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wo weeks ago, we discussed certain cataclysmic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Assad dictatorship, which seemed to change everything in an instant. But apart from such high-impact events, there are also trends that have dramatically changed everything about our lives over a relatively short period of time, often without our appreciating the degree to which they have done so.

Social psychologist Jon Haidt has amassed an impressive array of evidence, for instance, pointing toward the negative impact of the iPhone on the mental health of young girls. And the ubiquity of the personal computer has changed almost everything about how we conduct our lives over the last 40 years.

Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, explores the way that we are surrounded by “mediating technologies [that interpose themselves] between us and the world.” Instead of encountering the world through the immediate engagement of our senses, we do so through our screens and software. Ian Tuttle’s review of Rosen’s work draws on the insight of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Experience is the experience of human finitude.” Digital technologies, by contrast, are designed to negate the sense of limitation that is the core of all experience. Not by accident is Silicon Valley preoccupied with solving the problem of death, as if it were a defect of code.

Rosen’s concluding chapter recommends the Amish approach to technology, which consists of asking, “How will this impact our community? Is it good for our families? Does it support or undermine our values?”

Tuttle, however, points out that few people today live in communities with the stability and integrity of the Amish and capable of emulating the Amish decision-making process. The one community that does cultivate the Amish’s “robust skepticism about each new device and app” is the Torah community. And that is something of which we should be proud.

THE DRAMATIC CHANGES in my lifetime have come not only in the realm of technology, but also in attitudes. We recently had over for Shabbos an older friend, and we got to talking about her early days practicing law. She entered college at 16, after having won a full scholarship (which she desperately needed) to a top accounting program. She graduated first in her class, but received not a single job offer, while men who graduated with C averages readily found jobs.

Eventually, she was hired by one of the biggest national firms. But when she arrived for her first day of work, she quickly realized that much of her work would not be typical accounting. A future colleague welcomed by telling her how happy he was to see her, as “we’ve been saving all the lousy jobs for you.”

She attended law school at night while working in the accounting firm, again graduating at the top of her class. But when she took her résumé to the major firm where she spent her career, the receptionist directed her to the stenographic pool, so unknown were women attorneys at the time. Fortunately, the kindly Irish woman who ran the pool realized that she was not looking for a secretarial job and sent her for an interview with one of the hiring partners.

Her hiring did not end her status as a unicorn. In those days, secretaries who became pregnant were fired, and she feared the same would happen to her. When she became pregnant, she wore only black and dark blue suits to conceal her condition, until one day she fainted in the firm’s elevator.

In time, she became only the second woman to “make partner” in one of the so-called white-shoe firms. Even then, she could not attend the next annual partners meeting, because the exclusive club at which it was held did not allow women past the lobby. The managing partner assured her that such a thing would never happen again.

By the time she became a senior partner, many prestigious charity organizations sought her for their boards. But arriving at one such board meeting at an exclusive club, she was directed to the freight elevator. At least she had the presence of mind to ride down the main elevator after the meeting.

To someone who entered law school in the ’70s, these stories seem like fairy tales from a long-gone era. But even in 1971, two years before I started law school, women entering Yale Law School’s first-year class constituted only 15 percent of the students, and a few years after I graduated, it was only 28 percent. By then, however, none of the women had to worry that they would not be courted for top jobs.

Today, the entering class at YLS has a majority of women, and that is true in most top law schools and med schools. In many top colleges the ratio of women to men is 60:40. It is the men who are becoming the curiosities.

I’m not writing a brief for the feminist movement, which accelerated many of these changes. To a large extent, it has caused men and women to view one another as enemy camps, rather than as potential partners for building a family. Yet one of the best predictors of a country’s economic backwardness is the lack of educational and employment opportunities afforded the female half of the population.

Such broader societal changes never leave our own community unaffected, for better or worse. On the plus side, the vastly increased opportunities for women is a major driver of the expansion of long-time learning and allows many men from non-affluent backgrounds to continue their learning far longer than they otherwise could have.

At the same time, the three-headed hat of mother, homemaker, and breadwinner often sits heavily on the heads of the women who hold all three titles. Actually, the first time we met the friend described above was at a kiruv symposium in Monsey over 40 years ago. What I remember most about her presentation was a question from the audience: “How do you find the time to get your kids off to school, tuck them in at night, prepare Shabbos meals, and fashion beautiful Purim costumes, while maintaining the hours of a senior partner in an international law firm?”

Her reply was straightforward, though I thought I detected a slight quiver in her voice: “You can’t.”

Churchill and Me

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill has just passed. And as is to be expected, it has been the occasion of many encomiums to the 20th century’s “indispensable man.”

Many of those encomiums, however, begin by noting his numerous eccentricities and faults. “One Hundred Fifty Years of Churchill,” by Hillsdale College president and Churchill scholar Larry Arnn will serve as an example.

“He often spent more money than he had, although he earned a lot. Especially when he was young, his ambition showed all over him. He did not have the gift of some politicians, such as Abraham Lincoln, to be underestimated,” Arnn begins, before moving on to Churchill’s “obvious excellence at many things.”

He wrote more than 40 books, all worth reading and many of them great, for which he was the first non-novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And his collected speeches, which he wrote himself, run to 8,000 closely printed pages.

Above all, he, more than any other human being, is responsible for the fact that Adolf Hitler yemach shemo did not conquer the world.

Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History is a great read, though not a repository of the vast research of other Churchill biographers, such as Martin Gilbert, Anthony Roberts, and William Manchester. Johnson devotes an entire chapter to assembling — and then refuting — the case against Churchill’s character, “a spoilt, bullying, double-crossing, self-centered bore.”

In the midst of that chapter, Johnson quotes one Pamela Plowden, who rejected Churchill’s marriage proposal but remained a lifelong friend. “When you first meet Winston, you see all his faults,” she said. “You spend the rest of your life discovering his virtues.”

Quite obviously, I share nothing in common with Winston Churchill, having never been the leader of anything or moved anyone to great deeds with my eloquence. But that quote of Plowden’s did serve as a tenuous link to him, and more importantly to my late brother, Rabbi Mattisyahu Rosenblum.

My brother was once talking to someone whom he respected greatly, who somehow got onto the subject of the faults he discerned in Mattisyahu’s oldest brother — i.e., me.

“Anyone can see my brother’s faults,” my brother told him. “But you are a lamdan. Why don’t you concentrate on discovering his maalos?”

May we all be zocheh to becoming lamdanim in the evaluation of our fellows and to be surrounded by lamdanim in their evaluation of us.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1043. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post The Times They Are a’Changing first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

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ocial theorist Yuval Levin begins his new work on the American Constitution, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — And Could Again: “This is a book about America, and therefore, it is a hopeful book.” He is careful, however, to distinguish hopeful from optimistic: “To be hopeful about America is not to be optimistic about it. Optimism, the expectation that good things will happen, is a pretty silly attitude toward our fallen world.”

Not only silly, but a vice: “Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices, because they are both invitations to passivity.”

“Hope,” by way of contrast, “is a virtue, and so it sits between those vices [i.e., optimism and pessimism]. It tells us things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worthy of it happening.”

It occurs to me that Jews are the exemplars of hope. We have always followed the advice contained in Chizkiyahu Hamelech’s dismissal of the prophet Yeshayahu, “Even if a sharp sword is on his neck, he should not despair of Divine mercy” (Berachos 10a).

Without hope, Jewish survival throughout the millennia is inexplicable. Without belief in a beneficent G-d, Who has a plan for the world, which He will bring to fruition, we could never have endured what we have and remained intact.

And it is the Jewish People who best demonstrate the distinction between optimism and hope. Our history gives us little reason for optimism that things will surely work out — certainly not in the short run. As a law school classmate once remarked to me, “Jewish history has not exactly been a romp through sunlit fields.” (His own mother was born in the midst of the 1905 Odessa pogrom, and the first words she heard were, “Kill the Jews.”)

Both the pillars that Levin identifies with hope — actions intended to make us worthy of a better future and designed to bring into being a better world — have always characterized the Jewish People. When we say in our prayers that we were exiled due to our sins, there is an implicit call to action in those words: Let us make ourselves better, more faithful Jews, and we will be worthy of redemption.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, on a visit to Eretz Yisrael, described the Jews as a “restless people,” always ready to take action to improve their situation. In Radical Then, Radical Now, the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “For Judaism, faith is cognitive dissonance, the discord between the world that is and the world as it might be.”

The powerful force of minhag in Judaism results from our respect for the accumulated knowledge of mankind, and we look to words in many cases uttered in batei medrash over 2,000 years ago to guide our lives. But at the same time, we are constantly applying the principles learned to new situations and anticipating the future.

In a new book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew? Learning to Love the Lessons of Jew-Hatred, Rabbi Raphael Shore describes the Jewish People as the great disrupters of mankind, breakers of the status quo. Certainly no event has ever been more disruptive than the giving of the Torah, which introduced monotheism into the world and the morality that goes with it. Both haters of Jews — e.g., Hitler — and philo-Semites have always agreed upon that.

That drive to bring into being a better future has taken both religious and secularized forms, and the latter have oftentimes been destructive — e.g., Marxism and, in some respects, Freudianism. But the impulse is a Jewish one. Nobel Prize winners are by definition breakers of the status quo, those who have introduced new ways of thinking and viewing the world. Not by accident have Jews garnered 29 percent of the Nobel Prizes since the prize was introduced, despite constituting only 0.2 percent of the world’s population. In other words, 145 times the number one might have expected if all nations were equal.

ONE PRIME EXAMPLE of the Jews’ relentless efforts to seek solutions and innovate, no matter how desperate the situation, comes from the Israeli military. In the 1973 war, the Israeli tank corps was being devastated by a new weapon: Sagger wire-guided missiles that could be fired by a lone soldier lying on the ground at a distance of nearly two miles. Yet in the heat of the battle, Israeli tank commanders improvised a means to limit the Saggers’ effectiveness. Whenever the telltale red dot emitted by a Sagger operator was seen, all the tanks would begin swerving rapidly to kick up dirt, thereby blinding the operator of the Sagger. (I have previously cited this story drawn from Startup Nation.)

The IDF’s efforts to destroy Hamas’s huge underground tunnel network in Gaza and Hezbollah’s in southern Lebanon provide another example. Maj. John Spencer, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project at the Modern War Institute of West Point, writes that no military has ever faced anything remotely like the labyrinth of 350 to 450 miles of tunnels used by Hamas in Gaza, which cost over $1 billion to build.

The unique nature of the challenge facing the IDF explains why any citation of Gaza casualty figures to condemn Israel is ridiculous: Israel cannot defeat Hamas without destroying the tunnel network, which is entirely built under civilian areas, and the task is immensely complicated. Nevertheless, Israel’s ratio of civilian-to-military deaths among those killed is lower than any other army has ever achieved in urban warfare.

“The more the IDF engaged with the Hamas tunnel network, the more they adapted,” writes Spencer. That involved a great deal of trial and error to develop methods to identify the nature of a particular tunnel and its uses by Hamas in order to prioritize which tunnels required destruction. Given the vast scope of the tunnel network, a good deal of the specialized knowledge of the Yahalom engineering units had to be pushed lower to general purpose soldiers, who became proficient in shaft identification, site securing, and initial investigations.

Initially, the tunnels gave Hamas the initiative in most battles in Gaza. But a rapid learning initiative conducted by Brigadier General Dan Goldfus, the commander of the elite 98th Paratroopers Division, allowed him to develop a plan by which IDF soldiers entered tunnels without Hamas knowing they were there, and then using the intelligence service to coordinate between the special operations forces entering the tunnels with those maneuvering on enemy forces above ground.

Spencer summarizes: “They turned tunnels from obstacles controlled by the defending enemy into maneuver corridors for the attacker.” Tactics developed by Goldfus, in the midst of active warfare, soon spread to other units, and will, according to Spencer, will be studied by militaries around the world for years to come.

CHANUKAH REPRESENTS the ultimate symbol of Jewish hopefulness: the unwillingness to sink into passive despair in the face of overwhelming forces or to engage in irrational exuberance that everything will turn out for the best. But rather to take action in the face of a difficult, even seemingly impossible, situation in the hope of creating something better.

Only the recognition that Hashem is at all times the “ozer u’moshia” could have induced Mattisyahu, the Kohein Gadol, and his five sons to rebel and declare war on the mighty Seleucid Empire. Admittedly, I have never studied the Book of Maccabees or other sources on the tactics employed by the Maccabees in their war against Antiochus. But it is clear that they developed the tactics of guerilla warfare rather than succumb to the Hellenization of the Jewish People, and achieved victory.

Similarly, the decision of Kohanim who found a single container of pure, sanctified oil, sufficient for only one day, to light the Menorah reflected Jewish hope: We have to do what we can to the limits of our ability. But after that the result is exclusively in Hashem’s hand.

We carry on today, filled with hope, because so many times in the past Hashem has blessed our efforts to save ourselves with success. Indeed, it is the simple fact that we are still here today after 3,000 years of efforts to destroy the Jewish People that is the source of our hope.

A lichtigen Chanukah.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1042. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post A Hopeful People first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: Flash90

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history approaches its end, events start to speed up. Recent events in Syria certainly bear that out. Already in March 2011, widespread demonstrations against the Assad regime broke out, in the wake of Arab Spring. By mid-2012, Syria was in the midst of a full-blown civil war that would leave an estimated 600,000 dead and 12 million uprooted from their homes.

But over the last four years, the government and multiple rebel militias had settled into an ongoing stalemate, with occasional skirmishes but virtually no shifting of the map, which showed Assad in control of approximately 70 percent of Syria.

Then suddenly on November 27, rebel forces launched a major attack, and within days, they had captured Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, and were headed south to Damascus, the capital. A week after the conquest of Aleppo, government forces put down their arms, and Bashar al-Assad and family were on a flight to Moscow. Just like that, the 14 years of civil war and 53 years of brutal rule by the Assad family, father Hafez and son Bashar, were over.

The fall of the Assad regime once again reset the Middle East chessboard in Israel’s favor and to the detriment of Iran. Syria was the only state actor allied with Iran in the Middle East, and an irreplaceable transit point for Iranian arms being sent to Hezbollah. Without Syria, Hezbollah is effectively cut off.

David Wurmser, a Middle East expert from whom I once had the privilege of a private tutorial on Syria, compared the loss of Syria to Iran to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Soviet Union. The so-called “ring of fire” that Iran laboriously constructed to surround Israel has now fallen brick by brick. In addition to threatening Israel, that ring of fire was meant to deter Israel from attacking Iran. Now, Iran’s deterrent capacity has been reduced to virtually nothing, and at the same time, Israel has rendered Iran virtually defenseless by taking out its anti-aircraft defenses.

Iran has been stripped of its ability to project power throughout the Middle East, and left humiliated, as Israel has destroyed Hamas and dramatically weakened Hezbollah. The latter, in turn, contributed heavily to the shocking collapse of Assad’s forces. During the earlier fighting in Aleppo, in 2014 and 2015, Hezbollah played a major role in preventing the city from falling to the rebels, and its ongoing presence in the city served as a deterrent to rebel forces. But the substantially diminished Hezbollah of today could no longer deter the rebels. In addition, Israel’s air force made it impossible for Shiite militias in Iraq to enter Syria as reinforcements for Assad.

Wurmser characterized the regime of the mullahs in Iran as traveling on a “downward ramp,” and opined that it is concerned about its own ability to survive. Reportedly, there is serious infighting and mutual recriminations within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has the primary responsibility for Iran’s foreign adventures, over responsibility for Assad’s fall.

In the meantime, Israel flew 350 sorties in Syria in the first few days following Bashar Assad’s flight and destroyed virtually Syria’s entire navy, most of its air force, including fighter jets and attack helicopters, and its tank corps. Perhaps the IAF’s highest priority was Syria’s chemical weapons stores, lest they ever fall into the hands of those who mean Israel ill. The IAF spent two days bombing a “scientific institute” near Damascus, used to store and manufacture chemical weapons.

Israel destroyed dozens of weapons production sites, and a variety of Scud missiles, cruise missiles, sea-to-sea missiles, and drones. It has also taken advantage of the vacuum in Syria to seize the entirety of Mount Hermon, and to clear a security border between southern Syria and the Golan Heights.

We are witnessing something like the v’nahafoch hu of Purim. Prior to October 7, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar envisioned Iran and its proxies destroying Israel once and for all. Now, Sinwar is dead, killed by IDF soldiers in Gaza, and Hamas reduced to a rump military organization and unable to rearm. On October 8, Hezbollah joined Hamas by firing missiles at Israel, and eventually forced 60,000 residents of Israel’s north to evacuate from their homes. Now, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and all his top lieutenants have been eliminated and most of Hezbollah’s missiles destroyed. Syria has fallen, and the Iranian regime fears for its own continued existence.

Surveying this turnaround, I cannot help thinking of something the late Professor Robert Wistrich, the great scholar of anti-Semitism, once told me: There is a pattern in Jewish history of every tyrant who sets out to destroy the Jewish People, from Haman to Hitler to Stalin, almost immediately thereafter embarking on a course of action leading to his own downfall.

DICTATORS IN TOTALITARIAN SOCIETIES depend on terrorizing their own people. And few more so than Bashar al-Assad. Trained in Britain as an ophthalmologist, he proved every bit as ruthless and murderous as his father before him. After a 27-day siege of Hama in 1982, forces under the command of Hafez Assad’s brother, Rafiq, killed up to 40,000 residents of Hama.

Like father, like son. Nigel Jones writes in the Spectator, “There were no limits to [Bashar] Assad’s violence against his own rebellious people. Torture was routine in the regime’s jails, and human rights monitors estimate that 32,000 have died in them as a result.”

Bashar infamously employed poison gas against his own population. When rebel forces appeared on the verge of taking Aleppo in the Syrian civil war, Russian planes came to Assad’s aid by reducing Aleppo’s center to rubble with barrel bombs, which are highly lethal in confined urban areas.

“Joint Russian and Syrian-government air strikes deliberately targeted hospitals and practiced ‘double tap’ strikes, bombing a civilian target and then hitting the same location soon afterward to kill rescue workers,” according to Anne Appelbaum in the Atlantic.

(Somehow, Russia’s targeting of civilian populations in Syria, Chechnya, and today in the Ukraine never seem to rouse American university students.)

Dictators use systematic cruelty and brutality to instill a feeling of utter hopelessness in their populations. Yet they can fall in an instant when the tyrant’s soldiers no longer believe that he can protect them from their compatriots’ wrath. That is what happened in Syria when Assad could not call upon Iran or its Hezbollah proxy or Russia for support.

Another technique of totalitarians of all sorts is called “preference falsification,” by which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. The point of the technique is to convince each individual that they alone know that what they are saying is false.

In a brilliant Substack essay, drawing on the work of economist Timur Kuran (Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification), law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds points out that similar techniques are employed by governments and social movements, even in democratic societies: People refrain from expressing unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment.

But just as dictators can fall overnight, so can the bubble pop on ideological conformity when people realize that their views are widely shared. Kuran calls that a “preference cascade.”

And Reynolds argues that Donald Trump’s recent victory, with a majority of the popular vote, is such a moment. Ever since Trump appeared upon the scene, anyone who wanted to be heard among the chattering classes and express heterodox views found it necessary to preface his remarks by stating how repugnant he found Trump to be.

But in the weeks since the election, Trump’s popularity, according to one CBS poll, has increased six points, among both younger and older voters. The widespread imitation of the president-elect’s dance moves suggest that it is no longer the height of intellectual gaucherie to confess that one is supportive of Trump’s policy preferences and his determination to bring them to fruition.

It turns out, Reynolds suggests, that most people never bought into wokeism, but between the constant repetition of its tenets by the media, and the fear of being mobbed and canceled if you begged to differ, many people were afraid to stand up. Trump’s election and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and success in turning X into a genuine free speech platform, however, changed all that.

What William Deresiewicz, who formerly taught English at Yale, labels “Academe’s Divorce From Reality” was an effort to impose a cultural revolution from the top down. And the recent election was a referendum on the “politics of the academy.” It did not go well for the academy. From 2020 to 2024, Trump improved his numbers in 2,764 of America’s counties, and all 50 states moved to the right from four years earlier.

Americans, even in bright blue California, have rejected the efforts of progressive Soros-backed prosecutors to decriminalize property and drug crimes. Similarly, they do not want minors too young to buy a beer or vote making decisions about whether to undergo drastic and usually irreversible operations that will affect their future lives, in the name of “affirmative care.” Nor do they want biological men dominating women’s sports.

They reject the vision of America as divided into oppressors and oppressed, with all virtue inhering in the oppressed, and the “social justice” imperative that requires both government and private organizations to discriminate against white men in order to remedy past injustices. By overwhelming majorities, including blacks and other minorities, Americans prefer Martin Luther King’s vision of a “colorblind” society to one in which benefits are parceled out based on group identity.

The incoming president seems intent on fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. Christopher Rufo, the foremost crusader against DEI, has presented Trump with a detailed plan for uprooting DEI from all government offices, by reversing the executive orders of both the Obama and Biden administrations embedding DEI throughout the government, including the military.

And Rufo has similar plans for higher education to encourage all institutions receiving government funding to dismantle their huge DEI bureaucracies, as the University of Michigan recently did by banning all requirements of DEI statements as a condition of hiring or admission. It is a good bet that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon will no longer be spending much of its time harassing states and localities trying to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls and ensuring electoral integrity, and a good deal more protecting the rights of Jewish students on campus, as was the case in the first Trump administration.

In short, the stage has been set for dramatic and rapid change. Perhaps not as fast or as unexpected as Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but plenty dramatic enough nevertheless.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1041. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post Things Speed Up first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

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he recent election was a devastating blow to what voting guru Nate Silver refers to as the Indigo Blob — “the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia, and public health on the one hand and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups on the other hand.”

Indeed, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was a far greater blow than even that of 2016, following as it did on January 6; two impeachments; and a slew of legal actions, both civil and criminal, state and federal. In short, voters in 2024 could not say they did not know what they were getting in Donald Trump. His victory therefore demonstrates the degree to which voters have come to doubt the basic competence of the expert class.

School closures pushed by teachers’ unions during a pandemic, calls to defund the police during a crime wave, and a racial “reckoning” amid a pandemic are a few of the disasters Silver mentions. He emphasizes that voters were not swayed by “misinformation,” but by a correct perception of institutional decline and policy failures of the expert class: overstimulating the economy leading to inflation, opening the border to nearly ten million illegal immigrants, and trying to run a doddering Biden again. Perhaps the biggest recent failure of the technocratic elite cited by Silver was the handling of the Covid epidemic, which managed to combine economically ruinous lockdowns, disastrous school closures, and seven million deaths worldwide.

The one thing left to the elites after Trump’s victory was their unshakeable faith in their own moral superiority. And one of their favorite proofs was President Biden’s oft-repeated promise that he would abide by the jury determinations in his son Hunter’s trials and not pardon him. Brendan O’Neill writing in Spiked describes how the establishment media fawned over the president as a moral icon, whose acceptance of the jury verdict in Hunter’s trial for lying on a federal gun permit form contrasted so sharply to Donald Trump’s rants about a “rigged” justice system.

“Over and over and over” the media and Democratic politicians celebrated their own high-mindedness and morally spotless characters. Veteran D.C. journalist John Harwood, for instance, posted, “People who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves; they can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”

With last week’s announcement of a pardon of his son Hunter — not just on the federal gun charges on which he was convicted and the failure to pay federal taxes to which he has pleaded guilty, but of any and all crimes that he may have committed from 2014 on — Joe Biden has, in O’Neill’s words, “shattered the moral pretensions of his presidency, his party, and arguably his entire class.” Former DOJ pardon attorney Margaret Love could think of only one pardon so sweeping — Presidents Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon.

ALMOST AS EMBARRASSING as the president’s pardon itself was the justification he offered for his belated change of mind: His son, he argued, had been subjected to a prejudicial prosecution simply because he was the president’s son. On its face, the claim that the Department of Justice, headed by Biden’s appointed attorney general, Merrick Garland, had singled out Hunter Biden was laughable. That would be the same Merrick Garland who never appointed a special prosecutor to look into the multiple serious crimes of which Hunter Biden was suspected — money laundering, income tax evasion, and failure to register as a foreign agent — even though the very purpose of special prosecutors is to handle cases where the Department of Justice may have a conflict of interest.

United States District Court Judge Mark Scarsi, before whom Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nonpayment of taxes, responded sharply to the president’s claim that drug-addled defendants, like Hunter Biden, who eventually make back payments are seldom criminally prosecuted. Scarsi pointed out that the charges to which Hunter pleaded guilty included nonpayment of taxes in years subsequent to his crack addiction, and that he had admitted to having the necessary funds to pay his taxes in those years but preferred to spend the money on his sybaritic lifestyle instead.

He might have added that Biden’s crimes were not simple nonpayment of taxes, but sophisticated and deliberate frauds, involving large sums of money. Those included deducting his debaucheries as business expenses and taking payments from foreign entities to his consulting firm in the form of nontaxable loans from the firm to him. Moreover, the more than 100 money transfers to Biden family members, through a dizzying array of shell corporations, which were flagged by six different banks as “suspicious,” strongly suggest an effort to hide payments from foreign sources by breaking it into small payments.

Scarsi concluded archly that the president has the power to pardon; he does not have the power to rewrite history.

Far from having been singled out for harsh treatment by the IRS or the Justice Department, Hunter was given the most solicitous treatment possible. IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified that at every juncture, their investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances was stymied by supervisors. They were denied access to his laptop, which was in the possession of the FBI, and which contained extensive correspondence about his business dealings.

Nor were they ever informed of the fact that an FBI informant had testified to being told by the founder of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat for a monthly fee of $83,000, that he had paid both Hunter Biden and his father $5 million each to get Ukrainian investigators off his back and to run interference for the company with US authorities. Then-vice president Joe Biden held the Ukrainian portfolio in the Obama administration, at that time.

Shapley and Ziegler’s request for a search warrant of Hunter’s residence and a beach house belonging to his father where he frequently stayed was denied by Assistant US Attorney for Delaware Lesley Wolf, despite the latter’s admission that there was probable cause for such a warrant. And on another occasion, when they were going to search a storage locker belonging to Hunter, Wolf tipped off his defense team in advance. Further, Shapley and Ziegler were told to ask no questions about the “big guy,” or Hunter’s “dad.”

US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss slow-walked the investigation into Hunter’s taxes to such an extent that the statute of limitations ran out on the most serious of those investigations dating back to 2014.

Finally, there is the matter of the plea bargain and diversion agreement that the DOJ attempted to sneak past US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley described the plea agreement as looking like it had been drafted by Hunter’s attorneys at Latham and Watkins. It was not accompanied by an indictment detailing Hunter’s crimes, as would normally be the case.

Second, tucked away in the “diversion agreement” for his failure to note his drug addiction on his form to purchase a firearm was a provision immunizing Hunter Biden from prosecution for any other offenses (just like his father’s recent pardon). That provision should have properly been in the plea agreement itself. Fortunately, Noreika caught its presence in the diversion agreement and refused to ratify the plea agreement, which itself constituted a severe and rare rebuke to the federal prosecutors.

THOSE PROFESSING to be disappointed to learn that Joe Biden is not the paragon of virtue and honesty they had imagined must have been wearing pretty thick blinders. He was caught plagiarizing in law school, and rather than graduating in the top half of his class, as he has claimed, he finished in the bottom quintile. His 1988 presidential campaign came to an abrupt halt when he was found to have substituted the life story of British Labour politician Neil Kinnock for his own. In the 2020 primaries, he told a whopper about having been arrested trying to meet imprisoned South African black leader Nelson Mandela.

More significantly, he repeatedly claimed to not know anything of his son Hunter’s business affairs with foreign entities, including those with entities closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party. That claim was rendered untenable when two of Hunter’s closest associates, Devon Archer and Rob Walker, testified that Joe Biden was repeatedly available to demonstrate his closeness to Hunter by speaking to him during business meetings either by phone or in person. Archer listed at least 20 such occasions.

Joe Biden’s vice-presidential visitor logs show that Archer met at length with him just prior to being appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and three weeks before Hunter was appointed to same board, at a monthly salary of over $83,000, despite having no experience in the energy sector.

Doing nothing about Hunter’s lucrative links to a Ukrainian company, while he was in charge of the Ukrainian portfolio in the Obama administration, was by itself an ethical violation by the senior Biden. But Joe was also so incautious as to boast in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that he had had the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma fired by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Ukrainian government.

The impropriety is clear even if Joe Biden never received a penny by allowing his brother James and son Hunter to profit heavily over decades by trading on the “Biden brand,” as Devon Archer called it. But it would require a good deal of credulity to believe that was the case. The House Oversight Committee has uncovered at least $24 million in payments from foreign entities associated with Hunter through over 100 shell companies to at least nine Biden family members.

Tony Bobulinski, a onetime business associate of Hunter’s, has testified that the “big guy” — referred to in a document concerning the division of profits between Hunter-affiliated entities and Chinese Energy Company (CEFC) — was the president.

Bobulinski further testified that Joe Biden was present at a 2017 business meeting with representatives of Chinese Energy Company at a posh Los Angeles restaurant, and was well-versed in the relationship between his son and the Chinese company, with close ties to the ruling CCP. In a 2017 encrypted email sent by Hunter to CEFC’s Henry Chao, who is also a CCP official, the former threatened that between himself and the “man sitting next to me [i.e., Hunter’s father],” there would be severe consequences if certain promised payments were not forthcoming. Chao had no trouble believing the Hunter’s father was indeed next to him, and the payments were made forthwith.

Had President Biden been a little better law student, he would have realized that by pardoning Hunter, he might have tightened the noose around his own neck. Should the Trump DOJ decide to follow up on the investigations into the Biden family business by the House Oversight Committee, it can begin by hauling Hunter before a grand jury for questioning. He cannot plead the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, as he has already been immunized to prosecution, and would have no choice but to answer questions on threat of perjury.

What an ironic ending that would be to the Hunter Biden pardon.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1040. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post Biden Puts the Final Nail in the Coffin of the Elites first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

ITis not hard to see why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to a 60-day ceasefire with Hezbollah. The burden of over 400 days of warfare on the IDF, especially the reservists, has been enormous. They need a rest. And while they do so, there are plenty of enormous achievements to savor.

The achievements of the IDF since the Simchas Torah massacre are both remarkable and insufficiently celebrated in Israel. In addition, the last two months of fighting in southern Lebanon and beyond have revealed the amazing siyata d’Shmaya that the Jews of Israel have experienced. On Simchas Torah 5774, Hezbollah possessed huge stockpiles of weapons along the border with Israel, a network of tunnels leading into Israel, and a well-trained army. Had Hezbollah not held back from joining Hamas’s attack, for reasons not fully understood, Israel would have found itself fighting a war deep in its own territory on at least two fronts. The IDF was totally unprepared for such a war.

Instead, consider the situation in which Israel finds itself today. The IDF is in full control of Gaza’s borders. By destroying the tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor, the IDF has rendered Hamas incapable of rearming. At the same time, Israel has cleared a security zone along Gaza’s northern border, which makes a repeat of the Simchas Torah attack far less likely.

Hamas’s senior military leadership is decimated and much of its vast tunnel network under Gaza destroyed. Israel will not permit international funding to rebuild Gaza to be funneled through Hamas, which makes the reconstruction of that underground tunnel network impossible. And there are at least some signs that the population of Gaza is beginning to recognize the destruction that Hamas has brought upon them and seeks a future with some hope for better lives.

Meanwhile, a deal with Hezbollah means that the remnants of Hamas’s military wing are left to face the IDF alone, without hope of the IDF being distracted in the near term by the need to retain large forces in the north.

For its part, Hezbollah’s leadership, chief among them the charismatic and clever Hassan Nasrallah, has been thoroughly decapitated. The latest of Nasrallah’s would-be successors is rumored to have taken refuge in Iran, lest he join his predecessors at the receiving end of an Israeli bomb. The vast arsenal of rockets and missiles with which Hezbollah has terrorized Israel for more than a decade has been largely destroyed — 80% according to some news reports and including the majority of its long-range missiles. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed and many others maimed. Upon its withdrawal from Lebanon, the IDF will return with vast storehouses of weapons stockpiled by Hezbollah for a cross-border attack on Israel.

On the very eve of the agreement going to effect, the IAF destroyed Hezbollah’s major production site for precision missiles, built and operated with Iranian assistance, and the nearby central compound of Hezbollah’s Radwan Forces, killing dozens of Hezbollah fighters. In the days preceding that, Israel succeeded in eliminating all the senior commanders of Hezbollah’s drone division.

Here is a summary of Israel’s achievements by John Spencer, professor of modern urban warfare at West Point: “Once Israel decided to retaliate, it eliminated the complete enemy leadership hierarchy (cannot be replaced easily), destroyed massive amounts of their rocket launching capabilities (their key capability), seized and cleared critical terrain, demonstrated such superior capability (pager, dismantling operation) to put fear and consequences back in the enemy’s mind (aka deterrence), and measurably set the Islamic regime’s proxy back decades.”

In short, the most important element in the “ring of fire” laboriously built by Iran around Israel has been greatly weakened and no longer serves as a credible deterrent to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installation.

And for its part, Iran too has been greatly weakened. One measure of Iran’s diminished position: It urged Hezbollah to accept the cease-fire with Israel. Iran’s antiaircraft defenses have been rendered useless by the IAF. And even absent any direct attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment and storage facilities, Israel has apparently destroyed its major research facility for the creation of nuclear warheads.

The shocking capture of Aleppo by anti-Assad forces in Syria is a direct reflection of the dramatic weakening of Assad’s three principal allies: Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. Hezbollah units were long viewed as the best-trained forces defending Aleppo. No longer.

OF COURSE, all the foregoing achievements have come at a horrible price. Over 800 soldiers, many of them reservists with wives and children, have been killed, and many times that number wounded, often grievously, since October 7, 2023. Even for combat soldiers who are physically intact, the war has inflicted serious traumas. Tens of thousands of reservists have served between 200 and 300 days since the Simchas Torah massacre.

In the case of reservists with families, their absence from home has created tensions for every family member and incredible strain on their wives. For those who are self-employed, the war has made it impossible for many to keep their businesses going. Employers have similarly been unable to rely on workers who are serving. As a consequence of the burdens on reservists, the rate of those showing up for service has dropped into the range of 75% to 80%, in contrast to the well over 100% reporting in the early days after the Simchas Torah massacre.

At least 60,000 residents of the North have abandoned their homes to live in makeshift quarters, with limited privacy. Many of those commute hours daily back to their places of employment or to their fields. The cost of the war and support for uprooted families has been a heavy burden on the economy, at a time when tax revenues are lower due to reduced economic activity.

And finally, the war has reshaped Israel’s image in the world in a highly negative fashion, however unfairly. The ICC warrants for the arrest of the prime minister and former defense minister for war crimes, for instance, will be cited ad nauseum by haters of Israel.

Nor is it clear what more is to be gained by continued war with Hezbollah. With respect to Gaza, a relatively small area, it is possible to formulate concrete goals and metrics. But what would be the goal of continued fighting with Hezbollah? It is impossible to kill every Hezbollah fighter, at least without conquering all of Lebanon, something for which Israel has neither the resources nor the desire.

OPINION IS DIVIDED on the terms of the agreement. Northern mayors in Israel, by and large, criticized the agreement for failing to create a security cordon several kilometers deep on the Lebanese side of the border and are urging their citizens not to return home as of yet. They pointed out that too many Jews have been killed over the years by anti-tank missiles and the like fired from just across the border.

The ceasefire agreement is not self-enforcing, and on its face, the enforcement mechanism — namely, UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army Forces (LAF) — appears unpromising in the extreme. UNIFIL has been responsible since UN Security Council Resolution 1701, concluding the second Lebanon War in 2006, for ensuring the demilitarization of southern Lebanon. It has not performed its job since day one. Tony Badran, in Tablet, charges that its nonfeasance is actually malfeasance, as UNIFIL launders funds to Hezbollah by hiring Hezbollah operatives and supporters to act as contractors and provide other services. Furthermore, it serves as a human shield for Hezbollah by locating its bases close to or within Hezbollah infrastructure.

Primary responsibility for keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon will fall to the US-subsidized Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). But the Lebanese government is largely a fiction — it has been without a president for two years — and is dominated by Hezbollah. Yet it is the LAF that is charged with responsibility for destroying any remaining Hezbollah infrastructure and military sites south of the Litani River, and preventing Hezbollah from reestablishing itself in the south.

The latter will prove an especially difficult task, as the distinction between Hezbollah operatives and civilians, in the largely Shiite south, is blurred. IDF soldiers operating along Lebanon’s southern border over the last three months found that almost every home harbored Hezbollah arms.

Supervising the handover of security control of southern Lebanon to the LAF will be a monitoring group headed by the United States. How exactly the monitoring group will act is far from clear. A senior US administration official told Israeli reporter Barack Ravid, “There are restrictions on the military activity that Israel can carry out. It is impossible to sign a ceasefire agreement if Israel can shoot afterwards at whatever it wants and whenever it wants.”

But in his press conference announcing the agreement, Netanyahu insisted that Israel retains under the agreement the right of self-defense, and is thus free to act if Hezbollah seeks to rebuild its terrorist infrastructure or attempts to bring in trucks laden with missiles. And in the first days of the ceasefire, the IDF has taken action several times.

Badran argues that Israel will find itself passing complaints to the monitoring committee and awaiting permission to act. And he fears that given the large US investment in the LAF, the monitoring committee will treat complaints about the LAF’s performance with little sympathy. The entire arrangement, he argues, is a victory for “Obama’s decade-old policy of leveraging American power to secure both Iran’s continuing regional influence and direct control over Israel’s borders.”

There is evidence that Netanyahu himself is well aware of the hidden traps in the deal. Part of his pitch to the cabinet was that the US was threatening a UN Security Council resolution, with sanctions against Israel, including a possible arms embargo, unless Israel agreed. (Shades of the Obama administration’s orchestration of a UNSCR against Israel in its waning days in 2016.) Once in place, such resolutions are almost impossible to remove, as doing so requires unanimity from the five permanent Security Council members.

My own guess is that Netanyahu decided to avoid a confrontation with the Biden administration on its way out and to await a more sympathetic Trump administration. If, as expected, Trump reinstates his maximum pressure on Iran, in the form of sanctions on its oil exports, the Islamic regime will have far less money to finance rebuilding Hezbollah or rebuilding southern Lebanon, which may cause Hezbollah to lose the support of its Shiite base.

In sum, no one knows with any certainty what will become of the ceasefire agreement. The key determinant will ultimately be whether Israeli residents of the north feel comfortable returning to their homes.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1039. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post Netanyahu Makes a Deal first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Like most people who read a lot — by definition a solitary pursuit — I’m always eager to spread news of a great read with others just to have someone with whom to share the pleasure.

That doesn’t mean that I recommend every book from which I have gained. Each of us has specialized interests, and I would not expect, for instance, most readers to be interested in the structure of the American government created by the Constitution. So, I’m more likely to highlight some of the key ideas in Yuval Levin’s new American Covenant than to recommend it to every reader.

But there are times when I feel confident that nearly every reader will enjoy a particular book and be inspired by it. Frieda Bassman’s memoir Miracles is a recent example (“Her Life Was a Miracle,” Issue 1026). And I’m almost equally certain that Deborah Lipstadt’s History on Trial (2005, Ecco), her account of her defense of a libel action brought in England by Holocaust denier David Irving, fits into the same category. It is as taut and tension-packed as any great courtroom drama — e.g., To Kill a Mockingbird — with the additional benefit that it describes an actual trial and one in which every Jew worldwide had a stake.

Though I was vaguely familiar with the trial, I only decided to read Professor Lipstadt’s book after writing about Tucker Carlson’s promotion of “popular historian” Darryl Cooper in a lengthy interview (“Tucker’s Problem and Ours,” Issue 1029). Cooper, I learned, had rewarmed a number of Irving’s favorite themes: downplaying or ignoring Hitler’s role in the Holocaust; demonizing Churchill, not Hitler, as a warmonger responsible for the carnage of World War II; and the drawing of false equivalences between Allied actions — in particular, the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, the subject of Irving’s first book — and Nazi atrocities.

In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on History and Memory, Lipstadt described Irving as a “Hitler partisan wearing blinkers” who “distort[ed] evidence... manipulate[ed] documents [and] skew[ed]... and misrepresent[ed] data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions.” She considered her characterization harsh but incontrovertible, as Irving had already testified in a Canadian court case involving Ernst Zundel, another Holocaust denier, that there was no “overall Reich policy to kill the Jews.”

Irving instituted a libel action against Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, in Britain. While the suit would likely have been dismissed early on in America, where the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, and public figures like Irving must prove “actual malice,” in Britain, the burden of proof is on the defendants. For that reason, many publishers will quickly settle any libel suit. Fortunately for Lipstadt and the Jewish People, Penguin did not do that, and bore a significant part of the more than $3 million in costs over nearly six years of litigation. Supporters of Lipstadt, including philanthropist Leslie Wexner, covered her expenses.

She considered Irving the most dangerous of the deniers, as his command of the German military archives had been praised by a number of prominent historians and his books had been reviewed in prominent venues, like the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

The defense team decided not to call any Holocaust survivors, to spare them the trauma of being cross-examined on topics about which they knew little or nothing. But survivors crowded the gallery and followed the trial from around the world. A verdict in favor of Irving would have been another nightmare for them, in addition to those they already carried. In his speeches to neo-Nazi groups, Irving had characterized survivors as “liars, psychiatric cases, and extortionists.” Once, when Irving was confronted by a survivor at one of his speeches, he asked her, “How much money have you made from that piece of ink on your arm?”

Defendants assembled an impressive team of experts to expose Irving’s historical research as a sham, shaped by his anti-Semitism and racism: Professor Christopher Browning, an expert on the Einsatzgruppen, the SS killing squads in Eastern Europe and Russia; Professor Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian and the leading authority on the construction and operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau; Professor Peter Longerich, an authority on the organization of the Nazi bureaucracy; and Professor Hajo Funke, an expert on German far-right and neo-Nazi movements. In discovery, Professor Lipstadt’s team, led by Anthony Julius, gained access to all of Irving’s private diaries and speeches, which proved invaluable in establishing his anti-Semitism.

Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, was hired to survey the entire body of Irving’s historical writing to assess his standing as a historian. The conclusion of his massive report was devastating to Irving:

Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about... If we mean by a historian, someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.

In his 349-page opinion, considered one of the most devastating ever delivered against a British litigant, Judge Charles Gray could find no reason to quibble with Evans’s findings. He found for the defendants on every historical issue, and stated unambiguously that Irving was an anti-Semite and a racist, and that that ideology had tainted all his writings. The judgment against Irving was the lead story in every British paper the next day, and news of the closely watched trial was broadcast around the world.

After six years of preparation and a lengthy trial, defendants delivered what Irving’s fellow “revisionist” Bradley R. Smith called “the most serious single blow that revisionism [i.e., Holocaust denial] has ever received.” The reports by defendants’ experts of many hundreds of pages compiled in preparation for trial constitute an irrefutable record that will be available long after the last survivor has passed.

For his part, Irving joined a long list of English plaintiffs in libel actions, beginning with Oscar Wilde, destroyed by their arrogance. He was left bankrupt and even served time in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial.

A tremendous debt is owed by the Jewish world to Professor Lipstadt and her publisher for fighting Irving’s suit so fiercely and with every resource at their disposal. And no one should be put off reading History on Trial because the happy ending is known in advance. It is important that we all know the slimy ways of Holocaust deniers and the refutations of their “evidence.” And watching Irving trapped over and over again by his own words and internal contradictions is an incalculable pleasure.

Pay It Forward

Something really nice happened to me a few nights back. I arrived half a minute or so late for Maariv, and took a place on a bench at the side of the shul, without any shtenders nearby. No sooner had I started Birchos Krias Shema than a boy below bar mitzvah age came over with a shtender for me.

True, my hair is white. But I had not arrived at my seat panting from walking up the stairs, and I don’t feel too enfeebled to hold up my siddur. Nevertheless, I had aroused his concern, and he had hurried over to help me.

Admittedly, the expenditure of energy was not great, but that small gesture left me feeling uplifted and happy for the rest of the evening. As they say, big people are revealed by their smallest actions, and I have no doubt this boy’s future is bright. After learning his name, I contacted his parents the next day to tell them how moved I was by their son’s sensitivity and the alacrity with which he had acted upon it.

The good mood with which I was left reminded me of a cartoon on courteous driving I was forced to watch in Chicago Municipal Traffic Court more than 50 years ago, as the price for avoiding a fine. The theme of the cartoon was that if everyone is just a little bit nicer, we’ll all have a more pleasant driving experience. If one lets in someone trying to switch lanes, that person is more likely to allow someone to pull in from a side street, and so on. And at least in the cartoon, everyone has smiles on their faces as they “pass forward” the small kindness done for them.

Speaking of smiling, it too has that effect of setting off a chain reaction. Smiling releases a whole slew of hormones associated with happiness — serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and oxytocin. When you smile at someone, he or she is likely to smile back, creating an instant feedback loop. But he is also likely to smile at the next person he passes.

Each little act of kindness creates its own ripples. Those who produce even a momentary uplift for another, no matter how fleeting, join George Eliot’s legion of those “who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs,” but whose impact on those around them is “incalculably diffusive” and “upon whom the growing good of the world... and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing.”

Eliot was saying, I believe, that our general experience of life as positive is dependent on the countless smiles, small gestures, compliments, and acts of chesed that we receive and give. (That is why I took her description of Dorothea, the heroine of Middlemarch, as a sort of epigram for my collection Ordinary Greatness.)

Noted family therapist Terrence Real strikes a similar chord at the end of his 1998 classic, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. He advises males to stop focusing on winning and losing and being stronger or weaker, and more on their role as fathers. Being a father, however, does not only mean producing children, but engaging in any generative activity — i.e., any activity in service of others that fosters their growth or happiness.

I’d say that boy in shul is off to a good start.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1038. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post A Real-Life Courtroom Drama first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

President Trump was as surprised as anyone by his election victory in 2016. He had little background in Washington, D.C., and as a consequence, he came into office after a hastily-put-together transition, unfamiliar with many of those he would be appointing to key positions. Beyond the southern border wall, his priorities in office were unclear.

That is not the case this time. He has been announcing key appointments at a historically rapid pace. Having already spent four years in the White House, he has a much better idea of where the pitfalls lie, after having experienced frustration with many of those he appointed and having been preoccupied by the ongoing Russian collusion investigation in his first two years in office. He has a much clearer vision of what he hopes to achieve and the obstacles that must be removed.

Though never known for his attention to the details of policy, as long ago as December 2022, Trump already detailed a plan to prevent government agencies — e.g., the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security — from colluding with social media companies, as they did in 2020 to stifle the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the ways in which Joe Biden was implicated in Hunter’s influence peddling.

Trump has proposed to rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes social media platforms from suit for material posted on their sites, to require strict rules of transparency and neutrality as a condition for protection. In addition, he has proposed financial penalties for universities involved in identifying disinformation on social media, as did Stanford — one of the world’s leading research institutions — in 2020, in conjunction with government actors and social media platforms.

In a similar manner, he has taken aim at the huge DEI bureaucracies entrenched in almost every university, and proposed to hold universities accountable for the harassment of Jewish students with a loss of government funding. He has posted that on day one of his administration, he will notify every university president that continued anti-Semitic propaganda will result in loss of accreditation and federal funding. (Execution of that threat will no doubt result in numerous First Amendment challenges.)

The woke obsessions and emphasis on DEI will also be uprooted, root and branch, from the armed services. Doing so is at the top of the agenda of Secretary of Defense-designate Peter Hegseth.

THE PRESIDENT-ELECT’S first announced appointments were almost exclusively members of his foreign policy team. And those appointments were repeatedly labeled Israel’s “dream team.” They were not merely “pro-Israel” in the sense of having voted for appropriations bills with aid for Israel. They are ardent supporters of Israel.

Senator Marco Rubio, who will be secretary of state, responded angrily to a question about Gazan casualties by telling the reporter that Hamas is a group of vicious criminals whom Israel must destroy wherever they can. And Trump’s chosen national security advisor, Congressman Mike Waltz, terms Israel the greatest ally the United States has ever known. The new US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, rejects the terminology of the “West Bank” in favor of Judea and Samaria and says that Jews cannot be “settlers” in their historic homeland.

The new UN ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, has been an unrelenting critic of the organization and its anti-Israel bias. She first came to prominence with her congressional questioning of the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT as to whether calling for genocide against Jews violated their university policies. The failure to answer forthrightly resulted in the resignations of two out of the three.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf buddy and fellow real estate magnate, will be the latter’s special envoy to the Middle East, to build upon the Abraham Accords, in which task he will be assisted informally by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was instrumental in the negotiation of the first Accords.

Moreover, each of those appointees supports the “maximum pressure” approach to Iran of Trump’s first term in office. (Brian Hook, who oversaw that campaign, is in charge of the State Department transition team, and is expected to reprise his former role.) The new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, advocates putting one’s foot on the throat of terrorist regimes like Iran, as Israel has been doing. And Peter Hegseth, the secretary of defense-designate, has even gone so far as to say that the United States should be prepared to bomb the Iranian nuclear sites.

That latter comment is especially significant, as it is very much an open question whether Israel alone can destroy those sites buried deeply underground. The urgency of doing so, however, has been lessened by news this week that the most recent Israeli attack on Iran destroyed the site where all its research on creating a nuclear warhead was located.

Even before he takes office, the world has reacted strongly to Trump’s election. The Iranian rial plunged to its lowest rate ever. And the Iranian regime has also announced that its plans to strike Israel again have been shelved pending discussions with Trump. With Supreme Leader Khamenei on his deathbed, and the leadership likely to pass to his inexperienced son, the regime of the mullahs is highly vulnerable. That is especially so with the likely loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenues, if Trump reimposes the sanction regime from his first term in office, as expected. Elsewhere, manufacturers are moving their production from China in anticipation of Trump’s threatened tariffs against China.

BUT LET US not get carried away. Both Israel and the United States may have dodged a bullet with the defeat of Kamala Harris. But that defeat hardly cures all the world’s problems — and may bring others in its wake.

It should be noted that the campaign just completed was one of the least substantive in American history. Much of the discussion was over things that should not be issues at all — biological men in women’s sports, for instance, or the use of proper pronouns. Meanwhile, the doom star waiting America in the form of ever-growing debt went unaddressed. Kamala Harris’s only contribution was to accuse Republicans of planning to cut Social Security benefits. To which Republicans responded by denying any such intent and airily pronouncing trillion-dollar deficits curable by cutting government waste. Indeed, they even proposed large new tax cuts, like exempting income from tips (a Trump proposal immediately endorsed by Harris).

Charles Cooke of the National Review noted accurately, “Trump has no plan for our endless deficits, he has no interest in reducing the debt, and he is allergic to discussing the entitlement reform that will be necessary to fix both problems. Worst of all, when he is pushed on any of these questions, he asserts that everything will be magically magnificent or that he will fix each and every problem the country faces by collecting large across-the-board import tariffs.”

It is possible to roughly calculate the depletion of the Social Security fund at current rates; present recipients, like me, have little more than a decade to go, while younger workers now paying into the fund may never receive their benefits. Yet every politician in America would prefer to ignore the inevitable and the threat to our currency posed by galloping debt service.

At the same time, we devote enormous energy to worrying about climate change, about which all predictions have proven wrong. The ruinous policies proposed by Western governments to combat climate change have caused enormous increases in manufacturing and food costs, and yet will have, at best, little impact in the absence of buy-in from the world’s two most populated countries — India and China. Here, at least, the Trump administration has a clear plan to ramp up production of oil and natural gas, and to revive the nuclear power industry, source of the only truly clean energy.

Trump speaks about tariffs as if they were King Arthur’s magical sword Excalibur — the answer to all problems. At times, he gives the appearance of thinking tariffs are checks written by importers to the American taxpayer and could even obviate the need for income taxes. Nor does he appreciate that it is difficult to reconcile large tariffs with bringing down consumer prices, which was one of his winning issues on November 5. While it is true that not all tariffs will be passed on in full to the consumer, to some extent they will be. And they may not help American manufacturers as much as hoped, since they inevitably invite retaliation from nations whose products have been slapped with tariffs.

Another issue the candidates barely touched upon was how they would respond to a Chinese effort to conquer Taiwan, which could trigger a full-scale war between the world’s two most powerful militaries. Their thinking on the issue — if indeed they have thought about it at all — remains unknown.

FINALLY, DONALD TRUMP remains very much Donald Trump: transgressive, impulsive, narcissistic, and grudge-bearing. One would have to go back over a century to President Warren Harding’s appointment of his poker-playing buddy Harry Daugherty as attorney general to find someone as ill-suited for the task as Congressman Matt Gaetz. For one thing, he is as likely to be the subject of a criminal investigation as he is to head one. Indeed, Gaetz quickly resigned from the House, in the wake of the announcement of his pending appointment, to avoid the issuance of a House Ethics Committee report on him, believed to be highly unflattering. (The contents of that report, however, will no doubt see the light of day, and may even push mainstream news outlets to once again engage in investigative reporting.)

Gaetz is as reviled by Republicans as Democrats for his lead role in bringing down Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and four Republican votes will likely be found in the Senate to deny him confirmation. Even in the unlikely event that he is confirmed or receives a recess appointment, he will surely not be able to muster the required Senate support for the massive restructuring of the Justice Department in general, and the FBI, in particular, that Trump envisions. Moreover, he is almost completely lacking in the legal experience required for the sweeping reorganization of Justice Department.

Trump’s choice of Gaetz is best seen as a deliberate thumbing of his nose at his various opponents, along the lines of the apocryphal appointment by the Roman emperor Caligula of his horse Invictus to serve as a consul, as an expression of his contempt for the Roman Senate.

But here the president-elect would be well-advised to remember that as surprising as the magnitude of his victory was, it was not exactly a total rout, comparable to Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern, and there is still room for building on the coalition he assembled rather than reviving the doubts of all those who voted for him with extreme reluctance. Nor was it wise to taint all his excellent foreign policy picks with a choice for attorney general that signals that Tucker Carlson and Donald Jr. still have his ear.

True, Trump’s willingness to ignore conventional wisdom has, on occasion, been his greatest strength. That is what made it possible for him to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, in the face of decades of warnings that doing so would ignite the Arab street. The so-called two-state solution was the North Star of American Middle East policymaking for decades, and it was argued that solving the Palestinian problem was the key to all regional peacemaking. The Abraham Accords provided a conclusive refutation of that conventional wisdom. Another example of Trump’s rejection of the conventional wisdom was his cutting off of funding to UNRWA. Who knows, he may one day decide that the United Nations, as currently constituted, serves little function, and should be sent packing from Manhattan.

Whatever the next four years have in store, they will not be boring, though hopefully not in fulfillment of the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in exciting times.”  

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1037. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post Let the Good Times Roll first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK / ZB PHOTOS

Residents of D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood will likely be seeing less of Barack Obama, as his third term draws to an ignominious close and the prospect of a fourth term has been decisively rejected. The gatherings of former Obama administration officials, now ensconced in the Biden administration, at the Obama mansion are a relic of the past.

David Garrow, Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and the author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, told the Daily Mail that Obama’s current political relevance is at the level of Bill Clinton, the previous supernova of the Democratic Party. And what is that level? When Bill dropped into a McDonald’s recently, while on the campaign trail, the excited cashier asked him, “Are you Joe Biden?”

The Obamas campaigned hard for Kamala. She was, after all, the perfect frontwoman, through which Barack could have continued to pull the puppet strings — just as he had for an enfeebled Joe Biden. She articulated no policy ideas of her own — beyond the ridiculous call for price controls on groceries — and would have been fully content to follow his lead. But all Barack and Michelle’s hectoring of black brothers to overcome their misogyny and vote for Kamala does not appear to have moved the needle even a smidgen.
OBAMA ORGANIZED the present-day Democratic Party around a Faustian bargain between college-educated elites and an alphabet soup of identity groups. The latter would provide the votes needed for the elites to pursue their pet projects — a radical climate agenda, biological men in women’s bathrooms and competing in women’s sports, open borders — and, in return, the billionaire class would take care of them.

That balkanization of America into identity groups — e.g., POC, MENA, LGBTQ — gave rise to DEI regimes in the universities and major corporations to which a majority of Americans are ever more hostile, including blacks and Hispanics, who have discovered that the admission of middle- and upper middle-class members of their groups into elite universities and professions, based on DEI criteria, has done little to elevate their group as a whole or improve their economic prospects.

And the ubiquitous imposition of racial quotas, in the name of equity, has stoked resentment between favored and disfavored groups. Americans hoped that Obama’s election would finally begin to heal the wounds of slavery and racism. But at the end of his eight years in office, both blacks and whites consistently viewed race relations as having regressed.

November 5, however, marked the end of a politics based on racial or gender essentialism of the kind invoked by Biden on the campaign trail in 2020, when he told African Americans, “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black.” Kamala Harris, a woman of half Caribbean descent, underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 results among black voters and among women (with the single exception of older, college-educated white women), and most dramatically among Hispanics.

Democrats continued to address minority groups as if they owed the party their allegiance. As Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid put it, “This version of the Democratic Party is arrogant and patronizing, taking minority voters for granted and treating them like children.”

Trump addressed members of those groups like everyone else — i.e., as workers seeking a brighter economic future; and as parents, concerned with their children acquiring the skills needed to attain well-paying jobs, and opposed to their being indoctrinated in advanced gender theories designed to undermine the traditional nuclear family or in portrayals of America only in terms of its litany of sins and not as a beacon of freedom to mankind. The most effective Trump ad spot juxtaposed the candidates thus: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

The organization of the MAGA movement around common economic interests rather than immutable racial traits is surely a healthier, less divisive way forward for America. No doubt, the Democratic Party will at some future date do better with its traditional minority constituencies than it did in 2024. But as the old song goes, “How are you going to keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” Once terms like “Uncle Tom,” “racist,” or “misogynist” lose their power to intimidate, they can never do so again to the same extent.
A PARTY THAT JUST received the thumping the Democrats did would normally be expected to look in the mirror and figure out where it went wrong. And about that thumping, there can be little doubt. Harris 2024 underperformed Biden 2020 in every state in the country, except Washington. Indeed, she barely had any counties on a national map where she did better.

Trump captured seven nearly entirely Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border and a 40 percent black county in North Carolina, which had never gone Republican before. The overall vote for Republican House candidates was better than in any election since 1928. And all that is even after January 6 and Dobbs.

Yet such introspection does not come easily to Democratic Party elites; they are too convinced of their own virtue. The problem with American democracy, by their lights, is the pesky “American voter.” To hear the denizens of The View tell it, only misogyny and racism can explain the failure of Kamala Harris’s “flawless” campaign.

Never mind that before the candidacy was handed to her by party elders, she had the lowest approval rating of any vice president in history: 37 percent. Or that she had long proven herself a hapless national politician, whose 2020 candidacy for the Democratic nomination ended before the first caucus vote was cast in Iowa. Or that she was selected as Biden’s running mate only because Biden had promised Cong. James Clyburn, to whom he owed his victory in the 2020 South Carolina primary, that he would select a black woman to run with him. Or that she could not separate herself from the Biden-Harris administration, which had plummeted in public support ever since the disastrous August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Saner voices than Joy Reid or Joe Scarborough will eventually emerge. Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, for instance, castigated the entire party for having become the anti-common-sense party “so focused on pandering to niche groups and politically correct language that they are alienating everyday Americans.” But an aversion to self-criticism will continue to plague a party whose elites are so focused on their own virtue-signaling.

America’s legacy media has long since proclaimed Barack Obama to be the nation’s “leading tutelary figure,” in the words of David Samuels in Unherd. But the legacy media’s credibility on that score, or on any other, has long been shot, as it turned itself into cheerleaders for the Democratic Party. The nearly unanimous support of the legacy media for Harris, both print and broadcast, had almost no impact. They have simply lied and gaslighted the public on so many subjects in the service of the government/Democratic Party narrative that no one believes anything they say. Among those subjects: the origins of the Covid virus in a Chinese government lab; the efficacy of masking; the numbers of illegal migrants crossing the southern border, over 10 million during the Biden administration; President Biden’s steadily declining mental acuity — a coverup, incidentally, in which Harris was a full participant.

Consider just a couple of stories damaging to the Harris campaign that were almost entirely suppressed by the legacy media in the weeks leading up to the election. Israel’s plans for its second foray against Iran were apparently leaked by someone in the Defense Department prior to the attack, a very serious national security breach. Suspicion immediately fell on Ariane Tabatabai, a senior DOD official, with top security clearance, who is known to have taken direction from Iran’s Foreign Ministry, and who was a close associate of Robert Malley — chief Iran envoy for President Obama and President Biden, who has been suspended without pay for security breaches in his handling of classified documents. Obviously, the implication that Iran has successfully infiltrated an agent into the upper realms of the Biden administration was not one the White House was eager to have bandied about.

A second story, about Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s shameful treatment of women, which contrasted sharply with the media’s attempt to portray him as the poster boy for non-toxic masculinity, also drew scant press attention in America. One would have to go to Britain’s Daily Mail to read the sordid details.

At least Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, seems to realize that when a newspaper ceases to engage in journalism, instead of cheerleading, it has little to sell and no influence. His refusal to allow the Post to endorse Harris reflected his recognition that the paper has lost its credibility. Few in the media, however, have considered why their influence with the public has sunk to such lows.
THE GREATEST WOUND of the Obama era — at least in Israeli eyes — was his unremitting support for Iran, which he somehow convinced himself would be a balancing counterforce to the Middle East’s Sunni regimes. In pursuit of that theory, he and his successors in the Biden-Harris administration, including many of those responsible for the original formulation of that policy under Obama, have continually propped up the Iranian regime and provided it with tens of billions of dollars, with which Iran has financed the creation of a “ring of fire” around Israel.

Iran almost certainly would have obtained nuclear weapons sometime during a Harris presidency, and with scant opposition from the United States, which under Obama and Biden consistently avoided confrontation with Iran and, by and large, its proxies.

Trump will reimpose strict sanctions on Iranian oil sales, the same type of sanctions that had the mullahs begging for relief at the outset of the Biden presidency, and thereby deny it the resources necessary to maintain the “ring of fire” that Israel has done so much to eliminate over the past months.

No one can say with confidence that the United States will join Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations — which assistance might be necessary to achieve that goal. But at the very least, Trump has made clear that he will not oppose Israeli efforts to do so. And he has expressed support for Israel taking out much of the Iranian regime’s vital oil refining infrastructure.

Nor is Iran the only Middle East issue on which the second Trump administration will differ radically from the Biden-Harris regime. Since the election, the Biden administration has informed Israel that it fully intends to impose an arms embargo, at a crucial juncture in Israel’s current two-front wars, if Israel does not comply with 15 conditions by the November 13 deadline.

Among those conditions are that Israel not prevent funding of UNRWA, as the Knesset has already voted to do, in light of UNRWA’s ongoing complicity with Hamas, including the employment of many senior Hamas operatives. Trump already defunded UNRWA in his first term, and there is no reason to think he would not do so in a second term. Nor is there any chance of his imposing an arms embargo on Israel.

Finally, Trump will be eager to expand on his greatest diplomatic achievement — the Abraham Accords — by bringing the Saudis into the Accords, without insisting, as the Biden administration has done, on movement to toward a Palestinian state. The greatest achievement of the original Abraham Accords was decoupling the Palestinian issue from relations with the Sunni Gulf states, which the foreign policy establishment had always maintained was impossible.

Israel dodged a bullet, or more accurately a barrage of bullets, by not being left to face a Harris administration staffed by old Obama Iran hands and others with a longstanding hostility to the Jewish state. Nowhere will the end of the Obama era be more welcome than in Israel.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1036. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post The End of the Obama Presidency — Finally first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

BY the time this column is read, the results of the 2024 election will be known. Or at least I hope they will.

For if they are not, it means that once again the election was so close that the winner will likely be determined by lawyers and the courts, and charges of electoral fraud will proliferate. America’s badly frayed social fabric may not survive another such confrontation.

If, however, the polls headed into the 2024 election reflect reality, the United States appears headed for another nail-biter, of the type that has become the rule rather than the exception. In the 2000 presidential election, the result came down to 537 contested ballots in Florida, and was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. Donald Trump’s winning margin in 2016 in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was less than the number of votes siphoned off from Hillary Clinton by Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And in 2020, a shift of 47,000 votes in three states, out of nearly 160 million cast, would have changed the result in Trump’s favor.

The closeness of our elections puts a premium on public trust in the results. As then-US attorney general William Barr said on the eve of the 2020 election: “We are a closely divided country. People have to have confidence in the results of elections and the legitimacy of the government.” Anything that calls into question the legitimacy of elections, Barr told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, is “reckless and dangerous.”

Yet Americans across party lines entertain grave doubts about cheating affecting the results of elections. In a June 2024 Rasmussen poll, 66% of voters described themselves as very or somewhat concerned that the 2024 vote will be compromised, including 55% of Democrats, 58% of independents, and 83% of Republicans.

Nothing does more to undermine trust in electoral integrity than delays in determining the results. Such delays are the norm in banana republics. And they have become ever more common in the United States, as lawyers engage in intense “after voting” litigation about such things as the treatment of absentee or mail-in ballots with one or more defects — e.g., late arrival, lack of a postmark, failure to place the ballot in a security envelope or to write a date on the security envelope. In 2020, Trump led in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin when voters went to bed, only to eventually lose all four. Control of the Senate was not determined for four days and the House for eight.

Even as trust in our elections declines, it almost seems that there are those doing everything possible to promote doubts about their fairness. In a very long article in Tablet, “Broken Ballots,” Armin Rosen explores what he terms a stealth revolution in voting practices and laws since 2016, and asks, “Is mistrust being built into our system?” He concludes that changes in America’s system of elections are almost “perfectly calibrated” to maximize distrust in the system.

ONCE, ALMOST ALL AMERICANS voted on the first Tuesday in November in private voting booths on paper ballots, which were then placed in ballot boxes. That entire process took place under the purview of election observers. Though one party or another might transport voters they considered likely to vote for their candidate(s) to the polls, they could not possibly know how the voter actually voted or influence his decisions in the voting booth.

Since 2016, that has changed radically, and the changes were rapidly accelerated by the Covid pandemic of 2020. Today, most votes are cast early, with the result that Election Day voting is less and less the kind of binding national civic ritual so badly needed. Thirty-six states now have absentee balloting, with no requirement for a reason, or send mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Those ballots are filled out without oversight, and with no way of ascertaining that they were filled out by the person for whom they were intended and without duress or persuasion from anyone else.

Those new election procedures, however, deviate to an ever-greater extent from the recommendations of the 2005 bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform and those advocated by the Carter Center, which is actively involved in observing elections internationally. And they are dramatically out of sync with the practice of most advanced democracies, including those of Europe.

Yet rather than adopting the Carter-Baker recommendations, Democrats have fought tooth-and-nail against their implementation, whipping up hysteria about voter suppression. For instance, one of the Carter-Baker recommendations was for some form of uniform voter identification to ensure that the person voting, either in person or by mail-in ballot, is the one listed as a registered voter. Forty-six out of 47 European countries require such a photo identification, of the type needed to drive a car, buy a beer, or board an airplane in the US.

But listen to President Biden denouncing efforts to require voter IDs — something supported by 80% of the American public — in a 2021 speech in Philadelphia: “There is an unfolding assault taking place today — an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy....”

That diatribe is of a piece with Biden’s denunciation of a 2021 election law passed by Georgia, which included a photo ID requirement, as a “return to Jim Crow.” In the ensuing hysteria, Atlanta lost the Major League All-Star game, at the cost of millions of dollars to Atlanta businesses, many of them black-owned. Yet it turned out that Georgia’s law allowed more opportunities to vote than Biden’s home state of Delaware, or New York, where major league baseball is incorporated, in terms of the days of early voting and the availability of absentee ballots, without providing any excuse.

Biden received “four Pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler for claiming that the new Georgia limited election day voting to 5 p.m., too early for workers to vote after their afternoon shift. In reality, 5 p.m. applied only to early-voting days, and was a minimum closing time, not a maximum. Moreover, the statute dramatically increased the number of early-voting days on weekends, when few factory workers are working at all. Far from suppressing the vote, the percentage of those voting in Georgia’s 2022 midterm elections was the highest ever.

THE CARTER-BAKER COMMISSION identified absentee ballots as “the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That finding comports with experience around the globe. Of 47 European countries, only 35 allowed absentee voting for those living in the country, as of 2021. Larry Diamond, a Stanford political scientist and the founder of the Journal of Democracy, termed Taiwan the highest-functioning democracy in the world, in a conversation with Rosen. Taiwan has no absentee voting, no early voting, and requires a strong ID.

Great Britain had absentee voting similar to that currently prevalent in the US until 2004, when 40,000 fraudulently obtained absentee ballots were discovered in Muslim areas of Birmingham. Today, British citizens must appear in person with a photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot. France had similarly loose standards for absentee voting, until hundreds of thousands of deceased voters and vote buying schemes were discovered in Corsica. As a result, France banned absentee voting entirely.

And the problems with absentee ballots, which must be requested by the voter, and where there is at least a theoretical possibility of checking the signatures on the ballots against those on the request form, pale compared to mail-in ballots sent to all registered voters. For one thing, voter registration rolls are notoriously out-of-date. And given that 10% of Americans move every year, the potential for multiple ballots being sent to a single address is large. Stefan Niemann, a US correspondent for the German national broadcaster, reported in 2020 receiving ballots for three people at his rental apartment, none of them eligible — one a previous renter, the other the landlady who lived in Puerto Rico, and a third for her deceased husband.

The same year, Judicial Watch published a study of 353 US counties, in which the number of registered voters exceeded the voting age residents by a cumulative 3.8 million people.

The potential for so many ballots to be floating around potentially facilitates numerous unsavory practices, including vote-buying, group voting, and vote-harvesting — subsequent collection and deposit of the ballots by partisan third parties, and undue influence on those filling out their ballots in the presence of those vote harvesters.

The mailing of ballots to those who may have moved creates the potential for them to vote in their new residence and a second time in their former residence. Hans von Spakovsky, a former federal election commissioner, found that at least 8,000 people voted in at least two states in 2016, based on an analysis of voting data from 21 states.

The Carter Center’s best electoral practices inveigh against vote-buying, group voting, and vote harvesting. But when the temptation is there, it will be acted upon. A 2018 congressional election in North Carolina was overturned upon a showing that an enterprising vote-harvester had fraudulently requested 1,200 absentee ballots, which he then collected and filled out. That number was larger than the winning candidate’s margin of victory.

Project Veritas videos from 2020 uncovered widespread vote-harvesting fraud in Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Somali community in Minneapolis. In one video, the interviewee boasts of possessing 300 absentee ballots in the trunk of his car. In another, cash is exchanged for absentee ballots, with the recipient of the ballot being told, “When I fill it out, I’ll bring it back to you for your signature.”

Rosen cites an egregious example of how the elderly, infirm, or poor are particularly vulnerable to vote-harvesting. VoteER, a nonprofit founded by a former Harris adviser, instructed doctors how to assist their patients in psychiatric hospitals and other in-patient facilities on how to vote by mail.

Remarkably, rather than move to curtail these abuses, a number of states and courts have seemingly acted to make them more likely. Nevada, for instance, legalized third-party collection of multiple absentee ballots. In California, New York, and Nevada, it is legal to possess an unlimited number of absentee ballots, without any explanation of their provenance.

Marc Elias, formerly of the Perkins Coie firm — yes, the same firm that paid for the infamous Steele Dossier that haunted President Trump’s first two years in office — may well have been the MVP of the Democrats’ 2020 ground game. Elias and his underlings filed suits across the country to force states to loosen their election rules in light of the pandemic. In many cases, those suits were collusive in nature, with Democratic secretaries of state entering into settlement decrees to loosen state rules.

In Minnesota, for instance, Secretary of State Steve Simon entered into a consent decree to suspend his state’s requirement that a signed affidavit accompany absentee ballots. A Pennsylvania court determined that a requirement that absentee ballots be dated violated the state constitution’s requirement of “fair and free elections,” based on a far-fetched theory that such rules have a disparate impact on minority communities, and thus amount to voter suppression.

It is clear that any widescale system of mail-in voting minimally requires accurate and updated lists of voters. Yet everywhere that states have undertaken to weed out ineligible, deceased, or non-citizens from the rolls, they have been met with lawsuits. Just a week prior to the election, it took Supreme Court intervention to overturn a lower court stay on Virginia’s efforts to prune 6,000 self-identified non-citizens from its voter lists. As Walter Olson, an election expert at the Cato Institute, told Tablet’s Armin Rosin, “A credible mail-based system is undermined by legislation that prevents states from doing state of the art voter roll maintenance.”

As Judge Cardoza famously remarked in a case involving fiduciary duties, “not honesty, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive” is required. And so too with elections.

It does not matter that election fraud may not be widespread and has not yet demonstrably determined the result of any election. As long as millions of citizens across the political spectrum believe — not without reason — that it is widespread and has or will determine presidential outcomes, American democracy is in grave danger.  

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1035. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

The post Democracy Dies in Voter Fraud first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

PHOTO: AYAL MARGOLIN/FLASH90

The decision to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah marked a sea change for Israel. Lee Smith described that change in “Killing Nasrallah” (Tablet Magazine, September 28, 2024): “Not only have they finally liquidated an adversary they’ve long been capable of killing, they’ve turned a deaf ear to their superpower patron of more than half a century.”

As Smith colorfully put it, Netanyahu came to realize that “heeding Washington’s advice on the conduct of war is like taking counsel from the angel of death. Just as the US is no longer willing or able to win the wars it commits Americans to fight, the Joe Biden administration won’t let US allies win wars either.”

LET US CONSIDER what Israel has achieved since September 17, when approximately 3,000 pagers blew up in the hands or pants pockets of the Hezbollah operatives to which they had been distributed, disabling all of them in one second. A second attack on Hezbollah’s fallback communication system — walkie-talkies — eliminated many more the next day.

Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British Expeditionary Forces in Afghanistan, termed the rapid attrition of Hezbollah forces in the two weeks leading up to Nasrallah’s assassination “unprecedented.” And Professor Charles Lipson, writing in the Spectator, described the Israeli campaign against Iranian proxies as the “most dazzling combination of real-time intelligence, high technology, and precise military action in the modern era.”

Israeli intelligence has apparently penetrated everywhere in the constellation of Iranian proxies, including in Iran itself. On July 31, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was blown up in a Tehran guest house belonging the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), while in Iran to celebrate the inauguration of the new president.

The preceding day, July 30, Fuad Shukr, one of the founders of Hezbollah and designated an international terrorist by the US State Department, was eliminated in Beirut. The Wall Street Journal reported that Shukr had received a call earlier in the day telling him to move from his second-floor office to his home on the seventh floor, where he was killed by an Israeli drone. Israel appeared to have infiltrated Hezbollah’s internal communications network.

Fear of Israeli eavesdropping led Nasrallah and six of his closest top aides to meet in person on September 27, when Israeli planes dropped 80 tons of bombs on the building in which they were gathered. According to some reports, $1.5 billion dollars in cash held by Hezbollah from its drug-running operations was also incinerated and 2,000 pounds of gold melted down in the attack, severely straining Hezbollah’s finances. Israel has continued since then to target all those places where Hezbollah is hoarding its cash.

Nasrallah was irreplaceable, but Israel has made any succession as difficult as possible by eliminating several potential successors in the weeks following his killing. In addition, Israel eliminated a number of senior military commanders in the week leading up to Nasrallah’s assassination, including Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s senior military commander after the killing of Fuad Shukr, and Ibrahim Aqil, head of operations. The latter two were both eliminated in Israeli strikes in Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Concomitant with the elimination of almost the entirety of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, Israel moved on September 23 to degrade Hezbollah’s fighting forces and its large arsenal of missiles, with the Air Force hitting over 2,000 sites in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley and killing hundreds of Hezbollah fighters and destroying thousands of mid- to long-range missiles and missile launchers, cruise missiles, drones, and ammunition dumps in the process. In six hours, wrote John Podhoretz in Commentary, Israel did more damage to Hezbollah’s huge missile stash than it had managed to do during 34 days of fighting in 2006.

The impact of Israel’s combined actions has been immense. Hezbollah’s command-and-control structure has been effectively destroyed, and without such a structure, the chances of Hezbollah mounting a ground action against Israel, as it was contemplating prior to the assassination of a group of leading commanders from its elite Radwan force, are dramatically reduced.

IRAN IS THE BIGGEST loser from Israel’s game-changing actions. Its proxy in Gaza, Hamas, even prior to the killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar on October 16, no longer constitutes a fighting force, according to Israeli commanders.

Hezbollah has always been the crown jewel of Iran’s “ring of fire” around Israel, its vast missile arsenal serving as Iran’s insurance policy against an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities. Hezbollah’s centrality is, in large part, a function of the close relationship between Nasrallah and Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei, who personally chose Nasrallah to take over when Israel assassinated his predecessor in 1992. Nasrallah’s prestige soared in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, for which Hezbollah claimed credit — not without basis.

As Lina Khatib recently wrote in the Times of London, “For Iran, Nasrallah’s personification of hope, strength, and military credibility became immensely useful for rallying its proxies over the Middle East. Iran summoned Hezbollah to mentor and help train members of other groups... Beirut became a hub where leaders of Iran’s proxies gathered.”

But with Nasrallah’s killing, Khatib continues, “the invincibility of Hezbollah has been shown to be a facade. This sparks a tectonic shift in Iran’s relationships in the Middle East.” If Israel can bring Iran’s most powerful asset to its knees, newer, smaller, and weaker groups in Iran’s orbit must worry about their future. She concludes on a hopeful note, “The killing of Nasrallah is part of a wider Israeli campaign to neutralize Hezbollah, potentially marking the beginning of the end for Iran’s regional influence.”

In addition, Iran’s April 14 missile strike on Israel failed miserably, and a second one after the Nasrallah assassination was no more successful. As a result, Iran now finds itself “the subject of ridicule across the Middle East,” which their leadership will find intolerable. That perceived weakness poses an internal threat for the regime, which is widely despised. While Iran has been weakened, Israel’s deterrent profile has been dramatically raised, making it an increasingly important ally for Sunni Arab regimes that live in fear of Iran. The Israeli Air Force has demonstrated the ability to act with impunity in the skies of Iran.

YET AS SOON AS ISRAEL decided to cripple Hezbollah, Western countries joined together in singing the old John Lennon anthem, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” French president Emmanuel Macron proposed an immediate 21-day cease-fire and announced a cut-off of all arms shipments to Israel. Remarkably, during the preceding 11 months, during which Hezbollah showered northern Israel with rockets, missiles, drones, and RPGs, forcing 70,000 Israelis to evacuate their homes and farms, and killed 12 Druze schoolchildren with a drone, Macron never once called for a cease-fire. Indeed, the UN cease-fire statement prepared by France, the United States, and six other nations did not even mention Hezbollah.

In any event, the possibility of a diplomatic solution that would answer Israel’s basic need to return its citizens to their homes was nil. Such a “solution” has, in fact, been in place since 2006, when Hezbollah agreed to remove all its forces north of the Litani River under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. The only problem was that Hezbollah never paid the slightest heed to its commitment, and UNIFIL peacekeepers made no effort to enforce their mandate.

Indeed, UNIFIL has never served as anything more than a shield for Hezbollah from Israeli attacks. That is why Prime Minister Netanyahu urged the UN to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon before Yom Kippur. And it is also why the UN refused.

Macron’s cease-fire proposal was transparently nothing more than an attempt to allow Hezbollah to regroup after the heavy damage it had incurred to fight another day. But the last thing that an army with the momentum in its favor and the enemy in disarray wants to do is to remove the pressure. As Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner put it on X, “Iran is reeling... insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.”

Yet cease and desist is exactly what Israel is being asked to do, just as the United States has repeatedly ordered it to do in the Gaza Strip. Since the assassination of Nasrallah, the Biden-Harris administration has devoted its efforts to ensuring that Israel not deliver any major blows against Iran in retaliation for the launch of 200 or so ballistic missiles launched at Israel on October 1 — e.g., either striking its nuclear facilities or its oil refining facilities. It has alternately threatened Israel and attempted to cajole it with offers of diplomatic support and weapons systems. But the thrust of American activity has always been the same: Keep it minimal. And at every juncture, the administration has informed the world media and Iran of its efforts, when not directly leaking Israeli plans for retaliating against Iran.

All this is in furtherance of a ludicrous theory, first developed by President Obama and kept alive by holdovers from his administration, that Iran can be turned into a status quo power if treated with sufficient deference and its equities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere are respected. The result was the 2015 JCPOA, which guarantees Iran’s right to achieve nuclear weapons. In addition, Iran has been furnished with billions of dollars of cash by both the Obama and Biden administrations, and relief from oil sanctions valued at around $100 billion by the latter.

That Iran policy would surely continue to guide a Harris administration. Her chief foreign policy advisor, Philip Gordon, is one of its premier advocates and a vigorous opponent of Iran sanctions.

Yet all that solicitude has resulted in no diminution of Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist entities bent on the destruction of Israel, or even of its refraining from calls of “Death to America” in the halls of the Iranian parliament. Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have effectively closed the Suez Canal to shipping, while being declassified as a terrorist organization by the Biden administration.

Above all, Iran continues to call for the eradication of Israel from the face of the earth, as it has from the outset of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. And as Hitler should have taught us: When enemies declare their intention to exterminate all Jews, believe them.

Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre put the case against appeasing Iran well in response to a reporter’s question about how he could disagree with Joe Biden’s stance that Israel should not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities: “I think the idea of allowing a genocidal, theocratic, unstable dictatorship that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing the world could ever allow.” If Israel could take out Iran’s nuclear program, he added, “It would be a gift by the Jewish People to humanity.”

Peter Deutsch, a six-term Democratic congressman from Florida, recently endorsed Donald Trump, for reasons close to those stated by Poilievre: Biden and Harris “have pursued polices that have emboldened Iran even after its ballistic missile strike on Israel.... Their policies towards Iran make the world a much more dangerous place.”

THE DEFEAT of the Iranian axis would benefit the entire world — and perhaps most of all the Palestinians themselves. Only when the Palestinians give up the fanatic Islamic ideology that places a higher priority on dead Jews than prosperous Palestinians can they look forward to a brighter future. And that will only come with the same thoroughgoing defeat as Germany and Japan suffered in World War II.

What begins with the Jews does not end with the Jews. Iran and its proxies destabilize and threaten the West. Hezbollah has been the world’s most lethal terrorist organization for more than 40 years. The Houthis disruption of shipping in the Red Sea has disrupted global supply chains and caused shipping costs to skyrocket.

But perhaps the greatest benefit of Israel’s campaign to defeat Hezbollah and remove the noose of Iranian proxies is psychological. Israel has shown two things that the West has long forgotten. First, not every conflict has a diplomatic solution and can be solved by drawing lines on a map. Faced with a genocidal enemy, whose sole goal is the annihilation of your country, there is no possible compromise. And second, victory, something which America has not experienced in over three decades, is still an option.

We conclude where we began — with Lee Smith’s “Killing Nasrallah.” True, Washington and the Europeans are appalled by Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, he concludes. But that is only because Israel has reminded them of the ugly truth “that no modish theories of war, international organizations, or even American presidents could long obscure. Wars are won by killing the enemy, above all, those who inspire their people to kill yours. Killing Nasrallah not only anchors Israel’s victory in Lebanon, but reestablishes the old paradigm for any Western leaders who take seriously their duty to protect their countrymen and civilization: Kill your enemies.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1034. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)

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