Fake Virtue Lowers the Value of Citizenship

A Story of Bogus Virtue

When I was in my early twenties, I met a rabbi who worked as a kosher slaughterer. He was an old-fashioned, pious man who had grown up in Poland and escaped to the U.S. shortly before the Holocaust.

He befriended me at the synagogue we both attended. When he found out that I was trying to find my feet in Talmud study, not having had a traditional Jewish education, he offered to tutor me. I took advantage of his offer and spent several hours a week at his home in intensive, hands-on, one-on-one tutoring. His reward for this, he said several times, was to know that I would carry on the tradition, studying on my own and teaching others. Satisfied with such a payoff, he wouldn’t take a penny.

He spiced his lessons with stories, ones he thought I ought to hear and learn from. One story was about when a new slaughterer came to the place where he worked

This new shochet soon had my rabbi worried. The problem was this. Kosher slaughterers must inspect the animal they have slaughtered to see if its inner organs are healthy and undamaged. My rabbi related that he passed about 80 percent of the steer he slaughtered as kosher; the other 20 percent, he had to tag as non-kosher, and the owner would suffer no loss of value, as kosher meat sells at a premium. But the new man on the job was averaging the opposite — he passed only 20 percent and tagged 80 percent as non-kosher.

My rabbi was very worried — perhaps he was losing his touch. Perhaps he had been passing on meat that really was not kosher, causing spiritual harm and perhaps even physical harm to innocent people. So, he went over one day to examine an animal that the new man had rejected, and perhaps he could learn to improve his skills.

He looked and looked and could find nothing wrong, so he asked the new fellow what the problem had been with this particular animal. The new man pointed out to him a certain feature on the steer’s lung. My rabbi, astonished, said to him, “But that feature is addressed in kosher law and it does not invalidate the meat.”

“I know,” said the new man, “But I am a machmir — I am strict.”

My rabbi replied with a Yiddish pun, “You’re not a machmir, you’re a mach dir.” Machmir, as above, means in Hebrew someone who is strict. But he was punningly reading it as a Yiddish phrase meaning “making something of mine” and saying, no, you weren’t making something of your own, but rather, you were “Making something of his.” He was being very righteous on someone else’s account. It made him look good and virtuous, but it is empty of meaning — the sacrifice was made by someone else, the owner, who alone had the right to be strict beyond the law’s requirement.

It was a lesson as good as any in the books. And it’s a guide for our own times, infected as it is by a pandemic of bogus claims of virtue.

Senators Go Virtue Signaling

The usual suspects in the political realm are posing as champions of democracy. Senators fly off to El Salvador, hoping to make grand gestures of righteous advocacy for the case of a Salvadoran citizen here illegally. The Salvadoran has had his several days in court, was found by the judge to be an MS-13 gang member — and this finding was upheld on appeal —  and was ordered removed from the country. Moreover, his girlfriend had twice lodged complaints to Maryland courts that he physically assaulted her. But the Senators are appealing beyond the law, claiming somehow that not to do so would destroy the Constitution, and that deporting this man meant American citizens had to fear being jailed on the President’s whim.

Clearly, the Senators believe that their audience don’t have the logical powers of even a third grader. They are making a grand theatrical gesture of virtue — that should be enough to override every rational consideration and have everyone in awe of them.

It is nice to go beyond the law when it is your sacrifice — you suffer the consequence of your choice, which makes the sacrifice genuine. But that is not the Senators’ intention. They will not live in the neighborhood of this gangbanger if they succeed and force his return to the U.S. The Senators and their like live in safe places, and let the subordinate classes pay for their grand displays of virtue.

People like the Senators and their upper-class donors like the cheap labor they get from illegally flooding the market with millions of people. They don’t mind that their cheap help often are enslaved to the cartels that got fat in bringing them here and who extract their earnings here without end. These people fancy themselves virtuous and fine, going beyond the law.

American workers pay for their delicious shivers of virtue by losing bargaining leverage. Inner city neighborhoods pay by having their support systems overwhelmed; rural communities’ medical resources, already stretched, now routinely require long waits for appointments and jammed waiting rooms, as Victor Davis Hanson reports regularly from his home in the California farm country.

The biggest penalty suffered is the devaluation of citizenship. That is the real slippery slope we have been on. A last-ditch fight is being put up in the courts by the Virtue Fraud Gang, who have allies everywhere. Trump has upended their plan to neutralize the value of American citizenship.

When they ran the show, their actions and policies put the concerns of citizens behind those of the people they were bringing illegally into the country to serve their plans. The Virtue Fraud Gang finds the rights of regular citizens and the protection they have a right to expect from their own government gets in the way of their great drama of pretend goodness.  They get great value from cheap illegal labor and their (supposedly) manageable votes, as the Virtue Fraud Gang believes and which it has written about in such tomes as Demography is Destiny and The Emerging Democratic Majority.

I don’t know what happened in the end with the new man at my rabbi’s workplace. I hope he wound up learning not to follow the path of fake virtue and opted for the real thing.

But I do have a sense that a lot of people have grown very aware of the fake virtue game in America. They trusted the virtue signalers because a society’s greatest wealth is the trust of its citizens, as Jordan Peterson often stresses.

But many people have learned by experience that the virtue these people signaled was pretend, not actual. And once burned, twice cautious. They are not buying it any more. They see through it; they do not like being gamed. They don’t like having their own virtues, honestly earned in life, cheapened by the wholesale counterfeiting of this gang.

The people don’t care who these Virtue Fraud Gang members may be: senators, judges, TV anchors, university presidents, journalists. If they are dealing in fraud, they are fraudsters. The people value their own citizenship, and they know those who would destroy its meaning and value do not deserve their trust.

More and more, citizens will not participate in the devaluing of the immense worth of their American citizenship. They will sacrifice to uphold it and preserve it for themselves and their posterity.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

MAGA and the Citizen Against Globalism

The Abraham Accords Are the Way Toward Peace

Identifying and Correcting Our Mistakes Is a Moral Obligation

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