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June 2016

The Revenge of Tribalism Americans reject Locke and embrace Hobbes. By Ben Shapiro

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.”

Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.

The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).

Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”

So, who’s right?

They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves.

The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”

Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.

But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In Defense of the Tribe A new book explores why tribal life has attracted so many adherents throughout history. By Brian Stewart

Your humble servant recently came across a report showing that Israel scores highly in surveys of human happiness. The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel 11th in the world out of 158 countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Life Satisfaction Index rates Israel fifth out of 36 countries — ahead of many other advanced democracies.

At first blush, these data may seem unexpected, since Israel lives under the constant threat of terrorist violence. By definition, such violence does not discriminate between military and civilian targets, and strikes its victims at random. Yet it is partially because of this danger (not in spite of it) that citizens of the Jewish state exhibit remarkable degrees of personal fulfillment. The stresses of war and terror often breed social unity. Little wonder that 83 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity.

Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.” Since its inception, Israel has faced aggressive neighbors bent on its destruction — a near-constant reminder of its precarious status in the order of nations. Israelis have responded to existential danger by banding together as if they belonged to a vast kibbutz settlement. They have, in other words, taken quite literally the ancient Israelite claim to be people of the tribe.

The phenomenon of tribal solidarity isn’t confined to Jews. It is the subject of Sebastian Junger’s enthralling new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Junger offers a richly researched work of history, psychology, and anthropology to explore the deep appeal of the tribal culture throughout history. The result is a tour de force that should be read by anyone interested in the human condition.

Junger previously served as a war correspondent for Vanity Fair, embedding for long stretches at remote American outposts in Afghanistan’s frightful Korengal valley. This experience may help explain his interest in the intimate bonds that define tribal societies as well as the despair that can come from being wrenched out of a situation that makes those bonds necessary.

Tribe aptly opens with Benjamin Franklin’s observation, decades before the American Revolution, that more than a few English settlers were “escaping into the woods” to join Indian society. Doctor Franklin noticed that emigration seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, but rarely the other way around. White captives of the American Indians, for instance, often did not wish to be repatriated to colonial society. At this distance, it is simply astonishing that so many frontiersmen would have cast off the relative comforts of civilization in favor an “empire wilderness” rife with Stone Age tribes that, as Junger notes, “had barely changed in 15,000 years.”

The small but significant flow of white men — they were mostly men — into the tree-line sat uncomfortably with those who stayed behind. Without indulging the modern temptation to romanticize what was a blood-soaked way of life, Junger hazards an explanation for the appeal of tribal culture. Western society was a diverse and dynamic but deeply alienating place. (Plus ça change…) This stood in stark contrast to native life, which was essentially classless and egalitarian. The “intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe” provided a high degree of autonomy — as long as it didn’t threaten the defense of the tribe, which was punishable by death — as well as a sense of belonging.

NY Times Columnist Goes Bonkers Over Trump Comment about Black Supporter What the media omitted from their coverage of Trump’s remarks.Crystal Wright

Democrat New York Times columnist and certified Democrat water boy Charles Blow couldn’t wait to pounce on Donald Trump’s comment about a black supporter at a recent rally.

Blow tweeted:

If anyone ever says of me, “look at MY African-American,” I’m going ALL THE WAY off… ‪#YouDontOwnMeFool

Of course, Blow — who is black and has almost singularly focused his column on trashing Trump — is perfectly okay with being owned by Democrats and having candidates like Hillary mock him to his black face. Over the last 50-plus years of blacks showing slavish devotion to Democrats, blacks like Blow have received zero in return but insults. Hillary Clinton has again adopted a black dialect when talking to black audiences, like she did in her 2008 campaign. During a radio interview on an urban station, she even joked about carrying hot sauce in her bag — you know, like the blacks do.

But I never saw Charles Blow “go all the way off” on Hillary’s insults. Looks like somebody is the fool. I also don’t recall Blow being outraged when Bill Clinton blew up at Senator Ted Kennedy in 2008 when Kennedy endorsed then-Senator Barack Obama over Hillary. Clinton told Kennedy that not too long ago (black) Obama would have been fetching them (white men) coffee.

Back to Trump’s comment. The presumptive GOP nominee did single out a black person at a campaign event in California. But the liberal media mob, which includes Blow, took Trump’s comments out of context. What a shock.

First, Trump addressed violent protestors who tried to disrupt his recent rally in San Jose. Liberals far and wide blamed Trump for the violence. The GOP nominee said that he urges supporters not to fight protestors but smile if they punch you in the face “as your nose [is] pouring blood out of it.”

“Be very, very nice,” advised Trump.

Then, Trump went on to recount this story:

We had a case where we had an African-American guy, who was a fan of mine. Great fan, great guy. In fact I want to find out what’s going on with him. You know. . .

Look at my African-American over here, look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about? OK.

Muslim Leader Advertises that 9/11 was ‘Israeli-Jewish Job’ Hamas and David Duke supporter, Sofian Zakkout, once again finds way to target Jews. Joe Kaufman

Sofian Zakkout, President of the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), is always looking for new ways to promote hatred of Jews. Recently, he advertised on his Facebook page an article about how the Nazi Holocaust was “faked.” Now, he is targeting Jews by posting onto social media a claim that they perpetrated the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Will any of the hate he is peddling do harm to the relationships he and his group have made, both financial and otherwise, with organizations associated with fighting crime?

Usually, anti-Semites — those rabid ones who are violently opposed to Jews — attach themselves to one of two categories, white supremacists or Muslim terrorists. Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, who is Muslim himself, strongly supports both.

When it comes to white supremacy, Zakkout is a fervent follower of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Zakkout has described Duke as “David Duke, a man to believe in!” and Zakkout has said of Duke, “I respect him for his honesty!” Zakkout’s Facebook page and the websites of his organization AMANA each have been used to promote Duke and his bigoted videos. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has previously cited Zakkout and his group for posting what the ADL described as a “venomous” anti-Semitic Duke video onto AMANA’s official site.

This past February, Zakkout advertised on social media a report claiming that the horrors committed by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s were fabricated. Aptly titled ‘How the Holocaust was faked,’ it begins: “The alleged ‘Holocaust’ of ‘6 million Jews’ at the hands of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany during WWII is the biggest lie ever foisted upon humanity.” It was produced by The Realist Report, an anti-Jew, anti-black, anti-gay independent media outlet, which describes Hitler as “the greatest leader in modern Western history.”

Zakkout is also very open about his strong support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. In August 2015, he wrote in Arabic on Facebook, “Hamas is in my heart and on my head.” In July 2014, Zakkout organized a pro-Hamas rally held outside the Israeli Consulate in downtown Miami. On video, Zakkout is shown smiling, as event goers repeatedly shout, “We are Hamas.” Following the rally, Zakkout wrote the following in Arabic, above photos from the event: “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!”

Trump and Democratic Political Incorrectness If Democrats are truly outraged by Trump, they might want to try looking in a mirror. June 8, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

Remember the time a presidential candidate suggested that Gandhi used to run “a gas station down in St. Louis.” No it wasn’t Trump. That was Hillary Clinton. Had Trump said it, we would still be hearing about it. But since Hillary Clinton was responsible for it, it went down the memory hole.

Along with her more recent “Colored People Time” gag.

And who can forget the time that Trump said, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” But that wasn’t Trump. It was actually Vice President Joe Biden.

But still it was indisputably offensive when Trump told the Asian Chamber of Commerce, “I don’t think you’re smarter than anybody else, but you’ve convinced a lot of us you are.”

Then he followed that up by joking, “One problem that I’ve had today is keeping my Wongs straight.”

You would have to be ridiculously politically incorrect or an outright buffoon to say something like that to the Asian Chamber of Commerce. And this is exactly why Trump is… but wait, those lines actually came from Democratic Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.

Reid recently popped up to call Trump’s comments racist. And he ought to know. Harry Reid believed that Obama was electable because he was “light-skinned” with ”no Negro dialect”.

Memories are short when it comes to Democratic racial and ethnic stereotypes. Not to mention slurs.

Trump is certainly not the only prominent politician who says wildly politically incorrect things. Democrats do it all the time. And they do it in more pointed ways.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez is running for the Senate. Sanchez is a racist who accused the “Vietnamese” of “trying to take this seat” when running against a Vietnamese-American candidate. Last year she managed to ridicule both Hindus and Native Americans with one slur.

There was the time that Bill Clinton suggested that, Obama “would have been getting us coffee”. Or when Biden described his future boss as the, “first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guy.” Despite two terms in which Republicans were accused of racially stereotyping Obama with secret dog whistles, nothing any major Republican figure said was anywhere as bad as what Obama’s Democratic predecessor and his own Senate ally had said about him.

Democrats actually say politically incorrect things all the time. Trump has become famous because he’s one of the few Republicans who talks like a Democrat and says the sort of things that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid have no problem saying in private and even in public speeches.

‘The Struggle Continues’: Bernie Going All the Way to Convention By Bridget Johnson

Vowing “the struggle continues,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told a roaring crowd in Santa Monica, Calif., that he’s not dropping out of the Democratic primary and is taking the fight to the Democratic National Convention at the end of July.

Sanders won Montana and North Dakota on Tuesday night, while Hillary Clinton won New Mexico, New Jersey and South Dakota. Clinton was ahead in California.

The senator reminded followers that he has won 22 primaries and caucuses with more than 10 million votes. “Virtually every single state we have won by big numbers the votes of young people,” the 74-year-old noted. “Young people understand that they are the future of America and they intend to help shape that future. I am enormously optimistic about the future of our country.”

“We will not allow right-wing Republicans to control our government and that is especially true with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate,” Sanders continued. “The American people in my view will never support a candidate whose major theme is bigotry, who insults Mexicans, who insults Muslims and women and African-Americans. We will not allow Donald Trump to become president of the United States, but we understand that our mission is more than just defeating Trump — it is transforming our country.”

In an announcement greeted with huge cheers, Sanders said next Tuesday he would “continue the fight in the last primary in Washington, D.C.”

“We are going to fight hard to win the primary in Washington, D.C., and then we take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” he declared.

Sanders added that he’s “pretty good at arithmetic” and knows he faces a “steep fight… for every vote and every delegate we can get.” CONTINUE AT SITE

In Search of Iranian Moderates by A.J. Caschetta

Since Rouhani replaced Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president, all that has changed is U.S. policy towards Iran and the administration’s willingness to lie to the American people about it.

President Barack Obama personally guaranteed the peaceful nature of both Khamenei and Rouhani, saying: “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon.” To date, no such fatwa has been seen by anyone. Rouhani seems to have been lying.

The Iranians also keep threatening to “walk away from the nuclear ‘deal,'” even though there is no deal to walk away from as Iran has not signed anything yet.

Within the leaders of Iran’s regime, those who fail to live up to the Supreme Leader’s expectations are impeached or killed.

Ever since Hassan Rouhani became president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Americans have been told that a fundamental change had occurred, that the latest Iranian election had been a once-in-a-lifetime event, and that Iran’s formerly adversarial regime had been transformed into a moderate one.

In Iran, however, what has changed is precisely nothing. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is as powerful and dangerous as ever. Iranian support for terrorists has increased. And Iran’s genocidal rhetoric regarding Israel (“the malignant Zionist tumor”) and America (the great Satan) has not softened.

Since Rouhani replaced Ahmadinejad, all that has changed is U.S. policy towards Iran and the administration’s willingness to lie to the American people about it.

Regressive media applaud the San Jose violence By Bill D’Agostino

The far-left media are excusing the behavior of San Jose rioters, instead blaming the violence on Trump and rally attendees. Some journalists have gone so far as to encourage the attacks.

In the wake of the outrage over the violent protesters’ behavior, online leftist publications churned out a flurry of articles that stank of damage control. But unlike of the apologia they exhibited during the Baltimore and Ferguson riots, the authors of these pieces went a step farther than merely excusing the mob attacks in San Jose. They endorsed them.

On the night of the protests, Emmett Rensin, a deputy editor at Vox, tweeted, “Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot.”

Rensin was temporarily suspended from his position for the tweet. But this did not stop him from engaging in a two-hour rant on Twitter the following day, attempting to further justify physical attacks against Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, writers at other far-left outlets were given passes for their support of the violence. On June 3, Salon author Chauncey Devega published an article openly condoning the protesters’ actions:

In a functioning democracy, political violence should almost always be condemned. However, we must not forget that Donald Trump and his supporters are on the wrong side of history.

In March, Salon published a series of opinion pieces in a similar vein, exalting Trump protesters as heroes and blaming any violence they engaged in on Trump’s own rhetoric.

Excusing otherwise unacceptable behavior, so long as it comes from the “right” people, is a new favorite tactic of the regressive left. However, in blaming the behavior of a violent mob on the very people it targeted, authors like Emmett Rensin have taken their invective mentality to a new low. Though this double standard has yet to make its way to large news networks like CNN and MSNBC, it nonetheless reflects a troubling shift in the tone of mainstream regressive rhetoric.

Actually, Mexico is very close to a failed state By Sierra Rayne

Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal really, really doesn’t like Donald Trump.

In an interview with CNN’s serial plagiarist Fareed Zakaria, Stephens said it is his goal to “make sure he [Trump] is the biggest loser in presidential history” and that “[i]t’s important that Donald Trump and what he represents – this kind of ethnic quote ‘conservatism’ or populism – be so decisively rebuked that the Republican party, the Republican voters learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way, shape, or form.”

In his latest piece, Stephens attempts to convince his readers that conservatives have some form of derangement syndrome over Mexico, and that, in fact, “Americans are blessed to have Mexico as our neighbor.” Given his background, we might expect Stephens to be less than objective toward Mexico. Stephens was raised in the centerpiece of Mexican corruption itself, Mexico City, where his father was a senior executive in a chemical company.

Stephens claims that “Mexico is a functioning democracy whose voters tend to favor pro-business conservatives, not a North American version of Libya, exporting jihad and boat people to its neighbors.”

Well, I suspect that a geography lesson is in order for the WSJ’s boy wonder. Mexico has a long and largely undefended land border with the country into which its illegal emigrants want to immigrate. So why would they pile onto boats? Perhaps if the Rio Grande were the width of the Mediterranean, naval transportation would be necessary, but until that biblical flood arrives, Mexicans can just walk across the border, or have a light, refreshing swim. Let’s call the Mexican illegals “land people” instead.

As for jihad, another teachable moment is required. Mexicans aren’t Muslims, but they do export an equally threatening revolutionary philosophy called the “La Raza” movement – one that a certain judge presiding over the Trump University class action lawsuit is potentially implicated in, giving a textbook example of bringing the administration of justice into disrepute.

Absurdity Reigns: Of Want Ads and Counter-Radicalization Patrick Dunleavy

The theater of the absurd seems to have found a place to perform in the current atmosphere created by the threat of Islamic terrorism in both Europe and the United States.

Belgium, which has seen its deeply-rooted radical Islamic nature exposed by the attacks in Paris and Brussels, thinks it has the answer to the phenomenon of Islamic radicalization. The Muslim Executive of Belgium placed an ad seeking counselors to deradicalize inmates. The advertisement lists the following qualifications, looking for candidates with “sufficient religious knowledge” and a “resistance to stress.”

In essence, Belgium outsourced hiring for this experimental state-run deradicalization program to the country’s religious leaders.

It’s a bad idea that cannot work, and is especially untenable if Americans tried to follow suit.

Can you imagine if, after any terrorist attack or plot in the United States, instead of responding with force against the terrorist organizations that perpetrated those heinous acts, we simply placed an advertisement in the help wanted section of a newspaper announcing the job opening for someone who could “cure the problem”?

We’d call it what it is, naive foolishness.

Yet 15 years after 9/11, we find that some have actually taken that approach to the threat of Islamic radicalization and the acts of terrorism it produces.

In European city after city – Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, Toulouse – we have seen innocent civilians – men, women, and children – maimed or killed by people who were radicalized. Now we know that many of the terrorists were radicalized while serving time in prison for petty offenses. It was in the cauldron of the penitentiary that they were exposed to radical Islamic terrorists as well as to literature and clergy that facilitated their transition from crook to jihadist.

The United States is not immune to this disease. In Chattanooga, Garland, Texas, New York City, Philadelphia, San Bernardino and elsewhere individuals who had become radicalized committed attacks and murder in the name of Allah.

Authorities know that the journey to Islamic radicalization may take many paths including social media, videos, literature, or a charismatic facilitator. But the end result is always the same. It produces people who are willing to kill anyone, including themselves, while thinking they are pleasing God. False promises of virgins and paradise spur them on.