Notes on Tikvah Monday: Last Weekend in Seditionist Trumpworld
David Shasha
Notes on Tikvah Monday: Last Weekend in Seditionist Trumpworld
I am writing this set of notes on Monday evening, and it is hard to know what more might happen in Seditionist Trumpworld after what was a truly tumultuous weekend.
There was the excellent RNC declaration that the 1/6 Insurrection was “Legitimate Political Discourse:
Naturally, the RNC also censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for supporting the 1/6 Congressional Committee which is still aggressively investigating the treason:
“Hang Mike Pence,” bi-chbodo u-b-‘atzmo, in the flesh, decided to try and become “presidential” as he did his best attempt to audition for the Never Trump Republicans in the 2024 primary sweepstakes:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/politics/pence-january-6-trump/index.html
Good luck with that one:
https://morningconsult.com/2022/01/26/gop-primary-2024-polling/
Death Sentence all the way!
We should note that in his lame speech the still-living Pence did not renounce the Big Lie, but affirmed that it was “wrong” to try and overturn the election.
We should further note, for completeness’ sake, that Pence spoke at The Federalist Society annual conference, which also featured a closed-door event with Trumpscum SCOTUS Neil Gorsuch, proving that our highest court is a truly unaccountable political wing of the Trumpublican Party:
We also learned that the Zombie Orange Pig illegally destroyed official presidential records and illegally absconded with some 15 boxes of them, presumably to be shared over lavish Mar-A-Lago dinners with his pal Ike “I Love Me Some Black Panther” Perlmutter:
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=127473
But you will not hear about any of it from The Tikvah Fund.
Mosaic Magazine Leads the Silent Way!
We begin the Trumpscum Jew survey with Tikvah home base:
There is, of course, the usual Iran piece and another on the Islamic State, just for good measure.
The lead essay is an attack on European Secularism, which is reinforced by an article equating Karl Marx and Wagner. Meaning that Communism and Nazism are more or less equivalent.
There is a post-High School year in Israel HASBARAH piece by the dynamic duo of Gil Troy and Anatoly Sharansky. The whole thing is capped off by a bizarre piece by Rabbi Chaim Brovender, hero to the post-High School year in Israel crowd, redolent of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and his Art pretensions:
https://traditiononline.org/the-best-vermeers-geographer-and-astronomer/
The article is an excellent example of how the Washington Heights cabal has tried to eliminate Sephardic Jewish Humanism with their own Orthodox take on Art and Judaism.
It is something that Jarvanka could get behind!
Tikvah Trumpscum Bari Weiss Trolls the Libs, Leaves Trump Alone
This is the gem that WOKE Bari Weiss gave us on Monday:
Here is how Tikvah Trumspcum Nellie Bowles put it, in truly classic Troll the Libs fashion that would have made Norman Podhoretz weak at the Neo-Con Jew knees:
At this point all I can say is: go and see it.
Over the past two years, more than 1,360 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco. That is more than double the number who have died from Covid.
But you don’t need more stats. You don’t need more numbers about how the tent encampments are exploding. Or about the amount of money that the city is paying for each person doing drugs on the sidewalks. You need to see it.
I’m serious. Everyone in San Francisco should make a trip downtown. Walk around. And do not avert your eyes to the people dying slowly on the streets.
The politicians that run my hometown are relying on you not noticing what’s going on because it’s been bad for so long and who cares if it gets a little worse. Don’t let them. Go see it.
The city is using intimidation. They used it on me when I went to see what was going on at a new addict-services facility, which they’d set up in a public plaza. And they tried to intimidate my friend Michael Shellenberger, as you’ll read below.
The people in charge of homelessness and addiction want to bully people into giving up public streets and parks. They want to take your tax money and let your suffering neighbors die gentle, stoned deaths while they watch and call it justice. They think the mothers who want to get their sons out of the jaws of death are suspect. (It’s conservative to want your kid to live, don’t you know?) The city would like a little privacy please. Fentanyl use is an intimate moment between our officials and our addicts.
Do not listen to the propaganda. Skip Golden Gate Park. Bring your friends downtown instead. Stand in UN Plaza and just watch. Use your eyes, those great weapons.
The problem is Nancy Pelosi San Fran Liberals, and not Trump!
Indeed, “Do Not Listen to the Tikvah Fund Propaganda”!
Tikvah Trumpscum Jewish Insider Still Worried about Whoopi, not about Trump
Next up, we got some Straussian Trumpsilence from JI:
https://mailchi.mp/827e1d5f4d8d/daily-kickoff-781596?e=[UNIQID]
It is a true anti-Biden fest with items on Afghanistan – recall it well! – Ted Cruz on Iran; some nice red-baiting; BDS; Whoopi Goldberg; praise for the YU Rape Basketball team; more anti-Biden invective; and more Anti-Semitism.
But not a word on Trump.
eJewish Philanthropy Does its Job in Maintaining Trumpsilence
Then it was eJP’s turn:
https://mailchi.mp/c35ab05add57/your-daily-phil-4919532?e=[UNIQID]
An excellent lead piece on “COVID is Over” but what about the mental health of the kids?
Very Bari Weiss!
Or should I say Suzy Weiss?
Indeed, given all the “COVID is so over” rhetoric, the new Cancel Cancel Culture has moved from CRT and BLM right into children’s mental health:
https://unherd.com/2021/10/the-new-covid-despotism/
Then we got an excellent defense of the 1%-er Jewish Philanthropists implying that we should ignore their corruption and malfeasance.
And the rest of the usual White Jewish Supremacy garbage.
Tikvah Tablet Goes to El Lay
It is always a good time for a winter vacation:
We had some more Weiss MISHPOCHEH nepotism, but nothing of value – other than a tribute to Tikvah White Jewish Supremacist Token Liberal Todd Gitlin.
And in case you are not sure whether Gitlin represents Leftist White Jewish Supremacy, just look at who has paid tribute to him:
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/todd-gitlin-obit/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/opinion/todd-gitlin-liberal.html
I will be discussing the Gitlin problem in a separate SHU post.
It is a sign of what the White Jewish Supremacy really means today.
But Tikvah Tablet The Scroll Takes the Lysol Prize of the Day
Tikvah Monday ended as we would have expected it to end:
We start with an attack on Obama and the Iran Nuclear Deal, move on to the Canadian Trumpscum COVID Trucker Death Cult, Tucker Carlson-esque Alt-Right support for Putin, and, naturally not one, but two full-throated defenses of Trumpscum Idiocracy filth Joe Rogan.
Here is the piece de resistance that closes the post:
Most normal people have better things to do than care about Joe Rogan, but the people who run a Democratic-supporting super PAC called MeidasTouch are playing a different game than you or me. Amid an effort to get Spotify to drop Rogan over the alleged vaccine misinformation he shared, the multimillion-dollar comms shop appears to have produced a slickly and selectively edited video compilation showing Rogan saying the N-word a number of times over the past decade. Rogan was already on the wrong side of the people who control the U.S. federal government. Last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who speaks for the president of the United States, publicly urged Spotify to “do more” about Rogan, all but calling for his firing.
But the effort to censor Rogan isn’t just being led by the Biden administration and its adjuncts. Ironically, the Rogan backlash has brought into the open the marriage between artists and state power that icons of the 1960s like David Crosby and Neil Young once seemed to overturn when they were still playing at being rebels and truth tellers. Now in line with the White House, both of them publicly took their music off Spotify as part of the campaign to get Rogan unpersoned.
“I have not and will not demand anything from Spotify or Joe Rogan,” Crosby tweeted on Feb. 2, before contradicting himself in the tweet’s very next sentence. “I just don’t want my music on there if he’s on there, so I’m taking mine off … That is not censorship.” That an artist believes it is “not censorship” to issue ultimatums demanding the deplatforming of people whose ideas they disagree with shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The intuitive idea that creative geniuses are automatically on the side of freedom of expression, and that they trust audiences to be able to think for themselves, is misplaced. It reflects a distinctly 20th-century romantic wish about what artists are “supposed” to stand for rather than the reality of what they’ve often actually stood for.
Artists have been looking for ways to serve power for as long as either has been around. The line between Imhotep’s Step Pyramid of Saqqara, the astounding final resting place of the Old Kingdom pharaoh Djoser, and the Hays Code, classic Hollywood’s government-prodded but inevitably self-enforced censorship regime, is shorter than their more than 4,000 years of distance may suggest. In between them we get Shakespeare writing a cycle of history plays justifying his patrons’ dubious claims to the English throne, along with other examples of the art-power nexus that seem indecent to mention in the same sentence as Richard III, like Leni Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking works of Nazi propaganda or Sergei Eisenstein’s rapturous paeans to the Soviet revolution. In fact, we tend to focus in retrospect on the full-fledged Nazi propagandists like Riefenstahl to avoid the uncomfortable fact that so many of the great artists of the day, like the poets T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats, flirted with the fascist movements of the 1930s as they were rising to power. Does that mean we should burn their poetry? Of course not. The same Catholic Church that burned Talmuds in medieval France and Italy and kept an extensive index of banned books also commissioned and inspired some of the most sublime works of art and architecture ever created.
Of course Crosby, Neil Young, India Arie, and the other artists who have pulled their music from Spotify because they couldn’t tolerate being on the same streaming service as Rogan were not acting out of any direct relationship with holders of political power. They instead belong to a much more common and contemporary species of artsy free-expression skeptics: those who think that the reading, listening, and viewing public is incapable of processing complex or potentially distressing ideas and thus must have its exposure to those ideas limited for the sake of peace, harmony, and enlightenment.
It was artists who led the charge against Charlie Hebdo being given an award by PEN after much of its staff was massacred in 2015—a statement opposing the honor was signed by such literary celebrities as Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, and Junot Díaz. According to these writers, dying for the cause of free expression didn’t deserve recognition if the expression itself might be taken the wrong way.
By now the artist-as-scold is one of the most common tropes in popular culture, to the point where we’re pleasantly surprised when an artist turns out not to be a scold. In practice, the BDS movement, supported by a range of writers and musicians, acts as a quarantine on Israeli art and a blockade against creators from the Jewish state whose work threatens to corrupt the rest of the world. The great Brian Eno of the pioneering band Roxy Music, among the most prominent BDSers in the artistic community, wouldn’t even let an Israeli dance troupe use one of his songs in its performances.
In New York, it was artists who led the campaign to remove a portrait of the dead Emmett Till from an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, with some demanding that it be destroyed. In 2018, Judd Apatow, John Mulaney, and Jack Antonoff all dropped off the New Yorker festival’s bill on the assumption that the presence of Trump Svengali Steve Bannon would hypnotize a crowd of Manhattan liberals into agreeing with the president’s entire program. “There’s a difference between curation and censorship,” tut-tutted the memoirist Roxanne Gay in a recent New York Times column explaining why she’d be taking her podcast off of Spotify—it’s not censorship when we dictate what you should and shouldn’t be able to see. In 2015, Gay noxiously pleaded for nuance in understanding the slaughter of the Charlie Hebdo staff, so at least she’s remained consistent.
On and on it goes. Artists’ lofty opinion of themselves, and their low opinion of you, should be about as surprising as their natural, millennia-old alliance with power and their willingness to let an attraction to power overwhelm whatever other ideals they might once have had. Which leads to an alarming yet perhaps exhilarating insight: It should never be taken for granted that the people of special genius who would seem to benefit the most from a free society will automatically do much of anything to defend it. The responsibility lies with us, too—as much as or even more than it lies with them.
It ends with a self-promotional Rittenhouse Republicans plug for the editor and his Whore of Trump boss:
To understand more about Rogan’s appeal read Scroll editor Jacob Siegel’s exploration of the podcaster’s role as “a portal through which one glimpses the cultural mood of the American mind and spirit that is, at that moment, most popular and most repressed.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/joe-rogan-the-aleph
The truly unhinged Rogan rant, I will not take the time to parse out each of its hysterical whataboutisms, is not just about the vile Trumpscum Rogan and his Alt-Right followers. It is about, as we could see on Tikvah Monday, maintaining strategic silence on Trump and the crimes he has committed against America.
Indeed, I will close my own Monday with another attack on Traitor Garland, who is still hiding under his desk in fear:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/01/15/merrick-garlands-trump-problem-and-ours/
While the media and Congress are working hard to expose the crimes of Trump and his Mafia accomplices, the DOJ is MIA.
Indeed, I suppose that means that the New Banana Republic AG is welcome to write for Tikvah Tablet and the rest of the Straussian Jewish garbage press.
He and Jacob Siegel would get along plenty good!
David Shasha