Reading comments here, one would think the Truth is that most NYC race crime is committed by Blacks, not White Supremacists. For years. Altho for many years, this truth hasn't been very clearly articulated by the News.
Please keep looking for true facts, and doing good analysis.
This comment pertains to the Tablet essay and not the anti-Asian questions you raise which seem right on. I just wonder if the questions in the Tablet essay really measure anti-Semitism. Just one example is the contrast between The Danes supporting a national church and Israel as a Jewish state. What strikes me as more revealing would be Danish support for its dominant religion v. Israeli support for its dominant religion which is not the same as Israel as a Jewish state. Similarly, with stories in the press about Orthodox schools with a cramped curriculum v Montissori which many know is quite rigorous and secular, it is not clear if answers would be affected by the heuristic of news availability though there seemed no difference on that question to my surprise.
This is a comment to the whole, not just this article. I first learned about you through reading certain articles on the NYT, then seeing you a couple of times on Real Time with Bill Maher. I cannot thank you enough for your thoughtful, insightful, intelligent, and well-written articles. I live in the Bible Belt (north Texas) and liberalism is considered a mental disease by several communities around me, including the one I live in. The liberalism that is espoused through your writing, and the writing you share through Common Sense, is something I share where the extremists do not control your thoughts. It is refreshing, enlightening, and what I miss so much about journalism in general. It is a treat to read and I am so glad I subscribed because it has been one of my favorite reads each and every week. Thank you so much! From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
I subscribed and purchased subscriptions to Subsplash and Bari Weiss in particular for my 2 Gen Y/Millennial sons after hearing her as the guest on the “Good Fellows” program from the Hoover Institute of Stanford. This paper expresses my own frustration about “bystander fear” as exhibited by this incident and others illustrated. Reading the paper on the attitude of more educated individuals towards Israel and Jewish folks is equally disturbing but not surprising to me.
I have recently concluded a fascinating life/career as a working person. My experience began in the Air Force near the end of the Vietnam War era. I enlisted because I knew I would be drafted (#32 in the draft lottery) but in truth I planned to enlist after high school to escape an abusive family system and the knowledge that if I wanted to attend college the GI Bill was the most realistic means to that end. So, a kid of average intelligence, a conservative who lived on a steady diet of Wm F Buckley, a Roman Catholic of Polish heritage and descent entered the crazy-ass world of 1971. I did everything I knew of to secure a job as a medic and by a story for another time I made it. Fast forward through life as one of the first Emergency Paramedics in my state, a teaching job at the local community college that I would turn into a 30 year tenure and degrees in Education, Reproductive Physiology and finally a professional doctorate in Pastoral Care and an Ordained Lutheran Pastor.
I watched and lived in higher education with the “least of the least” rather than the “brightest and the best” as is so frequently described in this media. I held high expectations of my students and successfully resisted pressure to dumb down my expectations of students. Teaching at a community college meant having students from ages 14 to 95 in the same New Testament classroom! Being close to the Air Force base that formed me in emergency medicine meant a much more racially and religiously diverse student population than the university where I was also studying to get my college degrees. It is not an exaggeration to say that I loved my work, my students, and often their families for whom I baptized their children, joined them in marriage and buried their parents, because they did not have a church except that crazy professor who wore a clerical collar and joked openly about sex!
After the turn of the century I watched something insidious and terrible happen to my college. By then I decided to use my doctorate in pastoral care to finish off my career as a Counselor. There a new President from California joined our campus. Chairing a selection committee for a new Dean of Student Services, I experienced the Chancellor reject all of our work and gave me 3 files from which to choose in my committee, 3 files of candidates we screened out during the first round, three whose melanin levels were higher than mine because our campus was said to be “too white”. Rather than participate in this charade, I resigned as chair of the committee, the rest of the committee selected the person who would be my boss for the next 3 years….another time I should explain the “3 year cycle” I noticed on application after application.
Why this topic on my first comment? The same thing happening at the elite institutions is happening at the “least” prestigious segment of higher education, one which the Biden administration looks to follow the Obama unfulfilled promise of free community college….in other words, years 13 and 14 of the previous K-12 systems that have failed us so miserably. As if 2 more years of the same woke low standards will change the outcome of performance of success. I pray this is useful to someone here. A blessed Triduum from this retired Lutheran Pastor who loves Jesus first and everyone else because of Him!
The idea is to improve the status of public intellectuals doing good work – Steelman arguments, thinking in Bets/ probabilities, creating good Memes.
Telling the Truth about evil, and not looking away. Like you're doing.
I’m Tom Grey, a longtime admirer of Reason mag, very impressed with your work, and strongly committed to opposing “collective guilty”. I’m now subscribing on substack and following you on twitter @TomGrey56.
Please keep doing your good work. This is our first season, from April 1- June 30. I'll be trying to score points from your usual public expressions (SBMs above)
I'll also try to comment more – but no action is needed on your part.
"... any totalizing ideology, from right or left, that claims people are either pure or impure, real Americans or pretenders, saints or sinners, all good or all bad, collectively innocent or collectively guilty depending on the circumstances of their birth, is so dangerous." Brilliantly stated. Back in the day, this would have passed for common sense. It's a sad commentary on our culture today that this statement goes against the grain of popular thought.
I will not comment on this piece. It is just another indicator of our country going completely off the rails and the only way to fix what is happening is to go all the way back to agreeing on First Priinciples. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." might be a good place to start.
It was good to see your conversation with "The Goodfellows" at the Hoover Institution. We need an alliance of true Liberals and true Conservatives to confront what is consuming us.
Unfortunately we appear to be quickly running out of time and we may soon need action to replace talking. Lord of the Rings, the Battle for Helms Deep?
I'm old but will attempt to help in my small way. I just subscribed to your Substack and signed the petition at FAIR.
I wonder if the bystander response would be the same outside these major metropolitan areas? I also wonder if people are less likely to assist if the perp is black, fearing backlash - the whole “calling 911 against blacks is racist” thing? Or maybe a combo of that and the rampant soft racism prevalent amongst progressives - “those poor black folks couldn’t possibly act any other way because of all the historical racism...” I have a hard time believing that the bystander issue is a widespread issue or encompasses the whole of American culture. Is it possible that progressive culture breeds this sort of malaise? Could the ideology of massive government institutions erode our sense of self determination? After all, there’s a government office or system that’s designed to handle this sort of thing, right? Or so they believe. I don’t know, but it’s curious, and incredibly disturbing. There’s so many instances of violence in NYC that we’ve seen since that town’s COVID meltdown. Recall the lady on the subway that had her child punched in the face. No bystander intervened there as well. And so many others. Or course, this also begs the question, with what means do you intervene? It’s very easy to be disgusted by remote viewing of a video. But the reality of physical intervention is that you must assume that it could lead to your own life and death struggle. And that becomes very apparent in the midst of the violence, when you’re there and you can see and feel the rage. Dare I say that most modern cosmopolitan individuals have few useful tools to deal with a life and death physical struggle. Most people don’t. And sans a firearm, well, your intervention would then require a guarantee of assistance from the other bystanders. It’s hard to truly say you have self determination if you’ve surrender your ability to exercise it. We may be far to reliant on systems that are bound to fail or that are bound to rob us of our liberty under the guise of protecting us. We want to feel as though we’re protected or that we’ve established a benevolent force of good. It makes those of us that are wealthy or pathetic feel better about our environment. But feeling better doesn’t mean anything of real value has been achieved. Yet again and again when these systems fail, or when “crime happens” we hear the chant that “there should be some sort of law against that..” this mindset - the decades of this culture that demands a technocrat solve our problems- relieves us of our responsibility as citizens. Next thing you know we’re all sitting on a subway watching a crazy person punch a baby, afraid to intervene for a myriad of reasons, but mostly just afraid and maybe glad it’s not us.
IMHO characterization of the Atlanta massage parlor shootings as anti asian hate crime is absurd. I would not be at all surprised if we found out at some point that the CCP was exploiting it in order to take attention away from the Covid origins coverup they are promulgating with the help of the WHO.
This would have been a good article if Ms. Weiss had resisted the temptation to go off chasing rabbits. Yes, there are people who hate Jews and, yes, many of them are black, thanks to the Black Muslim movement and the fact that many slaves were Muslims who hated Jews and their hatred was passed on to their descendants. "White supremacy," which is essentially a media invention, is not synonymous with "anti-Semitic," which is a misleading term since Arabs are also Semites. In fact, the South was full of Jews - many of whom were slave owners and slave traders - and Southerners held no animosity toward Jews until Leo Frank allegedly killed Mary Phagan and rich Northern Jews mounted a campaign to get him off (and founded the ADL as a result.) One reason blacks have been going after Asians is because Asian shopkeepers, particularly Koreans, decided to exploit black communities for financial gain. By the way, I've spent time in Pittsburgh and have known a lot of people from there. Yes, it has a reputation because of US Steel but those plants are long gone and the air there is clean.
Wrong. The word has NEVER, EVER meant anything but Jews. It was invented by a German philosopher precisely to describe Jew-hatred in clinical terms. At its root, it has always meant hatred of Jews. "Arabs are also Semites" is simply not correct. "Semite" is not and has never been a synonym for Middle Eastern or Levantine.
@BariWeiss Please write about Chauvin trial. This is incredibly important - if the fascist, lawless lynch mob wins, and an innocent man is convicted, because the story fits the leftists narrative - there will be no chance for us to come back. That's what the fascist mob does - create an emotional picture, scream "racism" et al, and goes for the kill. If Chauvin is not acquitted - FAIR or any kind of fight with CRT does not stand a chance. Jodi Shaw does not stand a chance. Our country, Constitution and the rule of law do not stand a chance. We must to whatever it takes to get a fair trial. We are losing this battle so far.
Another fact that goes "unnoticed" is that so much of this hatred and violence is showing up in "liberal" communities. When you start throwing out "victim cards" with nonchalance, you'll never know who is going to pick it up and use it, and you can't control how it will be used.
I've been saying for years that these totalitarian monsters eventually eat their own. Hitler turned on his Generals and had many of them killed. Stalin killed over half of his revolutionary comrades.
I think a lot of hatred shows up in "liberal" areas because urban areas tend to be more liberal, and they also tend to be more mixed. It's a bit like the "ice cream causes murder" things where two things are correlated but not causally connected. In areas that are less diverse, you have more conservatism and fewer inter-ethnic squabbles of any kind simply because you have less diversity period. It's not that conservatism causes fewer squabbles, it's that less diversity causes both.
I think it is deeper than that. Liberal communities have learned, through decades of control by democrats, that they government is their first source of support. That distances people from others in their community and so they dont feel the need to be civil. When you live on rural communities, you know the government wont be there to help and you will need to rely on neighbors. You dont want to offend those you may be asking for help. I know this because I have lived it.
And you are not the only who lived it. I have as well, and I see things differently. When your entire neighborhood looks like you, of course you aren't going to have ethnic tension.
I'll make a couple of counter-intuitive (at least, according to current dogma) inferences from this. 1) People are naturally prejudiced. 2) Diversity can be harmful.
When Katrina hit New Orleans, the population of the city mainly "cried for help" from the government. Just a few weeks later, a similarly destructive hurricane hit the rural western part of LA. Those residents simply went out and helped each other. (I lived in New Orleans at the time so paid attention to this.)
In addition, I wonder if there are any studies looking closely at this. Are ethnic tensions the result of ethnic differences, or because the different ethnicities are artificially kept from building bridges by too much government interfer...I mean...support.
The perpetrator was on "lifetime parole" following incarceration for killing a woman when he was 18. He had been loosed on the public only a short while ago.
Oh that's heart-breaking. The video does show the type of behavior you see from someone who is broken in a way that produces unprovoked violent fury in an instant. We don't know how to fix someone like that.
I don't know what bystanders could have done to actively intervene; I get that. I have been within a few feet of a beating inflicted in public by strong young males on several occasions. It's breathtaking how severe of a damage can be inflicted by a young male human in just seconds, and although I wanted to help, there was nothing I could do physically. To physically step in between the perp and the victim looked to me akin to stepping into a tornado. Made of whirling bricks.
But what I do see in the all-too-common videos of violence that have been captured and posted in this modern cellphone age is a distinct change in the ATTITUDE of the bystanders. The default behavior seems to be apathy, disengagement, or even glee. If I were near this assault I would have at least been screaming, calling 911, looking actively for police etc. What I saw from the bystanders instead was a lot of "Huh. Would you look at that?"
The victim's daughter has publicly thanked an anonymous bystander for yelling at the attacker to distract him during the attack. If the victim's daughter can thank this person, I think it's worth mentioning that it happened so wanted to share.
NYPD said that NO ONE EVEN CALLED 911 during or after this assault. Cops saw the victim laying on the sidewalk as they were driving by after the attack. I understand being afraid to physically intervene, but as you mentioned, someone could have at least called the police. I don't know about the liability of the security officers, but I couldn't imagine any liability related to calling the police or checking on the victim to see if she were even alive. I couldn't imagine laying on the sidewalk, experiencing immense pain, and being disoriented after a violent attack...everyone just keeps on walking... It's disgusting and so sad.
"To physically step in between the perp and the victim looked to me akin to stepping into a tornado. Made of whirling bricks." Yeah. Unfortunately, "stepping in" in situations like this is like jumping in front of a train to save someone who's tied to the tracks. It creates two corpses instead of one. Like you, what bothers me is that no one tried to do ANYTHING. :-(
Bari — I just wanted to say how impactful each and every piece you publish is. How do we replicate you 1000x over to save our nation from the downward spiral of blame or victimization we are in? Thank you in advance for everything you continue to do. I can’t wait to read what’s next as a paid subscriber!
This article has two points. One is about the evil of standing by while another human is attacked. The other is about bringing to light how sometimes minorities attack other minorities. I'd like to share on this.
My wife worked in downtown Portland, OR for years and up until the pandemic. A few years ago she had a succession of harassment incidents. The first was when a transgender person physically walked into her and used their shoulder to push into my wife. My wife was called a "f**king dyke" by this person and told "you're not cool" with menace. Weeks later another incident like this happened with yet another transgender person. My wife was harassed for absolutely no reason than existing and being "visibly lesbian." We were utterly befuddled by both moments and did an internet search to see where this animosity was coming from. Several rabbit holes later, we learned of a new type of homophobia coming from others within the LGBTQ+ milieu. We discovered the disparaging and often incorrect term TERF, and we saw many Twitter accounts where lesbians were disparaged to the point of encouraging violence. It all was a shock to say the least.
Another incident involved a black man who followed my wife for a couple blocks, screaming ugly words at her. He called her an "it" and a "fag." He said loudly that he was going to "f**k her up" and that he hated white people. Both this man and my wife were surrounded by people waiting forthe trolly during morning rush hour. Many looked at what was happening but no one intervened. My wife had to rush into a store to get away from the man.
It was at this point I went to the city of Portland's Human Rights committee. I was allowed to share these experiences and my perspective. That the rhetoric of the constant demonization of Trump (who I didn't vote for) and his supporters and whites and men and cisgenders was fostering more minorities railing against minorities. I told them it almost seemed as if the bystanders in the last example I shared, were trying to decide who the more oppressed person was - the white appearing lesbian or the black man.
My plea for help went unacknowledged. So I took my concerns to the city council which included Mayor Ted Wheeler. I related all the same information and asked that they consider how their rhetoric may have consequences for the city. I urged consideration for embracing civility, not as a means to shut others up, but to serve as an example of how we humans need to treat each other...before all we are doing is performing acts of dehumanization in the name of what's politically beneficial for those who won't likely ever experience what my wife did.
My concerns went unacknowledged. It was then we began to really see where Portland was going and we started the process mentally of figuring out where to move to.
One would think a same-sex interracial appearing couple like us would be at home in such a progressive place. Instead we found zealotry disguised as justice, and minority on minority hated to be acceptable. The insult to injury came from our former Mayor's (we have moved away from Portland) Twitter post. It said:
"...the burden should not be on BIPOC communities to aspire towards resilience or be resilient in the face of racism's physical and psychological violence. The burden remains on dominant communities to do the work necessary to make Portland safer, welcoming..."
Meaning minorities are supposed to wait around until "dominant communities" decide if and when they want to help us and that minorities shouldn't have to be responsible for our own hated or be strong when one of "our own" or others attacks us.
I'd like to end this comment with a quote from musician and blogger, Regie Hamm.
"Once you decide to see every single person on Earth as an individual, and not the group they may or may not be a part of, you get set free."
Freedom includes responsibility and resilience. I hope we can foster more of that when anyone is being harmed and when we examine our own capacity to hate and disregard mercy.
I'm so sorry your wife had to endure those awful incidents and that your elected officials ignored your concerns! I'm also one half of an inter-racial lesbian couple. We've been lucky enough that we haven't faced any in-person harassment like your wife did; the worst we've received is a driver honking at us and asking if we wanted a threesome when we walked home holding hands one evening. It was frightening in the moment, since he had an aggressive demeanor, and no one else was in earshot, but he drove off when we gave him nasty looks.
The homophobia of radical trans activists is very real. There are plenty of kind, decent trans people doing their best to cope with a difficult hand they've been dealt in life. But the ones who harass innocent lesbians or tell lesbians they're transphobic if they're not attracted to natal males aren't doing the rest of the community any favors. Many of them have taken over in-person and online spaces. For example, Reddit has deleted without warning two female-only lesbian subreddits that took care to follow Reddit's rules. Meanwhile, the largest "lesbian" subreddit claims that not being attracted to a trans woman because she's trans is transphobic: https://www.reddit.com/r/actuallesbians/comments/15ha8u/on_dating_trans_women_and_transphobia/. The icing on the cake is the attempted joke, "With enough forethought you might not need a sperm donor!" Since I'm happily married, this new homophobia doesn't affect me directly. But I worry for all the young lesbians who are pressured into opening their dating pools to natal males in a new way.
As far as I'm concerned, taking a lesbian to task for not being attracted to a trans "woman" is proof positive that the whole world, including them, sees these people as what they are: men. Women are NEVER permitted to set boundaries and refuse sexual service to men. In their eyes, a woman setting any sexual boundary is a hate crime, not a man violating one.
What you and your wife unfortunately experienced is standard mob evolution. Time and time again, throughout history, this is where it starts. Historically, it has always gotten much worse and normally grows into tyranny as a ruthless leader is needed to quell the widespread violence. Can we avoid the same fate here in the US? I wouldn't bet on it; as a population we are no different than any population that has come before us.
I'm so sorry that happened to your wife. When I learned about the way that trans "women" harass lesbians, that's when the scales finished falling from my eyes about the whole trans business. It's just one more way for men to demand sexual gratification from all vaginas everywhere. It's the violence of any man anywhere who has encountered a woman who feels justified in setting a boundary of any kind. Men's fists are justice, but women's boundaries are violence, and somehow these men figured out that as long as they slap on some dimestore lip gloss and call themselves Poledancerina, their misogyny is woke now.
We've been second class human beings behind the ones with penises since time began. Now, we're second class WOMEN behind the ones with penises. Ishtar weeps.
I have a social worker colleague with decades of experience in the Pennsylvania penal system. Her specialty was counseling for sex offenders. A few years ago, she was asked to help decide the contentious issue of whether transgender woman would be housed in the male facility vs the female facility. She thought about it for a few nano-seconds and said, “people with penises go with the men.”
Your experience is deeply unfair and infuriating but somehow not surprising. There's this weird new extremist SJW behavior that your experience somehow reminds me of: in footage from the riots and protests we've had for over a year now, I have seen numerous examples of (white) leftist-aligned agitators screaming at other people, calling those other people the "N" word. Over and over, usually at other white people although I just saw a video where they screamed it at a black person. I still can hardly believe it, or understand it.
Reading comments here, one would think the Truth is that most NYC race crime is committed by Blacks, not White Supremacists. For years. Altho for many years, this truth hasn't been very clearly articulated by the News.
Please keep looking for true facts, and doing good analysis.
This comment pertains to the Tablet essay and not the anti-Asian questions you raise which seem right on. I just wonder if the questions in the Tablet essay really measure anti-Semitism. Just one example is the contrast between The Danes supporting a national church and Israel as a Jewish state. What strikes me as more revealing would be Danish support for its dominant religion v. Israeli support for its dominant religion which is not the same as Israel as a Jewish state. Similarly, with stories in the press about Orthodox schools with a cramped curriculum v Montissori which many know is quite rigorous and secular, it is not clear if answers would be affected by the heuristic of news availability though there seemed no difference on that question to my surprise.
This is a comment to the whole, not just this article. I first learned about you through reading certain articles on the NYT, then seeing you a couple of times on Real Time with Bill Maher. I cannot thank you enough for your thoughtful, insightful, intelligent, and well-written articles. I live in the Bible Belt (north Texas) and liberalism is considered a mental disease by several communities around me, including the one I live in. The liberalism that is espoused through your writing, and the writing you share through Common Sense, is something I share where the extremists do not control your thoughts. It is refreshing, enlightening, and what I miss so much about journalism in general. It is a treat to read and I am so glad I subscribed because it has been one of my favorite reads each and every week. Thank you so much! From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
I subscribed and purchased subscriptions to Subsplash and Bari Weiss in particular for my 2 Gen Y/Millennial sons after hearing her as the guest on the “Good Fellows” program from the Hoover Institute of Stanford. This paper expresses my own frustration about “bystander fear” as exhibited by this incident and others illustrated. Reading the paper on the attitude of more educated individuals towards Israel and Jewish folks is equally disturbing but not surprising to me.
I have recently concluded a fascinating life/career as a working person. My experience began in the Air Force near the end of the Vietnam War era. I enlisted because I knew I would be drafted (#32 in the draft lottery) but in truth I planned to enlist after high school to escape an abusive family system and the knowledge that if I wanted to attend college the GI Bill was the most realistic means to that end. So, a kid of average intelligence, a conservative who lived on a steady diet of Wm F Buckley, a Roman Catholic of Polish heritage and descent entered the crazy-ass world of 1971. I did everything I knew of to secure a job as a medic and by a story for another time I made it. Fast forward through life as one of the first Emergency Paramedics in my state, a teaching job at the local community college that I would turn into a 30 year tenure and degrees in Education, Reproductive Physiology and finally a professional doctorate in Pastoral Care and an Ordained Lutheran Pastor.
I watched and lived in higher education with the “least of the least” rather than the “brightest and the best” as is so frequently described in this media. I held high expectations of my students and successfully resisted pressure to dumb down my expectations of students. Teaching at a community college meant having students from ages 14 to 95 in the same New Testament classroom! Being close to the Air Force base that formed me in emergency medicine meant a much more racially and religiously diverse student population than the university where I was also studying to get my college degrees. It is not an exaggeration to say that I loved my work, my students, and often their families for whom I baptized their children, joined them in marriage and buried their parents, because they did not have a church except that crazy professor who wore a clerical collar and joked openly about sex!
After the turn of the century I watched something insidious and terrible happen to my college. By then I decided to use my doctorate in pastoral care to finish off my career as a Counselor. There a new President from California joined our campus. Chairing a selection committee for a new Dean of Student Services, I experienced the Chancellor reject all of our work and gave me 3 files from which to choose in my committee, 3 files of candidates we screened out during the first round, three whose melanin levels were higher than mine because our campus was said to be “too white”. Rather than participate in this charade, I resigned as chair of the committee, the rest of the committee selected the person who would be my boss for the next 3 years….another time I should explain the “3 year cycle” I noticed on application after application.
Why this topic on my first comment? The same thing happening at the elite institutions is happening at the “least” prestigious segment of higher education, one which the Biden administration looks to follow the Obama unfulfilled promise of free community college….in other words, years 13 and 14 of the previous K-12 systems that have failed us so miserably. As if 2 more years of the same woke low standards will change the outcome of performance of success. I pray this is useful to someone here. A blessed Triduum from this retired Lutheran Pastor who loves Jesus first and everyone else because of Him!
Hi Bari,
Have you heard of the Fantasy Intellectuals League? You are on my 15 member team Sam-I-Am
It’s explained on ASKblog:
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-top-150-intellectuals-selected-competitively/
The idea is to improve the status of public intellectuals doing good work – Steelman arguments, thinking in Bets/ probabilities, creating good Memes.
Telling the Truth about evil, and not looking away. Like you're doing.
I’m Tom Grey, a longtime admirer of Reason mag, very impressed with your work, and strongly committed to opposing “collective guilty”. I’m now subscribing on substack and following you on twitter @TomGrey56.
Please keep doing your good work. This is our first season, from April 1- June 30. I'll be trying to score points from your usual public expressions (SBMs above)
I'll also try to comment more – but no action is needed on your part.
Your fan in Slovakia,
Tom Grey
"... any totalizing ideology, from right or left, that claims people are either pure or impure, real Americans or pretenders, saints or sinners, all good or all bad, collectively innocent or collectively guilty depending on the circumstances of their birth, is so dangerous." Brilliantly stated. Back in the day, this would have passed for common sense. It's a sad commentary on our culture today that this statement goes against the grain of popular thought.
Hello Ms. Weiss.
I will not comment on this piece. It is just another indicator of our country going completely off the rails and the only way to fix what is happening is to go all the way back to agreeing on First Priinciples. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." might be a good place to start.
It was good to see your conversation with "The Goodfellows" at the Hoover Institution. We need an alliance of true Liberals and true Conservatives to confront what is consuming us.
Unfortunately we appear to be quickly running out of time and we may soon need action to replace talking. Lord of the Rings, the Battle for Helms Deep?
I'm old but will attempt to help in my small way. I just subscribed to your Substack and signed the petition at FAIR.
God speed.
I wonder if the bystander response would be the same outside these major metropolitan areas? I also wonder if people are less likely to assist if the perp is black, fearing backlash - the whole “calling 911 against blacks is racist” thing? Or maybe a combo of that and the rampant soft racism prevalent amongst progressives - “those poor black folks couldn’t possibly act any other way because of all the historical racism...” I have a hard time believing that the bystander issue is a widespread issue or encompasses the whole of American culture. Is it possible that progressive culture breeds this sort of malaise? Could the ideology of massive government institutions erode our sense of self determination? After all, there’s a government office or system that’s designed to handle this sort of thing, right? Or so they believe. I don’t know, but it’s curious, and incredibly disturbing. There’s so many instances of violence in NYC that we’ve seen since that town’s COVID meltdown. Recall the lady on the subway that had her child punched in the face. No bystander intervened there as well. And so many others. Or course, this also begs the question, with what means do you intervene? It’s very easy to be disgusted by remote viewing of a video. But the reality of physical intervention is that you must assume that it could lead to your own life and death struggle. And that becomes very apparent in the midst of the violence, when you’re there and you can see and feel the rage. Dare I say that most modern cosmopolitan individuals have few useful tools to deal with a life and death physical struggle. Most people don’t. And sans a firearm, well, your intervention would then require a guarantee of assistance from the other bystanders. It’s hard to truly say you have self determination if you’ve surrender your ability to exercise it. We may be far to reliant on systems that are bound to fail or that are bound to rob us of our liberty under the guise of protecting us. We want to feel as though we’re protected or that we’ve established a benevolent force of good. It makes those of us that are wealthy or pathetic feel better about our environment. But feeling better doesn’t mean anything of real value has been achieved. Yet again and again when these systems fail, or when “crime happens” we hear the chant that “there should be some sort of law against that..” this mindset - the decades of this culture that demands a technocrat solve our problems- relieves us of our responsibility as citizens. Next thing you know we’re all sitting on a subway watching a crazy person punch a baby, afraid to intervene for a myriad of reasons, but mostly just afraid and maybe glad it’s not us.
IMHO characterization of the Atlanta massage parlor shootings as anti asian hate crime is absurd. I would not be at all surprised if we found out at some point that the CCP was exploiting it in order to take attention away from the Covid origins coverup they are promulgating with the help of the WHO.
The Atlanta perp liked Asians a little too much.
This would have been a good article if Ms. Weiss had resisted the temptation to go off chasing rabbits. Yes, there are people who hate Jews and, yes, many of them are black, thanks to the Black Muslim movement and the fact that many slaves were Muslims who hated Jews and their hatred was passed on to their descendants. "White supremacy," which is essentially a media invention, is not synonymous with "anti-Semitic," which is a misleading term since Arabs are also Semites. In fact, the South was full of Jews - many of whom were slave owners and slave traders - and Southerners held no animosity toward Jews until Leo Frank allegedly killed Mary Phagan and rich Northern Jews mounted a campaign to get him off (and founded the ADL as a result.) One reason blacks have been going after Asians is because Asian shopkeepers, particularly Koreans, decided to exploit black communities for financial gain. By the way, I've spent time in Pittsburgh and have known a lot of people from there. Yes, it has a reputation because of US Steel but those plants are long gone and the air there is clean.
You’re not doing a very good job of hiding your anti Semitism....
"Arabs are also Semites"
Wrong. The word has NEVER, EVER meant anything but Jews. It was invented by a German philosopher precisely to describe Jew-hatred in clinical terms. At its root, it has always meant hatred of Jews. "Arabs are also Semites" is simply not correct. "Semite" is not and has never been a synonym for Middle Eastern or Levantine.
@BariWeiss Please write about Chauvin trial. This is incredibly important - if the fascist, lawless lynch mob wins, and an innocent man is convicted, because the story fits the leftists narrative - there will be no chance for us to come back. That's what the fascist mob does - create an emotional picture, scream "racism" et al, and goes for the kill. If Chauvin is not acquitted - FAIR or any kind of fight with CRT does not stand a chance. Jodi Shaw does not stand a chance. Our country, Constitution and the rule of law do not stand a chance. We must to whatever it takes to get a fair trial. We are losing this battle so far.
Another fact that goes "unnoticed" is that so much of this hatred and violence is showing up in "liberal" communities. When you start throwing out "victim cards" with nonchalance, you'll never know who is going to pick it up and use it, and you can't control how it will be used.
I've been saying for years that these totalitarian monsters eventually eat their own. Hitler turned on his Generals and had many of them killed. Stalin killed over half of his revolutionary comrades.
I think a lot of hatred shows up in "liberal" areas because urban areas tend to be more liberal, and they also tend to be more mixed. It's a bit like the "ice cream causes murder" things where two things are correlated but not causally connected. In areas that are less diverse, you have more conservatism and fewer inter-ethnic squabbles of any kind simply because you have less diversity period. It's not that conservatism causes fewer squabbles, it's that less diversity causes both.
I think it is deeper than that. Liberal communities have learned, through decades of control by democrats, that they government is their first source of support. That distances people from others in their community and so they dont feel the need to be civil. When you live on rural communities, you know the government wont be there to help and you will need to rely on neighbors. You dont want to offend those you may be asking for help. I know this because I have lived it.
And you are not the only who lived it. I have as well, and I see things differently. When your entire neighborhood looks like you, of course you aren't going to have ethnic tension.
I'll make a couple of counter-intuitive (at least, according to current dogma) inferences from this. 1) People are naturally prejudiced. 2) Diversity can be harmful.
When Katrina hit New Orleans, the population of the city mainly "cried for help" from the government. Just a few weeks later, a similarly destructive hurricane hit the rural western part of LA. Those residents simply went out and helped each other. (I lived in New Orleans at the time so paid attention to this.)
In addition, I wonder if there are any studies looking closely at this. Are ethnic tensions the result of ethnic differences, or because the different ethnicities are artificially kept from building bridges by too much government interfer...I mean...support.
The perpetrator was on "lifetime parole" following incarceration for killing a woman when he was 18. He had been loosed on the public only a short while ago.
Yes-he killed his own mother.
Oh that's heart-breaking. The video does show the type of behavior you see from someone who is broken in a way that produces unprovoked violent fury in an instant. We don't know how to fix someone like that.
Killing one woman, beating the daylights out of another? Maybe the actual problem here is m-m-m-misogyny? Naah ... not woke enough.
I don't know what bystanders could have done to actively intervene; I get that. I have been within a few feet of a beating inflicted in public by strong young males on several occasions. It's breathtaking how severe of a damage can be inflicted by a young male human in just seconds, and although I wanted to help, there was nothing I could do physically. To physically step in between the perp and the victim looked to me akin to stepping into a tornado. Made of whirling bricks.
But what I do see in the all-too-common videos of violence that have been captured and posted in this modern cellphone age is a distinct change in the ATTITUDE of the bystanders. The default behavior seems to be apathy, disengagement, or even glee. If I were near this assault I would have at least been screaming, calling 911, looking actively for police etc. What I saw from the bystanders instead was a lot of "Huh. Would you look at that?"
The victim's daughter has publicly thanked an anonymous bystander for yelling at the attacker to distract him during the attack. If the victim's daughter can thank this person, I think it's worth mentioning that it happened so wanted to share.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-asian-assault-victim-good-samaritan-diverted-attackers-attention
NYPD said that NO ONE EVEN CALLED 911 during or after this assault. Cops saw the victim laying on the sidewalk as they were driving by after the attack. I understand being afraid to physically intervene, but as you mentioned, someone could have at least called the police. I don't know about the liability of the security officers, but I couldn't imagine any liability related to calling the police or checking on the victim to see if she were even alive. I couldn't imagine laying on the sidewalk, experiencing immense pain, and being disoriented after a violent attack...everyone just keeps on walking... It's disgusting and so sad.
"To physically step in between the perp and the victim looked to me akin to stepping into a tornado. Made of whirling bricks." Yeah. Unfortunately, "stepping in" in situations like this is like jumping in front of a train to save someone who's tied to the tracks. It creates two corpses instead of one. Like you, what bothers me is that no one tried to do ANYTHING. :-(
Bari — I just wanted to say how impactful each and every piece you publish is. How do we replicate you 1000x over to save our nation from the downward spiral of blame or victimization we are in? Thank you in advance for everything you continue to do. I can’t wait to read what’s next as a paid subscriber!
This article has two points. One is about the evil of standing by while another human is attacked. The other is about bringing to light how sometimes minorities attack other minorities. I'd like to share on this.
My wife worked in downtown Portland, OR for years and up until the pandemic. A few years ago she had a succession of harassment incidents. The first was when a transgender person physically walked into her and used their shoulder to push into my wife. My wife was called a "f**king dyke" by this person and told "you're not cool" with menace. Weeks later another incident like this happened with yet another transgender person. My wife was harassed for absolutely no reason than existing and being "visibly lesbian." We were utterly befuddled by both moments and did an internet search to see where this animosity was coming from. Several rabbit holes later, we learned of a new type of homophobia coming from others within the LGBTQ+ milieu. We discovered the disparaging and often incorrect term TERF, and we saw many Twitter accounts where lesbians were disparaged to the point of encouraging violence. It all was a shock to say the least.
Another incident involved a black man who followed my wife for a couple blocks, screaming ugly words at her. He called her an "it" and a "fag." He said loudly that he was going to "f**k her up" and that he hated white people. Both this man and my wife were surrounded by people waiting forthe trolly during morning rush hour. Many looked at what was happening but no one intervened. My wife had to rush into a store to get away from the man.
It was at this point I went to the city of Portland's Human Rights committee. I was allowed to share these experiences and my perspective. That the rhetoric of the constant demonization of Trump (who I didn't vote for) and his supporters and whites and men and cisgenders was fostering more minorities railing against minorities. I told them it almost seemed as if the bystanders in the last example I shared, were trying to decide who the more oppressed person was - the white appearing lesbian or the black man.
My plea for help went unacknowledged. So I took my concerns to the city council which included Mayor Ted Wheeler. I related all the same information and asked that they consider how their rhetoric may have consequences for the city. I urged consideration for embracing civility, not as a means to shut others up, but to serve as an example of how we humans need to treat each other...before all we are doing is performing acts of dehumanization in the name of what's politically beneficial for those who won't likely ever experience what my wife did.
My concerns went unacknowledged. It was then we began to really see where Portland was going and we started the process mentally of figuring out where to move to.
One would think a same-sex interracial appearing couple like us would be at home in such a progressive place. Instead we found zealotry disguised as justice, and minority on minority hated to be acceptable. The insult to injury came from our former Mayor's (we have moved away from Portland) Twitter post. It said:
"...the burden should not be on BIPOC communities to aspire towards resilience or be resilient in the face of racism's physical and psychological violence. The burden remains on dominant communities to do the work necessary to make Portland safer, welcoming..."
Meaning minorities are supposed to wait around until "dominant communities" decide if and when they want to help us and that minorities shouldn't have to be responsible for our own hated or be strong when one of "our own" or others attacks us.
I'd like to end this comment with a quote from musician and blogger, Regie Hamm.
"Once you decide to see every single person on Earth as an individual, and not the group they may or may not be a part of, you get set free."
Freedom includes responsibility and resilience. I hope we can foster more of that when anyone is being harmed and when we examine our own capacity to hate and disregard mercy.
I'm so sorry your wife had to endure those awful incidents and that your elected officials ignored your concerns! I'm also one half of an inter-racial lesbian couple. We've been lucky enough that we haven't faced any in-person harassment like your wife did; the worst we've received is a driver honking at us and asking if we wanted a threesome when we walked home holding hands one evening. It was frightening in the moment, since he had an aggressive demeanor, and no one else was in earshot, but he drove off when we gave him nasty looks.
The homophobia of radical trans activists is very real. There are plenty of kind, decent trans people doing their best to cope with a difficult hand they've been dealt in life. But the ones who harass innocent lesbians or tell lesbians they're transphobic if they're not attracted to natal males aren't doing the rest of the community any favors. Many of them have taken over in-person and online spaces. For example, Reddit has deleted without warning two female-only lesbian subreddits that took care to follow Reddit's rules. Meanwhile, the largest "lesbian" subreddit claims that not being attracted to a trans woman because she's trans is transphobic: https://www.reddit.com/r/actuallesbians/comments/15ha8u/on_dating_trans_women_and_transphobia/. The icing on the cake is the attempted joke, "With enough forethought you might not need a sperm donor!" Since I'm happily married, this new homophobia doesn't affect me directly. But I worry for all the young lesbians who are pressured into opening their dating pools to natal males in a new way.
As far as I'm concerned, taking a lesbian to task for not being attracted to a trans "woman" is proof positive that the whole world, including them, sees these people as what they are: men. Women are NEVER permitted to set boundaries and refuse sexual service to men. In their eyes, a woman setting any sexual boundary is a hate crime, not a man violating one.
What you and your wife unfortunately experienced is standard mob evolution. Time and time again, throughout history, this is where it starts. Historically, it has always gotten much worse and normally grows into tyranny as a ruthless leader is needed to quell the widespread violence. Can we avoid the same fate here in the US? I wouldn't bet on it; as a population we are no different than any population that has come before us.
I'm so sorry that happened to your wife. When I learned about the way that trans "women" harass lesbians, that's when the scales finished falling from my eyes about the whole trans business. It's just one more way for men to demand sexual gratification from all vaginas everywhere. It's the violence of any man anywhere who has encountered a woman who feels justified in setting a boundary of any kind. Men's fists are justice, but women's boundaries are violence, and somehow these men figured out that as long as they slap on some dimestore lip gloss and call themselves Poledancerina, their misogyny is woke now.
We've been second class human beings behind the ones with penises since time began. Now, we're second class WOMEN behind the ones with penises. Ishtar weeps.
This thread is awesome! I'm very encouraged by this!
I have a social worker colleague with decades of experience in the Pennsylvania penal system. Her specialty was counseling for sex offenders. A few years ago, she was asked to help decide the contentious issue of whether transgender woman would be housed in the male facility vs the female facility. She thought about it for a few nano-seconds and said, “people with penises go with the men.”
Your experience is deeply unfair and infuriating but somehow not surprising. There's this weird new extremist SJW behavior that your experience somehow reminds me of: in footage from the riots and protests we've had for over a year now, I have seen numerous examples of (white) leftist-aligned agitators screaming at other people, calling those other people the "N" word. Over and over, usually at other white people although I just saw a video where they screamed it at a black person. I still can hardly believe it, or understand it.