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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28781 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Biden-⁠Harris Administration Releases First-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism

Last week the Biden administration published the anticipated national strategy to counter antisemitism.

This national strategy sets forth a whole-of-society plan that both meets this moment of escalating hatred and lays the foundation for reducing antisemitism over time. Informed by input from over 1,000 stakeholders from every sector of American society, it outlines over 100 new actions that Executive Branch agencies have committed to take in order to counter antisemitism—all of which will be completed within a year. The strategy also calls on Congress to enact legislation that would help counter antisemitism and urges every sector of society to mobilize against this age-old hatred, including state and local governments, civil society, schools and academic institutions, the tech sector, businesses, and diverse religious communities.

To support the whole-of-society call to action, today the Biden-Harris Administration also announced commitments to counter antisemitism and build cross-community solidarity by organizations across the private sector, civil society, religious and multi-faith communities, and higher education.

The Full Report starts with a legal disclaimer that it does not supersede any existing regulation or law- it should be viewed as a blueprint and aspirational. However, the 100+ "calls to action" touch every corner of government, even the USDA and and Department of Forest Services. One of the main architects of the initiative is Kamala Harris's Jewish husband, Dough Emhoff.

The first question you may have is "what's antisemitism?" I have discussed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in the past, and it is acknowledged in the report as the most prominent definition which has been adopted by the US:

There are several definitions of antisemitism, which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism. The most prominent is the non-legally binding “working definition” of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes:

  • Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
  • Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
  • Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust
  • Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
  • Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
  • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
  • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
  • Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
  • Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

The Biden administration's strategy to counter antisemitism includes censoring criticism of "the power of Jews as a collective", even while there exists a whole-of-society effort to engage in mendacious criticism of the power of white men as a collective.

There are indeed well over 100 calls to action, which includes things like:

  • AmeriCorps will distribute resources on antisemitism and countering antisemitism through its national service programs. (By September 2023)
  • Federal agencies will organize or participate in communications or events marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) and Jewish American History Month. (By May 2023)
  • The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will launch a campaign featuring artists who engage, unite, and heal communities through the arts, and who incorporate themes of countering antisemitism and other forms of hate in their artistic practice. (By September 2023)
  • IMLS will increase learning opportunities in rural libraries and museums on both Jewish American history, such as Jewish contributions to agriculture, and histories of antisemitism, including the Holocaust. (By March 2024)

The most tangible impacts of this strategy in the short term are the mandated propaganda initiatives described here and in many more "calls to action" in the document. By my view, the most alarming dimension of the strategy is in combatting online antisemitism (emphasis in original):

The Biden-Harris Administration also encourages all online platforms to independently commit to taking several actions that will counter antisemitism, including: ensuring terms of service and community standards explicitly cover antisemitism; adopting zero-tolerance for hate speech terms of service and community standards and permanently banning repeat offenders of these policies; investing in the human and technical resources necessary to enable vigorous and timely enforcement of their terms of service and community standards; improving their capabilities to stop recommending and de-rank antisemitic and other hateful content; increasing the transparency of their algorithmic recommendation systems and data; treating antisemitism as a distinct category in transparency reports; and more.

In today's day in age, where something like Twitter is unambiguously the public square, this call to action is clearly intended to abridge the freedom of speech even though it wouldn't run afoul of constitutional checks in the court system. In particular, the call for permanent bans from the public square in the face of a "zero-tolerance" policy is chilling. If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.

The Call to Congress is even more alarming:

We call on Congress to hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hatefueled violence, including antisemitism. The President has long called for fundamental reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and Congress should remove special immunity for online platforms. This should include removing immunity if an online platform utilizes an algorithm or other computational process to amplify or recommend content to a user that promotes violence, or is directly relevant to a claim involving interference with civil rights or neglect to prevent interference with civil rights.

...

We call on Congress to pass legislation requiring platforms to enable timely and robust public interest research, including on the spread of antisemitism and other forms of hate, using platforms’ data and analyzing their algorithmic recommendation systems, while maintaining users’ privacy.

The Right Wing has naively supported changes to Section 230 that would prohibit politically-motivated content censorship, on the logic that if they aren't publishers they shouldn't be censoring political speech. The more likely changes to Section 230 would be that social media companies will be required to have strict content policies and moderation against antisemitism and other forms of hate speech in order for social media companies to have legal protection.

This call to action doesn't seem unrealistic, I noted last month that Ron DeSantis travelled to Jerusalem to sign a hate-speech law which was described as "the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States". Likewise, this all-encompassing initiative by the Biden Administration has sparked absolutely no opposition of any note, indicating it's one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus among "our" representatives.

Generative AI is only mentioned in one part of the fact sheet:

The ADL will partner with the Interparliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism to convene a meeting in the fall to examine the impact of artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence on online antisemitism.

No doubt AI will be more prominent in the Second-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

One of the most tired memes is "replace 'Jew' with 'white' in this article and look how 1488 it looks loool", but I have to say if this document were a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-white hatred online, among our society, and institutions, it would be unambiguously identified as fascist, white supremacy.

I wonder if this push will have any effect at all on the increasing hostility towards Jews in Blue-team institutions, particularly towards those who wholeheartedly support Israel?

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing

https://www.thecollegefix.com/conservative-israeli-scholar-at-princeton-target-of-cancel-culture-campaign/

https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-hosts-fiery-palestinian-activist-well-known-for-antisemitic-rhetoric/

Or will they address the anti-semitism coming from Democrat darlings like Linda Sarsour, or from black activists? Or is this just another attempt to attack any conservatives they can paint as anti-semitic while ignoring any signs of it from their own side?

Or is this just another attempt to attack any conservatives they can paint as anti-semitic while ignoring any signs of it from their own side?

Yes, in fact a cynic might suspect that this is the intent. The grievance mongers are going to pedal racial grievances as is their wont, and guys like SS, @coffee_enjoyer, and others here are going to boost that signal like the good little Id-Pol stooges that they are because anything that increases the likelihood of ethnic strife is seen as a win in their book.

Do you see a difference between defensive and offensive id pol? Or active versus passive? In your book, id pol is bad even if others have been waging it for a decade?

Do you see a difference between defensive and offensive id pol?

Not really. It's all a load of psuedo-marxist bullshit, all of it.

Bruh. Ethnic, religious and racial identities have been a thing for far longer than marxism even existed. Get a grip. Not playing the game doesn't absolve you of the consequences for the enemy team owning you.

If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.

Only if you're a white-collar PMC. The underclass is not governed in the same way as the overclass. Do you think that being banned from Twitter would do anything to the people stealing random shit from Sephora? Most people are not on Twitter, or, if they are, use it to communicate shit-takes with their friends or as a mechanism to view various types of entertainments. Those latter functions are not part of "being in the public square" and can be done in any number of other ways, including passively consuming TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, etc.

Great write up.

Is there any major group in America that is more of a collective than religious Zionist Jews? It’s a combination of nationality, bloodline religion, singing odes to their ancestors in the Temple, praying for their bloodline, remembering historical slights… So, any criticism against white people as a collective applies some 60 fold to “collectivist” Jews, IMO (namely those who are deeply self-identifying, religious, and Zionist).

There exists a kind of Victimhood-Oppressor dynamic which is the lifeblood of Judaism since antiquity. You can read it in the stories of the Israelites against the Canaanites, and you can hear it in psalm 137: “for there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth […] Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”. This psalm is 3000 years old, and yet you can see in it how the Jews depict themselves as a collective. In a way, it reads like a scene from Schindler’s List. The threat of, let’s say, Jewish extremism is not something to be laughed at. Consider what happened in the 2nd century, when the Jews waged an insurrection and massacres hundreds of thousands of innocents:

Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished. In Egypt, also, they performed many similar deeds, and in Cyprus under the leadership of Artemio. There, likewise, two hundred and forty thousand perished. For this reason no Jew may set foot in that land, but even if one of them is driven upon the island by force of the wind, he is put to death. Various persons took part in subduing these Jews, one being Lusius, who was sent by Trajan.

what better way to deflect criticism of a group than to give said group protected status against criticism

  1. If you want to know why Dems will never get the working white class vote this is it

  2. A lot of antisemitism as defined is very close to just telling facts. Jews really do have a disproportionate amount of power in key institutions. Things like criticizing George Soros gets lumped in with a world wide Jewish conspiracy. And his play on DA’s was outside of prior political norms. Of course Koch plays too. I back Israel as part of the religious right but many of their actions are against enemies are more Old Testament vengeance than what grew out of the neoliberalchristianglobalhomo norm of exerting power.

  3. There is explicit mention of athletes in the documents. I guess in the identity politics games we see it confirmed blacks aren’t at the top of the totem pole. Sorry Kyrie.

  4. I wish a prominent Jew would trash the ADL or atleast this document. Like a formerly libertarian type who donates a ton like Zuck. I think this document only inflames racial tension.

  5. Agree this is an end-run around the constitution. They can’t themselves censor people. But they can strongly encourage those who are allowed to censor because they are technically “private”. It’s as I’ve pointed out in a prior comment in another convo I’ve radicalized on the use of power. I never would have supported Desantis versus Disney 5 years ago. It violates my understanding of US civic norms. Power should be used by the right when they can.

If you want to know why Dems will never get the working white class vote this is it

What? Yeah, I'm sure non-binding anti-Semitism plans are absolutely top salience issues for Bud from Scranton.

A lot of antisemitism as defined is very close to just telling facts. Jews really do have a disproportionate amount of power in key institutions.

This misses the point. No-one denies that Jews are over-represented in important areas, what is anti-semitic is suggesting that this is either the product of some nefarious process or that it will have deleterious consequences because of some imagined Jewish agenda. One can criticise Soros individually, even if I think the criticisms are mostly dumb, but bringing up his Jewishness in a negative light certainly implies anti-Semitism.

The above point that if you replace Jew with white and you basically have crt and all the anti-white woke ideology of the left. Buds not that dumb be realizes he’s being point at the bottom of identity politics.

On the second point perhaps if the document is read that tightly. I’ve seen plenty of people make antisemitism accusations for even mentioning Soros/DA. Same thing for Jewish over representation. But like I said in what you quoted “this comes pretty close to just telling facts” - let’s say this was law and I go to jail if I violate it. If I’m talking about Soros/DA manipulation then one wrong word or one judge who thinks I’m dog whistling/implying something puts me in jail. It’s very very close to the line of banning facts.

A lot of antisemitism as defined is very close to just telling facts. Jews really do have a disproportionate amount of power in key institutions.

Ah, Critical race theory!

I'm glad to find another adherent on this sub, most people are super against it here.

Less snarkily, your points are all valid only through the racialized, critical framing that produced the document you are arguing against.

If you are a white nationalist or black hebrew isrialite or some other flavor of such you are acting 100% consistent, otherwise I think you should do some intellectual hygiene regarding prevailing theories accepted without critical analysis.

I believe in hbd. I don’t think Jews win more because of societal advantages. I think genetically they have a much higher average IQ than other groups. Which I don’t believe is critical theory.

In that case, carry on and thank you very much.

If it's not too personal, may I ask which you are? White nationalist or Black Israelite or some other flavour of such?

No, I'm jewish.

I'm just taking the compliment.

Jewish criticism of the ADL is hardly uncommon. In any case, I highly doubt that a lack of antisemitism is why the Democrats aren’t doing well with the white working class.

In this case, "not being pro-Israel enough" means "only being pro-Israel when it can be used to attack the right, but ignoring it when the left would be the target". That's a substantial objection, not just a twenty Stalins criticism.

In today's day in age, where something like Twitter is unambiguously the public square, this call to action is clearly intended to abridge the freedom of speech even though it wouldn't run afoul of constitutional checks in the court system.

I don't think they are "unambiguously the public square" at all. For the obvious difference the historical public square was, well, public in that it was operated by a government and open to all. Twitter, Facebook, and similar online platforms are very much private. They have a big long list of things you have to agree to in order to use them and are definitely not operated by the government. Maybe they are the best way to disseminate a message to a mass audience, but that was true of television and radio in their time without them becoming the "public square."

Maybe they are the best way to disseminate a message to a mass audience, but that was true of television and radio in their time without them becoming the "public square."

Not so, the public airwaves doctrine put requirements and restrictions on broadcasters to require them to be used in the public interest, and the First Amendment applied to those.

The first amendment applied to the restrictions the government put on broadcasters, yes. Not to the restrictions broadcasters put on what they aired. Symmetrically the first amendment would apply to any government regulation of social media, but not a social media companies policies that users must follow.

Any relationship between this initiative and existing Noahide laws on the books?

Maybe this kind of stuff is needed because people like you deny the Holocaust and argue that Jews control our lives?

Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?

I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying we shouldn't care whether it did or not; certainly not to the extent of making laws about it.

Does everyone in America really need to be right about something that happened on another continent 80 years ago?

Doesn't this cut both ways? "Who cares if the Holocaust even happened - there's a known history of anti-Semitic hate and violence across Europe and America in their pasts, so we're better off just banning it legally to avoid further violence."

How about, "Who cares if the Holocaust even happened" leading into "all of those ethnonationalist things left-inc doesn't like are fine and dandy".

Yes, that is also an option. The point I'm getting at is that if you decide the truth is irrelevant, then you can justify things that people don't want. I assume that Butlerian is probably not in favor of European laws that ban Holocaust Denial.

The Holocaust ended up a quite reliable proxy for whether one has something against Da Joos or not.

I'd worry less about antisemites and more about the government cracking down on wrongthink.

Sometimes, if a thing is "needed" and violates the constitution, that means you still shouldn't get to have it. What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?

What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?

I would say that there is no point, that you should abandon paying lip service to principles you clearly don't believe in and live a life more authentic to the principles that actually govern your actions.

This is nice in theory, but giving yourself licence to break your own oaths on the altar of honest practicality is not a coherent ethic.

Oathbreaking needs to be punished with dire consequences, otherwise nobody can believe anybody's word and all conflict is total war.

In this case it means the only reasonable form of dissidence is armed terrorism since the State will always be able to justify any means to any ends and is bound by no chains of law.

Defection is the only rational behavior against defect-bot.

Looks good to me.

The most invasive part is potentially deplatforming some people on Twitter. Anything which discourages treating that cesspit as a “public square” is a net good in my book.

All the rest looks like boring cultural initiatives. Business as usual for the NEA and friends! Hardly worth being a Concerned Citizen over, no?

Why would these actions discourage the treatment of those platforms as a "public square"? They will continue to fulfill that function while they deplatform content that criticizes Jewish power or anything else deemed antisemitic by the IHR definition. Their purpose is to set the boundaries of acceptable speech within the public square, and the boundaries of acceptable speech will entail incessant criticism of white people with a zero-tolerance ban on criticizing Jews.

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Obligatory reminder that one of the first actions Biden took upon taking office was rescinding Trump's executive order banning executive-branch training that makes these sorts of claims about white people.

Edit: It wasn't limited to white people, but it was widely understood that nobody with any real power in the executive branch wanted to run trainings that made similar claims about people of any other race.

Do you have further information for that?

My first thought is that it was performative deTrumpification—he did something, so it’s got to go. If it was clearing the path for anti-white training, I haven’t really seen the follow through.

It was this executive order, repealed on Biden's first day in office.

Here's Biden's 2023 follow-on 'whole of government' "Equity" EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/

It's chock-a-block with the government's plans to:

  • stuff every agency full of DEI commissars ("requir[ing] agencies to designate senior leaders accountable for implementing the equity mandate")

  • giving those commissars increased control and oversight over the agency's policymaking and enforcement decisions ("instruct[ing] agencies to consider bolstering the capacity of their civil rights offices");

  • directing the agencies to slant everything they do through DEI analysis ("direct[ing] agencies to produce Equity Action Plans annually and report to the public on their progress");

  • ensuring that resources will be allocated to the DEI commissars to carry out this new institutionalized and systemic racism/sexism/heterophobia ("direct[ing] the White House Office of Management and Budget to support agencies’ Equity Action Plans");

  • increasing the amount of racial, sexual, and gendered discrimination and graft in federal contracting ("formaliz[ing] the President’s goal of increasing the share of federal contracting dollars awarded to small disadvantaged business by 50 percent by 2025"); and

  • carefully pruning the collection and dissemination of federally-collected data and statistics so that these progressive DEI shibboleths can't be challenged ("focusing [agency OCR] efforts on emerging threats like algorithmic discrimination in automated technology" and "further promot[ing] data equity and transparency").

What do you mean? There's been reports of CRT training in the military since then.

I don’t honestly have a great handle on what constitutes CRT. I guess I’d believe that the military has picked it up; if they did, it was probably down to the executive.

In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne. The closest we got to Internet-activist talking points was “race-blind isn’t good enough.” I wanted to see Trump’s EO so I could tell whether that would have made it past.

In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne.

You keep saying this as if you don't want to admit what's happening. https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/

And then when you're given evidence you forget all about it by next week. Is this deliberate?

My reply is simply, "which do you expect me to trust? Some guy on the internet, or my lying eyes?"

ETA: it is amusingly on brand to though see LockMart chase [latest thing] off a fucking cliff but I also suppose that I am in no position to cast stones.

By "off a fucking cliff" do you mean "they will continue receiving lucrative government contracts until the collapse of the American Empire"?

Wait, why did I get notified here? Was there a ping?

I keep saying this because it matches my experience. No one was giving me this evidence last time I raised the subject. Or the other time which got a little sidetracked by some guy ranting about socialism. So no, it's not deliberate. I'm just clueless.

arjin's example was better, anyway. Coincidentally, it's the same workshop, same year, and the same smug journalist blowing the whistle.

I don’t honestly have a great handle on what constitutes CRT.

It never ceases to amaze me how precise people's confusion on critical theory is. But if anyone's curious, a one sentence summary would be: dividing society into oppressor races and oppressed races, and analyzing social problems through that lens.

Or if you want something more in-depth and from the horses mouth, you can read something like Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.

In the defense industry, diversity training has remained fairly anodyne

Is this going to be like that time you asked someone for an example of segregation, I gave you a link to segregated housing, you went "holy shit, how is this legal", and promptly refused to change your mind about anything? I wouldn't call this anodyne but YMMV.

You've convinced me. I won't try to pretend that's anodyne. So yeah, I'm seriously unsettled, and I'm reevaluating whether I've been misreading the messaging at my company.

I really didn't believe we were getting stuff like that. Given the level of cross-pollination in defense, it's unlikely that we are much less woke than LockMart. I could believe that the messaging is very stratified, and that expensive, controversial workshops are only spent on the upper management. Or it's possible that I've just had my head in the sand.

For what it's worth, you convinced me that people are successfully bringing back segregated housing, too. I stood by my belief that Pynewacket was being hyperbolic, but I was naïve to assume that sort of project would be banned.

I do agree that there are a couple of ringers thrown in here that may be concerning (particularly the hate speech one, which is a clear end run around the Constitution), but I don't believe for a moment that it's just those parts that SecureSignals is objecting to.

I’m not sure this changes anything except for costing money.

Does anyone believe the Biden admin wasn’t already ‘encouraging online platforms to combat antisemitic misinformation’ or whatever?

The propaganda stuff literally just looks like excuses to spread money around to left wing NGO’s.

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