Sep 1 2021
Zionism manipulates and co-opts Judaism to promote an imperialist white supremacist agenda, which is something I write a lot about, and it goes back to Project Esther, which is written by the Heritage Foundation. It's not a Jewish organization. It's a Christian organization grounded in right wing Christian nationalism that is using all of Zionism's talking points to promote white supremacy abroad and to stifle dissent here at home. So Zionism has become a very useful tool for the right wing here in the United States.
Yoav Litvin joins us to discuss his Al Jazeera column, "Project Esther: A Trumpian blueprint to crush anticolonial resistance:The Heritage Foundation strategy named after the biblical Jewish queen offers insights into the persecution those who oppose Zionism and white-supremacy will likely face in Trump’s America."
"The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon.
Follow
Weekly Mailing List
New interviews every Monday
Aug 25 2021
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
There are more white people living in poverty in the USA than any other ethnic group. Not exactly, though. About 67-70% of people living in poverty are white, but that includes white people of Latino, Latina, LatinX identification. Somewhere between 34 to 40 million people live below the poverty line in the USA, and even just non-Latin white people still make up a whopping 40% of those living in poverty.
Steven Pinker, the famous popular writer of questionable brain-candy books, tends to rejigger all the figures he uses – inflating, or at best leaning toward the largest estimates of populations living in violence and poverty in past times, while both theoretically minimizing and leaning toward the minimal numbers of current rates of violence and poverty in order to prove his point that human history represents a trend of progress in material existence for all people.
So forgive me for being a little squishy while using the figures I’ve given above, but as I do so, I’ll be transparent about the process. White folk of northern extraction make up 40% of the impoverished in the US. 40%. That’s almost 50%. That’s roughly their percentage of the entire US population as a whole, give or take. There are about 40 million people in the USA living below the poverty line, and the poverty line is widely acknowledged to be a laughable gauge of what constitutes poverty, constructed as it is by people who aren’t poor. So there’s probably more poor people than official definitions indicate.
I’m going to suggest, with a Pinkeresque fungibility of reported statistics, that about 70 million people in the USA, about 20% of the population, are poor, including the functionally poor, which means people who have to pay half or more of their income for shelter, who opt out of necessary visits to health professionals for lack of funds, who have trouble affording healthy food, who have no choice but to work more than one fulltime job, or work one fulltime job that sucks, who have to work gig jobs but think they’re not poor because they sell their homemade jewelry on Etsy on the side, who go without medication, have severely limited if any time to themselves, or are burdened by snowballing debt due to predatory lending or predatory credit or a punitive civic system of fines.
Easily one in five people in the wealthiest... read more