Progressive/Liberal Zionism is bleeding out. #WalkAway before you’re ejected.

One of the questions that bloggers and opinion writers probably grapple with, I know that I do, is “who exactly is reading these words, and how is it affecting them?” To be able to change minds, indeed to write provocatively necessitates making certain statements that depart from objectivity and can become the source of controversy. I am well aware that when I write an article whether here, on the anti-censorship Hard News Network whose viewers and readers include many people with extremist opinions both on the right and left; or even just on my personal blog that there is a significant chance that someone will read it and discover several points to disagree with, or indeed conclude that there’s absolutely nothing of value.

Within the American political party system, free thought and dissent are not a cherished value notwithstanding its crucial place in our society and its guarantees by our constitution. The Republican Party has traditionally marginalized the anti-war, libertarian, paleoconservatives like myself that advocate for ending foreign entanglements, reining in the debt and working to reverse the abuses of the administrative state. That’s why Rep. Ron Paul, granted not a friend of the pro-Israel community, was robbed of having a legitimate shot at the presidency in 2012. This is one of the reasons that Donald Trump was able to succeed in 2016 as a rejection of the establishment GOP.

In parallel, the Democrats have embraced the same technocratic, elitist message as a means to pull the wool over the eyes of progressive voters. As a result of that the candidates that have been part of the genuine left such as Ralph Nader of the Green Party, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, and Sen. Bernie Sanders are shunned by the pro-Democrat media organizations who are in fact corporate donors to establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and blue state governors like Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown.

As a result of their humiliation in 2016, the Democratic Party and its donor base decided that if they could not address the issues of the populist take over of that year – jobs, education, opioids, healthcare, and national security – they would buy the type of crowds that had shown up at Trump rallies and create the impression that a populist uprising was now turning against the new president. This was the Women’s March, March for Science, March for Our Lives, and a variety of similar movements that sprung up in the immediate aftermath of the election. Several of the organizations participating in these mass rallies, such as the Women’s March and Indivisible, claim to be grassroots groups but are in point of fact funded by big money donors just like the party of whom we will not speak in specifics due to the absurd objections that tend to follow of “anti-Semitism”.  Once one peels back the layers of donations the Tides Foundation and similar groups seem to crop up.

The Women’s March and its various successors have always needed to pander to minority community fears in response to several policies in dispute of the Trump Administration to wit:

• The so-called Muslim Travel Ban of 2017, which in reality only restricted entry for the citizens of seven nations and was upheld by the Supreme Court.
• Removing several of the Obama Administration’s Title IX guidelines in US universities and colleges that created a parallel system of justice for students and faculty accused of sexual assault.
• Allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump, alleged ties to white supremacist groups or individuals, the Access Hollywood leaked tape, and the Russian collusion narrative.

White nationalism is actually failing, but the left needs it to remain relevant.

These are all principled reasons to object to a candidate or politician, but one has to notice that they are totally unrelated to the issues of US-Israel bilateral relations and the Middle East peace process, and only in some cases relevant to the American Jewish community. Nevertheless the issue of “white nationalism”, “white supremacists”, and racism continues to crop up. So let me address that in brief:

There are plenty of avowed anti-Jewish voters that have voted for Donald Trump, and particularly in the fall and winter of 2017-18 many of them coalesced within a “white nationalist” movement that included the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. However, in the aftermath of that event many white nationalists began to question the competence of its leader Jason Kessler, and the movement began to degenerate into infighting between the more intellectual anti-violence advocates like Jared Taylor and the militant extremists like Paul Nehlen and Patrick Little. By the time of the rally’s one year anniversary event in Washington, DC in August 2018 the event attracted mere dozens of people. Even the explicitly pro-Democratic news site Vox acknowledged that it was a pathetic failure.

Both Little and Nehlen attempted to run for elective office as Republicans in 2018 and lost in embarrassing fashion. After two years of Trump being in office, these clownish pretenders have actually lost influence within the GOP. This is exhibited by Nehlen actually earning five thousand less votes in 2018 in his six-way Wisconsin 1st District primary election than he did in 2016 when running in the same district against unpopular neo-conservative House Speaker Paul Ryan. And back in 2016 he had not revealed himself as an anti-Jewish candidate. Meanwhile Patrick Little came in 13th place in the California US Senate jungle primary in which he trailed several relative unknowns and received about a third of the vote as Latina GOP contender Erin Cruz. What is Little’s next move after this resounding . . . result? He is running for president in 2020 – as a Democrat.

The left needs its enemies so bad that it helps them to succeed.

The progressive left often points to ex-strategist and campaign manager Steve Bannon as an “avowed anti-Semite” when claiming that Trump may not be a Jew hater but he surrounds himself with them. For those that care to look, the strongest evidence if one can call it that of Bannon’s alleged views towards Jews were allegations by an ex-wife that he objected to his daughters attending schools that had large Jewish student bodies. These cannot be substantiated independently, and even his biggest conservative nemesis Ben Shapiro has rejected the notion that Bannon is an anti-Semite instead claiming he is “just an asshole“. Shapiro is himself a Jew, a staunch Zionist, a conservative, and departed Breitbart in order to express his dissent with Bannon and Trump. The second allegation against Bannon  made by among others the Southern Poverty Law Center is that under him Breitbart’s talk back forums became a cesspool of racist and anti-Semitic comments. But by the same standard the comments sections of many mainstream newspapers as well as almost any YouTube, Facebook, or Reddit thread would be similar cesspools. This position of blaming a publisher for the reactions of his readers is completely contrary to a civil liberties perspective.

So once Trump was installed in the White House, his opponents proposed that Bannon was this seven-headed hydra beast of hate that would initiate a Kristallnacht Kentucky-style. Once Bannon was ousted from the White House in August 2017 progressives and liberals briefly crowed including a ridiculous headline from the Huffington Post reading “Goy bye“. Then they rubbed their chins in confusion possibly thinking “now that we don’t have Steve Bannon at the White House, how will we keep the stigma of racism focused on his boss?” Had they allowed Bannon to wallow without attention in despair after the defeat of his candidate Roy Moore in the 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama perhaps that would have been the end of the alleged “white supremacist”.

But they can’t, because media racial arsonists need Stephen Bannon. Indeed since being fired by Donald Trump he has been interviewed by the New York Times (Nov. 2017), GQ (Feb. 2018), the BBC’s Channel 4 (May 2018), CNBC (July 2018), the Economist (Sep. 2018). He was supposed to be a headlining panelist at the New Yorker Festival but after public pressure they were forced to cancel their invitation. Most recently he debated neoconservative former George Bush aide David Frum at the Munk Debates concerning whether populism is the way of the future on the world political scene. Despite appearing before a largely hostile liberal anti-populist crowd, Bannon’s argument affirming populism won over 56% of respondents.

Stephen Bannon has also been credited by the world media to have been behind the election of populist far-right governments in Hungary, Italy, and Brazil. The media will not acknowledge the mismanagement of the pro-EU governments of western Europe in response to a migrant crisis in the wake of the Arab Spring, the War on Terror, and North African unrest or the utter corruption of the Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT) in that case. Instead they would like you the reader or viewer to believe that they are all under the spell of a pudgy ruddy-cheeked former naval officer and movie producer from Virginia.

Don’t misunderstand me, I do believe that Bannon is successful at networking between populist leaders and helping them to grow their international support, but they have not been dependent on him to succeed at home. According to the media reports, however for some reason this man they consider a grotesque Luciferian being of hate is behind it all.

Pathetic little kitties

So to refocus on the so-called Zionist left, their efforts have been a demonstrable failure because as part of “the Left” at large their strategy or lack thereof has actually empowered the Trump movement rather than challenge it. The Women’s March could once muster hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on an almost weekly basis. The original one was purported to have attracted a total of 3-4 million people worldwide with over one million in Washington, DC. In 2018 the second annual event attracted a mere ten thousand attendants in DC.

Among the participants in these marches are several Progressive Zionist (or nominally so) movements like Torah Trumps Hate, the Zioness Project, and Bend the Arc. Yet these groups have in one episode after another been tossed from general progressive left events. Rather than affirm the rights of these groups of Jewish and gentile progressive Zionists to march for “racial justice” in October 2017 other Jewish progressives at the behest of the organizers like Linda Sarsour attempted to confiscate their placards due to the “threat” they posed to Palestinians and “victims of Zionism”.

And what do these well-meaning progressive Zionists do in response to these conscious exclusion efforts against them? They don’t stand up and insist on the validity of their own convictions, but rather write rambling and self-torturing confessions of their own inner conflict. The progressive, feminist, leftist wing of Zionism is a sterile hybrid animal of contradicting viewpoints. They trash nationalism beyond Israel’s borders while clumsily struggling with it concerning their own heritage. They seek the company and comfort of their greatest haters rather than pursue an independent and principled position.

While claiming to fight anti-Semitism among the American public they participate in the anti-gun movement that is one of the most volatile fuels for the right wing elements of that persuasion. Attacking gun owners does nothing to serve the cause of Israel-US relations, unity in the Jewish communities, or for improving the standing of Jewish Americans in the United States. On the contrary, many American Jews including myself own weapons and keep them in order to responsibly defend ourselves if the need G-d forbid arises. We do not need a gaggle of shrill, inept sign wavers to teach us our own values or tell us how to keep ourselves, our families, or our friends safe from danger. In the midst of their hysterical screaming over the Trump visit to Pittsburgh after the synagogue shooting I never once saw any of these groups propose an actual protective solution for houses of worship. Worse than that, they all seem to have ignored the most recent wave of synagogue attacks by an ex-Obama campaign worker and New York City Hall employee. And as usual, now that the perpetrator was not a white male as was the case in Pittsburgh, mainstream publications like the New York Times are quick to attribute the blame to trauma and mental illness. I agree with the headline for the Times by the way, but I’d also wish they remained consistent on issues of mental illness independent of the suspect’s race.

Where are the receipts, ma’am?

In the past I have addressed in this blog the incompetence of the establishment Aiding & Abetting Defamation League for its censorship efforts, as well as the issues of Democratic Party politicians and activists courting the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, what I call #FarrakhanFeminism. I have been consistent in supporting the freedom of speech of all Americans, even the most ridiculous expressions of that freedom like Farrakhan’s. This does not mean an endorsement of their beliefs, but a recognition that in order for I the writer or you the reader or objector to enjoy our freedom of speech we have to defend the freedom of speech of our opponents. As Hustler magazine founder and pornographer Larry Flynt has stated “free speech is only important if it’s offensive”.

So after almost two years of this craptivism, I would like to ask a simple question to the progressive/liberal Zionist faction: Where are the receipts?

• You have supposedly been fighting to promote candidates in the Democratic Party that reflect your values as progressive supporters of Israel. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for people like Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andrew Gillum, Ilhan Omar, and Keith Ellison. No really, thank you. Are those the receipts?
• Thank you for promoting actual progressive viewpoints that could have crossover appeal among non-progressives such as implementing ranked choice voting and overturning Citizens United in order to get money out of politics. Except, you never did. Was it not intersectional enough?
• Thank you for supporting freedom of speech for all Americans. Except on the contrary, you have supported censorship in its most ridiculous forms. Except you don’t because you you block your detractors.
• Thank you for counteracting the parallel idiocy of the anti-Zionist Jewish Left like #IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Never mind that the press listens to them and not you. Thanks, but where’s the receipts.

On a personal level I wish these people well, but as for their supposed activism, it is clear that rather than yield results it only causes people on either side to roll their eyes and sip their tea. Progressive and liberal Zionism was a burgeoning movement during the early years of the State of Israel when there was common cause between mainstream Democrats and the socialized Israeli governments following independence. Where is the common ground now? Even if you can point it out to me, you should probably recognize that it’s becoming quicksand.

If there does arise a competent progressive Zionist movement some day I would hope that it affirms and defends the basic civil liberties in the United States. Until then however, I’m not expecting the same from the current iteration that seems enamoured with third-wave feminism and racial victim politics.