March 12, 2024: Feds Enlist NGO Borg to Help Get Out the Vote

Harvard fires Kulldorff; Biden threatens to condition aid to Israel; IC expects “large protests” against Bibi

Mar 12, 2024

The Big Story

In March 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14019, directing federal agencies to work with “nonpartisan” private organizations to “promote voter registration and voter participation.” Details have remained scarce aside from those contained in a few 2021 White House fact sheets—which nonetheless revealed that the Department of Homeland Security will be required to work with state and local governments and “nonpartisan nonprofit organizations” to register voters at the end of naturalization ceremonies and that the Department of Justice must “provide information about voting to individuals in federal custody” and “facilitate voting” by federal prisoners who are eligible to vote.

If you’re suspicious of the sorts of “nonpartisan nonprofits” that might partner with federal agencies in a get-out-the-vote scheme under an administration that has entrusted tens of millions of dollars’ worth of federal climate-related grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act to “climate” NGOs that promise to “mobilize additional sectors of the climate movement in the fight to free Palestine” while agitating in favor of the far-left “Stop Cop City” protests in Atlanta (see our Dec. 22 Big Story), congratulations: You win first prize.

On Saturday, we got our first look behind the curtain when The Daily Signal published information about the U.S. Trade Representative’s get-out-the-vote plan, obtained through a Heritage Foundation Freedom of Information Act request. (Why USTR, which is normally responsible for actions like suing China over aluminum tariffs, even has a get-out-the-vote plan is a good question for the Biden administration, as is “Why does the public need to wait on a FOIA request from a right-wing think tank to learn how this thing works?”)

USTR’s plan—which involves promoting voter registration among USTR employees and drafting “annual social media posts on key dates that are important to voter engagement”—appears somewhat pro forma, as one might expect from an agency whose responsibilities have absolutely nothing to do with voting. The interesting part is USTR’s “nonpartisan nonprofit” partners, which include several billionaire-funded and Democratic Party-aligned NGOs. For example:

The Brennan Center for Justice, funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, the Tides Center, Proteus Fund, and others. The Brennan Center has frequently engaged in lobbying and litigation against voter ID laws and in favor of expanded mail-in voting.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice, funded by several corporations (including Facebook, Google, and Rockefeller Group) and foundations (including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Proteus Fund). AAAJ’s past initiatives include launching a media blitz against Pottery Barn for selling “sushi chef” Halloween costumes, suing the city of Monterey Park, California, over an ordinance requiring English lettering on the outside of buildings to assist emergency responders, and lobbying for affirmative action and racial preferences that harm Asian applicants. The group’s president, John C. Yang, was a senior adviser in the Commerce Department in the Obama administration.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), funded by the Ford Foundation, Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society, NEO Philanthropy, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Service Employees International Union (see item #2 under The Rest in our Feb. 14 edition). MALDEF’s hobbyhorses include lobbying Congress to grant legal status to illegal immigrants, suing companies for refusing to hire or loan money to illegal immigrants, suing states for requiring local police to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, litigating in favor of racial preferences for Hispanics, criticizing the Trump administration for deporting violent felons, and joining AAAJ in a 2018 lawsuit attempting to block the Trump administration from asking about citizenship status on the 2020 census. Oh, and one of the group’s co-founders, Mario Obledo, once told an interviewer that anyone opposed to California becoming a Hispanic-majority state “ought to go back to Europe.”

These groups are unlikely to do much damage through USTR’s plan to post about National Voter Registration Day on Instagram. But their status as USTR partner organizations does raise worrying questions about the “nonpartisan nonprofit” groups partnering with more consequential agencies such as, say, the DOJ—which is currently being sued by the Foundation for Government Accountability for refusing to release its own plan to comply with EO 14019.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Eddy Portnoy on the Moyshe Littauer, the naked, vegan, Jewish Tolstoy of the Lower East Side

The Rest

→Martin Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, and leading scientific critic of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, claims he was fired from Harvard over his public opposition to vaccine mandates in a new essay for City Journal. The essay is worth reading for the laundry list of issues on which Kulldorff was right and the government-, media-, and Big Tech-enforced “scientific consensus” was wrong, but here’s the key passage:

Since mid-2021, we have known, as one would expect, that Covid-acquired immunity is superior to vaccine-acquired immunity. Based on that, I argued that hospitals should hire, not fire, nurses and other hospital staff with Covid-acquired immunity, since they have stronger immunity than the vaccinated.
[...]
For scientific, ethical, public health, and medical reasons, I objected both publicly and privately to the Covid vaccine mandates. I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency. This stance got me fired by Mass General Brigham—and consequently fired from my Harvard faculty position.

Kulldorff also notes a fact worth endlessly repeating: Sweden, which declined to lock down, had the lowest excess mortality of any country in Europe during the pandemic and suffered from fewer collateral consequences, such as the widespread learning loss that has affected students in the United States.

Read the essay here: https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-tramples-the-truth

→Biden will “consider” conditioning U.S. aid to Israel if Israel moves forward with its Rafah operation, administration sources tell Politico. How serious is the threat? Hard to tell. Politico reports that “while Biden has not made any decision on limiting future weapons transfers,” he “very well might” in the future. One official says “it’s something he’s definitely thought about.” Another said the United States wants to see a “credible and implementable” plan to protect civilians before it approves a Rafah invasion. An anonymous U.S. official quoted in a Tuesday report from Barak Ravid, however, is more explicit that a Rafah invasion would “likely” lead to “an end to the defense of Israel at the United Nations and restrictions on the use of U.S. weapons by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.”

Strong stuff! Aside from the tough talk, the most notable part of the story might be the assertion that the White House’s consideration of this step “reflects the extreme strains in [Biden’s] relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” As we’ve said repeatedly, the Israeli government and the Israeli public are united in their intention to finish the job in Rafah, so it makes zero sense to attribute U.S.-Israeli tension over a Rafah operation to Netanyahu and his “far-right government.” But the claim is illuminating as to how “U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking” are spinning the matter to reporters—and how reporters are lapping it up.

→The U.S. intelligence community’s declassified “threat assessment” for 2024 says that Israeli public distrust of Netanyahu has “deepened and broadened” and predicts “large protests demanding his resignation and new elections.” Free tip for these trend-forecasting spooks: It doesn’t count as a prediction if you’re the ones planning to organize the protests!

→That assessment prompted a strongly worded statement from an Israeli “senior diplomatic source,” according to Lahav Harkov of Jewish Insider:

→Meanwhile, Hunter Biden lawyer Abbe Lowell has accused Special Counsel David Weiss in a new court filing of doing “exactly what the Russian intelligence operation desired” by prosecuting Hunter Biden for felony gun and tax crimes—which Weiss is doing only because a federal judge blew up the sweetheart plea deal he negotiated with Hunter’s lawyers. Lowell, apparently, is trying to spin Weiss’ indictment of former FBI confidential human source Alexander Smirnov into proof that the entire cloud of suspicion around the first son, ranging from the armed, crack-fueled escapades with prostitutes to the influence-peddling with foreign oligarchs, was cooked up by the FSB. Expect to see more of this as we get closer to November.

→Boeing failed 33 of 89 product audits, while its subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems failed 7 of 13, during a Federal Aviation Administration investigation of the 737 Max production line, launched after a door panel fell off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max in midair in early January. According to The New York Times, which reviewed the FAA report, investigators observed Spirit employees using Dawn dish soap as a lubricant and a hotel key card to check a door seal. Safety incidents with Boeing aircraft have continued to pile up in recent weeks: On March 8, a tire fell off a Boeing 777-200 shortly after takeoff from San Francisco International Airport, and on Monday, about 50 people were injured when an unexplained “technical event” caused a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to nose-dive during a flight from Australia to New Zealand. On Saturday, John Barnett, a former Boeing quality manager turned whistleblower, was found dead from what authorities have called a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound after he failed to show up to provide testimony in a lawsuit against the company.

Read it here: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton

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The Naked Vegan Tolstoy of the Lower East Side

Moyshe Littauer introduces urban Jews to nature, and the world to Jews in their natural state

By Eddy Portnoy

“Nutose and Protose,” two forms of early-20th-century vegan meat, is the name of a story written in 1919 by Moyshe Nadir, one of the leading lights of early-20th-century Yiddish satire. A jailhouse confessional narrated by a man driven insane by an annoying waiter in a Lower East Side vegetarian restaurant, the story is an absurd but funny piece in which the narrator is persuaded to eat at a vegetarian restaurant after being accosted by a bizarre man hawking pamphlets on the street. To wit:

A guy with long hair, a scraggly beard, and sporting a pair of canvas pants sidles up to me on the street and asks if I eat meat.
“Sure,” I tell him. “So what?”
“So you’re a cannibal!” he says. “You’re digging your grave with your own teeth.”
“Cannibal-shmannibal, grave-shmave,” I say, “what are you babbling about?” “As long as a man is alive,” I tell him, “he’s got to eat a good piece of meat.
“Your stomach is a graveyard,” he says. “And the blood of fat, innocent chickens will pour down over your head.”
“You’re nuts!” I tell him.
“I’m crazy?” he laughs, “Ha! The people who say I’m crazy are the crazy ones. … Anyway, give me thirty cents and I’ll give you a pamphlet that explains our ideas.”
“For thirty cents I can get a good tenderloin,” I say.
“Gimme seventy cents,” he says, “and I’ll give you another pamphlet that proves that people who eat meat die young from a type of blood poisoning that’s produced in the stomach. Take a look at this picture.”
He shows me a picture of a dead body with a steak hanging out of its mouth.
Even though the whole thing was kind of fishy, I buy two pamphlets, only to discover that meat is deathly poisonous and that there’s only one thing in the world that can be compared to it, but because it’s considered so strong of a poison, even chemists are banned from dealing with it. And then I find out from the same pamphlet that the best food you can find is available at Wormkroyt’s Vegetarian Restaurant, along with all kinds of other vegetarian brochures—and for cheap.
—Excerpt from “Nutose and Protose” by Moyshe Nadir, 1919

Nadir’s story, which ends with the man killing an extremely irritating waiter in Wormkroyt’s Vegetarian, is clearly fictional. It turns out, however, that the man in the canvas pants, hard-selling vegetarian pamphlets, was based on a real person who was even more peculiar in real life than in Nadir’s portrayal.

That person was Moyshe Yitzhok Littauer, who, among other things, founded a vegetarian nudist colony in New Jersey to which he and a group of about 60 Jewish immigrants decamped in 1917 to escape the stifling tenements of the Lower East Side, and where they communed with nature, ate vegetables, and got naked.

But before he arrived at the wonders of nature, nudity, and vegetarianism, Littauer’s story in America begins much like many other Jewish immigrants of that era. Born in the shtetl of Mishenits (Myszyniec) in what was then Russian-ruled Poland, he immigrated as a teenager to the United States in 1899. At first, he found work toiling in New York’s Lower East Side sweatshops, though he eventually saved enough money to start a business as a coffee wholesaler and later managed to open a small grocery. He also got involved with some of the left-wing movements that became part of the fabric of the Jewish Lower East Side during the first decades of the 20th century.

Littauer ultimately found his home in the vegetarian wing of the anarchist movement. In spite of any success he may have had hawking java or selling groceries, he decided to give up commercial pursuits in order to dedicate himself to the vegetarian cause. And while it’s not generally considered among the multiple “isms” to which immigrant Jews attached themselves in the early 20th century, vegetarianism was not an insignificant movement in Yiddish-speaking New York. According to Yiddish journalist A.M. Shtiglitz, vegetarianism attracted thousands of young Jews, many of whom saw it as a revolt against materialism. Jewish immigrants of this era founded a number of different vegetarian organizations and produced a variety of magazines and pamphlets designed to draw the Yiddish audience to meatless fare. The philosophy of anarcho-naturism, of which vegetarianism was a component, also appealed to immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side, among whom anarchism had been a nominally popular political ideology since the late 1880s.

Known as the “Ghandi of East Broadway,” Littauer grew out his hair and beard just before World War I and began to saunter about New York’s Jewish quarter wearing white robes and sandals, preaching the benefits of his chosen diet. With a deep interest in mysticism and Buddhism, he also had an aversion to modern technology and refused to take the subway or streetcars, and always went by foot.

But it wasn’t easy to make a living as an itinerant vegetarian preacher on the Lower East Side, so Littauer found a job managing the Progressive Vegetarian Restaurant on the corner of Norfolk and Grand streets, the motto of which was, “For humane beings, try the humane diet.” As Ben Katchor notes in his hefty tome on the history of the dairy restaurant, the owner’s name was Meyer Litheron, though Littauer, an irrepressible sort, appears to have taken it upon himself to change the name of the place in 1913 to the Pythagoran (Vegetarian) Restaurant.

Not only responsible for the famed a² + b² = c² theorem, the Greek scholar Pythagoras was a vegetarian and an important philosophical influence on the early-20th-century vegetarian movement. Evidently, he also became an avatar for Yiddish-speaking vegetarians. Ever the assiduous advocate for the cause, Littauer advertised free, “bloodless” cooking classes at the Pythagoran in the anarchist weekly Fraye arbeter shtime (Free Voice of Labor) and placed ads for the restaurant in Di froyen velt (The Women’s World) under the headline, “Meat Is Unhealthy.”

Together with his wife, Harriet, who was also his cousin and a contributor of vegetarian recipes to Di froyen velt, he subsequently opened another vegetarian restaurant on Essex Street called Littauer’s Vegetaria. According to one patron, the walls of the place were adorned with pro-veg quotes from the Bible, the Talmud, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, as well as a number of Yiddish writers he favored. On Saturday nights at the Vegetaria, Moyshe Littauer himself could be found giving edifying lectures on the evils of animal slaughter and virtues of vegetarianism. Regarded as a captivating speaker, he always drew a crowd. A.M. Shtiglitz commented in Der tog that he had a kind of “mystical magnetism” that helped him attract a circle of “mostly female” devotees.

Perhaps on account of the long hair and white robes, Littauer was perceived as an eccentric, even among the Lower East Side’s vegetarian anarchist crowd. His writings, however, did manage to earn him a bit of grudging respect among the Yiddish literati. Critic and essayist, Eliyohu Almi noted that he was an excellent writer and claimed that Littauer’s essays on Emerson and Thoreau were among the best on the two American thinkers in any language. It’s unclear how much expertise Almi actually had on Emerson and Thoreau, but it was still a nice compliment.

In addition to his occasional contributions to anarchist and vegetarian Yiddish newspapers, Littauer was also a publisher of pamphlets that ranged in topic from the Indian scholar Rabindranath Tagore to his thoughts on the death penalty (he was against it). Opposed to the concept of copyright, Littauer often wrote “reprinting not prohibited” on his publications, and also didn’t mind simply giving them away for free; under “price” he would sometimes print, “from nothing to extremely high” on the front of his booklets.

In his memoirs, Almi recounts how one vegetarian restaurateur, Herman Schildkraut, would organize open air meetings on the Lower East Side during which speakers stood on soap boxes and expounded on the virtues of vegetarianism to crowds of immigrant Jews. Some locals, however, expressed their disagreement with the vegetarians by dumping slop buckets on their heads.

***

While no vegetarian riots ever ensued as a result of the occasional attacks on their public meetings, some of the Yiddishist anarcho-vegetarians were extremists. Almi mentions that one he knew argued fervently that slaughterhouses and butcher shops should be blown up and that butchers should be killed.

Most Yiddish vegetarians, however, were not of the murdering, bomb-throwing sort. Littauer and his ilk were regarded as calm, reasonable, and inviting. Almi recounts a story about Littauer in which he was accosted by an obnoxious young man in the street who, upon seeing this strange, white-robed figure, began to yank on Littauer’s long hair and beard. Instead of reacting angrily to the assault, Littauer spoke calmly to the young man and handed him his card, telling him to come to his restaurant. After a few words with Littauer, the young man burst into tears and apologized for his brutal outburst. From that day on, he could be found eating in Littauer’s restaurant, a regular.

Having spent his childhood in a small town in the Polish countryside, Littauer came to understand that the crowded, grimy tenements of the Lower East Side were hardly conducive to a healthy lifestyle, even if you stuck to a vegetarian diet. So, he plotted his escape. Taking about 60 adherents with him, he moved, in 1917, to a woodsy colony just outside of Plainfield, New Jersey, where he and his acolytes could live the healthful lifestyle they desired.

Taking up residence on a forested plot of land above the town called Freedom Hill, Littauer and his followers ate a lot of raw foods and kept their clothing to a minimum. Locals thought they were a bit odd and spread a rumor that the group practiced free love, a matter they didn’t exactly deny. The Yiddish journalist A.M. Shtiglitz paid a visit to the colony and described one evening’s activity as sitting around a campfire upon which a large pot of beans was bubbling, while Littauer, clad only in a loincloth, expounded upon the virtues of nature and of vegetarianism. His followers, Shtiglitz wrote, eagerly ate up his words—along with the beans.

Although Littauer’s colony was investigated in 1921 by local police on charges of public nudity, nothing ever came of it. When asked, Littauer commented that the colony’s members kept to their own property when going about “as nature intended.” Moreover, he added, “Clothing is bad for the health. A healthy skin cannot live all bound up.” The episode generated interest on the part of journalists, who produced a number of articles that brought nationwide attention to the small colony of Yiddish nudists.

These articles portrayed Littauer as somewhat of an exotic figure but noted that anyone could join the colony as long as they adhered to two tenets—humanitarianism and vegetarianism. Nudism, although mentioned, was optional and it seemed that colonists wore some clothing when outsiders were present. The essential point that Littauer stressed to curious journalists was not nudism but vegetarianism, which, he said was not only beneficial for one’s health, but was also a financial boon because it cost only a dollar a week to eat his prescribed diet, which consisted mainly of raw oats or corn and an occasional parsnip. One syndicated article, titled “Like Cave Dwellers of the Past,” appeared in dozens of newspapers throughout the U.S. in early August 1921, and claimed that the colony’s denizens lived “as the primitive ancestors of the human race.”

In the wake of this publicity, Daniel Persky, a journalist for the Yiddish daily Yidishes tageblat, suspected something was amiss and paid a visit to the colony in order to provide what appears to be a more accurate assessment than the journalists of the English language press had offered. The ideology of the colony, he wrote, was essentially the same as that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Leo Tolstoy, only more Jewish. According to Persky, the interests of the colonists were mainly moral and they simply wished to bring no harm to animals by eating either them or their products. In addition to hewing to strict vegetarian fare, we also learn that fasting was a common practice in the colony. Littauer told Persky that he once fasted for 30 days straight and also made the astonishing claim that, one day in the future, humans will eventually stop eating entirely and would obtain nourishment from the air alone. But, until that time, he and the colonists would stick to vegetables.

Persky’s report indicates that nearly everyone in the colony was Jewish, with the exception of two people—an Irishman and a Bulgarian, both of whom had learned to speak fluent Yiddish. Among the residents he counted Jews of all kinds: anarchists, socialists, Zionists, Yiddishists, Bolsheviks and more, although, he added, politics wasn’t really their thing. There was a significant minority of Hebraists—enough that they were able to organize some lectures in Hebrew. There were religious Jews in the colony as well. On Friday nights some women lit candles and on weekdays, there were some men who wrapped tefillin, although not made of leather, as is traditional, but instead made of strips from a type of thick paper that they wrapped around their arms.

In the summer, the colony attracted hundreds of weekend guests. The core of regular residents lived there as long as they could during the year, until it was too cold to be naked outside in New Jersey. At that point, they’d go back to the city to earn some money, returning in the spring.

***

Littauer would also make occasional trips back to the city, where he would lecture on vegetarianism and what it was like to live in nature. One December 1920 advertisement for a lecture at Schildkraut’s Vegetarian Restaurant, titled “What I Saw and Learned in the Woods,” announced that Littauer had “just arrived from the forest.”

Earlier that year, Littauer had published what was probably a variation on that lecture in the May issue of his Naturist and Vegetarian magazine. Titled “Greetings from the Forest—and an Invitation,” the piece extolls the virtues of living in the woods, among which are the possibility of “sleeping on the actual ground … something not even kings can enjoy” and a description of a place where you can see “primitive Jews in their natural state.” He invites outsiders to join them and says they can pitch a tent, or “do as we do and make a hut out of twigs.” All the gear interested parties needed to bring was a blanket, a wooden spoon, and a pair of shoes.

Littauer had nothing but pure enthusiasm for outdoor living and its healthful possibilities: “If you’re crazy,” he wrote, “come visit us in the woods. If you’re broken and weak from being enslaved, come to us and we will make you healthy; if the doctors have already given up on you, we’ll save you.”

Infused with a similar passion for nature, some of Littauer’s acolytes contributed poems and stories to his Naturist and Vegetarian magazine. Among these writings are effusive reports of what the colonists grew in their gardens. Longtime city dwellers out in the country for the first time, they seem amazed at seeing vegetables sprout out of the ground instead of being sold from dirty pushcarts. One interesting item is the "Yiddish Naturist Anthem," written by colony resident N. Kaplan. Titled “Back to Nature,” it deplores a drab urban existence and extols life out of doors. It also rhymes, but only in Yiddish.

What good is the city With all its culture When it takes you away From the freedom of nature
Life there is full Of worries and anguish The present unstable Tomorrow no better
The air is polluted With deceit and lies Even brothers seek To deceive one another
People drag themselves Through the streets gasping Sallow faces with Distracted glances
Wherever you look There’s no happiness nor joy To the freedom of nature They should return
Back to the green And fruitful fields Back to the freedom Of nature’s forests
The landscape is splendid The perfumed winds blow and The birds in the sky Give free concerts
The sun shines brighter here The sky is more open The air is cleaner And the food is cheap
In order to eat One needn’t spill blood There is not one fleck On a clean conscience
Mother Earth Is rich in food With its clear waters The stream provides
Free your bodies And spirits from the pressure And live as naturally As you desire

***

Unfortunately, the unalloyed enthusiasm of Littauer and his colonists didn’t translate into the creation of a successful enterprise. After a few short years, his career as the major-domo of the Jewish nudist, vegetarian, back-to-nature movement evaporated. He claimed that an influx of unprincipled interlopers ruined the atmosphere in the colony. The Yiddish journalist Shtiglitz, on the other hand, surmised it had something to do with Littauer’s lack of actual goals, other than expounding on nature’s bounty while sitting around the campfire and eating beans in the nude. Whatever the case, the result of this lack of focus was that his followers began to peel off into other left-wing movements in the city and Littauer himself was eventually forced to return to the dreaded Lower East Side.

But Littauer remained true to his ideals as best he could. He continued to run vegetarian restaurants and spent the remainder of his years working in a dingy, basement eatery on East Broadway. He kept his long hair and beard, which eventually turned gray, and he continued preaching naturalism and vegetarianism. His once-bronzed face became wrinkled and grizzled, apparently leaving him with a somewhat less appealing mien than he’d had in his younger days, and the many women whom he’d once attracted disappeared. His hope to bring the Jewish urban masses to the forests unrealized, he expired in 1950 at the age of 62, lonely and sick, a forgotten figure among the Yiddish romantics of the Lower East Side.

Jewish vegetarianism also waned in the years following World War II. In the face of postwar prosperity, luxe foods like pastrami and lox came to the fore as the comestibles of choice among the Jews of America. But Littauer and the Jewish vegetarians of the early 20th century have scored a posthumous victory: Jewish vegetarianism has returned in force as part of a general increase in popularity, as has Jewish environmentalism. Littauer might have been disappointed that Jewish nudism hasn’t made a comeback as well, but perhaps it’s just a matter of time.