhelmingly supported a ban on TikTok. Polls showed a 50-22% overall margin in support of a ban and 70-14% among conservatives. But Congress couldn’t get the RESTRICT Act passed.

As the public learned more about provisions in the bill, and particularly since the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, the legislative plan grew less popular. Polls dropped to 38-27% in favor by December, and they’re at 35-31% against now.

Yet the House just passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” by a ridiculous 352-64 margin, with an even more absurd 50-0 unanimous push from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. What gives?

As discussed on the new America This Week, passage of the TikTok ban represents a perfect storm of unpleasant political developments, putting congress back fully in line with the national security establishment on speech. After years of public championing of the First Amendment, congressional Republicans have suddenly and dramatically been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile Democrats, who stand to lose a lot from the bill politically — it’s opposed by 73% of TikTok users, precisely the young voters whose defections since October put Joe Biden’s campaign into a tailspin — are spinning passage of the legislation to its base by suggesting it’s not really happening.

“This is not an attempt to ban TikTok, it’s an attempt to make TikTok better,” is how Nancy Pelosi put it. Congress, the theory goes, will force TikTok to divest, some kindly Wall Street consortium will gobble it up (“It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Steve Mnuchin told CNBC), and life will go on. All good, right?

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-two/

Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts.

The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all.

Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective.

“Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel.

Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt.