The Tragedy of the Commons

On Mocking Dying Working Class White People

Matt Stoller cuts and pastes comment about the death of middle class Americans from the Huffington Post.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FREE TRADE?

The Wall street Journal published a very long article with lots of graphs and pictures bemoaning the end of free trade.

Nine years after the financial crisis, global trade is barely growing when compared with overall economic output. Cross-border bank lending is down sharply, as are international capital flows. Immigration in the U.S. and Western Europe faces a deepening public backlash.

Nationalist politicians are on the ascent. On Wednesday, the U.K. formally started proceedings to remove itself from the European Union. In the U.S., President Donald Trump pulled out of a Pacific trade pact on his first working day in the Oval Office, declaring, “Great thing for the American worker, what we just did.”

For traditional economists, globalization is a pathway to prosperity. Rooted in the works of Adam Smith in 1776 and David Ricardo in 1817, the classical canon has embraced the idea that trade is the basis of wealth, because it makes nations more efficient by allowing each to specialize at what its workers do best.

Few of them fully grasped globalization’s downsides in a modern economy. Tying together disparate nations economically also expanded the labor pool globally, pitting workers in wealthy nations against poorly paid ones in developing nations. That greatly boosted the fortunes of the world’s poor, but also created a backlash in the U.S. and Europe. At the same time, freeing financial flows led to debilitating financial excesses that ended in crisis.

Well, yes.  All of this was predictable, but the free traders were enthralled by their ideology and were blind to the real-world effect of their policies.  Free trade is like a drug, great in the correct dosage but when you overdose, you die.

My goodness, that’s a long winded way of blowing smoke. As we end, they note:

In the U.S., wages and salaries of workers rose 2% a year in the past five years. That’s down from 2.9% in the five years before the crisis.

Who has been in charge during the last five years and what has been the policy? The Obama administration has been busy working on globalization; lowering trade barriers, and the result is …. what? Tens of thousands of American factories closed and ninety million working age Americans permanently sidelined, not even looking for work anymore.

And then there’s this:

“Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy,” Mr. Trump said last June at a Rust Belt stop in Pennsylvania, “but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

Haven’t I been reading about this in this very newspaper? The rise in early death; the drug epidemic among the poor out-of-work men and women. The shuttered main streets of flyover America. And the WSJ wonders why working men and women around the world don’t love the free-trading ruling class any more.

HOUSE APPROVES BILL TO FORCE PUBLIC RELEASE OF EPA SCIENCE

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans are taking aim at the Environmental Protection Agency, targeting the way officials use science to develop new regulations.

A bill approved Wednesday by the GOP-controlled House would require that data used to support new regulations to protect human health and the environment be released to the public.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said "the days of 'trust me' science are over," adding that the House bill would restore confidence in the EPA's decision-making process.

Democrats approve of government agencies making rules based on data they want to keep secret from you.

Why I Just Don't Care About the London Attack

Interesting take

First, "What is it this time?"

Be it the Nice attack in France.

The bombing in Germany's market square.

The Boston marathon bombing.

The Cologne sexual assault party.

The Orlando gay night club shooting.

Or

The hotel bombing in Mumbai.

It's very apparent that nothing new is going to happen. The media will immediately rush to say it wasn't confirmed that it was a Muslim who did this. Then, when it's discovered it was, they will rush out to say Muslims fear a backlash in their communities before the bodies get cold. There will be furor on the internet on the right demanding we "do something about this." And people on the left will rush to say it's racism to point out the attacks came from Muslims.

But in the end NOTHING different will happen.

NOTHING....

I know this shows I no longer have a soul, and yes, I acknowledge there were definitely some non-leftist victims in these attacks, but again my point is not one of morality or ethics. My point is one of acceptance, numbers, and reality. It's hard to attack and kill conservatives in large numbers because those ignorant hick bastards are spread out over rural and suburbanite areas. They don't congregate in downtown areas to "party." And the major metro centers with the richest targets for terrorists tend to have heavily dense populations of leftists.

And while on a human side I do mourn the innocent worker in Mumbai, or the innocent tourist in the twin towers, on the whole I just can't give a fuck when the majority of people who are dying in these attacks are the ones who voted it in. And I REALLY can't give a fuck when for the past 30 years of my life these people are the ones who call me racist, sexist, evil, fascist and "privileged," blame me for all their problems, and likely hate me more than the terrorists themselves do.

He does have a point.

The Origins of the African Slave Trade

If you believe that white slavers invaded Africa, attacking villages and taking slaves you have been sadly misinformed.  that's just not how it worked; for one thing, it's just too inefficient.   All white traders  had to do was pay African kings and they got all the black slaves they wanted.

In 1807 Britain outlawed slavery. In 1820 the king of the African kingdom of Ashanti inquired why the Christians did not want to trade slaves with him anymore, since they worshipped the same god as the Muslims and the Muslims were continuing the trade like before.

The civil rights movement of the 1960's have left many people with the belief that the slave trade was exclusively a European/USA phenomenon and only evil white people were to blame for it. This is a simplistic scenario that hardly reflects the facts.

Thousands of records of transactions are available on a CDROM prepared by Harvard University and several comprehensive books have been published recently on the origins of modern slavery (namely, Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade and Robin Blackburn's The Making Of New World Slavery) that shed new light on centuries of slave trading.

What these records show is that the modern slave trade flourished in the early middle ages, as early as 869, especially between Muslim traders and western African kingdoms. For moralists, the most important aspect of that trade should be that Muslims were selling goods to the African kingdoms and the African kingdoms were paying with their own people.

Read the whole thing. It's a simplified version, but it's how slavery worked in Africa.

The damage Obama did to black people

Scrolling through some comments following an article by Bret Easton Ellis, I came across this comment that is worth pondering.

We were out with a black couple shortly after the election and they were saying things that I hadn't even thought about. "Race relations were getting SO MUCH BETTER before Obama took office, but now look what's happened .. he is teaching young black kids that cops are out in the streets hunting them down, we have riots in the streets and cops are getting shot. Obama started this mess and now we black people have to live in this mess". "Obama tried to convince blacks that we are the victims of white privilege ... he had a huge chip on his shoulder towards white people, probably from listening to that Reverend Wright for 25 years".

"Obama doesn't realize that white people now avoid us in public and even in my office. Before Obama, lots of white people would introduce themselves and it was easy to make friends with white people ... but now white people avoid eye contact with us and I can't really blame them for that". "This could impact my ability to get promoted and I definitely think it will be a factor in hiring ... white managers might now hesitate to hire blacks because of all the bad feelings out there right now".

Wow --- That was Deep. I hadn't thought of any of those aspects of Obama's attitude towards whites. I had to admit to these folks that there have been instances in the past year where I definitely found myself avoiding eye contact with blacks (and I noticed cases where they were avoiding eye contact with me). I had to think and I realized it was true that during the past year, I haven't been walking up to blacks and introducing myself like I normally did before Obama started poking the nation in the eye. I guess this will be his lasting Legacy (setting race relations back 40 years).

From my perspective as a white male, I can see the damage that Obama has done to race relations, but it has not affected my personal life.  But I can see that it may set back the opportunity that non-radical Black professional have outside of the academy (where blackness is a virtue).   When you see Black people on the street do you think to yourself: "odds are high that he's an Obama supporter."  How does that make you feel?  

Mark Steyn: If everyone is Hitler, then nobody is

Russia and the Democrats

You remember the Democrats, don’t you? They were the party who for decades would gaslight anyone concerned about Soviet communism as being some paranoid dupe of propaganda, sneering at them coastal-elite-style as some low-info true believer in the “Red Scare.” Mind you, this was when Russians actually were infiltrating US government and media. It’s also when they were slaughtering millions of their own citizens and injecting psychiatric medication into anyone whose brain even dared to burp up the mildest “reactionary” thought....

These gullible empty vessels who blame Russia—rather than, oh, Clinton—for Clinton’s loss are the same deluded blockheads that for generations have worshiped government power and media authority to the point where they scoffed at the mere mention of “conspiracy theories.” Yet suddenly—with, as far as I know, not even one tiny teenage female hamster pubic hair’s worth of evidence—they are convinced beyond all doubt that the Russians, rather than disgruntled American voters, decided this election?
...

Ninety-nine percent of the American media tried desperately to influence the election, and they lost—hence the delusional and fact-free Russian deflection.

Read the whole thing.

WHITE FRIEND CONFESSIONAL

MIA MERCADO

WHITE FRIEND: Forgive me, Designated Friend of Color, for I have sinned. It has been two Macklemore singles since my last white confession.

FRIEND OF COLOR: Go on.

WHITE FRIEND: I maybe did a racist thing.

FRIEND OF COLOR: Did you say the n-word during karaoke again?

WHITE FRIEND: No! I was definitely tempted to do “Formation” by Beyoncé but did “Single Ladies” instead.

FRIEND OF COLOR: That’s growth, I guess. What did you want to talk about then?

WHITE FRIEND: So, the other day I couldn’t tell the difference between two Asian women. But that’s not necessarily racist, right?

FRIEND OF COLOR: Who were the women?

WHITE FRIEND: Does it really matter?

FRIEND OF COLOR: Who were they?

WHITE FRIEND: I realized my mistake right after!

FRIEND OF COLOR: Who did you think you saw?

A Bried History Lesson on African Slavery

No, I recall quite clearly that the Arabs enslaved vast numbers of your sacred dindus, having most of them castrated along the way. That the dindus themselves retained some 80% of the slaves for their own use — Africa was a vast mass of murderous tribal despotisms riddled with slavery. That the Japanese enslaved Koreans, that the Alaska Skraelingr were mad at Abraham Lincoln for making them release the other Skraelingr they were keeping in bondage, that… well, you get the picture.

388,000 slaves were shipped to the United States. Those exploded into some 38 million today. Even allowing for some recent immigration, a 100-fold increase in population cannot be described as anything except a runaway biological success. Ah, such oppression, such a horror of racism.

At the same time, I suggest you go poke around the Middle East for dindus there. Huh, don’t see any. Wonder if cutting off their “courting tackle” as George McDonald Fraser called it has anything to do with that?

So, what we have in England is a case of a vile invader from a culture that was unabashedly slave-holding and in some countries STILL has slaves, killing people in a country that hasn’t had legal slavery for centuries — some of whom are descendants of a bunch (the British) who did their level best to quash the transatlantic slave trade in toto.

So yes, I do remember. The slave-trading, woman-torturing, murdering, primitive, barbaric enemy of the West — from a culture that took far more slaves — murdered a bunch of people from countries that abhor slavery and that, even during their participation in it, produced a bunch of rank amateurs compared to the skills of the Arabs and the Africans themselves in chaining up legions.

But it’s difficult to detach your lips from those brown posteriors long enough to glimpse the hazy outlines of truth, isn’t it?

The Mental Reign of Terror

Jon Miltimore argues that Yale is becoming a kind of jail which hands out professional credentials to those hardy enough to serve out their term. Until then its inmates should be careful not to make waves. The wardens in Miltmore's story are college administrators who've created a kind of politically correct kingdom where they -- not the professors -- are the rulers; where conformity not inquiry, is the most highly valued virtue.

What does this kind of bullying remind you of? To me and many others, it's the Red Guards.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution is now forgotten history. Yet important thing about the "Red Guard" movement was how artificial it was. It was astroturf all the way. Behind the youthful Chinese faces was the aged figure of Mao Tse Tung and his political cabal. Like some malevolent spirit he projected his voice through a million gullible dummies carefully nurtured on propaganda and paranoia.

And this is where it started, in homes like this in Venice, California.

The sad reveal about Charles Krauthammer.

If you’ve ever watched HGTV, the channel that features home renovation, you’ve seen “the reveal.”  That’s when an old house has been shielded by a curtain and, when the renovation’s complete, the curtain is raised and the new house is shown. 

Thanks to the toxic politics in Washington DC, we’re seeing the Charles Krauthammer revealed.

Krauthammer’s a gifted writer and analyst of political events.  He’s viewed as a Conservative, but an acceptable one: on the Right in foreign affairs and socially Liberal.  He holds an enviable position among the Washington chattering classes.  And he intends to stay there.

Which is why he’s echoing the Liberal establishment on a subject that is intellectually indefensible: that Trump lied about being wiretapped.

There is no need to even investigate the NSA, the FBI or any of the 17 intelligence agencies that – among them – apparently monitor our every moment.  The fact that Trump was wiretapped was written about by the NY Times, the Washington Post and an array of global news organizations.

As John Nolte wrote on March 24^th:

12 Pieces Of Proof: The MSM Knew Obama Spied On Trump and LIED To Cover It Up

Our national media has known for months that the Obama administration spied on Team Trump. This was not only common knowledge within the media community, it was no secret. In fact, as you'll see below, for two big reasons, the media was overjoyed that this spying had occurred: (1) they got scoops damaging to Trump, and (2) in their provincial and cultish minds, the very fact that the oh-so pure Obama administration felt the need to spy, could only mean Trump was in bed with Putin.

In fact, the media was actually having a big public party using Obama's spying. Hoo-hah here's a scoop! Whee-hee Flynn said this! Woo-woo palace intrigue! Ha-haaah here's what so-and-so said! Tra-la-la here's what so-and-so did!

But suddenly, when Trump accused Obama of wiretapping him, the media, who had been reporting for months the phone calls that these taps had uncovered, denied that there had been any surveillance of Trump and his team.

They even began using the Bill Clinton defense: “it all depends on the meaning of is.”  They were trying to maintain that if Barack Obama had not personally snuck into Trump Tower with wires and alligator clips hooked to copper phone wires it wasn’t Obama and it wasn’t “wiretapping.” 

Nolte demolishes this here.  Trump Is 100% Vindicated On Wiretapping, and 7 Other Things You Should Know

Yet Krauthammer sides with the people saying Trump is lying.  On March 19^th I wrote about Fox’s Special Report where both “A. B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer both stating categorically that Trump’s allegation of being spied on is false.”

A.B. Stoddard is your garden variety “Democrat operative with bylines” as Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds puts it, but Krauthammer has a carefully, and well-deserved, reputation for being smart rather than ideologically correct and must know better.  Here’s what he said (I transcribed the segment myself from a replay of the program) 

“It’s a farce, you know, the idea that everyone in this town – the media – the agencies – the congress – are running around chasing their tails on a story that everyone knows it’s not true, but having to pretend that it might be because he’s the President when we know how it’s going to end.”

I‘m sorry but this is a farce.   

The logic in inescapable.  The only question is whether the surveillance of Team Trump was really “incidental” or if it was deliberate, using surveillance of virtually anyone that Trump and his team could be in contact with as a cover for listening in on Trump’s conversations.   

As Nolte remarks:  this was a “successful Watergate bugging.”

I’m also sorry that it reveals something about Krauthammer - a man with whom I find myself in agreement much of the time.  It shows the power of the Washington establishment that someone as intelligent as Krauthammer is willing to tell lies to maintain his standing in DC.  

That position, for Krauthammer, is an enviable one: a onetime speechwriter for Walter Mondale, he has long-running column syndicated by the Washington Post.  According to his biography, He has written for Time, “served as a panelist for the PBS political roundtable in weekly basis. For the past decade, Charles has been commentator and political analyst for Fox News,” appearing almost daily. 

I suspect that Dr. Krauthammer really doesn’t want to buck a bi-partisan establishment that really, really does not want to open the door to the possibility that Nixon’s “Plumbers” goals of bugging the political opposition was finally realized by the Obama administration thanks to new and improved surveillance techniques.  The Ruling Class is determined that if the Obama administration committed crimes, they will stay properly buried..

The Krauthammer reveal reveals a lot.  It explains why conservatives who get elected and come to Washington are quickly neutered in contrast to Republicans at the State and local level who are so much more successful.  It explains why so many Supreme Court justices nominated by Republicans “grow” in office and why John Roberts was willing to re-write Obamacare so that he could allow it to pass as Constitutional.  It explains why the only people who are willing to stand by Trump are people outside the Beltway who don’t have Washington DC based careers to consider. 

As we get older we learn a lot about family and friends that show them with warts and all.  Each revelation does not make us love them less, but it shows that mere humans are frail.  

Unfortunately Krauthammer’s failure strikes at the heart of our regard for him as intellectually honest.  That’s sad.

Documentary on Yale Reveals How Scary U.S. Campuses Have Become

12 Pieces Of Proof: The MSM Knew Obama Spied On Trump and LIED To Cover It Up

What I am about to present to you is what really happened. All the proof is linked below, but what I'm about to do is what I call "Revealing the Matrix," showing you the truth backed by incontrovertible fact and the media's own words. Not my words. Not President Trump's words. The media's words.

We're gunna cut through all the code, all the spin, all the fog, all the lies, and all the Coordinated Narratives used by our media to obscure Truth.

Our national media has known for months that the Obama administration spied on Team Trump. This was not only common knowledge within the media community, it was no secret. In fact, as you'll see below, for two big reasons, the media was overjoyed that this spying had occurred: (1) they got scoops damaging to Trump, and (2) in their provincial and cultish minds, the very fact that the oh-so pure Obama administration felt the need to spy, could only mean Trump was in bed with Putin.

In fact, the media was actually having a big public party using Obama's spying. Hoo-hah here's a scoop! Whee-hee Flynn said this! Woo-woo palace intrigue! Ha-haaah here's what so-and-so said! Tra-la-la here's what so-and-so did!

And then on March 4, in a series of tweets that had the exact same effect as political nukes, Trump himself confirmed what the media had already told us, that the Obama administration had spied on him and his team. Trump's brilliance was focusing on the sleazy and illegal act of the actual spying. And this is when the media realized that all their ha-has and tra-la-las were about to backfire. Their Precious Barry was now at risk, and so the shameless cover up and lying began …

Suddenly, right around 8 a.m. on Saturday, March 4, the conventional wisdom and public knowledge that the Obama administration had spied on Trump, was surrounded by the media's semantic wagons which were manned by lying journalists armed with hair-splitting. I don't want to go through all that again, so you can read why Trump told the 100% truth in the first section of this piece. The bottom line, though, is this …

Trump accused Obama of spying on him.

Obama did spy on Trump.

The media knew Obama spied on Trump.

The media lied and covered up the fact that Obama spied on Trump.

We know this with absolute certainty because the media itself told us so. And here is all the proof you will ever need to make that case … [emphasis mine throughout]

1. Heat Street - November 7, 2016

EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia

Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.

So let's stop for a moment to make a couple of things clear. The FBI reports to the Department of Justice, which at the time was run by Obama's highly politicized Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. The author of this piece, Louise Mensch, despises Trump, and if you'll look at the publication date, she dropped this supposed bombshell the night before the election, and did so for reasons I should not have to explain.

You are now asking yourselves: Who the hell is Heat Street and how does this prove anything? That's a fair question, let me answer it this way: As you'll see below, this report of the Obama administration asking for and receiving a surveillance warrant to monitor Team Trump is confirmed by a number of other MSM sources.

Moreover, no less than The New York Times re-published this information as recently as last weekend.

Read the whole thing.

Friends in Safe Spaces

The Political Class Murders Itself

The author begins by discussing when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire and the Caesars ruled.

Bringing us to the present:

It is a good lesson to keep in mind as the politicians in the Imperial Capital wrangle over what could be a very dangerous scandal for them.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.

The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.

Democrats, meanwhile, cried foul.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, cast doubt on Nunes’ claims in a fiery statement and blasted the chairman for not first sharing the information with him or other committee members.

Schiff also slammed Nunes for briefing the White House on Wednesday afternoon given that the Intelligence Committee is in the middle of an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including possible collusion with the Trump team.

The political class chased Nixon out of town for talking about the use of the FBI and CIA as weapons against political opponents. The rule in politics has been that the use of the IRS or the intelligence agencies was expressly prohibited. There could be no exceptions for obvious reasons, as it would give these bureaucracies dangerous power. That was the lesson of Hoover. If the CIA or IRS are allowed to use their powers to gather dirt on elected officials, then they can control elected officials. That’s the end of democracy.

Of course, there’s another reason to take certain weapons off the table in politics. That’s self preservation. In prior ages, where the winners had the losers killed, the challengers would always have as their goal, the death of the current ruler. That prompted the ruler to get ahead of the curve and have any potential challengers killed, before they could be any trouble. This was Stalin’s game and he just about gutted the the intellectual and political elite of Russia in the process. They still have not recovered from it.

That’s what makes this so dangerous. It’s now clear what happened. The Obama people started spying on Trump once he had the nomination or perhaps even earlier. They may have started earlier with an eye on helping the Republicans knock him off in the primary, but that’s not clear. They figured that Clinton was a lock so they were not careful about covering their tracks. The Clinton people are as dirty as it gets so they were not going to be ratting on anyone over it. If anything, they would expand on it.

This is where the Russian hacking story comes into the picture. Once disaster struck and Team Obama realized they had a problem, they needed cover, so they started with the Russian hacking nonsense. They would then claim that it was all an accident and they were just trying to prevent Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from attacking our democracy! It’s also why Obama signed a retroactive Executive Order giving cover to the intel agencies for their domestic spying activities. They were creating a cover story.

The complication is that it appears that at least one person has perjured himself over this and that one person is FBI Director Comey. There’s no way to square his testimony with these new revelations. The best he can do is split hairs and claim he was not part of the spying effort. Of course, there’s no way to touch him as he runs the FBI. In fact, there’s no way to investigate any of the intelligence organizations. This is the point where many of the robot historians of the future will say the American political class murdered itself.

Unless there is some will to address it, and that’s highly unlikely, we now have a new normal where highly politicized intelligence agencies are used by both sides to discredit one another and discredit any attempts to reform the system. It’s no longer a game of rules. It is a zero sum game of power and that cycle only ends one way, with someone marching their army on the capital and taking control. As with Rome, whoever emerges as the dictator will not have murdered the system. The system will have murdered itself.

Welcome to London: We can say we’re not afraid, light candles and make hearts of our hands but the truth is that we can’t go on like this

This is our country now.

This is what we have become.

To this, we have been reduced.

Because all the while those forgiving fools in Brussels stood with their stupid hands raised in hearts to the sky, another mischief was in the making. More death was in the pipeline.

As the last life-blood of a police officer ran out across the cobbles, the attacker was being stretchered away in an attempt to save his life.

London is a city so desperate to be seen as tolerant, no news of the injured was released. No clue about who was safe or not.

Liberals convince themselves multiculturalism works because we all die together, too.

An entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb.

These people may have left their lands. But they have brought every tension, every conflict, every bit of fight here with them.

The Afghans hate the Somalias who loathe the Eritreans. As it was before, it is now. London is a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor whose greatest validation is his father's old job.

Son-of-a-bus-driver Sadiq.

I see him now, penning a missive about how London is a beautiful and tolerant city, how we are united by shared values and understanding, and how we will not be cowed by terror.

Sure enough, there he was, saying exactly that, just now. Fool....

The patriots of the rest of England versus the liberals in this city. The endless tolerance to those who harm us, (while the Home Office tries to shift the focus of public fear to white terror) — versus the millions like me who face the truth, with worried families and hopeless hearts, who feel the country sinking.

We are taken under the cold water by this heavy right foot in the south, a city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most, blame those who are most proud to be British, and shout racist at the 52%.

Please, no hashtag, no vigil, no tea lights. I am begging you not to light up Parliament in the colours of the Union.

Because we are not united. We are wrenched asunder.

Waiting ...

Hey, rabbis: Stop dividing us in the name of fighting hate

Too many rabbis and other Jewish leaders are linking the threats against JCCs and other Jewish spaces — like the Brooklyn Jewish Children’s Museum — to President Trump. Sure, you stand against anti-Semitism, and that’s good. But you do it under the umbrella of groups like Get Organized Brooklyn, groups with openly political leftist aims. Your fight against anti-Semitism is part and parcel of your fight against the president. It shouldn’t be.

After all, if there were no Donald Trump, there would still be anti-Semitism, and as a leader in the Jewish community, you need to say so — loudly and often. It only serves to downplay the scourge of anti-Semitism to pretend it’s an invention of Donald Trump or his followers.

Think about it: The two people arrested so far for making bomb threats against Jewish centers have turned out to be nothing like we may have imagined they’d be. They’re not white supremacists from states you’d probably never visit. No, on Wednesday, an American-Israeli Jewish teenage citizen was arrested for making some of those threats. A few weeks ago, Juan Thompson, a Hispanic leftist writer, was charged with making some.

At a time when we need to stand together, you have to know you are fostering an atmosphere that is working against that goal. When you infused the Purim spiel with your opposition to Donald Trump, do you know that you alienated people? I don’t mean people in faraway red states — I mean people in your own congregations.

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump myself, and, in fact (as some members of your shuls could tell you), I tried my best to stop him. Ironically, people in your liberal New York world weren’t too worried about a Trump win; Hillary was a lock, they said. But I was worried.

Still, I’m a conservative, and people know that. So fellow congregants who did support Trump felt safe confiding in me about that. Yes, though it may surprise you to learn, these are people in your own congregations — people who voted for the man you so openly oppose. Your efforts to pretend these people don’t exist, or don’t matter, or are on the wrong side, don’t do anything to bridge any divides.

Indeed, it’s fair to ask: Is your purpose to make people feel unwelcome? Certainly your e-mails, filled with calls for vigils and pleas for peace, as if Trump were the great evil facing Jews (if not the whole world) and Jews have a duty to stand up to him, suggest that. But why can’t you live up to the values you write to me about weekly — most notably, tolerance for people with different points of view?

Yes, we need to take anti-Semitism and threats to our community spaces seriously. Being a Jew can never mean sitting back and hoping for the best. There’s a reason we’ve had cinder blocks outside so many of our Manhattan buildings, metal detectors at our doors, security guards at every entryway.

But this didn’t begin with Donald Trump, and it won’t end with him. Now is the time to admit this and to stand together in opposition to anti-Semitism.

It’s time for Jewish leaders to disentangle their justified concern for the safety of Jews from their desire for a different president. Weakening Jewish unity and politicizing threats to Jews won’t do anyone much good.

Moral trumpeters are legion.

For them, it is an arcane ritual, designed to alleviate them of guilt, of a peculiar form of original political sin. It also gives them hierarchy to compete against. The person who takes the most wealth from one person and gives it to another is the pinnacle of proper Progressivism, the greatest of their moral agents.

Who the wealth is taken from, and who it is given to, doesn’t really matter from any moral perspective (it matters in other ways), so long as the wealth is taken. You might take millions from a man who cured cancer, and give it to a bunch of barbarian slavers in the Third World, but all is good because the millions were taken.

The middleman gets all the credit, of course. Lesser Progressives must bow to his superior morality, that he managed to steal more from one to bribe another to do his political bidding. The taxpayer is insulted for not giving more of his wealth to the government. There is no gratitude. The media is most moral, and the guy living in the sticks least moral, for no matter what he might do for the poor, no one is there to see it, therefore it isn’t moral.

If a person helps another, and the cameras aren’t there to record it, it is as if it never happened.

Competitive morality requires that you trumpet your moral achievements to the world. Stephen Colbert shows us how it is to be done:

 

Here Stephen Colbert is telling us that we are not Christians, and do not follow Christ, if we don’t want to give our earnings to the government. This is designed to wound a genuine Christian, by calling him a poor follower of Christ, and elevate himself as a superior agent of morality at the same time.

Mr. Colbert would be well-advised to read Matthew 6:2:

Therefore when you give your alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

Stephen Colbert and his ilk are revealed for what they are: hypocritical trumpeters of their charity.