What Happened Today: January 9, 2024

Fani Willis hires her boyfriend; The Jewish tunnels that weren’t; Substack’s fake Nazi panic

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The Big Story

Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is engaged in an undisclosed affair with Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she improperly hired to lead the felony RICO prosecution of Donald Trump and 18 of his associates in Georgia, and who used public money earned from the case to pay for cruise tickets for the couple and for vacations to Napa Valley, Florida, and the Caribbean. That’s all according to a public motion filed Monday by Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for defendant and former Trump campaign staffer Michael Roman. 

Here are some of the main claims from the motion:

• Willis hired Wade without seeking approval from Fulton County, as required by law, and without requesting money for the purpose. Instead, Willis paid Wade out of county funds she had previously secured to deal with a backlog of cases from the COVID-19 pandemic. Wade, in turn, failed to file his oath of office on accepting the contract with Willis. Merchant alleges that these bureaucratic irregularities were to avoid oversight that could have brought Wade and Willis’ relationship, and Wade’s lack of qualification, to light. 

• Willis and Wade were known to be in a romantic relationship before Willis hired Wade on behalf of Fulton County. The day after Wade accepted his first contract with the county, he filed for divorce and later had the records sealed by court order. However, he did not sign the contract until a year later—likely to hide the income from his wife during the divorce proceedings. Merchant claims to have viewed Wade’s divorce records and says that other witnesses have confirmed that Willis and Wade have an “ongoing personal and romantic relationship” that began while Wade was still married.

• Merchant claims, citing “sources close to both special prosecutor and the district attorney,” that Willis and Wade “have personally traveled together to such places as Napa Valley, California, Florida, and the Caribbean, and Wade has purchased tickets for both of them to travel on the Norwegian and Royal Caribbean cruise lines.” They have also “been seen in private together (in a personal relationship capacity) in and about the Atlanta area” and are “believed to have co-habited in some form or fashion at a location that neither of them owned.”

• Wade has no experience prosecuting felony RICO cases and indeed would not qualify to serve as a defense lawyer in the case under Fulton County rules. Nonetheless, Willis hired Wade to prosecute the most significant RICO case in the county’s history and has paid him as much as $1 million in legal fees since 2021 —far more money than the less than $200,000 per year he earns in private practice, and a much higher rate than would be expected from his level of experience. 

Merchant alleges that the entire case is marred by an “irreparable conflict of interest” and is requesting that the court dismiss all charges and disqualify both Willis and Wade from further prosecution. Willis’ office did not deny the allegations of a relationship but merely told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it will respond “through appropriate court filings.” On X, meanwhile, Techno Fog posted what appears to be evidence of fraud in Wade’s invoices, including billing Fulton County for 24 hours of work at a rate of $250 per hour on Nov. 5, 2021.

Techno Fog weighs in on the revelations: 

This prosecution has always been corrupt. It is contrary to Georgia’s RICO statute, which is intended to prosecute conspiracies involving financial gain or physical harm. It criminalizes political speech—such as including President Trump’s tweets as an “overt act” in the RICO conspiracy. It has involved the violations of law by Fulton County prosecutors, including DA Willis and Special Prosecutor Wade.

And now, we see that its origins and operation have enriched a couple who tried their best to keep their relationship secret from the public.

Indeed. We’ll add that the Democrats’ hopes that Trump would be convicted of a felony before the 2024 election now look likely to be dashed. Neither of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s two cases against Trump, for obstructing an official proceeding and for mishandling classified documents, seem likely to be resolved before November. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case in New York is widely acknowledged as a joke. And now Willis’ case in Georgia has taken a severe blow. Which may explain why the campaign to remove Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment, formerly considered a longshot not worth serious consideration, has now taken center stage. 

Read Merchant’s filing here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24352568/roman-motion-to-dimiss-010824.pdf 

And read Techno Fog here:

Fulton County DA Fani Willis: Her Affair with the Special Prosecutor

IN THE BACK PAGES: David Mikics on Jewish “plasticity,” which is the next form of anti-Zionist madness your child will be learning about in college

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The Rest

→There’s been a flood of antisemitic jokes and comments on social media—including allegations of Jewish “tunnels” and “rape dungeons”—after video emerged late Monday of NYPD officers responding to a call at Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In the video, young Lubavitchers—described by Chabad media director Motti Seligson as “extremist students”—can be seen tearing down the synagogue’s wood paneling to reveal a passage that apparently connected to a defunct mikvah around the corner. The clash (described as a “riot” by The New York Post), part of an ongoing dispute between the students and Chabad leadership, was apparently sparked when Chabad officials called in a cement truck to repair the damage the students had previously done to the building. Yaacov Behrman of Chabad public relations explains on X:

→A Chinese-born U.S. naval officer has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for sharing “sensitive U.S. military information” with China in exchange for nearly $15,000 in bribes. Wenheng “Thomas” Zhao, 27, a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, pled guilty in October 2023 to one count of conspiring with a Chinese intelligence officer and one count of accepting a bribe. According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, the information sold by Zhao, who worked at Naval Base Ventura County north of Los Angeles, included “plans for a large-scale maritime training exercise in the Pacific theatre [sic], operational orders and electrical diagrams and blueprints for a Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar system located in Okinawa, Japan.” 

→There’s recently been a minor media panic over Substack supposedly being a home of Nazism and white nationalism. In November 2023, The Atlantic ran a story by Jonathan Katz called “Substack Has a Nazi Problem,” which alleged the platform (which hosts The Scroll) “profits” from at least 16 overtly neo-Nazi newsletters. Then, last week, tech-reporting Substack “Platformer” ran a story claiming to have found “dozens” of Nazi Substacks, which it had reported to the company. Readers of The Scroll probably won’t be shocked to learn this problem is almost entirely fake, but journalist Jesse Singal has done the yeoman’s work of showing the public exactly how fake it is. Singal obtained a copy of the letter Substack sent to “Platformer,” which reads in part:

We have completed an investigation and found that five out of the six publications you reported do indeed violate our existing content guidelines, which prohibit incitements to violence based on protected classes. We have removed those publications from Substack. 

None of these publications had paid subscriptions enabled, and they account for about 100 active readers in total. 

That seems to mildly conflict with a Substack spokesman’s previous statement to Zaid Jilani and Alex Gutentag of “Public” that the accounts flagged by “Platformer” had only 29 paid subscribers between them, but whatever the number, the overall picture seems pretty clear: namely, that on Substack, as in the United States more broadly, neo-Nazism is a marginal phenomenon. Less marginal? Celebrating the murder of Jews in the name of “anti-Zionism.”

Read more here:

Platformer’s Reporting On Substack’s Supposed “Nazi Problem” Is Shoddy And Misleading

 

→A doctor from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center confirmed today that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in early December and was hospitalized on Jan. 1 after experiencing complications from a Dec. 22 prostatectomy. Apparently, nobody in the government knew any of that either. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed at a Tuesday press conference that President Biden “was not informed until this morning that the root cause of [Austin’s] hospitalization was prostate cancer.”

→The New York Times’ David Leonhardt occupies an interesting niche in the media landscape: On topics such as the lab-leak theory and COVID-era debates over mask mandates, school closures, and childhood vaccine mandates, his role has been to signal to the Times’ readership that they are allowed to believe in some well-established fact or finding that conventional progressive opinion had previously considered taboo. (It’s sometimes a thankless job: A Northwestern journalism professor told New York magazine in February 2022 that Leonhardt’s gentle attempts to coax liberals out of their COVID alarmism were “eugenic and genocidal.”) 

Leonhardt’s latest discovery? The value of standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT, which were abandoned en masse by elite colleges during the pandemic on the grounds that they were racist, biased against poor people, and useless for predicting academic success. Anyone who’s looked into the matter knows that none of that is true: The tests are not biased but are strongly predictive of later academic success, and alternative metrics for evaluating academic preparedness, such as high-school grades and admissions essays, are even more easily gamed by wealthy and well-connected students. Indeed, according to Leonhardt’s Sunday story in the Times, college admissions officers knew that, even as their schools did away with the tests:

When I have asked university administrators whether they were aware of the research showing the value of test scores, they have generally said they were. But several told me, not for quotation, that they feared the political reaction on their campuses and in the media if they reinstated tests. “It’s not politically correct,” Charles Deacon, the longtime admissions dean at Georgetown University, which does require test scores, has told the journalist Jeffrey Selingo.

He also spoke to an admissions officer from MIT, which dropped standardized testing requirements during the pandemic. “But after officials there studied the previous 15 years of admissions records,” Leonhardt writes, “they found that students who had been accepted despite lower test scores were more likely to struggle or drop out.” 

Indeed, and those who drink liquor are more likely to become drunk. Still, we’re happy to see a small victory for reality at the Gray Lady. 

Read the rest here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/briefing/the-misguided-war-on-the-sat.html 

→Young men (aged 18-29) have shifted to Republican by 11 points over the past decade, according to new data shared by American Enterprise Institute pollster Daniel Cox on X: 

These numbers fit with previous polls suggesting that Gen Z is more polarized by gender than any previous generation is and that Gen Z men are more conservative and less feminist than millennial men are. A November 2023 poll from the Survey Center for American Life found that only 43% of Gen Z men described themselves as feminist, compared to 61% of Gen Z women and 52% of millennial men. It also found that 45% of Gen Z men say that men face discrimination in American society. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Unrestricted Immigration Is a Real Problem, by Steven Camarota

Pretending it’s not happening will only make the consequences worse

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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More ‘Anti-Zionist’ Insanity Your Kid Will Learn at NYU

Sonali Thakkar’s grotesque new book about Jewish ‘whiteness' shows that the oldest hatred is also the most plastic

By David Mikics

Oct. 7 was a wake-up call for anyone still confused about anti-Zionism. No longer could the truth be dodged: If you want to dismantle Israel, you will need the old terror of the pogrom—murdering parents in front of their children, raping women until their pelvic bones break, tearing bodies to pieces and burning them. “Respectable” anti-Zionism is no different than “respectable” antisemitism—a request for a license to maim and kill Jewish bodies.

Yet there is something puzzling about the atrocities themselves, which have been sometimes celebrated, sometimes euphemized by the pro-Hamas left. On Oct. 7, Hamas tortured, murdered, and kidnapped not only Jews, but many foreign nationals and Israeli Palestinians. How, one might ask, do these acts make sense as manifestations of Jew-hatred?

The answer lies in the always elastic definition of the Jew. Anyone on Israeli soil was symbolically Jewish and therefore worthy of being genitally mutilated, hacked to pieces or burned alive. The terrorists fired 40 bullets into the body of a Bedouin woman—even a devout Muslim could be tainted by Zionism and righteously murdered. Arab Israelis, it seems, serve for Hamas as symbolic Jews, since, not surprisingly, they have displayed complete solidarity with Israel’s efforts to defend itself since Oct. 7. Muslim Israelis do not want to be slaughtered by maniacs any more than their Jewish neighbors do.

The disastrously flexible definition of the Jew on Oct. 7 has precedents in the history of antisemitism. Since Jewishness is not always readily visible, non-Jews can become Jews in the eyes of antisemites. For white Russian nationalists, Lenin was a Jew, and Bolshevism a Jewish movement. Some opponents of the New Deal called it the “Jew Deal,” and said FDR was a Jew.

Jewishness is deceptive, says the antisemite: A Jew could be lurking under a gentile façade. In 16th-century Spain, the third- or fourth-generation New Christian might still be a secret Jew. In present day Israel, Jewish identity gets passed on even to non-Jews contaminated by the Zionist entity.

The fact that Jews can hide their identity, and have often been forced to do so in order to survive, means that they are “plastic”—the term used by NYU professor of literature Sonali Thakkar in her new book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought. Thakkar sees plasticity as proof that Jews, like Asians, are a “model minority,” “educable,” and ripe for assimilation. These are, for the progressive academic, dirty words. For Thakkar, Jews’ plasticity means that, unlike Blacks, they can become “white” and so climb the ladder of success.

For Thakkar, Jewish plasticity goes in only one direction: toward assimilation, success, and whiteness. She denies that plasticity has its tragic side for Jews; because Jewishness can be hidden, it can also seem insidious to the non-Jew.

Thakkar ignores completely these undersides of plasticity. Antisemites claim Jews are poisonous because they can disguise themselves, and so manipulate hapless non-Jews. The Jew is charged with dual loyalty—he seems to be your average loyal citizen but is really the agent of a foreign power. Pretending to be a non-Jew is a double-edged sword, since vigilant antisemites are ready to unmask the Jew beneath the gentile masquerade.

Many nonobservant Jews do in fact conceal their Jewishness in public. They are, in Thakkar’s terms, plastic. But they may still feel Jewish when facing antisemites who tell them Israel is a genocidal white settler colony that delights in killing children. As Sartre pointed out, the encounter with antisemitism is basic to Jewish identity. We are now mobbed by non-Jews, like the U.N. secretary general, who explain that the inhuman slaughter of Oct. 7 “didn’t occur in a vacuum.” Chanting the word cease-fire, they deny Israel the right to defend itself, a right that is ready given to every other nation. Israel is blamed for casualties that ensue when its enemy commits large-scale atrocities and gleefully broadcasts them, then kidnaps Israeli citizens, including small children, and promises to do so again and again.

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Thakkar’s thesis about Jewish whiteness ignores the fact that more than half of Jewish Israelis come from Middle Eastern families, driven out and persecuted by Arab countries and Iran. Jews who lived in Arab lands for thousands of years are called white, while Palestinians are people of color. Such is the plasticity of the Jew, who can instantly be converted into a colonial oppressor after having been oppressed for centuries. Ashkenazi Jews faced a genocide committed by European whites who designated them an inferior race; but now that “whiteness” is bad, Jews are white.

Like all racism, the left’s neo-racist essentialism relies on imaginary slots that can be manipulated at will—the power of the postcolonial theorist is that he or she decides who gets to be a person of color and who is condemned to whiteness, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Muslims, members of history’s most successful group of conquerors, are of course permanently oppressed; the victims of Muslim empires are of course oppressors. In Thakkar’s telling, the plasticity of the Jews means that they are uniquely suitable to move—or be moved—from victim to persecutor status in the blink of an eye. Even when they are murdered and kidnapped, it is somehow their fault.

Thakkar is a student of Marianne Hirsch and Nadia Abu El Haj, two ardent promoters of the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement, and like them, she aims to delegitimize Zionism. She lists her areas of research as “race science” and “Jewish studies/Holocaust studies,” though no knowledge of Jewish culture or tradition is evident in her work.

You might be tempted to think that her book is just another near-unreadable academic treatise. But she is at the forefront of the new wave of anti-Israel propagandists and teachers at elite universities whose graduates will populate America’s government and leading institutions. Her theories—muddled, bizarre and obscure as they may seem—are therefore significant. Thakkar is where Jewish studies is headed, toward a fierce antipathy to the existence of Israel, which has become the epitome of evil white colonialism.

Thakkar spends much time analyzing the 1950 UNESCO statement on race, which declared that race is not a scientific fact, but a poisonous ideology. The UNESCO statement argued that inherited genetic factors cannot account for “the differences between the cultures and cultural achievements of different peoples or groups.” No group has a superior or inferior culture. Moreover, ethnic groups do not have a shared character, since individual differences override group identity. There are no “inborn differences” among humans, UNESCO claimed, perhaps wishfully.

Since three of its eight authors were Jews—Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Morris Ginsberg—Thakkar implies that the UNESCO declaration is somehow “Jewish.” (Another author, Franklin Frazier, was African American.) While the UNESCO declaration briefly alludes to the Holocaust, its focus is general: “The myth ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years it has taken a heavy toll in human lives and caused untold suffering. It still prevents the normal development of millions of human beings ...”

The bone that Thakkar has to pick with the UNESCO statement is a strange one. She bizarrely says that its authors prize plasticity above human equality, and that this is a covert plea for colonialism: “The eclipse of equality by ‘plasticity, educability’ exposes the statement’s ideological investment in managing the pressures generated by anticolonial freedom struggles and insurgent antiracisms.” But the UNESCO text upholds “equality as an ethical principle.” Equality is nowhere “eclipsed.” UNESCO also insists that all ethnic groups are equally plastic. Thakkar says that Jews produced the concept of plasticity and applied it to themselves. But all she shows is that she herself regards Jews as plastic, and by doing so she confirms a familiar prejudice.

“Plasticity was theorized in the early twentieth century through Jewishness,” Thakkar argues. Here she relies on articles from the early 1920s by the pioneering anthropologist and anti-racist crusader Franz Boas, who argued that Jews were assimilated to their surrounding populations, so that at times it was hard to tell the difference between Jews and gentiles. Blackness was less plastic, since it is obvious to the “man on the street” who is Black and who isn’t. Boas believed that only racial mixing could thwart the vicious power of white racism in America. “If conditions were ever such that it could be doubtful whether a person were of Negro descent or not, the consciousness of race would necessarily be much weakened,” he wrote. Thakkar comments, “Antiracist discourse that relies on the plasticity of racial form as the solution to racism ... has already assumed and naturalized the prevailing terms of race thinking.”

But it is Thakkar who sees race as natural. For Thakkar, like Ibram X. Kendi, race is fixed, not plastic: Blackness is a permanent stigma. Like Kendi, Thakkar “naturalize[s] ... race thinking”—which is what she accuses Boas of doing. In other words, Boas wanted to liberate individuals from the prison of race, while Thakkar wants to keep them there.

Thakkar invokes Frantz Fanon to support her essentialist reading of Blackness. For Fanon, she says, “Blackness is both the target of plasticity’s imperative and that which frustrates and resists it, never plastic enough.” Blackness is never "plastic enough," for Thakkar, because it is an inescapable stigma—Blacks, unlike Jews, cannot assimilate; their race is visible evidence that they have been forever cursed by society. But she misreads Fanon, who was describing a pathology, not espousing a fact. Fanon wanted to free Blacks and whites from the sickness of racial essentialism, but Thakkar, like the other new racialists, wants him to confirm that essentialism. Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks that the Black person who sees Blackness as a stain that can never be eradicated resembles “the schizophrenic or the sexual cripple,” captive to the sickness that Fanon wants to heal. Fanon argued for plasticity, not against it. Black people, he thought, should be free to interpret Blackness from their own experience, rather than being imprisoned by the white gaze.

Thakkar’s strangest chapter concerns the writer Caryl Phillips, who grew up Black in Britain. Phillips wrote The Nature of Blood, a novel that depicts Shakespeare’s Othello visiting the Jewish ghetto of Venice. Thakkar objects to this—since Othello was born a Muslim, and, as we know, every time someone denounces antisemitism, Islamophobia must be denounced too, in the same breath. Venice, it may be noted, did not imprison its Muslims in a ghetto. Yet surely Phillips could have described its bias against Islam! Phillips pinpoints anti-Jewishness and ignores Islamophobia, a sin against the progressive conscience.

The parallel that Thakkar asserts here between anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudice flies in the face of historical fact. Islam was attempting to conquer Renaissance Europe and convert its Christians; it was an aggressive, and very often successful, enemy of the Christian West. Jews, who lacked political power, were a purely imaginary danger to both parties. To call something a phobia implies unreality; the Islamic threat was quite real.

The antisemite produces the Jew’s plasticity, by seeing Jewish influence everywhere (the “Jewish lobby,” Starbucks). When they raise fake bloodstained hands, pro-Hamas protesters are not merely or even primarily accusing Biden and company of enabling the IDF’s child-killers—they are vicariously taking part in the Oct. 7 pogrom. They wish they had Jewish blood on their hands, too—proof of which is that they name their riots after that infamous day’s “Al-Aqsa flood” (“flood Grand Central for Palestine”).  

Israel’s continued existence drives the protesters crazy. They also despise America, the second-most Jewish country on Earth. Yet they insist they don’t hate Jews, only Zionism—and they clothe their hatred from the river to the sea, in every form of gobbledygook. Which prompts a sudden thought: The oldest hatred is also the most plastic.