Candace Owens, Shmuley Boteach, Naomi Zera and Me
Side Picking, Stone Throwing and the Singularisation of Truth as a Cornerstone of Morality
This essay began as a comment on the Substack post by Naomi Zera.
As I continued to reflect on her argument, my words continued to flow and make connections until it became clear that this ‘comment’ was to be more than that. So, here it is. That comment began almost a week ago now.
Here’s the link to Zera’s post.
I’ve created a stand alone audio of this essay for those who prefer listening:
On Substack
On Soundcloud
And here is the audio if you would like to listen and read here in Substack
Zera makes the argument, a weak one in my opinion, for people, perhaps me in particular, to chose the morally right side in the Zionist divide. Unfortunately, for her, she used Rabbi Smuley Boteach’s ‘debate’ — it wasn’t a debate — between him and Candace Owens on Piers Morgan Uncensored, as evidence or proof of the rightness of her chosen side.
Here is the essay/comment. [Once I’ve finished posting it, I will post its beginning as the comment in Zera’s post. In its entirety it is far too long to fit there.]
I Introduce Myself to the New-To-Me Naomi Zera
Hola, Naomi.
Nice to meet you. And I appreciate the perspective you argued. It gave me a bit more to chew on — actually a lot as I dug into this — as I continue to work through my examination of the perniciousness of 'morality' as, perhaps, the deepest manifestation of what some/many have and do call ‘evil’ — from both sides of the great divide. Note that since you unilaterally reached out to me in a direct message without a word of greeting or explanation, nothing other than the link to your article, I have assumed you wanted me to get a different perspective, your perspective, on Candace Owens. That is the common element joining my recent essay and your argument. I inferred that because I have recently written that I have been watching Owens, and other people like her, whom I have started to call 'righties’. What originally caught my eye with them was how easily they disassemble and/or eviscerate the mostly brain empty/dead vocal/hysterical ideological progressive liberals, loosely labeled ‘left’ or perhaps extreme left by the less radical left. I will avoid using ‘woke’ because I have come to see that it is a distraction descriptor, perhaps planted by the operators of language debasement.
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Taking Sides is Where It’s At?
It is to be noted that I've not once commented on her, or anyone’s, perspective on the 'Zionist divide', since I've not looked at it at all except to see its fallout, occasionally, such as when Shmuley humiliated himself and that side of the argument with his nasty schoolyard/childish verbal bullying and extreme ad hominem and insubstantial attacks on Owens in the Piers Morgan Uncensored debate you discussed.
So, since you unilaterally and wordlessly ‘asked' me to visit your piece without asking me directly — I'm also inferring that this is so you can help me to pick the right side — I have, therefore, unilaterally responded to your opinion piece and then provided my own opinion. And expanded on both with more detail and context for my thinking.
This began as a shortish comment, and continued to grow over a couple days. With that, I extracted it out of the comment box into a text editor because I could feel it calling me to expand it into a Substack essay with what your comment has brought into my awareness and how it has expanded my thinking and connected some fascinating dots. For that I am grateful. It has been an engaging exploration for me.
Ad Hominem Attacks Did Not A Debate Victor Make
To begin: Shmuley did not win the debate — he simply condemned Owens with at best weak, albeit nasty, ad hominem attacks, most of which were based on cherry picked snippets of her criticism and or commentary taken out of context. And some, as far as I can tell at this time, were simply creations from his imagination arising from his clearly expressed fanatical hatred of her. Furthermore, his poor childish deportment, demeanour and insults did nothing to convince me of anything he said being accurate. Finally, and perhaps the worst for his side of the divide, from him I learned absolutely nothing about what he was arguing. For me to get that perception of him from that short exchange — hadn't seen or heard him before — says a lot and none of it good.
Throughout the not-a-debate debate Owens maintained a good semblance of a grown, mostly equanimous adult, even while being attacked for her simply being alive. Without re-watching it, which I will not likely do — life is too short — Owens was the more reasonable and persuasive for the simple reason she was not throwing sand into her own eyes in one of the most incredible adult tantrums I’ve seen in such a forum. The only one that might have been worse was also on Piers Morgan Uncensored, this time with Cenk Ugyur. See “You're ALL Guilty!” Candace Owens x Cenk Uygur On Israel, Trump & More.” (I challenge you to watch it and see if you can see the resemblance between Ugyur and Shmuley.)
I’m Skeptical of All ‘Heroes’ and their Given and/or Expressed Authority
By my skeptical and inquisitive nature I’ve not taken Owens at face value. By experience I no longer side with anyone, especially people who have been given an aura of authority, such as Owens who it seems, has managed to accumulate such respect. Invariably the ‘heroes’ show their feet of clay at some point. Therefore I choose to listen without taking a side. Then, if what they say has interested me enough, I begin my own research by following the intuitive promptings and amazing synchronicities that guide me to see if I can find the dead bodies, skeletons or other clues in the closet.
So, with Owens, I’ve been gently poking around her and a few similar ‘righties’ to her, to see if I can figure how they embody the poorest aspects of so-called ‘good’ morality. And how that misanthropic morality is couched or hidden within or behind their powerful use of language and the expansive resources they have of accumulated knowledge of the Bible, its and society’s histories, as well as depth of recent/contemporary history. This puts most progressive liberal ‘lefties’ who challenge them at a complete, and often utter, disadvantage because these people are completely lacking all three of those resources. And that vacuum is unquestionably the consequence of having had their brains washed empty by the government funded/sponsored Rockefeller endorsed and structured education that began at an early age and then culminated in college’s ungrounded mis- and dis-informed ideologies. I’ve seen these adept righties eviscerate, without effort, even so-called college professors who have been successfully doing the brainwashing.
We Are Living In An Amazing Time To See This So Clearly
The conservatives, ‘trads’, as you called them, have the advantage of continually grounding their arguments in either the reality of measurements of and in real-world observations and with their knowing very well to extensively the Bible and details around it and its history. The progressive liberals are at a huge disadvantage because their grounding is in their having been implanted with unquestioned, and often unquestionable — even unconscionable — imaginary truths of history, the Bible and the material world as it is evolving here and now. Hence their need to yell their deluded truths because they have no weight with which to argue. With that kind of delusion they are the most basic of canon fodder to anyone who has grounded themselves with what is.
So your suggestion that Shmuley won the debate certainly brings into question, for me, your ability to see what is. And then that brings into question, for me, the true value of your article. However, since I am curious, I wanted to know what you presented and perhaps explore why you linked it to me. And so I finished reading it past your firmly stated ‘winner’. And, as you can tell, it engaged me enough to write a big pile words because it got me to think, a bit more, about Owens and her kind and my curiosity about them as moralists, with a fresh perspective.
I’m Not Nothing/Anything, and so Can Be Easily Trashed And Stoned
I'm neither 'Christian' nor 'Jewish' nor 'Moslem', (nor Buddhist, nor Hindu, nor Atheist, nor Agnostic nor … [fill in the blank]). With that you can easily discard my opinion because it is clearly coming from a nearly complete ‘religious’ ignoramus and, therefore, un estupido. Thus I’m someone who you can freely toss into the gentile trash can as irrelevant because I have no deep indoctrinated and moralist understanding one way or the other on this life-and-death Zionist debate/divide.
My perception is that it is mostly people throwing stones at each other instead of relaxing down into our shared humanity. And talking. Like, I mean, like wow, a real conversation between adults with opposing opinions. Imagine that! It was not what Owens and Shmuley did. Although Owens was much closer to human in her manner and ability to listen by far than was Shmuley whose spittle was flying.
When I watched it soon after its release into YouTube — YouTube’s algorithm fed it to me, of course — I was actually a little saddened by the entire spectacle, the spectacle of an adult body with a spoiled and hurting child’s deportment and engagement with life. Again, how could Shmuley have won the debate when he provided me with not one, not one, piece of evidence or history or ‘fact’ that was new to me in such a way as to create curiosity or even skepticism of the ‘evil ones’ with whom he was being consumed by hatred? Owens, on the other hand, did provide me with real information to consider and to chew on. No, that doesn’t mean I’ve consumed Owens-town’s Kool-Aid. Simply something to weigh, if this issue begins to really interest me. It hasn’t, yet. And Shmuley certainly did not provide anything to change my interest.
Who Hasn’t Been the Killer and the Killed, the Enslaver and the Enslaved?
Have Christians been attacked and killed in the world in the past and today? Yes. Have Jews been attacked and killed in the past and today? Yes. So too the Moslems, and women and men and... [fill in the blank.] OMG! Everyone everywhere somewhere at sometime — yes even outside our narcissistic view of the mediterranean basin as being the centre of the universe let alone of the world — have been killed as an undeserving at some time by the moralists who, at that unique time in history, had enough authority to power the community to split and kill those dehumanised and unworthy vermin. Everyone. Everywhere. Throughout time. There are no sides.
Why? Why all this passionate killing of our fellow and sister humans, man, woman, child and infant? Have you read about the 100 years war in France? Christians killing Christians with absolute horrific brutality, man, woman, child and infant. Why? I find this an interesting and an important question that the stone throwers do not ask themselves. How can they? They are too busy gathering their stones from history and even more busily casting their treasured trove of stones at the obvious sinners, those who are to be shunned then killed as unworthy and undeserving as Shmuley colourfully expressed because that was what Shmuley was doing with ineffective histrionics and vacuous words. Which might be in part why he was getting more and more angry: between them, Owens was the stronger by her relative equanimity under attack from his carefully accumulated verbal stones. Stones that simply bounced off her.
Where Is the Clear-Eyed Seeing?
So part of my somewhat tepid interest in this so-called Zionist thing is that both sides refuse to look at history with clear-seeing eyes. Instead they use every deluded vision possible to justify the moral correctness of what they are doing and saying today. Both sides. And which is often hateful and dehumanising. Both sides. Therefore, both sides have no interest in anything to reduce suffering in this world, here and now, because both sides are expanding hatred and, with it suffering. Why? For their perceived moral good justified by a very carefully selected past and chosen singularity of truth as religious moral righteousness.
If the Christians and Jews and Moslems all believe in, basically, the same god, then why keep killing each other? And that includes Christians killing Christians, Moslems killing Moslems and Jews killing Jews. For some reason, this brings to mind the significant role of the Jews in the successful development and expansion of the Atlantic slave trade. No, I’m not picking on the Jews: everyone, everyone has enslaved or has been enslaved by everyone everywhere at some time in history. The blacks, for example, who were sold into slavery, had been themselves enslaved by blacks. Every race has been enslaved by some moralist superior who had the power and/or moral authority to enslave the undeserving-other at some time. Moslems enslaved people in the 10th century to grow sugar cane and make sugar. And slavery is still alive and well, even without including the ‘underground’ trade of women and children.
Consider watching “The 13 Sugar Colonies” for a bit of important history that is not told ever because — why not? Memory holed? Remaking history to serve a (false) narrative? Or just a casual oops, because that tiny piece of history that is actually taught is being used, today, to vilify everyone white, and all counter narratives are to be suppressed. Nah! That is just me being, again, un estupido.
I have considered this ‘problem’ of narrative and morality to some extent previously, as you may have inferred by the length of this discourse. And it seems to me that, fundamentally, this requires the singularity of belief in a truth. It doesn’t really matter the singularity — the truth of whatever — although monotheism has been and is a big singularisation and perhaps source of much of the downstream singularities of thought and action. For example, Constantine ‘the great's' First Council of Nicaea that began in 325CE, was to take the huge diversity of religious beliefs and singularise them so that his problem of managing the power-threat to him of that diversity was packaged within a singular palatable truth. A singular truth was one that gave him the power to manage the malcontents who strived for the diversity that Constantine considered a threat to his rule.
It is interesting to consider that Constantine had no qualms at killing the malcontents who threatened the singularisation process to suppress diverse religious beliefs into what was to become the Roman Catholic Church. (Note: the version of that council has been cleaned up, of course, to keep by omission the truth of singularisation. For more of the uncleaned history, see the story of Constantine as told by his encomiast Eusibius Pamphillis.)
By Synchronicity I Came To Find A Hannah Arendt Observation On The Power Of Lies That Is Pertinent
“… What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are [mis]informed… If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government [or other authority structure] has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political [and authoritarian] winds blow. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." (Arendt, from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, cited by Roger Berkowitz in his article “On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations” 2024, my emphasis slight edit.)
When we ‘no longer can believe anything’, that is the crack in the mind/psyche that demands a singular truth. In our modern jargon it is that of the narcissistic ‘gaslighting’ that creates in the narcissists’ targets a rift, a divide, between the experiences in the tangible/physical world and how the world is perceived.
Everything, Everything, Has Been a Lie!
One of the amazing and providential consequences of the convid lie has been the eruption into awareness of the great lie: the great apocalypse, the great revealing that everything has been a lie. And I do mean everything. With thanks to Zera and Arendt, I now understand more deeply why the powers that be have been so successful in creating a bully culture and why we have been content within our discontent to be living in it blind to having adapted or perverted the truth of our Self into shills and adherents and even proselytisers for the bully culture Stockholm syndrome within which we swim, like the fish unable to see the water that surrounds it. I explore the evidence of this, and a method to help us escape it with simple language awareness and changes that allow the willing to clearly see the bully-lie. See my essay “Spell Breaking Language-Keys to Unlock Language Locks
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words
Amazing. The singularisation of truth is like the drowning person grasping at that last straw, the hoped for singular saviour from the sea of lies.
With that we have been inculcated into the moral truth of the life-and-death importance of singularities, be it the physicists’ search for the grand unified theory of everything to the smaller ones of a single source of malevolence or hero to rescue us form that evil, be it ‘vaccine’, drug, diet, or saviour. Once we have singularised our vision of truth, it rigidifies us into moralist automatons because everyone else who doesn’t share our truth jeopardises our world and so needs to be converted or killed. And our moralism allows us to justify the means to that end, including death. History is rife with rigid moralists killing the questioners, even if the questioner is still embodied as an infant.
Time for Some Heart-Centric Poetical Philosophical Wisdom to Point to the Non-Divided Way
Poet, philosopher and, likely heretical Christian, William Blake in his poetical way cautioned against these very rigidities. For example:
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. Wm. Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
And:
Now I fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold always. May God us keep From single vision & Newton’s sleep! (Wm. Blake from letter to Thomas Butts (1802). My emphasis.)
Who’s Choosing What? The Moral Imperative
You cited, above, the transfer of the chosen people from the Jews to the Catholics. And seriously, I am almost laughing at the similar childishness of that writer and Shmuley: it is like the child demanding from the parent to be the chosen: choose me, no me, no me with increasing volume and hysteria. All the while ignoring how humans were made in god’s image and the importance of loving the other.
What I've been looking into more closely, recently, is how moralism, especially when it becomes self-righteous, is that which removes compassion. As far as I can tell all of 'the Bibles' have failed to stop humans from killing any of each other, despite avowing with pious morality that we are god’s human creation. With morality the moralist can and does allow and justify with moral sanctimoniousness the authority to trump reason of the heart. And with that they remove themselves from engaged discourse, humour and especially compassion. Instead, they look into a fragmented and reframed history to morally justify gathering stones. There is good stuff in those books, and bad stuff that can be cherry-picked from each to moralistically, ie Biblically, justify removing compassion and killing the other. (That was Shmuley’s tactic, for example.)
A Real Question? Likely Not, Although I Play With Its Reality For While
Our question, our real question, is how to express that compassion in thought, words, and action. That is far more difficult than simply casting our moralistically given or found stones at the other without having acknowledged our own sin of dis-compassion. All sides are guilty of this, which is what my current essays are exploring. Including Owens. It demands of us to put away our childishness and take responsibility for seeing what is true. Single vision is, perhaps, the greatest enemy of that because it gives us the moral rectitude to be correct always, even when engaged in egregious ad hominem attacks and even killing the undeserving other.
There are no sides. There is only us. Us making sides then to take them with fractured imaginations to look, vainly, for singular truth and denying our experience of the multiplicity, multifaceted even fractalated nature life. When can we show compassion and reduce within ourselves the pain of that hurt child? And with that grow into our responsibility as adults and so be moved to reduce the suffering of those around us? Choosing sides is to remain the suffering child hurting the other instead looking within, as Christ directed us to do, for example. Of course, he wasn’t the only one to suggest that. All the ‘true’ sacred texts in the world, in their own way, one way or the other say the same thing. We are to stop casting stones and take responsibility for our own suffering so as to reduce the aggregate of the world’s suffering.
There are no sides.
Sides are the false creation of the enforcement of singular vision. That enforcement creates the schismogenesis that creates the sides. Once created, then begins the search for stones to throw at the other side, metaphorically in words or bombs.
There are no sides.
Penultimate Ending
And, to end this essay, I have chosen an extended set of quotations from Hannah Arendt and her book Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution. They have a powerful resonance, to me, with the subject of this comment-essay.
…let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. [It is often the needed first step to be able to see the creation of something new, ie, something that lies outside of our experience and expectation of future experiences.] Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make [the lie] disappear (my emphasis and edit.) [I would would state that moral outrage is more likely the source and/or perpetuator of the lie.]
Arendt has a sharp inquiry into the psychology of why cons work on even the most rational of us. Look at all the super smart intellectuals and social critics who swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the convid, for example.
[Our minds have been ruptured enough to create a fragility in the trust of what is tangible and real] that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason§, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. [The con man, the liar,] has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.
§Did Arendt know what Martin Luther thought of reason? From Luther:
But since the devil’s bride, Reason, that pretty whore, comes in and thinks she’s wise, and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit, who can help us, then? Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor, because [reason] is the Devil’s greatest whore. (Martin Luther’s Last Sermon in Wittenberg … Second Sunday in Epiphany, 17 January 1546. Dr. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. (Weimar: Herman Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1914), Band 51:126, Line 7ff)
Back to Arendt:
Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.
…
The deceivers started with self-deception.
…
The self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which still will catch up with him, because he can remove his mind from [the tangible/physical world] but not his body.
(All citations are from Crises of the Republic. For an excellent exploration of these quotations and more, see ‘The Marginalia’ by Maria Popova. My emphasis and edits.)
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