The left-leaning Jewish Daily Forward goes all-in to defend Footie Pajamas Boy, by accusing the right of “a centuries-old nexus of anti-Semitism and misogyny.” (Link safe; goes to Hot Air. I’m not rewarding a Website extra traffic for trolling the Interwebs):
In fact, Pajama Boy stands at a centuries-old nexus of anti-Semitism and misogyny. As scholars including Sander Gilman and Daniel Boyarin have shown, Jewish men have been accused of being unmanly for hundreds of years – including by other Jews, such as the early Zionists, whose muscular Judaism was a direct response to diaspora Jewish emasculation. This is an old, old motif.
The Jew is the Other is the Effeminate is the Liberal. He is the urbanite, the parasite, the usurer, the lawyer. His effeminacy corrupts the Volk or the Heartland or the real American values. He wouldn’t know how to drive a pick-up truck if it was on cruise control. And he definitely votes for Obama.
Really, what’s “metrosexual” about Pajama Boy, anyway? The fact that he’s wearing pajamas? Drinking a hot beverage? No – it’s the way in which he so perfectly fits the Right’s image of the liberal Jewish girly-man. There’s a real “masculinity,” and then there’s whatever it is that Pajama Boy is embodying. (For the record, I have no idea whether Krupp is gay or straight. Neither do his haters.)
Needless to say, in this brave new world of Eric Cantor and the Republican Jewish Coalition (whose executive director makes over half a mil – must be a real man), the Jewishness of Pajama Boy is conspicuously absent from the vitriol. But as soon as you see it, you can’t un-see it. Which makes you wonder what the Review’s Charles Cooke – in another line conspicuously omitted by the discussions of this issue – meant when he said “the advertising machine behind the Obama administration seems not to really know what normal human beings are like.”
Normal human beings are gentiles. They spit or smoke tobacco, they speak plainly, and they are manly men who don’t wear pajamas, don’t raise their eyebrows, don’t support affordable healthcare, and definitely don’t flay their arms around like Woody Allen. Or Shylock. Real men. Not Jews.
Whether or not the Pajama-Boy bashers are unconsciously anti-Semitic or not, I don’t know. Consciously, they are against everything “Judaism” stands for, at least as construed by its enemies: outsiderness, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, a progressive rather than nativist agenda, an opposition to the notion that there is one kind of “normal” person, a sympathy for the underdog and the immigrant as opposed to the successful and the privileged, and, yes, a rejection of a certain gendered, masculinist understanding of justice wherein the strong survive and the weak are trampled underfoot like the untermenschen they are.
Just a reminder, this is who you’re defending, Forward:
As The Daily Caller reported, Krupp was accused of racism and anti-Semitism during his college-aged stint as the editor of the Madison, Wisconsin comedy newspaper the “Madison Misnomer.”
The “Misnomer” ran a piece joking about 9/11 and was accused of running offensive content, according to a 2010 Krupp interview with The Badger Herald.
“We have gotten complaints about the paper being too harsh on Jewish students. It’s a comedy newspaper. Is there any doubt 95 percent of the writers are Jewish?…Actually, people have called us racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, fascist, ageist, homophobic, self-loathing, Glenn Beck supporters, Coasties and other negative words people commonly mistake with communism. To them I give a huge middle finger, and then probably agree with their concerns,” Krupp said.
“That person was murdered,” Krupp said of the critic who compared him to a Glenn Beck supporter.
“We have no morals, and we will attack you. But you really don’t have to worry because no one reads the paper anyway,” Krupp added.
As the Daily Caller noted, Ethan Krupp declared himself to be a “liberal f***” before scrubbing his posts from the Internet when his role as Footie Pajamas Boy backfired badly:
“I am a Liberal Fuck,” Krupp wrote in one post. “A Liberal Fuck is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while make the opponents feel terrible about themselves. I won every argument but one.”
Krupp then detailed the only political argument he claimed her ever lost, a drunken encounter he had with a “conservative gay prick.”
As far back as the summer of 2008, the Politico was referencing “The Liberal Bletchley Park” for its ability to”detect” racism where none exists, when first Hillary supporters and then Republicans were accused of unconscious racism — or heck, outright “racism straight up,” whenever they disagreed with Barack Obama’s fiscal policies. (To the point where MSNBC was declaring words like “golf” and “Chicago” racist by the summer of 2012.) The GOP will no doubt be accused of sexism by the summer of 2016, should Hillary or Elizabeth Warren win the Democrats’ presidential nomination.
And now they’re being accused of anti-Semitism, to the point of being crypto-Nazis, via language such as “untermenschen.” (Gore Vidal, call your office.) Nothing like accusing a group that’s against nationally socialized medicine of being…national socialists. (George Orwell, call your office as well.) But then, to borrow from one of Glenn Reynolds’ leitmotifs during the Tea Party’s initial surge in 2009, when the N-word was routinely tossed around by Chris Matthews and others on the left, it had to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.
While Footie Pajamas Boy Ethan Krupp may be a self-declared “liberal f***,” this latest attack on the libertarian right is a reminder that he’s got plenty of others on his side of the aisle competing for the title as well, who will attack you without morals. As Jesse Walker of Reason noted in September of 2009, the center of power is just as fueled by paranoia and imaginary boogiemen as any fringe group, if not more so; Forward’s rant is a classic example of what Prof. William A Jacobson likes to call “Kafkatrapping”:
One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap….
My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.
This is almost exactly the way the kafkatrap operates in religious and political argument. Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.
The flop sweat emanating from Obamacare is so strong, it caused one man to don his footiejammies for a photo op, and another to write, at long last, a winner in the prize of the dumbest piece of crying anti-Semitism ever written, since a column written by two Columbia students and published by the New York Times in 1992 declared the second Michael Keaton Batman movie to be an anti-Semitic allegory.
2014 will be quite an interesting year indeed. Forward.
Update: Funny; less than two weeks ago, NBC was telling us “You’re not supposed to like Pajamas Boy.” Last month, Mark Levin warned his listeners that “MSNBC is filled with hateful, racist, anti-semitic, anti-gay, misogynistic elements and individuals who at some time in their past or even now have shared one or all those traits.” But even the Great One had no idea how badly the rot had seeped into the self-hating Peacock Network…
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