… starts with the headline: TO MY FELLOW NEW YORK JEWS…

Ultraorthodox Jews do not consider themselves your fellow Jews; they consider themselves the only Jews. Why aren’t they part of the painstakingly nondenominational New York Board of Rabbis, composed of every denomination except ultraorthodox? For that matter, why is the entity we’re calling haredi or ultraorthodox strikingly at odds with itself?

Let’s focus our eyes: We’re looking at splintered sects, often mutually contemptuous (they’re not real Jews; we’re the real Jews), and each led by, or in search of, its own authoritarian.

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What in the world, for instance, does the undisputed leader of the violent mob the other night, a hero of large parts of his community, Heshy Tischler, represent? In terms of any recognizable, organized, Judaism?

[He] threaten[s] Cuomo that “if you touch my boy Trump, I’m going to put you over my knee, Cuomo, and smack you around like a little girl when you cry”; call[s] Mayor Bill de Blasio an “idiot” (and sometimes “the fuhrer”); call[s] Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s wife, a “retard woman,” as well as an unclear epithet that was variously heard as racist or merely insulting. Earlier this week, he ginned up a mob to corner an Orthodox reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, calling him an informer…

[I]n 2013, … a judge sentenced him to a year and a day in prison for immigration fraud. Tischler and 11 co-conspirators had been charged with extracting fees from thousands of undocumented immigrants to pretend to employ them at jobs that didn’t exist. (“I love Trump but I still don’t agree with him on immigration,” Tischler says now. “I believe this country should be open to everyone.”) “It is clear in the case of Mr. Tischler that there is a wide disconnect between his acts of religious charity and his views about the need to conform to the laws of civil society,” said the judge, Naomi Reice Buchwald, according to a sentencing document. “Not only did he commit the crimes charged as well as an earlier immigration fraud, but he has built up literally pages and pages of debts and judgments that are recited in the presentence report which can only be understood as reflecting a dismissive view of the obligations of a civil society and perhaps worse.”

… “The community is driven and guided by a combination of paranoia and a desire for full personal autonomy while excluding outsiders, outsider point of view, and that which makes them uncomfortable. Trump validates a lot of their attitudes,” said Menashe Shapiro, a political consultant. “Trump is the cocaine, Tischler is one of the dealers (as are super-right-wing radio, blogs and podcasts). The community are the addicts.”

When Andrew Cuomo identified the source of the violence on the streets of New York, he carefully identified it as ultraorthodox, not orthodox.

If I were an orthodox Jew, I’d be ultrapissed at the tendency of many writers on the issue to use the terms interchangeably.

An ultraorthodox Jew writes about his uncle’s death from covid.

“He didn’t die because of antisemitism. Or because New York Governor Andrew Coumo is inept or because New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is a hypocrite…

He died because many of our rabonim, leaders and askonim are too afraid or lazy to do their damn jobs.

He died because Boro Park, N.Y., where I grew up, is now run by the mob and not by rabbis.

He died because he had so much respect for daas torah that he believed them while they downplayed the seriousness of the virus.

He died because we were completely negligent.

He died because it was more important to say tehilim for Donald Trump than it was to care for the health of our elders…

He died because we were just too lazy to put on a simple mask to protect one another…”

The D.C. government on Friday set up a free coronavirus testing site outside the White House in response to the growing number of confirmed cases linked to the Trump administration.

… yes.

Things are getting shaky for the Genius of the Carpathians.

What’s happening in these nine [New York City] ZIP codes should have been no surprise. Three ingredients for the spike in cases we are now seeing have existed for months: a deficit of scientific literacy, a mistaken belief that April’s horrendous morbidity and mortality resulted in herd immunity and a longstanding distrust of outside, secular leadership borne of generations of collective trauma.

All of which can be summarized in two words: incivility and imbecility. Incivility with an emphasis on the word’s origin, having to do with one’s identity as a citizen of a shared polity, not merely a member of a small isolated sect; and imbecility having to do with the long-standing refusal of your sect to educate its children to mandated national standards. The failure of governments to insist that you adopt those mandates is shameful, to be sure; but the failure of your sect to instruct you in basic moral responsibilities toward people who don’t happen to share your mindless faith in things like herd immunity is the real scandal.

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These foolish people are suing. A law professor weighs in:

Covid-19 kills some and permanently injures others; the threat to human life is real and immediate. Those who flout the rules endanger everyone around them, and this is sufficient reason for regulating even a worship service… Nondiscriminatory rules to protect human life can be applied to the exercise of religion.

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Oh and look at that. The judge says would you please please stop??? Case dismissed.

The state argued the new restrictions do not unfairly target the Orthodox Jewish community and it is not a constitutional violation to acknowledge that religious gatherings have a higher risk of spreading the virus.

The judge agreed, stating she could not ignore the compelling state interest in protecting the health and life of all New Yorkers.

Whatever it takes.

“IF MY DISGRACEFUL ATTORNEY GENERAL DOESN’T IMMEDIATELY ARREST PRINCESS VICTORIA of Sweden AND HER HUSBAND PRINCE DANIEL, Duke of Västergötland, I PLEDGE TO FIRE THE MONSTER THIS AFTERNOON. HE’S GOT ALL THE EVIDENCE HE NEEDS. EVERYONE IS WONDERING WHY THEY HAVEN’T BEEN INDICTED. LOCK. THEM. UP.”

… and she’s delighted he’s scheduled to be standing next to Pelosi today, introducing legislation that would trigger the 25th amendment, replacing an incapacitated president. This announcement will push the Sitting Paranoid further into what UD believes will likely be, unless help is forthcoming, a suicidal rage.

Nice image.

He has this disease because he’s more afraid of not being seen as a man than dying… I don’t think he’s afraid of killing himself if the price would be to avoid what he feels is the humiliation of wearing a mask and submitting to common sense and care for others…

Didn’t take much time for UD to find a commentator who agrees with her about DJT’s suicidality. Giridharadas’s theory of the president’s self-destruction tracks precisely with theories about why so many macho men in Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana (America’s BIG suicide states) kill themselves. (This blog has covered our suicidal macho/nihilist states forever.) Angry, isolated, obsessed with projecting strength, these are men who, like Trump, can look back on sordid personal lives that make unavoidably graphic the lovelessness they feel and inspire. Care for others, in Giridharadas’s words, is felt as a humiliating depletion of their strength; rage at others for … for obscure reasons, I guess having to do with others trying to draw love out of these men… ? … eventually finds its way inside the man himself and attacks him. As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump is “dead inside apart from regular swoons of rage and resentment.”

Goes without saying that these same presuicides in our reddest states represent the very heart of Trump’s voting bloc, his demographic par excellence. Everyone noticed, during the last campaign, that Trump’s most solid support unerringly came from America’s most pilled-up, ginned-up, gunned-up, nihilistic counties and states (see, for instance, West Virginia).

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Look at it this way: These guys really need their guns, since they’re probably going to want to use them on themselves. They really need a president who supports the NRA.

A New Republic writer identifies Trump as the leader of the “Flailing Masculinity Death Cult.”

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And Trump’s other high-profile, 80% support demographic? Self-destructive ultraorthodox Jews – many of whom, by the way, share the heartland presuicide’s love of violence (this group spent last night rioting, burning masks, and assaulting people on the streets of New York) – cultish enclaves seemingly unmoved by the many covid infections and deaths among them.

How unsurprising that these two morbid, isolated constituencies are viscerally drawn to our nihilist in chief, whose “psychotic unraveling [is there] for all to see.”

If you listened closely, you could hear them:

As flies to wanton boys were we to Donald Trump;

He killed us for his sport.

I dread very deeply the idea of this tormented soul remaining at the head of the country for another three months. I find some relief in Nancy Pelosi just now having announced that she and her colleagues will discuss the 25th amendment tomorrow. I actually think we run the risk that Mr Trump’s mania combined with his rage will prompt him to kill himself. That will certainly be a first. The first American president to kill himself while in office. “After watching the interview, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Trump has come completely undone.”

Pelosi spoke after Trump was interviewed on Fox Business Network in a frenzied almost hour-long interview where he suggested Gold Star families may have infected him with COVID, claimed again he was ‘cured,’ equivocated over whether he is still on powerful steroids, demanded AG Bill Barr indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama and twice called Kamala Harris a ‘monster.’

With remarkable persistence, New York’s ultraorthodox have kept their children fatally ignorant.

It’s the only chance you’ll ever have to see a word in any way similar to “virtue” next to Trump’s name.