Opposing the Ceasefire in Pasadena Before Purim

 

Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing in the back in a red shirt and orange scarf.) Unfortunately, the ceasefire call passed in the form of a declaration as opposed to a resolution and the language included a mention that the hostages needed to be released. I guess, considering all things, it could have been worse. What truly struck me was how outnumbered we in the pro-Israel camp were, easily 10-1. I have never felt less sure that we can beat these people. 

I will give credit to the pro-Palestinian activists. For the most part, they were remarkably well-disciplined. There were exceptions such as the woman giving pro-Israel speakers the middle finger.

Also, someone went over to me and whispered in my ear: “We are all Hamas.” That being said, clearly, the organizers of the pro-Palestinian group made an effort to make sure that their supporters kept to the rules and did not boo their opponents. In the video, you can even see someone holding up a text on their phone telling people not to boo. I actually thanked one of their organizers for getting his people to quiet down. I even shook his hand. His response was: “I assume you support genocide.” This organizer might be an SOB, but at least he is a polite SOB.

Unfortunately, our opponents are not fools. They understand that, while anger is useful for whipping up people who are already on your side, it turns off precisely the sorts of average people that you need to convince. As Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, anger is the emotion that other people have the hardest time empathizing with. The pro-Palestinian speakers offered a tone of moral authority without coming across simply as angry or hateful. Having cute kids coming out to speak certainly did not hurt. (Yes, I assume that the kids were coached and rehearsed their statements. That being said, I have spent enough time in education to appreciate what it takes to get a kid to stand before a crowd and speak clearly.) The biggest ace cards that the pro-Palestinians were able to employ were the large numbers of Jews who went up to the microphone and said things like: “as a Jew who is descended from Holocaust survivors, I denounce the genocide being carried out by the apartheid Zionist state.” Obviously, it is hard to accuse the pro-Palestinians of hating Jews when so many of them are Jewish.

Seeing how badly one-sided the meeting was becoming, I put my name down to speak and was given a minute to address the council. Here is what I said:

It seems clear that, when talking about a ceasefire, quite a few people here mean that Hamas should get the chance to pull another October 7^th. (This got a response from the pro-Palestinians and they were called to order by the council chair.) This Sunday is the Jewish holiday of Purim when we celebrate being saved from the genocidal plot of Haman. I have a message for all the ideological descendants of Haman out there, particularly the Jewish ones. I admit that I am afraid of you. But I also know that, one day, my descendants will laugh at you. Perhaps, we will make cookies shaped like your ears, fill them with jelly, and eat them. The cookies and not your ears.

My basic idea was to make it clear where the moral high ground lies Our opponents are not human rights activists trying to prevent a genocide. On the contrary, their goal is to carry out one themselves. That being said, I did not want to come across as angry. Showing that you have a sense of humor can be an effective tool to humanize yourself in the eyes of your opponents. In contrast to anger, the desire to find humor even in difficult circumstances is something that people easily empathize with. Finally, and I guess this is Chabad having a positive influence on me, I wanted to reach out even to Jews who are so estranged from their Judaism as to willingly collaborate with people plotting to carry out another Holocaust. Perhaps, those who did not get my joke about hamantaschen will be intrigued enough to ask someone for an explanation. They might even come to realize that Judaism is far richer than simply spouting leftism and calling it tikkun olam. For example, Judaism has you teach your children to make a blessing on hamantaschen and share some with your neighbors.   

There is the old joke that the essence of Jewish holidays can be summarized as they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat. Purim takes this a step further. Haman tried to kill us, he failed and we will remember his efforts not as tragedy but as farce. More than killing Haman, we get our revenge on him, Mel Brooks style, by making him ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.    

The Trump Challenge for Libertarians: Are We Willing to Man Up and Admit That the Republican Strategy Was a Mistake?

While I have for years recognized a distinction between mainstream libertarianism and Rothbardian libertarianism, recently that breach appears to be widening. Some good examples of this would be the controversy over the cartoon published in the name of Ron Paul as well as the conflict at the Libertarian Party National convention. I suspect that a key issue here is the presidency of Donald Trump, which makes it harder to pretend that a common set of values exist. On the one hand, mainstream libertarians are horrified by Trump and see him as a reason to rethink their Republican strategy. On the other hand, the Rothbardians see a Trump Republican Party has precisely the kind of institution that they can do business with. This requires a reevaluation of what this relationship was from the very beginning.  

Historically, Murray Rothbard (Ron Paul's mentor) argued that libertarians should ally with anyone who really hated the government. He calculated that the people who best fit this category after the civil rights movement were radicalized working class whites. This required tiptoeing around the issue that such people were likely to be hardcore racists. Mainstream libertarians tended along a similar if a more moderate line of thinking of trying to reform the Republican Party to make it more market-friendly while hoping to keep Christian-conservatives in check.

As long as both sides were pursuing these tracks, the difference would appear as a matter of degree and personal taste. Both sides accepted that libertarians, as a small minority, needed to appeal to some audience that was not libertarian per se but sympathized with elements of the libertarian agenda. Both sides recognized that the post-1960s left (whether justified or not) was premised on making white males pay for an expanding welfare state and that this offered an opportunity for libertarians to make the case for small government to white men. With the New Deal, we could pretend that the government was going to shake down wealthy businessmen for their benefit. Now government means that you, white men, are going to have to pay to support public school teachers, who hate your values, brainwashing your children for seventeen years (kindergarten through college) in order to convince them to vote for more welfare for blacks. (Note that I would consider this perspective to be, technically accurate, but highly misleading in its choice of focus.)  

If you are looking for white men who simply want to make the government smaller, you can afford to be a little bit choosy about whom to associate with. From this perspective, it made sense to join the William F. Buckley coalition that denounced open racism. If you are actually trying to overthrow the government then you are left with precisely the kind white men that not even Buckley Republicans would be willing to touch. That being said, in practice what we had was a spectrum without clear lines, leaving a lot of room for personal gut checks. Furthermore, as libertarians were never actually in a position to put their policies in practice, all of this was theoretical. So, like any good marriage, both sides were free to pretend that the other was whatever they wanted them to be. Some libertarians wanted to focus on reigning in the growth of government in the short run, while others looked to the long-term question of what to do about government as a principle. Alu v’alu divrei Elokhim hayim (both are the words of the living God).

Going after welfare made sense as long as the existence of a certain Overton Window could be assumed that made actual racism an anathema. If there were no real racists outside of certain compounds (a position that sounded very reasonable considering that real racists felt the need to move into compounds in the first place), then one could, in good conscious, target the left for using welfare as a means of buying off black voters. If the left called that racist, well that simply demonstrated the extent that the left was not arguing in good faith and could safely be ignored. Similarly, if everyone recognized that legal immigration from Latin America was a good thing to be encouraged and expanded then it was perfectly reasonable to discuss certain border controls in the name of national security.

   

Long before Trump, I had already left the Republican Party, even as I continued to wish it well because I stopped believing that it was serious about promoting a free-market agenda. As quaint as it sounds now, I did not even support Mitt Romney in 2012. That being said, I still trusted in the basic decency of Republican voters. I was one of those people who believed that Trump was finished the moment he went after Mexicans for “not sending us their best.” Over and over again, I was proven wrong whenever I decided to interpret Republicans charitably and continued to assume that Stephen Colbert was a comedian and not a demonstration of the Poe Law.

These days, even the Republicans who oppose Trump, I find to be dominated by this black hole of conspiracy thinking and hatred of the left. A useful test case for this is birtherism. To be clear, I have no particularly strong opinions as to where Barack Obama was born beyond the conviction that if there really was something to him not being born in Hawaii, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden would have pursued it to the very end. The fact that any conservative would invest any of their moral capital in this venture even after Obama is no longer president suggests that, more than markets, what animates such people is a conspiratorial narrative that pits “true Americans” against the “left.” Such thinking is not inherently racist, but this acceptance of conspiratorial group narrative provides an important ingredient that allows a person to go from being politically incorrect/lacking proper sensitivity to being the actually dangerous kind of racist.  

Alternatively, consider the use of technical defenses that rely on particular definitions of words at the expense of the wider moral issue. For example, when a pro-Palestinian person responds to the charge of anti-Semitism by arguing that, as Arabs are Semites, he cannot be anti-Semitic. Putting aside the actual history of the word “anti-Semite,” we can readily grant the Palestinian his argument because he has already implicitly confessed to the charge. If he had an honestly worked out defense that allowed him to hold his political positions without being hostile to Jews, he would have given it and not tried to play word games. Similarly, when a conservative says that his views on Islam do not make him a racist because Islam is not a race, we can rest assured that whatever better more precise word we wish to come up with (and prejudice and bigotry have their problems as well), our conservative is guilty of it. If he had an honest defense, he would have used it. (Let me add that the real-life conservative who used this argument with me was a Jew, who then turned around and said that we Jews needed to ally ourselves with white nationalists.)  

                                                                                                                          

To return to the Rothbardian libertarians, I do not see myself as any kind of perfect model of tolerance even as I do not think that there are many people who are much better. If you think you are, might I suggest that it has more to do with the gaping size of the blank checks you have prejudicially written out for yourself? For this reason, I am willing to wink and nod at petty venial bigotry. (The kind of sensibility of Mel Brooks’ “let them all go to hell except cave 76.") If the Rothbardians want to be less politically correct than me, fine. It is not like the left would hesitate to come after me with similar arguments so why make myself vulnerable by self-righteously denouncing them. 

In my experience, if you are tempted to accuse someone of bigotry, you will usually find something more to the point close at hand. How can it be that it is a protectionist like Trump who causes Rothbardians to move closer to the Republican Party? As a libertarian, I value free trade (and that includes moving people across borders) as the vital link between private property and freedom of expression. The government has no business interfering with markets, whether physical or ideological. If you are willing to get behind Trump’s rhetoric on borders then it does not just mean that you happen to be a bigot. It means that you value your own bigotry more than free trade.

A similar line of reasoning underscores my disillusionment with Ron Paul. I could forgive the newsletters, the cartoons and the bone-headed statements regarding Israel as long as I believed that Paul, whether I agreed with him or not, was acting out of a desire to pursue a sincerely libertarian non-interventionist foreign policy. Such a person would know how to draw a clear line between criticizing American foreign policy and engaging in apologetics for Putin. The fact that Paul seems unable to draw this line suggests that he is less a libertarian non-interventionist as he is a white nationalist who looks to Russia to save him from liberals.   

The path to the summit of Mount Liberty is going to be tricky and I do not claim to have fully worked out how to get there. It is possible that along the way, at some point, we are going to have to make a Faustian bargain with racists. It may be that a libertarian society will feature open racists, who use their freedom of association to discriminate. I am willing to consider such a possibility on condition that I am not having that conversation with people for whom the point of climbing Mount Liberty was as an excuse to sell their souls in the first place.  

To Lakewood to Boro Park to the Gay Pride Parade in Manhattan: My Weekend (Part II)

(Part I)

I met up with my friend Dallas Blumenfield for lunch Sunday in Manhattan. I roomed with Dallas for two years when I was at Yeshiva University. The two of us were involved with the Drama Society and waitered on weekends. I would describe Dallas as my gay Texas Jewish Republican, complete with multiple pairs of several hundred dollar boots. Dallas is not actually gay (for one thing he is now happily married to a woman) though he does, in many respects, fit the stereotype. Dallas is the sort of person comfortable enough with his sexuality not to particularly care if he gives the imprecision that he is not straight. It was because of Dallas that I became a follower of Queer as Folk. I never actually saw more than a few scenes of the show, but I became familiar with the show, its characters, and plotlines from hearing it across the room and from Dallas filling me in on the details. I should also mention that Dallas is right now working on becoming a rabbi.

By some strange quirk of fate, we had lunch a block away from Fifth Avenue, down which the Gay Pride Parade was marching. So after lunch, we both went to have a look at what Dallas jokingly referred to as the “freak show.” I promptly berated him for his prejudiced attitude.
So here we were; two nice Jewish men arm and arm. I think we fit in quite nicely. What really struck about the whole event was how mainstream it was. (Men in leather thongs being as about as extreme as it got) There was nothing there that would be particularly out of place anywhere else in midtown Manhattan. Granted, that you can get away with almost anything in Manhattan today. I would see this as a reason to accept the gay rights movement’s agenda; if you can put up with Manhattan than you should be able to put with them. Alternatively, a heterosexual society that has created a Manhattan for itself frankly deserves the full normalization of homosexuality.

This parade was not all that different from parades honoring the Irish or the Italians. There were quite a number of local politicians walking. You can say that by now it is a necessary part of New York City politics, particularly if you are a Democrat, to walk. There was a gay running club, a gay rugby club, and a gay sailing club. For some strange reason, people think that there something radical or revolutionary about arguing for gay rights. If you have politicians trolling for your vote like any other interest group and particular social clubs to cater to the interests of members of your social group than you are no different from any other social group with the same moral standing as any other social group. Just as social groups such as the Irish and the Italians have the right to pursue their self-interest as something distinct from their rights so too do homosexuals. But let us be absolutely clear, just because something is in the gay community’s best interest does not mean it is a right.

I am not sure what to make of the fact that someone with a yarmulke was walking in the parade. Maybe this person was simply showing his moral support as a fellow liberal. I wonder if the person is Orthodox or not. If he was a secular Jew, who simply put on a yarmulke for the event to identify himself as a Jew, should I take it as an offense? My inclination is to see this in a positive light and embrace this person as someone pursuing his own Jewish journey even though I may have problems with the means by which he does this. I think it is simplistic and unhelpful to simply cast this person as someone trying to destroy Judaism.

This is why we need gays in the military. As fans of Mel Brooks understand, if we had a gay sergeant in the gay Peruvian Indians than we could crush France in six weeks.


Now I am flying off to England. Stay tuned.

Bill Cosby at the Draft

Here is a great video featuring Bill Cosby commenting on the draft and channeling Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man. Since John Madden has retired (thank goodness) could we draft Cosby to fill his place?