For anyone wondering, my header photo I took at a friend's destination wedding in the Dominican Republic - Sunrise, getting ready to leave. Glory to God!
@BarackObama@redistrictact If you are able to vote legally, showing identification wonโt disenfranchise you.
If you arenโt able to vote legally, NOT showing identification will disenfranchise everyone ELSE.
Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?
You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which Iโm already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.
I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, Iโm told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.
In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.
I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired peopleโlots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.
Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.
Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but Iโve only been there once in fifteen months).
His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.
Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and Iโve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. Iโve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and Iโve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.
Britain had a moment of silence for George Floyd. Our politicians kneeled en masse to show their outrage at his killing. "I can't breathe" became a slogan.
George Floyd died on the other side of the world. He wasn't British.
Henry Nowak *was* British and his treatment by the police was shocking and negligent in the extreme. Yet there is no minute of silence. There is no coordinated public campaign. There is no kneeling at sporting events.
And we all know why.
During the summer of BLM, some people said "All Lives Matter". This was treated as the highest form of racism and anyone who said this was immediately cancelled. Why? Because the people in charge don't actually think all lives matter in the same way.
They have created a racial hierarchy of victimhood where a career criminal who died through mistreatment by police in a foreign country with 0 evidence of racism like George Floyd is automatically sanctified because of the colour of his skin.
And Henry Nowak, a British man, one of ours, is automatically dismissed and ignored because of the colour of his.
This is the ugly fruit of so-called "anti-racism", an obsession with race that has created a two-tier society which treats people differently because of the colour of their skin.
This needs to stop.
@Kevin72127362@JDHaltigan In this case, that we are acting on our superior morality, that yes, aligns with that of the "other country whose existence is absolutely dependent on us"
The inability to recognize that all religions are not equal in their commitment to the US's foundational values will bring about its erasure. If a religion is committed to ending your freedoms if able to do so, you should not be bound to protect it under the "freedom of religion" imbecility. Suicidal empathy is going to destroy the world.
@qodeqs@ConceptualJames@JoelWBerry He does post regularly extremely long and thorough threads. As he said, he gives the energy he gets when he replies to, as I said earlier, those who don't even deserve to be in the same room as him.
@HIVE742 @grok@AnthonyLipke@Rothmus Thank you for this wonderful exchange that exposed some terrrible logic and reasoning. Hopefully it was a learning experience for you and others. God be with you.
I recently did an interview when I was in Jerusalem and dropped a concept I've been working on for a bit (with a podcast of my own forthcoming). That concept is this:
The Israel Question
My case is that before WWII and the Holocaust and the re-establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, almost everywhere in the world, and certainly Europe, was consumed with something called "The Jewish Question." After WWII, the Holocaust, and the re-establishment of the state of Israel, the Jewish Question rightly became unaskable* because its intrinsic evil was deeply recognized (*except in Islamist states).
Because of these two things:
1) The Jewish Question becoming unaskable in civilized society; and
2) The state of Israel being re-established,
I insist that the Jewish Question got relocated to something I call "the Israel Question."
All the "just asking questions" crap we hear today is just asking the Israel Question.
So what is it?
We start with the Jewish Question. What is "the Jewish Question"? The Jewish Question is "what do we do with the Jews, on the presumption that we don't want them?" It is intrinsically antisemitic and shouldn't have taken the Holocaust to show how bad it is.
Why is that presumption part of the question, which has historically been framed merely as "what do we do with the Jews?"? The reason is simple: if your answer to "what do we do with the Jews?" is roughly "let them be part of our society with freedom to be themselves," you wouldn't ask the question about what to do with them at all. The question wouldn't just be unasked because there's a ready answer; it would be moot and irrelevant. There's no need to ask the question at all unless you see Jews as a problem to begin with. Thus, the question rests on that presumption ("we don't want them (here)") and is intrinsically antisemitic.
So that's the Jewish Question: What do we do with the Jews, on the presumption that we don't want them (here)?
Different people proposed different answers throughout history. The Romans didn't want them in "Palestine" anymore and chased them into Diaspora in AD 70-74, for example. Martin Luther suggested horrible things in the 1530s after he kinda went nuts in his latest years. Karl Marx suggested you make them not Jewish anymore, and preferably Communist, and the problem solves itself because they're not Jewish anymore but Communist comrades. Hitler suggested first to relocate them all to Madagascar and, upon recognizing that's ridiculous and impossible, the "Final Solution," which was to find and murder ALL of them, in order to rid Europe of them entirely.
Again, my case is that we don't ask the Jewish Question anymore in civilized parts of the world because we recognize it as being not just antisemitic but a gateway to hell. The Jewish Question is anathema in modern civilized societies.
Roughly at the same time as humanity finally started that realization baldly in the face, the state of Israel re-established itself in its historical homeland. Not only is this good on its own, but it also provides a failsafe should the morality slip and the Jewish Question arise in earnest again. With Israel, and its IDF and thus the ability to defend themselves at need, Jews can make aliyah and escape any society that decides to ask the JQ and thus reopen the gates to hell within its own borders. And good luck dealing with the IDF, as history has shown.
Thus arose a replacement question, a proxy for the Jewish Question that could be asked even though the JQ was off the table: the Israel Question.
What is the Israel Question? Simple: "What do we do with Israel, on the presumption that we don't want it (not just there, but anywhere)?"
The Israel Question seems distinct from the Jewish Question, and on technicality (but not in substance) it is. This allows the Israel Question to pose itself as a high-minded, fully socially acceptable geopolitical topic of debate instead of the rank antisemitism that it's actually serving.
The Israel Question is "just asking questions" about the state of Israel and its role in the world (on the presumption that we don't want it, thus the relentless impossible standards Israel is held to under its gaze). It's very high-minded. It's just global politics, you know.
The Israel Question takes forms like
-whether Israel destabilizes the Middle East by its mere presence,
-if Israel is really legally entitled to be there at all,
-if Israel defending itself against its hostile neighbors is a form of implicit aggression that causes secondary problems like mass migration,
-whether Israel should be forced to share its land with people who want to kill Jews because they are Jews and do impossible things to make it work even when it cannot work by definition,
-whether Israel is really defending itself or just starting random wars,
-if Israel's military (IDF) or intelligence service (the Mossad) secretly controls other countries including its putative allies,
-whether Israel is really a good ally or an ally at all to the countries with which it is in alliance,
-if Israel has secret ambitions to illegally conquer foreign lands for its own and force, coerce, blackmail, or trick other nations to do its dirty work in the process,
-if Israel deserves any kind of aid packages, moneys, or alliances and if it actually deserves to exist if any such things help its security,
-and on, and on, and on.
See, these questions aren't about JEWS. They're just high-minded geopolitical questions about Israel and its role in the world.
But these "just asking questions" questions are the Israel Question in disguise: ultimately, what do we do with Israel, on the presumption that we don't want it?
The Israel Question, and its "just asking questions" disguises, again, simply don't exist without the presumption of not wanting Israel. If your answer to "what do we do with Israel?" is "treat it like any other sovereign nation," there's no impetus to ask the Israel Question at all, and many of its disguises are moot too. All of them are moot once the impossible standard lurking beneath them is exposed, and that impossible standard is the hidden Israel Question.
The thing is, the Israel Question is just the Jewish Question by proxy, though. The question is ultimately "what do we do with the one place Jews can unequivocally defend themselves, presuming we don't want such a place?" (Again, if that presumption isn't there, there's no reason for the question and thus no question to begin with.)
In other words, the Israel Question is still "what do we do with Jews, presuming we don't want them?" with only the slightest caveat in possibility but only very rarely in intention.
Of course, the presumption of the Jewish Question is called "antisemitism," as we already discussed, which makes the Jewish Question itself antisemitic.
Similarly, the presumption of the Israel Question is called "anti-Zionism," as should be obvious, which makes the Israel Question itself anti-Zionist.
But the Israel Question is the Jewish Question by proxy, so the underlying anti-Zionism is antisemitism by proxy too.
We spend a lot of time these days seeing not just the reinvigoration of the anathema Jewish Question itself but far more the Israel Question, which would rob the JQ of its failsafe, which the Jews call making aliyah. And we're supposed to tolerate it and pretend it's just high-minded policy discussion about big geopolitical matters that are detached enough not to be immoral, or, in some cases, people fool themselves into believing that first.
We flatter ourselves with high-minded platitudes like, "of course anyone should be able to question the activities any state at any time" or "of course people should be allowed to criticize and question a government," as though those are actually what the Israel Question is about. Yes, "of course," those things are on the table, and every Israeli debates them daily, but not on the presumption that Israel's existence is not actually wanted.
This is why the formal definition of antisemitism is correct to name holding Israel to an impossible standard or one beyond that any other nation would be held to when discussing matters of its sovereignty, existence, security, or role in the world. It is right to name what amounts to the Israel Question as antisemitism because it is antisemitism, only thinly veiled.
We should learn to recognize the Israel Question for what it is, both for the evil, potentially genocidal antisemitism it actually expresses and for its presentation as a hidden presumption tucked underneath seemingly high-minded, fair-game "just asking questions" questions.
The rise of the Israel Question is the rise of the Jewish Question by proxy, and the response to the Jewish Question we have all understood as moral bedrock for civilized societies is "never again." Thus, the response to the Israel Question is also "never again." In light of its undeniable and rampant rise, it is therefore wholly appropriate and necessary to take the bold, righteous, and courageous stand of our time.
Join me in saying, then, NEVER AGAIN IS NOW!
I want to live in a high-trust society that maximizes flourishing by maximizing the discovery of new knowledge. I want to continue the evolutionary process that created all beauty in the universe. I want to align humans with God.