Ari Kohen's Blog

CALL TO ACTION

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 13:25:56 -0600

Yesterday, Donald Trump named Steve Bannon to the very powerful position of chief strategist and senior advisor in his White House. For those who don’t know, Bannon has been the managing editor of Breitbart as it transitioned to a platform for white nationalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and misogyny. He is seen by the so-called alt-right as one of their leaders.

This morning, I called my elected officials and asked them to make a statement against Mr. Bannon occupying this position, as it suggests to dangerous, hateful people that they have a good friend in the Oval Office. I am asking you to call this morning too. Call their local office (you can find the phone number via Google in one second), politely ask if the elected official has released a statement yet, explain that Mr. Bannon is a dangerous choice for such an important position, and ask for a call back. When you’ve called, please comment here and let us all know. Share this too.

If your Senator or Congressman/woman gets lots of calls at their local office today, they’ll hear about it. Please call. This matters. This is how we act together to protect our country and our fellow citizens.

Judaism and Trump's America

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 09:06:33 -0600

I haven’t known how to write this post so I hope you’ll bear with me as I try to get it right.

I put on a kippah one morning this week and I haven’t taken it off. I anticipate wearing it from now on.

I didn’t make this choice lightly. I’ve thought about wearing a kippah for a while now and I’ve talked with my wife about it several times. I am a relatively observant Jew within the Conservative branch of American Judaism. I keep kosher. I attend weekly religious services. My family observes the Jewish holidays. I attended a Jewish day school and I can read and understand Hebrew. I send my children to Jewish day school and Jewish daycare, as well as to religious school at our synagogue. I am an executive Board member of both the day school and the synagogue. Two of my grandparents are Holocaust survivors.

But I did not wear a kippah, an outward symbol of my Judaism. In part, it’s because I feared the consequences of doing so in a place like Nebraska. I am taking an educated guess when I say there are no more than 10-15 men in the entire state who wear a kippah in public, outside the synagogue, on a daily basis.

When I put on the kippah and went to work or for a walk or to a party where no one was Jewish, as I did this week, I felt conspicuous. I felt that people were looking at me differently than they would have otherwise. That’s not to say I felt hostility, just that I felt I was being noticed now. I was being noticed for who I was, as a Jew in a city and a state with very few Jews.

I wanted that attention this week and I will want it going forward in the weeks, months, and years ahead. I need it. Before this week, I was comfortable here. I could and did easily “pass” for a straight, white, middle class man who (given the percentages) was probably Christian. But I want people who see my kippah to know that I am different from others in this community. I’m done “passing” and, in particular, I’m done passing the burden of being different on to others who can’t pass because of how they look or wha they believe. Latinos, African-Americans, Arab-Americans, Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans, observant Muslims, other observant Jews–the list goes on–have shouldered this burden without me for long enough.

The other side of this coin is that I want my kippah to serve as a jolt or a reminder to people who voted for Donald Trump or who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in this election of the costs and consequences of their choice. In the past year, I’ve personally been on the receiving end of countless messages of hate; these were directed at me as a Jew online. There were anti-Semitic images and language; there were memes expressing approval of the Holocaust; there were threats–veiled and straightforwardly stated–that Trump’s America should finish the job started by the Nazis. Every single one came from a Trump supporter.

The Trump campaign brought bigotry and anti-Semitism out into the mainstream. It embraced it by embracing the so-called “alt-right” and by putting one of its leaders, Steve Bannon, in a critical leadership position. It approvingly published comments from anti-Semites and white supremacists on its Twitter account, and it created ads that listed prominent Jews as members of a global financial system that is to blame for the economic woes of white working class Americans.

When people see my kippah, I want them to know that they voted to allow this to happen to me and to my family, either explicitly or tacitly. They surely aren’t all bigots themselves, but they made a choice to ignore all the bigotry wrapped up in the Trump campaign’s rhetoric and in its policy proposals because something else was more important to them than to stand up to bigotry. Over the past week, as swastikas have been painted on school buildings and community centers every day, people have told me that nothing bad will really happen. But what I know, deep down, is that there are thousands of people in my own community who would hurt me if their government told them to and tens of thousands more who wouldn’t stand against them. People who think this isn’t true need to see me as a Jew so they can start asking themselves how they’ll stand up for me and for everyone else who will need people to stand up for them in the coming weeks, months, and years.

I felt too scared to wear a kippah before, in Obama’s America, because I knew that anti-Semitism existed and that being different is risky. It’s scarier now because it feels much riskier. But I have to do it because this is who I am and because everyone needs to know it.

How Could It Happen Here

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 14:10:47 -0500

For months now, I’ve seen variants of the same article in virtually every online publication: “This is how fascism came to Germany.”

The premise each time is that there might exist similar conditions in the U.S. today and that we should be wary–maybe even terrified–because we have an authoritarian bully running for our highest office, we have people who feel disenchanted with establishment politics, we have serious economic issues, we have foreign policy troubles, and so on.

One thing that always strikes me is that this sort of article elides–or at least takes for granted–a very important problem, namely that we have millions of people in this country who are openly bigoted and who are reveling in the nastiness they feel empowered to shout out loud today.

Whatever else might have allowed Nazism to take root in Germany, we should make no mistake that hatred, bigotry, and xenophobia were an absolutely crucial component of the downfall of the Weimar Republic. What’s more, the willingness of so many people in America today to excuse the things said by Trump, by his sons, by his running mate, and by his supporters as somehow not serious or not a problem or not how they’ll act if they win is every bit as big an indicator of the danger we face as the outright misogynists, anti-Semites, homophobes, Islamophobes, and racists themselves.

Constitution Day

Sat, 17 Sep 2016 08:22:05 -0500

On the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, it’s important to point out that political parties–what the Founders called factions–didn’t exist in 1787. Parties really exploded onto the American political scene in the early 1790s, largely thanks to the personal enmity between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

229 years later, partisanship has reached such extremes that a credible third-party candidate for the presidency is barred from participating in a national debate by rules effectively crafted by the two dominant parties. And, of course, millions of voters across the U.S.–and their party leaders–are so wrapped up in partisan politics that they’re supporting the candidacy of a demagogue who actively lies to them and whose candidacy is an exercise in determining just how high an extremist can rise using nothing but the strength of his personal brand and the anger and fear he stokes.

I suppose it’s not so surprising that we’ve ended up here. If the Founders couldn’t figure out that sometimes partisanship and personal animosity must take a backseat to more important considerations, why should anyone assume that we would figure it out? Still, even if it’s not surprising, it’s no less sad and awful.

Last night, someone at the Trump campaign posted a tweet that...

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 10:36:22 -0500

Last night, someone at the Trump campaign posted a tweet that was designed as a response to the various speeches being given by the Democrats this week in Philadelphia.

It’s easy to make fun of this sort of response or to simply say that the feeling it describes doesn’t match up with reality, but it’s incredibly important to pay attention to it because this feeling makes up almost the entirety of Trump’s support (from people who aren’t supporting for reasons centered around bigotry and xenophobia).

A great many of Trump’s supporters don’t feel like things are going well, don’t feel like America is great, don’t feel like we’re on the right track.

The real question is how to talk to those people and, rather than telling them they’re just wrong, find ways to highlight Trump’s utter lack of a plan to help them and contrast it with Clinton’s decades of experience with helping people. That’s what the DNC speeches have been trying to do, but a whole lot of those people aren’t watching. So now it’s the job of everyone else too.

Here is the entirety of Trump’s video on “Jobs”:

One of the things I’m most proud about is that I create jobs. Over the years, tens of thousands of jobs for our country. And I’ll do that for you. I will tell you this and I can say it with certainty: I will be the greatest jobs-producing president that God ever created. I love the subject, I love doing it, and I love helping people. And there’s nothing like helping people than getting them and their family great jobs.

And here’s what he says in his video on “The Economy”:

One of the things I’m gonna to do and largely with our great tax plan where everybody’s taxes is going down, we’re gonna grow our economy. We have to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt. So unfair, so totally unfair to our young people. We are not gonna to leave you with that burden.

You can find all the details of Trump’s tax plan on his website and I strongly encouage you to look them over. That’s also where he says a little more about jobs, mostly that lower tax rates for businesses will mean adding lots of jobs for Americans. Here are some reactions to that plan:

The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center suggests that "Barring politically difficult spending cuts or tax increases, the Trump tax cuts would produce deficits of as much as $11.2 trillion over the next decade, which could swamp any salutary effects arising from lowering marginal effective tax rates on work, saving, and investment. We estimate that by 2036, with no change in spending or interest rates, the proposal would raise the national debt by nearly 80 percent of GDP. If interest rates rise in response to the burgeoning public debt, the increase in the debt could be much larger.” As far as I can tell, Trump hasn’t specified any spending cuts.

And, of course, the biggest benefits of Trump’s plan will go to the richest taxpayers. Here’s how Politifact characterized it, based on analysis by the Tax Policy Center:

While virtually everyone would pay less under the Trump plan, it offers particularly big benefits to the richest taxpayers.

The Tax Policy Center calculated that the average tax cuts for the top 1 percent would be $275,000, or 17.5 percent of after-tax income, and for the top 0.1 percent, they would be $1.3 million, or nearly 19 percent of after-tax income.

Middle-income households, meanwhile, would get a cut of $2,700, or a 4.9 percent reduction. Those making the least would see a cut, too, but only of $128 or so, working out to roughly 1 percent of after-tax income.

Here’s a piece from the Fiscal Times, which asks several experts to give their opinion on Trump’s plan. They’re all overwhelmingly negative.

Moody’s economists predicted a recession if Trump’s economic plans are enacted:

They envision a country with 3.5 million lost jobs, much larger debts and deficits, and an economy that will contract. The billionaire businessman’s tax cuts largely will benefit the wealthy while household incomes will stagnate and asset values fall, according to the report from Mark Zandi, Chris Lafakis, Dan White and Adam Ozimek.

A piece at Forbes concludes that “Trump’s tax plan is an entrepreneurial disaster. Trump’s tax agenda will effectively increase the middle class’ taxes and slow our economy to a standstill.”

The Tax Policy Center, by contrast, says the following about Clinton’s tax plan:

Clinton’s proposed tax increases [primarily on higher-income individuals] would decrease the federal debt by over $1.2 trillion over the next decade. The Tax Policy Center estimates that by 2036, with no change inspending orinterest rates, the proposal would decrease the national debt by 10.0 percent of GDP. Slower macroeconomic growth in response to higher marginal tax rates could reduce the net revenue gain and the decline in debt. However, if interest rates fall below the (low) baseline projections as government borrows less, the decline in the debt could be greater. The reduction in deficits and debt would be offset to the extent that any or all of the new revenue is earmarked to pay for new spending or tax cuts (which the Clinton campaign says are forthcoming).

Perhaps more important when it comes to providing a contrast with Trump on jobs and economy, here’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign page on the issues:

You can click on each of the headlines and get more information. There’s an overwhelming level of detail in these individual pages, almost too much for someone with limited time and/or casual interest. Take her page on jobs as an example. It’s worth spending a minute reading even just a couple of the ideas for the sake of comparison with Trump’s 20-second video. For the sake of ease, I took another screenshot:

Each one of the yellow underlined phrases takes you to another page with more information.

The difference between the amount of time and care the Clinton and Trump campaigns put into their Issues websites is stark and it highlights the way they’re approaching the seriousness of the feelings of those Americans who are, to use Trump’s campaign tweet, “living in poverty” and “despair.”

It’s easy enough to do the same analysis regarding their proposals for dealing with ISIS and with immigration. And so we should. And then we should share our findings with everyone who is even considering a vote for Trump in November, in no small part because the Trump campaign is actively discouraging his supporters from even listening to Clinton when she speaks tonight. The hallmark of a campaign with bad ideas or no ideas at all is to actively discourage voters from getting information.

So talk to people. But listen to what they’re telling you and don’t dismiss their feelings; they’re not idiots and they’re not wrong about how they feel. Instead, show them the ways in which the Clinton campaign is responding to how they feel, providing actual ideas that can work to reduce “poverty, violence and despair” rather than empty promises that, if enacted, will actually make them worse off.

If you haven’t spent any time on Donald Trump’s...

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 09:50:49 -0500

If you haven’t spent any time on Donald Trump’s website, I recommend it. Here are some screenshots of his “Issues” page, which reads like my 6 year old came up with the text.

And lest you think the videos are more informative, they’re about 30 seconds long and are filled with misinformation. In the “Education” video, for example, he says that education is very important, that Common Core is a disaster (he provides no reason for this assessment), and that America spends far more per pupil than any other country and gets terrible results (which is simply false).

This would be hilarious except that millions of people plan to vote for him in November.

Nothing like a little overt anti-Semitism from Julian Assange to...

Sat, 23 Jul 2016 18:23:06 -0500

Nothing like a little overt anti-Semitism from Julian Assange to really round out the weekend. The tweet was pretty quickly deleted. But don’t worry, his loyal followers got the message loud and clear:

All day I’ve been trying to think about what to say about...

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 13:49:05 -0500

All day I’ve been trying to think about what to say about Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night.

Obviously, I have my disagreements with the GOP platform when it comes to the rights of women, to LGBTQ individuals, to immigration, to the environment, to taxation, to separation of church and state, and a good deal more.

But beyond those disagreements, I realized as I watched that Mr. Trump was speaking to a group of people who see the world–and this country–in a fundamentally different way than I do.

He insists, and they believe, that we are desperately unsafe, that crime and violence are all around us, that our government is doing a very poor job of protecting us, and that even the police are powerless to stop the criminals who target us and them. He insists, and they believe, that vast hordes of Mexican murderers and Muslim terrorists are streaming or preparing to stream across our open borders and kill our loved ones. He insists, and they believe, that we have major economic problems and that we spend too much money on our international allies. He insists, and they believe, that America is being or has been stolen from the white Christians who made it great and that he is the only person capable of restoring America to its former glory.

This isn’t my America. This isn’t what I see when I look around.

Certainly we have a lot of work to do as a country; certainly there are many, many things we need to fix, including our politics; and certainly there are dangerous people out there. But in general things are pretty good, and certainly they are rosy when we compare things with the way they were in our not-so-distant past. Thankfully, there is actually less violent crime today than in the past; there are fewer police officers being killed in the line of duty; we are mostly shielded from terrorism, at least in part due to the governmental processes already in place to protect us.

So, as I watched thousands of people on their feet, voicing their approval for Trump as he hollered “We don’t want them in our country,” I realized it might be impossible for me to understand this. I might be in a position where all I could ever feel was fear and revulsion for this sort of thinking.

My family came to this country not so very long ago, survivors of the Nazi Holocaust who moved here from Israel for opportunities for their young children. As I listened to the full-throated approval for a presidential candidate playing on their fear of immigrants and refugees, insisting that THOSE people don’t belong in OUR country, I was reminded of Pastor Niemöller’s most famous quote:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I’m not a Mexican immigrant and I’m not a Muslim (whether a Syrian refugee or someone born in America). But I know my world history and my family’s history well enough to know that we must speak out and we must work against this notion that THOSE people make US less safe, take OUR jobs, make OUR country less safe, that THEY don’t belong HERE and that they’re taking OUR country away from US.

We must do this not only so that someone will be there to speak for us when we need them, but also because it is a moral imperative to speak out against the terrible lie that America belongs to a certain group of people and that the appropriate response to feelings of insecurity is to empower the government to lash out at anyone who isn’t part of that group.

Photo

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 09:52:53 -0500

One of my most memorable experiences was having lunch with Elie...

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 13:16:09 -0500

One of my most memorable experiences was having lunch with Elie Wiesel at the university president’s house the day I graduated from college.

It was made all the more memorable because my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, was with me and he’d always wanted to meet Elie Wiesel.

My grandfather, who was also Romanian, grew up in a village close to Wiesel’s hometown. The two sat together for a little while, talking quietly.

We asked my grandfather later what he’d wanted to talk about with Wiesel; he’d asked if Wiesel remembered his cousins who lived in Sighet. My grandfather’s cousins owned a little store in town; Wiesel said he had played with their kids. I think these little connections meant so much to survivors. It was a question my grandfather always wanted to ask his famous contemporary. It was a connection to his past, a past from which no one had survived.

Honestly, I don’t remember Wiesel’s words to us graduates that day, but my grandfather kept the photo of me, Wiesel, and him on his desk for the next decade.

Is It OK now?

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 09:18:21 -0500

Has enough time passed since the latest gun massacre so that we can now talk about common sense gun regulations, Second Amendment advocates and gun loving patriots? Or is it still not appropriate? You guys are generally the moral arbiters of when it’s acceptable to talk politics about gun violence, so please let us know, preferably before the next gun massacre, ok?

Place Your Bets

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 08:52:48 -0500

Is anyone taking bets this morning on what awful thing(s) Donald Trump will say or do today?

Keep in mind that in the past two weeks alone, he’s made a series of outright racist statements regarding the judge in his fraud case, he’s congratulated himself immediately after 50 people were murdered in a gay nightclub, he repeatedly implied that President Obama was a secret Muslim, he’s ramped up his hateful Islamophobic rhetoric (including repeated false claims about refugees and American citizens who are Muslim), and he revoked the press credentials of the Washington Post.

Most of this happened yesterday.

Elections Do Funny Things To People

Mon, 09 May 2016 10:53:44 -0500

Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that there is a decent-sized group of Sanders supporters who’d prefer a disastrous Trump presidency to a successful Clinton presidency. These are people with whom I agree on a great many policy positions, but they are completely convinced that Clinton spells the doom of progressive politics and that the system is so corrupt that only an utter catastrophe can shake things up and bring real, lasting change to American politics.

These people are now spending their time attempting to explain either that a Trump presidency might not actually be as bad as it seems for the country or that, even if it was absolutely terrible, at least it would cause the Democrats to totally reevaluate the way they do business and therefore they’d get a “truly” progressive candidate in 2020. It has been suggested to me that it’s most likely the case that no one would resign from the Supreme Court if Trump became president (no comment, though, on whether left-leaning justices would be sure not to die). It has even been suggested to me over the past week that maybe McCain/Palin would have been better than Obama/Biden since Obama turned out not to be as ideologically pure as he seemed to be when he was running for president.

From where I sit, this is all nonsense.

Hypothesis 3

Wed, 04 May 2016 19:50:40 -0500

There are several reasons one might prefer another candidate to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

Not all of those reasons can be ultimately boiled down to sexism but some are pretty clearly connected to the fact that she is a woman.

Hypothesis 2

Wed, 04 May 2016 14:34:46 -0500

Many Bernie Sanders supporters were not politically active in the run-up to the 2000 election contest between George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Ralph Nader. Some of them were young children and have no actual memory of what the Nader candidacy meant for Democrats.

Hypothesis 1

Wed, 04 May 2016 09:21:19 -0500

The number of Hillary Clinton supporters who wouldn’t turn right around and vote for Bernie Sanders if he managed to garner the Democratic nomination is so small as to be impossible to measure.

The same cannot be said of Bernie Sanders supporters.

This is because a great many Sanders supporters think they cannot compromise on their beliefs–whatever those beliefs might be in this instance–irrespective of what the result might be.

Senator Sanders, Lincoln, NE

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 15:49:48 -0600

Senator Sanders, Lincoln, NE

KING: Not long before someone gets killed at Trump rally

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 10:50:50 -0600

KING: Not long before someone gets killed at Trump rally:

I don’t claim to know what Donald Trump personally believes about African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. As a result, I can’t say definitively whether or not Mr. Trump is a racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobe or whether he’s simply playing one on tv in order to garner the support of Americans who are.

What I can say definitively is that at a certain point it becomes a distinction without a meaningful difference.

Not Voting for Trump

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 14:47:20 -0600

One thing that has really struck me over the past few weeks is the way that prominent conservatives have lined up against the candidacy of Donald Trump.

It’s not that they’re doing it, though; it’s the reasoning behind it.

In virtually every case, the main reason given for the strongly-worded denunciation of Trump’s candidacy is that … he’s not actually a conservative.

Now, I’m not disputing that claim. But I think it’s fascinating that the go-to reason not to support Trump is because he’s not a true conservative. He’s a megalomaniacal racist without a shred of experience and seemingly no interest in learning about what the presidency would actually entail; he would be an unmitigated disaster for our country and, indeed, for the entire world; and the people who are excited about him are almost exclusively conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and extremists of various other flavors who unite behind a banner of hatred, bigotry, anger, and a delusional sense of victimization.

But, sure, I guess he’s also not particularly interested in things traditional conservatives go for these days, like limited government, unwavering support for gun ownership, opposing marriage equality, and banning abortion.

Small Wonder

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 10:42:35 -0600

In an event no one ever could have predicted, an arrogant, amoral, New York billionaire who inherited his fortune failed to appeal to large numbers of hard-working Evangelical Midwesterners.

It’s an absolute stunner.