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A mural in the West Bank city of Bethlehem depicts President Donald Trump kissing an Israeli army watchtower along Israel's separation wall, August 4, 2017. (AP Photo / Nasser Nasser)

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As with pretty much everything else he touches, Donald Trump has created chaos among the Jewish right. Quite a few neoconservatives took hard-line anti-Trump positions, though in most cases this did not extend so far as endorsing Hillary Clinton. Weekly Standard founder William Kristol was especially energetic in his pursuit of a chimerical third-party conservative candidate, who never materialized and wouldnt have mattered anyway. But a few of the neocons stuck strongly with Trump. Commentarys Norman Podhoretzand FrontPages David Horowitz were 100 percent in. So was the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Kleins extreme right-wing group.

Others hedged their bets. Actual war criminal, convicted liar to Congress, and disbarred lawyer Elliott AbramsPodhoretzs stepson-in-lawkept a low profile during the election and then tried desperately to get hired as Rex Tillersons number two at the State Department. Owing to just how crazy this administration is, Abrams was treated as a sensible foreign-policy mandarin by the mainstream media, though he still came up short. A few of his comrades appeared ready to jump on board when Trump bombed Syria, in the mistaken hope that he could or would sustain any policy at all, much less one that upset Vladimir Putinbut of course, this didnt last. Still sounding like he was auditioning for a role he would never get, Abrams took to the pages of the formerly Never Trump Weekly Standard to proclaim that Trump had now acted also as Commander in Chief. And more: He finally accepted the role of Leader of the Free World. Kristol called it a must read. Still, no job offer.

Yes, one would think that a willingness to distance oneself from modern-day Nazis and Holocaust deniers would be the lowest imaginable bar for any sentient human being, much less the president of the country that helped defeat Hitler in World War II. And one might expect Jews to have precious little sympathy for any politician who has frequently trafficked in nakedly anti-Semitic symbols and memes. In a recent post-Charlottesville op-ed in The New York Times, neocon Bret Stephens lorded over those Jewish conservatives (neo- and otherwise) who had held their collective noses and thrown in their lot with Trump. Stephens allowed that while Trumps bigotries aligned, in some sense, with our political views, his lack of character undermined the likelihood that he would follow through on the policies these bigotries implied.

Trumps fondness for Third Reich fantasy re-enactors aside, Stephenss case for the anti-Trump side rests almost exclusively on whats best for Israel. He laments that the Iranian nuclear deal remains in place, that the US embassy in Israel hasnt been moved to Jerusalem, that Syrias Bashar al-Assad is still in power, and that the Israeli government is outraged by the deals the administration has cut with Russia at Israels strategic expense. Speaking to a gathering organized by the Tikvah Fund, a right-wing Jewish charity, Stephens argued that it was a scandalif we fail to live up to the promise of our American citizenship to do all we can to assure the survival of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

One would think a willingness to distance oneself from Nazis would be the lowest imaginable bar for any sentient human being.

Stephens fails to understand that what matters to the far-right Jews for Trump is less the issueseven when it comes to what they understand to be the survival of the Jewish statethan the hatreds they share with the presidents supporters. As Irving Kristol, the late godfather of neoconservatism and father to William, explained back in 1993, while he had professed to be motivated by traditional Cold War concerns in the days of the US-Soviet rivalry, those alleged life-and-death questions were always secondaryat bestto his true ambition: the defeat and destruction of American liberalism. There is no after the Cold War for me, Kristol wrote. [M]y cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. Now that the other Cold War is over, the real cold war has begun.

This hatred of liberalswhich animated so many white working-class voters to ignore their own self-interest and vote their animosities in 2016is no less powerful among the pointy-heads. Its why Podhoretz still hasnt said a word against Trump. Neither has billionaire Sheldon Adelson or Klein (whose organization Adelson generously funds). New Yorks Lee Zeldin, the only Jewish GOP congressman, also endorsed Trumps remarks that there is evidence that the violence came from multiple groups and multiple sides. Its why Horowitzs FrontPage is excommunicating the hapless Ron Radosh, insisting that by criticizing exTrump adviser Steve Bannon, he has returned to his Communistroots.

This personalized, political cold war is no doubt also why it took three days for Benjamin Netanyahua pretender to the crown of leader of the Jews if ever there was oneto say anything about Charlottesville. And even then, it wasnt much: a single tweet that never once mentioned Trump. Netanyahu didnt even bother to use up all 140 characters. Nor did he respond to the enormous wave of criticism that he received in Israel from all sides when the even more right-wing Naftali Bennett complained of Trump, saying: The leaders of the U.S. must condemn and denounce the displays of anti-Semitism. Insteadand forgive me if this sounds familiarhe left it to his son to do the dirty work of signaling his true calculations and reassuring what remains of his political base. Young Yair Netanyahu explained that the Nazis shouting Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville belong to the past. Their breed is dying out. However the thugs of Antifa and BLM who hate my country (and America too in my view) just as much are getting stronger and stronger and becoming super dominant in American universities and public life.

Just as Moses said of God, He visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children (Exodus 34:7), so too shall we suffer for the sins and misjudgments of pro-Trump Jewish conservatives for generations to come.

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Disdain for Liberals Drives the Jewish Pro-Trump Right - The Nation.

In recent weeks, a controversy has popped up pitting the centrist #Resistance and progressive wings of the Democratic party against each other. This iteration of what has become a common battle regards a rising star of the establishment Democratic partyKamala Harris, junior senator from California. Although the recent debate on Harris is relatively new, sparked by an article from The Week by Ryan Cooper titled Why Leftists Dont Trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick, its only the newest incarnation of a toxic dynamic that has been in full swing since 2016, where the two sides do battle over whether leftist critique of certain politicians is proof that the critics are racist, misogynist, or both. No matter how specific and policy-oriented the lefts critiques are, a certain class of liberals will never let the debate be about policy. This piece is an attempt to explain their tactics, and outline a strategy for overcoming them.

Typically, there are five steps to the centrist smear.

Step One: Define the Enemy as a White Male, Erase All Others

First, the leftists making the critiques are depicted by liberals as being almost exclusively white, male, and (often) privileged. The most popular method for carrying this out is the coining and weaponizing of the term Bernie Bros. Sometimes (white) female Bernie supporters are begrudgingly acknowledged, only to be dismissed as traitors suffering from internalized misogyny, or as flighty young singles supporting Sanders because thats where the boys areas Gloria Steinem, among others, claimed. Leftists of color, however, are rarely acknowledged even begrudgingly, and are often ignored outright in an act of erasure.

Step Two: Define the Leftist Motivation as Racist/Misogynist/Etc.

The second tactic of centrist liberals is to portray these supposedly exclusively white, male leftists as being solely motivated by misogyny and racism in their criticisms of women and minority politicians. They tend to do this by ignoring, minimizing or outright dismissing any policy criticisms leveled against these politicians, and by claiming that these female and or minority politicians are being held to a higher standard of purity testing than their white, male counterparts.

Step Three: Present Identity Politics and Class Politics as a Zero-Sum Game

Step three from the centrist playbook is to maintain that identity politics are being thrown under the bus in favor of class-only politicsregardless of the substantive policy and character critiques put forth. Many #Resistance-style liberals have a very narrow definition of good identity politics that only allows for superficial diversity in the form of representation optics. For example, a board of directors of a corporation may exploit its black workers and run abusive third-world sweatshops and practice environmental racism, but as long as that board has a proportionate number of women and minorities, the liberal idea of identity politics is usually satisfied. Therefore, even if the critique against a minority or woman candidate is for an action that disproportionately targeted black peopleexpanding the prison-industrial complex by locking up black men at an increased rate, for examplecentrists perpetually claim that the greater crime to the marginalized group is the fact that anyone dares to criticize a politician from that group. Even when that minority candidate is being criticized for a policy that hurts minorities and women, the lie must be maintainedcriticism of that politician is criticism of the group, and identity politics in all its forms.

Step Four: Attack the Delivery of the Message, Not the Message Itself

Step four is simple tone policingdivert the topic to civility of the discourse, shifting the focus to how the critic delivered her criticism, rather than the substantive merit of said criticism. This leads directly to smarm and virtue signalinga pattern that repeatedly occurred in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, and is happening again with Kamala Harris. In both cases, liberals press the idea that criticisms only ever come from privileged white men, are too rude and abusive to ever be constructive, and only ever stem from racism and sexismusually in the form of a total dismissal of all identity politics and a contempt for the oppressed identities theyre meant to protect. Critics of these politicians are never acknowledged as having legitimate concerns on policy and character.

Step Five: Personality, Not Policy

The fifth and final step for the neoliberals is to make the political debate a matter of charismatic personalities, or names. This is why we see so many pieces lamenting that Kamala Harris has a Bernieland problem, or is struggling with Bernie Sanderssupporters, despite the fact that neither Bernie Sanders or anyone in his inner circle are actually behind any of the Harris public criticisms, and most of these leftists havent brought up Sanders at all in their critiques. (Some centrists, such as Laurence Tribe, have gone so far as to accuse Sanders of masterminding the attacks, in the absence of all evidence.) These pieces often refuse to call the critics leftists or progressives, because that would give a clearer idea of policy beliefs and ideals.

On Aug. 8, when The Week published the aforementioned Ryan Cooper article, and every day since, all of these dynamics have been in the media. Cooper responded to accusations that the left is motivated by racism and misogyny in its distrust of Harris by citing her history as a prosecutor, her defense of questionable Wall Street fat cats like Bain Capital, and her closeness to the donor class. However, although a few responses did try to sincerely engage Coopers arguments, most simply evaded them altogether in favor of doubling down on accusations of racism, sexism, and the false claim that these critics refused to hold white politicians to the same standards.

How to Fight It

My personal belief is that liberals always want to pivot away from substantive policy to diversity, double standards, civility, privilege and personalities because theyre actually afraid of defending their heroes on a policy levelthough not always for the same reasons. Some of these liberals wont defend the problematic policies and connections of a Harris, Booker, or Patrick because they dont find them problematic. In fact, they outright support them, and dont want to openly say so. Others cant defend the problematic policies and connections of a Harris, Booker, or Patrick because they dont actually know enough about the policies and connections of their faves to defend them on that leveleven if they were inclined to try. They only engage with them on the level of fans and celebrities.

And its precisely because they cant argue politics on a policy level that they always want to get leftists to discuss the criteria that matter to thembourgeois feminism, superficial diversity, civility, and incrementalism. Since they can only critique on those standards, they try to force others into defending on the same standards, and shift the entire discourse. When you know you cant win the debate on policy grounds, there are some definite advantages to using this alternate strategy instead.

First, by constantly returning the focus to identity politics, the hope is to get leftists to respond on the same grounds, which subtly reinforces their premise that these are the things politics should be about. Therefore, even if you as a leftist are responding just to say no, were not white racists silencing people of color and women and no, were not uncivil, youre validating their premise that those are the most important issues at stake simply by defending yourself. Suddenly, youre on trial, and the politicians in questionalong with their policies and political connectionsare secondary. But if a leftist refuses to answer at all, she will appear to be tacitly admitting to racism, misogyny, and other forms of toxicity. Its the classic loaded question gambit gambit: Senator, when did you stop beating your wife?

Thats why the best response is to always pivot back to policy, even when choosing to answering the identity politics accusations. If, as a leftist, you choose to defend the lefts track record on race, be sure to include policies you support that help oppressed identities, and contrast them with centrist policies that hurt those same people. Whenever liberals get roped into policy discussions, they usually end up defending fallacious arguments that are easy to pick apart. Often, liberals will end up in ludicrous positionsbadmouthing single payer, defending Hillarys Arkansas slave labor, defending the Clinton crime bill, etc.

Thats why Coopers article was so effective and triggered so much defensiveness: it moved them out of their comfort zone and onto their opponents field of battle. Pivoting back to superficial identity politics, civilities, and litigating popular personalities is their attempt to regain home court advantage. In response to claims that the left dislikes Harris because shes black and female, Cooper responded with pure policy, rather than just saying, hey, we do like women and people of color, and here are examples of some who rock with uswhich is exactly the response they want. If you go that route, theyll ignore you anyway, and will view it as validation of the idea that politics is just a head count of tokens.

Even if you do respond with policy, note that a liberals only defense is to revert to superficial identity politics, which is why you have to remain vigilant and stick to policy no matter how often they force the pivot. Its not that identity politics and feminism dont matter; its just that theyre using these topics as shields, and no matter how much you accept and respond to their framing, theyll ignore the answer anyway. Furthermore, the superficial way they frame feminism and identity politics isnt particularly helpful to women and minorities anyway. Its optics and incrementalismutterly bourgeois in its concerns and solutions.

I feel liberals ignore policy concerns that people like Ryan Cooper, Briahna Joy Gray, and Zoe Samudzi bring up because either they fully support said crappy policies and know saying so looks bad, or because they arent engaged on policies at all, couldnt defend them intellectually even if they wanted to, and may not even know what they are.

Oh, and dont forget personalities. They also want to keep topic on personalities (Hillary, Kamala, Bernie, certain leftist podcasters, pundits, and writers) and not on systems and the needs of voters. They get hung up on people, and not ideas. That way they can dwell on things like Bernie Sandersthe person, his wifes legal case, and the cost of his house, and not on socialism and its growing appeal with the populace, especially young people. If this sounds like a Republican smear tactic, thats no accidenta continued focus on policy is kryptonite to liberals, whose only recourse is to act, and sound, just like conservatives.

T. Beaulieu is the host of the Champagne Sharks podcast. You can also find him on Twitter @rickyrawls.

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The Centrist Smear: The Five Steps Liberals Take to Undermine Leftist Critique - Paste Magazine

Actor Scott Baio says Hollywood critics of President Trump would blame the man for putting oncologists out of business if he cured cancer.

The Hollywood Reporter recently met with over 50 members of Hollywoods closeted conservatives group, Friends of Abe, to gauge their support for Mr. Trump after recent violence in Charlottesville. Most of them declined to publicly comment out of fears of professional retribution, but longtime Trump supporter Mr. Baio of Happy Days fame did not hesitate to speak.

I dont give a s about Hollywood liberals, he told The Hollywood Reporter for a piece published Wednesday. Theyre gonna hate the guy no matter what. If he cured cancer, theyd be on him for putting oncologists out of business.

Mr. Baio has been a staunch supporter of the president in an industry where right-leaning talent typically keeps mum on their political views. He also spoke at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 in support of Mr. Trumps campaign.

All this [racial Charlottesville coverage] does is help Trump because people have had it. Conservatives in Hollywood have had it, Mr. Baio added. We know who Trump is, and we dont believe the propaganda, and I dont think most of the country does, either. The media is almost irrelevant. Its predictable and boring. I want the man to get his agenda through, and everything else is a sideshow.

Many actors told THR that openly discussing Mr. Trump was too hot at the moment, or included no upside.

Are you trying to get me killed? an unidentified actor asked the magazine. Im staying away from politics for the foreseeable future.

Actress Mell Flynn said that conservative friends refuse to speak out in defense of Mr. Trump because their livelihood would be threatened.

They fear that they will never work again, she said. Theres a lot of truth to that. One producer told me Trump was right to call out the leftists who attacked the white supremacists since the latter had a permit and the former did not, but if he says this out loud, hed never work again.

Mr. Baio said that lost acting work no longer worries him.

My country comes first, he said. I guess Im just an old, angry, successful white guy who stole everything he has from someone else.

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Scott Baio: Hollywood liberals would howl over jobless oncologists if Trump cured cancer - Washington Times

Toronto Sun

Alt-politics of the Ontario Liberals Toronto Sun This week I found out I was an alt-right, white supremacist. Needless to say I was shocked. This appalling bit of information came courtesy of the Ontario Liberal party. They sent out an email they said revealed the alt-right leanings of Ontario ...

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Alt-politics of the Ontario Liberals - Toronto Sun

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla (Harper, 160 pp., $24.99)

In his new book, Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla laments the phrase speaking as an X. Ubiquitous in academia for years, but now increasingly prevalent in general discourse, it is an introductory clause that

sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means there is no impartial space for dialogue.

The passage makes plain what Lilla is up toand up against. He wants the Democratic Party to abandon identity politics for the sake of its electoral viability. Effecting beneficial changes requires wielding power, he argues, and in democracies, securing power requires winning elections. In Americavast, diverse, and unrulysuch victories can be secured only through the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from [oneself] to join a common effort. Lilla thus finds it necessary to instruct fellow Democrats that elections are neither prayer meetings nor therapy sessions nor seminars nor teaching moments.

What is identity politics? As a chapter epigraph, Lilla cites a statement from the Combahee River Collective, a 1970s group whose raison detreblack lesbians issues and perspectives were getting short shrift from existing civil rights, gay rights, and feminist organizationssounds like a parody of the problem Lilla describes. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics, the statement said. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody elses oppression.

This rejection of the very idea of an impartial dialogue is, Lilla believes, how the noble legacy of large classes of peopleAfrican-Americans, womenseeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions gave way, by the 1980s, to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition. Inherent in it is identitarians disdain for the ordinary democratic politics of engaging with and persuading people unlike themselves in favor of delivering sermons to the unwashed from a raised pulpit.

Rather than gratefully accept this enlightenment and path to redemption, however, the unwashed are likely to demand an identity politics of their own. As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity, Lilla warns, you invite your adversary to do the same. Thus, Donald Trumps victory and Lillas book, which grew out of a New York Times op-ed he wrote the week after the 2016 election. He was sick and tired of noble defeats, Lilla told interviewers then. Lillas article prompted many denunciations, the most venomous coming from a Columbia law professor who compared him, unfavorably, with David Duke.

Such reactions give strong reason to doubt that we will soon see a post- or anti-identity politics emerging the Democratic Party. And yet, an even stronger reason exists. The feasibility of Lillas project depends on the plausibility of his analysis. If identity politics is an affliction that happened to liberalism, as he sees it, then its realistic to activate Democratic antibodies to reject the pathogen. If, however, identity politics is a condition to which liberalism is inherently susceptible, or even disposed, then identity politics is not the Democrats problem but their destiny. Unfortunately for Lilla, the evidence points in this direction.

Something came between the New Deal Democratic Party, summoned to pride and patriotism by Franklin Roosevelts Four Freedoms, and todays Democratic Party, micro-targeting so many distinct constituencies that, to Lilla, it seems better prepared to govern Lebanon than America. In between came McGovernismnot just George McGoverns 1972 campaign but also the whole style and substance of 1960s and 1970s liberalism: from John F. Kennedys cool to Robert Kennedys zeal; from civil rights to Black Power; from the counterculture, New Left, and antiwar movements to feminism and environmentalism. The result, says Lilla, turned Joe Sixpacks Democratic Party into Jessica Yogamats. Democrats uncritically embraced the constituencies and passions brought to the fore in the 1960soften at the expense of common sense, political and governmental. In these years, Lilla writes, liberals, fearful of blaming the victim, refused to speak about the new culture of dependency, or about the tremendous rise in violent crime in the 1960s.

As a result, identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bushs presidential campaign raised the Willie Horton issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness, as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate.

Seen in this light, identity politics is not a problem for Democrats but a solution to the deeper problem that liberalism doesnt believe in itself. The evidence, once subtle, is now explicit. The final word belongs to no man, FDR said in a 1932 speech to the Commonwealth Club, addressing the question of whether government existed to serve individuals or vice versa. All we can do is believe in change and in progress, the never-ending quest for better things. Three-quarters of a century later, in Barack Obamas Audacity of Hope, it becomes clear that the author, and liberalism generally, suffers from what political scientist Charles Kesler calls certainty envy. Obama dislikes absolute truths but admires unbending idealists, up to and including murderous ones like abolitionist John Brown. Obamas solution is to encourage us to pursue our own absolute truths, while warning that there may be a terrible price to pay.

Pursuing our own absolute truths is an excellent summary of identity politics. On no other basis can modern liberals combine moral fervor with moral flexibility. Because my truths are subjective, they become unassailablebut at the same time, Im under no obligation to base my truth on any proposition about the nature of things, because we accept that the final word on such realities belongs to no one. Speaking as an X, I possess a truth borne of my experience that no non-X critic can fully appreciate or fairly challenge. As a Yale undergraduate wrote during that schools identity-politics convulsions in 2015: I dont want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.

Consequently, Lillas hope for a future liberalism that will forge ahead and surmount identity politics seems nave. His previous book, The Shipwrecked Mind (2016), assessed the reactionary longing to return to a mythical, irretrievable past. But his new quest, for the liberalism of a Golden Age too well grounded to succumb to identity politics, proves no less quixotic.

William Voegeli is a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author of Never Enough: Americas Limitless Welfare State and The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion.

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

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Liberals, Shipwrecked - City Journal