BRET STEPHENS, NY TIMES

The Progressive Assault on Israel

A movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.

It happened again last month in Detroit. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators seized the stage of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s marquee conference, “Creating Change” and demanded a boycott of Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they chanted — the tediously malign, thinly veiled call to end Israel as a Jewish state.

They were met with sustained applause by the audience at what is the largest annual conference of L.G.B.T.Q. activists in the United States. Conference organizers did nothing to stop the disruption or disavow the demonstrators.

Scenes of the kind that played out at the L.G.B.T.Q. conferences — not to mention college campuses across the United States — are familiar to anyone involved in the politics of the American Jewish community. They have burst into wider consciousness in recent months, thanks to revelations that Jewish organizers of the 2017 Women’s March were deliberately sidelined, excluded and attacked by some of its founders, at least one of whom, activist Tamika Mallory, is an unapologetic admirer of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam’s unapologetically anti-Semitic leader.

Linda Sarsour, left, and Tamika Mallory, two of the national co-chairwomen of the Women’s March at the 2019 event in January. Mallory’s admiration for Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, led many high-profile sponsors of the march to withdraw support this year.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency, via Shutterstock

They have also burst into Congress, largely as a result of the election of Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Both women support boycotts of Israel. Both have also written tweets with distinctly anti-Semitic undertones. Far from being reproached or condemned by their party, as Iowa’s Steve King was by Republicans, they have become Democratic rock stars. (Omar, to her credit, recanted her tweet; Tlaib did not.)

All of this is profoundly unsettling to a Jewish community that has generally seen the Democratic Party as its political home. That’s not because American Jews are unfamiliar with the radical left’s militant hostility toward the Jewish state. That’s been true for decades. Nor is it because American Jews are suddenly tilting right: Some 76 percent voted for Democrats in the midterms.

What’s unsettling is that the far-left’s hostility is now being mainstreamed by the not-so-far left. Anti-Zionism — that is, rejection not just of this or that Israeli policy, but also of the idea of a Jewish state itself — is becoming a respectable position among people who would never support the elimination of any other country in any other circumstance. And it is churning up a new wave of nakedly anti-Jewish bigotry in its wake, as when three women holding rainbow flags embossed with a Star of David at the 2017 Chicago Dyke March were ejected on grounds that the star was “a trigger.”

How did this happen?

The progressive answer is straightforward: Israel and its supporters, they say, did this to themselves. More than a half-century of occupation of Palestinian territories is a massive injustice that fair-minded people can no longer ignore, especially given America’s financial support for Israel. Continued settlement expansion in the West Bank proves Israel has no interest in making peace on equitable terms. And endless occupation makes Israel’s vaunted democracy less about Jewish self-determination than it is about ethnic subjugation.

There’s more to the indictment, but that’s the nub of it. It would be damning if it were true, or even half-true. It’s not.

A few facts ought at least to stir the thinking of those who subscribe to the progressive narrative. Israel's enemies were committed to its destruction long before it occupied a single inch of Gaza or the West Bank. In proportion to its size, Israel has voluntarily relinquished more territory taken in war than any state in the world. Israeli prime ministers offered a Palestinian state in 2000 and 2008; they were refused both times. The government of Ariel Sharon removed every Israeli settlement and soldier from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The result of Israel’s withdrawal allowed Hamas to seize power two years later and spark three wars, causing ordinary Israelis to think twice about the wisdom of duplicating the experience in the West Bank. Nearly 1,300 Israeli civilians have been killed in Palestinian terrorist attacks in this century: That’s the proportional equivalent of about 16 Sept. 11’s in the United States.

Also: If the Jewish state is really so villainous, why doesn’t it behave more like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Russia’s Vladimir Putin — both of whom, curiously, continue to have prominent sympathizers and apologists on the anti-Israel left?

None of this is to embrace the “Likud narrative” of the conflict, or support the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, or reject the idea of Palestinian statehood, or suggest that Israel is above criticism and reproach. For the record, I support a two-state solution, just as I supported Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip when I was the editor of The Jerusalem Post.

What it is to say is that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is far more complicated than the black-and-white picture drawn by Israel’s progressive critics. But the deeper flaw in progressive thinking on Israel — the flaw that has resulted in this efflorescence of bigotry — isn’t that it rests on a faulty factual foundation. It’s that its core intellectual assumptions are wrong and rotten.

The first assumption is that Israel’s choices toward the Palestinians aren’t agonizingly hard (as they are for some of the reasons mentioned above), but actually are quite easy — just a matter of stopping settlement construction, reaching a reasonable settlement with the Palestinians, making peace, and living relatively happily ever after. But this is a caricature, and it’s one that quickly descends to calumny: That is, the idea that Israel’s failure to make the “right” choice is proof of its boundless greed for Palestinian land and wicked indifference to their plight.

Next is the belief that anti-Zionism is a legitimate political position, and not another form of prejudice.

It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being, at least not where it is now. It is also fair to say that there is much to dislike about Israel’s current leadership, just as there’s much not to like about America’s. But nobody claims the election of Donald Trump makes America an illegitimate state.

Israel is now the home of nearly nine million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it, with no real thought of what would likely happen to the dispossessed. Do progressives expect the rights of Jews to be protected should Hamas someday assume the leadership of a reconstituted “Palestine”?

Then there’s the astounding view that anti-Zionism bears only a tangential relationship to anti-Semitism. Hatred of Jews is a shape-shifting phenomenon that historically has melded with the prejudices of the time in order to gain greater political currency. Jews have been hated for reasons of religion, race, lack of national attachments, and now an excess of national attachment. The arguments for hating Jews vary; the target of the hatred tragically remains the same.

Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism. But the striking feature of anti-Zionist rhetoric is how broadly it overlaps with traditionally anti-Semitic tropes.

To say, as progressives sometimes do, that Jews are “colonizers” in Israel is anti-Semitic because it advances the lie that there is no ancestral or historic Jewish tie to the land. To claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, when manifestly it is not, is anti-Semitic because it’s an attempt to Nazify the Jewish state. To insist that the only state in the world that has forfeited the moral right to exist just happens to be the Jewish state is anti-Semitic, too: Are Israel’s purported crimes really worse than those of, say, Zimbabwe or China, whose rights to exist are never called into question?

But the most toxic assumption is that Jews, whether in Israel or the U.S., can never really be thought of as victims or even as a minority because they are white, wealthy, powerful and “privileged.” This relies on a simplistic concept of power that collapses on a moment’s inspection.

Jews in Germany were economically and even politically powerful in the 1920s. And then they were in Buchenwald. Israel appears powerful vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but considerably less so in the context of a broader Middle East saturated with genocidal anti-Semitism. American Jews are comparatively wealthy. But wealth without political power, as Hannah Arendt understood, is a recipe for hatred. The Jews of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh are almost surely “privileged” according to various socio-economic measures. But privilege didn’t save the congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue last year.

Nor can the racial politics of the United States or any other country be projected onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as some have desperately sought to do. Nearly half of all Jewish Israelis have Middle Eastern roots; some, in fact, are black. Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolent resistance; Yasir Arafat practiced terrorism. The civil rights movement was about getting America to live up its founding ideals; anti-Zionism is about destroying Israel’s founding ideals.

As for the oft-cited apartheid analogy, black South Africans did not have a place in the old regime’s Parliament, as Israeli Arabs have in the Knesset; nor were they admitted to white universities, as Israeli Arabs are to Israeli universities. Israel can do more to advance the rights of its Arab citizens (just as the United States, France, Britain and other countries can for their own minorities). And Israel can also do more to ease the lives of Palestinians who are not citizens. But the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is unfair to the former and an insult to the victims of the latter.

PETER BEINART, GUARDIAN





PETER BEINART, GUARDIAN

Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic

All over the world, it is an alarming time to be Jewish – but conflating anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred is a tragic mistake.

American Jews Have Abandoned Gaza — And The Truth

PETER BEINART, THE FORWARD

Why Won’t Blackface Go Away? It’s Part of America’s Troubled Cultural Legacy

For more than 180 years, racist stereotypes have been used to entertain.

Al Jolson in the 1930 movie "Mammy."


NY TIMES
By Wil Haygood
Feb. 7, 2019

He keeps showing up, like some slightly bemused and maniacal houseguest, usually intending to get a laugh but instead taking America back into a wicked time warp. The man in blackface stands there, frozen. The photo of him starts to ricochet around our race-haunted land. The outcry begins anew.

We find ourselves in this situation again after a photo was circulated last week showing a man in blackface standing next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe on the medical school yearbook page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia. At first, Mr. Northam admitted to being in the photo (without disclosing which of the two men he was), but then he backtracked and denied it. He did, though, admit to a different flirtation with blackface, when he dressed as Michael Jackson. On Wednesday, the state’s attorney general, Mark Herring, also a Democrat, acknowledged that he himself had donned blackface while in college. All this as Virginia, like the rest of the country, celebrates Black History Month.

Blackface in America just won’t go away — consistently showing up at stag parties, on frat row, in college musicals and elsewhere.

But the persistence of blackface is unsurprising. It has been a part of American popular culture since what we recognize as popular culture emerged — roughly round 1832, when Thomas Dartmouth Rice, in blackface, performed his song “Jump Jim Crow” to thunderous applause at the Bowery Theatre in New York.

“It started during President Andrew Jackson’s presidency,” said Rhae Lynn Barnes, a professor of American cultural history at Princeton and the author of the forthcoming “Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface.” She added that minstrel shows and blackface performances, both reinforced and popularized the “stereotype of the dimwitted slave who was happy to be in the South.”

For showbusiness impresarios, there was money to be made in perpetuating such stereotypes.

A partial list of people who have appeared in blackface on screen and stage in the 186 years since Rice’s performance on the Bowery includes: Desi Arnaz, Fred Astaire, Dan Aykroyd, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (from “Amos ‘n’ Andy”), Ethel Barrymore, Milton Berle, Jimmy Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Billy Crystal, Ted Danson, Marion Davies, Robert Downey Jr., Judy Garland, Alec Guinness, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Benny Hill, Bob Hope, Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton, Hedy Lamarr, Janet Leigh, Harold Lloyd, Sophia Loren, Myrna Loy, the Marx Brothers, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Will Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, Grace Slick, Spencer Tracy, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Mae West, Gene Wilder and the Three Stooges.

[Read our critic Wesley Morris’s assessment of Gov. Northam’s situation.]

“Its longevity is because it’s been institutionalized into every aspect of American life,” Dr. Barnes said. “People have perpetuated blackface because we don’t teach minstrel history. If these people had ever been exposed to it in a safe classroom environment, they would know better.”

Judging from not only various records of campus life but also the numerous Instagram accounts of women appearing as “black” personalities — a phenomenon known as “blackfishing” — many do not know better.

The popularity of blackface was at its height in the early 20th century and has waned sharply since the ’50s, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Rather, it has taken on different forms, perhaps more palatable to modern audiences.

In 1986, “Soul Man” was a major Hollywood release, featuring C. Thomas Howell in blackface, posing as an African-American to reap the rewards of affirmative action. As recently as the early 2000s, Jimmy Kimmel wore blackface on “The Man Show” while doing an impression of the basketball player Karl Malone. He has never apologized for it, and he’s on television five nights a week. And it wasn’t until 2015 that the Metropolitan Opera of New York stopped using makeup to darken the faces of the singers in the lead role of “Othello.”


A screenshot of Jimmy Kimmel in blackface on Comedy Central's "The Man Show," which Kimmel co-hosted from 1999 to 2003.

If one were looking for a historical case study in celebrating blackface, well, one could proceed straight to the White House of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson knew Thomas Dixon, a novelist who in 1905 published “The Clansman,” an unabashedly racist book set during Reconstruction, featuring bands of black men looting and raping white women, which became a publishing sensation

The “heroes” of the novel were Ku Klux Klansmen who came to the rescue of the white populace. From the book, the director D.W. Griffith made his lauded and wildly popular film, “The Birth of a Nation.” The major “black” characters in the film were portrayed by white actors in blackface. President Wilson showed the movie at the White House; it may have been the first movie ever screened there. “It is like writing history with lightning,” Wilson was quoted as saying about the film. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” provided an additional layer of irony. The book, a runaway success that was often credited as one of the precipitators of the Civil War, told of the horrors of slavery. Theater producers bounded into view. But when the first stage production of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” landed in New York City in 1853, it featured an all-white cast.

As the 19th century wore on, the country swooned over minstrel and vaudeville productions, which often used burnt cork or shoe polish to darken performers’ faces. And over Al Jolson, in particular. It was around 1904 when Jolson, a Jewish man born in what is now Lithuania,began performing in blackface. Broadway beckoned, and in the succeeding years he became the biggest star of both blackface and Broadway. In 1927, he starred in “The Jazz Singer,” the first talking motion picture.

Blackface was such a surefire route to popularity that even black performers started wearing it. Bert Williams, a Bahamian-American comedian, was a major one of these stars, and even in his lifetime his act was freighted with pathos. “Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew,” W.C. Fields reportedly said.



Sammy Davis Jr., circa 1930.CreditEverett Collection

In perhaps one of the more heartbreaking developments, black child actors were enlisted in blackface acts, including an elementary school-aged Sammy Davis Jr. He was a black child portraying a white man portraying a stereotypical black person. Audiences howled in laughter. It is little wonder that Davis, who died in 1990, would spend a lifetime enduring racial jokes and put-downs, despite his many gifts as an entertainer.

One of the landmark radio shows in American history was “Amos ’n’ Andy,” which began in 1928 and featured white actors portraying black characters. It was rife with black caricature. Black audiences, starved for entertainment, listened as well as whites. In June 1951, the show landed on television. The actors were now black, but the stereotypes were intact. The protests were swift, and the show lasted less than two years.

By then, though, blackface was such an ingrained part of popular American culture — enacted so widely across entertainment media — that it had passed from the stage and screen to everyday life for many.A joke that could be made, a costume that could be worn. And as those recent revelations in Virginia have shown us, it is never long before another door opens and another photo emerges, and there he stands again, the man in blackface.

Wil Haygood, a visiting professor at Miami University (Ohio), has written biographies of Sammy Davis, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Sugar Ray Robinson. His latest book is “Tigerland: 1968-1969.”

Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of ‘Extortion and Blackmail’



NY TIMES

By Jim Rutenberg and Karen Weise
Feb. 7, 2019

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, accused the nation’s leading supermarket tabloid, The National Enquirer, of blackmail on Thursday, laying out an alleged scheme that brought international intrigue and White House politics to the publication’s exposure of his extramarital affair last month.

It was an unusual move by Mr. Bezos, who had largely avoided the spotlight even as he became the world’s richest man, despite the frequent attacks from President Trump, who has labeled his newspaper The Amazon Post and recently called him “Jeff Bozo” in a tweet.

The Enquirer pushed the multibillionaire into the headlines with its Jan. 28 edition, which hit newsstands and supermarket racks on Jan. 10. The tabloid devoted 11 pages to the story of Mr. Bezos’ affair with Lauren Sanchez, a former host of the Fox show “So You Think You Can Dance,” calling it “the biggest investigation in Enquirer history!”

The Enquirer boasted in the article that it had tracked the couple “across five states and 40,000 miles,” observing them as they boarded private jets, rode in limousines and repaired to “five-star hotel hideaways.” The article also included amorous text messages that Mr. Bezos had sent to Ms. Sanchez.

Mr. Bezos is hardly the sort of character the Enquirer typically puts on its cover, and the story set off speculation in Washington and New York media circles that the coverage was tied to The Enquirer’s alliance with the White House. The relationship between the tabloid’s owner, American Media Inc., and the president had been frayed by a cooperation deal struck by The Enquirer’s leadership with prosecutors looking into its role during the 2016 campaign, when it helped orchestrate the payment of hush money to women who alleged past affairs with Mr. Trump.

After seeing his texts in the tabloid’s pages, Mr. Bezos sprang into action, starting his own investigation into the tabloid’s motives as The Post prepared an article speculating on its potential political agenda. His tying of The Enquirer’s motive to politics, Mr. Bezos alleged in a post on Medium on Thursday, prompted associates of David J. Pecker, the chairman of American Media Inc., to threaten to publish graphic photos it had apparently obtained, as well as more of the steamy text messages.

“Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks and corruption,” Mr. Bezos wrote of A.M.I., explaining why he had decided to speak out. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over and see what crawls out.”

Mr. Bezos said A.M.I. had political reasons for wanting him to stop looking into its decision to publish the article. He pointed to the publisher’s past cooperation with Mr. Trump, as well as its connectionsto the government of Saudi Arabia. The Washington Post has relentlessly reported on the murder last year of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident.

The Jan. 28 issue of The National Enquirer devoted several pages to Mr. Bezos’ affair, using private text messages and paparazzi photographs.CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times

Mr. Bezos’ online post details a stunning and bizarre clash between the world’s richest man and the nation’s biggest tabloid publisher. In it, all of the country’s obsessions of recent years appear to have collided, from the personal lives of billionaires and sensational tabloid headlines to Mr. Trump’s fight with the media.


[Our media columnist examined the unlikely power of The National Enquirer in December.]

It has also shown that even for one of the world’s most powerful tech titans and the owner of one of the country’s most influential newspapers, the best means of communications can be a simple blog post. And in a time when Beltway pundits complain that the public has lost its capacity to be shocked, Mr. Bezos’ post did exactly that.

Amazon declined to comment. A.M.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The confrontation began last month when Mr. Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced that they were getting divorced. The couple, who have been married for 25 years, disclosed their separation just before The Enquirer published an article exposing that Mr. Bezos was having an affair with Ms. Sanchez, who is also married. The Enquirer article included text messages between Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez, in which he wrote of his feelings for her and used endearments including “alive girl.”

[Who Is MacKenzie Bezos? Her divorce has made the novelist, and her private life, a public fascination.]

Mr. Bezos said in his post that he had then quickly “engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by The Enquirer.”

Mr. Bezos said he had turned to Gavin de Becker, his longtime private security consultant, for help. In recent interviews, including with The Daily Beast and The Washington Post, Mr. de Becker has said he was investigating whether Ms. Sanchez’s brother, who has said he supports Mr. Trump, may have been behind the leak for political reasons.

Those who support the president may have been motivated to move against Mr. Bezos since Mr. Trump has long criticized the billionaire. Mr. Trump has previously linked The Post and Amazon in critical Twitter posts, once declaring the “Fake Washington Post” a “lobbyist” for Amazon.

Mr. de Becker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Mr. Bezos’ post on Thursday, he also published several emails between Mr. de Becker’s lawyer, Martin Singer, and A.M.I.’s lawyer, Jon Fine, and chief content officer, Dylan Howard [top photo, inset rt]. The emails detail explicit photos The Enquirer had obtained of Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez but hadn’t run, and went on say A.M.I. would not publish the photos if Mr. Bezos stopped his investigation and publicly said he did not think the leak had been politically motivated.

In one email that Mr. Bezos disclosed, Mr. Howard wrote that The Enquirer had obtained photos of Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez as part of its “newsgathering.” Included, Mr. Howard wrote, were photos that showed Ms. Sanchez simulating an oral sex scene and Mr. Bezos clad in just a white towel.

“Nothing I might write here could tell the National Enquirer story as eloquently as their own words,” Mr. Bezos wrote of releasing the emails.

He added that any personal embarrassment from the revelations took “a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here.”

“If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion,” he wrote, “how many people can?”

Labor neutrality is a sane demand: Amazon should commit to letting workers organize without interference, but union advocates shouldn't silence them entirely

DAILY NEWS

The advent of Amazon to New York City has brought focus upon that company’s attitude toward labor and the relevance of the rule of law. It was President Lincoln who first told us that capital could not exist without labor. FDR tried to make this a genuine reality by establishing a mechanism through which labor rights could be made a reality in the Great Depression.

But the National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor-management relations in the private sector, has proved ineffective and inadequate in its protection of workers against anti-union tactics which frequently border upon coercion or threats but sometimes escape prohibition through the law’s vagueness.

This, along with the law’s slow-moving nature, imperils effective union recruitment drives aimed at workers fearful of retaliation for union activity. Delay in the law means that justice delayed is justice denied, workers fearing that they cannot realize the opportunity for collective bargaining in the foreseeable future.

One answer to this can be the negotiation of so-called neutrality agreements which promote a kind of code of conduct for labor and management.

City Council Speaker, Corey Johnson, questions Amazon representatives during a hearing last month. (Emil Cohen for New York City Council)

One of its most significant features is provision of union organizer access to employer property during non-working time — a feature generally unavailable by virtue of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ maiden opinion a quarter of a century ago.

A second feature is allowing for the expedited handling of union petitions to obtain recognition and bargaining. This could involve an agreement not to appeal the New York City regional director’s decision to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington; that would save time and avoid the anti-union Trump NLRB. (Unions would prefer a so-called “card-check” providing for recognition without an election, something rarely agreeable to private sector employers.)

But the third and most controversial area relates to employer and union speech, particularly employer “captive audiences,” through which an anti-union message is given by management on company pay time and property, emphasizing employer dominance. A well-crafted neutrality approach would prohibit these tactics and it could require both sides not to disparage one another. That would provide more fairness, balance, less acrimony and a better atmosphere for the subsequent negotiations about wages, hours and working conditions.

It’s a reasonable request for the city and state to make, given that Amazon’s plans to set up shop are at least partially made possible by the taxpayers.

But there are two cautionary notes. Employers should not be gagged. Supervisors should be allowed to speak respectfully without subtle threats about job losses or closures. And a second flag for local authorities is that, while they can and should nudge the parties to negotiate, an ordinance or legal instrument providing for any or all of these features would likely be deemed unconstitutional through the doctrine of preemption, which makes national labor law supreme.


If they agree to neutralit y— genuine neutrality — Amazon, the unions and New York City can set a good example for the nation. Sensible discourse and fairness would be the beneficiaries as well as the potential to reduce inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots,” a problem that plagues our society.


Gould, the Charles A. Beardsley Emeritus Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, was chairman of the NLRB in the Clinton administration. He is author of “Labored Relations: Law, Politics, and the NLRB — A Memoir.”

Yes, There’s a Crisis at the Border.

POLITICO

SUPER BOWL LIII

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady hugged the team’s owner, Robert Kraft, 

Patriots Win Sixth Super Bowl, but It Isn’t Pretty
In the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever, New England beat the Los Angeles Rams, 13-3.
The Patriots won their sixth championship in 18 seasons to tie the Steelers for most N.F.L. Wins.


How Boring Was the Super Bowl? Even The Punts Got Exciting.

Maroon 5 Barely Leaves a Mark at Super Bowl Halftime Show.Adam Levine led Maroon 5 through a set that was as anodyne as possible for the Super Bowl halftime show. 

 Trump struggles to defend his record amid setbacks on immigration, trade, North Korea



WASHINGTON POST

The New 30-Something

• How can anyone with a family, or even someone with a stable, upwardly mobile job, afford to live in a major city?
• The answer: Many urban 30-somethings are bankrolled, to varying degrees, by their parents.

NY TIMES

Behind Illicit Massage Parlors Lie a Vast Crime Network and Modern Indentured Servitude

Lanyun Ma, 42, left, and Wei Ma, 22, were charged with sex trafficking at a massage parlor in Oxford, Mass., in 2012.CreditPaul Kapteyn/Worcester Telegram & Gazette

Image

NY TIMES

We Get the MAGA Folks; But Who Are The Other People Stopping Trump’s Approval From Collapsing?

Trump's numbers are back up. We get the 30 percent who love him. But who are these other 10 percent? How could someone not love Trump but still say thumbs up?


MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

So the president’s approval numbers have nudged back up, I see. During the government shutdown, he dipped down into the mid-30s; 34 percent was the lowest one I saw. But now it looks like he’s back in the low 40s.

I understand the 30 or so percent of the country that loves the guy. As loathsome as I find the man, I can totally get why some people adore him. He’s their cultural avenger. Easy.

The people who applaud the lock-’em up stuff are easy to account for. The people who are harder to get are the other 10 or whatever percent who aren’t MAGA-heads but who approve of the job he’s doing.

These people are utterly unfathomable to me. The ones who love him by definition can’t see what a crook, shyster, and cheater he is, what a bunch of grifters that whole family is, that he’s never lived an honest day in his life, that he’s a complete racist, that the only thing he thinks about any woman is whether she’s a piece of ass or not a piece of ass, and that on top of all that he’s a moron. I understand those people.

But the non-lovers who approve of the job he’s doing mystify me. These people really confuse me. I would have thought that if you’re not blinded by admiration for the guy, you’d see what a mobster he is and what an organized crime syndicate his White House is. But some people who fit this description evidently don’t see it. Who are they? What in the world is up with them?

I’m just guessing here, but I think they come in three flavors, these people. The dumb, the selfish, and the cynical.

First, the dumb. They’re the least interesting. There’s not much to say about them. They’re just… dumb. Nothing in their daily lives has changed much one way or the other, and they don’t remember anything from one week to the next anyway, so the idea that they might for example hold the memory in their heads of the stories about how the guy created a foundation and a “university” that were both total scams, among about a thousand other revolting things, is basically hopeless. They’re hopeless. Trying to get them to connect dots is like trying to teach a dog to use a toilet.

Next, the selfish. These are the people who give him a thumbs-up on approval because the economy is going well. These are pretty apolitical people. I’d say that these people would give a thumbs up to any president as long as the economy is doing well—as long as they themselves are doing well—but I don’t think that’s quite true. Since they fundamentally don’t really care about society but only themselves, they tend toward conservative attitudes and presumptions (low taxes, government off their backs, etc.)

They probably reflexively believe that Republicans are better for the economy, which has been factually untrue (PDF) since World War II. They don’t know or it doesn’t sink in that the last two recessions happened under Republican presidents, and the last two Democratic presidents had to clean up their messes (with admittedly varying degrees of success, but they did it). They just want more money in their pockets, and mistakenly think the GOP will give them that.

There was a story on HuffPo recently about a woman in Long Island who voted for Donald Trump and was thrilled about getting $90 more per pay period. Yeeha! But now it’s tax time, and she’s getting socked with a $5,000 tax bill, five times what she’s accustomed to.

Why? Because she lives in a high-tax state, and the Republicans and Trump fashioned the law to punish blue states by limiting deductions on state and local taxes. But more than that, they wrote the law in a way that led to many employers withholding less from people’s paychecks. So now this woman is steamed. Hey, whatever it takes, I guess.

It’s been said a million times that if or when we hit a recession, which more and more people see coming, Trump’s numbers will suffer. An obvious truism of presidential politics. But if I’m right, his numbers won’t fall as much as some people think, because the selfish are just one third of the 10 percent.

Which brings us to the deeply cynical. These are the people who think all the politicians are terrible, and Trump is different from the lot of them only by degree, not kind. They accept that he’s corrupt, but they think that all politicians are corrupt. They acknowledge that he lies sometimes, but they doubt he lies much more than anybody else lies. And they hate the establishment, which of course makes them kind of admire Trump.

I suspect that the deeply cynical—all three groups, really—are in for some big surprises ahead. I think Robert Mueller will tell us, assuming that the new attorney general doesn’t succeed in burying the report, that the president of the United States is essentially a pawn of a foreign government (Russia), and a whole lot of other stuff. I think House committee investigations will tell us how much money he and those ghoulish kids have been making since taking office, and maybe what he promised Putin with no one else in the room, and a dozen other things.

Will they see then, this baffling 10 percent of our fellow citizenry? I have no idea. I mean, my God, what does it take? This has been a real lesson in how constant the struggle is to get some people to acknowledge what’s in front of their noses, as Orwell said in his famous essay. The essay concludes on the morose note that “political opinions… will not have to be tested against solid reality.”

I hope and actually think that time will prove old George wrong, or at least wrong enough, on the matter of Trump. Reality day is coming.

How Lindsey Graham Went From Trump Skeptic to Trump Sidekick

“What happened to me?” the senator asks. “Not a damn thing.”

NY TIMES

The Vatican’s Gay Overlords
A sensational new book mines the Catholic Church’s homosexual dominance.

NY TIMES

Fewer than about 10 priests in the United States have dared to come out publicly. But gay men likely make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from gay priests themselves and researchers. Some priests say the number is closer to 75 percent. One priest in Wisconsin said he assumed every priest is gay unless he knows for a fact he is not. A priest in Florida put it this way: “A third are gay, a third are straight, and a third don’t know what the hell they are.”

The environment for gay priests has grown only more dangerous. The fall of Theodore McCarrick (above), the once-powerful cardinal who was defrocked last week for sexual abuse of boys and young men, has inflamed accusations that homosexuality is to blame for the church’s resurgent abuse crisis.

Studies repeatedly find there to be no connection between being gay and abusing children. And yet prominent bishops have singled out gay priests as the root of the problem, and right-wing media organizations attack what they have called the church’s “homosexual subculture,” “lavender mafia,” or “gay cabal.”

Even Pope Francis has grown more critical in recent months. He has called homosexuality “fashionable,” recommended that men with “this deep-seated tendency” not be accepted for ministry, and admonished gay priests to be “perfectly responsible, trying to never create scandal.”

Pope Francis receives a letter from Giuseppe Consiglio, an alleged abuse victim from Verona, Italy, at a Vatican event in October 2015. The letter warns of 14 priests accused of abuse of deaf children in Italy, including four who had transferred to Argentina. (Servizio Fotografico/Vatican Media/Servizio Fotografico/Vatican Media)

This week, Pope Francis will host a much-anticipated summit on sex abuse with bishops from around the world. The debate promises to be not only about holding bishops accountable but also about homosexuality itself.

Study after study shows that homosexuality is not a predictor of child molestation. This is also true for priests, according to a famous study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the wake of revelations in 2002 about child sex abuse in the church. The John Jay research, which church leaders commissioned, found that same-sex experience did not make priests more likely to abuse minors, and that four out of five people who said they were victims were male. Researchers found no single cause for this abuse, but identified that abusive priests’ extensive access to boys had been critical to their choice of victims.

The notion that a certain sexual identity leads to abusive behavior has demoralized gay priests for decades. Days after one man retired, he still could not shake what his archbishop in the 1970s told all the new priests headed to their first parish assignments. “He said, ‘I don’t ever want you to call me to report about your pastor, unless he is a homo or an alchie,’” he said, referring to an alcoholic. “He didn’t even know what he meant when he said homo, because we were all homos. He meant a predator, like serial predator.”

FRANK BRUNI, NY TIMES

Marveling at the mysterious sanctum that his new book explores, the French journalist Frédéric Martel writes in his new book, “In the Closet of the Vatican,” that “even in San Francisco’s Castro” there aren’t “quite as many gays.”

He’s talking about the Vatican. And he’s delivering a bombshell.

It includes the claim that about 80 percent of the male Roman Catholic clergy members who work at the Vatican, around the pope, are gay. It contends that the more showily homophobic a Vatican official is, the more likely he belongs to that crowd, and that the higher up the chain of command you go, the more gays you find. And not all of them are celibate. Not by a long shot.

Although Martel himself is openly gay, he sensationalizes gayness by devoting his inquiry to Catholic officials who have had sex with men, not ones who have had sex with women. The promise of celibacy that priests make forbids all sexual partners, and what violates Catholic teaching isn’t just gay sex but sex outside marriage.

He challenges the conventional wisdom that Pope Francis, who has detractors all around him, is “among the wolves,” clarifying, “It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens.”

In a telephone interview on Thursday, Martel (above) stressed that the 80 percent isn’t his estimate but that of a former priest at the Vatican whom he quotes by name in the book. But he presents that quotation without sufficient skepticism and, in his own words, writes, “It’s a big majority.”

He says that “In the Closet of the Vatican” is informed by about 1,500 interviews over four years and the contributions of scores of researchers and other assistants. The book has a richness of detail that’s persuasive. It’s going to be widely discussed and hotly debated.

It depicts different sexual subcultures, including clandestine meetings between Vatican officials and young heterosexual Muslim men in Rome who work as prostitutes. It names names, and while many belong to Vatican officials and other priests who are dead or whose sexual identities have come under public scrutiny before, Martel also lavishes considerable energy on the suggestion that Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, (below) and other towering figures in the church are gay.

The book doesn’t equate them, and in fact makes the different, important point that the church’s culture of secrecy — a culture created in part by gay priests’ need to conceal who they are — works against the exposure of molesters who are guilty of crimes.

As David Clohessy, a longtime advocate for survivors of sexual abuse by priests, said: “Many priests have a huge disincentive to report sexual misdeeds by colleagues. They know they’re vulnerable to being blackballed. It’s celibacy and the secretive, rigid, ancient all-male hierarchy that contributes to the cover-up and, therefore, more abuse.” Abuse has no sexual orientation, a fact made clear by many cases of priests having sex with girls and adult women, including nuns, whose victimization by priests was publicly acknowledged by Pope Francis for the first time early this month.

The book speaks to the enormous and seemingly growing tension between a church that frequently vilifies and marginalizes gay men and a priesthood dense with them. “This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and gay, in an excellent cover story for New York magazine last month. It explains why so many gay men entered the priesthood, especially decades ago: They didn’t feel safe or comfortable in a society that ostracized them. Their sense of being outsiders gave them a more spiritual bent and greater desire to help others in need.

They weren’t pulling off some elaborate ruse or looking for the clerical equivalent of a bathhouse. They were trying, psychologically and emotionally, to survive. Many still are.