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Out of Town for entire week
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Will Democrats rain on your parade? Henninger thinks so.
Democrats Will Ruin the Climate
They’ve wrecked the cities and the border. Why would climate policy be different?
By Daniel Henninger
Wonder Land: Democrats have wrecked the cities and the border. Why would climate policy be any different? Images: Zuma Press/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
Notwithstanding that we are passing the 18th month of a global Covid-19 pandemic that has killed 4.3 million people and crushed national economies, the United Nations decided that what the world needs just now is more bad news, as summarized by the New York Times : “The new report leaves no doubt that humans are responsible for global warming, concluding that essentially all of the rise in global average temperatures since the 19th century has been driven by nations burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat.” What’s more, the report says climatic destruction is going to get worse no matter what we do. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be alive when the world ends.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change even includes an interactive atlas depicting that global warming’s ruin will be everywhere, meaning there’s nowhere to hide. Now what?
My short answer: Don’t put the Democrats in charge of Noah’s Ark. It will sink.
If only for the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate the U.N.’s climate report may be right that warming is a problem. One still may pose a practical political question: Instead of mitigating the world’s climate challenge, what evidence exists that these progressive advocates—Democratic politicians or affiliated scientists—would do anything other than make it worse if we put them in charge of the solutions?
The currently observable reality is that progressives, who have now captured the Democratic Party at all levels of government, don’t seem able to run anything anymore—not cities, not Covid, not a national border. Why would letting them run climate policy be different?
Whatever one thinks about the “root causes” of the rise in violent urban crime or the more than one million migrants apprehended at the southern border in the current fiscal year, both stand as significant case studies in political mismanagement.
The nonresponse to the overrun border by the Biden administration and to urban violence by progressive mayors in Chicago, New York, Washington and Portland, Ore., suggests this high-probability scenario on climate: They will make mistakes, the world will go to hell, and then they will deny we are in hell—and what’s worse, insist that we keep doing the same manifestly wrong things.
Even more fantastically, the progressives offload responsibility for their policy failures onto us with constant guilt-tripping: The cities are a mess because of systemic racism. The world is burning because “humans” have used fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.
One may question the progressives’ ability not only to govern but even to do politics effectively. The idea of systemic racism, often allied with teaching some version of critical race theory, is so extreme that it simply falls outside a strong majority’s consciousness of the real world. No surprise, an active refusal to adopt those ideas is under way among parents in public and private schools.
A similar mystery is why the progressive greens, and the climate press for that matter, actually believe it is effective politics to describe life on Earth as at the edge of a cataclysmic apocalypse—with the world engulfed over the next 30 years in hurricanes, wildfires, floods and melting icebergs. And that avoiding doom will require uncapped public spending and ceding authority over daily life to unseen climate scientists. These claims are beyond any politics that normal people can process.
The Covid-19 pandemic, a real event requiring constant public vigilance, has reached a state of personal and political fatigue. But the progressive version of the Democratic Party is oblivious to how many guilt-laden political burdens they can load onto the body politic. Past some point of incomprehension, people tune out or resist. With the climate apocalypse, resistance is simple: Stop caring. It’s hopeless.
It was not always this way with Democrats. After it became clear that Vermont’s three-year experiment in a single-payer healthcare system had manifestly failed to control costs, its then- Gov. Peter Shumlin admitted as much and ended it in 2014. Still, single-payer advocates dismissed Vermont as too small to disprove their idea, and progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have persisted.
With climate regulation, we have the test case of California, the world’s fifth-largest economy. Progressive-run California for years has been the most climate-correct state in the union, and the most screwed up.
By suppressing the use of fossil fuels and natural gas while elevating solar and wind, California has created an electrical grid that performs poorly under stress, causing statewide power outages. Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to shut down the state’s only nuclear power plant, which is emissions-free, in 2025.
New York’s defrocked Gov. Andrew Cuomo closed the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant in April. This Wednesday, amid a heat wave, the Con Edison utility text-messaged residents that if the power goes out, “Reply HELP for help.”
If only life under progressive mis-governance were that easy.
And:
What is the logic behind Biden's desire to enrich Russia?
Joe Biden Wants OPEC to Drill
The White House pleads for more foreign oil. The U.S.? Not so much.
By The Editorial Board
We thought we’d seen everything, but there it was Wednesday morning in black and white on the White House website: Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, imploring the cartel of oil exporting nations to pump more oil. Talk about a political climate change. This is the same Biden Administration that has spent six months doing everything it can to crush U.S. oil production.
“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Sullivan’s statement said. “While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.”
Someone pass the smelling salts to Tom Steyer, the climate crusader who surely fainted when he heard that one. Oil production is beneficial? Fossil fuels are essential to economic growth? The world needs more petroleum to be burned to release more CO2 into the atmosphere?
Perhaps Mr. Sullivan missed Monday’s U.N. report that the world will soon be as hot as Hades if we keep pumping oil. In a single, brief statement, he managed to contradict President Biden’s entire energy message as a candidate and in office. But as it happens, Mr. Sullivan wasn’t talking out of his hat.
On Wednesday Brian Deese, the White House economic council chief, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil-price fluctuations. This is a hardy perennial whenever White House officials fret that rising gasoline prices are becoming an issue. Blame “anti-competitive” practices. Perhaps Mr. Deese found the letter in a White House file cabinet. This means inflation is showing up as a bigger political problem in the polls than Democrats let on.
Allow us to help. How about asking Congress and your own regulators to take their foot off the neck of U.S. oil and gas drillers? Before the pandemic, the U.S. had become the world’s largest oil producer. Thanks to private innovation, the end of the U.S. oil export ban passed by the GOP Congress in 2015, and President Trump’s deregulation, America has had to import far less foreign oil. The U.S. reduced the strategic leverage of foreign producers such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But since taking office, the Biden Administration has killed the Keystone XL pipeline to transport oil from Canada and the Bakken Shale to Gulf Coast refiners; canceled oil leasing in Alaska; suspended oil leases on federal land, even after a court ruled the moratorium illegal; increased fuel-mileage standards for cars, which favors electric vehicles; and invoked the Endangered Species Act as part of a strategy to reduce drilling on private land in the West. No doubt we’re missing something.
Someone should ask Mr. Biden, on his next stop for ice cream, why the President thinks oil produced by foreign dictators in Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia is more desirable than oil drilled by American entrepreneurs.
Finally:
Will Obama ever disappear? How long do we have to endure his destructive actions and policies?
Biden Is Delivering Obama’s Third Term or is it FDR's fourth or both?
A Democrat in the White House is once again discouraging work, growing the size of the welfare state and increasing dependence on government.
By Jason L. Riley
One reason voters denied Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016 was the belief that it would have amounted to a third term for Barack Obama. Joe Biden is betting that the country wants now what it rejected then.
Mr. Obama will be remembered for the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, and Mr. Biden seems to have learned nothing from the experience. The economy has a record high number of unfilled jobs, and this administration has gone out of its way to discourage people from returning to work.
It has pushed for extensions of supplemental unemployment insurance and directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to continue a “temporary” ban on evictions. It has increased the child tax credit, which sends cash each month to tens of millions of U.S. households. It has extended student-loan forbearance, initially set to expire in September, until January 2022 and is even mulling the cancellation of student debt.
These efforts may have been justified to some degree in the early days of the pandemic, but the longer they continue, the more they undermine attempts to get the economy back up to speed. People who aren’t worried about getting evicted or paying off student loans obviously have less incentive to return to work, even when jobs are plentiful. And employers who can’t offer wages that compete with state subsidies will have trouble finding workers. People aren’t taking jobs primarily because the government has made it easier for them to be unemployed.
It’s happened before. The Obama administration pushed policies that expanded the welfare state to the detriment of economic growth, and the trade-off was a long and tepid recovery. As the economists Richard Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth and Douglas Holtz-Eakin explain in a study released in March, “while the safety net response to the Great Recession helped to preserve the incomes of middle-class households and fended off an increase in inequality, it came with a cost—discouraging work and thus contributing to prolonged labor market weakness.”
Under Mr. Obama, unemployment insurance was extended for up to 99 weeks in many states, nearly four times as long as normal. Work requirements for food stamps were waived even for able-bodied adults with no dependents. Medicaid was expanded, and subsidies were provided for the purchase of private health-insurance plans.
“The key lesson from the Great Recession,” Mr. Burkhauser and his co-authors conclude, “is that strong economic growth and a hot labor market do more to improve the economic wellbeing of the working class and historically disadvantaged groups than a slow recovery that relies on safety net programs.” It’s a lesson that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, who are calling for business tax hikes and larger entitlement programs, appear in no danger of learning anytime soon.
Even some Republicans are now persuaded that wealth redistribution—in the form of some kind of basic income guaranteed by the government—is the best way to help today’s disadvantaged. Sens. Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have supported an expanded child tax credit, though they’re unlikely to expand it enough to satisfy Democrats. Mr. Romney’s plan has no work requirement, which makes it no different from any other welfare program. The problem is that people respond to incentives, and not working is a rational choice if a government program is offering you more money and benefits than you otherwise would be earning in the labor force.
As the welfare state expands some groups are seeing higher rates of multigenerational dependence on government assistance. Providing a guaranteed income to unproductive people will create more unproductive people. Government benevolence, no matter how generous, will never compensate for a lack of personal responsibility, and subsidizing irresponsibility won’t end well. A larger welfare state that discourages work would shrink the labor force and reduce the nation’s economic output. How is that helpful?
There’s another way to go. Before the pandemic, poverty and inequality declined under President Trump, who focused not on expanding the safety net but on cutting taxes and easing regulatory burdens. Businesses responded by increasing capital investment and hiring more workers at higher salaries. The result was faster economic growth and dramatic increases in jobs and wages, especially for lower-income minority groups.
Liberal support for government solutions is politically motivated. Dependency creates a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, who are ideologically committed to the cradle-to-grave entitlement systems so popular in Europe. Republicans who think they can beat Democrats at this game are fooling themselves and doing a disservice to the country. Americans need more growth, not more handouts.
And:
What They Love About the $3.5 Trillion Bill Isn’t Just What’s in It
Noah Rothman August 11, 2021
When Democrats and their allies in media describe a $3.5 trillion “budget blueprint” that includes essentially the whole progressive agenda, they’re careful to focus primarily on what it would accomplish.
It would be “the most significant expansion of the nation’s social safety net since the Great Society,” the New York Times reported. Indeed, “some say” the legislation is “on par with the New Deal of the 1930s” in both scope and cost, according to the Associated Press. The measure would expand access to Medicare, balloon paid family and medical leave, create federal child-care programs, establish “free” universal pre-k and community college, impose green mandates on energy producers, increase subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, and impose “fees” on industries that emit carbon and methane gases.
Any one of these aspects of the progressive agenda would be a slog to pass through an evenly divided Senate and the narrowest of Democratic majorities in the House. But when you lump the whole thing into one comprehensive package, it changes everything. Perhaps most attractively from the progressive perspective, by cramming the smorgasbord of leftwing longings into a “budget” bill, this “bold” and “transformative” legislation does what progressives have always wanted: It short-circuits the conventional legislative process. They’ve put aside all the messy compromises that are usually necessary to pass incremental reforms in favor of one revolutionary blow to the status quo.
The process of budget reconciliation, an arcane parliamentary maneuver designed to speed budgetary issues through the upper chamber, works by making an end-run around the legislative filibuster (to which reconciliation bills are not subject). If liberal Democrats are to be believed, governing this way—with abject contempt for the conventions that stymie radical transformations to the civic compact in the absence of overwhelming, bipartisan consensus—is what they’ve always wanted.
“I think it’s unacceptable to campaign on issues and to say you care about them, and then hand [Republican Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell the ability on behalf of powerful special interests to block those efforts,” said Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley of the filibuster. “I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Delaware Sen. Chris Coons agreed, even while conceding that the filibuster’s elimination would remove “what’s left of the structural guardrails” in the upper chamber of Congress. Even the vaunted institutionalist Joe Biden entertained the prospect of ditching the filibuster to get what he wanted out of the legislature. “It’s going to depend on how obstreperous they become,” Biden said of Senate Republicans. In other words, whether the filibuster would survive hinges on whether Republicans intended on using it. Truly generous.
The activist left isn’t any more circumspect. The Center for American Progress denounced the “disproportionate power” the filibuster “provides to a small segment of society,” which was precisely its intent. The “filibuster is a tool that [Republicans] use to impede progress,” declared She the People founder Aimee Allison. Sen. Harry Reid’s former deputy chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, claimed that the filibuster is a “procedural tool that was invented by segregationists to uphold Jim Crow and white supremacy.”
Progressives’ efforts to lobby for the legislative filibuster’s abolition failed, but their frustrations with the conventions and norms that govern American legislative politics persists. That frustration is reflective of the sentiments shared by the Democratic Party more broadly, even if the party is reluctant to sacrifice the minority privileges they used to great effect throughout the Trump era. In this $3.5 trillion moonshot, Democrats get to have their revolutionary transformation without having to touch the filibuster. It’s an innovative strategy.
And yet, it doesn’t seem likely to succeed. Without a majority in the Senate (at present, there is no majority and Democrats control the chamber as a result of a mutual agreement with the GOP), the party cannot afford to lose a single vote, and they already have. “I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion,” Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema declared in July. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin isn’t sold either. “Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession,” he said in a formal statement, “not an economy that is on the verge of overheating.”
Having successfully cleaved the “hard infrastructure” initiatives away from progressive demands for social, human, caregiving, and metaphysical “infrastructure,” America’s less revolutionarily inclined legislators are once again imposing restraints on their intemperate colleagues. If they succeed in scuttling this $3.5 trillion exercise of the imagination, it will deal a profound psychological blow to the left on two fronts. Not only will their agenda be imperiled, their totalitarian vision of a Senate that does what they want when they want whether the voting public’s representatives like it or not will once again be exposed as a flight of fancy.
It is a testament to their self-absorption that progressives retain the capacity to be surprised when they discover that not everyone hates the conventions of American politics as much as they do. If this latest effort to circumvent those time-tested protocols fails, progressives will surely be shocked once again. And it will be everyone else’s fault but their own.
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There is a fundamental question that haunts the pages of history, and it is one that has never been addressed in a satisfactory manner. There are many schools of thought on why and how tyranny rises in any given society and all of them miss the mark in terms of explanations, primarily because they all allow their biases to rule their conclusions and blind them to the deeper aspects of power and conspiracy. In other words, they are willing to go down the rabbit hole only so far, and then they deny that the rabbit hole even exists.
The common assumption when it comes to autocracy or oligarchy is that people are "stupid" and easily manipulated into following compelling personalities that make promises they never intend to keep. This is a foolish oversimplification of reality. In truth, the level of manipulation needed to lure a majority of people into dictatorship is so complex that it requires an advanced understanding of human psychology.
In our modern era, people cannot merely be ordered to submit at gunpoint, at least not right away. They must be tricked into conforming, and not only that, they must be made to think that it was their idea all along. Without this dynamic of self-censorship and self-enslavement, the population will eventually rebel no matter how oppressive the regime. A thousand-year tyranny cannot exist unless the people are conned into supporting it.
And this is where we find the true key to totalitarianism. It only thrives because there is an inherent portion of any given society that secretly loves it and wants it to exist. We might call these people useful idiots, but it is more than that. They are not completely unaware of what they are doing; they understand to some extent that they are helping in the destruction of other people's freedoms, and they revel in it. Sure, there are elitists and globalists that levy root conspiracies and seek out more and more control, but they could not accomplish much of anything without the aid of an army of sociopathic aberrations that live among us.
This strange and destructive characteristic is ever visible today in light of the COVID lockdowns and the push for forced vaccinations. It is clear that there are some people out there that are overly concerned with the personal health decisions of everyone else. They have become a cult that ignores all science and logic and demands fealty to their fraudulent narrative. They do not care about the facts, they only care that we comply.
Well, as I have said time and time again: We Will Not Comply!
And so begins the epic conflict; a tale as old as civilization itself. There are two types of people in this world: Those that want to control others, and those that want to be left alone. But what motivates the control freaks? Why are they the way they are? Let’s examine some of the causes...
The fear engine
There are people that are driven by success, by merit, by hope, by prosperity, by faith, by optimism, by love and by honor. And then, there are people driven by fear. There are hundreds of various fears, but only a few ways to react to any of them. Infiltrators respond to fear with a desperate need to micromanage their environment; they believe that if they can dictate people and events to a certain degree, they can eliminate unexpected outcomes and be free of fear. But life does not work this way and it never will.
The level of influence these people seek is so far beyond them that it can never be attained. That is to say, they will never be satisfied until they get more. Their fears will always haunt them because fears cannot be dealt with from without, they can only be dealt with from within.
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Furthermore, the things they fear often revolve around their own narcissism and are of their own making. They fear failure, but they rarely work hard enough to succeed. They fear exposure, but only because they constantly lie. They fear conflict, but only because they are weak in body and character. They fear death because they believe in nothing greater than themselves. They clamor for dominance of their surroundings because they wrongly believe that they can cheat fate and the consequences of their own terrible choices.
The safety of the mob
The issue of fear extends into the common mindset of the totalitarian and how they find safety. The idea of standing on their own two feet and standing by their principles in the face of opposition is completely foreign to them. They avoid these situations at any cost and the notion of risk is abhorrent to them. So, they instead look for a mob to blend into. This makes them feel safe in obscurity while also wielding force through collectivist action. They can feel powerful while at the same time being pitiful and weak.
These people almost always operate through large single-minded groups that punish any dissension in the ranks, usually with gatekeepers that moderate the motivations of the hive.
The mob itself is a weapon, its only purpose beyond the comfort of its adherents is to destroy those people that do not hold the same beliefs or values as the controllers. There is no defensive purpose to the mob; it is an assassin's tool; it is a nuclear bomb. And, as we have seen in every modern dictatorship from the Bolsheviks in Russia to the Fascists in Germany to the communists in Mao's China, the totalitarian mob is capable of murdering more people than any nuclear weapon in existence, all in the name of "the greater good of the greater number."
False piety in place of self-worth
All tyrants believe themselves to be righteous in their cause, even when they know that their actions are morally abhorrent. I have seen this dynamic on bold display during the COVID mandates and the vaccine passports initiatives. Consider for a moment that 99.7 percent of the population is under no legitimate threat from the COVID virus; they will not die from it, and in the vast majority of cases they will recover quickly from it. Yet the COVID cult consistently argues that people who refuse the mandates, the lockdowns and the vaccines are putting others at risk, which is why we need to be "forced" to submit.
Most of them know according to the data that COVID is not a threat, but the narrative gives them an opportunity to apply power through "moral judgment," and so they lie, and they continue to lie about the data until they think the lie will be accepted as reality. This is a common aspect of most cults and of fundamentalist religions that have gone astray. The habit of adherents to value lies over facts and evidence not because they are trying to protect their faith, but because it affords them the chance to feel pious and superior to everyone else.
Those who disagree are labeled heretics, the lowest of the low, the unwashed terrorists. The anti-mandate crowd is thus stripped of its humanity and is painted as demonic. The people who want to remain free become monsters, and the totalitarian monsters become heroes out to save the world. As the author Robert Anton Wilson once said:
"The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly."
The love of a cage
I feel as though I understand this philosophy to an extent, but it never fails to shock me the way in which people who scratch and scrape for power over others also seem to love being slaves to the system. I'm not so sure that it is ironic, as authoritarianism does fulfill some of its promises of "security" as long as the people involved are willing to trade away any impulses of liberty. If you do as your told at all times and serve the system without fail, then there is a good chance you will be able to hold on to the meager necessities of survival. You will live a life, though probably not a happy one.
For those that go above and beyond and cast aside all personal principle in order to further the goals of the system, they might even enjoy a modicum of wealth beyond their peers. You see, in a despotic society, the people who are most without honor are the people that get ahead. They don't need merit, or accomplishment or skills or even brains; all they have to do is sell their souls and do whatever it takes to catch the eye of the oligarchy. They don't have to be good at anything, all they have to do is be evil and for some people that's easy.
In this way, the system becomes a comfortable blanket that people can be swaddled in. They wrap themselves in it and luxuriate in its warmth. They are not concerned with freedom because freedom feels cold to them. Freedom can be isolating, and the existence of choice is terrifying. When all your choices are made for you, there is never any doubt or internal stress. All that is required is that you wake up each day and obey.
For weak and ignorant people, subservience is a gift instead of a curse. They believe that a cage is meant to be gilded, not escaped from, and anyone that seeks escape must be crazy or dangerous. If free people exist then the slaves are forced to question their own condition and their own compliance, so everyone must be enslaved to remove any and all doubt from society. The hive mind is placed above all else.
The defiant and free
The little tyrants that infiltrate humanity probably look at liberty advocates as some kind of alien creatures from far beyond the bounds of their universe. They just can't fathom how it is possible for someone to defy the system, to stand against the mob or the collective, even when they are outnumbered or when the risk is so high. They assume that it is a form of madness or a lack of intelligence; for how could anyone smart think they have a chance of fighting back against the dictatorship?
Liberty people are individualists by nature, but we also care about the freedoms of others. There is a common propaganda argument that individualists are "selfish," but this is not the case at all. It is not enough for us alone to escape slavery; we will not stand by and watch others be forced into bondage either. We are willing to sacrifice our lives not just to save ourselves but to save future generations from autocracy.
As the vaccine passports and mandates continue to escalate the totalitarians will find themselves even more bewildered, because each new mechanism of control will result in even greater impetus for rebellion, and frankly at this point, it is going to be us, or them. They will not stop their pursuit of dominion and we will not comply, so we are at an impasse. Our two tribes cannot coexist on the same continent, maybe not even the same planet.
The truth is that if voluntarism was a valued ideal then this whole fight could be avoided. If the collectivist cult was willing to accept the notion that they can choose to live in a highly micromanaged environment while others can choose to live independently, then there would be no conflict. We could easily go our separate ways. But this is not how totalitarians think: To them, all people are chattel, we are property to be staked down and reeducated until we see the light. And if we don't see the light, we are to be done away with and erased.
This is why they are utterly to blame for the war that is coming. They cannot stop themselves from grasping for our throats and our minds. They are addicted to supremacy. They are living in a fever dream and the only drug that cools their veins is total oppression of everyone around them. I see what is coming next and it is not pretty for either side, but it will be especially gruesome for the collectivists because they cannot imagine a scenario in which they lose. They are so certain of their preeminence and the safety of their self-imposed prisons that they will see failure as a phantom, a ghost that cannot touch them. They will implode when they find out otherwise.
To truth and knowledge,
Brandon Smith
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Black civil rights activist says America has a 'grace problem,' not a race problem
By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter
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New Temple U President Jason Wingard Misled Its Board About Anti-Israel Tides Foundation Which He Chaired
By ZOA National President Morton A. Klein
(AUGUST 4, 2021 / JNS) As a Temple University alumnus and an Israel-supporter, it’s deeply troubling that Temple and its leaders have not held its new presidential choice, Dr. Jason Wingard, accountable for chairing the anti-Israel, antisemitic Tides Foundation and serving on the Tides Center board, at the very same time when the entities “proudly” funded at least 17 antisemitic, anti-Israel BDS organizations; elevated antisemitic organizations and leaders on Tides’ website as “Extraordinary Palestinian leaders”; and viciously libeled the Jewish state.
ZOA previously detailed Tides’ actions while Wingard served on Tides’ boards and as Tides’ chair, and urged Temple to rescind his appointment (here and here).
Wingard then gave the following embarrassing non-responses. Unfortunately, Temple’s Board chair sent an email adopting them.
His “It started before I got there” non-excuse: Wingard irrelevantly argued that “the programs in question … were engaged prior to my arrival on the [Tides] board.”
What matters is that Tides and Tides Center continued to donate huge annual amounts to multiple antisemitic BDS and Israel-demonization groups throughout the three-and-a-half years when Wingard was on its boards, and served as Tides co-chair and chair (Jan. 1, 2018, through June 24, 2021). ZOA’s previous articles described Tides’ partnerships and grants during Wingard’s reign, shown in Tides Foundation’s 2018 and 2019 Form 990 tax filings, and Tides Center Rockefeller Bros. Fund grants through June 2021.
In addition, during Wingard’s Tides chairmanship (and today), Tides’ website prominently boasts “Meet These Extraordinary Palestinian Leaders,” featuring Tides “partner” Arab Resource & Organizing Committee (AROC) and other BDS groups. Tides also has a page urging and facilitating donations to AROC—the main organizer of “Block the Boat” BDS actions to violently prevent an Israeli-based shipper from unloading medical and other supplies needed by Americans at U.S. ports around the country.
READ MORE
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Is this coming to America down the road?
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