This Week in Bret Jewish Genius Stephens Proves Me Right (9/11)
David Shasha
Bret Stephens Trolls Biden in the Tikvah Catholic Fascist Manner
On Tuesday, I posted items on both Bret Stephens and his Jewish Genius pal Bari Weiss:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/XJV-JMVQUsA
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/hktm7TUPEHY
The posts included articles attacking WOKE Identity Politics, without acknowledging the fact that both Stephens and Weiss are ethnocentric practitioners of WOKE Identity Politics and Cancel Culture, as can be seen the special newsletters I re-posted:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/7EfM-yW_Cks
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/Vg1uJhdbjl0
Weiss has sought to cancel those who do not agree with her strident Neo-Con HASBARAH militancy, while Stephens has proudly quoted from White Supremacist eugenics racists in his article on “Jewish Genius.”
Stephens’ writing and institutional work is suffused exclusively with Neo-Con Jewish ideas and dogmas. He is one of the most intolerant of the New Straussians and brooks no debate when it comes to asserting his White Jewish Privilege.
His Wednesday column followed the Tikvah lead echoed by so many on the Right, attacking Joe Biden’s Philadelphia speech as “Malicious”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/opinion/biden-speech-maga-republicans.html
The complete article follows this note.
It is another piece of immoral PILPUL that trafficks in fake moral equivalency, as it ignores the real problems we face in America today.
The article validates every bad thing I have ever said about him.
He could have written about Trump’s criminality, Trump’s embrace of Nazis, Trump’s criminal manipulation of the judiciary, but instead chose to say this:
In other words, Biden claimed to distinguish MAGA Republicans from mainstream ones and then proceeded to conflate them. That may resonate with partisan Democrats who have never seen a conservative they didn’t consider a bigot or a fool. But it gives the lie to the idea that dismantling MAGA Republicanism is the prime objective of the president or his party.
As his beloved Israelis like to say, Biden was “ZEH LO FAIR.”
Biden needs to have more compassion for those who are destroying American democracy. He needs to make granular distinctions between those who want to destroy our Civil Rights and those who believe in QAnon conspiracies and stolen election myths.
Stephens, as is the case with Ross Douthat, has a serious MAGA problem. Rather than focus on the necessary, he continues to Troll the Libs:
For this election cycle, pro-Democratic groups have spent north of $40 million in ad buys to help nominate the Trumpiest candidates in Republican primaries, on the theory that they will be easier to beat in November. That included a successful effort to defeat Michigan Representative Peter Meijer — one of just 10 House Republicans who voted for Donald Trump’s impeachment last year — in last month’s G.O.P. primary.
Stephens, Weiss, and Douthat make the purported Republican Never-Trumper puffery a distinction without a difference, as they remain implacably hostile to Liberal Democracy and seek to create a moral equivalence between those who believe in that Liberal Democracy and the vast number of Republicans who obviously do not.
Stephens should admit what he stands for, as he attacks the milquetoast Biden for finally calling out the New Fascism.
As I was finishing up this note, I received an e-mail from the rabidly MAGA Townhall which could have used the Stephens column as support for its demented Fascism:
Thursday night, President Joe Biden declared war on
conservatives. On you.
Flanked by U.S. Marines and standing before an ominous blood-red background
right out of the Stalin-Hitler playbook, President "Unity" gave his
most divisive screed yet, calling "MAGA Republicans" extremists who
"embrace anger," "thrive on chaos," and live in "the
shadow of lies."
Then, Biden called for the nation to "come together," as if more than
half the country would simply accept being declared enemies of the state.
If they want a fight, they've got it. We won't take this laying down anymore.
It's time for us real "MAGA Republicans" to take a stand and fight back.
Despite Biden's lies, the true enemy of America is the radical left and its
insane agenda that embraces Big Government, censorship, and political violence.
For them, the ends justify the means, and they will stop at nothing to destroy
this great country. We've seen the lengths they're willing to go against
President Trump. What do you think they're willing to do to you?
As Trump has always said, "In reality they're not after me, they're
after you. I'm just in the way."
Indeed, it is hard to see any difference between Stephens and Townhall.
Not that the Jewish Genius would ever admit it.
David Shasha
With Malice Toward Quite a Few
By: Bret Stephens
Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of reconciliation, to those who deserved it least.
Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week bears no resemblance to either address, except that, in his own inaugural, he staked his presidency on ending “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” So much for that. Like the predecessor he denounces, Biden has decided the best way to seek partisan advantage is to treat tens of millions of Americans as the enemy within.
How can an American president go wrong in identifying threats to democracy? Biden offered a master class.
Start with the “MAGA Republicans,” who, Biden said, “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
Who are they? The president allowed that they are “not even the majority of Republicans.” Then, in describing their goals, he cast a net so wide it included everyone from those who cheered the attack on the Capitol and the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to those who oppose abortion rights and gay marriage.
As categories go, this one is capacious.
It includes violent Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — as well as every faithful Catholic or evangelical Christian whose deeply held moral convictions bring them to oppose legalized abortion.
It takes in the antisemites who marched at Charlottesville — as well as socially conservative Americans with traditional beliefs about marriage, which would have included Barack Obama during his 2008 run for president.
It encompasses undoubted election deniers like lawyers Sidney Powell and John Eastman — along with ordinary Americans who have been bamboozled into harboring misguided but sincere doubts about the integrity of the last election.
In other words, Biden claimed to distinguish MAGA Republicans from mainstream ones and then proceeded to conflate them. That may resonate with partisan Democrats who have never seen a conservative they didn’t consider a bigot or a fool. But it gives the lie to the idea that dismantling MAGA Republicanism is the prime objective of the president or his party.
Then there were the transparently partisan purposes of Biden’s speech.
For this election cycle, pro-Democratic groups have spent north of $40 million in ad buys to help nominate the Trumpiest candidates in Republican primaries, on the theory that they will be easier to beat in November. That included a successful effort to defeat Michigan Representative Peter Meijer — one of just 10 House Republicans who voted for Donald Trump’s impeachment last year — in last month’s G.O.P. primary.
Is that smart as hardball politics? Maybe. But Biden could have spared us the pieties about timeless American values. As far as I can tell, he has yet to say a word in public against the ad buys, much less tried to stop them. Instead, his speech makes a neat bookend to a strategy of promoting MAGA extremists so they can be denounced as MAGA extremists. Some liberals took a similar approach in 2016, all but rooting for Trump to win the nomination on the theory that he’d be Hillary Clinton’s weakest opponent. Look how that worked out.
And then there was the crassest part of Biden’s speech, in which an ostensible presidential address became a campaign rally for Democratic priorities such as prescription-drug benefits and the “clean energy future.” When a president makes the implicit claim that to be a small-d democrat one must today be a big-D Democrat he advances the interests of neither his party nor the country. He only gratuitously insults millions of voters as deplorables while again branding Democrats as the party of sanctimony and condescension.
I write this as someone who has long thought that Trump represents a unique threat to democracy.
He is the only president in American history who has refused to concede an election, who has schemed with conspiracy theorists to remain in power, who has sought to bully state officials into finding him votes, who has egged on a mob, who has cheered an assault on Congress, who has put the life of his vice president in jeopardy, who has flouted the demands of the Justice Department to return classified documents, who has violated every norm of American politics and every form of democratic decency. He is the tribune of the “mobocratic spirit” that Lincoln warned against in his first major address, and to which he devoted his life to stopping.
The gravest threat American democracy faces today isn’t the Republican Party, MAGA or otherwise. It’s Trump. He’s one man, sinister but also buffoonish. To defeat him, the core task is to make him seem small, very small. Biden’s misbegotten speech did precisely the opposite.
The next time Biden talks about democracy, he should remember Lincoln’s other exhortation: charity for all.
From The New York Times, September 7, 2022