Main Edition
US
FR
Police arrest protesters during pro-Palestinian demonstrations in New York (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
As May takes hold, the crisis brewing inside America’s political system shows no signs of abating; if anything, recent events have only confirmed how serious things have become. On May Day itself, the police moved in to quash the occupation at Columbia University in New York. Many miles from there, on the other side of the continent, their peers helplessly watched on as counter-protestors at UCLA set off fireworks and attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment.
Both incidents foreshadowed the looming crisis that awaits the Democratic Party, whose convention in August is ominously slated to be held in Chicago. In 1968, the jamboree was also held in the city, where, due to growing and intractable divisions over the Vietnam War, it became one of the most contentious political gatherings to take place in American history. The idea that anti-war sentiment, once inflamed and radicalised, can somehow be quashed by sending in riot cops is wishful thinking. On this reading, Chicago 2024 may very well be a repeat of Chicago 1968.
None of this, however, is good news for the Republican Party. Their crisis, though somewhat less commented on, is even more profound than that facing the Democratic Party. The Democrat coalition is splintering, and organisations, friendships and patronage structures are openly fracturing over the strain imposed by US support to Israel. But the Grand Old Party is absolutely in no position to capitalise on this — because it is now facing a collapse as well.
For months now, signs of dysfunction have been obvious inside the Republican coalition. Support for Israel had for a very long time been not just assumed but essentially required for anyone who wanted to hack it as a pundit or politician on the American Right; and those who thought otherwise did well to keep their own counsel. Since November 2023, however, that omertà has been slowly unravelling, with publications like The Daily Wire becoming flashpoints in a brewing intra-right conflict.
But questioning the utility of Israel as an ally was only the first crack in the dam, the foreshock before the real earthquake was to begin. For more than half a year now, US support to Ukraine had been held up by the GOP inside the House of Representatives; before that, the previous Republican speaker was toppled by his own comrades for related reasons. The argument for this obstructionism was quite simple: America cannot continue to send infinite sums of blood and treasure to other parts of the world while the homeland is falling apart, with the most bleeding ulcer believed to be the completely chaotic situation at the southern border. As a result, the political balance between the pro and anti-Ukraine factions inside the American Right came to rest on a straightforward maxim: no money for Kyiv until something is done about the border.
For half a year that compromise held, until the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, went against internal party rules to pass a number of bills with the help of the Democrats. The result was an orgy of foreign spending to the tune of $100 billion dollars, with money for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — but nothing for the border. To add even more insult to injury, the GOP also caved on warrantless wiretapping of Americans, something else its own base strongly opposes. The mood inside the Republican base as a result is now exceedingly bitter, hostile, and angry; people feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back by their own politicians, and that the entire political system is now openly hostile to them and their interests.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeNot to worry, Mr. Kyeyune, at least one of your dire predictions won’t come true: “Chicago 2024 may very well be a repeat of Chicago 1968.”
I’m guessing, long before the Democratic National Convention rolls into town in August, downtown Chicago will be cleaned up and the homeless moved out. Anyone who so much as complains about the price of bread within a mile of the Convention will be arrested.
And on the subject of the Democratic coalition fraying, Politico has a very interesting article about the identity of some major financial backers of pro-Palestinian groups:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/05/pro-palestinian-protests-columbia-university-funding-donors-00156135
Strange times, indeed.
Agreed. Almost zero chance of violence at the Dem convention. It will be locked down tighter than a nun’s …
Or a gnat’s c***f
Or a bull’s a**e in flytime
Or (suggestions on a postcard)
“Jewish Voice for Peace” is like the old 1980’s “Moral Majority” in that it’s neither Jewish or remotely for peace, just as the MM wasn’t moral or a majority. I must admit though Hamas is great at branding and public relations however.
“The Tides Foundation issued a statement about funding groups that protest, saying it is “committed to advancing social justice,” adding that its “community of fiscally sponsored projects, donors, and grantees represent a wide range of perspectives on what social justice looks like.””
That is because social justice has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with seeking to enforce particular social prejudices that seek to divide society into oppressors and victims and to manoeuvre your favoured group into the victim group.
So Jews can be seen as either white adjacent Zionist oppressors or hapless victims of Muslim majority oppression fighting against widespread anti-sematism.
Making anti-Semitic rhetoric illegal is motivated by the latter sentiment but bolsters the former idea given that rhetoric against other groups is not outlawed.
My understanding of the bill is that it doesn’t “outlaw” anything.
Ah, Tides Foundation. Along with Open Society Foundation and others they have caused so much damage. I remember writing an Unherd comment years ago about how the blame for the rise of the massive trans industrial complex since 2013 can be laid at Tides’ door. All these scumbags do is foster chaos.
It’s not clear Chicago will be cleaned up by August. The ACLU has expressed astonishment that the powers that be in Chicago have done no preparation so far about security and appearance. Supposedly, the mayor has got his hands full trying to accommodate the thousands of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s Administration has let through on the Southern border. As they say, start popping the popcorn, August is unlikely to be sleepy this year.
If the media doesn’t display videos of pierced and purple haired militants peacefully looting alongside kaffiyeh wrapped doctor’s kids, then it won’t be deemed newsworthy, or even extent.
We live, largely, in a post-reality world, as Karl Rove would say.
Interesting. Thanks.
Republican infighting and own goals is standard operating procedure for the GOP. I’m not sure this is any different.
Didn’t this really accelerate with the ‘Tea Party’ movement ?
or what ever the Tea Party movement was reacting to.
This author purports to be clever and to be a prophet, apparently. Unfortunately, he is neither of these things.
If you’re going to criticise a piece it’s best to say what it is specifically that you disagree with and why
Ad hominem is the default argument for wokists.
A certain socialist with a taste for the good life is the champion of that particular practice around here.
You want to know something funny? I have always sided with Jews over Muslims because I always knew which one wanted to shove blasphemy laws down my throat and undermine my rights and which one would fight for them. Now my rage has still not subsided, and that equation has undergone more than a bit of rebalancing. You try to destroy my Bill of Rights; you are my enemy period. No if’s, and’s, or but’s. A line was just crossed. This feels like nothing more than a betrayal to me. Turns out a lot of free speech advocates are nothing of the sort.
As far as fighting “antisemitism” goes I have a serious question for the bill’s authors and the politicians who voted for it. Are you high? They just decided to take the old, whispered fire of “the Jews control the government” and instead of pouring water on it they decided that gasoline would be a better choice. Now there is just one group and one country that would be legally protected from criticism. Not even the US government is protected from criticism from its own citizens. No, the little line at the end of the bill saying it totally does not supersede the Bill of Rights does not reassure anyone who has looked at even part of the bill’s language. This is the kind of stuff that does not end well and more than a few members of America’s Jewish community are screaming out warnings over this bill.
Not only have they given a middle finger to Constitution loving Americans who were some of their biggest supporters and outright confirmed the worst suspicions of the protesters, but they have undermined the state of Israel’s strongest case for American support. Do you have any idea how much the whole “Israel is the only freedom loving democracy in the Middle East,” and they are “merely a ‘trusted friend’ and ally” to the United States” play a part in them having the support they do? I’m stupefied here. How is it even possible to pick the most counterproductive path there is at the worst time and for most of Washington to just go along with it celebrating?
I hear your frustration, Matt, but what do you propose to counter the alarming rise in violent rhetoric & worse across the US? Rhetoric actively being taught at every level in education k-12…
My ( possibly flawed) understanding of this bill was that it was extending title 6 civil rights protection from 1968 to Jews?
I still think you’re safer from the latter group than Muslims. Try drawing a cartoon of Mohammed & see what happens.
I personally wish we could return to a time when we were all equal before the law – with no special exceptions. At the same time I’d like to see incitement to violence prosecuted.
Incitement to violence may be in the ear of the listener. My understanding of what has transpired on college campuses is pretty much nonviolent protest. The most violence occurred at UCLA, where a pro-Israel group attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment, with tear gas, and injured one woman by slamming a plank down on her hands. No grave injuries, but still more than the protests against the genocide have caused. I totally support the Bill of Rights and think this move by the U.S. House is reprehensible and self-serving, as it so often has become, and I totally agree with Mr Hindman’s assessment.
There is no ‘genocide’. There is an urban war, initiated by Hamas, and aggravated vis a vis civilian casualties by Hamas’ practice of embedding itself with civilians and using civilians and their homes, hospitals, schools and mosques as human shields for military installations and arms depots. Despite this, the combatant/civilian ratio in this war is much lower than other recent wars, such as the retaking of Mosul. Never heard anyone call that a genocide. Never even heard anyone call the killing of 2 million German civilians between 1942 and 1945 a genocide. But then, Jews weren’t involved in those strikes.
The use of that word is indeed questionable and without doubt unhelpful. But many did call the Mosul and German civilian body count excessive and unnecessary in scale.
only afterwards with regard to Germany. However Germany did fight on even after 1943 when it was absolutely clear they couldn’t possibly win. That’s because the final solution was not yet final and that it was seen as vital. As soon as they were forced to surrender and did so the bombing stopped. Would have stopped at any time up until 1945 had the Germans surrendered. They literally fought for the bombs to keep falling. Same with HAMAS.
Still, Dresden was regarded as a horror by many who were on the side of those doing the bombing, including American author Kurt Vonnegut. And there were important misgivings about making the whole population suffer unlimited punishment for the crimes of their leaders and wartime brass, even though the decided majority of the whole country was in some measure pro-N*zi.
Furthermore, it’s pretty hard to get an accurate measure of popular support when openly opposing those in power is likely to bring instant death, then endanger the lives and relative freedom of family members.
Killing 40,000+ victims, mostly civilians, is not genocide? What is your definition? Irrelevant anyway, the ICC and ICJ will soon issue a ruling.
You don’t think 1 in 50 people being slaughtered in Gaza is genocide? Go look at a map of Gaza and West Bank. If not genocide, then it’s ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing that has been occurring for 75 years. Look at the west bank. What other “democracy” could occupy a foreign land, then divide it into 3 areas and completely subjugate and humiliate the people, all the while moving their own settlements in – and get away with claiming to be a “democracy”.
You say Isreal isn’t committing genocide because, “they could wipe them out tmrw!” OK, so I guess Putin is a saint for not dropping a nuke on Ukraine. Isreal WOULD do it. We have Isreali politicians calling for Amulek. The ONLY thing stopping them is the outrage of the West. Isreal has received $3 trillion in economic and military aid. You think they would receive that if they actually committed total genocide? Nah, they’re going to slowly eat away at Palestine. Slowly steal its land via settlements. Keep them in a 50+ year hell and then cry foul when they attack as an excuse to launch 100x more bombs.
A totally absurd use of the word “genocide”, which is ceasing to have any meaning at all as it used by mainly, mainly on the Left, to meet any casualties of civilians in wars that they disapprove of, though in a completely selective way. “Genocide” means the deliberate annihilation of an entire people If Israel had wished to, it could have destroyed the Palestinians decades ago. Funnily enough their population has grown not fallen. I
I don’t need to say more, Harry Storm has provided an excellent riposte to your idiocy below. But, hey, words mean whatever I want them to mean!
Just because someone cannot draw a picture of Mohammed without being persecuted does not mean that Muslims are a fair target for Jews who with their more extreme forms of observance are almost as bad. It is still a crime to kill people out of hand and if you side with it you are on the wrong side of the law. By the way all of those people in the middle east, jews, arabs etc are Semitic peoples and the only thing that distinguish many of them is their chosen mythology.
what do you propose to counter the alarming rise in violent rhetoric & worse across the US? —–> Enforcement of existing laws would be a good start. Freedom of speech has never allowed for incitement, and no provision sanctions the “worse.”
We make a lot of noise in the US about the rule of law but are very selective in terms of enforcing it. That has to change. People must learn that behavior carries consequences. We’ve already seen how incentives work by turning a blind eye to far more serious crimes than violent rhetoric.
And what are examples of “violent rhetoric” and of speech that incites one to violence? My observation, from Chapel Hill,NC, is that there has been little on the part of the groups protesting the genocide. But, if you’ve got evidence of such examples, I’d like to hear them. I do not think that calling for boycotting Israeli goods meets that standard, nor do I think any comment condemning what the Israeli government is doing does. We must do everything we can to insure the safety of all students, but certainly not only the Jewish students, and certainly not by expelling or jailing students who protest. I applaud their bravery and that of the professors who support them.
I feel sorry for all the janitors and cleaning crews who will have to clean this mess up after all these adult-children and their highly-paid enablers are done with their tantrum fits and go home for the summer.
Do you feel the same way after concerts and sporting events?
Er, isn’t the cost of cleaning up factored into ticket pricing?
Yes, I judge people on their ability to clean up after themselves, but in any case colleges aren’t sporting events. I wish the colleges would expel and fire all these protestors regardless of whatever trendy cause they support. They’re a huge waste of space.
Then you are a fool.
The examples of calls to violence are numerous and started immediately after the October 7th invasion; well before Israel had even begun it’s mission to destroy Hamas.
Chanting “Gas The Jews” (Sydney) is blatantly incitement to violence. “From the River to the sea” or “Death to Israel” or “death to the Zionists” or “globalise the intifada” has the same intention but allows people such as yourself to pretend that this is some sort of fight for Palestinian freedom. It’s not, it’s straight up genocidal Jew hatred.
Does Isreal have the right to exist?
Germany and Germans have a right to exist. Nazi Germany does not. Likewise, an Isreal that has 20% non-Jewish minority, but it’s law says “Isreal is a nation state of the Jewish people” and “settlements are a national good” does NOT have the right to exist.
If Isreal’s existence depends on the occupation of Palestine, then the answer is – no.
As for “gas the jews”. That was proven to be fake LOL. It was edited by a Zionist, as proven by ABC news. What I find funny is that Zionists are crying about increased antisemitism. Meanwhile, a Palestinian CHILD was murdered in America and 3 were shot at. Protesters were literally run over and had chemicals thrown at them.
You can call them antisemetic, but the playbook is OUT. It’s been out since the 50s, but no one cared until we could see in real time the devastation of the bombing of Gaza and the horrific lives that Palestinians have endured in the West Bank for 57 years (and counting)….57 years…even Nazi Germany was only occupied for 4 years after the war. And, THEY actually murdered millions of Jews, while Palestians just want to remain in their homeland.
Noam Chomsky says it better: “On the weaponisation of false anti-Semitism charges against radical progressive movements. Fifty years ago, the distinguished Israel statesman Abba Eban wrote that “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”
Do you know any actual history of this situation? “Palestinians just want to remain in their homeland” What “homeland” would that be? Judea? There’s a hint in the title. Israelis would have no trouble whatsoever living alongside people who are prepared to work together. They could all prosper greatly. They cannot, like any nation, live alongside religious lunatics whose only wish and aim to exterminate them. As to the Chomsky quote, you take seriously the accusations of a self-hating failed academic?
You are not a fool. As Noam Chomsky says, it’s been the ploy of Isreal to link Zionism and Judaism for 75 years now: https://diem25.org/noam-chomsky-the-weaponisation-false-anti-semitism-charges-against-radical-progressive-movements/
This is the real violence: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/30/us/palestinian-american-boy-stabbed/index.html
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/palestinian-american-student-was-shot-vermont-and-became-reluctant-poster-child-on-the-media
So you’re ok with extending civil rights protection to Jewish people but to no other ethnic group?
I certainly am. We need to protect the sharpest tools in the box.
That isn’t what’s been done. They’ve ‘added’ Jews to the protected list. I think it was a bad move, but it isn’t what people like you and the religious right are describing.
The bill is unconstitutional and will be overturned by the Supreme Court.
The entire western political class is to blame. Sanctomonious, yet greedy and spiteful. Happy to send in the riot cops against the natives, yet grovel and cringe before the far left, and islamofacists.
They need to be got rid of, all of them.
They also seem to have little issue sending the FBI into Catholic Churches, but are largely ok with carjackings and shoplifting. Jews, who at least as a group are extraordinarily law abiding, aren’t the only group they’re terrified of offending.
Ukraine is of limited strategic importance to the US, though one hates to appease a conqueror. Israel is next door to a vital shipping lane our Navy used to guard. We are no longer the guarantor of the high seas, nor even of our allies’ canals. We now must partner with the Indian Navy, or China would be landing in Taiwan, which is another area of extreme importance to trade.
Say what you’d like about Trump – narcissistic, thin skinned, retrograde, etc – but I can’t picture any of Biden’s awful messes happening under a Trump administration.
In fairness, Biden is likely being led to the podium and handed a speech to read before his afternoon nap. Our country appears to be led by a committee of college sophomores, and perhaps a handful of their professors checking the polls.
I can’t picture any of Biden’s awful messes happening under a Trump administration.
Given the volume of messes, and it is substantial, it’s long past time to suggest that they are an unfortunate by-product of Biden’s issues. They are the intentional outcomes of the people who make the decisions. It would be statistically impossible to have been wrong that often.
Totally agreed. The trojan horse trick has worked once again, and the US has been run by mobsters for at least 50 years, if not more
Republicans and Democrats didn’t seem to care when The Patriot Act was was passed after 9/11. The Act tore away American’s Fourth Amendment rights . It also introduced warrant less spying. It verged on being ridiculous when it tried to find out what movies were checked out at video stores and what books were being checked out at libraries. Librarians refused to cooperate and won. Americans did not protest. This new move to once again violate our Constitutional rights needs to be condemned by ALL Americans. We can’t be apathetic this time.
Excellent observation. Instead of “fat and happy” we need to get lean and mean and stand up for our constitutional rights en mass or we are basically sunk
The politicians are almost all idiots who grew up in the system, trust the system, and depend upon the system. Most haven’t the faintest clue how it works, why it works, how to defend it, or how to fix it if it breaks. They can’t handle real leadership because they have no experience. All they’ve evr had to do is go through the motions, running campaigns, making speeches, kissing babies, and performing for the camera. The system worked well enough that nothing more was needed.
They are probably baffled that it’s no longer working. The freedom caucus Republicans are the only real leaders among the lot. They’re the ones willing to stand up to decades of precedent and entrenched interests and say “no. This isn’t good enough. Politics as usual won’t cut it anymore. We have to do better.” There simply aren’t enough of them yet and there’s no corresponding group on the other side. The Democrats have their firebrands but they’ve yet to truly challenge the party leadership, maybe out of fear of Trump. I expect that to change just as I expect the old guard Republicans to continue to lose power in their own party. Change is a process. It takes time, it’s uneven, often ugly, and there will be many setbacks, but at least the process has begun. It’s long overdue.
My rabbi here in Brooklyn has said for years, we’re happy to live in such a hospitable country and vote and abide by its laws, and always remember we are guests and should not get involved as the ACLU does in how Americans practice their religion. Jews are a small minority and so we need to act accordingly.
No Orthodox Jew I’ve ever known wants a Christmas creche removed from public property. We take a libertarian attitude to religion: freedom for all to live their lives and leave others alone to do the same.
A bill will stop anti-Jewish hatred, on campuses or anywhere else. Attack the cause of the current outbreak: As Salzman writes, “the dominant ideology in universities is the far leftist conception of “social justice,” generally defined and implemented as “diversity, equity, inclusion.” This is not a student invention but a policy imposed from the highest level, the Biden administration in the United States and the Trudeau government in Canada.”
This used to have a lot more upvotes.. is everyone else seeing this or am I going mad?
Who would have thought that RINOs actually did exist, and the term was not just a made-up insult?
Same with the tories in the UK. They’re mostly leftists now.
“…was it really the Gaza security fence that Hamas drove through with their bulldozers, or was it the entire West’s own version of the Berlin Wall that they punched a hole in?”
No, it was just one more stop along the path of retreat of American power from Afghanistan westwards.
Now we get to find bit by bit which realities we’ve taken for granted for the last 80 years are self-supporting and sustainable and true and which ones live and die with American might.
Next on the way: the EU. Is this really the vaunted peace project everyone talks about so glowingly? Or has peace in Europe just been a little rubber ducky bobbing along on the calm waters Pax Americana?
A journalist made exactly the same point about possible conscription in Western Democracies 20 years back, saying ‘I hope they don’t expect my son to go – he won’t get out of bed if he can’t be certain of a dial-up facility to Domino’s pizza’.
“We’re doomed Captain Mannering, we’re doomed “
Mainwaring.
Pedant.
I think you’ll find it’s “Marciano”.
Just messin’! ;¬D
No relation.
I think we will find the EU is that little rubber duck, but it arrogantly thought it was in control of its own calm waters. The EU and UK are going to have to scramble to put defences and self protection in place along with more self sufficiency and local supply chains. I don’t think politicians have realised this yet, until then the chaos will get worse before it hopefully gets better.
I’ve never bought into the belief that the EU was the cause of peace in Europe. But it’s a belief which has a quasi-religious quality to it for a lot of people. When the war in the Ukraine started, a friend of mine even spoke of the EU as though it had the same protective power as NATO and I had to really bite down hard on my tongue at that moment in order not to say “WHAT?“.
It seemed so ridiculously naive. But I didn’t grow up under Communism so maybe I just don’t have the same appreciation of how the EU can be a shining beacon of hope rather than a source of overweening regulation and a place where you park your problematic politicians until everyone forgets what it was they did wrong.
The UK negotiations to create the EEC (the European Economic Community, created in 1958) started off smoothly, with trade, but the British would then find the political talks too restrictive, with political control dominating the wealth creating business and trade necessary to keep a modern (20th century) group of sovereign countries prosperous, and free? :)) , and therefore Britain wasn’t included in the original group of countries. I remember comments that remnant thoughts of authoritarianism were present, though it was the Napoleonic Law that was usually mentioned, for obvious reasons, at the time.
And so it has come to pass. While Engineers and Natural Scientists have excelled in research and developments, with discoveries and products that would appear to be just dreams in the 1960s, the efforts of the Arts, Humanities and Social Scientists, while making a few advances, have really screwed the Western World and ‘not helped’ the rest. They have even invaded the Natural Sciences with their NET Zero policies, Gender confusion and the rest of woke. And we still vote these idiots into positions of political influence!
The peace that European Coal and Steel Community/EEC/EC/EU was meant to achieve was that of preventing a repeat of the Great War.
Such an objective – taking the control of the production of coal and steel out of the hands of nation states – became obsolete in 1945 for obvious reasons. All of the original members of the EEC were in Western Europe and all but one were members of NATO.
Just how much pax was in the Americana all along?
Well, over a billion human beings were lifted out of extreme poverty by international trade.
That can only be enabled by a modern equivalent of the Royal Navy, which for decades was primarily the US’s carriers and battleships. Otherwise, ports, canals, and shipping lanes are at hazard.
We also had a collection of friendly or at least cooperative allies throughout the world, until a certain president decided on “change,” and then Islamic theocracies like Iran were inexplicably courted, and loyal allies like Israel and the Anglosphere were snubbed.
Free speech! The Romans may have killed Jesus but it was only because the pharasies insisted on it.
The whistleblower will be brought down by his own people. It happens all the time, but your example is the most famous.
The ‘Pharisees’ didn’t rule Judea; Rome did. What the Pharisees or any other Jewish sect insisted on wouldn’t matter once the Romans came to a decision. And it wasn’t the Pharisees, in spite of what some of the Gospel says. It was the Saducees, the priestly class, that made up the Sanhedrin that called for Jesus’ death.
Pharasee, Saducee what does it matter? Pilate wouldn’t have bothered if they hadn’t handed Him over and primed the baying mob threatening civil disorder. ‘I see no fault in him’… but if you insist…
The Gospels and Roman records all record that Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, and executed by crucifiction by the Roman army.
Jesus of Nazareth, whether you believe that he was the son of God, a prophet or just a popular preacher at the time, was himself a Jew with (Jewish) opponents among the clerics as well as wealthy (Jewish) friends including Joseph of Arimathea and a large number of other (Jewish) followers without whom Christianity would not exist.
Would someone be so kind as to lend a Bible to those complaining that the act (for all its flaws) would make the Bible illegal, and perhaps help them read it?
Be as smug and superior as you like, Pilate only got involved because the Jewish authorities insisted on it to the point of threatening a riot.
The same breakdown of traditional democratic process among or within parties is flavour of the month in many Western Democracies. The main takeaways from our recent ‘democratic theatre piece ‘ (aka election) were for me;
1 Increasing voter apathy and decreasing turnout.
2 No expectation of any real change.
3 Fracturing of both the main parties about fundamental issues.
4 Increasing emasculation of Parliament at the hands of unelected International organisations, national quangos, special interest groups and a plethora of self-imposed targets of all sorts.
5 Lack of any real ideas about any of the major problems besetting the country.
6 Petty and vindictive point scoring all round worthy of 8 year olds in a school playground.
7 Huge rise in independent candidates of all sorts.
8 Rise of sectarian and religious voting blocks.
None of this bodes well.
Great summary. Thank you.
Perhaps the point is being reached when the majority of the electorate, on both sides of the Atlantic, write “neither of the above” on their ballot papers when faced with a binary choice between two dinosaur parties with barely the width of a cigarette paper between them on policy.
Anyway, I think Jews would rather be called “Christ Killer” by a swivel eyed loon than face the kind of hatred spouted by the Islamist-backed, screaming caucus of students and useful idiots on so called “peace marches”.
Is there a third option available?
One group of people are blaming me for killing Jesus 2000 years ago in ancient Judea. The other group are telling me I don’t belong in modern Israel/Palestine (where a lot of ancient Judea was) because I belong in Poland/Europe/Russia (take your pick) and have nothing to do with that land.
Both can’t be true. You couldn’t make it up. So angry.
Proof that a mob can be a collective of 100 contradictory beliefs and yet still act as one.
The fact that 5 people voted down my comment by just stating the facts is amazing.
You’re absolutely spot on….
Neither is a rational point of view, either, and so both are part of an illogical and ignorant worldview.
As a (lapsed) Roman Catholic, I see Judaism as our ancestor religion. Christianity was once viewed as a Jewish sect, until the Romans made it the primary state religion of West. In hoc signo vinces, and all of that.
(Honestly, a Roman governor had Jesus executed, not a Jew. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment.)
It’s also clear to anyone who’s studied religions that both Jesus of Nazareth and the founder of modern Christianity – Saul of Tarsus, aka St Paul – had extensive rabbinical training, and that Christianity is very much a close descendant of Judaism.
Jesus was raised Jewish?? But Abbas said last summer that the Jews weren’t there first!
I didn’t hear what he thinks of the Temple(s) ruins…
Madness, madness. Society spinning apart like a cracked fly-wheel. Hold on to your homeland in Israel. If things don’t change soon you’ll be the only ones left with a safe, functional place to call home.
The people who are telling you Jews don’t belong in Israel, also genocided Armenian Christians in Turkey, Zoroastrians in Iran, Hindus from Karachi, Lahore and Kashmir, Sikhs from West Punjab, Coptic Christians from Egypt ….
But somehow they demand special privileges whenever they are in a minority.
Daar Islam: once land is under Sharia, it’s Moslem forever. They claim India to Portugal.
They told the Home Secretary years ago he had no jurisdiction in their part of London.
Two screens read, subject matter not yet even mentioned – gave up reading. Feels like it should have been published in Quillette “Bloviate, Bloviate, Bloviate”.
Before you get too far going on the Republican betrayal:
Not that long ago a tough bipartisan border bill was about to pass. It was scuppered because Trump and the radical Republican wing blocked it – they did not want any solutions because continuing chaos might gain them votes. Even more recently Democrats were willing to vote for tougher border controls in return for the help-to-Ukraine bill. It did not happen because the Republican right refused to let the relevant law reach the floor – and the Democrats did not want to oblige. There was a congress majority for helping Ukraine, and the legislation duly passed. There could have been a majority for tightening the border in return – but the radical Republicans blew it because they would rather achieve nothing than make a deal.
Source: The Economist.
The bill would have allowed 5000 immigrants /day for a week before it activated. The Republicans had their house bill (HR2) rejected by the Democrats in the senate. The house Republicans are waiting until the election results this year.
Your statement is a partisan distortion.
But…but….the Economist says it’s so.
1) How does a man who holds no office “scupper” anything?
2) The border has been an issue since Biden took office. What prevented a bill from being introduced beforehand, like when Dems controlled the House?
3) There is nothing in the measure about “tougher border controls.” There are provisions to hire more people but that’s mostly to expedite the entry of illegals, not to stop it.
utterly ignoring the plain fact that Biden could issue executive orders to deal with the border, just the same way he issued EO’s to ‘scupper’ Trump’s border policies. Legislation isn’t required. Will is, and it isn’t there in this administration,
Making the Jews a special case, defining ‘anti-semitism’ in law… Then all the other ‘special cases’ get in the queue, especially the Muslims. Queue pressure for a specific act outlawing any criticism of Islam and its adherents.
I am not very knowledgeable on US politics but this article is concerning. And what a last line.
This was such a terrible idea on the part of the GOP. “Islamophobia” will be next in line…any mild criticism of Islamic cultures will be considered punishable under this new “blasphemy law.”
Personally, I prefer the anti-Israel sentiments and antisemitism percolating on the far left and far right to be out in the open…helps with friend/enemy distinctions. Let them show us the odious nature of their beliefs and who they are aligned with.
Fellow Jew who agrees with you
Completely agree
The entire concept of “hate speech” is a foolish one. The hateful can be silent, and can perform their malevolence sub rosa. The good can easily let slip a thoughtless comment or a mistaken assumption and be punished.
The noisily evil are, in general, dismissed by thinking people, as they’re unreasonable, marginal, and hopefully of little influence.
However, “oppressor classes” (men, heterosexuals, etc) aren’t protected in the slightest by hate speech bans. Up until very recently, groups like Jews, Catholics, and Asians were deemed “white adjacent,” and apparently could be slandered or offended at will. Or worse.
We find ourselves, like Stalin era Kulaks, lumped in with the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoise, and mystified as to why we also posses some sort of collective, inherited guilt.
How much better our lives would be if we were treated, and treated others as, individuals with agency, accountability, and merits of our own making!
But that would of course throw away the left’s main cause celebre, and replace Marx, Mao, and Marcuse with Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, or perhaps Ayn Rand.
The +4.5B $ the US “gifts” Israel yearly can only be spent buying US military weapons. In such, it’s really less of a gift and more of a circular investment in the US’s own manufacturing sector. On the other hand, the US “invests” over $18 billion a year in the UN – an organisation that is literally set up to undermine its global interests and about $400 million to UNRWA, a sub shoot of the UN dedicated to perpetuating Palestinians as refugees and ensuring they remain forever dependent on the interests of rich donors. In the state of moral and ideological chaos and disarray the world is plunged in, “Soft power” is quickly becoming totally irrelevant – hard power is the only believable currency.
The US has spent a lot of time and money funding both sides for profit and political gain.
Read Mearsheimer et al’s book. It isn’t all military spending.
Whatever Mearsheimer says, the opposite is usually true.
Using the Ukrainian people as a buffer against a bloc which one has already been responsible for creating through an aggressive take on post-Soviet geopolitics on behalf of neoconservative Washington…
…well, that may be more abstract, but it’s in the same sphere of immorality as the atrocities committed by those savages in Israel last October.
Meanwhile, the modern Left has no morality whatsoever, that’s clear. Never has a set of people gone so wrong in the modern world.
The Jews ‘blamed’ for killing Jesus? Assuming there was a Jesus, and that he was killed, it was the will of god; if he hadn’t been killed there would be no Christianity. Where the hull does ‘blame’ fit into it? Just imagine the panic in Heaven: ‘The Jews have pardoned Jesus! What’s plan B, Boss?’
As far as I understand it, theologically speaking, Jesus’ death was not viewed by the Church Fathers or later scholars as preordained, and some authors back in antiquity were labelled heretics for saying as such because it supposedly undermines both the human Trinitarian aspect of Jesus as well as his free will. One example is Apollinarism.
I like it!
Hopefully RFK Jr will drive a massive wedge between these two collapsing political behemoths and end the ‘bipartisan’ status quo that has prevailed in the US for too long. It’s time to stop these corrupt actors from enriching themselves and their financial supply chain along the way.
First, May Day isn’t celebrated in the United States due to it’s original political connections to socialism, communism, and anarchism. We celebrate our laborers and our collective labor on Labor Day, which occurs at the end of the summer, before the new school year begins. May 1st, here, is the day after April 30th.
In terms of American unity, it’s always been bifurcated…the North versus the South…Democrats versus Republican…the elite class versus the working class…White America versus Peoples of Color. There’s nothing new going on here other than a loud microcosm of pseudo-intellectuals on Ivy League (and second-tier elite) campuses embracing and regurgitating political dogma that’s been spoon fed to them by their Progressive professors. Being pro-Hamas, and wearing a keffiyeh to your “New Wave Feminism in America” college classroom, has replaced wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt to ones suburban Thanksgiving dinner circa 1970. It’s eye-rolling to the silent majority.
The vast majority of America sees the Israeli-Gaza situation as a side show that doesn’t involve them. Combined, the United States has a 3.7% population of Jews and Muslims…a fact that effects national voting in only 3 states: New York (Jews), Michigan (Muslims), and Minnesota (Muslims). Most Americans will live their lifetimes without meeting a Jew or a Muslim face-to-face.
Lastly, as an American, unless your vocation involves working within the Military Industrial Complex at a high level, or being a high ranking officer in our “all volunteer” military (which was the direct response to our disastrous failure in Vietnam which resulted in conscription going kaput), you have no idea what our armed forces are up to…or where they’re embedding themselves. Sadly enough, we’re a great nation, but an incurious one when it comes to global affairs or geography. Seriously, most Americans, and I’m not talking about all of you overeducated UnHerd readers [insert smile emoji], have no idea where Ukraine or Israel are located on a world map…and have little concern about wars that aren’t being fought by our troops.
I’m just saying, come November, Americans will be voting their pocketbooks; their mortgage rates; the crime rates in their neighborhoods; the education that their children are getting in public school; and their positioning on DEI (abortion, home affordability, the national debt, etc.). Foreign affairs will be at the bottom of the American voters checklist of concerns.
The collapse of the Republican Party doesn’t reflect any collapse of actual conservatives willing to do battle with the entrenched Forever Government – which the official Party both enables and is enabled by.
Historically & philosophically, I submit that free speech is misunderstood in the US. For brevity’s sake: First, speech is not free from regulation as in the proverbial example of forbidding one from falsely shouting „fire“ in a crowded theater. Sadly, our civil discourse has been diminished by cases such as the infamous „f$&@ the draft“ case. Second, following therefrom is the societal need to prohibit false speech as practiced in Nazi Germany & the USSR. Tell the lies long enough & they’re accepted as truth. But we have become a nation more concerned with procedural rights that shift with the wind as opposed to one of substantive rights rooted in God & reason (see also, Democracy‘s Discontent by Sandel).
Was the US as weak as it is now in pre COVID 2019 under the Orange one?
I don’t think so.
Under Biden:
Appalling exit from Afghanistan.
The perceived disassembling of US societal norms under the new cultural revolution
A failure to repel Putin in Ukraine.
A lot of this perceived weakness can be laid at the door of the Dems who have done everything they can to knock out scaffolding from below the American project.
The rest of the world can see an America unsure of its own purpose and unity.
That is fatal of course.
Yes, the bill is stupid. So is calling it a GOP measure. When 320 of the 435 House members are for it, saying it’s a Repub bill requires intentionally ignoring the dozens of Dems who jumped on the bandwagon, many of them seeking distance between themselves, the campus protesters, and the even more grotesque “death to America” chants echoing among exclusive Democrat voters.
The bill should, as the title says, backfire. If feelings about Jews are deemed criminal, it’s not hard to see where this exercise in thought policing leads. The bill also did not occur in a vacuum. For the past few years, we’ve stood by and listened to a barrage of anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight, and anti-Christian rhetoric, often fueled by angry white leftists engaging in performance art.
The bill doesn’t criminalize anything.
So when was it that Pelosi and company worked her magic to derail a previous denunciation of Jew Hate….with a House statement that they oppose all forms of hate against any group….so I’m okay with this …..given the tsunami of Jew Hate….some official denunciation is welcom.
The funniest thing about this whole situation is that conspiracy theories about Jewish control of American politicians are going to skyrocket in scale. A total shooting in the foot moment.
This is too alarmist. The student unrest will end — they always do — and things will return to normal after Trump is elected. Let the Russians and Chinese learn about the depth of African corruption as the West did to its rue.
…and in the long run freedoms of speech and religion will go the way of free love: straight to the HR office’s filing-cabinet feifdom
A Generation Lab report from today suggests that less than 8% of students in America participated in any form of protest, and that the issue itself (Israel/Gaza) is the 9th on their election topic priority list, far behind issues like gun control, healthcare, and climate change. Once again, a small and aggressive minority forces their radical agenda onto millions of ultimately moderate and sensible crowd.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/07/poll-students-israel-hamas-protests?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top
Spot on, well reasoned, and also well articulated. Our “enemies” have hacked the Western tradition and have no doubt aided the self-destruction that appears to be playing out. If the US loses the liferaft of a constitution that was so cleverly designed by our founders, the strongest swimmers may survive somehow, but the empire will not. What a mess…
Assuming that Epstein was working for both Mossad and the CIA and that his effectiveness as a blackmailer ended around the time of his first conviction in 2008, we have had 16 years since for a new generation of US politicians who are not being blackmailed by Israel to emerge. Is this what we are seeing?
To say that this is a hot potato to many Christians — who interpret this the Republican Party trying to ban or at least suppress parts of the Bible itself — is an understatement.
That statement doesn’t make any sense. Does anyone know what he’s trying to say?
The ongoing crisis in whatever you want to call that piece of real estate will end when one of the antagonists has the will and power to drive the other to total unconditional surrender. Until then it is all just a very costly game, a way to make money to take sides to signal virtue and score small points. There is more to gain from ongoing war than peace, so far. Obviously no one is willing to pay the price of peace.