On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and said out loud what a majority of Americans concluded a long time ago — that President Donald J. Trump is a liar.
Mr. Comey did not resort to euphemisms when he accused the president of defaming him and the bureau he once led. At that moment, Mr. Trump was at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference across town, basking in applause.
“We will always support our evangelical community and defend your right and the right of all Americans to follow and to live by their teachings of their faith,”
.. It was a fascinating morning of contrasts. While Mr. Trump swore to protect American Christendom from the forces of secularism (i.e, the Democrats), Mr. Comey told a riveted audience on Capitol Hill about Mr. Trump’s attempts to extract a loyalty oath over dinner at the White House.
.. a figure of either utter mendacity or incompetence, depending on one’s ideological bias.
But across town, the righteous surrounded Mr. Trump with a cloud of hosannas and affirmation. “In my first 100 days,” Mr. Trump told the adoring audience, “I don’t think anybody has ever done more or certainly not much more [as president].”
.. Donald Trump learned a long time ago that he can get away with saying demonstrably false things to his core supporters with little fear of paying a price. As the cliche goes, his people take him seriously — not literally. He may be a liar, but he’s their liar.
.. In the universe that I come from, Christians would rather have been fed to the lions than to have been allied with a vulgarian like Donald Trump. In this simulated universe, the American faction of Christianity appears to worship a Jesus that has contempt for the poor, hates refugees and embraces militarism. Here, Jesus blesses wealth and power and those who seek it relentlessly.
.. In the universe I originally came from, evangelicals would’ve gone nuts at the sight of Donald Trump and several Arab despots meeting in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago, putting their hands on a mystical orb in a darkened room as if sealing an Antichrist-level deal to divvy up the world.
..
In this universe, Christians are the opposite of the weak and sentimental fools Friedrich Nietzsche complained about. Here, Nietzsche’s “will to power” is exemplified by America’s dominant religion. The beatitudes have been turned upside down and inside out to accommodate the new American spirit — the gospel according to Donald Trump.
The Joy of Hate Reading
My taste for hate reading began with “The Fountainhead,” which I opened in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a college class on 20th-century architecture. I knew nothing of Ayn Rand or of objectivism.
.. What stuck was the abiding knowledge that I was not, nor would I ever be, a libertarian.
.. It was only by burrowing through books that I hated, books that provoked feelings of outrage and indignation, that I truly learned how to read. Defensiveness makes you a better reader, a closer, more skeptical reader: a critic. Arguing with the author in your head forces you to gather opposing evidence. You may find yourself turning to other texts with determination, stowing away facts, fighting against the book at hand. You may find yourself developing a point of view.
.. loathing is mixed with other emotions — fear, perverse attraction, even complicated strains of sympathy. This is, in part, what makes negative book reviews so compelling.
.. the authors were too credulous of certain research, and in ways that served their thesis.
.. It can be interesting, and instructive, when a book provokes animosity. It may tell you more about a subject or about yourself, as a reader, than you think you know. It might even, on occasion, challenge you to change your mind.
.. an even more stimulating excitement comes from finding someone else who hates the same book as much as you do
Civilities: Why Milo Yiannopoulos is a man to be feared. (It’s not why you think.)
No, the reason to pay attention to the 33-year-old Breitbart editor lies in his ability to provoke otherwise decent citizens to put profits and publicity before civil discourse, and in how his hateful speech incites many to clamp down on the free speech that is a fundamental right in this country. That’s what we most have to fear from him: that we’ll lose ourselves and our values in this mud-wrestling contest.
.. How is a thinking person to reconcile the shameless profiteering of a magazine that supposedly serves the LGBT community with the knee-jerk reaction to suppress this admittedly outrageous voice?
.. I’m reminded of what the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, which is that the remedy for hateful speech is not enforced silence, but more speech. As much as I deplore what Yiannopoulos says and the greed that gives him a platform, we should not silence his offensive words. We can only face them with our ongoing message of inclusion and respect, drowning out his message of hate.
Five myths about anti-Semitism
According to the FBI, Jews in the United States are annually subject to the most hate crimes of any religious group, despite constituting only 2 percent of the American population. The picture is considerably darker in Europe, where Jews were the target of 51 percent of racist attacks in France in 2014, even as they made up less than 1 percent of that country’s population. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools and museums have been subject to terrorist attacks in France, Denmark and Belgium. A 2013 E.U. survey found that nearly 40 percent of European Jews fear to publicly identify as Jewish, including 60 percent of Swedish Jews.
.. The state of Israel often confounds the anti-Semitism conversation. Some assume that an attack on Israel and its policies must necessarily be an attack on Jews; evangelical leader Franklin Graham, for instance, dubbed criticism of Israeli settlers an assault on God’s “chosen people.” Others justify their attacks on Jews around the world by pointing to Israel, claiming to be anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. Much of this confusion stems from the conflation of all Jews with the state of Israel, its government and its policies.
.. Anti-Semitism, however, is a unique case — and uniquely corrosive to those societies that embrace it. That’s because it often takes the form of a conspiracy theory about how the world works. By blaming real problems on imagined Jewish culprits, anti-Semitism prevents societies from rationally solving them. In one of the most famous examples, Nazi scientists shunned Einstein’s advances as “Jüdische Physik,” as opposed to “Deutsche Physik,” enfeebling their understanding.