What's Important to the Voters?

Jim Geraghty consults the recent CNN poll to see what issues are of greatest concern to voters. It turns out that what voters care about is not at all what either presidential candidate seems to care about:

Joe Biden would love for this year’s election to be about forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion, those oh-so-plausible tales of him saving six people from drowning as a lifeguard, how he was arrested for standing with a black family during protests of desegregation, and how he was “runner-up in state scoring” in football . . . until his teenage asthma kept him out of the draft for Vietnam.

Donald Trump wants this election to be about how unfairly he’s been treated and how he’s being persecuted for his political views, how he was the real winner in the 2020 presidential election, and how he embodies “retribution” for his supporters.

So what are the major concerns of the electorate?

The average American voter is desperately yearning for a candidate who would just focus on fighting inflation and getting the cost of living under control. Yes, American voters have other priorities, but that is the most-often-mentioned priority by a wide margin.

Don’t take it from me, take it from this weekend's CNN poll which had Trump ahead of Biden, 49 percent to 43 percent:

In the new poll, 65% of registered voters call the economy extremely important to their vote for president. . . .

Considering other issue priorities for the upcoming election, 58% of voters call protecting democracy an extremely important issue, the only other issue tested that a majority considers central to their choice.

Nearly half call immigration, crime and gun policy deeply important (48% each), with health care (43%), abortion (42%) and nominations to the US Supreme Court (39%) each deeply important to about 4 in 10 voters.

At the lower end of the scale, just 33% consider foreign policy that important, 27% climate change, 26% the war between Israel and Hamas, and 24% student loans.

You get slightly different answers when Americans are asked which issue is their top priority, compared to whether an issue is important to their vote for president; more on that in a moment.

The average American doesn’t lose any sleep thinking about climate change, gun control, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI initiatives, or whether the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have access to enough food. This is not to say that if the average American doesn’t think about an issue very much, it doesn’t matter.

In other words, neither the issues pressed by Mr. Biden's progressive handlers nor Mr. Trump's grievances are foremost in the minds of most voters. It'll be interesting to see how the candidates seek to deal with his fact once the campaign gets underway in earnest this summer.

Meanwhile, check out the rest of Geraghty's column at the link.

Reading Books

This survey at Yougov.com is very disappointing. It found that just over half of all Americans said they read at least one book in 2023. Most of them read just a few books this year: 82% of Americans read 10 or fewer books.

One wonders where our presidential candidates would fall in this survey. At any rate, here are some of its other findings:

Book-reading is strongly associated with college education. 44% of U.S. adult citizens without a college degree said they read at least one book in 2023, compared to 73% of those with a college degree.

Americans who did read were more likely to read physical books. More than 40% of Americans read a physical book in 2023, compared to 21% who read an e-book and 19% who listened to an audiobook.

Mystery books and histories were the most popular book genres Americans read in 2023, with more than 35% of those who have read at least one book saying they read a book in each of those genres. Fantasy, historical fiction, biographies, and literary fiction were other popular genres.

Genre choice is heavily influenced by gender. 45% of female readers read at least one mystery or crime novel in 2023, compared to 28% of male readers. On the other hand, 49% of male readers read at least one history book, compared to 24% of female readers.

History was still a popular genre for female readers, like mysteries were for male readers. Mysteries were the fourth-most popular genre for men, and history was the sixth-most popular genre for women.

If you read or listened to only one book in 2023, then you read more than 46% of Americans. Reading five books puts you ahead of two-thirds of U.S. adult citizens. Readers of 10 books are in the 79th percentile, while Americans who read 20 or more books read more than 88% of their peers.

Charts at the link give more details on the above summary. They're very interesting. One of the data points that especially caught my eye is the number of college educated individuals who read no books last year - about one in four.

It's disappointing but not surprising that 46% of Americans read no books in 2023. It's also disappointing but not surprising that among the popular genres listed above only one, biographies, was non-fiction.

To quote Thomas Jefferson once again, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."

Which Side Is Genocidal?

Bill Maher summed up the difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians in one sentence and in doing so showed all the empty-headed protestors on our university campuses what real genocide is.

The allegation against Israel is that they're committing genocide in Gaza. Maher responded that the difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis is this: The Palestinians would kill every Israeli but they can't. The Israelis could kill every Palestinian, but they don't.

The Palestinians have sworn to wipe out the Israelis, they even have it in their constitution. They earnestly desire to commit genocide against the Jews. The Israelis, on the other hand, have tried throughout their 70 year history to be at peace with the Palestinians even though they could eliminate them in a matter of weeks or less.

Even in the current war the Israelis are doing something historically unprecedented. They're trying to get humanitarian relief to the Palestinian people, the very people who voted Hamas into power and who overwhelmingly supported the slaughter of Jews on October 7th.

We didn't fly relief shipments to the Japanese or Germans while we bombed their cities in WWII, and it's quite impossible to imagine any Muslim or Arab state helping Israeli civilians if the Arabs were bombing Israel. Indeed, it's much easier to imagine the Arabs killing every Israeli civilian they could, just as they did on October 7th.

It's not the Israelis who are genocidal.

Why Would They Do This?

This piece by Matthew Xiao at The Washington Free Beacon should receive more air time than it's been getting.

Ever since October 7th we've heard that the Israelis are causing a huge humanitarian crisis in Gaza. This, despite the fact that the Israelis have been allowing hundreds of relief trucks into Gaza and the United States has been air-dropping food and medicine to Palestinian civilians.

The U.S. is even constructing a pier to offload humanitarian relief into Gaza, but true to their nature, Hamas has launched a mortar strike against the pier:

Gazan terrorists on Wednesday launched mortar shells at a site off the coast of Gaza where the United States is planning to construct a floating pier to deliver humanitarian aid, according to a report from Israeli outlet i24NEWS.

The mortar attack damaged American engineering equipment and left one person injured, i24NEWS reported on Thursday. The United States could start building the humanitarian pier as early as this weekend, with the Israel Defense Forces reportedly in charge of providing security during the construction.

President Joe Biden first announced the pier’s construction during his State of the Union address on March 7. U.S. military personnel will assemble the floating pier, an 1,800-foot-long causeway attached to the coast of northern Gaza, Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the day after Biden’s speech.

"As the president has said, not enough aid is getting in [to Gaza]," Ryder said, noting the pier is expected to help deliver "up to 2,000,000 meals in a day."

One has to ask, what kind of individuals are these who would attack this facility in what was apparently an attempt to thwart efforts to get food and other necessities to their own people? Why would they do this if they cared at all about their own kin?

Well, in fact they're the same barbarians with whom the moral blank slates on our university campuses across the country have chosen to identify themselves.

This incident should tell us something about both Hamas and the young people who think Hamas is worthy of their praise and support.

Divine Hiddenness

There are two antitheistic (against the existence of God) arguments that non-theists have found particularly convincing over the last several centuries.

One of these is the problem of evil which has received perhaps its greatest literary expression in The chapter titled "The Rebellion" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

The other argument, which is in some ways similar to the problem of evil (or suffering), is based on what philosophers call "Divine hiddenness" and which the Japanese Catholic Shusako Endo portrayed so powerfully in his novel Silence (See also the movie based on the book).

The technical form of the argument from Divine hiddenness can be found here, but in simpler English the argument goes something like this:

1. If a good God exists, He would not allow anyone who would otherwise believe in Him to remain ignorant of His existence and be lost for eternity.
2. There are people, however, who are ignorant of God's existence who would otherwise believe in Him if they knew of Him.
3. Therefore, there are people who would believe in God if they knew of Him who are lost for eternity.
4. Therefore, a good God does not exist.

Or, put more simply, because there are people who are innocently unaware of God's existence and who would believe in Him if they knew, therefore He doesn't exist.

This argument makes three questionable assumptions. It assumes that there really are those who are genuinely ignorant of God's existence; it assumes that those who are ignorant of God's existence will necessarily be lost for eternity; and it assumes that God could not possibly have overriding reasons for not revealing Himself in ways that persons ignorant of His existence, if such there be, would find compelling.

Each of these assumptions is doubtful, and in this form, at least, the argument is not very persuasive.

Perhaps a more psychologically compelling version of the argument is the one developed by Endo in his novel.

Roughly based on a true story, the novel describes the terrifying ordeal of a 16th century missionary to Japan who is put through mental tortures to persuade him to commit what seems to be a relatively minor act of blasphemy. He's required to step on a crude portrait of Jesus, and his refusal to commit this act of desecration is punished by Japanese samurai who subject innocent Christian villagers to unimaginable suffering until the missionary relents.

Despite his agonized prayers, however, there's no apparent answer from heaven. God seems silent, hidden, absent.

As emotionally gripping as this story is, in the end it doesn't demonstrate that God does not exist. The only thing it demonstrates about God is that He's sometimes, perhaps frequently, inscrutable, but believers already knew that.

It's interesting, too, that Endo's missionary, although crushed and broken by his ordeal, ultimately retains his belief in God.

To say that the argument from Divine hiddenness ultimately fails is not to minimize, however, its emotional and spiritual force.

God's seeming absence has been the cause of much anguish among many believers in the midst of great suffering and fear throughout most of human history. I have a friend who has drifted into agnosticism largely because of it.

A family member recently sent me a simple vignette that's a parable about the doubt materialists have about life after death but which actually, if perhaps inadvertently, also addresses the problem of Divine hiddenness. It goes like this:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well, I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only reasonable to believe that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

In other words, from the fact that the babies don't perceive her, don't see or hear her, it surely doesn't follow that she doesn't exist or care about them and their well-being. So it is with God's silence.

Just Plain Evil

Abe Greenwald, executive editor of Commentary magazine, posted some penetrating questions for the Pro-Hamas demonstrators on our university campuses. Townhall's Guy Benson fills us in on Greenwald's fiery post.

Greenwald writes:

Why aren’t the “protestors” demanding that the terrorist group Hamas release hostages and surrender? Literally none of them are calling for that. All the fury is aimed at Israel, none at the party that started the war with an act of mass slaughter and rape and that keeps it going with hostage-taking and human-shielding.

Hamas has turned down every “ceasefire” offer. Why would pro-ceasefire activists support the side that refuses a ceasefire? Why would a supposedly anti-war movement overtly support the side of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, all of whom exist only to wage war?

Why haven’t these wonderful humanitarians mounted similar campaigns in response to actual genocides, such as those carried out against Muslims in China, Syria, Sudan, and Myanmar? Slaughters that have claimed many more innocent lives than the war in Gaza?

I’ve screamed and written about these atrocities for years. Where were they? Why do protesters cite Hamas statistics as gospel? Why do they ignore the fact that most wars—especially those wars that have been overwhelmingly celebrated as righteous—have far worse civilian to combatant ratios than does the current war in Gaza? World War II comes to mind.

Why did they start protesting Israel immediately after October 7, before Israel even launched its ground invasion in Gaza? Why do people who would be apoplectic over the most microscopic indication of anti-black racism or Islamophobia downplay the flagrant and widespread violent anti-Semitism of these rallies as the unrepresentative behavior of “just a few jerks”?

Have they not seen the total saturation of Hamas slogans at these events? Why are these protests growing larger, more active, and more violent at the moment that Gaza has been becalmed? Israel pulled out the majority of its troops weeks ago and the death toll dropped dramatically months before that (even by the bullsh*t Hamas numbers).

Why does a political movement that claims to believe in indigenous rights, immigration, gender-equality, refugee acceptance, democracy, and religious pluralism support a non-indigenous, conquering, theocratic tyranny of female servitude, murderous homophobia, religious intolerance, and totalitarian subjugation against a democratic state of an indigenous people that values equal rights and personal liberty?

Greenwald goes on to state what's pretty obvious to everyone who's paying attention. I'll paraphrase since Greenwald's anger leads him to use some intemperate language - These students and their professorial abettors are know-nothing hypocrites.

Either that or they're just plain evil. After all, what else can you call people who applaud those who committed the horrors of October 7th.

Haters

In a column highly critical of President Biden's waffling when asked if he condemns the anti-semitic bigots protesting on some of our university campuses, Jim Geraghty says something that bears especial emphasis.

He writes:

As I have pointed out before, notice that these people, who often insist that they’re just anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, take out their anger on any Jewish people they can find. They’re not marching over to the Israeli consulate. They’re not going down to Washington to protest outside the Israeli embassy. Nope, they’re protesting and harassing people outside campus Hillels, synagogues, and JCCs.

These bitter little hatemongers keep claiming they’re upset about Israel, but they keep taking out their rage on any Jew they can find. Folks, that’s antisemitism! Do not judge people by what they say, judge people by what they do.

The people protesting on our campuses, or at least many of them, are filled with hatred, not just for the Israeli government, not just for the nation of Israel, they're filled with hatred for Jews.

The longer the war in Gaza continues the more the mask they wear slips and the more blatant are the expressions of their hatred.

This is the American left. It began in the sixties talking about "peace and love' and has morphed over the last sixty years into a seething cesspool of loathing and violence.

The religion of the left is Marxism, its expression is anarchy. Its deepest desire is the destruction of the West, and any policy, any movement, which facilitates that end is embraced as a cause célèbre.

The means to this end, as Marx makes clear in his The Communist Manifesto, is the destruction of the traditional family, community, religion, the capitalist economic system, the education system, and every other institution that has made America the greatest nation in the history of the world.

The goal is the complete atomization of society, the dissolution of whatever glue holds individuals together in society, which is why it does all it can to drive wedges between the races. It's why the left pushes identity politics and anything else that divides us rather than unifies us.

As Hannah Arendt observes in her master work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the individual, solitary and alone, cannot withstand the pressures exerted by the state to bend the masses to its will.

The left is driven by its detestations to "tear it all down," and their hostility is directed at anything and anyone that represents success, achievement, and merit.

Today it's the Jews because they're an easy and vulnerable target and have been hated all through history. Tomorrow it'll be some other group. Perhaps it'll be the group to which you belong.

The protestors, or at least many of them, at Columbia and elsewhere are anti-semtic bigots, and bigots who despise people who are Jewish should have no more place in our society than those who despise people because of their skin color.