A holiday miracle in the making?

A few quick notes before the Christmas break:

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I’m not sure what’s gotten into the former guy lately, but I like it:

Former President Donald Trump pushed back on Candace Owens during a recent interview when the conservative commentator appeared to be undermining the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines to hurt President Joe Biden politically.

Trump joined the Daily Wire host for a wide-ranging interview, which was released on Wednesday, in which the two pushed various conspiracy theories surrounding the riot in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. But the issue of vaccines came up and the former president continued to tout the efficacy of the vaccines in a manner that will likely encourage some of the vaccine-hesitant and eventually save lives.

Trump took credit for the incredible speed at which the vaccinations were developed during his administration and in partnership with private pharmaceuticals, reiterating a point he made over the weekend during Bill O’Reilly.

“I came up with a vaccine with three vaccines,” Trump said. “All are very, very good. Came up with three of them in less than nine months. It was supposed to take five to 12 years.”

Owens interjected, “yet more people have died under COVID this year.” She then pivoted to hit the current administration, saying “By the way, under Joe Biden, then under you and more people took the vaccine this year. So people are questioning how …”

Trump interrupted “oh no, the vaccine work, but some people aren’t the ones. The ones who get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected.”

This doesn’t make up for [waves hands around generally] but it’s better than nothing. As for Owens and her more-Trumpy-than-Trump crowd, it’s hard to imagine anything more cynical than fighting tooth and nail against everything that might mitigate this raging pandemic, and then blaming the current President for the death toll.

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The new President of Chile has some interesting views about a certain ethnic-religious group:

Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old left-wing lawmaker who has been sharply critical of Israel and Chilean Jews who support it, was elected president of Chile in a landslide victory this weekend.

Boric, who came to fame as a student leader, won with 56% of the vote, 12 points over his conservative rival, José Antonio Kast, a right-wing pro-Israel politician.

The election left many Chilean Jews feeling uneasy because they had to choose between Boric, who has encouraged Chilean Jews to lobby for Israeli territorial concessions, and Kast, a right-wing pro-Israel politician whose father likely was a Nazi and who has defended the legacy of Augusto Pinochet, the head of Chile’s military dictatorship that killed thousands of dissidents in the 1970s.

Okay, so he’s against Israel. That’s not antisemitic in and of itself, right?

No, it isn’t. The problem is, Boric has a history of making it clear to Chilean Jews that they have a patriotic duty to denounce the Jewish state, or else:

The official group representing Chile’s roughly 18,000 Jews has a complicated relationship with Boric. In 2019, it sent him a Rosh Hashanah gift along with a note expressing a desire for a “more inclusive, respectful society with more solidarity.”

“I appreciate the gesture but they could start by asking Israel to return the illegally occupied Palestinian territory,” Boric wrote after posting a picture of the gift to Twitter.

[…]

Boric’s criticism of Israel is longstanding. As a lawmaker, he supported a bill proposing to boycott Israeli goods from the Golan, West Bank settlements and areas of Jerusalem that came under in Israeli control in 1967.

And during the campaign, many members of the community expressed concerns over that comment and what they said was a pattern of demanding that local Jews condemn Israeli policy.

“We do not believe that it is fair or correct for you to hold the Jews […] responsible for the policies of a government in power in Israel,” read an open letter in July to Boric by 500 Chilean Jewish women. “History is full of examples of unjust accusations or massive blame on our people.”

Some Chilean Jews fear Boric intends to promote his supporter Daniel Jadue, a major communist of Palestinian descent who has declined to explain why his high school yearbook lists him as a “an anti-Semite” who will “clean the city of Jews. ”He has called the Jewish Community of Chile the“ Zionist Community of Chile, ”and Chilean Jews have called him an antisemite. Jadue has denied the charge, arguing that he himself is a “semite because he’s an Arab.”

Contacted by the Jewish Community of Chile for a comment about Jadue, Boric answered he would reply when community leaders “oppose the Israeli policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to the letter, signed by some of Chile’s most prominent Jewish women.

Even I oppose many of Israel’s policies while supporting the country in general. I don’t even think it’s necessarily antisemitic to oppose Israel’s existence. (The argument that it’s a “settler-colonial” state can be, and often is, used to denounce the legitimacy of Canada.)

But when you’re making it clear to Jews that you only represent them if they denounce the actions of the Jewish state in which they don’t actually live, well, I think it’s fair to draw some conclusions.

By the way, the guy Boric beat in the election thinks the country’s late, unlamented, right-wing dictator was all that. With a far-left candidate just barely beating out the daughter of a former autocrat in Peru, Maduro running Venezuela so far into the ground it’s like he’s remaking The Core, and a legitimate insane person as President of Brazil, the return of the Latin American caudillo is one of the least welcome developments of this blighted decade.

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“No one is erasing history,” they said, while literally erasing history:

The Royal British Columbia Museum has been repeatedly voted as one of Canada’s top cultural attractions by reviewers on TripAdvisor. It often ranks as one of the country’s most-visited museums and the Frommer’s travel guide refers to it as “hands down, one of the world’s best regional museums.”

And in less than two weeks, almost all of the Royal B.C. Museum’s most signature attractions are being abruptly ripped out in the name of “decolonization.”

The demolition contracts have already been signed. Starting on Jan. 2, crews will start taking crowbars to life-sized dioramas of a Peace River homestead, a salmon cannery, a Vancouver Island coal mine and HMS Discovery, the flagship of British explorer George Vancouver.

Most notable of all, crews will be ripping out Old Town, the museum’s walk-through recreation of a B.C. community at the Turn of the Century. Lining a model street paved with authentic wooden cobblestones are a Grand Hotel, a blacksmith shop, a movie theatre screening Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and a railway station where special effects are used to simulate the arrival of trains.

By mid-2022, the only exhibits left unscathed at the Royal B.C. Museum will be its second-floor natural history galleries.

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In prior eras, when the Royal B.C. Museum has faced criticisms of presenting a Eurocentric vision of provincial history, the usual reaction of management was to add context to its existing galleries.

In 1990, Royal B.C. Museum curator Bob Griffin admitted that Old Town was “largely a reflection of the working/middle class European (largely English) origin of the early immigrants.” In response, the museum drafted a “plan to delineate and increase ethnic profiles within all the galleries.”

The most notable change was the addition of a Chinatown to Old Town in 1992, for which the museum partnered with the Victoria Chinatown Lion’s Club and local Chinese-Canadian historian David Chuenyan Lai.

A 1970s-era sawmill diorama was similarly updated with a display highlighting the experiences of Punjabi-Canadians in the B.C. forestry sector. The cannery section saw the addition of a fish butchering machine that had been sold to early 20 th century B.C. canneries under the brand name of the “Iron Chink” – a stark illustration of the overt racism directed at Chinese fish butchering crews.

One of the first actions of Lohman upon his arrival to Victoria was to coordinate the creation of Our Living Languages, the exhibit that currently greets visitors to the third floor human history galleries. Created with the assistance of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, it highlights B.C. for being home to one of the most dense collections of Indigenous languages on earth.

Visitors first walk through a “language forest” in which they’re bombarded by spoken greetings from 34 First Nations languages.

At the end, they’re met with videos and displays detailing the Government of Canada’s concerted attempts to destroy Indigenous languages right up until the era of living memory.

When the American Alliance of Museums gave the exhibit their Excellence in Exhibition award in 2015, judges marvelled in particular at the RBCM’s work to track down speakers for some of B.C.’s rarest languages in order to build an accurate auditory catalogue to accompany the exhibit.

Our Living Languages — as well as Chinatown and the rest of the third floor — is scheduled to be gone in less than two weeks.

Read the whole story and it’s clear that there were some serious issues with how many museum exhibits were acquired and displayed. (Some ceremonial masks were, if not outright stolen from native peoples, “purchased” from them in the same way Pablo Escobar would want to enter into a mutually beneficial business transaction with you.) It is not at all clear that this scorched-earth “renovation” was a grassroots demand from actual First Nations people instead of progressive white folks just assuming this is what they want and dismissing it as “internalized white supremacy” if they don’t.