Veteran 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley reported on Donald Trump’s efforts to strong-arm some of the country’s top law firms into doing his bidding on Sunday night’s episode of the embattled CBS newsmagazine.
Pelley’s segment pulled no punches in describing Trump’s efforts and reminding viewers that Trump is the “first felon” ever to sit in the Oval Office.
A certain philosopher seems spot-on about the nature of our enemy.
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The antisemites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.
[The anti-Semite attributes] all or part of his own misfortunes and those of his country to the presence of Jewish elements in the community, … proposes to remedy this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of certain of their rights, by keeping them out of certain economic and social activities, by expelling them from the country, by exterminating all of them …
It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than of reason. But ordinarily they love the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves.
[The anti-Semite] fears every kind of solitariness… however small his stature, he takes every precaution to make it smaller, lest he stand out from the herd and find himself face to face with himself. He has made himself an anti-Semite because that is something one cannot be alone.
[The anti-Semite is afraid] of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews. [He is] a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself.
Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man.