A Battle for the Soul

By Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz

The news landed last week like a thud. A heavily edited, carefully scripted and produced three-minute video announced that Joe Biden was running for reelection as president of the United States. The present occupant of the most prestigious and difficult job in the land is going to try to get another four years as commander-in-chief of this country and the so-called leader of the free world.

Normally, the announcement that an incumbent president is running for reelection would be a festive, heavily promoted, occasion. There would be incessant coverage, and a large crowd of dignitaries and supporters would line up alongside him, as the smiling president would proudly speak about all he has accomplished and his plans for the future, the crowd chanting, “Four more years!” The president would then take off for a bit of a triumphant tour of important battleground cities, where he would tout his achievements and test drive stump speeches.

But not this candidate. Apparently, even his own people don’t trust him to read a statement live from his teleprompter, and certainly not to speak extemporaneously, even on a topic as important as his reelection. So, they had him say in the video that he is running so that he can “finish the job” he started.

He didn’t explain what job he started that needs finishing. But he did rehash his poll-tested refrain: “The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer. I know what I want the answer to be. This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for reelection.”

Most of the country didn’t notice the announcement, and those who did were underwhelmed as they went about their day. But no one was embarrassed. Nobody felt humiliated that a person who was always considered incompetent, bumbling and unintelligent is president.

Like the video, everything pertaining to Biden and his campaign is scripted and depends on the mainstream media playing and helping along, doing what he cannot do and campaigning for him because he can’t campaign either. They give words to actions, thoughts to his mindlessness, and attribute to him what his staff does.

For decades, Joe Biden was known as a gaffe machine, and now as well, every time President Biden speaks, he demonstrates how foolish he is and how disastrous his policies are. The media doesn’t report on that. Instead, they bash Donald Trump and people like you and me, portraying us as dangerous extremists who are fascistic, anti-democratic, anti-science and anti-progress.

None of the traditional media will be reminding voters of the Biden lockdowns imposed and sustained during Covid, the masks on school kids, and months of little or no school.

They won’t discuss the runaway inflation that Biden’s policies caused, nor the disastrous Afghanistan escape and the embarrassment that followed. They won’t be asking the president questions about the way he caused America to be snubbed by Russia, China, France, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and many more major players in the world sphere who no longer respect or fear the United States.

The first week of the campaign, Biden didn’t do more than he usually does. He traveled a few miles to read a speech to a friendly union crowd. The next day, he had a small press conference with the children, thinking that he would do okay with them. He didn’t. While responding to their questions, he couldn’t remember how many grandchildren he had or where they live. He couldn’t remember his last foreign trip either. A child reminded him that he had been in Ireland. At the end of the week, a staff member revealed that very few activities were scheduled for him earlier than 10 a.m. or later than 4 p.m., lest he not be able to perform properly.

And now that he is an official candidate, don’t expect that to change. You won’t see Biden barnstorming across the country, engaging in town halls, shaking hands, and exchanging small talk with people. You won’t even see him debating Democrat presidential challengers, such as RFK Jr., who is approaching 20% support a few weeks after declaring his candidacy.

The president is simply not up to the task. He can’t travel too much too often. He can’t speak without revealing that he does not have a proper comprehension of what is going on. Every time he speaks, people watch and think to themselves that he should not be president and should not be running for reelection.

So why, you wonder, is the party allowing him to run? They have to know that he is weakened, not a good president or candidate, and seriously lacking in public support. A Gallup poll last week showed him at 37% popular support.

The answer is that, in essence, he is a prop for the Democrat party. The campaign will raise over a billion dollars and the party will put it to good use, as they have previously done, on a get-out-the-vote effort. They will hire people to go door to door asking people to sign paper ballots and then deliver them in the mail. To win, as they did last time, they don’t have to debate issues or tout their unpopular candidates. They don’t have to defend Biden and Harris, because the issues are not what decide elections anymore. In fact, they make little difference.

The country is basically tied. The race is basically decided by five percent of the voters in five states. The party that gets out the most votes, even by a slim margin, wins. So while the Republicans will spend their money demonstrating that Biden has opened the border, enforced nonsensical woke policies, is incompetent, and ruined a good economy and a strong country as it recovered from Covid, if they, like last time, don’t spend money on vote harvesting, they will once again go down to defeat.

And it won’t just be the party that loses. Since this is an existential election, the country will lose as well. The left will be empowered to continue their socialist slide. Not only will taxes rise and the economy continue to stumble, but the moral fabric of the country will come apart. In this paper, we don’t write about all the woke policies that the administration is formulating and enforcing in schools, businesses and government offices. We also don’t discuss these topics in our communities. But that doesn’t mean that we can ignore what is going on and support the dissolution of traditional family life by electing liberals and Democrats. We are deluding ourselves if we think that wokism won’t affect us.

There is an international battle going on now between the Left and the Right. Compare what is going on in this country to what is happening in Eretz Yisroel. Here, the Left is in power and is working diligently to assume total power over everything. Their plans were stymied in the first half of Biden’s administration by two stubborn Democrat senators who kept things tangled up, though they ended up voting for the party bills. Then Republicans won a narrow majority in the House in 2022. But they still control the Senate, and the president has advanced the progressive agenda by signing over one hundred executive orders.

In Israel, the Left lied its way into power, with Naftoli Bennett getting elected by promising never to form a coalition with Yair Lapid or Arab parties. Upon election, he did exactly that. After causing much mayhem and damage to the country, that coalition finally fell apart and the nation endured its fifth election in less than four years. The Right won a decisive victory and Binyomin Netanyahu was returned once again to the premiership. As Netanyahu began assembling his coalition, the Left started plotting to bring it down.

They took their plan public after Netanyahu’s Likud party began working with MK Simcha Rothman of the Religious-Zionism party to do as they promised in the election campaign and embark on reforming the country’s dictatorial justice system. Judges on the Supreme Court are not elected as they are here, but appointed by sitting judges. They are answerable to no one and have supreme power over every law and everything that transpires in the country. As we have been reporting here, the coalition is working to bring some checks and balances and democracy to the process.

The Israeli Left found its excuse, and with financial support from American secular Jewish organizations and donors, the Left unleashed its campaign to basically cancel the past election and cause Netanyahu and the Right to lose power.

As Biden and the Left did in America, they created the narrative that the Right is fascist and anti-democratic. Biden, though, just talks about it, such as in his reelection video, where he said, “Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy, stand up for our personal freedoms, and stand up for our right to vote and our civil rights. This is ours.” Once again, he painted Republicans as anti-democratic and exhorted Americans to vote for him because he will preserve democracy here. The Israeli Left has gone further, holding massive weekly demonstrations against the anti-democratic Right which they say wants to destroy Israel’s democracy by wiping out the justice system.

The Left seeks to have the election results overturned by claiming that they are fighting for democracy. The compliant media broadcasts their propaganda, creating the illusion that the majority of the country supports the Left. Leftist leaders shamelessly ply their lies to leaders of Israel’s allies and convince them to lobby Netanyahu to accede to the wishes of the Left if he wishes to enjoy continued allied friendship and support. They seek to hurt the country not only politically, but also financially, convincing tech leaders to announce that they will pull their money out of Israel and persuading credit rating companies to threaten to drop Israel’s grades. After all, everything is fair when democracy is at stake.

Just as former President Trump was bogged down with investigations based upon lies, Prime Minister Netanyahu has been battling corruption charges in court for the past many years. Though the charges are obviously bogus, the charade continues and the media reminds everyone that a pall hangs over the country’s leader. Not only that, but the prime minster is forbidden by the Leftist Attorney General to get involved in the battle over judicial reform and seek a solution to the issue ripping the country apart as a legitimate leader would be expected to. He is banned from doing so because he is a “nogeia bedovor” as a defendant in a case being brought by the government against him.

So while Bennett and Lapid work to delegitimize Netanyahu, his coalition government and the battle to reform an out-of-control judiciary, their clear goal is to overturn the will of the people, change the public’s positive perception of the Right, and besmirch the religious community as well.

Let nobody think that what is going on is anything other than a battle of Left against Right and wrong against right. It is a war over the soul of Eretz Yisroel. Will the Left be allowed to continue their campaign to trounce everything halachic in the state or not? Will they be permitted to continue working to eradicate everything Jewish about the state and turn it into a liberal, anti-religious entity, or will it be allowed to maintain its Jewish veneer and flavor? Anyone who watched or participated in the 600,000 person Right rally last week in Yerushalayim was able to note that every one of the speakers referred to the ongoing debate as a battle against Yahadus and a Medinah Yehudit.

Let nobody delude themselves into thinking otherwise.

And the current election here is much the same. This is not a race between Republican and Democrat, Trump and Biden, nasty tweeter and nice old man, or anything of the sort. This is a battle between whether the United States should be a country of traditional democratic religious values or a socialist anti-religious paradise. Every check next to a Democrat name is a vote against religion, against morality, against capitalism, and against everything that has allowed us to grow and prosper.

There will be much propaganda on both sides and billions of dollars spent to convince you to vote a certain way, but never will it be more important to understand what underlies it all.