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Notes -
Is the left-right distinction really the relevant political metric we should look at the in US?
The president of NYU's student bar association lost their job offer after expressing support for Hamas. I say they, because it's a trans person who also happens to be black. Can you hit higher on the diversity bingo? Well, take the wrong side where Israel is involved and apparently that does not help you. And it's not like NYU is a conservative campus.
I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives). But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism. So, this isn't a case of being a leftist or a rightist. It's a case of being against perceived Jewish interests. Sometimes people talk about the progressive stack and we have once again found out that being black and trans is no defence if you go against Jews. No such punishment against being anti-White. This seems to imply two things:
The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.
People who claim Jews are White must explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does. In other words, Jews have relative privilege in America in a way that is not available to Whites.
If a Jew expressed support for a white nationalist group or a Christian anti-trans group, I'd expect them to lose a student bar association job.
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Simpler explanation - a strain of influential white people enjoy being culturally pegged, influential jews don't.
The reason why whites are at the bottom is not because they were put at the bottom, but because they chose it. To revel in the guilt. Don't ask me why, but they do. This trans black woman activist has probably met and insulted enough powerful people with means to end her career or something milder - like hiring someone to kneecap her. But they didn't.
Jews push back. Powerful whites don't yet because it is usually other whites that pay the price.
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I don't think this is true. For example, when black nationalists (not sure how better to describe Black Hebrew Israelites) murder 5 Jews in a terrorist attack, progressive sources just leave the ethnicity/photo/motives of the perpetrator out.
https://archive.ph/VyNhJ https://archive.ph/hqN5U#selection-1714.3-1724.0
When there is an increase in antisemitic attacks, there's a distinct lack of curiosity as to who is doing them - at most a brief mention that it's (surprisingly!) not white nationalists.
https://archive.ph/zL1P1 https://archive.ph/XOjPZ
You need to look on social media to find out who actually did it: https://www.facebook.com/assemblymandovhikind/videos/1899927243445157/
I think this guy was just exceptionally dumb for doing it literally 1-2 days later.
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I think it's more that they supported terrorists right after a terrorist massacre of innocent civilians. If they had just kept their mouth shut for a few weeks while this was in the news then they would have been fine. I'm not Jewish and I don't really care about Israel all that much but I also would have wanted this person fired. This person sounds like they are a psychotic narcissist with no impulse control and would be awful to work with. That is on top of being a massive PR liability for the firm.
I posted about this earlier, but this whole saga has been shocking to me how these leftists can't even pretend to have sympathy for real victims of a tragedy FOR JUST A FEW DAYS! Instead, they are crying about Israel propaganda and how there's no evidence that these women slaughtered at the music festival were raped. It's like okay fine they weren't raped (even though let's be honest there's a good chance they were). Instead 250 plus civilians were just shot in cold blood then stripped naked and spat upon (literally) while they drove around in trucks celebrating their death and posting it to social media to humiliate them and their families. Even if you pick out that one piece of information, it's still so awful that the raping really doesn't matter one way or another if a rape happened.
All this person had to do was shut up until Israel messes up and kills civilians in their counter attack and they could have gone back to larping as a freedom fighter while working on Wall Street. This person is not a serious person. This whole saga makes me update my priors that Hanania is right about Civil Rights law being the biggest reason for this. What other reason could there be someone so ridiculous is given such an amazing opportunity and red carpet rolled out to invite them to the elite? The sad part is they will still land on their feet and this will probably end up helping them.
At the end of the day though, this isn't really their fault. They were trained to make these kinds of comments with no repercussions. In fact, they probably benefited from these kinds of hot takes. If you look back at their social media history and application letters to elite institutions, it was probably full of similar remarks that they were praised for. And any negative reactions they probably dismissed as bigotry or that the people on the left criticizing them were "liberals". However, they finally ran up against something that at least humans have enough dignity left to hold them accountable for at least for a few months. People don't want to work with someone who supports terrorists who murder innocent civilians and records it for social media. However, in a few months, this will pass and they will have some other elite position making lots of money. This is just the world we live in.
Israel has already done this. Israel has already been doing this for some time, including shooting unarmed journalists. They even sent police to physically assault the pallbearers of her coffin during her funeral (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/24/un-israelis-fired-shots-that-killed-journalist-abu-akleh). It isn't like Hamas' latest attack is some sudden new change in the conflict - the Israelis already have done all the things you have said they should have waited for them to do, and has repeatedly been doing these things for years, rape included. While I absolutely agree that this person is larping as a freedom fighter despite having one of the most privileged positions in the country (if you are even a contender for a job in BIGLAW you are actually privileged in the real sense of the word), if I try to see things from their perspective it isn't particularly hard to understand.
From everything I know about modern day left wing political ideology, it is very clearly diametrically opposed to almost everything about the state of Israel. Israel is a white supremacist (jews do not get to renounce white privilege), colonial ethnostate that is brutally oppressing people of colour, while at the same time being extremely friendly towards Trump and the republican party. Left-wing activists frequently and publicly compare the treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa, a regime that they condemned and boycotted in no uncertain terms. Israel is a far, FAR greater example of the kind of things that modern left wing politics define themselves in opposition to than any European society or indeed America itself. I'm not one of them, but if you're ensconced in that ideology, Israel is already practically an illegitimate state. Why then would you not celebrate one of the most visible incarnations of a political ideology you hate receiving violent resistance? Factor in the left-wing idolisation of figures like Che Guevara and a shift in attitude towards "punching nazis" being an admirable activity and this all makes sense from their perspective.
From the point of view of the western left and centre-left, Israel is also just a really right-wing country in a way which makes it less sympathetic. The only reason why the current (until the formation of the national unity war government) "National Camp" coalition between the right, the far right and the religious right doesn't have a permanent majority is that Naftali Bennett is outraged by Bibi's corruption - if Likud dumped him for a non-crooked leader then there would be a solid 55% of the vote for aligned right-wing parties. And the principal opposition comes from the liberal centre-right (Yesh Atid) and a bunch of retired generals (what is left of Blue & White).
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I think this one needs the asterisk that it's the Law school, and the company that dropped their job offer is a law firm. Law is probably one of the most Jewish careers out there. It's entirely plausible that the law firm has enough Jewish associates that they would have major problems if a bunch of them quit, or threatened to, because they hired a Hamas-supporter as a new junior associate. That's gotta be the easiest decision in the world for that firm.
It's also very plausible that if this individual happened to be starting in a substantially less Jewish career, this would have been brushed under the rug.
I think they would have had issues at any branded product firm. I bet Pepsi or Bud Light would have fired them too.
The places they may have been able to survive would be at like some industrial company that only insiders know the brands. Maybe a commodity firm like a coal company. Normal white people though have been fired for far less such as ok hand symbol guy at an electric utility. And all the non-branded businesses tend to be red tribe so they probably wouldn’t mind firing a woke person.
A ‘black trans president of the law student association at NYU’ does not deign to seek employment at a non-branded company.
Is there actually reason to hire them since just by description it is strongly hinted that they will be only trouble
Optics, I guess.
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I dunno. I’m pretty far into free speech absolutism, but I’d support firing anyone who openly advocates the ongoing mass murder, rape, and torture of civilians for creating a hostile work environment. At a law firm!? Disregarding morals completely, you’d lose every Jewish client, associated business, and employee.
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This would only follow if, for instance, there was a massacre of black people and jews could make similar remarks about the massacre without being fired. Obviously white people are lower, but that doesn't tell us anything about the ordering of the favored groups, or whether they are ordered in any sort of consistent way to begin with.
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Citation needed? I don’t even think you’re wrong that someone willing to make maximally-inflammatory statements about Hamas has probably said some racist nonsense. I am skeptical that it describes the average black progressive. Unless you’re playing with definitions, and saying that the Berniebros and tankies don’t count?
Anyway, the people who “talk about the progressive stack” are wrong. Not least because it’s only observed in the breach. There isn’t a defined hierarchy of privilege, at least not in a way that shields certain groups from criticism. That would defeat the purpose of an ever-shifting battlefield of social dynamics. Goodhart’s law is in full effect. Politics is a social game, and any ideology which doesn’t allow playing the game is no use at all.
I would argue that it’s much more practical to reverse the model: is the victim sympathetic? How diverse/marginalized/dispossessed is the subject of an attack? Can it be described as “punching down?”
Such a model explains the usual incidents of a privileged individual condemned for stomping on a marginalized one. But it also covers cases where the privilege isn’t clear, or “live by the sword” situations where the victim becomes the perpetrator. The difference is who played a better social game.
It explains why intersectionality gets so much attention, despite its anti-inductive nature; listing all the reasons why a group deserves sympathy is the first step in arguing importance. It explains the need for a monolithic model of systematic bias favoring whites, as otherwise, attacks on the solidly Red “basket of deplorables” would be far more risky.
In this case, Mx. Wickman’s statement came at the expense of one of the all-time classics of sympathetic victims: grieving mothers. Or at least that’s how it was portrayed, since I don’t expect many Israeli parents are reading a law school newsletter. The point is that they became a target not by upsetting a fixed stack, but because they looked like an ass for victim-blaming the one group who looked least blameworthy. Blood in the water.
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Even far left activists, as @roystgnr says, very rarely openly advocate the rape and slaughter of whites in explicit terms. You can link to a handful of tweets about crimes against South African farmers, but I’d wager that’s not something most leftists think or even know about.
So the rhetoric supporting Hamas’ actions is arguably more extreme than the average leftist rhetoric about whites, including demands for reparations from congress or whatever.
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Prior to last Friday, taking an anti-Zionist stance would have gotten you applause in progressive circles. For that matter, you're still clear to say "I'm anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" as long as you can resist the urge to openly celebrate massacres of Israeli civilians. Before Friday, you were clear to say Israeli civilians should be massacred.
Alternatively, it implies your model is wrong. That it's not as simple as "people higher up the progressive totem pole get to do what they want and Jews are at the top".
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Jewish concerns are an exception case which exist outside the Progressive hierarchy, because they have their own self-contained culture in which ethnic pride is good (indeed, obligatory). I think It’s important when we discuss “Jewish interests” to note that it’s a small percent of the Jewish whole who are committed to extreme pro-Jewish lobbying, but that these are the ones who are wealthy and/or have courted the wealthy, and have ties to Israel and rabbinical schools. It wouldn’t matter if 70% of Jews were hypothetically pro-Hamas because the remaining 30% are the ones who are well-connected to wealthy politically-active Jewry and all the important rabbis and organizations.
If you are envious of Jewish power then you can build up your own racially-conscious religion which emphasizes shared experiences of tragedy and historical uniqueness. It really is that simple. They can exert influence because they have a self-contained cultural ecosystem where “love of race” is encouraged and comprises half the point of the traditions and rituals.
Is that an exception? I think that progressive culture promotes pride among every ethnicity, except whites. Also, while LGBT is not an ethnicity, it literally has a whole month of pride now. (Even once we have a Wrath month, Envy month, Greed month, Gluttony month, Lust month, and Sloth month, we'll still be 5 sins short of a full calendar of sin.)
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Is this ironic? Are you doing that thing everyone figured that guy who kept deleting his ops was doing, making deliberately terrible arguments that actually weaken the side you appear to be supporting? Why?
What specifically do you disagree with in my comment? The OP is asserting that Jews sit at the top of some progressive status hierarchy totem pole; I’m saying that instead they are outside it due to their culture. Then I explained why I think this is, and what you can do if you envy their position.
They were part of the stack when those tiki torch protests were going on, and when teenagers scribble swastikas on bathroom walls, and when Kanye went off his meds. Everyone is part of the stack/totem pole - that's one of the problems with it, you can't opt out, you are stuck being judged based on characteristics you have no influence over. What the op is missing is that the stack order changes depending on which grifter is most influential at the time, and that instability is part of the point - if you knew exactly how it was ordered, you might hate it but at least you can work with it and plan around it.
As for your suggestion to the 'envious' (sliding in the implication that jealousy is the only reason anyone could object to an ethnic hierarchy), "just go make your own 7000 year old religion" is one of the most ridiculous versions of the "well go make your own magazine/news channel/social media platform/government" meme I've ever heard.
But not every social judgment and censure comes from the “progressive stack”. The reason that Jews can exert the influence they are exerting right now re: Israel is that they have an ethno-centric culture built around self-love which doesn’t care an iota for the progressive stack. That’s why we see Bill Ackman asking for the name of every Harvard student who signed a petition (blaming Israel for the violence) so that he can prevent them from ever working on Wall Street. It’s why Jewish donors can prevent human rights leaders from getting positions at Harvard because they criticized Israel. This exists independently of any progressive status hierarchy.
You can make a religion tomorrow provided that you earnestly believe in the religion. It doesn’t have to be 6000 years old; Talmudic Judaism is no older than Christianity. Mormonism isn’t even 200 years old.
Ackman gets away with that stuff because he is allowed to get away with it, and he is allowed to get away with it because of the position of Jews in the stack. Everyone in the higher tiers of the stack gets to hold onto solidarity and exclusivity that would be called dangerous and frightening if done by a straight white man. Black people also put ingroup solidarity above the progressive stack, why aren't you praising them?
In fact you could consider the civil rights movement the religion black Americans started. We can simplify your message to "Be like black Americans." You'll endorse that right?
Fuck this fucking toilet hole of a planet.
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I think dropping the context around timing here is important. As of now it's not socially-policing pro-palestine view points. It's socially-policing those who support it immediately after a terrorist attack.
If anything it's putting common decency and humanity above intersectionality & showing it's limits.
I'm not sure we're seeing any of the real pushback come from those inside intersectionality disciplines to even make your arguments. Now if/when they do you bring up some points, but it's the none-crazy world that normally lets intersectionality devotes just ramble is finally speaking up.
It's not even just that! There are a number of standard pro-Palestine viewpoints in that message, but "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." isn't a middle-of-the-road pro-Palestine viewpoint, it's a pro-Hamas-massacring-civilians-without-consequences viewpoint. Merely pointing out Israel's past wrongdoing with such timing might have been tasteless, but excusing Hamas' wrongdoing is what crossed the line to outright evil.
But as long as I'm in @MelodicBerries ' thread:
My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category. In the wake of that Las Vegas festival massacre, was there anyone like a student bar association president who said "Well, country music fans, you know they had it coming" but got away with that?
I'm not generally thrilled with the way "safety" gets used as a buzzword to cancel people, but there are "safety" fears where your potential coworker might say mean words in the office, and then there are safety fears where your potential coworker believes innocent blood is a good way to terrorize their enemies and you can't help but notice that you happen to be filled with conveniently located blood.
Were any of these statements (which I'll presume you read, because just making that sort of thing up has no place here, right?) as bad as excusing mass murder while the bodies are still being counted? If so, then your ethnic bias theory would deserve another look. But if not, then I hope you'll reexamine the "terrorist massacres are especially bad" theory and figure out why (a different direction of ethnic bias, perhaps?) it wasn't as easy as it should have been to come up with that theory on your own.
Off the top of my head some of the public statements about the race-motivated prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine would seem to contradict this. Not to mention it actually becoming U.S. government policy and killing many thousands of people. There are probably closer analogues, but I remember that particular one well and wrote this post about it at the time:
The CDC has officially recommended ACIP's vaccine distribution plan that deprioritizes the elderly, even though they estimate this will save less lives, in part because more elderly people are white
The most overt quote mentioned in that post would be this one:
The New York Times: The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?
Or from the same article a quote from a member of the ACIP committee (the people responsible for writing the CDC's recommended prioritization):
I think even the dry language of ACIP itself would be beyond the pale, like when they list "Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65" in red as a reason to not prioritize them. If it was instead "Whites under-represented" or "Jews over-represented" I do not think they would have remained in charge of writing the CDC's recommendations, nor do I think states would have adopted those recommendations.
You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated. That is the main reason I said the analogy is not particularly close. But at the same time saying "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." is less extreme than actually saying that loss of life is a good thing, let alone using your position in the U.S. government bureaucracy to deliberately cause that loss of life and being permitted to do so.
Regardless of exactly where the line is for anti-white statements and (more importantly) anti-white policies, it is obvious that they would not and could not have done something like this in the name of increasing black or jewish deaths instead. It is the product of explicit institutional racial bias. (Note that their policy actually did kill more black people because of how much more vulnerable the elderly are, it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. And naturally it killed more jewish people as well.) Of course, that doesn't prove anything about the ordering of favored groups against each other like the OP was arguing. It just shows that social justice disfavors white people and is influential enough to shape the decisions of institutions like the CDC/ACIP and the states that followed their recommendations or prioritized by race outright.
There was some… fairly extreme partisanship in 2020-21, and the Covid hawks had very strong and obvious reasons to come down on one side rather than the other.
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Those are good examples, logically; I just doubt that public reaction is "logical but philo-semitic", I think it's "emotional". Jewish-Americans are classified as white, and average older than other white Americans, so they were also getting burned by the same policy.
I think I'd have to. You're right that that policy was a heinous crime, but it's the sort of crime whose magnitude can only be reasonably grasped through statistics, rather than through video of screaming bloody women being kidnapped and festivals strewn with bodies.
Heinous crimes in healthcare regulation, from a logical standpoint, are a dime a dozen, and nobody seems to do anything about most of them. The FDA dragged its feet on approving beta-blockers for a decade, with something like a hundred thousand deaths in that time of people who could have lived years longer, and I think literally the only person I've seen vociferously complain about it was David Friedman, a source with negligible popularity.
COVID healthcare decisions were an especially weird instance of this. Pfizer changed its vaccine test protocols from their original design to avoid examining the results until after the election, with no better public reason than "er, we were kinda nervous" handwaving, in the face of public demands that they not give "the Trump vaccine" a big high-profile win right before people went to the polls ... and this time I think the biggest champion of "shouldn't we have gotten a bigger head start and saved tens of thousands more lives" was Steve Sailer, a source with negative popularity. When half the public seemed to think that the vaccines are a deadly big Pharma scam, and the other half of the public seemed to think that they're magic spells from technocrat experts (Biden said flat-out "You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations" during the Delta wave; even the original tests were only 90% effective!), is it really so surprising that nobody was rising up to complain that the technocrat experts were making mistakes allocating vaccine doses?
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Really feels like you're fitting the evidence to the theory here. Prominent Jews are still cancelled for making racist/transphobic remarks. It's not that Jews are invincible, it's that white people are seen as a fair target.
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College students have been engaging in consequence-free (well, except for Rachel Corrie) protesting of Israel for decades.
I mean will the red tribe start using this stuff as a weapon against progressives the way ‘racism’ gets used against conservatives? There’s clearly appetite for it(and if you have to string up nick fuentes to do it, who cares, he was a clown).
This was a massive element of the taking down of Corbyn's Labour party in the UK, the press were on a hunt for any and all potentially anti-semitic comments from leftwing figures. (To be clear, they did find a fair few.)
That was coming from the pro-establishment left much more than the right.
Yeah? I'd say it was both, there were loads of gotcha articles by Times reporters for instance that dug up internet comments made by MPs in their youth and such.
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The reason for losing that support has nothing to do with being pro/anti-Jew. It has to do with the viral videos of Hamas actively massacring civilians who were not threats to them in any way. Right now, the world is entirely aware of what Hamas is doing. That very much sticks in people's minds when they see a person endorse Hamas. The fact that you jumped straight to "Jews are at the top of the progressive totem pole" is insane.
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