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There are more Democrats than Republicans, more liberals than conservatives, more progressives than MAGAs. But you’d never know that from looking at our politics. From abortion to the minimum wage to war, the Right wins the important arguments.
How do they do it? Verbal abuse. Right-wing bullies name-call, they hector, they doxx, they blacklist, they lie. Most of all, they yell. No one’s louder than a conservative barking a talking point. They’re REALLY loud when said talking point makes no sense.
The current discussion about the student protests at American college and university campuses over the U.S.-Israel war against Gaza is a perfect illustration of their tactics.
They also showcase how the Left can expose right-wing bullies as intellectually dishonest, ridiculous and unworthy of serious consideration about important issues. I know because I deal with these clowns every day.
The first thing to notice is that supporters of Israel have given up trying to justify the Netanyahu government’s brutal blockade and assault of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians since Oct. 7, flattened the territory and left hundreds of thousands more starving to death. They can’t justify it.
So they deflect.
Supporters of Israel’s war against the people of Gaza characterize protesting college students as privileged brats wasting their parents’ money. Never mind that two-thirds of them pay their own way, a third borrow student loans, and many earn scholarships, hold jobs and/or don’t have parents willing and able to pay.
Critics of Israel should call supporters’ rhetorical bluff. OK, let’s assume the protesters are all a bunch of spoiled, snot-nosed punks who wouldn’t know suffering if it bit them on the you-know-what. So what? That doesn’t make it OK to drop 2,000-pound bombs on civilian buildings.
Pro-Zionists portray demonstrators at the encampments as dupes of “outside agitators” funded, in some cases, by billionaire Democrat George Soros. (So ironic that the Right’s obsession with Soros originated as an expression of classic antisemitic tropes about this rich Jew and his supposed web of intrigue and conspiracy.) Some protest organizers, the pro-genocide brigade brays, even get paid a salary!
Again, the proper response is: so what? Who the protesters are, where they came from and who pays them — which, of course, is absurd, since 99.999% of them get paid not one bit — none of these distractions address the question of whether the U.S. should ignore homeless people sleeping on its own streets in order to send billions of dollars of bombs and missiles to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to murder more innocent people.
One might also mention the racist origins of the phrase “outside agitator,” used to great effect by racists during the civil rights struggle. The three Freedom Riders (two of them Jews) murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 were northerners, outsiders, agitators — and their cause was right. If a 28-year-old or 48-year-old marches with young adults for peace in Gaza, they’re older — but no less right.
The fascists ask: Why won’t they show their faces? If they’re proud of themselves, why don’t the students who cover their faces with keffiyehs and/or COVID-19 masks expose themselves?
Uh, because they don’t want to be doxxed or face expulsion? Where is it written that protesters are required to make things easier for those who seek to oppress them? While we’re at it, should supporters of Gaza strip naked and submit DNA samples? Do yard work for Zionists? Perform sexual favors?
Then there’s the rightist complaint that some of those in the encampment are too comfortable, sacking out in donated tents and noshing on donated pizza. Again, so friggin’ what? Conservative Public Action Conference attendees don’t seem to miss many meals. Fox News hosts sleep comfortably enough. Please show us, o ye noble haters of Palestine and lovers of ethnic cleansing, where it says in the Rules of Protest that being comfortable is cheating. Why exactly is it impure to accept tasty foodstuffs as you’re awaiting arrest? What does this have to do with the big food-related issue: that Israel is intentionally starving Gazans to death?
Don’t forget the asshole gambit. Any group of people has its resident asshole; the Right finds him and implies he represents the whole movement. This time, it’s the Columbia student who posted that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Look! say the Zionists. They really are all antisemites! Except this asshole isn’t antisemitic, he’s anti-Zionist. The Left should refuse to be embarrassed. They should defend him. Right-wingers stand by their own, and so should we.
More seriously but no less stupid is the accusation, delivered with ferocious illogic, that student demonstrators in favor of Gaza are antisemitic. Not actually antisemitic but antisemitic by inference . Amid the zillions of words in news stories, congressional testimony and apologetic statements issued by craven college officials, you will find many references to antisemitism as a concept but no actual antisemitic statements like, say, “kill the Jews.” What you will find, delivered at high volume and through a curtain of crocodile tears, are syllogisms such as the one that states that the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is antisemitic just because.
Hold my hand as I walk you through it.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they argue loudly, means the eradication of the State of Israel, which in turn means the murder and/or expulsion of all Israelis, which is thus genocidal and antisemitic.
This is a series of insane assumptions. First, that freedom for Palestinians requires an end to Israel as a nation-state. I can certainly imagine a democratic State of Israel without apartheid or occupied territories or racist policies against Palestinians; the problem might be that too many Israelis cannot.
Next comes the assumption that the demise of the State of Israel, the governmental entity, would necessarily mean genocide against its resident Jews. (Let’s assume the Israeli Arabs would be OK.) It is certainly possible to imagine the eradication of the Israeli ethnostate without Holocaust 2.0 or Nakba for Jews: the Revenge. It would look like South Africa after apartheid. White South Africans were terrified that vengeful Blacks would get even with them; today, whites, a minority, and Blacks live side by side as citizens.
Israelis, one suspects, are suffering from psychological projection based on guilt — they know they live and love on land stolen from people they continue to brutalize. Odds are, however, that freed Palestinians will be far more interested in living their own lives than killing Jews.
Israelis and their supporters are entitled to their paranoias but not to have us share them.
Whether it’s about Gaza or another issue, it’s time the Left engaged the howling bullies of the Right with the forthright ridicule they deserve.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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The whole article is so absurd I don’t know where to begin.¹
I congratulate Ted Rall: you outdid yourself, buddy!
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Does this guy get paid to write this crap? What a dick.
Lots of confusion here, this article another instance of why simple categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’ aren’t helpful anymore.
Boomer Ted Rall (born 1963) is heavily ‘old school’ leftist, less so modern leftist, and he reflexively blames the blocking of his old-style-leftist agenda on the ‘right wing’, as he sees the power elite.
Whereas for the modern grass-roots ‘right wing’, such as many Unz readers – focused on traditional culture, and common-sense views of social reality, rather than ‘capitalism’ – it’s the elite who are the ‘left wing’.
Both can be seen as correct in some ways. The power elite have the money and deploy it, thus are capitalist / corporatist ‘right wing’ in a sense … but they also bring a wrecking ball to traditional and common sense culture, in favour of elite-driven, manipulative, destructive, imposed social ideology, thus ‘left wing’ in the more later-stage sense of ‘leftism’
Confusion and ‘odd alliances’ due to differing versions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are everywhere. E.g.:
– European parties against immigration are classed as ‘right wing’ even when quite socialistic on economic issues
– Pro-Palestine, anti-Israel views are both ‘radical left wing’ and ‘radical right wing’, the methods of critique quite differerent, tho arriving at the same anti-Zionist conclusion
– Classic ‘fascists’ such as Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, maintained high wages for humble workers, so even lowest-tier labourers could have homes and families … but they were ‘right wing’?
Mr. Rall doth protest too much, methinks.
I once worked for a fellow who had a plaque on his desk that said: when you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
That, in one sentence, sums up the US Right.
It’s not just that your (very well expressed) thoughts have never crossed Mr. Rall’s mind. He’s an ossified NPRogressive who will not let them in. Many of us have friends and family members like this, people who refuse to critically think or change.
I suspect that when Tom Engelhardt left, Mr. Rall was the best of that type willing to have his work published at TUR.
Freedom for the Palestinians means a right of return to Israel proper, Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa etc, and since millions of Palestinians are eternal refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria etc, they will take up that offer quickly. Millions come in, Jewish nation-state goes out.
“I can certainly imagine a democratic State of Israel without apartheid or occupied territories or racist policies against Palestinians”, and many can imagine a democratic state of Switzerland, filled to the brim with Congolese people coming in as climate refugees in 2045 because of White Made Climate Change.
“Odds are, however, that freed Palestinians will be far more interested in living their own lives than killing Jews”, as will be those Congolese. The question being, when things do get tough and whatever contingent of psychos rises up from both ethnic groups with the message of theocracy or expelling the other group, will we try to remember the other countries with multiple large opposing ethnic groups that had decades long civil wars over these questions?
And now, at this point, I would have no problem with it.
The right on this UNZ site and other sites has been opposing corruption of American by the powerful Israeli/Jewish AIPAC and its umbrella organizations (providing more than 50% of all campaign money to both parties for years), and the Jewish-communist domination of our media for decades. We’ve always tended to look on all Mideasterns, whether Jewish or Arabic as not good for this country. By contrast, the Leftist swing towards Palestine has occurred only in the past few months. Leftist brains are scattershot, they vary daily. The rest of the right, the gullible public, are all easily swayed by the media.
Democracy doesn’t work. There is too much ignorance and corruption.
The wikipedia article is a showcase of what happens when corrupt science goes wild. The ‘Examples’ truly demonstrate this. The law needs extension:
* [Brandolini’s law] The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
* [Corollary]: If you have unlimited resources (as corrupt science has) you can always produce material that makes real truth look like bullshit
I’m sure you know the latter part is true, that’s why you IMMEDIATELY resort to ad hominem dismissal. Pathetetic.
“Pro-Palestiners Should Fight Back Against Right-Wing Bullies”
The terms “right” and “left” are really meaningless today. In this case it’s pro-zionist or not pro-zionist. The traditional “right” conservative vs “left” liberal/socialist is an outmoded 1960’s way of framing today’s events and is irrelevant.
True right-wingers (like me) hate Israel and wish it had never been founded.
We don’t need to justify anything to anyone. Not even Joe Biden. All the justiifcation we need for anything we do in Gaza is that Hamas has not returned the hostages, has not laid down their weapons and has not surrendered.
Half the right and half the left are on one side. The other halfs are together on the other side.
Write it down if you can’t remember it.
LOL, show a little humility, Joe may be a an angry old fool but Israel is partying on someone else’s bar tab. The best strategy you guys have is financial in nature. Now give good old Uncle Joe a sloppy wet kiss!
The bullies at UCLA were not “right wing”, they were Jewish supremacist.
Is this article satire? Like that anglin guys stuff?
Seriously, the entire article was a huge deflection piece. Everything the author wrote about republicans and conservatives is actually more true about democrats.
This bit here, where I stopped reading is insane! “White South Africans were terrified that vengeful Blacks would get even with them; today, whites, a minority, and Blacks live side by side as citizens.” Notice how the author wrote whites in lower case and blacks in upper case. Idiot.
Does the author not know that whites in South Africa are being murdered and raped and driven off of their ancestral lands!?
‘South Africa farm attacks: Brutal crimes landowners face‘
News com au
Mar 2018
“She said most white owned homes have barbed wire, alarm systems and burglar bars while car-jackings were a part of life. Jobs for white people were also becoming harder to obtain, she said, with affirmative action favouring black people”
‘Killing of white farmers becomes flashpoint in South Africa’
NY Times
Oct 2020
“Outside a court hearing for two Black suspects in a murder case, white Afrikaners nostalgic for the apartheid era and Black protesters angry that whites still own most farmland squared off”
‘Suspects acquitted of white farmer murder that sparked riots in S.Africa’
Reuters
Nov 2021
“the government is preparing to discuss a long-awaited bill to expropriate white-owned land without compensation, as part of an effort to redress economic inequalities that remain stark 27 years after the end of white minority rule. The bill has become a flashpoint for the racial tensions…”
Just imagine: Rall is publishing those very words on a rightwing website, having been booted off CounterPunch. LOL!
Also, it never ceases to amaze me how so many lefties can vehemently oppose this deadly foreign deluge over the historic lands of the Palestinians, while promoting the exact same fate for the White nations of the earth. I guess, like so many Conzos out there, the lefties combat one wing of Judaism by appealing to the other … groan.
Blogger is unwittingly ranting about pseudo-right. Nothing to do with the Right, bud.
Get a real dictionary. Neocons are jews and their prostitutes. Nothin new or conservative about them. Always the opposite meanings.
Before you write, learn the words. Otherwise don’t write.
Actually Ted Rail is right about one thing…
He points out that conservatives are now using the same tactics that the left have been used on them for many decades now.
The right is attempting to “protect” the israel slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank as congress is pretty much owned by jews.
Conservatives don’t want to see their jewish “cash cow” slaughtered itself…
Follow the shekels.
As an aside in the November general (s)elections, I propose that all voters of good will do the following:
Refuse to vote for any candidate that supports israel.
Write-in your vote for every public office.
Vote for HAMAS.
If millions of the voting public do this, the powers that be will recognize it.
“Right-wing bullies”
Does he know he’s really talking about Jews? (And their servants)