THIS TINE IT IS PERSONAL — FOR US

“America First” is an honorable slogan; America’s traditional culture, values, and history are precious

By Dov Fischer

The American Spectator
December 20, 2019

Those pathological haters and congenital liars impeached not only President Trump on Wednesday night. They impeached us. This time it is personal. That is my vote they are trying to take away. As an Orthodox Jew, I know plenty about governments taking away my vote. Rome did it to me in Talmudic times. Western Europe did it to me in the Medieval ages. The Ottoman Sultan did it to me. Sheiks did it to me. The Tsar did it to me. Hitler did it to me. Stalin did it to me. Damned if I am going to let a mob of socialist and lying Democrats do it to me. The muck stops here.

For four years, polling has documented that the president’s strongest support demographic is America’s Orthodox Jews. The support runs between 70 percent in radical Los Angeles to 90 percent most everywhere else. This has been documented here and here and here and here and here. Much of that support stems from a deep affinity with his stands on the whole gamut of traditional American cultural and social issues. Many faithful Christians, including devout and committed Catholics, small business owners, and working-class households with traditional values in the heartland between the two coasts all feel the same, determined to rush in to protect this president’s back.

Mr. President, you are not alone.

The corrupt Democrat impeachment charade now, for the first time, has made their three-year war against Trump personal for his backers, too. We now have “skin in the game” — because the Democrats not only are trying to nullify him but also to nullify us, to annul our 63 million ballots and 304 electoral votes, our role at the heart of the American process. We realize that this moment in history demands that we have Trump’s back, too, not just Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, Devin Nunes and Steve Scalise, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush. The toxic Democrats and their Corrupt Journalist Corps voted, with defections, to steal our votes and our election. Now it is personal as it never before has been for Trump backers. His poll numbers have survived Pelosi’s gambit magnificently, and we now support him more passionately than ever. Here’s why.

1. America First

We are deep America Firsters. Contrast this video and this with the gutless coward, LeBron James. Just listen to this Lee Greenwood song once again: “I’m proud to be an American.” And they can’t take that away.

We do not care that vile haters a century ago used the “America First” slogan to incite xenophobia because we focus on the different contexts of then and now. Words and terms change meanings over time. A century ago, the word “liberal” would have fit today’s “conservative” perfectly. It meant inter alia that you supported the free market and opposed state control of the economy. By contrast, after the Left arrogated it, the term became so loaded with failure that Democrats have run away from it and now call themselves “progressives.” Similarly, the word “stalwart” is a fine word, meaning someone who takes a stand and sticks to it with loyalty, someone you can trust and count on. But a century and a half ago, that term instead identified a faction of the Republican Party, typified by the likes of Chester Arthur, that promoted “machine politics” and patronage, the Swamp that handed out government jobs based on political connections rather than on merit. Even as that term has changed over time, consider that the era’s opposing Republican faction, associated with such as James Garfield, were a group who believed nobly in honest government run by the best people; yet they were called — yikes! — the “Half-Breeds.” Go ahead and use that term today. We are Trump stalwarts, as the word is used today. And likewise we are America Firsters.

We despise the Left’s obsession with Colin Kaepernick and the troglodytic multi-millionaire ingrate lemmings like him. No Nike athletic shoes or outdoor jackets in our homes and no more NFL football on our TV. We strongly and enthusiastically support building the Wall. Why should we not be enthusiastic about sealing off a porous border (i) that allows the smuggling of deadly drugs including opioids that murder tens of thousands annually, (ii) that fails to keep out animals like MS-13, and (iii) that facilitates and even invites the most vile human trafficking in women and children for unspeakable perversions and quasi-enslavement? We virulently oppose the Democrats’ cynical effort to import millions of illegal immigrants so that, having failed for generations to persuade the majority of self-sufficient Americans who live here legally and know the score, they instead seek to change vote outcomes by importing millions whom they know will rely on Democrat welfare programs. That was their formula in New Mexico and then in flipping California from the Golden State of John Wayne and Reagan to the Homeless State of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. And now they press on to Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. We are furious that there was not a president nor even a viable candidate for president in the past half century — and that includes Bush, the other Bush, Dole, McCain, Romney, and the whole bunch of them — until Trump who frontally would try stopping the surge of illegal immigrants.

We see no comparison between the illegal immigrants of today, a group that has no statutory claim to enter and must not be allowed in, in contrast to the plight of Irish who fled famine in the 1840s, other North Europeans who flocked to Ellis Island a century ago, and Jews who fled Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s — because each of those prior groups endeavored to enter the United States legally within the allowed immigration quotas and by the proper procedures. They were not admitted on government handouts and did not assert “entitlements” for public assistance of any kind because they never had the brazen audacity to imagine themselves “entitled” to anything but a chance. They had to demonstrate that family would house and support them from becoming a public charge. There was no welfare state for them, no food stamps, no bilingual education. In the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jewish immigrant children who spoke Yiddish in the public school hallways had their mouths washed out with soap because in America, you speak English.

To the degree that Jews do remember bitterly the American immigration impediments during the Hitler years, noted Holocaust scholar Professor Rafael Medoff has documented that Roosevelt consciously altered the laws to keep Jewish immigrants from Hitler out, so 190,000 legally authorized immigration openings never were filled during FDR’s presidency. Any comparison between the Ellis Island immigration struggles then and the southern border issues now is blasphemous. ICE of today feeds illegal immigrants, houses them, provides them with medical care and plumbing facilities. Those who ignorantly compare that to concentration camps and Auschwitz, where inmates did not voluntarily seek to enter but instead were transported forcibly there from their homes, then were enslaved into 15-hour work days, experimented on medically, starved, taken to be shot to death or gassed with Zyklon B, and then incinerated in crematoria are not merely idiots; rather, they reflect the dereliction and impact of American conservatives having abandoned wholesale to the Left the sacred task of educating our future generations.

2. America’s Traditional Culture, Values, and History Are Precious

We Trump stalwarts are socially conservative. For Orthodox Jews for example, our Written Laws of Judaism (Torah) and Oral Laws of Judaism (Talmud) recognize only two genders (Genesis 1:27). Our religion’s positions on homosexuality, transgenderism, bisexuality, and gay marriage are defined by Judaism’s unequivocal texts (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13; Tractate Chulin 92a-b). America’s Christian faithful share that core tradition and those values. Orthodox Judaism’s position on abortion is that a fetus is a human life after 40 days (Tractate Yevamot 69b). Thus, this year the Rabbinical Council of America, an association of 1,000 Orthodox Rabbis, severely condemned New York’s newly enacted abortion-on-demand law. Our position on capital punishment is that, in almost all cases, a person who takes a life with premeditation should pay with his or her life. We oppose assisted suicide. We pray patriotically for the welfare of the government. And these are values shared by Trump supporters across the religious, ethnic, and racial spectra. On issues of law and order, anyone can walk through an Orthodox Jewish community any hour, day or night, male or female, adult or child, and the only danger that may arise will come from outsiders in a passing car or others from outside the Orthodox Jewish community. And so it is wherever Trump support is strong, no matter the religion or color. Police are not concerned for their safety when assigned to patrol communities where Trump support is strong. We deeply believe that Blue Lives Matter. These identical cultural values are held equally by faithful Christians, working-class households in the heartland between the coasts, married women and soccer moms, and Jewish conservatives. And that is why Democrats from Kentucky to Virginia to New Jersey to Florida keep trying to extend the vote to felons, another of their core support bases.

We hate what has happened in American education and the degrading of America’s traditional culture and Judeo-Christian heritage. Many of us Orthodox Jews who grew up before the 1960s went to public schools before the widespread rise of yeshiva parochial schools. We sang in public-school choirs, and that meant singing Christmas carols in school. Fine. My wife Ellen, the Rebbetzin (wife of an Orthodox rabbi) of our shul, knows every single lyric to every single Christmas carol so well that, for decades, she always would win the “Name That Christmas Carol Lyric” contest at the annual Christmas party at the office where she managed investigations of alleged white-collar crime, working as a certified fraud examiner and a certified internal auditor. Only one year did she ever come in second place, the year they brought in a “ringer” who was choirmaster at his church. In the year when they wanted someone else besides The Rebbetzin finally to win for a change, with winking apologies to her they held the party at a non-kosher restaurant where she could not attend. America needs Christmas carols in public schools and Christians wishing each other “Merry Christmas.” Go ahead and keep the crosses on government seals and war monuments. None of this Obama “Happy Holidays” junk — bah, humbug! Thus, Orthodox Jews continually advocate for America’s public schools to begin each day with a prayer, the way it was in the old days when we were younger, when kids started the day with some humility that a G-d reigns supreme — and when kids did not shoot each other in school.

The public schools do not need to teach ideologies: cisgender, transgender, non-binary gender, the whole leftist agender. They do not need public school teachers to hand out condoms or teach sexual strategies for avoiding pregnancy, nor courses on who in history was gay, who was straight, who had bellies inside-out or outside-in. Rather, the schools need to teach reading and writing and arithmetic, hard sciences and technology. Even with texting and keyboards, kids still should grow up knowing how to read a handwritten birthday card or write one. And even with calculators and smartphones, they should be able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide on their own. Just look at Congress to see what happens to people who grow up without skills needed to balance a checkbook. And they need to learn real history, not the pure garbage that now consumes valuable pages in texts and jams kids’ minds with dross and detritus. Just imagine if, instead of being encouraged to whine and blame, they were taught the heroism and sacrifice of Americans of all ideologies and races during World War II. They should learn what their grandparents and great-grandparents lived: what if we had lost Midway, what it took to win Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and to take back the Philippines. The suffering and heroism of the Bataan Death March. The thousands who died in the air on utterly exposed daytime bombing runs over Germany until we revised strategies, supplying fighting escorts and shifting to nighttime raids. Liberating Italy, the difference between heroes like Patton and screw-ups like John Dahlquist, the struggles at Anzio and Monte Cassino, the heroic struggles and leadership miscalculations at Market Garden and Hürtgen Forest and the heroic discipline of American soldiers who answered the call, and of course Omaha Beach. The Battle of the Bulge. If taught right, how can students not be inspired to patriotism? That it is why it is not taught.

Teach the Civil War, too. Teach real history — the ugliness of slavery and real racism, but also the heroic sacrifices of more than half a million White people who gave their lives to end it. Teach about the Revolutionary War. Teach about real sacrifice like Nathan Hale and about the rich White men who signed a Declaration of Independence that guaranteed their deaths and the confiscation of all their enormous wealth if the Revolution had failed. When a young person really learns about what a real American Congress once was when it was made of greatness, he or she instantly will perceive the sham impostors of today’s House who pledge neither their lives nor their fortunes — and who have no sacred honor to pledge anyway. The Torah instructs, “Remember the days of yore. Understand the years of generation to generation. Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will say it to you” (Deuteronomy 32:7). A nation cannot survive if its future generations do not know its actual history, its vision, its “mission statement.”

Today’s kids go through college, get lofty-sounding degrees that make them feel really smart, just as the Scarecrow felt brilliant immediately after the Wizard gave him a diploma from Universitatas Committeeatum E Pluribus Unum (and, by the way, he convoluted the Pythagorean theorem) — but they are a generation of factually challenged Ocasio-Cortezes, ignoramuses who know more about mixing an alcoholic drink and tweeting a meme than they do about reality: real history, real climate science, real economics. An advanced degree in Identity/Grievance Studies prepares that scholar for a life of jealousy and coveting what others have. Those who stand with Trump know that the key to the American Dream is not wanting to take what others have but to look upon their success, to figure out how they did it — and then to work hard and honorably, learning from their lessons to secure a piece of that pie, too.

We voted for Trump because he was the first since Reagan — and truly even better than Reagan — who spoke our language, gave voice to our values, and truly had demonstrated that he has the executive skills, drive, and determination to keep the promises he made. We knew there was a terribly expanding Swamp that was subverting our democratic republic from within, but neither he nor we realized how deep and all-pervasive it had become. We knew the Swamp had grown to implement its own agenda, impervious to “interference” or “meddling” by the office-holders actually elected by the American people. We watched the Swamp consume everything from the Democrat hedges to the Republican Bushes, subverting and controlling everything from domestic economics to energy and environmental policy, from bank lending to education policy to foreign affairs. We knew it had overtaken the State Department, for example, but most of us had no idea how deeply it even had entrenched itself within agencies of the Justice Department, like the FBI.

Donald Trump dared to take them on. Our 304 electoral votes gave him our Constitution’s most sacred authority to do so. Now the Pelosi House has voted to impeach us, too, to cancel our votes. President Trump has had our backs, and now we have his because this time it is personal — for us, too.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Orthodox Jews are obviously not liberal Jews. It’s too bad they make up only a small percent of American Jewry. Most American Jews are Reform Jews, who vote Democrat, call Trump anti-Semitic, defend the LGBTQ community and love the blacks who hate them.