“Try This on for Anti-semitism” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. An excerpt:
Paul Gottfried’s essay, “Are Bannon’s Critics For Real?”, dispenses with the no-brainer that Steve Bannon, “Breitbart executive and Donald Trump adviser,” is a white nationalist. After all, argues Gottfried, Bannon “comes from the world of Washington politics and journalism,” not exactly a hotbed of white identity politics. It’s “not at all clear to me that those who write for Bannon’s website publication, some of whom are Orthodox Jews, have much to do with white identitarians who also use the term ‘Altright,’” contends Gottfried.
As co-originator of the Alternative Right concept and phrase, Gottfried is in the know.
His piece appeared on FrontPage Magazine, which openly debates taboo topics—from black-on-white crime (the predominate kind), to slavery (who abolished it; who still practices it), to Islam (it counsels conquest, not co-existence). And now neoconservatism, a deformation of conservatism drastically weakened, inadvertently, by Donald Trump.
Why inadvertently? As Barack Obama remarked recently (“a stopped clock” and all that stuff), President-elect Trump is not an ideologue. It’s a point made in my latest book, “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed”:
“Donald Trump is no ‘visionary’ vis-à-vis government. If anything, he’s practical and pragmatic. He wants a fix for Americans, not a fantasy. A healthy patriotism is associated with Trump’s kind of robust particularism—petty provincialism, if you like—and certainly not with the deracinated globalism of the neoconservative and liberal establishment. The Left calls it fascism; patriots call it nationalism. Donald Trump has the potential to be just the provincial, America Firster the doctor ordered.”
Bannon is also catching hell for some hearsay. He’s alleged to have complained about wealthy Jews raising “whiney brats.” Try this on for antisemitism. It’s a flashback. I’m seated at a café with my father. We’re being served by a rather animated waiter. I can’t recall how the conversation turned to Ashkenazi Jews, but our waiter let rip: “If only Hitler had killed all of them,” he fulminated.
The café was in Israel of my youth. The waiter was a Yemeni Jew. The time: Well before American political correctness had percolated around the world. The hatred our waiter had expressed for his East-European brethren was perfectly understandable to Israelis back then. …
Read the rest. “Try This on for Anti-semitism” is now on Townhall.com.
