Those who testified at the state capital against New Jersey’s adoption of the IHRA, arguing that it would criminalize free speech, had our microphones muted and were shouted down, proving our point.
Any even semi-honest judge would declare the New Jersey law to be flatly unconstitutional. Similar laws have been held unconstitutional whenever the issue was raised.
But - there's a catch. Even if you win in court, the proponents of the law will appeal, and keep appealing. The plaintiff, meanwhile, suffers whatever penalty the law provides and has to keep paying legal bills in the meantime. Even if they win, they won't get those attorney fees.
And there always is a chance that a judge with ambitions for bigger and better things will rule in favor of the constitutionality of the law.
So from the anti-free speech side, it's a no-lose proposition. It's not as if this Robert Karabanchak turd will have to pay for the New Jersey AG out of his own pocket. Of course, were that piece of shit subject to one-tenth the atrocities that Gazans suffer every single day, he'd be screaming that he is far too important and somebody needs to get him out of here.
Those Gazans who would be suffering with him? Holmes, he's a democrat and a liberal. Like his conservative republican buddies, he could not care less.
It's also worth pointing out that zionists need antisemitism, and they carefully and lovingly cultivate and nurture antisemitism, real or imaginary.
Without antisemitism, Israel no longer has a basis to demand double standards and special pleading. Hell, take away antisemitism and there is no longer any reason for there to be an Israel.
This appears to be the way we will be silenced in the U.S.
I come to realize that it’s part of a long-game strategy. We know that there is an actual industry in creating and nurturing hostilities that can be weaponized at a later date for other purposes, not always in plain sight to the entire world, until now.
You are confirming also how victims transform into victimizers, at a given moment, in the service of some power that will dehumanize and annihilate them, when their purpose is served and they have no further use value.
I have college friends and acquaintances who stood up courageously to South African apartheid in the 1980s. Recently, one of them whined about how scared they are for their own lives today as Jews in the NYC, right about when Columbia University was gearing up to prohibit free speech on campus, because Trump and his threat to withhold federal funding largesse. My reply was: What are you talking about? I later realized the person was fishing to determine who stood where.
And I'm therefore vouching for my experience that quite the contrary was true. Perhaps nearly a quarter of the guys in my entering class were NYC Jews. Quite a healthy percentage of particularly the undergrad population, overall.
Here's a story. One snowy morning, freshman year, I awoke and looked out my dorm window onto the snow on south field. Someone had foot-printed into the fresh snow: "Jesus Saves, Moses Invests". Everyone just more-or-less shrugged in agreement.
And I thought satire was dead ;-) Loved this. I remember WW2 and the discovery of the concentration camps. Horror and guilt permeated society. I wonder how many of the survivors thought that they, the abused, would become the abusers. Apparently it's not an uncommon human characteristic.
I too always thought that so bizarre. Meanwhile the Trump Administration is employing Jew-haters all over the place. The resistance to his policies in Israel in his base is propelled by nothing but Jew-hatred and no concern for Gaza. Even his more "educated" supporters are people who LOVE Israel and HATE Jews as Jews.
What are you talking about? Asking seriously. Just to be clear: Everybody is potentially on the menu. There are no eternal favorites who will spared. I wouldn’t count on any promises, no matter how ancient.
I'm sorry but I don't understand your question. Perhaps you were responding to someone else? I was simply concurring with the post that stated that the notion of Columbia University being a hotbed of Jew-hatred is absurd on its face. Additionally I was pointing out the irony that the Trump administration leading the attack on Jew-hatred itself is filled with and supported by Jew-haters.
Another instance of where the United States is heading. I'm very worried about the future as I read more and more reports like this from around the country. The people living in the rural areas largely have no idea what's coming, and a lot of them don't want to know. Once the transition is complete, then they will wake up and realize that something has changed. But it will be too late by then. It's almost too late now. The window for taking back the government from the authoritarians is almost closed. This public meeting is just one example of more to come. That the Israeli lobby will work hard to force this change as it benefits them and their Zionist agenda.
Eventually all of this will tear the United States asunder and no one will benefit.
" a lot of them don't want to know" is your key phrase, here. Denial of all flavors is the hallmark of our minimally informed citizenry, and as George Carlin told us: garbage in garbage out. Uninformed, ignorant citizenry gets you the same quality of politician. aka "leadership". It was too late a while ago, I suspect.
What we are seeing is the United States is discarding any pretense of being anything other than an Empire. European leaders could not care less and crowd around their American Master like dogs seeking attention, as long as that Empire is willing to fight Russia on their behalf.
They care. Just not about what was supposedly the crowning achievement of western civilization--the Enlightenment. Its values were rationality, democracy, self determination, higher education, science, progress, etc. The shadow side was these ideals were believed possible only for the best. The Euro inferior masses and their emigrant descendants were prevented from interfering by the fiction of representation. The rest of the world, by definition uncivilized, was fit only to serve the needs of the best through colonial empires.
Halberstam's revelatory book on the Vietnam war, The Best and the Brightest, lives on with the Dem party's "meritocracy." The Rs, who always flirted with plutocracy, now include the anarchocapitalist techies convinced their economic dominance gives them the right to rule. Of course European leaders respond cheerfully to the American neolib certainty that economic profit is the only real value and to the American neocon fantasy of Empire enforced by endless wars. They view everything through that same old reality tunnel.
For the irrelevant masses and all other life on Earth, the Endarkenment.
The plan ever always only was for the United States to intervene, once they run low on warm live Ukrainian bodies to soak up Russian munitions. There never was any other plan.
Thank you as always for your courage and your willingness to speak the truth regardless of the potential consequences. The situation you describe in the NJ courtroom should terrify every American who cares about truth, justice, and human rights!
I watched the video of Chris Hedges' excellent talk, and was wondering just who the jackasses were whose squawking voices I kept hearing in the background. I guess we could call out those putrid Zionists who tried to silence Mr. Hedges and the other speakers for the self-righteous, hypocritical medicine show and jug band that they really are, but sadly, that kind of stuff is getting to be old news. My fear, like my fear regarding so many outrages, those of Zionists and other groups, is that we'll become numb to hearing about them.
Your articulate repudiation of heinous injustices changed my entire approach to the classroom as a Canadian academic. We use what levers we can against cultural depravity, but you are right--the liberal class no longer has the capacity to model the kind of critical thought necessary to change minds--really change them. Most terrifying of all is that this genocide--the once most before us today (but by no means the only one in progress)--is a _symptom_. It is a dark day when genocide is simply the tell as to how far into the midden heap the West is willing to go to defend the ruling elite . . .
What happened was the liberal class got the whip hand.
You may have noticed that the subversives, the class clowns, the Roasters Of Sacred Cows and the Tellers Of Forbidden Truths are found these days on the alt-right and the dirtbag left. Meanwhile, the liberal classes have morphed into scolds, hall monitors and finger-wagging moralists so dour and humorless that they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison. (Apparently, even Johnny Rotten himself has noticed and is baffled by this development.)
This is NOT because of any inherent love of liberty on the right, nor any natural censoriousness on the liberal left, but is an artifact of their respective relationship to power.
A blue collar rank and file activist for 29 years whose grandpa was a Wobbly, I appreciate "dirtbag left." I was trained in the late '60s by 1930s CIO union organizers who warned me "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." My experiences of elitist sniffing dismissals are exemplified by a Dem fundraiser where I was representing maritime unions. An attorney asked me why workers (ie, dirtbags) should get high wages just because they belonged to a union. A PhD scientist/professor and an MD nodded in agreement. My schadenfreude is PhDs and MDs are rapidly becoming de facto assembly line workers themselves. The working class sacrificial lamb turned out to be a bellwether.
Remnants of the old dogmatic left show up on these sites. Typically well educated people who assume their right to act as vanguard of the working class. Like my grandpa and Eugene V. Debs, I reject elitist implications we're too stupid to lead ourselves. They also do "finger-wagging moralists" when insisting BIPOC and LGBTQ are merely diversions from class. Denying our reality because they've never had to fight to be recognized as what they are. Nor for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives. They're stuck in the Aristotelian logic of either/or; unaware of the both/and of quantum physics. I'm LGBTQ and BIPOC as well as an old labor leftist. Politics is about building coalitions, not demanding purity and bowing to power.
When the killing of children is seen as justifiable our world is in the throes of a calamitous demise. There is an avalanche of ignorance behind this insidious evil. The goodness in people like Mr. Hedges offers us a ray of hope in this growing darkness.
I read your address and loved it. It spoke courageously about the dangers of adopting this definition. Thank you for follow up with a description of how the proceedings were received. Painful but not shocking
Language, it has been said, is humanity's most sacred invention. There is merit in that, no doubt.
However...
Today, as this hearing puts on full display, Language is being torqued and manipulated for the dismantling of our so called civilization.
Genocide has been officially, legalized. And if you dare breath a word of challenge to that, you are by definition, a criminal in this lovely little setting of ours.
You have wonder when their going to come round us up.
The think tanks that emerged following Powell Memorandum have perfected their dark craft. All the pieces are in place.
And, that's not all boys and girls, it's supercharged with AI.
It's insanity. Maybe I should just have a lollipop and keep my mouth shut.
The late Native American, author, activist, and musician John Trudell said, (paraphrasing ), " The big lie is...civilization. There's a deficit of civility within our civilization."
Orwell of course understood how language could - and would - be used for distortion and oppression. GK Chesterton wrote decades before that (I’m loosely quoting) “one day saying 2+2=4 would be an act of courage.”
I was dismayed to learn that my own district has adopted this definition. It was done in the dark, without any local press coverage, either before or after. Most likely, money changed hands. The politicians no longer make any pretense of representing us. They respond only to donors, including the out of control Israeli lobby.
Thank you Chris for speaking in New Jersey against the IHRA. We do not have control on whether our words and acts will change the world for the betterment of all, but we do have control on what we can do. Doing nothing is acquiescence and defeat. Doing what we can uplifts our souls and those around us. Thank you for uplifting my soul, Chris. God Bless.
Thank you, Chris, for speaking up for freedom of speech in NJ! Many young people out there get it, and there are more each day. It will be very difficult, but it’s definitely not hopeless. Keep up the good fight! ❤️
I am disgusted with grown men and women being rude, and bullying, and shockingly ignorant. Their sense of superiority begs the question, "How did they find a sandbox large enough to hold so many toddlers?"
Seems to me Americans are getting a taste of what they've paid for. Not only the weapons for Israel to keep destabilizing a region America seems to want to control, but the legal and political system that has played planetary cop for decades.
As long as nobody connected any of the dots......you could have your so called civil liberties.....but now that the cat is out of the proverbial death bag........some freedoms have to go.
Any even semi-honest judge would declare the New Jersey law to be flatly unconstitutional. Similar laws have been held unconstitutional whenever the issue was raised.
But - there's a catch. Even if you win in court, the proponents of the law will appeal, and keep appealing. The plaintiff, meanwhile, suffers whatever penalty the law provides and has to keep paying legal bills in the meantime. Even if they win, they won't get those attorney fees.
And there always is a chance that a judge with ambitions for bigger and better things will rule in favor of the constitutionality of the law.
So from the anti-free speech side, it's a no-lose proposition. It's not as if this Robert Karabanchak turd will have to pay for the New Jersey AG out of his own pocket. Of course, were that piece of shit subject to one-tenth the atrocities that Gazans suffer every single day, he'd be screaming that he is far too important and somebody needs to get him out of here.
Those Gazans who would be suffering with him? Holmes, he's a democrat and a liberal. Like his conservative republican buddies, he could not care less.
The capitalist judicial system.
It's also worth pointing out that zionists need antisemitism, and they carefully and lovingly cultivate and nurture antisemitism, real or imaginary.
Without antisemitism, Israel no longer has a basis to demand double standards and special pleading. Hell, take away antisemitism and there is no longer any reason for there to be an Israel.
This appears to be the way we will be silenced in the U.S.
I come to realize that it’s part of a long-game strategy. We know that there is an actual industry in creating and nurturing hostilities that can be weaponized at a later date for other purposes, not always in plain sight to the entire world, until now.
You are confirming also how victims transform into victimizers, at a given moment, in the service of some power that will dehumanize and annihilate them, when their purpose is served and they have no further use value.
I have college friends and acquaintances who stood up courageously to South African apartheid in the 1980s. Recently, one of them whined about how scared they are for their own lives today as Jews in the NYC, right about when Columbia University was gearing up to prohibit free speech on campus, because Trump and his threat to withhold federal funding largesse. My reply was: What are you talking about? I later realized the person was fishing to determine who stood where.
Oh, very well, then:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/as-an-american-jew-i-feel-completely-reassured-for-my-safety-now-that-trump-has-targeted-the-epicenter-of-american-antisemitism-columbia-university
Oh Yeah, as a Columbia alum, I can vouch. Good one!
Thx. I wasn’t picking up that theme hence I dropped it. I’ll revisit it.
And I'm therefore vouching for my experience that quite the contrary was true. Perhaps nearly a quarter of the guys in my entering class were NYC Jews. Quite a healthy percentage of particularly the undergrad population, overall.
Here's a story. One snowy morning, freshman year, I awoke and looked out my dorm window onto the snow on south field. Someone had foot-printed into the fresh snow: "Jesus Saves, Moses Invests". Everyone just more-or-less shrugged in agreement.
Wow. That is weird. What year?
Jan. or Feb. 1966
And I thought satire was dead ;-) Loved this. I remember WW2 and the discovery of the concentration camps. Horror and guilt permeated society. I wonder how many of the survivors thought that they, the abused, would become the abusers. Apparently it's not an uncommon human characteristic.
Marek Edelman, who was in a position to know, commented on this.
I can’t get past the first paragraph ffs. This monotonous victim boo hooting is stale but ever powerful.
Either you didn't read it or didn't understand it. It mocks the idea that Columbia is some hotbed of antisemitism.
I too always thought that so bizarre. Meanwhile the Trump Administration is employing Jew-haters all over the place. The resistance to his policies in Israel in his base is propelled by nothing but Jew-hatred and no concern for Gaza. Even his more "educated" supporters are people who LOVE Israel and HATE Jews as Jews.
What are you talking about? Asking seriously. Just to be clear: Everybody is potentially on the menu. There are no eternal favorites who will spared. I wouldn’t count on any promises, no matter how ancient.
I'm sorry but I don't understand your question. Perhaps you were responding to someone else? I was simply concurring with the post that stated that the notion of Columbia University being a hotbed of Jew-hatred is absurd on its face. Additionally I was pointing out the irony that the Trump administration leading the attack on Jew-hatred itself is filled with and supported by Jew-haters.
Another instance of where the United States is heading. I'm very worried about the future as I read more and more reports like this from around the country. The people living in the rural areas largely have no idea what's coming, and a lot of them don't want to know. Once the transition is complete, then they will wake up and realize that something has changed. But it will be too late by then. It's almost too late now. The window for taking back the government from the authoritarians is almost closed. This public meeting is just one example of more to come. That the Israeli lobby will work hard to force this change as it benefits them and their Zionist agenda.
Eventually all of this will tear the United States asunder and no one will benefit.
" a lot of them don't want to know" is your key phrase, here. Denial of all flavors is the hallmark of our minimally informed citizenry, and as George Carlin told us: garbage in garbage out. Uninformed, ignorant citizenry gets you the same quality of politician. aka "leadership". It was too late a while ago, I suspect.
The leadership prefer apathetic and uninformed subjects.
I think you may be right but I try to be optimistic.
I try to never contest impulses toward optimism since I myself am so deficient in it.
ha ha ha, I like that.
Anything other than the coldest realism will get me either dead or used as a subject of lurid medical experiments.
Keep fighting.
What we are seeing is the United States is discarding any pretense of being anything other than an Empire. European leaders could not care less and crowd around their American Master like dogs seeking attention, as long as that Empire is willing to fight Russia on their behalf.
They care. Just not about what was supposedly the crowning achievement of western civilization--the Enlightenment. Its values were rationality, democracy, self determination, higher education, science, progress, etc. The shadow side was these ideals were believed possible only for the best. The Euro inferior masses and their emigrant descendants were prevented from interfering by the fiction of representation. The rest of the world, by definition uncivilized, was fit only to serve the needs of the best through colonial empires.
Halberstam's revelatory book on the Vietnam war, The Best and the Brightest, lives on with the Dem party's "meritocracy." The Rs, who always flirted with plutocracy, now include the anarchocapitalist techies convinced their economic dominance gives them the right to rule. Of course European leaders respond cheerfully to the American neolib certainty that economic profit is the only real value and to the American neocon fantasy of Empire enforced by endless wars. They view everything through that same old reality tunnel.
For the irrelevant masses and all other life on Earth, the Endarkenment.
Which may be coming to an end soon. Then what will the EU do?
The plan ever always only was for the United States to intervene, once they run low on warm live Ukrainian bodies to soak up Russian munitions. There never was any other plan.
That plan is proceeding apace.
Thank you as always for your courage and your willingness to speak the truth regardless of the potential consequences. The situation you describe in the NJ courtroom should terrify every American who cares about truth, justice, and human rights!
I watched the video of Chris Hedges' excellent talk, and was wondering just who the jackasses were whose squawking voices I kept hearing in the background. I guess we could call out those putrid Zionists who tried to silence Mr. Hedges and the other speakers for the self-righteous, hypocritical medicine show and jug band that they really are, but sadly, that kind of stuff is getting to be old news. My fear, like my fear regarding so many outrages, those of Zionists and other groups, is that we'll become numb to hearing about them.
Your articulate repudiation of heinous injustices changed my entire approach to the classroom as a Canadian academic. We use what levers we can against cultural depravity, but you are right--the liberal class no longer has the capacity to model the kind of critical thought necessary to change minds--really change them. Most terrifying of all is that this genocide--the once most before us today (but by no means the only one in progress)--is a _symptom_. It is a dark day when genocide is simply the tell as to how far into the midden heap the West is willing to go to defend the ruling elite . . .
What happened was the liberal class got the whip hand.
You may have noticed that the subversives, the class clowns, the Roasters Of Sacred Cows and the Tellers Of Forbidden Truths are found these days on the alt-right and the dirtbag left. Meanwhile, the liberal classes have morphed into scolds, hall monitors and finger-wagging moralists so dour and humorless that they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison. (Apparently, even Johnny Rotten himself has noticed and is baffled by this development.)
This is NOT because of any inherent love of liberty on the right, nor any natural censoriousness on the liberal left, but is an artifact of their respective relationship to power.
A blue collar rank and file activist for 29 years whose grandpa was a Wobbly, I appreciate "dirtbag left." I was trained in the late '60s by 1930s CIO union organizers who warned me "liberals are the ones who leave the room when the fight starts." My experiences of elitist sniffing dismissals are exemplified by a Dem fundraiser where I was representing maritime unions. An attorney asked me why workers (ie, dirtbags) should get high wages just because they belonged to a union. A PhD scientist/professor and an MD nodded in agreement. My schadenfreude is PhDs and MDs are rapidly becoming de facto assembly line workers themselves. The working class sacrificial lamb turned out to be a bellwether.
Remnants of the old dogmatic left show up on these sites. Typically well educated people who assume their right to act as vanguard of the working class. Like my grandpa and Eugene V. Debs, I reject elitist implications we're too stupid to lead ourselves. They also do "finger-wagging moralists" when insisting BIPOC and LGBTQ are merely diversions from class. Denying our reality because they've never had to fight to be recognized as what they are. Nor for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives. They're stuck in the Aristotelian logic of either/or; unaware of the both/and of quantum physics. I'm LGBTQ and BIPOC as well as an old labor leftist. Politics is about building coalitions, not demanding purity and bowing to power.
When the killing of children is seen as justifiable our world is in the throes of a calamitous demise. There is an avalanche of ignorance behind this insidious evil. The goodness in people like Mr. Hedges offers us a ray of hope in this growing darkness.
I read your address and loved it. It spoke courageously about the dangers of adopting this definition. Thank you for follow up with a description of how the proceedings were received. Painful but not shocking
Language, it has been said, is humanity's most sacred invention. There is merit in that, no doubt.
However...
Today, as this hearing puts on full display, Language is being torqued and manipulated for the dismantling of our so called civilization.
Genocide has been officially, legalized. And if you dare breath a word of challenge to that, you are by definition, a criminal in this lovely little setting of ours.
You have wonder when their going to come round us up.
The think tanks that emerged following Powell Memorandum have perfected their dark craft. All the pieces are in place.
And, that's not all boys and girls, it's supercharged with AI.
It's insanity. Maybe I should just have a lollipop and keep my mouth shut.
The late Native American, author, activist, and musician John Trudell said, (paraphrasing ), " The big lie is...civilization. There's a deficit of civility within our civilization."
Orwell of course understood how language could - and would - be used for distortion and oppression. GK Chesterton wrote decades before that (I’m loosely quoting) “one day saying 2+2=4 would be an act of courage.”
How many fingers Winston!!!?
How many fingers do you see!!!?
On Intelligence Squared, YouTube, there is an excellent debate with Will Self and another guy on whose vision was more accurate, Orwell or Huxley.
I think it's a lot each.
I was dismayed to learn that my own district has adopted this definition. It was done in the dark, without any local press coverage, either before or after. Most likely, money changed hands. The politicians no longer make any pretense of representing us. They respond only to donors, including the out of control Israeli lobby.
Probably no money need be exchanged. Rather, those politicians know what is expected of them, without being told.
Exactly. They’ve been paper-trained like the good spaniels they are.
More like lapdogs. Spaniels are breeds capable of real work.
Thank you Chris for speaking in New Jersey against the IHRA. We do not have control on whether our words and acts will change the world for the betterment of all, but we do have control on what we can do. Doing nothing is acquiescence and defeat. Doing what we can uplifts our souls and those around us. Thank you for uplifting my soul, Chris. God Bless.
Thanks for this update. FYI, I wrote to my representatives in district 8 to oppose this bill. Like you, I feel it makes me a target for speaking out.
Thank you, Chris, for speaking up for freedom of speech in NJ! Many young people out there get it, and there are more each day. It will be very difficult, but it’s definitely not hopeless. Keep up the good fight! ❤️
I am disgusted with grown men and women being rude, and bullying, and shockingly ignorant. Their sense of superiority begs the question, "How did they find a sandbox large enough to hold so many toddlers?"
Seems to me Americans are getting a taste of what they've paid for. Not only the weapons for Israel to keep destabilizing a region America seems to want to control, but the legal and political system that has played planetary cop for decades.
As long as nobody connected any of the dots......you could have your so called civil liberties.....but now that the cat is out of the proverbial death bag........some freedoms have to go.
Mr. Fish's cartoon is on the money.
Cat!?!?
Metaphorically......in that cliche.......the cat stands in for truth.
I like it.....and the illustration at the beginning of this screed illustrates what must be done once truth is unveiled.
A lot of tongues need to be eliminated.