Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.

Things are beyond bad.

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Harold Meyerson, American Prospect:

I do not believe the Israeli nation can endure half modern-democratic and half theocratic-primitivist; a house divided against itself cannot stand. Unlike Lincoln, neither do I believe that it will become all one thing or all the other. Someone there should start thinking about how to break it up.

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The idea of dividing Israel into cantons, which for years has been received with mockery due to the country’s small size and security challenges, has been gaining more and more traction over the past few months, and liberals are angrily calling to separate “Israel” from “Judea.” For some, Judea means the occupied territories. For others, Judea represents all ultra-Orthodox and messianic Jews, whether they live in Bnei Brak (in Israel proper) or Hebron (in the West Bank).

Gitit Ginat, Foreign Policy

So Eli’s in trouble with the law again – an occupational hazard for the very worst of career criminals – and having helped get his buddy Trump to pardon Eli the last time, one assumes Alan Dershowitz is now hard at work on a second pardon.

Eli and his partners in crime hail from Lakewood NJ, a hotbed of theft which you already know about if you read University Diaries.

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What? You say there’s no way Fuckface can be reelected?

Silly. Everyone said there was no way he could be elected the first time.

The logic of integralism is straightforward. There is no neutral ground on fundamental questions of God, good and evil, and the purpose of human life. Political conflict entails conflict about these ultimate things, integralists argue. Accordingly, they view public institutions, social structures and religion as an integral whole. Nothing is truly private. Everything affects the common good; there is no private life or private conscience. The resulting vision is of a hierarchical society with concentrated power, close coordination between church and state, and public regulation of religious orthodoxy… [In short,] the Catholic Church should strategically co-opt the American state. The result would be a return of state-sanctioned religion and a politics that is at once socially conservative, statist and economically populist… [The ultimate goal of all human life] is heaven, and the integralist means of getting us to that destination is to subordinate politics to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.

UD so wishes her hero Richard Rorty were still around to do a number on these lost souls.

(For background, search Vermeule and Deneen on UD‘s search engine.)

… announces James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.

Here in America in 2023, it’s the millionth plus one time for America’s anti-abortion zealots (14th Amendment Protections for Zygotes Now!) to encounter the reality of experience — as in, strong majorities of Americans value access to abortion, and these majorities are acting and voting accordingly.

A year after the Dobbs decision, the anti-abortion movement is contending with two unexpected results. The first was neatly expressed by the banner headline in a newspaper that abortion rights groups We Testify and INeedanA.com printed to mark the Dobbs anniversary: “We are Still Having Abortions All Across the Country.” Not only did the Society for Family Planning’s survey of reported abortions find less of a decrease than many expected; it doesn’t account for the untold number of people who are accessing abortion medications through overseas or peer-to-peer suppliers, even in states where it is banned. Meanwhile, other states and localities are taking historic steps to ease abortion access. On the day [a prominent anti-abortion speaker addressed an important gathering], New York’s governor signed a law to protect abortion providers in the state who are openly planning to provide telemedicine abortions in states where it is banned.

… Since Dobbs, abortion rights supporters have won all six abortion-related ballot measures, stifled the “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, and cinched a key Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. In [a recent anti-abortion] convention’s host state, Pennsylvania, outrage over Dobbs helped Democrats flip the state House, elect a Democratic governor, and send Democrat John Fetterman to the US Senate. 

It’s the reality of experience all over again. What are the anti-abortion people to do?

They could ease up, or they could harden. The problem with easing up (‘Well … maybe we won’t go after rape and incest victims…’) is obvious; you’re allowing some abortions to happen.

The only option is toughening up, which inevitably means you’ll have to, among other things,

revoke enforcement authority from local prosecutors, many of whom have declined to enforce abortion bans, and give it to state attorneys general. [Plus] allow citizens to enforce abortion bans with civil lawsuits, apply RICO laws used to take down the mob to abortion providers, and weaponize anti-trafficking laws to make it harder to leave the state…

The increasingly popular neologism Cathoflucht (okay, well, I like it), an intentional echo of brutal Republikflucht laws used to punish people who tried to flee Communist East Germany, captures the attempted flight from states whose coalitions of anti-abortion-activist Catholics and Evangelicals have begun to restrict free movement out of abortion deserts. Gradually we will be able to trace a Republikflucht-like declension, from civilized, moderate efforts to force people who want out of no abortion states to stay in them, all the way to electronic tracking/threatening, to prisons, and to walls along borders.

Too horny to defend the homeland, Iranian men must be kept from the sight of female heads.

While the “Woman, Life, Freedom” street protests were largely snuffed out months ago, and stricter hijab rules have been enacted, legions of Iranian women … are still refusing to wear hijab in public.

… In mid-June uniformed and plainclothes security forces again raided coffee shops in several cities and beat customers over hijab rules. And the police chief of a northern resort province was filmed telling a subordinate, “Break the neck of anyone who breaks the [hijab] norms … and I will take responsibility.” 

What is arguably the book’s most important claim — that liberalism is beset by an insuperable tension between a conservative mass public and an insular liberal elite — is never established with a single empirical study or even a simple piece of polling data…

In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.

Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”

Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions.

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While reading the book, Beauchamp emailed Deneen asking what he thought of some of Beauchamp’s reactions to his arguments. Deneen completely refused to engage:

“I’m quite certain you’re unlikely to deviate from any conclusions you’ve already settled upon, regardless of what I might try to convey in response to any questions.”

Beauchamp sees in this refusal Deneen’s revolutionary commitment to “conflict” rather than conversation with the liberal enemy. UD sees it as far more insidious, the sort of snobby/nihilistic reaction you get from a person who left a position at Georgetown University because it’s not truly Catholic and “insulated” himself (to use a word Deneen constantly uses to characterize out of touch liberal elites) at the University of Notre Dame, and who – should God grant him long life – will eventually leave Notre Dame for Ave Maria University, and then Ave Maria for a pontifical campus in Rome within walking distance of the Vatican. It don’t get no more cluelessly elite than an intellectual shut-in uniquely possessed of the truth.

Yikes. Thought the one in the NYT was bad?

Given Deneen’s influence, the incredible sloppiness of the writing in Regime Change is a surprise. Many of his sentences are ambiguous if not incomprehensible, many of his paragraphs internally contradictory. There are places where the literal meaning of the words on the page [is] precisely opposite to what he plainly intends to convey. (When he says that it was “not uncoincidental” that two related things coincided, I doubt he means they happened together merely by chance.)

Even going to great lengths to puzzle out the strongest versions of the arguments Deneen seems to be making will get the reader only so far. Every one of his major claims disintegrates under scrutiny. You’re left with the impression that he barely understands his own ideas, and that he misunderstands entirely the thing he’s arguing against.

… Yes, people are ticked off about woke overreach by the progressive left. But the idea that most Americans favor a crackdown on pornography or a reintroduction of Sabbath laws or any of Deneen’s other post-liberal fantasies is comical.

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Yeah, but when Deneen and his monk take over, this reviewer will be the first heretic burned at the stake.

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To make matters worse – taken to task by two lady reviewers in the NYT and Reason.

Post-monk, they’ll only open their mouths to sing the Cathophate’s national anthem, Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.

He claimed he could alter the course of hurricanes. He claimed 9/11 was divine punishment for “pagans, abortionists, gays, lesbians, [and] the American Civil Liberties Union.” He joins Brother Falwell in the bowels of hell.

Patrick Deneen is the revolution’s Menshevik to Adrian Vermeule‘s Bolshevik; but he’s a prominent enough theocrat to score a scathing review in today’s NYT.

Me, I’ve got some sympathy for Deneen: He’s deeply invested in top-down Bang ‘Er Mandates, as in Viktor Orban’s spectacularly failed mission to get drunk suicidal Hungarians to do the missus and seed the world with Hungarians. Orban’s more than done his bit, focusing relentlessly on getting women out of college and splayed panting ‘pon the ágy; but so reluctant are the men that the state has confiscated the fertility clinics, and – in a blow to Natural Law and all that stuff – been engineering the little buggers. Sad.

The Bible has been removed from all elementary and middle school libraries throughout the Davis School District [in Utah] after someone challenged its contents.

A committee tasked with reviewing books that fall under review for sexual content last week determined that the Bible will be retained at district high schools, but removed from all elementary and middle schools…

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So predictable. Once you let people challenge library books, the sky’s the limit.

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In the day since this decision was announced, the Davis School District has also received a request for the Book of Mormon to be reviewed for inappropriate content. 

University Diaries mainstay, Philip Esformes, who was convicted of running the “largest single criminal health-care fraud [scheme]” in the history of the Dept of Justice (he got twenty years), and who soon after was miraculously pardoned by Donald Trump, is on UD‘s mind this morning. Everyone’s talking about the increasingly plausible claim that DT and R. Giuliani sold pardons for two million dollars apiece.

Did they? Did Esformes, a way-pious orthodox Jew (I’ve already told you how much I love shout-out-loud hypocrisy!), shell out the bucks? Can’t wait to find out.

Meanwhile, right after Esformes got sprung, the pissed off feds filed another big criminal case against him (when you’re a world-historical crook, the pickins ain’t slim) so that was maybe two million down the crapper but thanks to tens of thousands of dead and dying old people (nursing homes were Phil’s MO) Esformes has TONS of money so don’t worry.

Matthew 19:16-18.

There are 16 counties in the United States with populations of at least two million residents. Eleven of them were less religious in 2020 than they were a decade earlier...

Just saying.

The Florida Senate rejects one of the guv’s hand-picked nominees for New College trustee. Herr Eddie Speir is the architect of A WHOLE NEW WORLD! He has announced his plan to fire THE ENTIRE FACULTY, JA? JA! His main activity once he’s done that will be informing students that Jesus Christ is King and that vaccines and climate change are anti-Christian conspiracies.

A whole new world
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no
Or where to go
Or say we’re only dreaming

Tomorrow belongs to me!