Saturday Commentary and Review #168
"The Protestant Roots of Wokeness", Indonesia "Sanctions-Proofing" Its Own Economy, Rwanda the "Autocracy", "MAGA Communism", The Oral History of PREDATOR (1987)
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
A firestorm has erupted in certain corners of the political internet over the question of the genealogy of what we call “Wokeness”. On one side are those who insist on crediting it to the significant influence of Jewish Americans in academia, politics, governance, etc. On the other side are those who take a longer view and argue that its roots can be found in 19th century Protestant progressivism.
For all intents and purposes, Wokeness is now synonymous with progressive politics, and this means that in order to tackle this question of genealogy, we have to look at the actual history of progressivism in US politics. To me, it is very much an open and shut case; the progressive political movements of 19th century America were entirely Protestant affairs, ranging from Abolitionism to Woman’s Suffrage. This bled into the early 20th century, when females finally did get the vote, and Prohibition was enacted.
Some people tend to overlook these significant victories (with Prohibition’s repeal an obvious defeat) and instead focus on more recent political movements in which American Jews have punched way above their weight. This is a mistake for the very simple reason that the central aspect of this debate is the roots of progressivism, and 19th century American Jews were nowhere near as influential as their 20th century relatives were in those political currents.
Marxism began to make inroads in the USA by the end of the 19th century, but it became turbocharged with the arrival of immigrant Jewish populations from Eastern Europe. Socialist trade unions sprung up in places like New York City that catered specifically to these new arrivals, de facto rather than de jure as its ideological underpinnings rejected ethnic sectarianism. As Jews began to climb up society’s ladder, they found themselves within academia at precisely the time when Critical Theory began to be shaped and formed, and when what we now refer to as “Cultural Marxism” got its start. Even though this was the age of FDR and his progressive “New Deal”, progressivism was becoming more multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, with the irony that religious faith took a back seat to these very same politics.
Steve Sailer has waded into this debate, insisting that the roots of American progressivism are in fact Protestant:
But Protestant history, which was long recognized as absolutely central to American history, is increasingly seen as boring, and thus all this is fading from consciousness.
Moreover, to the left, being aware of this fundamental U.S. narrative sounds bigoted. While to the right, the notion that the woke call is coming from inside the house is distressing. Thus, we see the obsession among callow rightists about declaring wokeness a foreign, un-American import by Marxists or Jews or Jewish Marxists or whatever.
I think that there is a lot of truth to Steve’s suggestion that Protestant American history is considered boring. The preachers of those days were the rock stars of their era, but who these days can name even five of them?
Yet, a recent article in American Affairs by Sheluyang Peng called “More Christian than the Christians” makes a strong case for wokeness as an outgrowth of traditional Northern U.S. Protestant tendencies in an age of declining faith. In historian David Hackett Fischer’s famous four-layer model of British ethnicities in America, the northernmost Americans were the descendants of fiercely moralistic, cancel-culture-addicted New England Puritans. The next layer south traces culturally back to the less obnoxious Pennsylvania Quakers. Then come the feisty Scots-Irish of the Appalachians and Ozarks, and finally the conservative lowland Southerners.
Peng writes:
…wokeness appears to be a syncretic blend of Puritanism and Quakerism. Woke adherents value elite education and moralizing, seem obsessed with rooting out heretics, adhere to orthodoxy, and display a sense of personal salvation, traits that were all characteristic of Puritans, while also displaying the radical openness and commitment to egalitarianism that characterized the Quakers.
Puritans tended to be intense and Quakers nice. Put them together and you get an intolerant religion of tolerance.
Indeed, the entire American culture war might be best understood as a war over the future of Christianity, even if the combatants themselves do not recognize it in these terms. The talking points of both sides seem stuck in a previous generation, with conservatives continuing to stoke fears of Marxism and progressives continuing to stoke fears of Christian theocracy. The big irony is that it is progressives who are the new theocrats enforcing a Christian-derived morality, while conservatives increasingly abandon Christian churches and lurch toward economically populist proposals, views that Reagan-era conservatives would have called (and some still call) “Marxist.”
This switcheroo has led many commentators to warn liberals and leftists that they might soon regret seeing the end of the Christian Right, as the Post-Christian Right will be a very different beast.
On American Jews:
While there is no question that Jews achieved remarkable levels of influence in America in the later 20th century (although that may be fading at present because the antiwhite quotas promoted by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement inevitably hurt Jewish chances of being hired, whether Jews personally feel they are white or not), Peng sees Jewish liberalism as, historically, a triumph of assimilation:
Whereas anti-Semites today like to blame Jews in academia for “cultural Marxism,” the correlation actually runs the other way: Jews gave up their faith and assimilated into liberal Christian values, including sometimes literally converting to Christianity. The Jews that resisted assimilation, Orthodox Jews, are a solidly Republican bloc. A similar assimilation is occurring among Asian Americans, who have swelled the ranks of the same colleges over the past few decades.
I think that there is a lot of merit in the idea that Jewish liberalism is a “triumph of assimilation”, but it overlooks one key fact: the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (Heal the World). Jewish friends tell me that this is not a central nor mandatory element of Judaism, but they do concede that it is a powerful one. It also perfectly overlaps with progressive politics as they exist in today’s USA.
(Note: Steve’s essay is not a thorough exploration/analysis of this subject, so for those interested in a deeper dive, check out the essay that he is referencing here.)
Steve chose to conduct a rudimentary analysis via combing through The Atlantic’s List of the 100 Most Influential Americans (2006). He chose this edition as it pre-dated the arrival of the Wokeness deluge:
The top ten names, for instance, are Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, John Marshall, Martin Luther King, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson.
Some biases are evident. The historians mostly seem to vote for individuals about whom they can find something to admire, so Roger Taney (author of the disastrous Dred Scott decision), Jefferson Davis, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace don’t make the top 100. But in this prewoke era, instead of disqualifying Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears, he ranks No. 18 with the tagline: “The first great populist: he found America a republic and left it a democracy.”
Counting:
I count ten women: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Addams, Betty Friedan, Margaret Mead, and Mary Baker Eddy. Not a bad list, although I might argue that Margaret Mead’s mentor Franz Boas was actually more influential in originating the now-dominant social constructionist perspective in academia.
Eight blacks: King, Jackie Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Louis Armstrong, Thurgood Marshall, Nat Turner, and Booker T. Washington. Probably a couple too many, but sensible choices.
One Arab (Ralph Nader) and no Hispanics, Asians, or American Indians. Nader is a good selection to represent the rise of lawyers over the past sixty years in our current NIMBY era.
One striking aspect is how many of the 72 most influential white male Protestants could reasonably be called liberal, progressive, or radical.
more:
Still, white male Protestants who were considered on the progressive side in their own time would likely include Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Paine, Harry Truman, Earl Warren, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Jennings Bryan, John Dewey, LBJ, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Law Olmsted, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Bill Gates, Horace Mann, William James, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Benjamin Spock, Rev. Lyman Beecher, and John Steinbeck.
Conservatives tend to be a little rarer: e.g., John Marshall, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, William Faulkner, Richard Nixon, and a number of businessmen like J.P. Morgan and Sam Walton.
and:
I note seven Jews: Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Robert Oppenheimer, Samuel Gompers, Friedan, Walter Lippmann, and Sam Goldwyn.
That’s a healthy number, but it might be fewer than you’d expect from 21st-century discourse. For example, Emma Lazarus of the “huddled masses” poem is now often depicted as a founding father whose word is law on immigration. But she didn’t make the list.
In general, Jews didn’t get here quite in time to be extremely influential on the long course of American history. This fact tends to annoy both Jews and anti-Semites, both of whom want to overstate Jewish influence.
Since the debate revolves around roots, a better methodology would have been to do a year by year analysis, comparing Protestants to Jews (and Catholics). I will admit that the result would have been the same anyway.
When US policy planners decided to rollout the severe sanctions regime targeting Russia in the wake of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, there must have been a point where they had to weigh its pros and cons with respect to how such a punishing program would be viewed in the parts of the world not formally allied to the USA. They must have concluded that the rewards would outweigh the risks attached to it, and that proceeding with the rollout would be the best course of action.
Unfortunately for the Americans, the sanctions regime has been a catastrophic failure, and Russia’s biggest success. It failed to tank the Rouble and cripple the Russian economy, for one. Just as importantly, it put much of the world on notice that they too could be on the receiving end of such treatment, and unlike the Russians, they might not be able to defy them so successfully if the Eye of Sauron turns in their direction.
The over-reliance on sanctions regimes by the USA has done considerable damage to its diplomatic standing on several continents. Viewed as a perennial bully by much of the world, many countries are caught between the power of the US economy and Dollar, and the desire to maximize their own national sovereignty. Many world leaders are watching closely to see if the USA and the EU actually do steal the roughly $350 Billion USD Russia has parked in western banks over the years. Critics of US foreign policy point to this specific threat as one with a “fat tail” in that trust in western banking would significantly erode overnight should the temptation to seize Russian reserves be too much to overcome.
Many are looking to the BRICS as a potential saviour, but all of you know that I am very bearish on this idea. Still, the desire to “sanctions-proof” national economies is a strong one that is trending upwards. The world’s largest Islamic country, Indonesia, is the best example of a state currently not involved in any of the world’s present major conflicts seeking to make their own economy sanctions-proof:
Indonesian Ambassador to Russia Jose Tavares confirmed last week that a $1.14 billion contract signed for the acquisition of 11 Su-35S fighter aircraft from Russia remains in force, in spite of widespread unconfirmed reports and speculation since early 2019 that it had been terminated due to threats of sanctions by the United States Treasury Department. The ambassador added that Jakarta was waiting for the situation to become “more accommodating” before returning to implementation of the contract, stating that it was “put on hold to avoid certain potential inconveniences” – which was seen to refer to the threat of sanctions and other forms of Western pressure. The acquisition of a new generation of Russian fighters would end the hopes, widely expressed in the Western world, for the Indonesian Air Force to operate a fully NATO-compatible combat fleet. The deal has potentially significant strategic implications amid growing uncertainty regarding Jakarta’s future geopolitical alignment.
How many of you were aware that the USA uses the threat of sanctions to push its own military hardware sales?
Some background:
A central factor leading Indonesia to first acquire Russian fighter aircraft in the 1990s was a growing perception that diversifying away from Western aircraft was critical to the country’s security interests. Following a military takeover in 1965-66, which was supported and heavily facilitated by the U.S., Britain, and Australia, Jakarta significantly downgraded ties with the Soviet Union and China and went on to exclusively operate Western combat aircraft, while selling its most capable pre-coup Soviet fighters to the U.S. for adversary training purposes. This dependence on Western aircraft proved devastating for Indonesian combat aviation capabilities in the 1990s, when the U.S. and its European allies imposed multiple rounds of arms embargoes on the country over its occupation of East Timor. This grounded the majority of the Indonesian fleet and further expanded the superiority of Australian aviation in the region, as Canberra moved to bring East Timor into its sphere of influence. The country’s Su-27 acquisition in 1997 was accordingly referred to in the New York Times headline at the time as a “slap at [the] U.S.”
Aside from the risk of embargoes, the U.S. has also consistently offered Indonesia lower-end combat aircraft than those it has supplied to Singapore and Australia, with this mirroring Washington’s guarantee of conventional superiority to Israeli forces in the Middle East and similarly ensuring the perpetuation of a balance of power favorable to the interests of its closer security partners. Thus, much as has been the case for multiple Arab states, Indonesia has seen acquisitions of Russian equipment as the only way to break away from these artificial restrictions, with military officials in the country having repeatedly expressed reservations regarding American armaments due to Washington’s unwillingness to provide its more capable systems, as Russia was. For example, America’s top fighter, the F-35, is off the table for Indonesia, and even if provided would not be built to the same standard as those supplied to Singapore or Australia, while remaining far more likely to be embargoed than the fleets of its two closely U.S.-aligned neighbors. Having placed no comparable restrictions and shown no remotely comparable propensity to embargo Indonesia, Russia has accordingly long been valued as a dependable supplier.
Jakarta gets more bang for the buck by choosing Russian fighter jets.
Sanctions-proofing:
While it is unlikely to move ahead with more than two of these, the Su-35 retains a unique strategic advantage, as the only “sanctions-proof” fighter that is not built to a NATO standard, and does not rely heavily on American inputs.
Indonesia’s continued interest in the Su-35 notably fits into a broader emphasis on “sanctions proofing” its economy, which reflects the country’s “free and active” foreign policy, and its desire to remain aloof from the growing competition between the U.S. and its partners on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. The perceived need to insulate its economy from possible Western sanctions appears to have intensified as Western pressure on the country has grown over its economic ties to Beijing and Moscow. While a growing number of countries across the non-Western world have since early 2022 taken significant steps to insulate themselves from possible Western sanctions, after unprecedented sanctions were placed on Russia after the escalation of war in Ukraine in February, Indonesia has been one of the few countries where officials have specifically cited the sanctions regime against Moscow as a reason for doing so.
A notable example was President Joko Widodo’s call in March 2023 for his country to abandon the use of Western payment networks like MasterCard and Visa, asking the public to use the Domestic Government Credit Card payment system implemented 12 months prior. “Be very careful. We must remember the sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russia. Visa and Mastercard could be a problem,” he warned, adding that without them “we can be independent.” “If we use our own platforms, and everybody is using them, from ministries and local administrations to municipal governments, then we can be more secure,” he added.
This call came five months after Bank Indonesia urged diversification away from over-reliance on the US dollar:
The president’s statement came five months after Bank Indonesia had urged a transition to the use of alternative national currencies for international payments to reduce Indonesian financial markets’ reliance on the U.S. dollar. As Nugroho Joko Prastowo, the head of the Bank Indonesia’s Solo Representative Office, said at the time, “About 90 percent of export-import payments are conducted in U.S. dollars, while the share of Indonesian direct exports to the U.S. is estimated at only 10 percent, and U.S. imports account for 5 percent.”
Fighter jet purchases and sanction-proofing go “hand in hand”:
Ultimately Indonesia’s efforts to “sanctions proof” its economy and to “embargo proof” its air force go hand in hand, with the possibility remaining highly significant that the U.S. and other Western states will seek to further escalate pressure on the country over its continued close ties with China and Russia. Indeed, the conclusion that the threat of sanctioning Indonesia over its Su-35 acquisition had alienated the country from Washington fit into a much broader trend, as Western analysts widely warned that a vast array of secondary sanctions on Russian trading partners were alienating much of the non-Western world.
Much as Jakarta resisted Western pressure to shun Moscow, so too has it flatly resisted pressure over relations with China, a notable example being the U.S. pressure to limit ties with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. The Indonesian government has instead continued to plan new collaborative “strategic projects” with the firm, while relying on China as its largest and fastest-growing trade and investment partner, dimming Western hopes that Jakarta would align itself against Beijing. Considering the precedents of Western countries sanctioning their adversaries’ trading partners – the imposition of secondary sanctions on Russian trading partners from India to the United Arab Emirates being recent cases in point – Jakarta has significant grounds to be wary of future Western efforts to target its economy.
Can you blame them?
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
President Bukele of El Salvador has managed to end the stranglehold that violent, murderous gangs had over his country by arresting them and locking them up. In response to this, western media and NGOs have continuously criticized him for “democratic backsliding” and “human rights violations”. This gives the appearance to many that a horrific level of violence is the price that we must pay for respecting so-called “human rights”.
Bukele is not an isolated case. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame is also coming under increasing attacks for “violating human rights”, with many charging him with being an “autocrat”. Kagame has led Rwanda’s renaissance, a country that only three decades ago saw extreme sectarian violence that could safely be argued to be an actual genocide. The country’s economic and social turnaround has been quite the feat. Nevertheless, he is doing it in the “wrong” way. Furthermore, he is upsetting many important people in the West through his and Rwanda’s participation in a proposed program to re-settle migrants in the UK in his country.
Although the prospect of this resettlement is slim due to the massive lead that Labour UK has in the polls, it has attracted interest elsewhere. The Germans are quite interested in striking a similar deal with Rwanda, which is why German publication Der Spiegel has published this hit piece on the country and on Paul Kagame:
A number of journalists, politicians and other emissaries have already been led through the Hope Hostel in Kigali, and now it is the turn of Jens Spahn. This is where migrants from Great Britain are to be housed in the future. The idea is that instead of being granted asylum in Great Britain, migrants will be sent straight to Rwanda – in order to deter others from making the trip. It is a plan that has triggered intense international criticism and was briefly suspended by the courts. Nevertheless, Spahn would like to see the EU make a similar deal. The prospects are good, Spahn says in Kigali.
Migrants are supposed to go to Europe, not to East Africa.
Rwanda, though, is an autocratic country. Government opponents are harassed and persecuted, with quite a few of them disappearing without a trace or losing their lives in dubious circumstances, both at home and abroad. The regime has spies everywhere that report suspicious behavior. Elections are neither free nor fair.
Seventeen international media outlets, including DER SPIEGEL, German public broadcaster ZDF and the Austrian daily Der Standard have spent recent months looking into human rights violations and acts of repression committed by the Rwandan regime. The joint investigative project was coordinated by the non-profit journalism association Forbidden Stories under the name Rwanda Classified. As reporting has revealed, the long arm of the Rwandan regime even reaches as far as Germany.
There are two primary narratives that can be applied to Rwanda, the small, East African country of 14 million. The first focuses on how the country managed to rise up from the horrors of its past – of how it emerged from the brutal 1994 genocide just 30 years ago to become a country striding into modernity with a growing economy and a capital city that looks at times not unlike a European metropolis. A model country that can be a worthy partner for international treaties. That is the story that Western politicians prefer to hear.
But there is a different narrative. It focuses on critics who have been silenced, on political assassinations at home and abroad. It includes the fact that Rwandan media outlets have become mouthpieces of the dictatorship. And the fact that critical journalists have disappeared – like John Williams Ntwali.
“Dictatorship”.
“Mouthpieces”.
Check this out:
Other Rwandans in German exile have also reported experiencing harassment. Some say they have received threatening phone calls from anonymous numbers. "Sometimes they didn’t say anything at all, for 10 to 15 seconds,” says Emmanuel Ndahayo, who used to work for a Rwandan opposition party. Or they would say: "We know where you are.” Many say they are afraid of possible consequences for their families and friends back home. It’s not uncommon for family members of critics to disappear without a trace or to receive threats.
These are the “human rights violations”, I guess. As for critics disappearing without a trace back home, the report offers little to substantiate these claims.
Officials and diplomats from several EU countries regularly express criticism of the Rwandan government and openly speak of human rights violations. The Germans, by contrast, prefer restraint and have shown a preference for positive news from Kigali, says one European diplomat. And there is a fair amount of that. BionTech has just opened a vaccine factory in Rwanda, for example, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock traveling to the country for the occasion. Not far from the BionTech location, VW operates a car assembly plant and also runs a taxi app in the city. Its cars can be seen everywhere. The head of VW Mobility in Kigali used to work for the Rwandan government, and his profile on X still includes the hashtag #TeamPK, which is used by supporters of Paul Kagame.
Africa, long-starved of foreign direct investment, needs to focus on human rights instead, I guess.
Rwanda entered into a sponsorship deal with Bayern Munich, Germany’s most famous football club:
The episode shows how Rwanda is using pro-regime elements in the diaspora to exert influence and boost its image abroad. Organizations loyal to the government regularly also hold Rwanda Day, on which Rwandans living in exile gather to celebrate their homeland. Such an event took place in Germany in 2019. During Rwanda Day, regime opponents are routinely intimidated, according to interviews conducted with victims of such bullying by Human Rights Watch.
All countries seek to boost their image abroad. This is the simplest way to attract foreign investment. This report makes it out to be some sort of crime.
Please also note the role of the Soros organization “Human Rights Watch” in this charade.
This hit piece also has a sponsor as revealed to us at the end:
This piece is part of the Global Societies series. The project runs for three years and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Kagame has run afoul of certain interests due to his willingness to import migrants and take them off of the UK’s hands. He must also have upset some western financial interests to earn such a poorly-composed hit piece.
“Is the internet real life?”, is a question posed by many these days. My answer is that it both is and isn’t. Our lives are now so embedded in the online world that sometimes it is difficult to separate the two. At the same time, the importance of the online realm is too often over-exaggerated, even though it frequently bleeds into the “Meatspace”.
Allow me to be an “oldfag” for a second and criticize Gen Z (aka “Zoomers”). This cohort has a serious inability to separate the real from the merely online. In their heads (apologies for generalizing), their favourite online personalities are just as powerful, influential, and significant as heads of states or military chiefs. This creates a distorting effect, one of which is the difficulty that we olds have in discussing political issues with them. There is an obvious generational gap.
On the other hand, we olds have to understand how the world has changed and how new generations brought up almost entirely online have and will influence politics and culture going forward. One example is that certain internet personalities will pop up from time to time and be given large platforms upon which they can present themselves and their ideas. One such example of this is the online youth movement known as “MAGA Communism”:
In the last few years, a self-styled political movement that sounds like a contradiction in terms has gained ground online: “Maga communism”.
Promoted by its two most prominent spokespeople, Haz Al-Din, 27, and Jackson Hinkle, 24, Maga communism comprises a grab bag of ideas that can seem lacking in coherence – ranging from a belief in the power of Donald Trump’s followers to wrest power from “global elites” to an emphasis on masculine “honor”, admiration for Vladimir Putin and support for Palestinian liberation.
The two have been repeatedly kicked off social media platforms for spreading disinformation. Hinkle, for example, was booted from Instagram earlier this year – shortly after claiming in a series of posts that Ukraine was behind the terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow, despite Islamic State claiming responsibility for the act.
Hinkle and Al-Din have been ridiculed by critics as pseudo-intellectual, cravenly opportunistic grifters who have carved out an intentionally provocative niche designed to siphon followers away from other highly online political communities.
“If you look at their policies, like what they actually propose, it’s clear that this is a deranged fringe movement that doesn’t really have a great deal of articulation,” said Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University and author of Against the Fascist Creep, which explored how rightwing movements co-opt the language of the left. “It seems ludicrous, but I would say it’s really a symptom of the erosion of rational political life.”
The last line is both correct and illuminating at the same time; yes, MAGA Communism is ridiculous, but it is for now REAL on the internet. If it is real on the internet, it means that it is real in the eyes of the Zoomers.
“Deranged” or not, Hinkle and Al-Din’s “movement” is attracting recognition in increasingly high places on the right. Hinkle’s defense of Putin’s foreign policy has earned him an invitation on to Tucker Carlson’s show and praise from Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Hinkle and Al-Din have also forged international alliances with the likes of the Russian ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin, whom they met at a conference in Moscow earlier this year.
Therefore, this online movement is translating into real world influence…of a sort.
Both Haz and Hinkle say they support Trump not out of admiration for the man, but out of the belief that his followers represent the most significant mobilization of the American working class in decades.
They subscribe to social conservatism in a way that appeals to the growing numbers of gen Z males who believe feminism is harmful to men, and cast issues such as transgender rights, the climate crisis and racial justice as neoliberal distractions.
“It’s not that we’re against women. We just perceive that the discourse, culture and the political sphere have seen a huge decline in the notion of honor,” Al-Din said. “One of the reasons for that is the decline in basic masculine virtues, the rise of a kind of effeminization, especially of men.” Hinkle has regularly made anti-trans comments on his own social media, making declarations such as: “We need to protect our youth from trans terrorists and propagandists.”
“They’re firmly embedded in a corner of social media that is the most vitriolic, terminally online, troll culture,” said Reid Ross.
Gen Z is terminally online.
Before Hinkle was a cigar-smoking Maga communist who supports fossil fuels, he was a denim-clad Bernie bro and an environmental activist. He founded a successful ocean clean-up club at his high school in San Clemente, California, organized a student walk-out to protest gun violence after the 2018 Parkland shooting, was invited to speak at a congressional briefing in Washington DC about decommissioning nuclear power plants, and took a knee at his graduation to protest racial injustice. “He’s the kind of guy that gives you hope about the future,” one environmental activist leader once told the Los Angeles Times about Hinkle.
In 2018 and 2019, immediately after graduating high school, Hinkle ran (unsuccessfully) for San Clemente, California, city council, and campaigned against homelessness and corruption.
By 2020, Hinkle was still entrenched in progressive politics, identifying as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. But he was also starting to flirt with various personalities considerably outside the progressive mainstream, getting a boost after interviewing the then Democratic presidential candidate Representative Tulsi Gabbard on his YouTube show, The Dive with Jackson Hinkle. (He was kicked off YouTube for spreading disinformation and now streams on the fringe platform Rumble.)
Al-Din is the son of Lebanese Muslim immigrants and grew up near Dearborn, Michigan. When he was in college at Michigan State University, he says, he was a full-fledged Marxist. While he claims he’s never voted in a presidential election, he says he was probably most sympathetic toward Bernie Sanders.
When Trump won, Al-Din says, he concluded that the left was “out of touch with actual working people”. Put off by what he calls the left’s association with “so-called alternative sexualities and fringe countercultural tendencies” and lack of patriotism, he started developing the set of ideas he called Maga communism.
“We were just telling these leftists, these crazy-looking septum-piercing purple- haired leftists, that when you go up to working class Americans and tell them they have to hate their country, and they have to hate being American, you are aiding the enemy, you are not helping, you’re not helping fight imperialism,” said Al-Din.
Absurd and ridiculous? Yes….but so is pretty much everything else these days.
We end this weekend’s SCR with an oral history of the classic 80s flick PREDATOR:
Gary Goldman, military adviser: I was an officer in Vietnam, commanded a rifle company in Vietnam, then did some reconnaissance work afterward. And I ventured into some special operations training. I had a pretty good reputation in that field. And at some point I got a phone call from John and he said, “Can you help us out on this film?” He gave me the storyline and he said, “Honestly, these guys look like a bunch of ballerinas. They don’t look like soldiers.” So I flew down there, sat next to this kid on the plane, and he turns out to be Shane Black, who spent the entire flight stripping my brain of all kinds of little bits and pieces of tactical military information and war stories.
The first thing I wanted to do was see if these guys actually had what it takes to make it look like they’re in special operations, so I took them out for a run. I was looking at these guys, and most of them were pretty big guys. But in combat, if you can’t run, you’re f—ed. It doesn’t matter how many inches your neck is. So we’re out running on the road, and they got strung out pretty good. I’d look back at [Arnold] every now and then, and I thought, “I’ve got to hand it to him, he’s trying, he’s keeping up.” And then I realized, wait a minute, I’m running on a Mexican road with cars on it, and I’ve got this million-dollar star out here, I’d better be careful. So I started running wide around the curbs so I could see the oncoming traffic. We got back to the hotel and everybody was really silent, they just went straight to their rooms. I thought, “These guys are finished.” And I thought that was pretty funny. Anyway, after that, I would take them out around the set locations, and I’d walk through a tactic with them and get them to run through little simulations, and I’d critique them on what they looked like. So we did that for a few days, and that was a lot of fun.
Chaves: A lot of it was raw jungle that we were running through when we were in the week rehearsal. And we took a break one day, and I checked the area out, you know, where I was gonna sit my butt down, and laid down, and next thing I know I am covered in red ants. I was bitten almost 100 times down both my arms, and went into a little bit of shock, was running through the jungle ripping my clothes off, butt naked. They had a water tank, and I went into the water tank and just doused myself. And I’ll never forget when the Mexican doctor came, and I have these welts, and he looked at it and he says to me, “You know, I never seen anything like this before”! (Laughs.) I think it was about three or four days before we started shooting, and I was so proud of my body because really, Arnold and Arnold’s really good friend Sven[-Ole Thorsen], who played one of the Russians in the palapa scene, they really put me together, and so I wasn’t gonna wear a long-sleeve shirt because my arms were really buff and everything, but then this happened.
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"I think that there is a lot of merit in the idea that Jewish liberalism is a “triumph of assimilation”, but it overlooks one key fact: the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (Heal the World). Jewish friends tell me that this is not a central nor mandatory element of Judaism, but they do concede that it is a powerful one."
You should get some better Jewish friends. If you spent the next six months dedicating yourself to studying talmud, commentaries and classic Jewish legal codes you'll probably find a lot of stuff you think is antiquated, or offensive, or moronic, but the likelihood is you won't come across Tikkun Olam even once. If you study kabbala (don't recommend) you will come across it, but it means basically that doing ritual commandments fixes breaks in the metaphysical world because of abra cadabra. The concept of Tikkun Olam as it understood today is, in fact, a perfect example of assimilation because it shows you can just put a basically random Hebrew term on gentile ideas and Jews will eat it up faster than keneidlach.
A far more important factor imo is Jewish distaste for Christianity, which usually takes about two generations to wash out even for those who assimilate. This explains a strong trend across countries whereby Jews identify Left in proportion to the extent that the Left-Right divide is coded around anti/pro Christianity. It probably played a role in the development of the American puritan/quaker tradition emancipating itself from Christianity. Also explains why Italian Jews liked fascism, why orthodox Jews like Trump so much and a lot of otherwise puzzling stuff.