The America of the early naivete: America and the dawn of a new neoliberal society on the right track
American progress wasn’t always certain. It took great courage to move to the country that is more fair. We can’t presume that progress is permanent. It never is. No one is more aware of that than America’s most vulnerable communities. They feel the effects very keenly when we take steps backward, when our commitment to our principles falters in the face of our own sin.
America is not an exception. Our new world has been plagued with sins of the old from the beginning. The central declaration of the founding is that all men are created equal.
Evolution applies to biology, not human nature. It has been found that humanity does not grow out of darkness. It needs to be challenged by every generation. We are neither imprisoned by darkness nor ever fully captured by light.
Source: Opinion | An Old Hate Cracks Open on the New Right
The era of the New Right: When antisemitism becomes intolerable to Jews despite the Owens-Shapiro confrontation
It is no coincidence, for example, that after the Owens-Shapiro confrontation, many New Right figures began posting “Christ is king,” an obvious shot at Shapiro’s Jewish beliefs.
hatred of Israel has confronted Jews around the world since October 7. I think that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same thing, and that the left is not genocidal when it wants to see a binational state in Israel and Palestine. However, the explosion of anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence occasioned by the war in Gaza — the stabbing of a Jewish woman in France, the shootings of Jewish day schools in Montreal, the killing of a Jewish protester near Los Angeles — has forced me to reckon with how often anti-Zionism and antisemitism are intertwined. The state of the Jewish nation becomes intolerable to Jews.
Everything about the New Right mind-set told us that this devolution was inevitable. It degrades character and decency in the public square, often turning cruel into virtue. This was needed for the entire enterprise. Decent people can be misguided, certainly, but they are not consumed with hate. Decent people do not indulge bigots.
Buchanan is not a minor figure. The prediction of the present moment in Republican politics was made by his presidential campaigns in the 1990s. The party “traded Reaganism for Buchananism,” she contended. By the day, the evidence increases that she was correct.
William Buckley Jr. denounced Pat Buchanan, accusing him of antisemitism in 1991, because of Buchanan’s influence. Buchanan had a case that related to war and peace. In the run-up to the first Iraq war, Buchanan said, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” That was not a big deal compared to many of his later statements. If Elena Kagan were confirmed to the Supreme Court it would mean that Jews will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?”
The Ghost of Charles Lindbergh: What Have We Learned in the First Half of the 20th Century? The Old Jews-and-Meaning Joke about the Right Right
The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us. The hero pilot who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 is remembered by readers. He later grew to admire German fascism and gave a famous speech in September 1941 in which he accused Jews of attempting to push America into World War II.
What is going on? The Republican Party has been a strong ally of Israel for the last several decades and that has caused some criticism from evangelical voters. I was a lawyer and a Republican and I never observed a trace of antisemitism. The answer is obvious. The “new” American right isn’t that new at all. It has rejected Reaganism, yes, but in doing so, it’s reconnecting with older and darker forces on the right.
While there are more examples of right-wing antisemitism spilling into the public square, I’m going to stop there. I don’t want to diminish the antisemitism we have seen on campuses and in the streets, but I do want to focus on the people who are most prominent on the right.
The founder of a right-wing organization jumped in the next day to defend Musk and the original post on his show. Kirk argued that the first part of the original post was true, despite the fact that he didn’t like to generalize. The old Jews-and-money joke is that some of the largest financiers of anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans.
“I’m deeply disinterested,” he continued, “in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
The term white genocide is used by the right as an example of how the left is trying to replace America’s white majority with people of color. This is the theory that motivated the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. It is false, evil and very dangerous.
On Nov. 3, Owens posted on social media, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no basis for a genocide. I can not comprehend that this needs to be said or that it is seen as the least controversial to state. Many of her followers interpreted this as a criticism of Israel, and Shapiro, who staunchly supports Israel in its present conflict with Hamas, was later caught on tape at a private event saying Owens’s behavior during the war has been “disgraceful.”
The Daily Wire drama should be aNetworkExposure for anyone who cares about it, but what happened next was frightening. The man with multiple loyalties is a leading personality at TheBlaze, one of the largest right-wing websites. He loves America, but he loves Israel too. And maybe he loves Israel and he loves America too.” He said that Owens is more America first. She has just one loyalty.
X’s erratic owner was able to win this approval without even apologizing for boosting the very antisemitic conspiracy theory behind the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. It’s hard to figure out who is behaving more cynically, Musk or the Jewish leaders who are koshering him.
Charles Weber, a self-identifying Jewish conservative, took to X a week ago to talk about the cowardice hidden behind the anonymity of the internet and posting that Hitler was right. Weber dared those trolls to “say it to our faces.” One X user took him up on it.
We are working to create a platform for everyone at this company. And there is no other platform that’s working as hard to protect free speech like X. Our work is critical, but it’s not always easy. We do things that matter, which leads to criticism from people who don’t share our beliefs.
While some advertisers may have temporarily paused investments because of a misleading and manipulated article, the data will tell the real story. Because for all of us who work at X, we are absolutely clear about our efforts to fight antisemitism and discrimination, as there is no place for it in the world.
X’s Yaccarino: Restarting X to Make Up for the Phenomenology of Antisemitism
Our values have to work and be supported by one another. I will see you at the office tomorrow morning and I am so proud to be on the front line with you.
Meanwhile, Semafor reports that Yaccarino has enlisted her son Matt Madrazo to reboot X’s political advertising business, in hopes to make up for the revenue lost by the “temporarily paused investments” of what previously were some of the company’s biggest clients.
In an email to all employees, Yaccarino expressed her enthusiasm about the company. In the memo, first published by The Hollywood Reporter and obtained by The Verge, she claimed that advertisers had “temporarily paused investments” — an interesting way to phrase major advertisers like Apple, Disney, and IBM pulling their business from the platform because of Musk’s seeming endorsement of antisemitism. She blamed some articles that she thought were manipulated for damaging the platform’s reputation. “The data will tell the real story,” she wrote in her memo, possibly a reference to Musk’s post / screenshot indicating that he would sue Media Matters.