The battlefield has changed, and liberalism’s fate is our concern, too

IF a liberal tree falls in the forests of Silicon Valley, does anyone in Lakewood hear it?

Twitter’s announcement last week that ads featuring “climate denialism” are now banned was one such tree. The social media firm’s decision to join Google in restricting advertising that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus” is as chilling as it sounds.

The right to voice banned views as opposed to curated mainstream opinions — a.k.a. free speech — is under threat, but it’s doubtful whether many in our community worry.

That’s a mistake, because America’s culture wars and the ravings of progressives might seem very far from our shuls and yeshivahs, but they affect us all too directly. We face a new battle for the legitimacy of our values, and so far, we’re woefully unprepared.

Take climate change. Whether or not the planet is heading toward environmental disaster has no particularly Orthodox angle — we’ll all fry together if it comes to that — but the way that debate on the subject is being shut down has very real implications for us.

Today it’s climate change, and tomorrow it’s lifestyles that the Torah finds reprehensible — the rise of militant liberalism is a threat across the board. What’s to stop the arbiters of polite conversation deciding that our conservative approach to these issues is dangerous and must be censored?

That future is already here. A few years ago, the so-called “chinuch crisis” in England involved a government agency enforcing a hyper-progressive education worldview on frum schools. Only with intense lobbying was an understanding reached that allowed Orthodox schools to avoid teaching young children about the gamut of relationships that is now standard fare in state education.

The push to liberalize Britain’s schools didn’t happen on its own; it was the product of a militant progressivism that marched out of academic humanities departments, and conquered elite opinion over decades.

That same illiberal-liberalism has marched out of Ivy League quads and taken over boardrooms like Twitter's, leading to the decision to ban anyone questioning the consensus.

We’ve been able to ignore the new intolerance mostly because it manifested first in places removed from our direct experience.

For many who leave yeshivah/kollel for business, campus life — and exposure to the anti-Israel hate that now defines much of the progressive world — is theoretical. It stayed that way until that bigotry spilled over into Manhattan during last year’s Gaza flareup.

The same for the ever-growing list of alternative lifestyles and identities. The proving ground for the assault on traditional morality was in the universities — by the time that most of us became aware of the changes, the battle for society was already over.

Frum society is hard-wired to shut out the craziness of the modern world. But the disappearance of our core values from society’s mainstream is something that we can no longer afford to ignore.

Our community knows how to fight for its rights. Over the last few decades, we’ve developed tools — political and organizational — to lobby for what we need.

Yet we’re now in danger of preparing for the last war. Whereas previously we’ve had to fight for resources — the right to expand our communities, access to funds for education, not to be penalized for taking Shabbos off — we now have to battle for the legitimacy of our ideas.

Where are the organizations dedicated to making sure that our values are still seen as acceptable in a world without moral boundaries?

Militant progressivism is mounting an all-out push to remake the modern world’s moral landscape, and what elites debate today will shape our communities tomorrow.

To shape our response, we need to recognize that the battlefield has changed, and that liberalism’s fate is our concern too.

Imperial Delusions

Emmanuel Macron sounds humbled. “Our country is full of doubts and divisions,” said the chastened French president — newly reelected for a second term this week — in a victory that must have felt close to defeat.

Although the 44-year-old took 58 percent of the vote to Marine Le Pen’s 42 percent, his rival brought her far-right National Rally party the closest it’s been to power, taking 12 million votes, or 5 million more than in her last attempt in 2017.

Wunderkind Macron’s first victory five years ago upended French politics, destroying the legacy parties and feeding Macron’s own delusions of grandeur. But after endless media fawning over his “Jupiter-like” attributes as a stern French leader in the mold of de Gaulle, Macron faced nationwide protests in 2019 under the Yellow Vest movement that fed into a groundswell of support for Le Pen this year.

The French leader could yet prove transformational, parlaying his imperialism into a new program for the European Union, which he sees as charting a third way between America and China. But equally, Le Pen’s surge on an anti-globalist platform could prove to be a harbinger of doom for further European integration.

“The second big reason for inflation is Vladimir Putin. Not a joke.”

This column doesn’t specialize in forensic fact-checking, but it’s not hard to call Joe Biden out on the assertion that historic inflation now plaguing the US is exclusively tied to Covid and Putin.

Back in February 2021, former Clinton treasury secretary Larry Summers warned in the Washington Post that “stimulus close to World War II levels” would trigger once-in-a-generation inflation. The White House pushed back fiercely in defense of its massive injection of stimulus cash, calling Summers’s prediction “flat-out wrong” and saying inflation would be “transitory.”

Come November’s midterms, voters might forget the pleasurable feeling of Biden’s stimulus in their pockets amid the economic pain which they might well pin on the White House. That, as Joe Biden might say, is “not a joke.”

Nation That Dwells Alone

There was a moment a few weeks ago when for Israeli leaders, Ukraine had turned into an impossible quandary. While Zelensky basked in international adulation and the West rushed arms and cash to bolster his heroic struggle, Israel’s refusal to arm Ukraine and sanction Russia looked bad, like it hadn’t gotten the memo that Putin was a murderous thug.

Ukraine’s battlefield successes, along with the revelation that France and Germany continued to arm Russia after 2014 — in defiance of sanctions — have taken the heat off Israel.

But the suddenness with which Israel found itself once again isolated internationally calls into question the alliance of pro-Israel organizations that exist to make the country’s case.

Here was a classic case of an Israel in need of international spokesmen. Bennett could hardly go on record explaining that Jerusalem had to stay on the sidelines because of Moscow’s air forces on Israel’s northern borders.

But pro-Israel groups were strangely quiet, and the voices speaking for Israel in the international media were muted — almost as if the spokespeople had fallen for Zelensky’s talk of Israel’s unique duty to help as a Jewish state.

Israel’s hasbarah machine is a chronic basket case, and the latest failure might point to the reason: a PR effort has to have a clear line of defense.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 908)