The United States is the most accepting diverse society on earth and has been for decades.
How many Black people have risen to President of France? To Prime Minister of France? Of England? Of Germany? Of Spain? Of Russia? How many have been named Ambassador to the United Nations, Foreign Minister (akin to Secretary of State), Defense Minister (akin to Secretary of Defense), Justice Minister (Attorney General), to other cabinet posts, national security advisor, and such? How many non-ethnic-Chinese have attained such positions in China? Non-ethnic Japanese in Japan?
Ours is a remarkably kind, accepting, and fair country. Yes, this country once was blighted by slavery, but more than 300,000 White American men gave their lives to end that tragic institution more than 150 years ago. Slavery ended. Like the Holocaust of only 75 years ago, it is part of a history book now. It is history. It is something to remember, something from which to learn so that it never be repeated — and it is over. A proud and healthy culture cannot be built predominantly on a tragedy, even a historic tragedy of incalculable proportions. As a rabbi, the Judaism I teach is the Torah and the Talmud, the commentaries and writings of Rabbi Rambam Maimonides and of Rabbi Rashi and of so many others. I teach the history of 3,300 years since Sinai, the achievements even in the face of the challenges. Yes, we are informed by the Shoah, as we are by the destruction of the Holy Temple that someday will be rebuilt in Messianic times on its promontory on Mount Moriah, as we are by the expulsions, Inquisitions, blood libels, pogroms, Communist terrors, and other persecutions that have visited us. That makes us vigilant. But we do not build a culture on that. I wish so much for others in other cultures to understand that no culture can be built in 2019 America on a slavery that ended in 1865 by virtue of 300,000 White men giving up their lives to end it.
Today’s reality is that the United States is the most accepting diverse society on earth and has been for decades.
I associate with people of all political, theological, ethnic, and gender-oriented stripes. In actual life experience, racism like anti-Semitism has all but ended in open American society. Racist Democrat governors like Lester Maddox and George Wallace, racist Democrat Senators like KKK Exalted Cyclops Robert F. Byrd and J. William Fulbright are gone from the scene. Yes, one reads despicable hateful social-media comments in certain online vehicles. Call it “Godwin’s Law.” In a society of more than 300 million people from so many diverse backgrounds, it is what it is. But wanton hatred has departed from our open society. I have not met a conservative in more than twenty years who cares a whit about someone’s color. That simply is not part of the conservative mindset. We measure people by their trustworthiness, resourcefulness, good cheer, skills and intelligence, and readiness to contribute to team success. Nothing else matters.
To gin up racism hysteria and get more TV viewers and online Twitter clicks, those merchandising in amplifying racial tensions must search through yearbooks of forty years ago to find morons posing in Blackface and 60-thread-count white polyester hoods. Impressionistic experiences are confirmed by data. Yes, there were more ticks on the “anti-Semitic-incidents” chart last year, but that was primarily because of one single mentally ill Israeli teen with some high-tech equipment who phoned threats to 245 American Jewish locations. Likewise, a modest uptick in recorded racial incidents reflects primarily that more agencies reported data than ever before. In all, under 8,000 reported hate crimes in a population of more than 300 million. Reports get overblown by certain agencies who raise vast amounts of money when they scare their constituencies into believing that Hitler and Eichmann are down the block. For example, the ADL, which has been taken over by Obama White House alumni, raises money by reporting spiking anti-Semitism, even when the honest data contradict them. They merchandise in alternative facts. For Al Sharpton — one of America’s worst racists of the past fifty years (honorable mentions: Louis Farrakhan, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour) — bogus allegations of racism feed his kitty and career, got him an MSNBC show, and got him invited to the Obama White House for more than seventy visits recorded in the visitor logs. But the truth we all know from our everyday real-life encounters is that the American People are a warm and welcoming nation. We don’t ask much — just that people respect our laws and keep their hands off us.
The most deeply conservative pro-Trump Republicans may be frustrated by Don Lemon or by Rachel Maddow or by Obama or by Ana Navarro, but I never have heard anyone hate Obama or Lemon because of color, or Maddow because of whatever she is, or Navarro because of ethnicity. I never hear the “N-word” spoken by anyone outside the African-American community, and I also never hear any other anti-Black epithet, nor anti-Hispanic epithet, nor any other of that sort regarding people of Irish, Polish, German, and Italian descent. Not even the low-octane “Archie Bunker” insults. I heard some of those words half a century ago when I was a little kid, but America evolved. As a Jew who wears a yarmulke, once every two or three years I hear someone yell an anti-Semitic epithet at me, invariably from a passing car that then speeds up to 100 mph to race away before I presumably find a phone booth to change outfits and wreak vengeance on the terrified fleeing gutless coward.
The United States is the most accepting diverse society on earth and has been for decades.
If the 9/11 attacks had occurred in any other country, there would have been a corresponding wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence unprecedented in that country. But not in George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s America. The same America that once interned more than 110,000 patriotic Japanese-Americans who had been born here and loved this country, as America’s West Coast became consumed by a post-Pearl Harbor frenzy, had evolved to the point by 2001 of distinguishing between law-abiding loyal Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans and even Muslim and Arab visitors — all on the one hand — and the Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, Jihad sorts on the other hand, for all of whom we built beautiful soccer courts at Gitmo.
None of this changed after subsequent terrorist actions by individual Muslims and Arabs in this country — for example, the Chechen Muslim terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon; Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfin Malik, who perpetrated the San Bernardino Christmas attack; Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 at an Orlando gay bar. Americans continue to welcome and accept all people of all societies who enter legally and participate constructively in our republic. Despite the Minnesota-based Somali Muslim immigrant community having had people leave America to join ISIS, Congressional Democrats still have welcomed their first Jew-hating Somali-immigrant Muslim House representative, Rep. Ilhan Omar. Among American conservatives there are no religion tests, although the Democrat Left is beginning to impose religion tests, in violation of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, on nominees to the federal judiciary. There are no ethnicity tests, although it seems obvious that Harvard and other major liberal universities have secret admissions policies aimed at keeping many qualified Asian-American applicants out.
The United States is the most accepting diverse society on earth. Period.
It is a blatant lie that racism and anti-Semitism are on a dramatic rise. The Big Lie is stirred by a cynical Democrat Left that has found pay-dirt, solid gold, in dividing voters into neat pockets of identity-politics constituencies. Obama showed that he could beat a Republican opponent if he somehow could run a close race among all but one constituency, and then carry more than 90 percent of the African American vote and a big part of the Hispanic vote. Hillary tried to replicate the divide-and-conquer strategy, so — like Obama — she tried setting Blacks against Whites, Gays against Straights, Women against Men, Muslims against Christians and Jews, Latinos and other Hispanics against Caucasians. That was her “Basketful of Deplorables” trope. It worked for Obama because he actually has one Black parent, though was reared by his White mother, White grandmother, and spent all his formative life outside any classically “Black American environment,” as he grew up in Hawaii, then Indonesia, later attended Occidental College, then Columbia, then Harvard. By contrast, it did not work for Hillary because a majority of Americans simply do not like her, never particularly liked her, never will, do not trust her, and did not want more drama emerging from the #MeToo lug she would be bringing back to D.C. with her.
So Obama found that, if manipulated correctly, divisive identity politics could win elections, especially when plied against uninspiring GOP opponents who could win caucuses in Iowa and cross-over primaries in New Hampshire but who did not reflect the values, concerns, or passions of the realigned Republican electorate. In the Wasted Obama Decade, identity politics took on a new centrality. Trayvon Martin. Ferguson and Michael Brown. Baltimore and Freddy Gray. Obama gave impetus to Black Lives Matter, a radical movement that attacks police but does not give a whit about the tragedies of inner-city mass murders that pock Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis and that have stolen forever innocent Black lives in the thousands. When Obama was elected — and was there ever an objectively less qualified candidate for President besides, perhaps, Lyndon LaRouche and maybe Chester Arthur? — our country was at racial harmony.
The rise of cable television and of social media were the latest advances that were supposed to make our lives even better. In one era, it was the light bulb. In another, the car. Then came radio, TV, and air conditioning. And now we could watch a zillion shows and news all day and night, and we could find friends from years ago and drop them notes, and forward them emailed jokes, and FB or tweet that we were bored at work and eating spaghetti, so wassup? But those two newest advances set us back gravely. Social media meant that anyone with a keyboard and a chair in Mom’s basement secretly could ignite lies that can spread like a California wildfire. And 24/7 cable news meant that media now could make enormous amounts of money by identifying carved-out niche audiences and appealing to those targeted segments with sensationalism. The masses crave sensationalism: it is the sensationalist newspapers that are sold at the supermarket and drugstore checkout counter, not Applied Mechanics and Philosophy Today. So MSNBC identified their niche, and as Fox News took the conservative viewership, CNN abandoned any pretense of being centrist and instead moved all-out to the left. To keep viewers watching, they aimed for ever more sensationalist and overheated presentations: Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, Bourdain until he killed himself, and ever-more-extreme panels of bitter and divisive race-mongers like Van Jones and Don Lemon encouraged to say hateful things that make for great re-tweeting though they bear no relation to reality while inciting civil distrust and animus.
It is against that backdrop that the Left media’s fixation on Hate Hoaxes now is both their obsession and our societal blight. We are a good people. We do not lynch Blacks or others. Rather, we had Loretta Lynch. Outside of New York, we smile at people we do not know as we walk down the street. When we cross a street, we wave to the driver who waits to make a right turn. We make friendly small talk at the grocery cash register, even a guy with a yarmulke when paying a woman with a hijab. We are a good people. And we deserve better than the despicable Big Lie that this country is riven on racial, gender, religious, or ethnic lines. It is a lie that Left Democrats propel for electoral gain, as Hitler lied about the Jews, the Romanis, and the Freemasons to secure power. As the Tsar lied about the Jews to maintain power. And the Democrats lie about the American People, the Basketful of Deplorables, whom they can pigeon-hole outside their favored Intersectionalists in order to return to power — no matter the cost to the society’s well-being. This Lie is what defines Enemies of the People.
They lie. One racism or genderism hoax after another. The Oberlin College racism hoax perpetrated by campus Democrats. The racism hoax at the University of Buffalo where a Black student hung a “Whites Only” sign. The Grand Valley University racism hoax. The Montclair State University racism hoax. The University of Chicago racism hoax. The Albany racism hoax. The Princeton University racism hoax. The Vassar College racism hoax. There was no rape at the Duke University lacrosse team’s party. There was no rape at the University of Virginia. Al Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley was not thrown into a garbage dumpster, nor smeared with feces, nor even attacked. Lena Dunham lied about being raped. Blasey Ford lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Julie Swetnick lied about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. Avenatti facilitated Swetnick. It may be that a woman later lied about Avenatti. The Mattress Girl at Barnard College gained her fifteen minutes and Kirsten Gillibrand’s admiration by promoting a myth that police investigators exposed and for which Columbia University had to pay big time when it settled the falsely accused’s lawsuit. The Mediacracy lied about Nick Sandmann and the boys of CovCath, who behaved beautifully in the face of provocation by a proven liar who marched right up to them and menacingly beat a drum in their faces. Hoaxes one and all — and so many, many more — including racist lies and gender-driven lies aimed at driving up ratings, clicks, revenues, and Democrat votes.
And as for Jussie Smollett: I had heard of Empire, but I never had seen a minute of it. Most Trump MAGA conservatives, by and large, have no particular interest in a television program centering on the hip-hop music industry, even though appreciating Kanye West’s support for the President. Note that Trump rallies begin with Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to Be an American,” and they end with the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The premise from Day One that a Trump MAGA crew would go after a Jussie Smollett — someone whose name means nothing to Trump supporters, whose show means almost nothing, and frankly whose very life is irrelevant — was preposterous. In a world where conservatives express our views about Nancy Pelosi, Alec Baldwin, Robert De Niro, the Hyphen and her Green New Deal, and Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe, the notion that Trump supporters would bring a rope to lynch this irrelevant character on a show outside our horizon was beyond absurd. But it provided one more racist hoax to divide the American people, to give Democrats vying for the Presidency something to tweet about frantically, something to re-Tweet and to draw some viewers to search curiously for the channel where CNN can be found if it still is on air.
The racist hoax was unfair and a crime against the most accepting diverse society on earth.
