The ADL: Managing White Rage

Kevin MacDonald

December 7, 2009

A recent Haaretz article on the state of the Jewish world contained the following:

In general today, one of the long-term challenges for the American Jewish community is evident in demographic forecasts that predict that in two or three decades, certain minority groups are expected to become a majority in the United States. A recent ADL poll showed that 12 percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic views — but among African-Americans, the figure is 28 percent, and among foreign-born Hispanics it is 35 percent.

"If 20 years from now the largest caucus in Congress is Hispanic, they will have a great deal to say about where foreign aid goes," says [ADL head Abraham] Foxman. "On church-state issues and all kinds of social issues — some of which impact directly on the Jewish community and some indirectly — they will have a great influence. We are working on it now, so as they become the majority force, there is a sensitivity, a relationship. It's a major challenge."

Jews tend to have a very large blind spot when it comes to immigration. Norman Podhoretz recently published a book titled Why are Jews Liberals? The basic pitch is that American Jews should support the Republican Party because it’s better for Israel. Podhoretz never proposes that Jews should actually become conservative — just support Republicans because they’re better for Israel. It never occurs to Podhoretz to oppose immigration for the same reasons alluded to by Foxman, his fellow Jewish activist and unregistered agent for a foreign government — to wit, that a future America with a non-White majority may well have much higher levels of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment than an America with a White majority.

Podhoretz claims that American Jews have a religious devotion to liberalism — religious in the sense that it is wonderfully impervious to empirical reality or even a reasonable view of Jewish interests. But Podhoretz’s pro-immigration brand of “conservatism” is open to the same charge — that it’s not in the interests of Jews.

Is Jewish support for immigration really irrational? Stephen Steinlight certainly thinks it is, stating, for example,

“Privately [American Jewish leaders] express grave concern that unregulated immigration will prove ruinous to American Jewry, as it has for French Jewry, and will for Jews throughout Western Europe. There’s particular fear about the impact on Jewish security, as well as American support for Israel, of the rapid growth of the Muslim population. At the conclusion of meetings with national leaders, several told me, ‘You’re 1000 percent right, but I can’t go out and say it yet.’”

In fact, Steinlight even argues that massive immigration in general is bad for Jews: “Massive immigration will obliterate Jewish power by shrinking our percentage of the population — to a fraction of 1% in 20 years.”  And he points out that there is also a problem with Latinos because they are

steeped in a culture of theological anti-Semitism that’s defied the post-Vatican II enlightenment of European and North American Catholicism. Nor have they a mitigating history of familiarity with Jews, little knowledge and no direct or familial experience of the Holocaust, and regard Jews simply as among the most privileged of white Americans. An ADL study found 47 percent of Latinos hold strongly anti-Semitic attitudes.

The idea that Jewish support for immigration is irrational fits well with the hostility that even Jews like Steinlight have toward the traditional people and culture of America. Steinlight’s hostility toward the restrictionism of 1924–1965 is palpable. This “pause” in immigration is perceived as a moral catastrophe. He describes it as “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,” a “monstrous policy.” Jewish interests are his only consideration, while the vast majority of pre-1965 Americans are described as a “thoughtless mob” because they advocate a complete moratorium on immigration. (See here.)

Such hostility is likely to be blind to rational calculations of self-interest — at least for most Jews. Just as the vast majority of Jews can’t bring themselves to vote Republican because of fear and loathing of all those conservative Christians — a major theme of Podhoretz’s book, Jews can’t bring themselves to oppose immigration because of fear and loathing of Europeans and their culture.

Nevertheless, the fact that Jews are doomed to follow their gut hostility about Europeans and their culture doesn’t mean that they aren’t making rational calculations about the future. Foxman’s comments indicate what is doubtless the mainstream Jewish attitude about a non-White future: It presents problems, but the problems are manageable if the organized Jewish community makes alliances with the looming non-White majority.

And that is exactly what they have done. As I noted elsewhere,

Jewish organizations have made alliances with other non-white ethnic activist organizations. For example, groups such as the AJCommittee and the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington have formed coalitions with organizations such as the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). A prominent aspect of this effort is the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, co-founded by Rabbi Marc Schneier, President of the North American Boards of Rabbis. The Foundation is closely tied to the World Jewish Congress which co-sponsors the Foundation’s Washington, DC office and several of its programs. Typical of the Foundation’s efforts was a meeting in August, 2003 of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Jewish Congressional Delegation, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; the meeting was co-sponsored by the World Jewish Congress. The Foundation’s many programs include organizing the Congressional Jewish/Black Caucus, the Corporate Diversity Award, given to “a major Fortune 500 company committed to building a diverse work force,” the Annual Latino/Jewish Congressional Awards Ceremony, the Annual Black/Jewish Congressional Awards Ceremony, and the Annual Interethnic Congressional Leadership Forum. The latter project organizes an annual meeting of the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the World Jewish Congress, and the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. Quite clearly the various non-European ethnic groups are developing close ties and Jewish organizations are taking the lead in this effort. (Jews, Blacks, and Race; Ch. 14 of Cultural Insurrections)

Besides making alliances with non-White groups, Jewish groups may well have a reasonable fear that any movement to restrict immigration is bound to bring White racial consciousness to the fore. Calls to restrict legal and illegal immigration would inevitably be met by anguished hostility and cries of "racism" by Latinos and others who are the main beneficiaries of current immigration policy. This would increase White racial consciousness. One only has to recall the high-profile marches in Los Angeles and other cities during the 2007 Congressional battles over illegal immigration. Whites around the country were treated to open displays of hostility by Latinos and others.

And of course, support for immigration restriction would come from many of the same groups that Jews fear the most: Whites and Christians. (Podhoretz's book is a good primer on Jewish hostility toward Christianity and the culture of the West.) Moreover, it would be applauded by the racialist right — some of whom have explicitly anti-Jewish views. It would also tend to legitimize the racialist right because undoubtedly their main concern is the dispossession of White America via immigration.

The campaign to manage White discontent is multipronged. A good recent example is the ADL report, “Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies.” It begins thus: “Rumors about gun confiscations.  Angry protests about the government's tax policies, replete with Nazi comparisons.  A resurgent militia movement.  Rage at the election of a president deemed to be illegitimate and threatening.  Distrust and anger toward the government fueled by paranoia and conspiracy theories.”

Yikes! The peasants are getting their pitchforks.

But then the report shifts into management mode. Particularly important is to keep any vestige of “extremism” out the mainstream media, particularly anything that would legitimate White anger and concerns about the future. Because of the bothersome First Amendment, Jewish organizations cannot simply outlaw all the speech that they dislike, although they would certainly like to do exactly that. We know this because Jewish organizations have been strong advocates of laws against speech around the world whether or not the speech is connected to a violent crime. The ADL was the major force behind the recent Hate Speech law in the US, but that is pretty weak tea for them, since it only criminalizes speech in connection with other crimes.

Since the enactment of police-state controls on speech remains an unfinished task for the ADL, it necessarily resorts to other strategies. Recently Lou Dobbs resigned his show in CNN. Over the years, the ADL has targeted Lou Dobbs several times, including a 2007 article claiming that Dobbs “broadcasts an anti-immigrant message and supports the views and activities of other anti-immigrant activists. … [including] Peter Brimelow, who runs VDare, a Website that publishes racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant articles.” The  ADL was especially upset about the following statement in particular, from Dobbs’ book, Independents Day:

Socioethnocentric special interest groups, meanwhile, join in the assault on our borders, demanding multiculturalism rather than assimilation into American society. America’s elites have embraced corporatism, globalism, and mulitculturalism as the unholy trinity of a twenty-first-century orthodoxy that is now at work to deny our traditions, values, and way of life and to render impotent even the idea of America’s national sovereignty.

Dobb’s invention of the word ‘socioethnocentric’ presumably functions to blunt his charge: An important force for open borders is the ethnocentrism of non-European Americans. The ADL is a perfect example. Their ethnocentrism is aimed at helping their own people — a biological imperative, not a sociological one.

The ADL article also targets Pat Buchanan, radio personality Lynn Woolley, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, and Congressman Steve King (Rep-IA). None of these individuals, with the exception of Buchanan, has spoken out against legal immigration. None has taken an explicitly racial view of White identity and interests.

The latest mainstream media target of an ADL hate campaign is Glenn Beck. The ADL complains that Beck is “fearmonger in chief” — the “intersection of the mainstream and the extreme.” The ADL complains that Beck compared Obama to Hitler and called Obama “a dangerous” man.

The power of the ADL can be seen from the fact that its fatwah against Beck was immediately picked by the MSM. Tim Rutten of the LA Times snapped to attention and chimed in on Beck, citing the ADL report and comparing Beck to Father Charles Coughlin, the radio personality of the 1930s. And just as Coughlin was removed from the air waves because of his views, Rutten wants Rupert Murdoch to get rid of Beck:

Is [Fox] willing to become the platform for an extremist political campaign …? CNN recently parted ways with its resident ranter, Lou Dobbs — who now confirms he's weighing a presidential bid.

Does Fox see a similar problem with Beck — and, if not, why?

The campaign against Glenn Beck is still in its early stages, and it’s certainly not at all clear that Beck would actually contribute to a real change in a racialist direction. Like other mainstream conservatives, he is at best an advocate of implicit Whiteness — his supporters are overwhelmingly White but he does not explicitly advocate White identity and interests.

In his recent TOO column, Charles Dodgson notes that Nick Griffin’s performance on Question Time “was not adequate to impress the educated classes” — a critical constituency among Whites. The ADL’s campaign to set strict limits on what can be said on TV is really a campaign to manage elite-level discourse aimed at the educated classes. The effectiveness of Jewish influence stems from the veto power it has over all the high ground in American society, particularly the mass media and the academic world. In the ADL’s ideal world, explicitly racialist rhetoric and anti-government attitudes and behavior by Whites would exist only among “extremists” far from the center of political discourse. Purveyors of these ideas would be objects of derision — little more than reliable cash cows to fill the coffers of Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the $PLC.

The fact is that the domination of the mass media and the academic world by elites that are hostile to White identity and interests makes it very difficult for educated Whites to sign on to a racialist movement. Such people are often vulnerable to economic pressures where they work, and, as college-educated people, they have a respect for mainstream academic and media institutions. Having been treated fairly in general, they trust the integrity of the basic institutions of the society. They identify with its basic ideology — America as emerging from its long dark night of evil into the glorious goodness and virtue of the multicultural future.

This is not so much the case with less-educated Whites. These people often have fewer inhibitions and far less to lose by adopting explicitly racialist views. They don’t pay attention to the New York Times.  Most importantly, they are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.

Dodgson directs his readers to this compelling video of a working-class British woman of the type that is the heart of the BNP. These people are former supporters of the Labour Party. They have been completely abandoned by their party which, like the Democrats in the US, is seeking to keep itself in power by enabling a permanent majority of non-Whites. They rightly fear a future in which the White working class will have no power at all.

It may well be the same in America. As I noted previously, the enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class. They are very angry — but they can’t discuss the real reason they are angry: mass immigration and the dispossession of people like themselves and their culture.

Eventually, all the phony implicit White issues will run out. And when that happens, these people won’t be overtly concerned about health care plans or even about Obama and his radical proclivities. All that will be ancient history. And it will have to get right down to it — that it is indeed about race.