From my FB page. Today's musing minute - What does the 2024 election reveal?

 Between the group of euphoric highs and devastated lows, it is hard to decide who is more arrogant. Arrogant people fly higher and fall harder. No matter what the result, there was going to be a lot of VERY unhappy people. Meantime, stepping back, what did we learn? What happened that was not expected?

Some of us wondered: who are the real Americans? What do the silent majority really think and feel in their hearts. I think we found out. It turns out “average” Americans were not so easily manipulated by a well-oiled seemingly powerful Democratic party establishment, nor deterred by the alarming disarray of what remains of the Republican party. The attempt to wag the dog failed miserably.

It seems to me what we saw, very ironically, was a significant number of voters who were spooked and insulted by the chutzpah of the Democratic Party to try and get them to vote for someone as abysmally unprepared as Kamala Harris. So, ironically, they did not vote for Trump, they voted against Harris. A surprising number of Democratic voters crossed party lines, very few went the other way.

Stepping back from the widely accepted aberrant personality of the president elect, which much of media commentary was about, the voters in general were more concerned with the issues, and the lies surrounding them. The swing within minority groups, including among the Jews of America, was beyond the imagination of the Democratic party elites. So, very surprisingly, the election turned out not to be about Trump the toxic narcissist, or at least, certainly not only about him. Front and center was inflation (the elites told lower income folks they just imagined it), immigration, taxation, Israel and Ukraine. (As unpredictable as Trump might be, many shuddered at the thought of Harris tackling the intricacies and subtleties of foreign policy.)

And looking deeper it is possible to see the sparks of a fundamental ideological realignment in America. Neither of the two main parties is what they used to be, especially the Democrats whose current mix of transformative policy positions strikes “reasonable” Americans as very un-American in its arrogance and scope. Disillusionment with crazy, costly, irrational climate policy, high taxes and uncontrolled spending that evidently has not done much good for anyone, and more. And, the Republican party too, has moved far from the Party of Reagan toward an embrace of big brother government on some issues. The politicians are out of touch with the silent majority. One wonders how this will play out, what steps they will take to course correct and what changes to policy platforms this will bring. Are we at a pivotal moment?

I confess that some of this gives me a bit more hope than I had. It could have been much worse. Many voters did not vote for anyone for president, they voted against the alternative they feared and resented most. The swings in the votes for the Senate and the House suggest it was much more than Trump’s personality.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the complete collapse of the Democratic party in this election. There are simply no redeeming results for them. Every metric that is remotely relevant went against them. Just how bad it was is expressed by the splash of red ink covering the entire map, with a few blue spaces peeking out here and there. And if you take out California, with its whopping 54 votes, the imbalance is mind blowing. And when we realize that much of California is populated by sleep-walking dreamers wondering around in their impenetrable bubble, completely out of touch with the rest of the country and with reality itself, this sharpens the contrast.

But now, we have to contend with a presidency of unpredictables, and we better hope, that, one way or another, it strikes the right balance that will push us closer to the real Americans.

The Meaning of October 7

Monday October 7, 2024 was one year since the savage attack and massacre launched by Hamas in Southern Israel. Over 100 of the hostages taken are still in captivity. What does October 7 mean? 

The linked presentation is an extended version of a talk I gave on September 26 to the Bastiat Society of Dallas – entitled 

ANTISEMITIS AND THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 

I know the slides contain a lot of text. You can pause the audio if you want to read them carefully, but the audio covers it all. 

As always I am happy to discuss anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEGC2Jh1WvA&ab_channel=PeterLewin 

You can access the transcropt here.

Antisemitism and the delcine of the wes^.pdf

From my FB page. On the implications of the existence of Jews who are anti-Israel.

 Today’s musing minute. We live in anxious times.

What starts in academia does not stay isolated in academia.

As many who read this feed have noted, and some even written books about, American higher education is in a state of crisis. It has lost its way. It has abandoned the basic precepts upon which Western civilization depends – that scholarly discourse should relentlessly pursue truth through unbiased investigation and dialogue.

Many, most, of us have known this for decades, and worried about the future. Would America and the civilized world come to its senses? What would it take?

The answers are not yet in. But the unfolding of the terrible events of October 7, and, particularly, the perverse reactions to them, have penetrated the consciousness of some of the so-called “liberals” who thought the moral high ground was with the progressive camp of left-wing fascists. Time will tell how things will be when the dust settles.

In the meantime, I will share with you a personal experience.

I just got out of a Faculty Senate meeting, the second in two weeks, in which a central focus was the recent police action that broke up an SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) encampment on campus . The senate was outraged, or at least some vocal members were. As might be predicted, the conversation soon broadened to a discussion of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

I, and those of like mind, do not know where our faculty at large stand on the issue. The senate is a very small body. Our faculty is over 1,000. We (the likemindeds) really wanted to push back against the condemnation of the police action and some of the self-righteous gratuitous comments of the faculty from last meeting. I was really content to observe in silence.

But, then, one young (self-righteous) faculty member got it into her head to assure the members of the faculty present that even though she was Jewish, “plenty” of our Jewish faculty sympathize with the suffering of the people of Gaza.

That could not stand without a response. I made two points.

1. It should be clear that those who criticize the proclamations and behavior of SJP, particularly for anti-Israel vitriol that is hardly distinguishable from antisemitism, sympathize every bit as much with the people of Gaza as do the members of SJP. If people really sympathize with the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, they should be agitating loudly for the release of the hostages and the surrender of the barbarians who lead Hamas (after all they are criminals), which would bring about an end to Israel’s defensive war. The absence of enthusiasm for such agitation and the presence of enthusiasm for anti-Israel bashing, speaks volumes. (That anyone should feel the need to make such a statement, as she did, is a really perverse manifestation of Jewish guilt.)

2. No one should be under any illusion that the presence of Jews among the members of SJP obscures or negates the clearly anti-semitic nature of their proclamations and behaviors.

I could have said more, but I think it sufficed to get a few people’s attention.

Upside down at Harvard

Today's musing minute. 

Some may not know about it, others may remember it. I refer to the firing of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard not so long ago. Comparing the cases of the firing of Summers and Gay is very informative, very revealing of the mindset of the decision-makers at Harvard - for some time now.

Summers was fired for the very reasons Gay was hired, and why her firing was so strongly resisted. Lawrence Summers is a white male with a distinguished academic publication and research record and unimpeachable scholarly integrity. He also proved to be an able administrator with extensive experience at the highest levels of government. He was fired because of his acadimic integrity, and because his race and gender aggravated his sin in the eyes of his critics. His sin was to express an unacceptable opinion come to as a result of his research. Even though he is a clearly identified "liberal" his careful examination of the intriguing disproportionate representation of men in the STEM fields led him to conclude that this was a matter of a difference in the distribution of IQs between males and females (for whatever reason) and *not* a result of discrimination. Apparently this opinion, whether having merit or not, was completely unacceptable and he was hounded out of office. 

Keep this in mind while considering Claudine Gay's decision to obfuscate on the acceptability of calling for genocide of Jews, or, if excused as conforming to a legal technicality, her engaging in serial plagiarism. Apparently both were worthy of a strenuous defense, not only because of their political correctness but also because Gay's race and gender made it "excusable". 

 What irony that in the very letter announcing her departure, they had the chutzpah to suggest that she was the *victim* of racial discrimination, when, in reality, she had obviously been the temporary big time beneficiary of it!