Finding Galt's Gulch

Circa 2004 on a sunny, midsummer day, I and friend Mr. Z3, who is Jewish, went to Jo Goldenberg's deli in the Paris Marais for breakfast. Goldenberg's deli was a respite for holocaust survivors and resistance fighters after the war. Goldenberg's was attacked by a Palestinian militant organization in 1982. Six were killed, including two Americans, and twenty-two were injured. Our server in the sparsely frequented deli that late morning, was none other than Jo Goldenberg himself. Jo, in his mid 70's, joined us for a late breakfast and rehearsed (in French) the sad decline of the once vibrant Jewish presence in France.

Since Mr. Z3's and my visit to the Marais in 2004, 150 thousand Jews have left France, mostly for Israel, leaving France's total Jewish population at 350 thousand. Conditions in France remain inhospitable for Jews as antisemitic violence has not abated over the last decade. 10% of the French population is Muslim. Muslim militants were responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015. Targeted attacks against Jews in France remain all to frequent and disproportionate to overall crime rates in France.

The French population pays lip service to denounce antisemitism... but, that's about as far as it goes. The climate for Jews in France today is decidedly inhospitable. It is understandable that French Jews are leaving France in significant numbers.

Is there an antisemitic climate in the United States, which like France, is so virulent that it could spur a significant outward migration of American Jews seeking more hospitable climes? I would have hardly thought so until I saw Dana Milbank's 28 October 2022 column, Opinion: American Jews start to think the unthinkable - The Washington Post. I had to think again.

Milbank reports that his rabbi recently polled his Jewish congregation asking how many of the faithful had considered "the unthinkable," that is, fleeing the United States. Milbank said most individuals in the congregation raised their hands. Milbank's column indicated a tripling of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault in the United States between 2015 and 2021. Milbank also posited that "the disappearance [from the United States] of liberal democracy would be a disaster for Jews, implying that many Jews would have no other alternative but to leave the United States should liberal democracy erode. The implication here was that growing populist electoral strength in the US would correlate to the demise of liberal democracy and render American Jews even more vulnerable to antisemitic threats and violence.

So, like France before it, antisemitism appears to be on the rise in the United States. Therefore, for a Jewish person to consider leaving the US, as has been the case in France, seems understandable.

I commiserate. I am not Jewish, but like the members of Milbank's Jewish congregation, I am also sensing "ill winds" in the US that could cause me to want to flee the United States. I don't want to minimize the horror of the holocaust and the reemergence of sentiments that gave rise to it. But the horrible consequences of tyranny have smitten peoples other than the Jews. In the previous century, as many as 100 million deaths have been attributed to tyrants Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

So, you don't have to be Jewish to feel threatened by the ascendency of tyranny, antisemitic or otherwise. But certainly, tyranny and its horrible consequences could never happen in the United States, right?

Happily, the US is not, today, a totalitarian state... far from it. But the trends towards consolidation of power in the US, a country conceived on the foundation of limited central government, are worrisome, particularly as those in power take increasing aim at political enemies. To wit. The rise of woke orthodoxy, supported by US government institutions and US corporations, threatens to minimize individual freedom at the expense of group/race preference. Progressive Democrat controlled government wants to abrogate constitutional protections of gun ownership, free speech and religious freedom. A mom voicing her opinion on educational curriculum to a local school board is labeled as a domestic terrorist by the US Department of Justice. Conservative groups that celebrate constitutional originalism are targeted by the IRS. Should one choose not to receive the Covid vaccine, he or she could lose their job. Be one Jewish or Conservative, rising government backed threats to both groups have the potential to make American life untenable.

But where can threatened Americans, Jewish or Conservative, who feel unsafe in America, go? I've lived over twenty years outside of the United States in seven countries, visited one hundred thirty-one countries and set foot on seven continents. I don't know of a place that offers more opportunity for individual freedom and self-fulfillment than the United States... at least up until now. Sadly, most parts of the world today trend towards tyranny. Tribalism and autocracy are on the rise everywhere. If America, which for one hundred years, has been a guarantor of freedom around the world, loses its freedom culture I don't see any place that can pick up the freedom baton. If America loses its freedom edge, the world sinks into another dark ages. Jews could migrate to Israel, but Israel is threatened by tyrannical forces all around it and survives as a democratic country today only thanks to a US guarantee, a guarantee threatened by further US government centralization directed by antisemitic progressives.

In Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," when government overreach and abrogated freedoms in a fictional country made life untenable, freedom lovers found a new, free place to live: Galt's Gulch. If things continue to get worse for Milbank's Jewish congregation which is victimized by rising antisemitism and Conservatives who are watching their freedoms erode in an environment of ascendent woke-ism, could they join forces to locate and inhabit a new "Galt's Gulch?" Personally, I like Arizona as a Galt's Gulch candidate as long as a Pacific port could be secured from Mexico at Rocky Point.