Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see a bit of snow with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 11m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred eighty-second day.
On this day in 1861, Sauk County volunteers join the Union Army:
On this date 26 volunteers from Sauk County departed for Madison where they became part of the First Wisconsin Infantry, Company F. By the end of the war, over one thousand men served in the Union Army from Sauk County.
Recommended for reading in full:
Eric Levitz writes If You Are Defending Stephen Miller, You Are an Ally of Anti-Semitism:
It is true that Stephen Miller is Jewish, and that white nationalists have historically targeted Jews for persecution. But this does not mean that Miller cannot be a white nationalist. There was a time in the U.S. when white supremacists were virulently anti-Catholic, and considered the Irish to be a subhuman race. That has not made it impossible for an Irish Catholic like Steve Bannon to openly endorse white-nationalist novels and thinkers.“White people” is not a coherent biological or ethnic category. It is a social caste with semi-porous borders. And by all appearances, Miller identifies with that caste. More to the point, there is no evidence whatsoever that [Democratic congresswoman Ilhan] Omar directed her criticism toward Miller because of his Jewish heritage and not because of his (undisputed) status as the White House’s most influential and hardline immigration adviser.
But the GOP’s decision to brand Omar’s comments as anti-Semitic is something much worse than unfair or unsupportable. It is confirmation that the party sees anti-Semitism less as a scourge to be combatted than as a political cudgel to be exploited.
….
It is worth noting that even if Trump’s revanchist nativism didn’t contain traces of anti-Semitism, it would remain a form of politics that endangers Diaspora Jews. Jewish reactionaries like Stephen Miller might be able to assimilate to the form of Americanism that Trump champions. But the vast majority of American Jews are liberal, cosmopolitan, and secularist. Which is to say: They are the “globalist” villains in Trumpism’s Manichaean fable of American decline.
And even if Trump’s politics did not endanger Jews, anyone who has ever uttered “never again” in earnest would still be obliged to oppose him. If you are a Jew who has “zero tolerance” for anti-Semitism — but infinite tolerance for a president who describes immigrants as an “infestation,” and directs extrajudicial cruelty at their children — then you aren’t so different from the Nazis’ apologists. You share their conviction that some populations are entitled to basic rights, while others are not.
You just believe the führer should have included your people among the chosen.