I was an intern at the Heritage foundation in the early 1980s. Even back then it was a fraud. I was assigned to write an important foreign policy “research paper“ at the age of 18. It was published under the “scholar’s“ name. My only sources were time and Newsweek articles and my own imagination. And yes, I have spent a lifetime repenting although I think I’m now out of purgatory.
Glad you realized it Leonor. While the Heritage Foundation existed since 1973 as part of the wave of institutions designed to give Neoliberal economics its validity according to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson in "Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism" it was Reagan that gave it real life. Back then, I could not believe that people would vote a mediocre actor into the role of President, but then I was insulated from what America was like across the land, being limited to my section of it, and some travels, but mostly going abroad to see family when I had time to go anywhere. I grew up thinking that main stream ideas were from the old days and people did not think like that any more. I am still surprised, since I mostly live abroad that the liberal Americans I know, mostly come from families where they have relatives who support Trump, or at least vote Republican and have conservative Christian ideas. I have no Trump supporting family members.
Katherine Stewart documents the well developed network of right wing organizations and donors that support Christian Nationalism, a horribly sexist, racist system of beliefs, in her book, "Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy." We should beware. Under Trump they are getting bolder and bolder with their greed and hatred of people, which he sanctions.
Thanks for posting about Katherine Stewart’s book. Your description of “Christian” nationalism is accurate but I would add that are also the antithesis of Christian.
Ken Wilbur back in the '80's adroitly contrasted "Churchianity" with "Christianity." The former, of course being a vehicle for the accumulation of money and power, and the denigration of anyone not deemed sufficiently pure.
On a side note, has anyone noticed that Karoline Leavitt no longer wears her Cross necklace when discussing anything Epstein?
Yes Linda, they hide behind the cloth of God to do their criminal and racist bidding, and shower the country with their hatred. They are no christians, they are wicked diabolical.
Although we shouldn’t forget that the Church has a long history of antisemitism beginning with accusations of deicide, continuing with the blood libel and assorted other conspiracy theories which fueled centuries of exclusion, inquisitions, pogroms and ultimately Hitler.
The Heritage Foundation’s name , with its lofty pretensions, in fact reflects a long and unpleasant heritage. Who knows if that was the intention behind the name or yet another twisted irony.
It is indeed, a good article & I just saved it, Thanks.
— And here’s the rub: “But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and 🔹manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, 🔻 “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and 🔻Fox News had them every single night.”
And so I refer to them as “Gullibles”, not ‘Deplorables’. They are only too-willing suckers for the ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ because those are the racist messages they actually wanted to hear.
* One christian denomination that didn’t get swept up in this fervour was the JWs — as they refuse all political interaction other than to obey the laws of the land except where they interfere with the scriptures.
“Jesus answered: “My Kingdom is 🔹no part of this world. If my Kingdom were part of this world, my attendants would have fought that I should not be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my Kingdom is not from this source.” John 18:36
… not being grounded in bible teachings they were susceptible :
“Look out that no one takes you captive by means of the philosophy and 🔹empty deception according to human tradition, according to the elementary things of the world and not according to Christ.” Ephesians 1:19-21
Yes, There have long been shysters at the ready to take advantage of gullible people to suit their own ends.
I suspect that the reason why God is seeming to take so long to ‘straighten things out’ is that we need to be hurt & sick enough from doing things ‘our way’ that we see no alternative but to turn to Him. Time will tell.
I don't think the JWs are usually considered Christian. Christians are trinitarian (God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit). that doesn't seem to be a JW teaching. This is not an objection to your statement relative to their actions or inactions politically.
The belief in Christ, and his being sent by his Father, are the essentials for being considered a Christian. The Holy Spirit is God’s active force, unseen.
The ‘trinity’ is never mentioned in the bible, and came *after the writing of the Bible by God’s authorized writers.
Indeed. Tough times ahead for a good portion of the earth.
— Personally, I am (currently) ‘snug as a bug in a rug’, retired & living in the country, but it pains me to see so many innocents suffering, and the nutbar in the oval office reigning supremely ignorant & harsh.
2 Timothy 3:1-5 — “But know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, 3 having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, 4 betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with pride, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, 5 having an appearance of godliness but proving false to its power; and from these turn away.” Does this sound like ‘today’ or what?
‘Last days’ of the current ‘system of things’ = mankind’s self-governing.
the bible prophesies that will come to an end — we’ve had CENTURIES to get it right … and look where we are now … the world’s slimiest goofball ruling the world. The scriptural idea is therefore that God will resume ruling the earth, through Jesus & his 144,000 chosen ones.
Bring it on, we’re all getting sick & tired of this.
Perhaps. It would fit time wise. However, there is more behind it, in that the oligarchs had been funding these foundations that spread fallacious research about how the economy does better when the rich are allowed to keep more capital and pay less in taxes. They legitimate lies. A lot of money is spent on them that could go to solving some of our social problems.
Years ago I read Jesus and John Wayne about Christian Nationalism. I read somewhere that the only thing all of the right wing militias have in common is the subjugation of women.
When I moved from Ohio to Minnesota I realized how bigoted many of my family members were/are. My lifelong antipathy toward Thanksgiving began in Ohio, where an uncle took pleasure every year in using every racial and ethnic epithet at the Thanksgiving dinner table. I argued, unsuccessfully and miserably, while the rest of the family remained silent. Their silence spoke loudly: they did not disagree. I know that racism, homophobia, misogyny must live on in Minnesota, but the words and deeds are so much different that I never considered moving back to Ohio. 55 years later I still feel fortunate that at 18 I made the right choice.
Katherine Stewart is one of the finest resources of insight on the actual documented actitivities and the ideology that comprises Christian Nationalism. And I too giver her books my highest recco…
I didn't think much of Reagan when he was governor of California. They called Jerry Brown Governor Moonbeam, but he was actually a good governor - for 4 terms. His first 2 terms were before term limits became the law. That meant he could have 2 more, several years later.
So do I understand correctly that the Heritage foundation started out as a neoliberal (theoretical) think tank, but evolved into a conservative organization under Reagan? And then further evolved in the present time to a white nationalist tool for disseminating their propaganda?
I think it has remained a neoliberal evil "think" tank and added on these other pieces, but it is currently a Christian Nationalist organization, funded by super wealthy people.
This whole nationalist Zionist Christian movement is extremely dangerous and I have noticed a lot of behaviors from Christians that I never thought I would see. I pray that the heritage foundation will lose some of its power but the President is embracing it and pushing project 2025 through faster than I ever anticipated. Does anyone know if they are losing some of their steam? At 63, I don’t know how much more I can take. Sorry to be dramatic but I find DJT to be terrifying. I don’t admit it on my own personal page but it’s true.
Don't worry, Mr. McKie. My post's opening sentence was meant as sarcasm. Also, Trump's felony conviction count is actually 34. I don't want to short change the guy, since he's worked so hard to get those convictions.
Not only out-of-the-blue weird, but also probably yet another lie. I doubt he could pontificate with any genuine insight about sports, either. That's a topic that "real people" really do know a lot about.
Ouranos, I respectively disagree only in that every community needs a sewer system. It delivers away the excrement that can poison the commons. What Heritage more closely resembles is pollution dumping into the water system. People think it’s “Okay to drink the water” because it “appears” clean. But it’s not. And it makes them sick.
Trump’s contribution has mainly been to take the stuff in the septic tank, attach a hose to it, and spray the entire country—nay, world—with Heritage-branded liquid manure.
But the donors to the Heritage Foundation though- 1972- Tim Mellon, Joseph Coors, Walton family, Koch- I mean - geez. - think this had been marinating ever since Brown V Board/ 1955- so they poured big dollars into the formation of The Heritage Foundation in 1972/1973–(from Wikipedia-The foundation was established on February 16, 1973, during the Nixon administration by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors initially. Growing out of the new business activist movement inspired by the Powell Memorandum [this refers to Justice Powell] Weyrich and Feulner sought to create a conservative version of the Brookings Institution that advanced conservative policies.)
Timothy Mellon, a billionaire and prominent political donor, has been identified as the donor who gave a reported $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay military personnel during a government shutdown.
Yep. It’s not a big secret; it’s all about money. No regulations, no taxes, and no ethics or morals. Trump has liberated them to enjoy lies, greed, and racism so they can add to their millions without any concern about the damage they do. They are rich. They can do what they want, and that includes sex with 14- year- olds.
Yup, they're all on the same team. So, no matter how extreme, corrupt or evil the right can get, they all believe the true enemy is the strawman liberal built up in their heads, who is far worse than the worst-of-the-worst on the right. So, here we are, with billionaire oligarchs running the show who would rather destroy civilization itself than be fairly taxed, regulated, or held accountable for their actions. Trumpism is the end game of humanity.
Even though most of the oligarchs may virtually zero in taxes already. I suspect the death of oversight and regulations is the ultimate carrot. They would make more from the ability to cheat and pollute than any piddling tax cuts.
And what most people don't understand is that, just because "research" comes out of what sounds like a legitimate organization, doesn't mean it's valid. Trust, but verify, comes to mind. A peer reviewed study from a school like Stanford, UPenn, NYU, etc can be trusted as valid far more than one from Heritage, whose research is concocted to support its' goals, not to garner truths. It's like KKKaroline Leavitt saying, with a straight face, that DoorDash is a trusted source for employment and pricing data.
Yeah, that's why they landed the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which gave us dumb denials of the severity of Covid-19, and Trump's incompetent adviser.
The evolution of these neoliberal, far right foundations are well documented in Monbiot and Hutchinson's "Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism" and in Katherine Stewart's "Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy." In fact, Stewart makes the point that the far right machine is so well organized and networked and funded that it does not matter who they back, they back who will bring about the policy issues they want, and the center and left are not that well organized. Greed seems to be a powerful driver.
Their cunning plan failed with Trump. He's their Frankenstein monster. The monster has broken out of the lab, and is now running amok destroying the "neo-liberal" system of rapacious capitalism that has made them all so rich.
It's interesting. The little magas realized that the Republicans were in it for the money. The GOP paid lip service to the cultural things the magas cared about, (Driven through exposure to FOX and talk radio), but they didn't follow through. The GOP brought them the Iraq War, based on lies and the 2008 Great Repression.
Donald Trump came in, the biggest liar of all, and told them what they wanted to hear. The little magas believe him because he delivered RvW and a conservative Supreme Court. He loudly talks the talk.
The little magas are as ignorant as ever. It takes a long time for them to realize they're being screwed because the places they get their news from tells lies. However, Trump is so loud and obvious it may take less time for it to sink in.
Please don't overlook the libertarians at George Mason University. And look up the 1980 Libertarian Party Platform, presumably written by the late David Koch who was Veep on the ticket. I feel that Reagan was a proxy for the Libertarians and that Speaker Gingrich didn't even try to hide his libertarianism. In the Reagan years libertarian thinkers stopped the right-wing from working with liberals in Congress. And here we are.
I think the genesis of this crap goes back at least to the Rosevelt's, starting with Teddy, who they won against after WW I, and then again when FDR had to save the country during the depression. I don't think the "business plot" gets nearly enough press now. It was a coup plot, but no one was successfully prosecuted for it.
Think you are right on this! Heard something similar. Found it—-The individual who threatened to act as President in a conspiracy to seize control of the US government by eliminating tax obligations in the 1930s was
General Smedley Butler. He reported that a group of wealthy businessmen, known as "oligarchs," had asked him to lead a military coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, this plot, known as the "Business Plot," was exposed before it could be implemented.
The plot: In the 1930s, a group of wealthy and powerful businessmen, frustrated with Roosevelt's policies, allegedly approached General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against him.
Liberal Currents, on Substack, just published this morning much of what is discussed here, and with information about the Heritage Foundations tie-in with the KKK in WV in the '70s over book-banning.
Make NO mistake about it, Heritage is all in with the extreme Right, and is positioning itself as midwifing the coalition of pro-Nazi groypers and the radicalized GOP. read it here:
The Heritage Foundation, Groypers, and the Narcissism of Small Differences
Very different culture... a friend of mine wrote a paper and saw his academic advisor publish it under his own name, and he burned the advisor's car in retaliation. This was in Italy in the early 2000s.
all of the think tanks have always been frauds, masking their donors biases with a cheesy facade of "scholarship" or expertise and or analysis. And no one wants to give up this huge money trough.
A number on those “normal” institutionalist conservatives at places like Heritage Foundation have been purged. When I was in graduate school in the late eighties and early nineties I would occasionally use them as a reference for term papers on relatively uncontroversial issues like enterprise zones. They were obviously to the right politically but kind of a go to that was a bit to the right of the American Enterprise Institute. Now they’ve gone over to the John Bircher neo fascist end of the spectrum.
These fucks basically slowly took over the country by lying relentlessly about everything for 40 years. Dumb people will believe anything if you say it often enough. And they did all of this simply so billionaires would not have to pay taxes and they could make white supremacy in America great again. All of it culminating in successfully tricking enough of the population to vote for a pedophile narcissist hell bent on destroying the country. What a shit legacy.
I never have understood antisemitism. I have been blessed to know many Jewish folks. What do you say about a group that has contributed so much to humanity in the arts, science, and charity? I say Thank You!
It has its origins in mediaeval Christianity (the 'Jews killed Jesus' trope) but in the 19th century it evolved into a resentment of Jewish success in higher education and business. Hollywood, for example, was largely founded by several prominent Hungarian Jewish immigrants, which could be misrepresentated into the idea that Jews 'control' Hollywood.
That reminds me of Hitler in Vienna when he tried unsuccessfully to be admitted to the Academy of Arts & to survive he got a job as a facade’s painter in building. He used to walk along the Ring (road in center Vienna where the rich Jews were allowed to build their houses and mansions) & there developed deep seated resentment & envy. We know what he did after WWW I Antisemitism was the best way to distract German people from his grab of power. Sounds familiar ?
Interestingly both Hitler and Stalin were living in Vienna in 1913 a few streets apart, although of course they didn't know each other. Stalin himself persecuted Jews after ww2.
Stalin's antisemitism came and went in fits and spurts over the decades. Trying to discern how much of it was mere opportunism playing on longstanding Russian prejudices and how much genuine antipathy (possibly connected to his longtime nemesis Trotsky being Jewish) is difficult because he was a deeply private and paranoid man who never shared his inner thoughts. (He had similar on-off antipathy towards Poles, perhaps a legacy of his experiences in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21.) Not so Hitler, who in the words of one historian "spoke eagerly and often, sometimes so much he exposed his own lies."
Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva later commented to the effect that "father did not like Jews very much; but then he did not like most people."
Hitler opportunistically fanned existing embers of jealousy and resentment in the German peoples at a time they wanted a scapegoat for their economic woes.
...Germany's Jews *really* weren't even remotely that rich, whatever Nazi propaganda liked to claim. But the Nazis certainly weren't at all shy about pillaging them or anyone else for that matter. (Hitler's patently unsustainable economic policies throughout the Thirties were partly predicated on the assumption he'd soon enough be holding his creditors at gunpoint.)
Hitler absolutely financed his war machine through massive theft of Jewish assets—whether from wealthy industrialists, middle-class shopkeepers, or working-class families. The scale was staggering.
And a footnote in the scale of the actual state finances. My whole point here is that Hitler didn't finance his bullshit "by" or "with" it - in the grand scheme of things it was a drop in the ocean.
The Nazi economy, already during peacetime, basically lived hand to mouth and scraped the bottom of *every* barrel with progressively worsening desperation to stay afloat. Pillaging Jews was merely one aspect of that as well as a logical part of their repression (and, later, destruction).
Just for one example, did you know they basically stole ALL the trains from the occupied territories? This kinda gutted the economic productivity of those gains but they had little alternative because pivoting the heavy industry well-nigh entirely to armaments production since the early Thirties had left the German rolling stock in neglected shambles - the rail network almost collapsed from the military redeployments made during the Sudeten Crisis for ex.
Much older than that, actually. It pretty much goes all the way back to the 1st and 2nd centuries CE and the spate of major Jewish revolts that seriously soured the Romans on the lot. The early Church basically just jumped onto that bandwagon to improve its poor standing and image in the society of the day.
Easy enough to do since with its universalist message it had long since outgrown its de facto origins as fringe Jewish sect.
Much of the rest stemmed from Christianity's claim to a monopoly on divine truth (in part an outgrowth of the long and often hard struggle to establish itself against older pagan institutions) and the awkward socioeconomic niches Jews were forced into that made them easy and convenient scapegoats for all and sundry.
You’re right of course, plus the fact that the Middle Ages’ interdiction of perceiving interests on loans for Christians made the Jewish community where it was not forbidden the object of detestation from the people (it didn’t however prevent the rise of Catholic banking dynasties like the Medici in Florence or later the Fugger in Germany). Pogroms & restrictions against Jewish communities institutionalized a distrust against them that was diminished in the integration policies in Austria and the German states during the 19th century. The disaster of WWW I revived the pretext to channel renewed hatred towards Jews. Hitler jumped on the occasion.
The amount of :care: European secular princes had to spare for Papal proclamations was always pretty low, especially when it conflicted with their immediate interests. Case in point the doomed attempt to ban the use of the crossbow (inspired by the newly introduced much more powerful horn-stave design) against fellow Christians in whenwasitnow, the 1100s?
Yeah it pretty much became the signature weapon of Italian city-state armies...
Anyway after a lot of truly tortuous theological hair-splitting and heavy squinting at the Bible the Church eventually settled on whatwasitnow, 3.5% as the "fair price" of interest it was still just about acceptable to charge. Economic historians opine this low "soft cap" on interest rates was actually very significant for the later takeoff of preindustrial European economy... but I digress.
Yeah, for a constellation of reasons Jews tended to work a lot with money in one capacity or another, whether as moneylenders, tax collectors, tax farmers or suchlike. Which while quite lucrative occupations were also *extremely* unpopular among the common people for some rather good reasons regardless of who worked them - since they basically amounted to being the face of economic exploitation - which both compounded the other antipathies towards the religious minority and gave a lot of people entirely practical economic reasons for hostility.
Historians have noted that in an awful many recorded outbreaks of Medieval anti-Semitic violence a rather high priority seems to have been destroying the records of Jewish moneylenders...
OTOH, canny rulers often liked having Jews around if only because it was easy to squeeze them for hard cash (a rare resource in Medieval economy) to cover various extraordinary expenses. Richard I ("the Lionheart") for example partly funded the preparations for his participation in the Third Crusade with such de facto protection money extracted from the kingdom's Jewish communities.
This was also partly why during the Black Death (mid 1300s) many princes were willing to go to great lengths to try and protect their Jewish subjects from lynch mobs, with varying degrees of success.
“The early Church basically just jumped onto that bandwagon to improve its poor standing and image in the society of the day.”
Also, when Constantine embraced Christianity he needed to deflect potential criticism of the Roman government for its role in the execution of Jesus. So blaming colonized Jews was better politically than admitting that Pontius Pilate, acting as the Roman government colonial governor, was responsible. Admitting the Roman government was responsible probably would have hastened the demise of the Roman government. We still see this blame game among politicians today as they claim immigrants, POC, religious minorities etc are the reason for their own failures.
I mean tbf by basically all accounts Pilate would rather not have touched with the proverbial 10' pole what was from his perspective an incomprehensible Jewish sectarian squabble but needed to address the vehement complaints of the Jewish priestly class. (Which is obviously rather easy to twist into the "Jews killed Jesus" trope if one is so inclined.) Heck, Luke claims Pilate initially hot-potatoed the case back and forth with Herod Antipas, the client king of Galilee and Perea, on account of Jesus hailing from and having been most active in the territory the latter governed. Yes this was the same Herod Antipas who executed John the Baptist in the late 20s CE. Apparently he didn't want to deal with the mess either.
By Constantine's time Christianity had long since divested the awkward baggage of its Jewish origin and plenty ready and willing to shed its previous opposition to the Imperial government anyway, while prevailing opinions on Jews - who lest we forget were in fundamental theological conflict with both Old Skool pagan polytheism *and* rapidly spreading Christian monotheism - hadn't exactly improved any. The mono/poly friction had been a major source of trouble and tensions already way back when the Hellenistic Successors ruled Judea; polytheists as a rule don't mind others' gods but they tolerate blasphemy against their own (which monotheism basically commits by default) as poorly as anyone else.
Christianity's long history of anti-semetism is odd when you consider jesus was a jew. In the 19th century a new type of anti-semetism arose, which sometimes derided Christianity as a 'Jewish cult' unsuitable for aryans. Some even tried to absurdly claim jesus himself was an aryan, others embraced neopaganism. The nazis, whilst generally tolerant of Christianity, attempted to form a national reich church ostensibly devoid of any Jewish elements.
As I understand it the overall theological argument is that the ethnic background of the Son is simply a cosmetic detail. And given that Pilate (who by p much all accounts would rather not have had anything to do with such sectarian squabbles) had de facto had Him executed due to persistent complaints from the Jewish priestly class it's not hard to see how that could be easily spun into the tired old "teh j00s killed Jebus" cudgel were one so inclined.
Anyway, the later 19th-century "scientific racism" and the particularly German brand of racialised antisemitism (substantially embraced in the Anglophone world in no small part due to then-prevailing Germanophilia) are convoluted topics in their own right. Suffice to say the latter was heavily influenced by the particularly ferocious strain of anti-Semitism common across the entire "serfdom zone" east of the Elbe (what historians duly term "East Elbia"), stemming from the particular socioeconomic niches (moneylenders, tax farmers etc.; professions pretty universally loathed by the general populstion) Jews often occupied in the area. As they thus served as the middlemen of elite exploitation the common people directly interacted with, well, you can see how that rather compounded the other antipathies.
The missing piece is that Jews were denied owning land. They turned to banking and associated work because they couldn't invest in land. Most Jews were not rich but made livings as store owners, craftsmen, scholars, etc. Not being accepted into the Christian communities, they do what all marginalized communities do, turn inward. Human nature is to look down on and even despise the outsiders. the Jewish story is the story of immigrants from all parts of the world. It is unfolding before our very eyes and most of us don't know how to stop it. Seems only by destroying the environment will we be able to stop the cycle.
In the 30s-40s there was an Anglican churchman who wrote in detail about the Jewish origins of Christianity, suggesting that the church should adopt more Judaic practices, and attracting a good deal of agreement and opposition. Now pretty much forgotten.
My understanding is that in the early days, the Christians and the Jews were engaged in bitter combat over which sect would prevail on a nationwide scale.
Woulda gone pretty poorly for the early Christians that one, given they were a small sect mainly popular among the have-nots of the society (initially just in Judea).
Judaism is kinda exclusive by default - to simplify rather heavily, you're either part of the Chosen People or lol fuck you for eternity. Jesus ditched that and embraced an universalist agenda - anyone can readily join and be saved. Way moreveasily marketable to wider audiences that, obviously. No surprise then that the Apostles were soon spreading the word (and getting into trouble with the authorities) far afield from Judea. Paul for ex was famously executed in Rome sometime in the late 60s CE p much as part of Nero's crackdown on Christians. And the Galatians he wrote his famous and influential letter to (sometime in the 40s to 50s) were descendants of Danubian Celts who had migrated to central Anatolia (roughly the environs of Ankara today) in the early 3rd century BCE - a splinter of a larger Central European Celtic invasion of Hellenistic Macedon and Greece - and lent their name to the later Roman province...
It's definitely a third rail topic, but since you raised it... A big part of anti-Semitism relates to centuries of people misconstruing what it means or doesn't mean to be God's Chosen People. Those prone to bigotry are not known for being enlightened about much of anything, and such people have definitely taken off in a twisted direction on that concept, again and again.
Well good luck on *not* getting, say, the Romans or Macedonians or random Medievals annoyed at what to all appearances looked like what we might term "supremacist bragadaggio"...
Discourse on such matters wasn't exactly sophisticated in the olden days. Or, for that matter, in the Old Testament much of which can be unkindly characterised as rather crude tribal one-upmanship.
The vast majority of scholars believe Jesus did exist as a historical figure. The jesus myth theory as being banded about since the late 18th century (when people were freeer to start saying controversial things) but has never been accepted by most experts. Bart Ernhem has done some good lectures on this if your interested.
A couple of things. The ghetto arose out of the early practice of isolation of lepers.
Jews were the financial advisors and book keepers for French monarchs. Their influence threatened the monks who feared displacement, and so the monks started the stories of Jews making matzo using children's blood and practicing witchcraft. The first ghetto was actually created to protect the Jews.
Source: R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Blackwell, 1987.
Christian countries in Europe also limited the professions and trades that Jewish people could go into. Often they couldn't own land or belong to trade guilds. They often excelled at the professions they *were* allowed into, including finance, but it's worth remembering that the late 19th and early 20th century pogroms in eastern Europe and Russia usually targeted vulnerable rural and village people, not those in the cities.
But yeah, the trades Jews were allowed to pursue were for the most part sharply curtailed and for practical reasons - namely they might need to grab their things and leave *very* abruptly, whether due to a lynch mob or a realm-wide expulsion decree - gravitated heavily towards accumulating "immaterial capital" they could carry in their heads if need be.
Working with money in some capacity was one such field, and particularly attractive as the Christian taboo on usury limited competition. Also potentially highly lucrative.
The *downside* was that the barely-numerate majority basically saw things like "compound interest" as foul black magic - see also religious antipathy above - and nobody anywhere ever liked loan sharks, tax farmers etc. Also the dominant majority having a pragmatic economic incentive to burn down your house and your ledgers in it was obviously a wee bit unsafe.
Easier to get a lynch mob going in the barely-literate backwaters where police presence was thin at best. Not that the Russian authorities were exactly predisposed to protect *Jews* ofc, but they were an awful lot less tolerant in general of rioting in the cities where such disorder discomfited and endangered people and property they actually gave a shit about. (Also they probably didn't want the already-restless urban proletariats to get any more funny ideas about, shall we say, "direct action"...)
There is a great exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles exploring the founding by Jewish immigrants of the studio system for motion pictures, which became Hollywood. Interestingly enough, those founders started in NYC when filmmaking was so novel that there were fewer restrictions for Jews (Samuel Goldwyn was a very successful glove salesman who turned to filmmaking when he realized his ethnicity limited advancement in the glove business). For more on the exhibition, go to - https://www.academymuseum.org/en/exhibitions/hollywoodland
It also moved because Thomas Edison had the patent on movie cameras and was extremely litigious, arguing that his patent covered the content of the films as well as the equipment and the theaters. Moving to California put the filmmakers out of Edison’s reach.
Medieval? I grew up in an Italian neighborhood where kids went to parochial school. They'd come back from school, and being the only Jew on our small street, I was called a Christ killer. Can you imagine being an 8-year-old kid and being called a Christ killer? So not so medieval. Back in the Medieval 50s.
I feel bad that happened to you. I was 8 when a Baptist child in my class told me I was going to hell because I was Catholic, and Catholics were not Christians. I was very upset.
My daughter was about 8 when she was called a racial epithet aimed at white people by a black child in our neighborhood.
I told her what my mother told me: they heard it at home.
I was 7 when a classmate called me a Nazi, and then my White German mom had to explain to me what that was, and then on the playground a girl called me the other "N" word, and my mom explained to me that people who hurt inside try to hurt other people. It was a double whammy year. Later on, I formed a group of "Black Germans" which is carried on today in another city in the US. I no longer would limit myself to such an identifier, but it served its purpose and I discovered the history of Blacks in Germany at the time. Blacks in Germany under Hitler were not the Nazis, but the victims of Nazis, although they were the other "N" word.
Reminds me of a story about a son of a Jewish friend of my father (an old college mate of his, after whom I was named) who was taunted by some kid who shouted "You're a Jew!", to which he retorted "So are you!" Which gave a good laugh to the grownups.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, Jewish bankers propped up many states starting in the late middle ages, and were hated as part of the royal elites. In the course of the 19th century they lost that station with the advent of more effective taxation and, curiously, as their power receded the hatred increased.
Half Jewish here - I like to say I got all of the guilt and none of the benefits. There is an old quote I am probably bungling here: 'The Jews have had the distinction of producing 2 such luminaries as Jesus and Karl Marx - and the courage to follow neither of them." I don't remember who said it.
Russian Jews were overall pretty prominent in the Bolsheviks - for the rather simple reason they were just about the first major political movement actually willing to give Jews a fair chance.
Nestor Makhno's Ukranian anarchists were also very pro-Jewish, and one of the scat few ideological points of agreement they had with the Bolsheviks was that antisemitism *fucking sucks*. Another was that the counter-revolutionary "Whites" sucked somewhat more than the other did so they were usually willing to keep a truce when White armies were a more pressing problem. (The Bolsheviks eventually cleaned up their most pressing White problems and then naturally destroyed the Makhnoists.)
Meanwhile British liaison officers working with the Whites were getting ulcers worrying about the PR disaster and political fallout should the public back home learn just what kind of frothing antisemites *those* guys were...
The quote is from the American author Philip Roth. He wrote the line in his 1960 short story, ""The Conversion of the Jews"", found in the collection Goodbye, Columbus
But if you Google "Philip Roth quotes," Google AI says Roth never said it.
What we currently call AI is closer to using the internet as a crowdsourcing encyclopedia filled with 20-40% people generated data and 80-60% AI generated content based on the crowdsourced encyclopedia with the % if AI data increasing exponentially. It’s a snake eating its tail or maybe its head. The validity of its data source is degraded day by day with more AI generated content.
While I know where it comes from and see myself as a Brown skinned ally to both my White and Non-White Jewish friends, I see antisemitism growing in the US and abroad.
I mainly live in Germany where 2 members of my virtual political book club are Jewish. The city I live in is pretty supportive of diversity and immigrants but there just is such a small Jewish presence here.
In the US I saw it growing in the school in which I taught. The racism was always there too. Fortunately 2 directors that tolerated it are gone. Still, one of my closest friends in the US, who is Jewish, lesbian and has 2 adopted daughters from Central America, is still feeling the creepiness as the school indulges far right parents and does not protect her enough as they assign these children to her class. They do not protect her from hatred and offensive ideas or complaints. Much needs to be done to protect people.
When we realize the extent of what has been done to Jews historically, you might think that as a group they must have presented a real threat to those in power. The pogroms, Hitler's Final Solution, the antisemitic response to Israel's horrific retaliation for the Hamas massacre—none of it makes rational sense. The only explanation I can imagine is that throughout history, Jews were scapegoated as the cause of whatever unwanted events occurred, and antisemitism took root. Wherever Jews lived, they were always a minority, and as we know, minorities are easy targets. Jew-hatred has a long history fueled by insane conspiracy theories that have been aimed at them for centuries.
Not Jewish but with a Hebrew first name, and a believer in Israel for as long as I've been conscious of such things -- well, almost -- I entirely agree.
Fear of the "other" And contrary to what you think, the less real differences between group the better. Just a little bit different.
Jewish people are perfect for this role.
We are Communists
We are Greedy Wall St capitalists
We control the world (though why we would want to rule this clusterfuck of a planet is never explained)
Killed Jesus (even though Jewish execution was by stoning and not crucifixion as was the ROMAN way) Also never mind the other 20 thousand political rabel rousers on the road to Jerusalem who were also nailed up!
NO matter; bend over backwards to make Jewish people responsible. And since Rome (how ironic) became the seat of Catholic rule then you must absolve (wash their hands!) of the whole blame thing.
Right? I mean such a small percentage of the world’s population with so many contributions to society and culture writ large and yet the target of such vile hatred for centuries. It is truly a supernatural diabolical phenomenon that I can’t get my head around either.
It has to do with finding some group to "blame". When your worldview is patriarchal, you see everything through the lens of competition: Everything is a fight that your men must win. So of course, picking an enemy to blame--especially one with comparatively small numbers and a cultural heritage of "otherness"--becomes your foil. For many, it's Jews. Or brown-skinned people. Indigenous people. Educated people. The group to blame changes depending, but not their need to have someone else to focus their anger and grievance upon.
I understand it perfectly. The answer is right there in your post: it's because they are more successful than other people.
I my native country we have a joke that illustrates how malicious and envious some of my countrymen can get:
A man walks on the beach and finds a magic lamp. Genie pops out and tells the man that he will grant him any wish. But remember, adds genie, I will give to your neighbor double of what you shall receive.
The man thinks for a second and says: "Ok, then I want you to poke my eye out."
Now imagine that neighbor being of different faith and/or culture.
There is never an actual reason behind prejudice, except that people so categorized can be easily lumped into a group that can be the “other” for hate mongers to use to gain power.
Shortly after this came out on LP, I played it for my in-laws. A good time was had by all, but I think my father-in-law's approving remark on the lines of "Isn't it true!" were meant in a politically incorrect sense. In mitigation, I should that a few years before, when the news came out about the murder of people working for voting rights in the South, he was rather shocked, saying "They're citizens, aren't they?" So even he believed in the 14th Amendment so far as he understood it, which puts him way ahead of Trumpolini.
As one who’s known and appreciated a vast number of Jewish friends, teachers, classmates, colleagues, clients, etc. over the decades from childhood till now, I will never understand this either. What is there to hate? I am only inspired by their contributions and resilience.
As for the "I just read a speech" bit, I've seen that sleight of hand before ("Oh, Pat Robertson didn't write that antisemitic book, his ghost writers put that in."). Even if a speechwriter drafts a speech, once a politician reads it it's "their" speech. If you put your name on a ghost-written manuscript, it's your words. And if Roberts read something he was really offended by (something that was, say, anti-fascist, anti-misogynist, anti-obscene wealth) he'd never have gotten to the end of it.
Though, as the Christians say (those who understand their religion), if you repent and admit your wrongness and work to fix things, you can be blessed. If only...
Thanks. I always thought of it as a generic right-wing think tank until it came out with Project 2025. My bad.
As others have pointed out, this is the problem with the "no enemies on the right" approach. Once you decide you'll accept Nazis as a distasteful part of the coalition you inevitably wind up defending Nazis.
Stephen Moore is also a raging misogynist who melted down because he saw a woman referee at a sports event — dammit, why do women have to force their way into his masculine safe space like that?
Fuentes’ antisemitism gets highlighted, but he’s just as bad about racial minorities and women. Conservatives who do not consider themselves antisemites, racists or misogynists need to speak up. Otherwise, we can only conclude that they’re okay with aligning themselves with all that.
Since the most consistent marker of someone supporting Chump is their level of racism, I think we can assume that every one of his voters and supporters is in fact racist. And given how certain attitudes tend to "bundle" with one another, we can almost certainly add misogyny, bigotry against LGBTQ folks and anti-semitism to their expected belief sets.
I have some Trump voters in my family, including women. I explain it to myself by noting that they’ve been in Texas a long time. But individually, they’d be appalled to think of themselves as misogynistic or racist, and I don’t think they are. People voted for Trump for a variety of reasons, and didn’t necessarily buy into all the ugliest parts of the MAGA movement, just as all Dems, including myself, don’t necessarily buy into the notion that a person born male should compete in women’s sports. Would it be fair for a Republican to accuse me of being in favor of letting trans females compete in women’s sports just because I voted for Harris? Bottom line: we shouldn’t condemn people with such broad strokes based on who they voted for.
Would it be fair? No, but in terms of campaign rhetoric, this is exactly what Republicans argued: that support for Harris implied support for (horrors!) civil rights for transgender people. And Republican rhetoric claimed that Democrats sank their political prospects by this support when in fact it was Republicans who saw an appeal to prejudice against trans people as a powerful campaign tactic and promoted it.
If you support racism and misogyny and bigotry, then, yes, it's fair to consider - and condemn - you as a racist, a misogynist and a bigot. And, BTW, trans women should absolutely be able to compete in women's sports. That they shouldn't is a non-issue ginned up by the right to inflame the mouth breathers.
It’s not a nonissue for the female athletes who lose out on spots on teams, medals, and scholarships to people born male who have an undeniable biological advantage. It’s not “made up” by the right. I know of many democratic women who left the party over this very issue.
Very much with Renee on this point, and not with Rena.
75% of the American voters are against trans women participating in women’s sports. That’s exactly why the GOP exploited the issue in 2024. If Rena wants the Dems to die on that hill, that’s exactly what will happen in a general election.
Your point is well taken. I should point out, though, that according to a June 2025 Gallop poll, 41% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans said they believed that transgender atheletes should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender. If I’ve done the math correctly, that corresponds to a correlation of 0.515 between being a Republican and supporting the restriction on sports participation. In contrast, the authors of <em>Authoritarian Nightmare</em> found a correlation of 0.812 between prejudice and approval of Trump.
Of course, 0.812 is not a perfect correlation, and doesn’t mean that every Trump supporter is prejudiced, but it’s a strong correlation. The same survey included three questions about economic well-being; they all had correlations of less than 0.5 with support for Trump. Agreement that “If Donald Trump is defeated in November 2020, he should continue to be president if he declares the election was fixed and crooked,” had a correlation of 0.466.
Correlation with the RWA scale (which measures the tendency to follow authoritarian leaders) was 0.737, which is unsurprising. Disagreement with the factual assertion that “President Trump stopped the payment of funds for military aid to Ukraine, then called President Zelensky and asked for a favor in order to release those funds” produced a correlation of 0.764, and many Trump supporters do seem eager to embrace “alternate facts.” But prejudice is the closest think to a defining characteristic that Trump supporters have unless you go with obvious things like identifying as a Republican (correlation 0.859) or expects to vote for Trump in the next election (correlation 0.927).
Do you believe Zuckerberg & Bezos are racist? I've always said people who vote republican are either senile, shysters, or simple. The shysters are exploiting the other two for their gain.
These wholesale dismissals of Trump voters is mistaken. We’re taking about half of the US electorate. I have well-informed friends who voted for Trump for two main reasons: protection of their second amendment rights and securing the southern border. Others voted for Trump because they (mistakenly, imho) viewed him as a better steward of the economy. If you assume these friends of mine are racist, anti-woman, and antisemitic - or senile or simple or shysters - you’d be wrong. We need to win over some of that Trump-voting electorate in order to win next time, and this wholesale disparagement of half the American electorate is not fair, and it’s also self-defeating.
Note I stated republican and not Trump. I grew up in a county that 80% vote republican, including most of my family. And, I used to live in Texas, as well, about a quarter of a century ago. It seemed to me, being from a mid-western state, that Texans back then were perfectly happy with exploitable illegal labor. It was not a concern during Bush's reign. Maybe your friend concerned about the border is a more recent arrival? Maybe I should replace shyster with self-interest. However, I do believe the operatives are shysters who distract less affluent voters with non-economic issues because republican economic policies only benefit those with successful businesses or who are somewhat affluent to wealthy (this administration may prove even that not to be true except for the very wealthy who can buy politicians). "Half of the American electorate" continually vote republican, even when 40% of them do not benefit from it economically.
There's extensive research on this. It takes time and energy to pay attention and most people would rather live their lives than pay attention to this stuff. Those of us who regularly follow the news are a shrinking minority of the population, let alone news on the level of detail to be aware of the Heritage Foundation. Similarly, people generally don't vote on policy because people generally are not aware of policy beyond very basic top headline level items.
Richard, and yet “this stuff” affects some of the most important aspects of our lives. Our financial well being, the health of our society, and religious beliefs. And then we go to the polls unprepared to vote in our own best interest.
“people generally are not aware of policy beyond very basic top headline level items.”
And in many cases that’s being charitable. I’ve met more people over the years who voted based on the candidate’s perceived personality than on any policy.
Since the days of Rush Limbaugh on talk radio, ad execs, propaganda pushers and others with agendas have known that rage makes money. As we've seen it's also and easy path for nation states to influence the US political realm.
According to conservatives, anything less than full-throated screaming support for Israel is antisemitism. Calling for Jews to be killed and being a Hitler fan? Not antisemitism! Good thing Heritage has an antisemitism task force!
And I remember when Heritage was actually posting a bounty for any authenticated story about a family having to sell their farm or small business to pay the Estate Tax. They never paid that bounty because nobody ever came forward with a credible story. But Heritage KNEW that story was out there somewhere! So it kept on pushing it. As Donald Rumsfeld would later say on a completely different matter (that also turned out to be pure fabrication), "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
“Calling for Jews to be killed and being a Hitler fan? Not antisemitism!”
And the more subtle disregard for Jewish lives embodied in the belief Israel is just a stepping stone to “The Rapture”, when all Jews (along with everyone else who isn’t a particular brand of Christian) will die horrible deaths.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, I lived and worked in DC. I owned a small townhouse near the corner of A Street and 3rd Street, SE, directly across the street from St Mark's Episcopal Church.
Every day, I walked 3rd St SE, right past a walk-down office (that is, an office below street grade), home to both the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. They were co-located and had a total employment of, at most, 5-6 people. If anyone from the staff was outside, I'd wave and say "Hello." Eventually, familiarity, frequency and a bit of friendliness led to chatting with anyone standing outside.
That's when I discovered that both institutions were funded by "unknown rich persons" to develop "talking points and research papers" to justify tax cuts and deregulation positions for the Republican Party. [Yes, those are quotes by staff.]
One time after being told a staffer was "waiting to hear what position he was to take on a pending policy paper he was supposed to draft," I said,
"So, you do 'research' to gin up something to justify a position? No real analytical research?"
"I research various sources looking for numbers and statements that justify the position paper's main point," he replied.
"Isn't that a bit like putting the cart before the horse; and deceptive? You're looking for numbers and 'facts' to justify a position. That's not analysis."
"Yeah, I know -- but it's a job."
I'll never forget the conversation, because I was a analyst for a consulting firm (and later, a staff analyst for Reagan's NSC). That one conversation told me everything I needed to know about both entities.
After Reagan got elected, both organizations got bigger, better funded and moved out to bigger buildings.
IMHO, when they did the neighborhood's quality improved considerably.
"Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.”
In other words, he shouldn't be fired for bigotry. He should be fired for incompetence. What kind of leader simply accepts and amplifies whatever he's handed without fact checking?
Um, Trump? Who claims he didn’t know the cryptocurrency billionaire felon who had financial deals enriching Trump’s own family, whom he recently pardoned?
It’s straw manning and the flat out blatant lies like this that only further propagate movements like the groypers. Tucker and Fuentes clearly dislike Israel almost in part and parcel because of Netanyahu and his genocidal acts.
I don't think so. You can be anti-Israeli policy and not antisemitic. At least I think so. I separate the two. I'd be happy to never have my tax dollars go to Israel again. I think they'd have been better off without us because they would have had to come up with a better solution with the Palestinians without our money. There might actually have been a two-state solution. They haven't been in any danger of being annihilated for a long time. We gave them nuclear technology. They've got the bomb.
I agree but my point was more so that saying things like “they’re probably still pro Netanyahu” just shows ignorance their views. Falsly ascribing something to others is not very productive. In fact, tucker released an hour plus video addressing almost entirely Netanyahu and his government and how they were destroying Israel!
100% with you on not sending anymore tax money and especially military aid to Israel.
P.S. they stole our uranium and nuclear technology (which in part they worked with the French to acquire), we didn’t give it to them!
The Heritage Foundation is a seditionist organization and should be closely monitored as such. If the title of Project 2025 was changed to "Putin's Plan to Destroy US Democracy" not one word would have to be changed.
I was an intern at the Heritage foundation in the early 1980s. Even back then it was a fraud. I was assigned to write an important foreign policy “research paper“ at the age of 18. It was published under the “scholar’s“ name. My only sources were time and Newsweek articles and my own imagination. And yes, I have spent a lifetime repenting although I think I’m now out of purgatory.
Glad you realized it Leonor. While the Heritage Foundation existed since 1973 as part of the wave of institutions designed to give Neoliberal economics its validity according to George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson in "Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism" it was Reagan that gave it real life. Back then, I could not believe that people would vote a mediocre actor into the role of President, but then I was insulated from what America was like across the land, being limited to my section of it, and some travels, but mostly going abroad to see family when I had time to go anywhere. I grew up thinking that main stream ideas were from the old days and people did not think like that any more. I am still surprised, since I mostly live abroad that the liberal Americans I know, mostly come from families where they have relatives who support Trump, or at least vote Republican and have conservative Christian ideas. I have no Trump supporting family members.
Katherine Stewart documents the well developed network of right wing organizations and donors that support Christian Nationalism, a horribly sexist, racist system of beliefs, in her book, "Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy." We should beware. Under Trump they are getting bolder and bolder with their greed and hatred of people, which he sanctions.
Thanks for posting about Katherine Stewart’s book. Your description of “Christian” nationalism is accurate but I would add that are also the antithesis of Christian.
Most religion is used as a wrapper to get power over people and to excuse that agenda.
Ken Wilbur back in the '80's adroitly contrasted "Churchianity" with "Christianity." The former, of course being a vehicle for the accumulation of money and power, and the denigration of anyone not deemed sufficiently pure.
On a side note, has anyone noticed that Karoline Leavitt no longer wears her Cross necklace when discussing anything Epstein?
She's just putting in the time to get her own show on FOX in '28.
Meanwhile, South Park is supposedly prepping an episode that will prominently feature her.
Katheryn Stewart's earlier book 'The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism' is also excellent.
True Theodora. Not as most people I know understand it. I call it a system of beliefs for that reason.
Thanks for the recommendation
Yes Linda, they hide behind the cloth of God to do their criminal and racist bidding, and shower the country with their hatred. They are no christians, they are wicked diabolical.
Jo. We do need to call it out. Let us not allow anyone to pretend these people are Christians, or believe in anything worth believing in.
Although we shouldn’t forget that the Church has a long history of antisemitism beginning with accusations of deicide, continuing with the blood libel and assorted other conspiracy theories which fueled centuries of exclusion, inquisitions, pogroms and ultimately Hitler.
The Heritage Foundation’s name , with its lofty pretensions, in fact reflects a long and unpleasant heritage. Who knows if that was the intention behind the name or yet another twisted irony.
Good article on that here if you have a subscription to The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/
It is indeed, a good article & I just saved it, Thanks.
— And here’s the rub: “But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and 🔹manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, 🔻 “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and 🔻Fox News had them every single night.”
And so I refer to them as “Gullibles”, not ‘Deplorables’. They are only too-willing suckers for the ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ because those are the racist messages they actually wanted to hear.
* One christian denomination that didn’t get swept up in this fervour was the JWs — as they refuse all political interaction other than to obey the laws of the land except where they interfere with the scriptures.
“Jesus answered: “My Kingdom is 🔹no part of this world. If my Kingdom were part of this world, my attendants would have fought that I should not be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my Kingdom is not from this source.” John 18:36
… not being grounded in bible teachings they were susceptible :
“Look out that no one takes you captive by means of the philosophy and 🔹empty deception according to human tradition, according to the elementary things of the world and not according to Christ.” Ephesians 1:19-21
It’s discouraging. One common denominator in these MAGA types is right wing media.
Yes, There have long been shysters at the ready to take advantage of gullible people to suit their own ends.
I suspect that the reason why God is seeming to take so long to ‘straighten things out’ is that we need to be hurt & sick enough from doing things ‘our way’ that we see no alternative but to turn to Him. Time will tell.
I don't think the JWs are usually considered Christian. Christians are trinitarian (God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit). that doesn't seem to be a JW teaching. This is not an objection to your statement relative to their actions or inactions politically.
The belief in Christ, and his being sent by his Father, are the essentials for being considered a Christian. The Holy Spirit is God’s active force, unseen.
The ‘trinity’ is never mentioned in the bible, and came *after the writing of the Bible by God’s authorized writers.
There are different opinions about the trinity, and JWs are not the only ones to not believe in this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitarianism_in_the_Church_Fathers
Indeed. Tough times ahead for a good portion of the earth.
— Personally, I am (currently) ‘snug as a bug in a rug’, retired & living in the country, but it pains me to see so many innocents suffering, and the nutbar in the oval office reigning supremely ignorant & harsh.
2 Timothy 3:1-5 — “But know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, 3 having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, 4 betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with pride, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, 5 having an appearance of godliness but proving false to its power; and from these turn away.” Does this sound like ‘today’ or what?
‘Last days’ of the current ‘system of things’ = mankind’s self-governing.
the bible prophesies that will come to an end — we’ve had CENTURIES to get it right … and look where we are now … the world’s slimiest goofball ruling the world. The scriptural idea is therefore that God will resume ruling the earth, through Jesus & his 144,000 chosen ones.
Bring it on, we’re all getting sick & tired of this.
I had always thought that Heritage was founded as a direct result of the Powell Memo.
Perhaps. It would fit time wise. However, there is more behind it, in that the oligarchs had been funding these foundations that spread fallacious research about how the economy does better when the rich are allowed to keep more capital and pay less in taxes. They legitimate lies. A lot of money is spent on them that could go to solving some of our social problems.
It’s Quack Economics. It only breaks the system.
MAGA: Morons Are Governing America.
MAGA: Monsters Are Governing America
I’m pretty sure you’re spot on with that thought.
Years ago I read Jesus and John Wayne about Christian Nationalism. I read somewhere that the only thing all of the right wing militias have in common is the subjugation of women.
In addition to being racist and antisemitic, they’re misogynists.
It's the klan without the hoods.
When I moved from Ohio to Minnesota I realized how bigoted many of my family members were/are. My lifelong antipathy toward Thanksgiving began in Ohio, where an uncle took pleasure every year in using every racial and ethnic epithet at the Thanksgiving dinner table. I argued, unsuccessfully and miserably, while the rest of the family remained silent. Their silence spoke loudly: they did not disagree. I know that racism, homophobia, misogyny must live on in Minnesota, but the words and deeds are so much different that I never considered moving back to Ohio. 55 years later I still feel fortunate that at 18 I made the right choice.
Good for you Marge! There are better ways of spending ones time than in the company of miserable people who make you miserable.
Minnesota nice wasn't as apparent as I hoped when I lived there in 2015. I'm hoping that, since George Floyd, things have improved.
I’m glad you’re here!
Prez Hollywierd did so much to advance RethugliKKKan policy and practices in addition to legitimizing propaganda . . . .
Katherine Stewart is one of the finest resources of insight on the actual documented actitivities and the ideology that comprises Christian Nationalism. And I too giver her books my highest recco…
I read the book mentioned, and it's a hard read in a way. Amazes me that more people don't see through that Christian Nationalist BS.
MojoMan, I have only read one, but would like to read more. I agree based on that one book.
I didn't think much of Reagan when he was governor of California. They called Jerry Brown Governor Moonbeam, but he was actually a good governor - for 4 terms. His first 2 terms were before term limits became the law. That meant he could have 2 more, several years later.
I have put the book on hold at my library when the current reader finishes, I was pleased to find it there, and checked out.
So do I understand correctly that the Heritage foundation started out as a neoliberal (theoretical) think tank, but evolved into a conservative organization under Reagan? And then further evolved in the present time to a white nationalist tool for disseminating their propaganda?
I think it has remained a neoliberal evil "think" tank and added on these other pieces, but it is currently a Christian Nationalist organization, funded by super wealthy people.
This whole nationalist Zionist Christian movement is extremely dangerous and I have noticed a lot of behaviors from Christians that I never thought I would see. I pray that the heritage foundation will lose some of its power but the President is embracing it and pushing project 2025 through faster than I ever anticipated. Does anyone know if they are losing some of their steam? At 63, I don’t know how much more I can take. Sorry to be dramatic but I find DJT to be terrifying. I don’t admit it on my own personal page but it’s true.
Such a farce! Imagine if the President of ESPN said:
“I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of sports. I consume a lot of news.”
Oh, don't be so hard on the clown. After all, Roberts was just exercising one the Right's great superpowers...a total lack of shame.
To have shame, one needs empathy; for that one needs a soul.
Don't worry, Mr. McKie. My post's opening sentence was meant as sarcasm. Also, Trump's felony conviction count is actually 34. I don't want to short change the guy, since he's worked so hard to get those convictions.
Not only out-of-the-blue weird, but also probably yet another lie. I doubt he could pontificate with any genuine insight about sports, either. That's a topic that "real people" really do know a lot about.
Ouranos, I respectively disagree only in that every community needs a sewer system. It delivers away the excrement that can poison the commons. What Heritage more closely resembles is pollution dumping into the water system. People think it’s “Okay to drink the water” because it “appears” clean. But it’s not. And it makes them sick.
It's a pig farm disposing its waste directly into media streams.
Yes!
Perfect descriptions!
Trump’s contribution has mainly been to take the stuff in the septic tank, attach a hose to it, and spray the entire country—nay, world—with Heritage-branded liquid manure.
Maybe because if you fill it with enough sewage the pressure builds and it all comes flying back out?
Heritage Foundation motto: The solution to our putrid pollution is dilution.
But the donors to the Heritage Foundation though- 1972- Tim Mellon, Joseph Coors, Walton family, Koch- I mean - geez. - think this had been marinating ever since Brown V Board/ 1955- so they poured big dollars into the formation of The Heritage Foundation in 1972/1973–(from Wikipedia-The foundation was established on February 16, 1973, during the Nixon administration by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors initially. Growing out of the new business activist movement inspired by the Powell Memorandum [this refers to Justice Powell] Weyrich and Feulner sought to create a conservative version of the Brookings Institution that advanced conservative policies.)
Timothy Mellon, a billionaire and prominent political donor, has been identified as the donor who gave a reported $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay military personnel during a government shutdown.
Yep. It’s not a big secret; it’s all about money. No regulations, no taxes, and no ethics or morals. Trump has liberated them to enjoy lies, greed, and racism so they can add to their millions without any concern about the damage they do. They are rich. They can do what they want, and that includes sex with 14- year- olds.
Yup, they're all on the same team. So, no matter how extreme, corrupt or evil the right can get, they all believe the true enemy is the strawman liberal built up in their heads, who is far worse than the worst-of-the-worst on the right. So, here we are, with billionaire oligarchs running the show who would rather destroy civilization itself than be fairly taxed, regulated, or held accountable for their actions. Trumpism is the end game of humanity.
Even though most of the oligarchs may virtually zero in taxes already. I suspect the death of oversight and regulations is the ultimate carrot. They would make more from the ability to cheat and pollute than any piddling tax cuts.
Absolutely. And Trump is doing everything he can in that direction.
And what most people don't understand is that, just because "research" comes out of what sounds like a legitimate organization, doesn't mean it's valid. Trust, but verify, comes to mind. A peer reviewed study from a school like Stanford, UPenn, NYU, etc can be trusted as valid far more than one from Heritage, whose research is concocted to support its' goals, not to garner truths. It's like KKKaroline Leavitt saying, with a straight face, that DoorDash is a trusted source for employment and pricing data.
Yeah, that's why they landed the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which gave us dumb denials of the severity of Covid-19, and Trump's incompetent adviser.
The evolution of these neoliberal, far right foundations are well documented in Monbiot and Hutchinson's "Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism" and in Katherine Stewart's "Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy." In fact, Stewart makes the point that the far right machine is so well organized and networked and funded that it does not matter who they back, they back who will bring about the policy issues they want, and the center and left are not that well organized. Greed seems to be a powerful driver.
Their cunning plan failed with Trump. He's their Frankenstein monster. The monster has broken out of the lab, and is now running amok destroying the "neo-liberal" system of rapacious capitalism that has made them all so rich.
Greed is a very powerful motivator.
It's interesting. The little magas realized that the Republicans were in it for the money. The GOP paid lip service to the cultural things the magas cared about, (Driven through exposure to FOX and talk radio), but they didn't follow through. The GOP brought them the Iraq War, based on lies and the 2008 Great Repression.
Donald Trump came in, the biggest liar of all, and told them what they wanted to hear. The little magas believe him because he delivered RvW and a conservative Supreme Court. He loudly talks the talk.
The little magas are as ignorant as ever. It takes a long time for them to realize they're being screwed because the places they get their news from tells lies. However, Trump is so loud and obvious it may take less time for it to sink in.
I totally agree, Linda!
Please don't overlook the libertarians at George Mason University. And look up the 1980 Libertarian Party Platform, presumably written by the late David Koch who was Veep on the ticket. I feel that Reagan was a proxy for the Libertarians and that Speaker Gingrich didn't even try to hide his libertarianism. In the Reagan years libertarian thinkers stopped the right-wing from working with liberals in Congress. And here we are.
Thanks Joanna, excellent point on Libertarians.
1980
Libertarian
Party Policy
Platform
PEACE.
PROSPERITY.
FREEDOM.
THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY.
TO BE ABOLISHED:
• Department Of Energy (DOE)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• Food & Drug Administration (FDA)
• Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OHSA)
• Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
• Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI)
• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Federal Reserve
• Social Security
• Welfare
• Public Schools
• Taxation
The late David Koch wrote it prior to 1980, not me.
I think the genesis of this crap goes back at least to the Rosevelt's, starting with Teddy, who they won against after WW I, and then again when FDR had to save the country during the depression. I don't think the "business plot" gets nearly enough press now. It was a coup plot, but no one was successfully prosecuted for it.
Think you are right on this! Heard something similar. Found it—-The individual who threatened to act as President in a conspiracy to seize control of the US government by eliminating tax obligations in the 1930s was
General Smedley Butler. He reported that a group of wealthy businessmen, known as "oligarchs," had asked him to lead a military coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, this plot, known as the "Business Plot," was exposed before it could be implemented.
The plot: In the 1930s, a group of wealthy and powerful businessmen, frustrated with Roosevelt's policies, allegedly approached General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against him.
It was founded to be fraudulent. That was its whole mission.
Great story. Thanks. You’re forgiven. The “scholar” who put his (surely) name on your work, maybe not.
Typo/autocorrect error corrected.
Liberal Currents, on Substack, just published this morning much of what is discussed here, and with information about the Heritage Foundations tie-in with the KKK in WV in the '70s over book-banning.
Make NO mistake about it, Heritage is all in with the extreme Right, and is positioning itself as midwifing the coalition of pro-Nazi groypers and the radicalized GOP. read it here:
The Heritage Foundation, Groypers, and the Narcissism of Small Differences
Fuentes is the fly born of Heritage’s maggot.
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-heritage-foundation-groypers-and-the-narcissism-of-small-differences/
Very different culture... a friend of mine wrote a paper and saw his academic advisor publish it under his own name, and he burned the advisor's car in retaliation. This was in Italy in the early 2000s.
That still wouldn't fly in the U.S. of A. as a legitimate response, but I can certainly understand the impulse.
all of the think tanks have always been frauds, masking their donors biases with a cheesy facade of "scholarship" or expertise and or analysis. And no one wants to give up this huge money trough.
A number on those “normal” institutionalist conservatives at places like Heritage Foundation have been purged. When I was in graduate school in the late eighties and early nineties I would occasionally use them as a reference for term papers on relatively uncontroversial issues like enterprise zones. They were obviously to the right politically but kind of a go to that was a bit to the right of the American Enterprise Institute. Now they’ve gone over to the John Bircher neo fascist end of the spectrum.
It's still difficult to deal with the fact that the John Birch Society has taken over American politics.
These fucks basically slowly took over the country by lying relentlessly about everything for 40 years. Dumb people will believe anything if you say it often enough. And they did all of this simply so billionaires would not have to pay taxes and they could make white supremacy in America great again. All of it culminating in successfully tricking enough of the population to vote for a pedophile narcissist hell bent on destroying the country. What a shit legacy.
A lot of us go through a similar experience. I think I voted for Brian Mulroney once.
Leonor,
When you were there, were the offices still located on 3rd St SE? Or, had you moved by then?
I never have understood antisemitism. I have been blessed to know many Jewish folks. What do you say about a group that has contributed so much to humanity in the arts, science, and charity? I say Thank You!
It has its origins in mediaeval Christianity (the 'Jews killed Jesus' trope) but in the 19th century it evolved into a resentment of Jewish success in higher education and business. Hollywood, for example, was largely founded by several prominent Hungarian Jewish immigrants, which could be misrepresentated into the idea that Jews 'control' Hollywood.
The only thing better than demonizing a poor minority (eg refugees) is demonizing a wealthy minority whose assets you can then expropriate...
That reminds me of Hitler in Vienna when he tried unsuccessfully to be admitted to the Academy of Arts & to survive he got a job as a facade’s painter in building. He used to walk along the Ring (road in center Vienna where the rich Jews were allowed to build their houses and mansions) & there developed deep seated resentment & envy. We know what he did after WWW I Antisemitism was the best way to distract German people from his grab of power. Sounds familiar ?
Interestingly both Hitler and Stalin were living in Vienna in 1913 a few streets apart, although of course they didn't know each other. Stalin himself persecuted Jews after ww2.
Hitler wanted to be an artist and Stalin wrote poetry and studied to be a priest.. How did they become monsters?
Intolerance is the cornerstone of religions.
Hitler also had ambitions to become a priest in his early days.
I’d bet money they both shared the same LOW -T syndrome. 🤭
Stalin's antisemitism came and went in fits and spurts over the decades. Trying to discern how much of it was mere opportunism playing on longstanding Russian prejudices and how much genuine antipathy (possibly connected to his longtime nemesis Trotsky being Jewish) is difficult because he was a deeply private and paranoid man who never shared his inner thoughts. (He had similar on-off antipathy towards Poles, perhaps a legacy of his experiences in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21.) Not so Hitler, who in the words of one historian "spoke eagerly and often, sometimes so much he exposed his own lies."
Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva later commented to the effect that "father did not like Jews very much; but then he did not like most people."
True; but the first place I saw a reference to 'rootless cosmopolitans' was an essay by an English writer in the 1940s, who was definitely no Nazi.
Hitler opportunistically fanned existing embers of jealousy and resentment in the German peoples at a time they wanted a scapegoat for their economic woes.
I mean, sure. And Stalin was not at all shy about doing the same with similarly deep-seated Russian prejudices when it suited him, either.
But Hitler by all accounts truly, genuinely believed in what he was selling too.
Definiitely sounds familiar but it seems like some people have forgotten...
Hilter funded his war using Jewish assets.
...Germany's Jews *really* weren't even remotely that rich, whatever Nazi propaganda liked to claim. But the Nazis certainly weren't at all shy about pillaging them or anyone else for that matter. (Hitler's patently unsustainable economic policies throughout the Thirties were partly predicated on the assumption he'd soon enough be holding his creditors at gunpoint.)
Jews were very much assimilated in German society.
Nobody claimed otherwise, your point?
Hitler absolutely financed his war machine through massive theft of Jewish assets—whether from wealthy industrialists, middle-class shopkeepers, or working-class families. The scale was staggering.
And a footnote in the scale of the actual state finances. My whole point here is that Hitler didn't finance his bullshit "by" or "with" it - in the grand scheme of things it was a drop in the ocean.
The Nazi economy, already during peacetime, basically lived hand to mouth and scraped the bottom of *every* barrel with progressively worsening desperation to stay afloat. Pillaging Jews was merely one aspect of that as well as a logical part of their repression (and, later, destruction).
Just for one example, did you know they basically stole ALL the trains from the occupied territories? This kinda gutted the economic productivity of those gains but they had little alternative because pivoting the heavy industry well-nigh entirely to armaments production since the early Thirties had left the German rolling stock in neglected shambles - the rail network almost collapsed from the military redeployments made during the Sudeten Crisis for ex.
Kristin, I’d bet money they both shared the same LOW -T syndrome. 🫢😬
Much older than that, actually. It pretty much goes all the way back to the 1st and 2nd centuries CE and the spate of major Jewish revolts that seriously soured the Romans on the lot. The early Church basically just jumped onto that bandwagon to improve its poor standing and image in the society of the day.
Easy enough to do since with its universalist message it had long since outgrown its de facto origins as fringe Jewish sect.
Much of the rest stemmed from Christianity's claim to a monopoly on divine truth (in part an outgrowth of the long and often hard struggle to establish itself against older pagan institutions) and the awkward socioeconomic niches Jews were forced into that made them easy and convenient scapegoats for all and sundry.
You’re right of course, plus the fact that the Middle Ages’ interdiction of perceiving interests on loans for Christians made the Jewish community where it was not forbidden the object of detestation from the people (it didn’t however prevent the rise of Catholic banking dynasties like the Medici in Florence or later the Fugger in Germany). Pogroms & restrictions against Jewish communities institutionalized a distrust against them that was diminished in the integration policies in Austria and the German states during the 19th century. The disaster of WWW I revived the pretext to channel renewed hatred towards Jews. Hitler jumped on the occasion.
The amount of :care: European secular princes had to spare for Papal proclamations was always pretty low, especially when it conflicted with their immediate interests. Case in point the doomed attempt to ban the use of the crossbow (inspired by the newly introduced much more powerful horn-stave design) against fellow Christians in whenwasitnow, the 1100s?
Yeah it pretty much became the signature weapon of Italian city-state armies...
Anyway after a lot of truly tortuous theological hair-splitting and heavy squinting at the Bible the Church eventually settled on whatwasitnow, 3.5% as the "fair price" of interest it was still just about acceptable to charge. Economic historians opine this low "soft cap" on interest rates was actually very significant for the later takeoff of preindustrial European economy... but I digress.
Yeah, for a constellation of reasons Jews tended to work a lot with money in one capacity or another, whether as moneylenders, tax collectors, tax farmers or suchlike. Which while quite lucrative occupations were also *extremely* unpopular among the common people for some rather good reasons regardless of who worked them - since they basically amounted to being the face of economic exploitation - which both compounded the other antipathies towards the religious minority and gave a lot of people entirely practical economic reasons for hostility.
Historians have noted that in an awful many recorded outbreaks of Medieval anti-Semitic violence a rather high priority seems to have been destroying the records of Jewish moneylenders...
OTOH, canny rulers often liked having Jews around if only because it was easy to squeeze them for hard cash (a rare resource in Medieval economy) to cover various extraordinary expenses. Richard I ("the Lionheart") for example partly funded the preparations for his participation in the Third Crusade with such de facto protection money extracted from the kingdom's Jewish communities.
This was also partly why during the Black Death (mid 1300s) many princes were willing to go to great lengths to try and protect their Jewish subjects from lynch mobs, with varying degrees of success.
“The early Church basically just jumped onto that bandwagon to improve its poor standing and image in the society of the day.”
Also, when Constantine embraced Christianity he needed to deflect potential criticism of the Roman government for its role in the execution of Jesus. So blaming colonized Jews was better politically than admitting that Pontius Pilate, acting as the Roman government colonial governor, was responsible. Admitting the Roman government was responsible probably would have hastened the demise of the Roman government. We still see this blame game among politicians today as they claim immigrants, POC, religious minorities etc are the reason for their own failures.
I mean tbf by basically all accounts Pilate would rather not have touched with the proverbial 10' pole what was from his perspective an incomprehensible Jewish sectarian squabble but needed to address the vehement complaints of the Jewish priestly class. (Which is obviously rather easy to twist into the "Jews killed Jesus" trope if one is so inclined.) Heck, Luke claims Pilate initially hot-potatoed the case back and forth with Herod Antipas, the client king of Galilee and Perea, on account of Jesus hailing from and having been most active in the territory the latter governed. Yes this was the same Herod Antipas who executed John the Baptist in the late 20s CE. Apparently he didn't want to deal with the mess either.
By Constantine's time Christianity had long since divested the awkward baggage of its Jewish origin and plenty ready and willing to shed its previous opposition to the Imperial government anyway, while prevailing opinions on Jews - who lest we forget were in fundamental theological conflict with both Old Skool pagan polytheism *and* rapidly spreading Christian monotheism - hadn't exactly improved any. The mono/poly friction had been a major source of trouble and tensions already way back when the Hellenistic Successors ruled Judea; polytheists as a rule don't mind others' gods but they tolerate blasphemy against their own (which monotheism basically commits by default) as poorly as anyone else.
Christianity's long history of anti-semetism is odd when you consider jesus was a jew. In the 19th century a new type of anti-semetism arose, which sometimes derided Christianity as a 'Jewish cult' unsuitable for aryans. Some even tried to absurdly claim jesus himself was an aryan, others embraced neopaganism. The nazis, whilst generally tolerant of Christianity, attempted to form a national reich church ostensibly devoid of any Jewish elements.
As I understand it the overall theological argument is that the ethnic background of the Son is simply a cosmetic detail. And given that Pilate (who by p much all accounts would rather not have had anything to do with such sectarian squabbles) had de facto had Him executed due to persistent complaints from the Jewish priestly class it's not hard to see how that could be easily spun into the tired old "teh j00s killed Jebus" cudgel were one so inclined.
Anyway, the later 19th-century "scientific racism" and the particularly German brand of racialised antisemitism (substantially embraced in the Anglophone world in no small part due to then-prevailing Germanophilia) are convoluted topics in their own right. Suffice to say the latter was heavily influenced by the particularly ferocious strain of anti-Semitism common across the entire "serfdom zone" east of the Elbe (what historians duly term "East Elbia"), stemming from the particular socioeconomic niches (moneylenders, tax farmers etc.; professions pretty universally loathed by the general populstion) Jews often occupied in the area. As they thus served as the middlemen of elite exploitation the common people directly interacted with, well, you can see how that rather compounded the other antipathies.
The missing piece is that Jews were denied owning land. They turned to banking and associated work because they couldn't invest in land. Most Jews were not rich but made livings as store owners, craftsmen, scholars, etc. Not being accepted into the Christian communities, they do what all marginalized communities do, turn inward. Human nature is to look down on and even despise the outsiders. the Jewish story is the story of immigrants from all parts of the world. It is unfolding before our very eyes and most of us don't know how to stop it. Seems only by destroying the environment will we be able to stop the cycle.
In the 30s-40s there was an Anglican churchman who wrote in detail about the Jewish origins of Christianity, suggesting that the church should adopt more Judaic practices, and attracting a good deal of agreement and opposition. Now pretty much forgotten.
My understanding is that in the early days, the Christians and the Jews were engaged in bitter combat over which sect would prevail on a nationwide scale.
It wasn't a "bandwagon"; it was war.
Woulda gone pretty poorly for the early Christians that one, given they were a small sect mainly popular among the have-nots of the society (initially just in Judea).
Judaism is kinda exclusive by default - to simplify rather heavily, you're either part of the Chosen People or lol fuck you for eternity. Jesus ditched that and embraced an universalist agenda - anyone can readily join and be saved. Way moreveasily marketable to wider audiences that, obviously. No surprise then that the Apostles were soon spreading the word (and getting into trouble with the authorities) far afield from Judea. Paul for ex was famously executed in Rome sometime in the late 60s CE p much as part of Nero's crackdown on Christians. And the Galatians he wrote his famous and influential letter to (sometime in the 40s to 50s) were descendants of Danubian Celts who had migrated to central Anatolia (roughly the environs of Ankara today) in the early 3rd century BCE - a splinter of a larger Central European Celtic invasion of Hellenistic Macedon and Greece - and lent their name to the later Roman province...
It's definitely a third rail topic, but since you raised it... A big part of anti-Semitism relates to centuries of people misconstruing what it means or doesn't mean to be God's Chosen People. Those prone to bigotry are not known for being enlightened about much of anything, and such people have definitely taken off in a twisted direction on that concept, again and again.
Well good luck on *not* getting, say, the Romans or Macedonians or random Medievals annoyed at what to all appearances looked like what we might term "supremacist bragadaggio"...
Discourse on such matters wasn't exactly sophisticated in the olden days. Or, for that matter, in the Old Testament much of which can be unkindly characterised as rather crude tribal one-upmanship.
The vast majority of scholars believe Jesus did exist as a historical figure. The jesus myth theory as being banded about since the late 18th century (when people were freeer to start saying controversial things) but has never been accepted by most experts. Bart Ernhem has done some good lectures on this if your interested.
A couple of things. The ghetto arose out of the early practice of isolation of lepers.
Jews were the financial advisors and book keepers for French monarchs. Their influence threatened the monks who feared displacement, and so the monks started the stories of Jews making matzo using children's blood and practicing witchcraft. The first ghetto was actually created to protect the Jews.
Source: R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Blackwell, 1987.
.
Christian countries in Europe also limited the professions and trades that Jewish people could go into. Often they couldn't own land or belong to trade guilds. They often excelled at the professions they *were* allowed into, including finance, but it's worth remembering that the late 19th and early 20th century pogroms in eastern Europe and Russia usually targeted vulnerable rural and village people, not those in the cities.
But yeah, the trades Jews were allowed to pursue were for the most part sharply curtailed and for practical reasons - namely they might need to grab their things and leave *very* abruptly, whether due to a lynch mob or a realm-wide expulsion decree - gravitated heavily towards accumulating "immaterial capital" they could carry in their heads if need be.
Working with money in some capacity was one such field, and particularly attractive as the Christian taboo on usury limited competition. Also potentially highly lucrative.
The *downside* was that the barely-numerate majority basically saw things like "compound interest" as foul black magic - see also religious antipathy above - and nobody anywhere ever liked loan sharks, tax farmers etc. Also the dominant majority having a pragmatic economic incentive to burn down your house and your ledgers in it was obviously a wee bit unsafe.
Easier to get a lynch mob going in the barely-literate backwaters where police presence was thin at best. Not that the Russian authorities were exactly predisposed to protect *Jews* ofc, but they were an awful lot less tolerant in general of rioting in the cities where such disorder discomfited and endangered people and property they actually gave a shit about. (Also they probably didn't want the already-restless urban proletariats to get any more funny ideas about, shall we say, "direct action"...)
There is a great exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles exploring the founding by Jewish immigrants of the studio system for motion pictures, which became Hollywood. Interestingly enough, those founders started in NYC when filmmaking was so novel that there were fewer restrictions for Jews (Samuel Goldwyn was a very successful glove salesman who turned to filmmaking when he realized his ethnicity limited advancement in the glove business). For more on the exhibition, go to - https://www.academymuseum.org/en/exhibitions/hollywoodland
Yes, it moved to California for better lighting. Or so I’ve heard.
This was before bright electric lighting.
It also moved because Thomas Edison had the patent on movie cameras and was extremely litigious, arguing that his patent covered the content of the films as well as the equipment and the theaters. Moving to California put the filmmakers out of Edison’s reach.
Yep.
Less rain (this weekend is an exception). Snow is very unusual for Los Angeles. Neither the Dodgers nor filming are likely to be rained out.
That would help too.
Medieval? I grew up in an Italian neighborhood where kids went to parochial school. They'd come back from school, and being the only Jew on our small street, I was called a Christ killer. Can you imagine being an 8-year-old kid and being called a Christ killer? So not so medieval. Back in the Medieval 50s.
I suggested it originated in the mediaeval period not that it stopped there.
I feel bad that happened to you. I was 8 when a Baptist child in my class told me I was going to hell because I was Catholic, and Catholics were not Christians. I was very upset.
My daughter was about 8 when she was called a racial epithet aimed at white people by a black child in our neighborhood.
I told her what my mother told me: they heard it at home.
There ALWAYS has to be someone to hate.
As Tom Lehrer points out!
I was 7 when a classmate called me a Nazi, and then my White German mom had to explain to me what that was, and then on the playground a girl called me the other "N" word, and my mom explained to me that people who hurt inside try to hurt other people. It was a double whammy year. Later on, I formed a group of "Black Germans" which is carried on today in another city in the US. I no longer would limit myself to such an identifier, but it served its purpose and I discovered the history of Blacks in Germany at the time. Blacks in Germany under Hitler were not the Nazis, but the victims of Nazis, although they were the other "N" word.
Reminds me of a story about a son of a Jewish friend of my father (an old college mate of his, after whom I was named) who was taunted by some kid who shouted "You're a Jew!", to which he retorted "So are you!" Which gave a good laugh to the grownups.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, Jewish bankers propped up many states starting in the late middle ages, and were hated as part of the royal elites. In the course of the 19th century they lost that station with the advent of more effective taxation and, curiously, as their power receded the hatred increased.
Martin Luther became a cruel anti-Semite during his lifetime. As he was seen as a leader too many people believed and spread his propaganda.
Wikipedia knows a bit more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism
Never forget: Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew. And he knew nothing about Christianity .
Half Jewish here - I like to say I got all of the guilt and none of the benefits. There is an old quote I am probably bungling here: 'The Jews have had the distinction of producing 2 such luminaries as Jesus and Karl Marx - and the courage to follow neither of them." I don't remember who said it.
Trotsky was ethically Jewish, something Stalin used to help bring him down by utilising antisemetic feeling against him.
Russian Jews were overall pretty prominent in the Bolsheviks - for the rather simple reason they were just about the first major political movement actually willing to give Jews a fair chance.
Nestor Makhno's Ukranian anarchists were also very pro-Jewish, and one of the scat few ideological points of agreement they had with the Bolsheviks was that antisemitism *fucking sucks*. Another was that the counter-revolutionary "Whites" sucked somewhat more than the other did so they were usually willing to keep a truce when White armies were a more pressing problem. (The Bolsheviks eventually cleaned up their most pressing White problems and then naturally destroyed the Makhnoists.)
Meanwhile British liaison officers working with the Whites were getting ulcers worrying about the PR disaster and political fallout should the public back home learn just what kind of frothing antisemites *those* guys were...
My grand niece and grand nephew are half Jewish. Thanks for the quote, I will pass it on to my niece to share with them, when they are old enough.
I'm very happy to know what some of my ancestors were doing 3000 years ago!
[off topic]
If you Google the quote, Google AI says:
The quote is from the American author Philip Roth. He wrote the line in his 1960 short story, ""The Conversion of the Jews"", found in the collection Goodbye, Columbus
But if you Google "Philip Roth quotes," Google AI says Roth never said it.
Says a lot about AI.
Here is the story and it does not contain the quote (unless I somehow missed it): https://www.macalester.edu/religious-spiritual-life/wp-content/uploads/sites/417/2013/11/RothConversionoftheJews.pdf
What we currently call AI is closer to using the internet as a crowdsourcing encyclopedia filled with 20-40% people generated data and 80-60% AI generated content based on the crowdsourced encyclopedia with the % if AI data increasing exponentially. It’s a snake eating its tail or maybe its head. The validity of its data source is degraded day by day with more AI generated content.
Stephen, it was the American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus.
While I know where it comes from and see myself as a Brown skinned ally to both my White and Non-White Jewish friends, I see antisemitism growing in the US and abroad.
I mainly live in Germany where 2 members of my virtual political book club are Jewish. The city I live in is pretty supportive of diversity and immigrants but there just is such a small Jewish presence here.
In the US I saw it growing in the school in which I taught. The racism was always there too. Fortunately 2 directors that tolerated it are gone. Still, one of my closest friends in the US, who is Jewish, lesbian and has 2 adopted daughters from Central America, is still feeling the creepiness as the school indulges far right parents and does not protect her enough as they assign these children to her class. They do not protect her from hatred and offensive ideas or complaints. Much needs to be done to protect people.
It goes way back… my grandfather witnessed a KKK lynching in the 1920s and was terrified of anyone finding out about our family history.
I wonder what witnessing a hanging is like. I don't even watch them faking it in movies and wonder at the relatives that are there.
When we realize the extent of what has been done to Jews historically, you might think that as a group they must have presented a real threat to those in power. The pogroms, Hitler's Final Solution, the antisemitic response to Israel's horrific retaliation for the Hamas massacre—none of it makes rational sense. The only explanation I can imagine is that throughout history, Jews were scapegoated as the cause of whatever unwanted events occurred, and antisemitism took root. Wherever Jews lived, they were always a minority, and as we know, minorities are easy targets. Jew-hatred has a long history fueled by insane conspiracy theories that have been aimed at them for centuries.
Thank you Sean. We try.
As a proud Jewish American I feel compelled to say that I’m horrified by what Israel has become under Netanyahu. Not in my name.
Not Jewish but with a Hebrew first name, and a believer in Israel for as long as I've been conscious of such things -- well, almost -- I entirely agree.
Humans live by tribalism.
Fear of the "other" And contrary to what you think, the less real differences between group the better. Just a little bit different.
Jewish people are perfect for this role.
We are Communists
We are Greedy Wall St capitalists
We control the world (though why we would want to rule this clusterfuck of a planet is never explained)
Killed Jesus (even though Jewish execution was by stoning and not crucifixion as was the ROMAN way) Also never mind the other 20 thousand political rabel rousers on the road to Jerusalem who were also nailed up!
NO matter; bend over backwards to make Jewish people responsible. And since Rome (how ironic) became the seat of Catholic rule then you must absolve (wash their hands!) of the whole blame thing.
Right? I mean such a small percentage of the world’s population with so many contributions to society and culture writ large and yet the target of such vile hatred for centuries. It is truly a supernatural diabolical phenomenon that I can’t get my head around either.
It has to do with finding some group to "blame". When your worldview is patriarchal, you see everything through the lens of competition: Everything is a fight that your men must win. So of course, picking an enemy to blame--especially one with comparatively small numbers and a cultural heritage of "otherness"--becomes your foil. For many, it's Jews. Or brown-skinned people. Indigenous people. Educated people. The group to blame changes depending, but not their need to have someone else to focus their anger and grievance upon.
I understand it perfectly. The answer is right there in your post: it's because they are more successful than other people.
I my native country we have a joke that illustrates how malicious and envious some of my countrymen can get:
A man walks on the beach and finds a magic lamp. Genie pops out and tells the man that he will grant him any wish. But remember, adds genie, I will give to your neighbor double of what you shall receive.
The man thinks for a second and says: "Ok, then I want you to poke my eye out."
Now imagine that neighbor being of different faith and/or culture.
wow! never heard that one
There is never an actual reason behind prejudice, except that people so categorized can be easily lumped into a group that can be the “other” for hate mongers to use to gain power.
They killed Jesus, you know. 🙄
You know, Jesus.
The guy whose whole point was to die for us.
The guy who stayed dead less than three days.
The guy who suffered less than tens of thousands of political prisoners are suffering →right now as I type this←.
I never have understood antisemitism, because I was raised by *humanist* Christians who only embraced the anti-tribal lessons of Jesus.
Shortly after this came out on LP, I played it for my in-laws. A good time was had by all, but I think my father-in-law's approving remark on the lines of "Isn't it true!" were meant in a politically incorrect sense. In mitigation, I should that a few years before, when the news came out about the murder of people working for voting rights in the South, he was rather shocked, saying "They're citizens, aren't they?" So even he believed in the 14th Amendment so far as he understood it, which puts him way ahead of Trumpolini.
Same here. Why?
As one who’s known and appreciated a vast number of Jewish friends, teachers, classmates, colleagues, clients, etc. over the decades from childhood till now, I will never understand this either. What is there to hate? I am only inspired by their contributions and resilience.
Sorry but philo-semitism is only marginally better than anti-semitism.
Jewish people are people, no better or worse than any other group of human beings.
Either we believe that to be true, or we’re creeping towards the precipice.
Antisemitism is just an intolerant form of triblism.
It could be any other group not of the adherant's chosen tribe.
My tribe is open to the encounter with other people, other points of view. Being a member of the human race.
plain and simple, the heritage foundation should be branded a terrorist organisation.
And Prof. Krugman’s response is perfect and true:
“Every accusation by the modern right is really a confession.”
This should be emblazoned as a permanent chyron at the bottom of every Fox “news program.“
Its "nonprofit" status needs to be revoked.
Perfect Musical Coda.
I miss Tom Lehrer. He was a jem!
As for the "I just read a speech" bit, I've seen that sleight of hand before ("Oh, Pat Robertson didn't write that antisemitic book, his ghost writers put that in."). Even if a speechwriter drafts a speech, once a politician reads it it's "their" speech. If you put your name on a ghost-written manuscript, it's your words. And if Roberts read something he was really offended by (something that was, say, anti-fascist, anti-misogynist, anti-obscene wealth) he'd never have gotten to the end of it.
Though, as the Christians say (those who understand their religion), if you repent and admit your wrongness and work to fix things, you can be blessed. If only...
Thanks. I always thought of it as a generic right-wing think tank until it came out with Project 2025. My bad.
As others have pointed out, this is the problem with the "no enemies on the right" approach. Once you decide you'll accept Nazis as a distasteful part of the coalition you inevitably wind up defending Nazis.
Stephen Moore is also a raging misogynist who melted down because he saw a woman referee at a sports event — dammit, why do women have to force their way into his masculine safe space like that?
Fuentes’ antisemitism gets highlighted, but he’s just as bad about racial minorities and women. Conservatives who do not consider themselves antisemites, racists or misogynists need to speak up. Otherwise, we can only conclude that they’re okay with aligning themselves with all that.
Misogyny is one of the great forces that keeps them all united.
Since the most consistent marker of someone supporting Chump is their level of racism, I think we can assume that every one of his voters and supporters is in fact racist. And given how certain attitudes tend to "bundle" with one another, we can almost certainly add misogyny, bigotry against LGBTQ folks and anti-semitism to their expected belief sets.
I have some Trump voters in my family, including women. I explain it to myself by noting that they’ve been in Texas a long time. But individually, they’d be appalled to think of themselves as misogynistic or racist, and I don’t think they are. People voted for Trump for a variety of reasons, and didn’t necessarily buy into all the ugliest parts of the MAGA movement, just as all Dems, including myself, don’t necessarily buy into the notion that a person born male should compete in women’s sports. Would it be fair for a Republican to accuse me of being in favor of letting trans females compete in women’s sports just because I voted for Harris? Bottom line: we shouldn’t condemn people with such broad strokes based on who they voted for.
Would it be fair? No, but in terms of campaign rhetoric, this is exactly what Republicans argued: that support for Harris implied support for (horrors!) civil rights for transgender people. And Republican rhetoric claimed that Democrats sank their political prospects by this support when in fact it was Republicans who saw an appeal to prejudice against trans people as a powerful campaign tactic and promoted it.
It's exactly fair.
If you support racism and misogyny and bigotry, then, yes, it's fair to consider - and condemn - you as a racist, a misogynist and a bigot. And, BTW, trans women should absolutely be able to compete in women's sports. That they shouldn't is a non-issue ginned up by the right to inflame the mouth breathers.
It’s not a nonissue for the female athletes who lose out on spots on teams, medals, and scholarships to people born male who have an undeniable biological advantage. It’s not “made up” by the right. I know of many democratic women who left the party over this very issue.
Very much with Renee on this point, and not with Rena.
75% of the American voters are against trans women participating in women’s sports. That’s exactly why the GOP exploited the issue in 2024. If Rena wants the Dems to die on that hill, that’s exactly what will happen in a general election.
Your point is well taken. I should point out, though, that according to a June 2025 Gallop poll, 41% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans said they believed that transgender atheletes should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender. If I’ve done the math correctly, that corresponds to a correlation of 0.515 between being a Republican and supporting the restriction on sports participation. In contrast, the authors of <em>Authoritarian Nightmare</em> found a correlation of 0.812 between prejudice and approval of Trump.
Of course, 0.812 is not a perfect correlation, and doesn’t mean that every Trump supporter is prejudiced, but it’s a strong correlation. The same survey included three questions about economic well-being; they all had correlations of less than 0.5 with support for Trump. Agreement that “If Donald Trump is defeated in November 2020, he should continue to be president if he declares the election was fixed and crooked,” had a correlation of 0.466.
Correlation with the RWA scale (which measures the tendency to follow authoritarian leaders) was 0.737, which is unsurprising. Disagreement with the factual assertion that “President Trump stopped the payment of funds for military aid to Ukraine, then called President Zelensky and asked for a favor in order to release those funds” produced a correlation of 0.764, and many Trump supporters do seem eager to embrace “alternate facts.” But prejudice is the closest think to a defining characteristic that Trump supporters have unless you go with obvious things like identifying as a Republican (correlation 0.859) or expects to vote for Trump in the next election (correlation 0.927).
Do you believe Zuckerberg & Bezos are racist? I've always said people who vote republican are either senile, shysters, or simple. The shysters are exploiting the other two for their gain.
These wholesale dismissals of Trump voters is mistaken. We’re taking about half of the US electorate. I have well-informed friends who voted for Trump for two main reasons: protection of their second amendment rights and securing the southern border. Others voted for Trump because they (mistakenly, imho) viewed him as a better steward of the economy. If you assume these friends of mine are racist, anti-woman, and antisemitic - or senile or simple or shysters - you’d be wrong. We need to win over some of that Trump-voting electorate in order to win next time, and this wholesale disparagement of half the American electorate is not fair, and it’s also self-defeating.
Note I stated republican and not Trump. I grew up in a county that 80% vote republican, including most of my family. And, I used to live in Texas, as well, about a quarter of a century ago. It seemed to me, being from a mid-western state, that Texans back then were perfectly happy with exploitable illegal labor. It was not a concern during Bush's reign. Maybe your friend concerned about the border is a more recent arrival? Maybe I should replace shyster with self-interest. However, I do believe the operatives are shysters who distract less affluent voters with non-economic issues because republican economic policies only benefit those with successful businesses or who are somewhat affluent to wealthy (this administration may prove even that not to be true except for the very wealthy who can buy politicians). "Half of the American electorate" continually vote republican, even when 40% of them do not benefit from it economically.
Heritage must think the Fuentes Fan Club represents even votes that they don’t want to alienate them.
I've been paying attention. For years. Why wasn't everybody?
There's extensive research on this. It takes time and energy to pay attention and most people would rather live their lives than pay attention to this stuff. Those of us who regularly follow the news are a shrinking minority of the population, let alone news on the level of detail to be aware of the Heritage Foundation. Similarly, people generally don't vote on policy because people generally are not aware of policy beyond very basic top headline level items.
Richard, and yet “this stuff” affects some of the most important aspects of our lives. Our financial well being, the health of our society, and religious beliefs. And then we go to the polls unprepared to vote in our own best interest.
I know. It was a rhetorical question.
Democracy, if we can keep it. We've proven that we can't.
Even rhetorical questions deserve answers :-)
“people generally are not aware of policy beyond very basic top headline level items.”
And in many cases that’s being charitable. I’ve met more people over the years who voted based on the candidate’s perceived personality than on any policy.
I always thought people were like me, on top of what's going on in the world. But then I moved to New England. Heads in the sand people.
And here I am thinking that New England is a little better than average! Maybe not.
There's also the pace of life. People are saturated with tasks and demands to survive to point that they have no time to do anything else.
Yes! Thank you Paul!
Since the days of Rush Limbaugh on talk radio, ad execs, propaganda pushers and others with agendas have known that rage makes money. As we've seen it's also and easy path for nation states to influence the US political realm.
Traditional newspapers too. “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Nutritional Supplements are probably their biggest money spinner.
According to conservatives, anything less than full-throated screaming support for Israel is antisemitism. Calling for Jews to be killed and being a Hitler fan? Not antisemitism! Good thing Heritage has an antisemitism task force!
And I remember when Heritage was actually posting a bounty for any authenticated story about a family having to sell their farm or small business to pay the Estate Tax. They never paid that bounty because nobody ever came forward with a credible story. But Heritage KNEW that story was out there somewhere! So it kept on pushing it. As Donald Rumsfeld would later say on a completely different matter (that also turned out to be pure fabrication), "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
“Calling for Jews to be killed and being a Hitler fan? Not antisemitism!”
And the more subtle disregard for Jewish lives embodied in the belief Israel is just a stepping stone to “The Rapture”, when all Jews (along with everyone else who isn’t a particular brand of Christian) will die horrible deaths.
Why didn't the article include that the Heritage Foundation has been funded, in large part, by the Koch Network since inception?
Another one of those stink tanks (for they reek of fraud, lies and hidden agenda's) is the poshly named "American Enterprise Institute".
And the Federalist Society!
Some of the Federalist Society judges/prosecutors have fallen on their swords rather than be part of Trump's unethical justice department stuff.
I disagree with the Federalist Societies aims, but they're not all Trumpian.
Could Paul sue for libel?
It's interesting how think tanks with the name 'heritage' or 'freedom' in them are always opposed to both.
And "patriot."
In the late 1970s and early 80s, I lived and worked in DC. I owned a small townhouse near the corner of A Street and 3rd Street, SE, directly across the street from St Mark's Episcopal Church.
Every day, I walked 3rd St SE, right past a walk-down office (that is, an office below street grade), home to both the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. They were co-located and had a total employment of, at most, 5-6 people. If anyone from the staff was outside, I'd wave and say "Hello." Eventually, familiarity, frequency and a bit of friendliness led to chatting with anyone standing outside.
That's when I discovered that both institutions were funded by "unknown rich persons" to develop "talking points and research papers" to justify tax cuts and deregulation positions for the Republican Party. [Yes, those are quotes by staff.]
One time after being told a staffer was "waiting to hear what position he was to take on a pending policy paper he was supposed to draft," I said,
"So, you do 'research' to gin up something to justify a position? No real analytical research?"
"I research various sources looking for numbers and statements that justify the position paper's main point," he replied.
"Isn't that a bit like putting the cart before the horse; and deceptive? You're looking for numbers and 'facts' to justify a position. That's not analysis."
"Yeah, I know -- but it's a job."
I'll never forget the conversation, because I was a analyst for a consulting firm (and later, a staff analyst for Reagan's NSC). That one conversation told me everything I needed to know about both entities.
After Reagan got elected, both organizations got bigger, better funded and moved out to bigger buildings.
IMHO, when they did the neighborhood's quality improved considerably.
Norquist's anti-tax outfit sits in a very nice pile of bricks on a block of what appears expensive real estate to me.
"Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.”
In other words, he shouldn't be fired for bigotry. He should be fired for incompetence. What kind of leader simply accepts and amplifies whatever he's handed without fact checking?
Um, Trump? Who claims he didn’t know the cryptocurrency billionaire felon who had financial deals enriching Trump’s own family, whom he recently pardoned?
The 60 min. thing was wonderful. 'I don't really know the guy. He's my son's buddy. They're making a huge amount of money with him.'
perfect analogy
The typical Enron excuse. Last year I was the genius CEO, now that it's all collapsed I was just a smiling face that didn't know anything.
Yeah. It's kinda staggering how ready these folks are to tell us that they're not actually smart.
The Heritage folks never had far to fall being generally lower than a snake's belly.
I bet they’re pro Netanyahu though
It’s straw manning and the flat out blatant lies like this that only further propagate movements like the groypers. Tucker and Fuentes clearly dislike Israel almost in part and parcel because of Netanyahu and his genocidal acts.
I don't think so. You can be anti-Israeli policy and not antisemitic. At least I think so. I separate the two. I'd be happy to never have my tax dollars go to Israel again. I think they'd have been better off without us because they would have had to come up with a better solution with the Palestinians without our money. There might actually have been a two-state solution. They haven't been in any danger of being annihilated for a long time. We gave them nuclear technology. They've got the bomb.
I agree but my point was more so that saying things like “they’re probably still pro Netanyahu” just shows ignorance their views. Falsly ascribing something to others is not very productive. In fact, tucker released an hour plus video addressing almost entirely Netanyahu and his government and how they were destroying Israel!
100% with you on not sending anymore tax money and especially military aid to Israel.
P.S. they stole our uranium and nuclear technology (which in part they worked with the French to acquire), we didn’t give it to them!
The Heritage Foundation is a seditionist organization and should be closely monitored as such. If the title of Project 2025 was changed to "Putin's Plan to Destroy US Democracy" not one word would have to be changed.