VIRTUE SIGNALING IS A POWERFUL DRUG: 48 Yale Students Arrested During Protest.

In the annals of pointless protests, this may be the most pointless:

Forty-eight students at Yale University were arrested Friday during a protest in the investment office calling on the university to divest from Puerto Rican debt and fossil fuel companies. According to a press release from Fossil Free Yale, the student group organizing the protest, the sit-in began at noon Friday and continued until 5 p.m., when police began making arrests. More than 350 students rallied outside the office, cheering on the students being escorted by the police.

Let’s imagine the students “won,” and the university divested on Day X from Puerto Rican debt and fossil fuels. You know what would have changed in the world on Day X plus whatever? Exactly nothing. Of course, if the students really, truly wanted to help Puerto Ricans, I’m sure there are plenty of charities that would love to accept the difference between their $73K a year cost of Yale attendance and the cost of attending State U., if students were inclined to make a real sacrifice rather than engaging in political theater.

HOW THE GRASSROOTS WOMEN’S MARCH GOT TAKEN OVER BY PROFESSIONAL LEFTIST ACTIVIST ANTI-SEMITES: Tablet: Is the Women’s March Melting Down? This is great reporting from The Tablet, and the sort of investigative reporting the New York Times and NPR would be doing is they valued real journalism over being part of the resistance.

BUT THE NARRATIVE: I can’t vouch for the robustness of these results, but according to this Morning Consult poll from August, 11% of liberals and 3% of conservatives have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of neo-Nazis.

THE IMMORALITY OF SOCIALISTS: Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy.

Chomsky goes on and on about the horrors of what he calls “neoliberalism” since 1979. As with other leftists of a similar ilk, he simply ignores the fact that the rate of extreme poverty globally has fallen from around 27% to around 4% (!). Indeed, poverty rates worldwide have fallen dramatically more generally. You’d think if you were a socialist (or really almost anyone, but especially socialists), this would be the greatest thing to happen in the history of mankind. And yet, they not only don’t celebrate it, they don’t even acknowledge it. Which makes you think that their purported concern for the poor and downtrodden isn’t really what’s motivating them.

NOT IF YOU’RE CONSISTENT, BUT: Anti-Zionism Isn’t the Same as Anti-Semitism.

Goldberg writes, “certainly, some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but it’s entirely possible to oppose Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot.” Sure, if you’re a libertarian or socialist type that rejects ethnicity and/or nationalism for anyone, then having the same view of Jewish nationalism is not anti-Semitic. But very few critics of Israel who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) are actually against ethno-nationalism; indeed, they want Israel to be replaced by an Arab/Muslim majority state ruled by that majority (and not, as Goldberg suggests, a “bi-national state”), and thus not only don’t oppose ethno-nationalism, they support replacing a liberal ethno-nationalist state that grants autonomy to its domestic Arab population to be exempt from military service, to study in Arabic in public school, and so forth, with an Arab one that would almost certainly be illiberal.

What would be the fate of the Jews of Israel under that scenario? Let’s hear from the late Edward Said, the leading Palestinian nationalist intellectual in the English-speaking world before his death:  “I worry about that. The history of minorities in the Middle East has not been as bad as in Europe, but I wonder what would happen. It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.” In short, while Said apparently hoped the Jews would make out all right, the strong possibility (I’d say great likelihood) that they would be murdered, exiled, and/or oppressed was not sufficient to tame his desire for a Palestinian state replacing Israel. That’s what most BDS supporters and anti-Zionists think, and that’s why declaring that “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea” is an implicitly genocidal slogan.

MAX BOOT IS JUST AS GRATING as a former conservative as he was as a leading necon. In today’s example, he writes about an Israeli-based company that sells spy software to dubious governments. The headline blames this on “Israel,” not the company. Rather than correcting this, Max sends out a tweet itself suggesting that “Israel” is responsible for “enabling foreign oppression.” Meanwhile, it turns out that the company is actually owned by a San Francisco-based private equity fund, and has been since 2013, making it all the more opaque why “Israel” is the focus of the op-ed.

REMINDER: All modern American presidents exercise power that is morally and constitutionally illegitimate.

Also, the U.S. has no nobility or official ranks, and over-the-top state funerals and public mourning for retired leaders are more reminiscent of monarchies than redolent of the principles of a constitutional republic. Before the growth of the modern federal behemoth, we had funerals like Grover Cleveland’s, “marked by simplicity and absence of pomp.” Carry on.

WHOM SHOULD JEWS EXCOMMUNICATE NOW? Man tries to run down Jews leaving Los Angeles synagogue.

So someone else tried to murder American Jews at a synagogue, this time unsuccessfully. After the Pittsburgh shooting, the Jewish left went nuts, blaming Trump, Trump-supporting Jews, and Israel (!) for the incident. The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer wrote, “Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.”

The perp in L.A., however, was not a “white nationalist” but a Muslim named Mohammed Mohammed. I want Foer to follow his own logic. If “Trump’s Jewish enablers” were to blame for Pittsburgh, who in the Jewish community is to blame for Los Angeles? And who should be “shunned” now?

A NICE RECOMMENDATION FROM QUIN HILLYER OF THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: Books! Books! For Christmas, for the Reader You Love:

Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, By David E. Bernstein call to arms for libertarian constitutionalists, this is an excellent, eminently readable (and sometimes persuasive) history of how the “progressive” legal movement hid its original racism, stole the image of liberty lovers, and undermined the proper reading of the Constitution.

DEFENDING A LIBERTARIAN POSITION ON ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAWS: My latest essay, downloadable at the link: The Boundaries of Antidiscrimination Laws.

A BALANCED ASSESSMENT OF GEORGE SOROS: Jamie Kirchik: The Truth about George Soros.

One sentence summary: Soros did a lot of good in promoting democracy and the rule of law in post-Communist Europe. He has done a lot of harm in the U.S. by being a shrill partisan who funds extremists.

THAT DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK: The New York Times asks, Are Jared and Ivanka Good for the Jews?

Arrgh. The Times adopts the narrative, popular on the left, that the only reason any Jews support Trump is that he is pro-Israel. Look, surveys show that 25-30% of American Jews are Republican or lean Republican. Orthodox Jews and older immigrants from the former Soviet Union are especially likely to be Republicans. Most American Jews don’t vote on “Jewish issues” as such, and Republican Jews, like other Republicans, will be inclined to support any Republican president unless they affirmatively strongly disagree with particular policies, though I assume a blatantly anti-Semitic president of either party would change voting patterns significantly. Ninety percent of Republicans in general approve of Trump, and if you are outside the liberal bubble that blames Trump for anti-Semitism, there is no reason to expect that figure to be significantly lower among Jewish Republicans unless you think that Jewish Republicans are especially likely to disapprove of Trump otherwise. And indeed, last I looked surveys show that 25-30% of American Jews approve of Trump.

In my experience, some of Trump’s most controversial policies, including the so-called Muslim ban, are reasonably popular with my Republican Jewish friends (real and Facebook) and family. Indeed, many of them are very concerned about the anti-Semitism immigrants from the Middle East bring with them, though it’s generally considered impolitic to talk about this in public. And not only are these Republican Jews not using Trump’s pro-Israel policies to excuse his contribution to anti-Semitism, as the Times suggests, but in fact they see those policies, along with appointments like Nikki Haley (who withdrew the U.S. from the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Commission that Obama had rejoined) and Ken Marcus as policies of a very philo-Semitic presidency. Some of my Jewish Facebook friends routinely pronounce the Trump administration to be the most pro-Jewish in history. It’s far more accurate to conclude that Jews see Trump’s Jewish-related policies through the lens of their preexisting approval or disapproval of Trump than to suggest, as the Times does, that Trump’s Jewish-related policies are what drive Jewish voters one way or the other.

As usual, the New York Times reports on subcultures it doesn’t understand as if it is visiting Mars.

THE ACLU NO LONGER EVEN PRETENDS TO BELIEVE IN CIVIL LIBERTIES: American Civil Liberties Union, RIP.

AS GLENN NOTES BELOW, the guy shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump” during intermission at a production of Fiddler on the Roof, which was reported nationwide as yet another symptom of anti-Semitism run amok thanks to Trump, tuned out to be a drunk guy who hates Trump and was therefore comparing him to Hitler. This is exactly what I expected. If you are actually a Hitler fan, would you (a) buy a ticket to Fiddler on the Roof; (b) sit quietly through the first act; and (c) make your pro-Hitler remark during intermission, rather than disrupting the show? Besides, there are way more Americans who think Trump is like Hitler in a negative way than in a positive way.  The question is, why couldn’t the New York Time, Washington Post, etc., (a) figure out that this was unlikely to be an actual pro-Nazi guy; or (b) at least consider the possibility that the guy might actually be anti-Trump and anti-Nazi, and not rush to breathlessly report nonsense?

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES, 2018 EDITION (UPDATED and moved to front): It’s kinda weird the way the intersectional left demands that we all ignore the reality in front of us in the service of ideological ends. So, for example, teenage girls shouldn’t object to having a boy with gender dysphoria who has male genitals naked in the locker room with them, because they should understand that despite the reality in front of them, he is “really” a girl. Similarly, Linda Sarsour, who is fair-skinned (and an Arab-American, a group that has always been “white” in American racial parlance, even if much darker-skinned), feels entitled to lecture to her “white sisters” as a “woman of color”. Apparently wearing a hijab magically turns a white women into a “woman of color,” because intersectional politics demands it. Meanwhile, my much darker-hued Iraqi-Jewish relatives are white oppressors. You can’t make this make this stuff up.

UPDATE: RELATED: Male Gym Teacher Punished For Refusing To Oversee Middle School Girl Get Undressed In Boys’ Locker Room

YOU WERE EXPECTING INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY?:  Boston Globe Defends Mobbing of Jewish Republican.

So now comes Tom Mountain, a Jewish Massachusetts Republican official who, on Friday, November 2 was blocked from his own office by a group of Democrats wearing Jewish prayer shawls while chanting that Republicans are the party of White Nationalism and are responsible for the mass murder of Jews in Pittsburgh. Mountain, understandably annoyed, told reporters that these people were “a disgrace to the Jewish people” and “an embarrassment to this country.” The mob of Democrats refused to let him through and the police had to physically haul them off.

Globe headline? “Mass. GOP official calls Jewish protesters ‘a disgrace’ and an ‘embarrassment.’”

Had the Globe any integrity at all, they would have reported – in either the headline or the lede – that Mountain himself is a Jew.

Jews have always been famously internally disputatious, going back at least to the Maccabean era, when more traditional Jews emerged victorious over Hellenizers in the war that led to the restoration of Jewish rule in Judea under the Hasmoneans now celebrated during Hanukkah. The Holocaust and the emergence of Israel created a few decades of general solidarity, but the reaction of left-wing Jews to a massacre of Jews by a neo-Nazi in Pittsburgh–to blame American Jewish Republicans, and, bizarrely, Netanyahu and Israel, complete with calls in mainstream outlets to excommunicate Trump supporters, suggests that those days are over.

Mainstream Jews of moderate liberal to moderate political proclivities, a majority of American Jews, are going to have to choose between the modern-day Hellenizers whose actual religion is a pastiche of left-wing cliches, and those who are loyal to something akin to traditional Judaism. I don’t doubt the traditionalists will win in the end, if only because they are producing far more Jewish progeny per capita than are left-wing secularists. Unfortunately, in the meantime the leftists are proceeding to destroy formerly mainstream American Jewish institutions. The small denomination known as Reconstructionism, once the most intellectual branch of American Judaism, has devolved into a theological joke, much larger Reform Judaism is on the brink, and the once-respected (albeit liberal-leaning) Anti-Defamation League has become a center of partisan progressive hackery. I’ve been sounding apocalyptic about this lately, but let me repeat: a Neo-Nazi murdered eleven Jews, and the immediate and continuing reaction of a very vocal segment of American Jewry has been to use the occasion to attack fellow Jews.

DEFENDING BERNIE SANDERS (!): Bernie Sanders Says Not All Voters Who Feel ‘Uncomfortable’ With Black Candidates Are Racist.

People of Sanders’s generation would have distinguished between being “prejudiced” and being “racist.” That linguistic distinction has been lost, but it’s a useful one. Most people who are “prejudiced” against members of a group don’t have the hatred/hostility that “racist” implies. (Same is true of “anti-Semitism.”) It would be better if we had still a way to linguistically distinguish, for example, between people who have mild negative stereotypes of a group but interact with members of those groups in a totally respectful way (“mildly prejudiced”) and, say, fans of Stormfront (“virulently racist”).

THE ACADEMY IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: A professor of political science actual at a leading state university tweeted the tweet below. He apparently failed to notice that only one-third of the Senate is up for reelection at any one time, and of the seats that were actually being contested the Democrats did significantly better than 55.4%. This was the case even though there was no Republican candidate running in California, by far the most populous state. Anyone can tweet something foolish once in a while, but the fact that this tweet is still up twenty-four thousand likes later suggests that he still doesn’t get the underlying fallacy. (Of course, his tweet also assumes that the Senate should reflect the popular vote, but even if that were the case it’s hard to see why a Democrat would object on “democratic” grounds to winning almost two-thirds of the contested seats on a day when they received 55% of the vote. If anything, someone who believed in proportional representation should be calling on some Democratic senators to resign in favor of Republicans.)

DEMOCRATS DON’T DO AS WELL AS HOPED/EXPECTED, GUESS WHO LINDA SARSOUR BLAMES: If you guessed, “the Joooz,” you win.

This illustrates a serious point about antiSemitism: it’s not “left” or “right,” it’s a conspiracy theory where you blame a phenomenon that you don’t like and don’t understand on Jews. Socialism or capitalism, sexual promiscuity or sexual repression, etc.; it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense, or if it’s directly contradictory to what you’re ideological opposites are blaming the Jews for. So just as you will see right-wing troglodytes blaming the Jews for enabling the left, you will find Linda Sarsour and company blaming Jews for disabling the left when it “underperforms.”

I BET DEMOCRATS ARE WISHING that Obama Attorney General Eric Holder had not set a precedent that the AG may simply ignore subpoenas from the House of Representatives.

SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE PRESIDENT CHRISTIE COLLINS JUDD IS APPARENTLY AFRAID OF BAD PUBLICITY FROM POTENTIAL LEFTIST STUDENT PROTESTS but not from students threatening and intimidating a conservative-leaning professor, with zero consequences. So let’s give Sarah Lawrence some bad publicity for Judd’s atrocious handling of this situation.

A VERY STRONG STATEMENT ON ANTISEMITISM: Donald Trump on Sunday: “This evil, anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us. It is an assault on humanity. It must be confronted and condemned everywhere it rears its ugly head. We must stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters to defeat anti-Semitism and vanquish the forces of hate. Those seeking their destruction, we will seek their destruction.”

This has to be among the strongest statements any president has made on behalf of Jewish Americans. Yet I could find no mention of it in the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on.

Compare and contrast Obama’s reference to Jewish victims of anti-Semitic terrorism in Paris as victims of zealots who “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” with the White House afterwards defending the proposition that the Jews shopping in a kosher market, somewhere that only Jews go, were not targeted because they were Jews, which was obviously untrue from the getgo.

UPDATE: A Facebook friend points out that you can find bits and pieces of the quotation, but not the full quotation, in the Times. But the way the Times isolates and portrays the final sentence, which I see as the strongest and most dramatic part of the statement, is bizarre and dishonest.

REMINDER: It’s very unlikely you will ever confront an active shooter, but if you do: run as far and fast as you can in the opposite direction of where the gunfire is coming from, and if possible don’t hide somewhere where you are cornered/trapped. If you do find yourself cornered in a room or closet, don’t just sit there and wait for the gunman to find you, have a plan (with your fellow cornerees) to confront and attack the gunman from each side of the  door as soon as he opens the door, and if you are in hiding an the gunman doesn’t appear, don’t come out until authorities give the all-clear signal. That’s what I learned in my State Department security training, and it’s advice that would have saved lives in several recent incidents. It’s undoubtedly very hard to keep these things in mind under the stress of the situation, but much easier if you have it firmly in your mind in advance.

FAKE NEWS ALERT: Correcting the ADL’s False Anti-Semitism Statistic. All reporters would have to do to see that the way the ADL has portrayed its study doesn’t match what the study itself says would to actually read the study, instead of just the press release. But they can’t be bothered to do that. Anti-Semitism, while low overall in the U.S., unites the left and right nutty fringes, from Farrakhan to Richard Spencer. A politically neutral, non-partisan watchdog is needed. The ADL under Abe Foxman, while far from perfect, was at least adequate in that role. Under Greenblatt, it’s become an arm of the Democratic Party.

ANOTHER STUDY IN LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS: Aaron David Miller, who helped put unrepentant anti-Semitic terrorist Yasser Arafat in power in the territories, is now lecturing *other* Jews about the “moral hazard” and “risks” of their views on the American role in Middle East politics.