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(JTA) Andrew Yang, a former tech executive, has never held public office. But that hasnt stopped him from running the most successful dark horse campaign of the election cycle.

His platform is based around creating a universal basic income giving every American citizen over the age of 18 $1,000 per month, in place of other welfare programs. His Freedom Dividend proposal has ignited debate and made him a favorite among many, especially young people, looking to shape up the economic status quo.

Yang has no experience in government, which makes figuring out where he stands on Jewish issues more challenging. However, there is one Jewish issue Andrew Yang has made headlines for:

Andrew Yang is against circumcision.

At one point he said he would incorporate that view into public policy, according to The Daily Beast.

Its sort of pushed on parents in many situations, Yang said, calling circumcision a cultural onus.

From what Ive seen, the evidence on it being a positive health choice for the infant is quite shaky, he added.

This makes Yang an intactivist one of those who advocate for keeping penises intact, as they like to say, or uncircumcised.

Despite this, doctors say that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks.

An anti-circumcision policy would greatly impact the Jewish community: a bris, or brit milah, is the Jewish ritual of circumcision usually performed on the eighth day after a baby boy is born, and a sign of entering into the Jewish covenant.

After a backlash, Yang seemed to walk back his statements, tweeting that he would not pass a universal policy on circumcision.

I support the freedom of parents to adopt circumcision for any religious or cultural ritual as desired. Actually have attended a brit milah myself and felt privileged to be there Always up to parents.

Still, he never said he would end his anti-circumcision advocacy.

Besides the circumcision controversy, has Yang waded into other waters that Jews should be concerned about?

Oddly enough, Yang is a bit of a hit with the alt-right.

For one thing, some of them applauded his comments on circumcision. But as The Verge reported in March, Yang has a following on forums on the site 4chan that are full of anti-Semitic memes.

One meme showed Yang redistributing wealth from a Jewish banker caricature, the kind of noxious anti-semitism thats common on [the 4chan forum] /pol/, Russell Brandom reported.

Yang has strongly denounced this form of support.

I denounce and disavow hatred, bigotry, racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and the alt-right in all its many forms. Full stop. For anyone with this agenda, we do not want your support. We do not want your votes. You are not welcome in this campaign, he said in a statement to The Verge.

What else has Yang said about anti-Semitism?

He tweeted support for Jews in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

I know its true for everyone but I feel terrible and terrified for my Jewish friends. So many have lost family members to violence and anti-Semitism. It hits home for them like for very few others because of their history of persecution. Imagine having your worst fears realized, Yang tweeted.

But further along in that same Twitter thread, he went on to push for universal basic income, saying that it would decrease economic and social tensions and potentially help to stop violent shootings.

Economic stress adds to social polarization and violence, he said. If youre walking around worried about how to survive month-to-month you are more likely to lash out and respond to hateful messages and ideas.

On Yangs blog, he expanded on his plan to fight anti-Semitism, with the help of UBI.

Would a Universal Basic Income have prevented the violence in Pittsburgh? Perhaps not but I believe it would have a better chance of preventing the next one than just about anything else we could do. And yes, that includes thoughts and prayers.

What does Yang say about the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel commonly referred to as BDS?

Yang has not specifically addressed BDS.

What about relationships with Jewish groups?

Yang hasnt appeared with any, though he did submit a minute-long video message to J Street.

There is also a Jews for Andrew Yang Twitter account. As of this writing, it has just under 3,000 followers.

Does he have a foreign policy with regard to Israel?

Not a very detailed one, but he has come out in favor of a two-state solution.

The only acceptable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves a two-state solution that allows both the Israeli and Palestinian people to have sovereign land and self-determination, Yang told the Council on Foreign Relations.

I dont want to prescribe the specifics of a two-state solution, as the Israeli and Palestinian people both need to be leading any conversation, and I look forward to engaging with all stakeholders to come up with confidence-building measures, such as a ceasefire and an end to the expansion of settlements, as we look towards building a sustainable peace.

Where does he stand on aid to Israel?

In March, Yang acknowledged to voters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that he did not know enough about aid generally to pronounce on aid to Israel. Im not going to get into the specifics of foreign aid, he said when asked about the annual defense assistance Israel gets. It could be the $3.8 billion in the context of money we give to other countries is appropriate.

In terms of the money we are giving to an ally like Israel, my first instinct would be like, why would we reduce it, you know? Yang said, speaking off-the-cuff at a meeting in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

In his video to J Streets 2019 conference, Yang said that under his administration, aid to Israel and Gaza would continue, and also, aid to Palestinians under U.S. Aid would be restored.

Jewish fun fact

In Yangs corner or part of the Yang Gang, we should say is Sam Altman, a Silicon Valley investor who last month threw a fundraiser for him. Altman has experimented with supporting universal basic income. In a 2016 New Yorker profile, Altman joked about how his younger brothers urged him to run for president. Lets send the Jewish gay guy! Altman said. Thatll work!

Click here for all of the other 2020 candidates positions on anti-Semitism, Israel and other issues that matter to American Jewish voters.

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Where does Andrew Yang stand on anti-Semitism, Israel and other issues that matter to Jewish voters in 2020? - JTA News

Michelle Malkin appeared on the YouTube channel of prominent white nationalist content creator Vincent James on Tuesday, where she applauded young alt-right supporters for having come to the epiphanies that for me took a long time in the making.

It appears that Malkin, after becoming a pariah among mainstream conservatives, has decided to lean into her support among the far-right.

Writers and members of the mainstream GOP began distancing themselves from Malkin after she explicitly endorsed anti-Semitic and white nationalist YouTube political personality Nicholas Fuentes in a speech at UCLA in November. Subsequently, Young Americas Foundation cut ties with Malkin. Washington Examiners Tiana Lowe chided Malkin for affiliating with racists because [Malkin] sees them as the most potent allies available to back a militantly xenophobic agenda. Jonathan S. Tobin wrote in the New York Post that Malkin thinks these haters are allies in a crusade to halt all non-European immigration (ironic, since Malkins parents were Filipino immigrants).

Malkin said she met Vincent James, who also goes by the pseudonyms of Vincent Foxx and Vincent James OConnor, at the UCLA event, adding that it was excellent to make that connection. James is a far-right YouTube political entertainer who often pushes white nationalist and conspiratorial content and was spotted perusing the perimeter of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference with Fuentes.

During her 42-minute interview with James, Malkin said her recent embrace of the self-described groyper alt-right made sense to her because it was in line with the type of politics she had been trying to engage in for the last 25 years.

I feel like theres a good synergy and partnership here because thats the work that Ive been trying to do for 25 plus years. Its been frustrating because so many people dont care. And so, when I see a glimpse, a glimmer of a spark of energy and hope and optimism, yeah, hell yeah, Im going to run to that, Malkin said. Thats what I did.

Earlier in the interview, James had vouched for Malkin to the groyper crowd, which recently co-opted Trumps America First slogan to brand its latest efforts.

I cant stress this enough. Michelle Malkin supports America First. Michelle Malkin tells the truth. Michelle Malkin is standing up against the conservative establishment, James said.

In one portion of the duos conversation, James asked Malkin to stop him when one of the following policy proposals sounded white nationalist: an immigration moratorium for at least 10 years, prosecuting employers who hire undocumented immigrants, banning welfare for undocumented immigrants, and requiring high school students visit a third-world country so that they see how great they have it here.

Malkin did not stop him.

Malkin alleged that conservatives know and believe that demographic changes in the United States could negatively affect them, but says they dont talk about it publicly for monetary reasons. (Malkin does not seem to consider the possibility that conservatives could try appealing to immigrants instead.) Malkin also praised America First activists who hung a banner over a bridge in Virginia that featured a design scheme remarkably similar to the one used by American Identity Movement, the rebranded white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

During his interview with Malkin, James scrolled through her Twitter profile and revealed that he is the operator of The Red Elephants Fan Account on Twitter. James has been banned from Twitter before, and banned users often pose as fan accounts to gain access back onto the platform.

James has appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast and was filmed in 2017 asking members of Rise Above Movement, a violent white supremacist group, to recite the white supremacist slogan 14 Words on camera. Members of that white supremacist group have since faced federal charges for engaging in violence at the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The same year, James blamed Jews for social media bans, saying that the people responsible for fact-checking articles on Facebook were very similar in DNA to [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg, who is Jewish. James once kept a Holocaust denier on his payroll who later ran the failed Senate campaign of neo-Nazi Patrick Little.

As Right Wing Watch reported in 2018, James uses his platform tohostprominentwhite nationalistspeakers and sympathizers,bolstersuch white nationalist organizations as Identity Evropa,stokeracist fears about immigrants,advancerace war narratives, andspeakto aggrieved white people at-large. Last year, James dedicated one video to arguing that the Trump administration should not hire black people and especially not black women.

James denies having ever advocated for anti-immigrant, white nationalist, or anti-Semitic ideas, claiming such accusations are a tactic of communists.

Read the rest here:
Michelle Malkin Appears on White Nationalist YouTube Show - Right Wing Watch

Read: Russias twin nostalgias

In his landmark 1981 book, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism. Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.

Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help Americas enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.

But in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar. All around them, they see degeneracy, racial mixing, demographic change, political correctness, same-sex marriage, religious decline. The America that they actually inhabit no longer matches the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America that they remember, or think they remember. And so they have begun to look abroad, seeking to find the spiritually unified, ethnically pure nations that, they imagine, are morally stronger than their own. Nations, for example, such as Russia.

The pioneer of this search was Patrick Buchanan, the godfather of the modern so-called alt-right, whose feelings about foreign authoritarians shifted right about the time he started writing books with titles such as The Death of the West and Suicide of a Superpower. His columns pour scorn on modern America, a place he once described, with disgust, as a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual universal nation whose avatar is Barack Obama. Buchanans America is in demographic decline, has been swamped by beige and brown people, and has lost its virtue. The West, he has written, has succumbed to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicidethe displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

This litany of horrors isnt much different from what can be heard most nights on Fox News. Listen to Tucker Carlson. The American dream is dying, Carlson declared one recent evening, in a monologue that also referred to the dark age that we are living through. Carlson has also spent a lot of time on air reminiscing about how the United States was a better country than it is now in a lot of ways, back when it was more cohesive. And no wonder: Immigrants have plundered America, thanks to decadent and narcissistic politicians who refuse to defend the nation. You can read worse on the white-supremacist websites of the alt-rightdo pick up a copy of Ann Coulters Adios America: The Lefts Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellholeor hear more extreme sentiments in some evangelical churches. Franklin Graham has declared, for example, that America is in deep trouble and on the verge of total moral and spiritual collapse.

See the article here:
The False Romance of Russia - The Atlantic

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) has long been a target of the Right wing due to her vociferous opposition to President Donald Trump.

One of Waters' most vocal opponents, Omar Navarro, ran against the Congresswoman in 2016 and 2018, losing in a landslide both times. He intends to run against her again, but a recent development may have eliminated that possibility.

Navarro was recently arrested on three felony charges after his ex-girlfriend, fellow Trump fanatic DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, who spotted Navarro lurking outside of her San Francisco home late Saturday night.

Shortly after, she received a text from an unknown number that read:

Tesorierowho herself is challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her congressional seatcalled police, and Navarro was arrested for felony stalking, criminal threats, and attempted extortion.

Despite losing both of his elections by more than 50 points, Navarro came to be regarded as a popular figure within the alt-Right, enjoying around $1 million in campaign donations, along with support from notable pro-Trump figures like former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and former Trump advisor Roger Stone.

That support seems more precarious now, with alt-Right media outlet Gateway Pundit urging Republicans to drop support for Navarro:

Tesoriero updated her followers of the situation in a campaign statement.

People weren't exactly surprised that a far-Right figure was arrested for displaying violent tendencies.

Navarro had already been on probation for secretly placing a tracking device on his then-wife's vehicle.

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READ: Alt-Right Gateway Pundit Distances from Omar Navarro: 'The Last Thing We Need Is Behavior Like This from Our Candidates' - Second Nexus

Jed I. Rosenberg/Courtesy of the artist

Jed I. Rosenberg/Courtesy of the artist

The decade is on its deathbed. The empire has crumbled. America's jig is up. The 2010s will likely go down as the deadliest era in rap, too. We lost too many voices to overdoses and unexplainable tragedy before their prime (Some of them: Lil Peep, Mac Miller, Fredo Santana, Doe B, Bankroll Fresh, XXXTentacion, Nipsey Hussle, Juice WRLD). The only thing worse is the unspoken irony. In the winter of our discontent, so much chart-topping pop rap sounded mind-numbingly content.

As the year went on, I found myself listening to a lot of rap that was hard to listen to full of sonic dissonance and emotional distance, and pregnant with something rarely present in dystopian tropes: the sounds of blackness. A couple of years ago Angelica Jade Bastien wondered aloud in Vulture, "Why Don't Dystopias Know How To Talk About Race?" She was talking about the cinematic and small-screen boom in dystopian narratives and our predictable absence from them. Too many dystopian threads feature a colorless future, where whites are the only survivors running scared and we, presumably, are already dead.

We, too, have the right to exist in an end-times fantasy, the same way we have the right to create our own Afro-futurist narratives of optimism. Hell, we've been living through dystopia in the western world for 400 years: Slavery. Segregation. Colonialism. Post-colonialism. Nihilism. All the -isms. Dystopia is just another way of name-checking the blues if you're black. That feeling of outside forces bringing an end to life as you know it? Yeah, we know all about that. We're the canaries in the coal mine outfitted with respirators. Meaning, the rest of y'all might want to listen to us, if you plan to make it out of here alive.

The best rapper of 2019 is billy woods, the poet laureate of our Afro dystopia. He raps like a ghost and every bar is haunted. Even his one-liners are succinct tragicomedies. "Western education is forbidden / Might as well sell what's left of your Ritalin," he raps on a song whose title ("Western Education is Forbidden") is translated from the name of the Nigerian jihadist organization Boko Haram. In the same song he raps, "'Shorty can't eat no book' what I told Ta-Nehesi Coates / The room was thick with smoke." The funny thing is he's been this wicked for years; the times just finally caught up with him. Actually, the times have been this wicked for years, too. We were just too high on hope to read the writing on the wall. Now that everything's so surreal, we're realists again.

The two albums woods released on his label Backwoodz Studioz this year Hiding Places, with L.A. producer Kenny Segal, and Terror Management feel like bookends to a year of grief. Hiding Places dropped in March, the same month Nipsey Hussle was senselessly gunned down. Terror Management came just two months before 21-year-old rapper Juice WRLD's unexpected death this weekend. When you're black these kinds of tragedies have a way of making everything macro political crisis, financial crisis, climate crisis seem manageable, even laughable, in comparison.

The title Hiding Places feels both like an allusion to the refuge we seek from our monsters and an acknowledgment that no such refuge really exists especially when the monster we're running from is our own despair. That fear becomes even more threatening on Terror Management, an album that feels like the soundtrack to our apocalypse now.

But woods isn't a prophet. He's not here to save us. If anything, he's laughing at us and the absurdity of the human condition. It's dark humor to be sure. It's also a reminder that black folks have been finding humor in the concept of American (and other western) exceptionalism for a long time now.

I played these two albums incessantly in 2019. It felt like an act of resistance. It felt necessary to preserve my sanity. When everything's confusing, confusion becomes the norm like facts dismissed as fake news. I needed to hear someone acknowledge that the world is woefully out of order and has been for some time now. I found peace in the discord.

A remnant of NY's '90s underground heyday, woods is the son of an English Lit professor from Jamaica and a Zimbabwean father who was part of his country's liberation movement. Though born stateside, he grew up both abroad in Zimbabwe and in Washington, D.C. before eventually moving to New York. His ability to see through BS similarly knows no borders. Since starting the label Backwoodz Studioz in the early '00s, it has slowly grown it into a stealth collective. Together, he and ELUCID form the critically-acclaimed duo Armand Hammer, and woods' solo albums have reached a tipping point.

Like a house of mirrors, you can get lost in his art. Woods personifies paranoia to the point of near-parody. And his rhymes read like literature as he constantly switches point of view (first, third, omniscient) while dropping complex webs of references (geopolitical, cultural, biblical) layered with double meaning and subtext. "His character boorish / Bravado without the courage / Mar-a-Lago hollow the minute he nutted / Disgusted / The nerve to be disgusted," he raps on "Crawlspace" without once paying President Trump the honor of saying his name. "This is America," he continues. "It's not for the weak of stomach / Waiting on Donald Glover outside the Dakota / I'm at the telly, waitin' for Reagan to show up."

You've probably heard the claim that hip-hop doesn't make protest anthems anymore. But this is 2019, not 1989. Woods has no desire to scream "Fight the Power," even though Public Enemy's theme song to Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing was the first hip-hop song that grabbed him after his family moved back to America, as he said in a 2013 interview.

The stakes are similar but the battleground is different. To fight the power, or rage against the machine, you have to believe there's something worth fighting for, something worth saving beyond yourself. That kind of belief in anything, especially in America, requires one to live in a permanent state of suspended disbelief.

"You're dealing with a narrator who doesn't have a lot of faith in things," woods told DJBooth's Donna Claire-Chesman earlier this year in an interview about Terror Management. "There's not a lot of sense of community. I would say in this record, any sense of commonality and community with others is constantly undermined."

Who knows what future critics will see when they look back on this year in rap? Who cares? The historical record has rarely proven true when it comes to subversive black art. After centuries of being written out of history, the oppressed are satirizing the hell out of the oppressor's misery. In this new age of Afro dystopian thrillers, we're not only the protagonists but the antagonists, too. These are the sounds discordant, deviant, droll I relied on to maintain a sense of being in this senseless year. I made a playlist as anarchic as our politics and played it to no end. It feels like a reawakening.

In the least predictable pairing of the year, Segal gives woods a stark sound palette for his frighteningly vivid observations of the human condition.

The author of our modern-day anarchy brings the fire this time with a scorched-Earth accounting of the western world's demise.

Mello Music Group YouTube

Quelle Chris made a whole concept album breaking down the myriad ways in which we weaponize and commodify hate in this country. Then he slayed us, per his usual, with sharp-witted humor and an arsenal of lyrical gunspray.

The Haitian-American rapper's physical appearance remains as obscure as his online discography, but his masked ethos is clearly strategic. The album title roughly translates to "You will get what's coming to you," and that kind of vengeance seems like the right attitude for a descendant of the long-suffering country still punished by western powers for its early revolutionary streak.

Peggy turns down his avalanche of experimental noise and technicolor just enough so his politics don't get lost in the cacophony. The ex-vet wears his heart on the sleeve of his gown, though, especially when striking down the likes of alt-right autobots.

Deem Spencer's first full-length album with a tracklist of titles that stack up into the sentence, "Really, I been tryna tell shorty how beautiful shorty is to me but shorty not tryna hear it from me." is what young love sounds like in the time of whoa.

When the whole world's gone to hell in a handbasket, why not teach the homies how to scam. The absurdity here is how specific Teejayx6 gets when detailing his dark-web how-to schemes, from credit card fraud to cryptocurrency side hustles.

A constitutional crisis can't compete with the self-proclaimed "Brexit Bandit," who's Bajan roots play into his irreverent dissection of power, politics, race and class in his not-so-great homeland.

The orchestration, produced by U.K. composer Wilma Archer, is so soothing that it almost belies former Odd Future member Pyramid Vritra's realist musings. "High in the daytime / How else could you live in times like these?" he asks rhetorically because, really, there's no suitable answer.

See the rest here:
9 Rap Albums As Dark And Dystopian As 2019 - NPR