An Affirming Flame

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

I keep reading posts and essays urging me to learn from the voters who just elected Trump. I am learning from them, believe me — just not the lessons those folks had in mind.

For instance, I’m learning that journalists will kneel and kiss the ring of power almost as fast as GOP politicians. Take Andrew Sullivan, for instance, who until recently hated Trump so much he was routinely accused of TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. These are just a few of the words and phrases he used to describe Trump before this election:

A huge enthusiast for war crimes.

He loves torture.

He’s a depraved human being.

Deranged.

At what point are these conservatives gonna recognize what’s in front of them and stop excusing this stuff? It’s insane that people will find any excuse for this person. I’m sorry, I am exhausted. There is no fucking way to justify this person in any fashion of any way, whatever the cause.

People say I have Trump Derangement Syndrome or whatever. But I love this country. And he’s taken a flame thrower to it. There comes a point at which you have to say, I don’t care. Get rid of him. Get him out of here.

Contrast that with three days after the election, when Neville Chamberlain — whoa, sorry, I meant Sullivan — wrote these words in his own substack newsletter, The Weekly Dish:

Trump is now a world-historical figure, the most significant American politician of this century so far, with a real mandate. That requires, in my view, an attitude adjustment: not a doubling down of “resistance” but a strategy of engagement and discerning opposition. The way to get Trump to do what you want is to flatter and seduce him — the way Putin and Kim Jong Un do. I suspect that finally giving him the establishment respect he so desperately yearns for could be the most effective way of dealing with him. That requires a real shift in worldview among his opponents. And it will not come easy to many of us. But if this election doesn’t occasion that, what would?

Something else I’m learning from this election is that Americans have an insatiable appetite for casting the entire U.S. electorate in their own image.

If they despise Israel, then loyalty to Israel is the reason Harris lost.

If they love Israel, then insufficient loyalty to Israel is the reason Harris lost.

If they’re passionate feminists, Harris lost because she’s a woman.

If they’re passionately anti-racist, she lost because she’s Black.

If they're finely attuned to the (undeniable) fact that Black women are the most disrespected, undervalued demographic in America, then they see her race and gender together as a doubly fatal liability.

If they’re anti-trans, Kamala was too trans-friendly.

If they’re xenophobic, she wasn’t serious about enforcing our borders.

If they loathe “wokeness”, this election represented a rejection of wokeism.

And so on. In take after take, their cardinal issue was confidently brandished as THE cardinal issue.

And yet another thing I’ve learned is that too many Americans hate their political opponents so much that they’d rather punish those enemies than help or even save themselves.

Exhibit A: Dearborn, Michigan, the majority-Arab city which Trump won last week, in a protest vote against Harris’ “support for genocide”. Per Newsweek Magazine today:

"They didn't vote for Trump because they believe Trump is the best candidate," Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News, told Politico. "No, they voted for Trump because they want to punish the Democrats and Harris."

"It's clear as day that he's playing us," Alawieh added of Trump. "I think he's going to target us. That's what he's going to do. He's going to target our families, and it's going to hurt. So, I think we're about to find out."

Indeed, yesterday Trump announced that America’s new ambassador to Israel will be Mike Huckabee, who is as unambiguous a hardliner Zionist as anyone could find.

Lest anyone still believe that Trump’s supposed favor toward Israel has anything to do with Jews rather than Evangelicals, let this appointment — of a Baptist preacher to the center of all foreign diplomacy involving the Jewish nation — put that notion to rest once and for all.

Unlike America’s nominal policy to date, Huckabee is against a two-state solution. He has said there’s no such thing as a Palestinian. He has never supported a solution that requires Israeli settlers to compromise in any measure. He believes the entire West Bank is the rightful property of Israel, saying “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”

Per USA Today, in an article published yesterday:

"There’s no valid reason to have a cease-fire with Hamas. They’re not capable of having an honorable negotiation," Huckabee said, accusing the terrorist organization of pretending to listen to cease-fire details but always rejecting a deal.

“This is like trying to negotiate with the Nazis in World War II. You just don’t,” Huckabee said. “You beat them. You defeat them. You eradicate them.”

Now personally, I also believe Hamas must be defeated. But my point here is that if Dearborn was hoping for any reward of loyalty from Trump in return for their support, they’re almost certainly — shocker! — due for disappointment.

Way to go, Dearborn! You sure showed us!

Meanwhile, am I happy about the Huckabee pick? No, I’m sick over it. As Israel-loving as I am, Huckabee is a horrific human being, the dehumanization of Palestinians is nothing I’ll ever be able to get behind, and invoking Biblical justifications for Israel’s primacy within her own borders is to me no better than trying to justify extremist Islamic dominance with passages from the Quran.

In her November 8th substack, Letters From An American, renowned historian Heather Cox Richardson brings us more cases of overnight lightning-swift buyer’s remorse:

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices, she said by way of opening.

The next paragraph opens with:

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation.

This is just the beginning.

So what is the overarching lesson to be learned from this election? That brutal and implacable tyrants have always risen to power and likely always will, especially when an angry, demoralized public has been steeped in as much disinformation as ours.

Just as regrettably, my money is on the bet that right-wing Jews, too — who believe that anti-Semitism on the left is a higher threat than anti-Semitism on the right, and thus Trump was the better pick — will soon come to regret their faith in him.

I don’t post on Twitter, but I read Twitter, because the information I get from the site outweighs — for now — my distaste for huge swaths of the content.

Last night, the hashtag #IsraelFirst was trending. The phrase overwhelmingly refers to America First voters who are disappointed and disillusioned by Trump’s current pro-Israel cabinet picks (I say current because Trump goes through cabinet members like Kleenex with many of them leaving his adminstration and going directly to jail without passing Go or collecting $200). Within a few minutes of investigating this trend, I’d waded through hundreds of angry right-wing posts like these:

I’ll be real, fam: this is a very frightening time to be a Jew in America, or really anywhere else. There are global forces well beyond our control.

So what can we do right now? I expect that answer to become clearer in the days and weeks and months ahead but there’s one thing I know for sure at this moment, and it includes a commitment I swear to uphold to you right now:

I will never kneel and kiss Trump’s ring. I’ll never gaslight you about what we’re experiencing. I will never modify my stance toward Trump in the direction of admiration and appeasement.

I’ll close here with three quotes from writers who resisted authoritarianism and tyranny to their last breath. Each of them upholds an insistence on the truth as the basis for all integrity, sanity and resistance.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ― George Orwell, 1984

THE LEAST A MAN CAN DO AT SUCH A TIME IS DECLARE HIMSELF AND TELL WHERE HE STANDS. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago…I am in love with freedom and it is still an affair of long standing and it is a fine state to be in, and…I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators…

A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off–even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumberance.

— E. B. White, “Freedom”

And finally, the last two stanzas of “September 1, 1939”, a poem penned by W.H. Auden in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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Fam, among other aims, I will strive with all my might to make this newsletter such an affirming flame. Thank you for being here with me.

I’m here to keep saying that 2 + 2 = 4. I will never hint that maybe, if enough people vote for an alternate answer, the sum could be 5.

Fierce love to you all.

Am Yisrael Chai.