Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review<\/p>\n
Anti-Semitism, racism, deception, and dirty tricks: For progressives, the ends justify the means.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018W<\/span>hite folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God\u2019s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I\u2019m here to say your time is up, your world is through.\u201d<\/p>\n So spoke recently our Nietzschean Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.<\/p>\n Not long ago, Representative Danny Davis (D., Ill.) spoke up in behalf of Farrakhan, calling him \u00a0\u201can outstanding human being.\u201d Davis went on to use an unfortunate choice of words: \u201cThe world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Jewish question\u201d?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The \u201cJewish question,\u201d of course, refers to a 19th-century pan-European debate over whether Jews would ever assimilate into European countries. The debate quickly descended into abject anti-Semitism. And by the 20th century, in the German Third Reich, the phrase \u201cDie Judenfrage\u201d was to become the signature Nazi euphemism for the Final Solution. Davis is either ignorant or shameless or both.<\/p>\n Even weirder was a recent revelation that in 2005, at a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) event, a smiling Barack Obama, then a newly elected senator, had posed in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for a photo alongside a smiling Farrakhan.<\/p>\n Photojournalist Askia Muhammad just recently released his picture \u2014 13 years after he took it. Muhammad had held it back for years, complying with requests from the CBC and Obama\u2019s staff, in order to protect the political viability of the then up-and-coming Obama, who was already eyeing the presidency.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, in retrospect, the somewhat bewildered photographer now seems perplexed at the requests for secrecy and at his own acquiescence. \u201cIn fact [Obama] had people from the Nation of Islam working on his staff and in his office in the Chicago, his Senate staff,\u201d Muhammad recently told Fox News\u2019s Tucker Carlson in an interview. \u201cThe members of the Nation of Islam helped him in his Senate campaign and on the South Side of Chicago.\u201d<\/p>\n If Muhammad had released his picture of Obama and Farrakhan in 2005, and if he\u2019d disclosed that Nation of Islam people were working on his U.S. Senate campaign, Obama\u2019s political aspirations probably would not have survived the outrage. Certainly, if a Senator John McCain or former governor Mitt Romney had posed for a photo-op in the U.S. Capitol with David Duke, while hiring members of the Klan to work on their staffs, they would have been disgraced and their careers quickly aborted.<\/p>\n In the old days, anti-Semitism was more the domain of white rednecks railing against supposedly sneaky, rich, Eastern bankers and New York traders. Today it is the \u201cintersectional\u201d collection of black extremists, Palestinian nationalists, and radical feminists. They apparently feel immune from charges of anti-Semitism, on the premise that minorities cannot themselves be bigots and that leftists can loathe and single out Israel for inordinate venom, but not be anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n In sum, the octogenarian Farrakhan is now a mainstream identity-politics activist and an apparently integral part of the new Democratic party\u2019s \u201cinclusion\u201d agenda. Why else would Representative Jim Clyburn (the third-ranking Democrat in the House) have shared a stage with him? Or why would DNC vice chairman Keith Ellison (former Nation of Islam member) shrug off his relationship to Farrakhan with the assertion, \u201cI am telling you, no one cares.\u201d And if one looks to the Democratic hierarchy, he\u2019s apparently right.<\/p>\n \u201cRedlining\u201d used to be the banking and real-estate industries\u2019 effort to exclude people of color from mostly white neighborhoods. Its lowbrow version peaked in the 1970s, when white thugs harassed blacks and other minorities who dared to buy houses or move into in their ethnically homogenous enclaves.<\/p>\n Now a new generation of race-obsessed activists in big cities hounds out so-called neighborhood interlopers. Opponents of gentrification use the same old tactics of vandalizing newcomers\u2019 property and attempting to destroy their businesses. In the old days, liberalism defended the efforts of \u201cthe other\u201d to integrate into neighborhoods of the majority. Not now.<\/p>\n Instead, it is okay for anti-gentrification activists to use racist language (\u201cBe wary of white men\u201d is a talking point in Los Angeles) to harass so-called yuppies, who wish to move into their traditional barrios. What would happen if there were like-minded bigots in Palos Verdes who organized patrols to stop Mexican Americans from buying homes in their neighborhood, as they marched with placards saying \u201cBe wary of brown men\u201d?<\/p>\n So is the argument both that it\u2019s fine for Latinos to be racist and that others are racists (which is not fine) for suggesting that Latinos are racists? Or is the defense that others were racist in the past, and so some now have a few more years in which they can be racists before we dial back the needle on the racist meter? Or is it weirder still: Whites are racists either for wishing to move into minority neighborhoods or to stay in their own white-majority neighborhoods?<\/p>\n Nearly everyone has gone crazy over Russian conspiracy theories. Representative Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee envisions them as an updated version of the Red Scare. Progressives now recalibrate the old novel and film\u00a0The Manchurian Candidate<\/em>\u00a0to paint Donald Trump as a dupe of Russian-American conspiracies.<\/p>\n Supposedly the pesky Russians have used their money and mafia-like cunning to promote Donald Trump and fuel his right-wing pro-oligarchical agenda. Yet aside from the fact that Robert Mueller\u2019s nearly year-long investigation has so far found no evidence that Trump colluded with Putin\u2019s Kremlin, there have always been illegal attempts to alter U.S. political campaigns, and we\u2019ve seen many political movements intended to promote the interests of foreign countries. What is different is that these efforts are for now legally and ethically exempt from scrutiny, as the necessary means to achieve noble ends.<\/p>\n Speaking of Russian colluders, we already know that British subject Christopher Steele was paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to find dirt on Donald Trump and to thwart his candidacy. Steele did not register as a foreign agent of any sort. But unlike the Russians, he is easily extraditable from the United Kingdom. Why hasn\u2019t he been indicted?<\/p>\n There\u2019s no reason to believe that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, former FBI director James Comey, members of the Obama Department of Justice, and veterans of the Clinton campaign would have disclosed their shared knowledge of Clinton\u2019s handprints on the Russian-supplied dirt on Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Far more likely, Russian interests would have made use of President Hillary Clinton\u2019s opposition dossier. They could have found the right moment to disclose \u2014 or threaten to disclose \u2014 that they had colluded with her oppo-research team to ensure her the election.<\/p>\n Other new disclosures show that Russian oil-money interests with ties to Vladimir Putin\u2019s Kremlin may well have funded and subsidized the efforts of multiple American green groups to retard American fracking. In a report released March 1, congressional investigators say, \u201cRepublicans and Democrats agree the Kremlin is manipulating environmental groups in an attempt to carry out their agenda\u201d The report cites the 2014 assessment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary general of NATO:<\/p>\n Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations \u2014 environmental organizations working against shale gas \u2014 to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Those front groups have long been part of the Russians\u2019 global strategy. In 2014, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported that \u201cRussians typically worked with foreign environmental groups to shut down shale gas development in their own countries.\u201d<\/p>\n Russia and the Persian Gulf monarchies detest fracking, given that the resulting flood of new natural gas and petroleum has tanked their export oil revenues, saved motorists and consumers billions of dollars, and made the U.S. nearly oil-independent and strategically liberated from Russian and Middle East pressures.<\/p>\n Who knew that Putin and American anti-fracking groups shared the same goal of reducing the oil and gas output for the United States? Again, progressives call the union of diverse efforts against a common enemy \u201cintersectionality.\u201d Try to imagine the reaction to a group of Russian operatives, secretly bankrolling conservative grassroots efforts to shut down windfarms across the country, claiming that the noise, high profiles, and damage to wildlife were an environmental crime. What would the green lobby think of their Russian-subsidized opponents?<\/p>\n Sometimes the efforts of foreigners to warp U.S. elections are even more overt, at least in the case of foreign progressives in service to kindred American progressives. During the 2016 election, former mayor of Mexico City and often-mentioned Mexican presidential candidate Marcelo Ebrard was the subject of a flattering\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0profile. The puff piece (\u201cHow a One-Time Political Star in Mexico Ended Up Campaigning for Clinton\u201d) praised Ebrard, a Mexican citizen, for \u201cworking on Latino get-out-the-vote campaigns on behalf of Hillary Clinton.\u201d<\/p>\n Ebrard was quoted as despising Trump (\u201cnothing else like I\u2019ve encountered\u201d), and he bragged about how he had organized Mexican-American communities to increase voter turnout.<\/p>\n So, again, imagine the reverse: A Russian citizen and former Moscow mayor relocates to New York to help Trump by galvanizing Russian immigrants to stop Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential bid. Any such Russian politician, as well as Trump himself, would likely have been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for election interference and collusion.<\/p>\n All these various paradoxes point to a shared theme. The common denominator is the ceaseless quest for power and influence. A Linda Sarsour or a Representative Danny Davis doesn\u2019t much care whether Farrakhan is a racist, an anti-Semite, and a bigot. But they do understand that he has a large African-American following they can absorb into their own political agendas.<\/p>\n Progressives are not much upset about the notion of foreigners meddling and warping U.S. politics. They indeed seem to approve of the idea that an American campaign would hire a British subject who, colluding with Russians, could help their candidate, Hillary Clinton, derail Donald Trump. And Russians aiding American greens to shut down fracking? Progressives shrug. A major Mexican politician moves to the U.S. to help Clinton organize Mexican-Americans voters to stop Trump \u2014 more shrugging.<\/p>\n We are back to the future of various grievance groups using venom, probably illegal actions, and outright threats to further a political agenda that has not won majority support and whose ends cannot be realized without the use of dubious means \u2014 any means necessary \u2014 to achieve them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Anti-Semitism, racism, deception, and dirty tricks: For progressives, the ends justify the means. \u2018White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God\u2019s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I\u2019m here to say your time is up, your world is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1170,1169,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Sd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3792,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-anti-semitism-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":11049,"position":0},"title":"The New Anti-Semitism","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 2, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Hating Jews, on racial as well as religious grounds, is as old as the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe, pogroms and the Holocaust were the natural devolution of that elemental venom. Anti-Semitism, after World War II, often\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2006"","block_context":{"text":"October 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/october-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13140,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eeyores-cabinet-noble-lies\/","url_meta":{"origin":11049,"position":1},"title":"Eeyore’s Cabinet: Noble Lies?","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 13, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers Americans are being saturated by a whirlwind of events never quite seen in recent memory. When a person with a gun or car now kills someone, the media\u2014in anti-humanistic fashion, and quite callously\u2014 massages the story to fit deductive narratives. And they are based\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 8 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 8 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eeyores-cabinet-noble-lies\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/NobleLies2.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/NobleLies2.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/NobleLies2.jpeg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/NobleLies2.jpeg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/NobleLies2.jpeg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/NobleLies2.jpeg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":521,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/who-gets-a-pass\/","url_meta":{"origin":11049,"position":2},"title":"Who Gets a Pass?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently said of the Chick-fil-A fast-food franchise that \"Chick-fil-A's values are not Chicago's values.\" Why? Because Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy is on record as being opposed to gay marriage \u2014 as is close to half the US population, according\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11599,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-new-anti-semitism\/","url_meta":{"origin":11049,"position":3},"title":"The New, New Anti-Semitism","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 15, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (\u201cgentlemen\u2019s agreement\u201d) to the rawer regions of the Ku\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anti-Semitism"","block_context":{"text":"Anti-Semitism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/anti-semitism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11815,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-progressive-anti-semitism-and-why-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":11049,"position":4},"title":"Why Progressive Anti-Semitism \u2014 and Why Now?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The\u00a0New York Times International Edition\u00a0recently published an anti-Semitic cartoon of a dachshund with the face of Benjamin Netanyahu. The composite animal was leading a hunched Donald Trump who had on dark sunglasses, as if blind, and a yarmulke. Almost immediately, everyone pointed out that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anti-Semitism"","block_context":{"text":"Anti-Semitism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/anti-semitism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11092,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/03-28-2018-angry-reader\/","url_meta":{"origin":11049,"position":5},"title":"03\/28\/2018 Angry Reader","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 28, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"From An Angry Reader: Mr. Hanson, About 15 or 20 years ago, I used to read your articles voraciously. I sent them to fellow graduate students\u2014nearly all of whom were overwhelmingly liberal\u2014in order to give them a jolting shot of truth. That was then, this is now. I recently took\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11051,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11049\/revisions\/11051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}