Replies to post #532638 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Whether economics or other, Krugman - "Paul Krugman Must Read: We're All Rats Now" - knows what he is talking about:

"The fact is that the Trump administration already contains a number of figures with strong ties to antisemitic extremists. The Great Replacement Theory, which has de facto become part of MAGA’s ideology, doesn’t just say that there’s a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color; it says that it’s a Jewish conspiracy.
It’s short, so read the whole thing and share it. The warning lights are blinking red. It’s not a coincidence that ICE is slated for a massive budget boost in the One Big Ugly Bill."

Project Esther and the weaponisation of Zionism
"Trump’s disregard for US constitution ‘a blitzkrieg on the law’, legal experts say"
[...]
A conservative project to allegedly counter anti-Semitism is using a pro-Israel stance to mask white nationalist goals.
[...]
The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The “national strategy” proposed by Project Esther .. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/15/project-esther-a-trumpian-blueprint-to-crush-anticolonial-resistance – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights.

The first “key takeaway” listed in the report is that “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)”. Never mind that, in reality, there is no such thing as a “global Hamas Support Network” – just as there is no such thing as the HSN’s alleged “affiliated Hamas Support Organizations (HSOs)” that the Heritage Foundation has also taken the liberty of inventing. Among these alleged HSOs are prominent American Jewish organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace.
[...]
The October publication of the Heritage Foundation report occurred on the watch of President Joe Biden’s administration, which the think tank diagnosed as “decidedly anti-Israel” despite its complete and utter complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The report included many suggestions on how to “combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States … when a willing Administration occupies the White House”.

Fast forward seven months, and a recent New York Times analysis .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritage-foundation-palestine.html .. indicates that, since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, “the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals”. These range from threats to withhold gargantuan sums of federal funding for US universities that refuse to silence resistance to systematic slaughter to efforts to deport legal US residents for the crime of expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
[...]
A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had “struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups”, and that Project Esther “focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups”.

Meanwhile, in an open letter .. https://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/stand-up-for-jewish-safety-and-democracy/ .. published this month, influential American Jewish leaders warned that a “range of actors” in the US are currently “using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press”.

Now, if the Trump administration seems to be taking Project Esther and running with it, it is more out of concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that utilises Zionism and anti-Semitism charges to its own extremist ends. And this, unfortunately, is just the beginning of a far more elaborate project.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=176369058

See Chomsky's comments on Christian Zionism:

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=176385583
"...the last phase of European colonization..."

See also:

[...]Who Is Leonard Leo’s Mysterious Dark Money King?

America needs to know who Barre Seid is, what kind of country he wants, and just how massive an impact his $1.6 billion gift can have on our political discourse.
[...]
Leo is a proud “Knight of the Sovereign Order of Malta,” and his long career has been motivated by fanatical opposition to women’s rights to reproductive choice. Since Seid handed the money over in 2021, part of the pile has been funneled into black boxes like Donors Trust, a mega-donor money-washing machine. Having succeeded at subjecting American women to forced pregnancy, Leo, 57, is directing the money toward other goals: stopping “woke” culture, ending federal regulations on climate change, and limiting voting rights. Ultimately, Seid’s money will be used to shore up society’s winners—the American oligarchy, inherited trusts, CEOs, self-made billionaires, corporations—against the demands of the weak. It will be used to make the United States a tougher and, for many, a nastier country, where big money always wins, under the eye of Rambo Jesus.

All that from a man nobody knows.
[...]
During those years, Baer encouraged Seid to deepen his support for Israel, introducing him to a project that connected Israeli right-wingers with American evangelicals, so-called Christian Zionism. Seid then became a generous donor to Israeli causes. In 2011, he traveled to Israel with his wife to accept an honorary degree from Bar-Ilan University for “supporting those organizations which will fortify Israel’s position in the world.” A photo from the award ceremony is one of the few publicly available pictures of Seid.

Besides the cultural recipients of Seid’s largesse, political beneficiaries have largely maintained omertà. To mangle an idiom: Why expose a gift horse with your mouth? The Chicago-based climate-denial Heartland Institute, for example, received many of Seid’s millions. Its leaders refused to acknowledge him publicly, even after he was outed, continuing to refer to him as “anonymous.” “He is entitled to his privacy,” said Joseph Morris, the chairman of Heartland’s board of directors, when I called his office.

The only chatterer has been Steve Baer, a man who, before retiring, dabbled in reverse mortgages for senior citizens. As I reported on this story, Baer veered between helpful and avenging-angel righteous, hell-bent on converting a feminist into an “abortion abolitionist.” He put me on a text string that he boasted included Ohio Representative Jim Jordan and Leonard Leo. Few recipients replied to his memes and effusions, with the exception of one or two delicate flowers from the anti-choice movement, presumably female, horrified at Baer’s repeated use of the word “pussy,” who begged to be removed. He ignored them.

As crude as he is, Baer has clearly been useful to both Seid and Leo. Baer was a key link in the chain between the reticent Midwestern billionaire and the powerful D.C. fixer whom The Washington Post has anointed as a man “on a mission to turn back the clock,” and whom Clarence Thomas has called “the number three most powerful person in the world.”

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171957415

To 2019

After anti-Semitic video removed from NY county GOP Facebook page, chairman defends intent
[...]
The Republican Party has its own Israel problem
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Despite the fact that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 90 percent, Gallup found that 32 percent of Conservatives (and 18 percent of Republicans) feel that the president is not doing enough to find a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This might be because more than one-third of Republicans also feel that Trump is favoring Israel too much. Last year, the University of Maryland’s Critical Issues Poll found that while a majority (57 percent) of Republicans do want the Trump administration to lean toward Israel when mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a significant minority – 39 percent – do not.
[...]
Michael Koplow, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, described as “draconian” what Trump has been doing to the Palestinians.

“It could be that people are seeing that in the GOP and realizing that it doesn’t make sense to go after one side so much,” he told JTA.

If Israel is seen as failing to live up to its values of democracy and human rights for all, then support for the nation might start to erode, even among its most fervent supporters.

But it doesn’t take a crisis of biblical proportions to shake Republicans’ certainty in the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship. For some, it just takes a skepticism in a peaceful future for the region. Some millennials and younger voters in particular, Brog said, “feel less connected to Israel, maybe more quickly embrace a narrative in which they see Israel as an obstacle to peace.”

Indeed, groups like CUFI are facing a serious generational issue. Younger evangelicals aren’t identifying as conservatives or with Israel at the same rates as their older peers, Dan Hummel, author of the forthcoming book “Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations,” told JTA. This declining support limits the ability of Christian Zionist groups to spread their pro-Israel message.

“Basically, evangelicals under 35 don’t care about this issue nearly as much as older groups do,” Hummel said. “Most evangelicals rarely think about Israel at all, and when they do, it’s because of a major issue coming out of the Middle East.”

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=150865812

[janice shell]

Tommy Tuberville’s reaction is chilling — and not an outlier.

And Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama basically declared New York’s voters subhuman, saying:

These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.

These reactions are vile, and they’re also dishonest. Whatever these men may claim, it’s all about bigotry.

And what do more than half the country say about Tommy Tuberville and Alabamans?