Policing the Media

Jonathan Chait and the End of Liberal Society in the West

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The Charles Hebdo affair presents a difficult dilemma to liberals and the left in general. Typically, they have no problem with censorship of views they don’t like. They jump on board campaigns to fire college professors for publishing about race differences or White dispossession, and they shed no tears when some poor soul in the media gets fired for blurting out something about Jewish power in Hollywood. They would love for such people to go to prison.

But they want to think of themselves as principled and high-minded. So what to say about the murderous attempt to shut down Charlie Hebdo?

Here’s what Jonathan Chait says in New York magazine:

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that Charlie Hebdo is crude and even racist. Freedom of expression is not a strong defense of crude, racist, or otherwise stupid expression. Indeed, one of the most common and least edifying defenses made by people who have proffered offensive opinions is that they have the right to free speech. The right of expression is not the issue when the objection centers on the content.

This last comment—that “the right of expression is not the issue when the objection centers on the content”— reflects Chait’s intellectual arrogance about the dogmas of liberalism — that for example,  there is no such thing as race, but if there is, genetic differences are irrelevant to average group differences in IQ or any other trait important for success in the contemporary world, etc. From his point of view, these dogmas are set in stone and massively supported by scientific data. So it’s perfectly legitimate to exclude people who dissent from these dogmas from having any voice in the mainstream media, and exert pressure to get them fired them from their jobs or put them in jail.

And Chait, as a prominent contributor to the elite media, is well aware that he is in a great position to do exactly that.  Read more

Policing Race: Nicholas Wade and James Watson

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Editor’s note:

 

Jared Taylor has a great interview of Nicholas Wade on his book, A Troublesome Inheritance.  

JARED TAYLOR: Would it not be correct to say that . . . when it comes to the biological basis of population differences — or even individual differences — that the Western mind is relatively closed? . . .

NICHOLAS WADE: “I think this is a parochial problem of the academic left . . . They’re very fearful of each other . . . So if you step out of line just a little — particularly on this subject — if you write anything that doesn’t accord with the current dogma about the nature of race — you’ll be branded as a ‘scientific racist’ . . . you’ll be set upon as a racist and you’re career will be destroyed.

“So the whole of the academic left is sort of hoist on its own petard.  It’s sort of captured by this monster it’s created . . . which cannot brook criticism or dissenting thought.  It’s very sad . . . It has to change some day . . . the sooner the better.”

Well, it certainly hasn’t changed yet. Just recently James Watson was reduced to selling his Nobel Prize medal because he has been ostracized for publicly airing his views on race and IQ (“James Watson selling Nobel prize ‘because no-one wants to admit I exist‘”).

Mr Watson said his income had plummeted following his controversial remarks in 2007, which forced him to retire from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He still holds the position of chancellor emeritus there.

“Because I was an ‘unperson’ I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income,” he said.

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Opposition to Koch Brothers’ media ownership

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Recently I posted an optimistic article on non-Jewish media and would-be media owners. A centerpiece was that the Koch brothers, while far from ideal for those advocating White interests, were serious about buying the Los Angeles Times and several other high-profile newspapers (“Non-Jewish media owners: Hope for the future“). No surprise that the Koch brothers bid is getting quite a bit of opposition from the left, described in prominent articles in both the LA Times and the New York Times. The opposition is coming from public employee unions, from liberals in the California State Legislature, and a well-funded activist organization.

A letter from the unions to Bruce Karsh, the president of the company that is the largest present shareholder, stated that the Koch brothers were “”anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-public education and anti-immigrant.” As noted in the above article, there is no evidence that the Koch brothers are anti-immigrant, and aren’t all these issues open to more than one point of view?

Darrell Steinberg, President Pro Tem of the California State Senate said,   “I believe newspapers are a public trust. The Los Angeles Times has a long and respected tradition of community leadership and impartiality. The Koch brothers have a long and demonstrated history of a rigid political ideology.”

For anyone familiar with the LATimes, calling it impartial is ridiculous. It would be more accurate to label it far left, most notably for being completely on board with open borders, amnesty, and citizenship for anyone who wants to come to America.

The argument of the unions is just as far-fetched. Since they are public employee unions, none of their members would ever work for the LATimes. But public employee pension deals are well-known to be the major cause of California’s dire fiscal situation and these unions are very generous with political donations to all levels of California politics, so it’s nice to have liberals in charge of the media. The unions have threatened to remove pension funds from the financial management company that now owns the Times.

And of course there’s an activist movement called Courage Campaign headed by Rick Jacobs that takes out ads urging subscribers to cancel subscriptions.

But the good news is that there would likely be legal issues if a public company took a lower bid, since it would not be in the shareholders’ interests.

The bottom line is that the liberal bias of the media is far from an accident. Notice that there is no campaign against Rupert Murdoch, who is seen as a conservative and has also been mentioned as a possible buyer. Murdoch’s views on immigration and Israel apparently make him entirely acceptable to liberals. And rest assured that the bid from Eli Broad and Ron Burkle will not run into any problems at all from the activists.

The Menace of the New “McCarthyism”

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On June 25, the Huffington Post “reported” that a Cambridge University academic “responsible for mentoring students” has “come under pressure” to resign his position. Guess which allegations resulted in Martin Sewell, a supervisor in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge University, coming under intense scrutiny:

(a) Rapist
(b) Pedophile
(c) Serial killer
(d) Flash-mob thief
(e) Cannibalistic predator
(f) Racist, sexist, “pro-Hitler” eugenicist

If you guessed (f), you are correct! Critics are horrified that Sewell, an accomplished academic and incisive observer of human differences, has bucked the forces of political correctness and some how remains gainfully employed.

Sewell, a 43-year-old native of Reading, has posted summaries of “taxonomies of race,” which include notable (hint: notorious) sources: John R. Baker’s Race, a landmark study published in 1974 by Oxford University Press; Michael Levin’s seminal work Why Race Matters; Herrnstein and Murray’s bestseller The Bell Curve; Arthur Jensen’s The g Factor; Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests; Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence; and Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone.Sewell’s Website postings have driven his adversaries raving mad. Surely a “responsible” mentor of students should know better than to risk one’s academic position by favorably citing such radioactive literature on race and ethnicity. Acknowledging that race is a valid scientific taxonomy and that race differences are natural biological realities will generate accusations of “racist” faster than Heidi Beirich can inhale a tray of donuts. After all, “responsible” mentors know better!

"Hideous Heidi" loves to get people blacklisted and fired.

The fact that an academic with Sewell’s laudable record is under such scrutiny speaks volumes as to the nature of the infraction. From whence does this “pressure” come?
Left-wing critics have worked tirelessly over decades to make it dangerous to espouse such views—positions that are now rendered career-sacking offenses. How this has come about is worth closer scrutiny.

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Anti-White hostility in the media: Menachem Rosensaft, Jonah Goldberg, Steve Weinberg, and Arthur Goldwag

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The media police are at it again, and in honor of these recent outrages, TOO has a new “Policing the Media” category. This time let’s start with Menachem Rosensaft’s “Jewish Nationalism: A Scourge That Won’t Go Away,” presenting views that are common throughout the Middle East.

Sorry, I got the title wrong. It’s “White Nationalism: A Scourge That Won’t Go Away.” Rosensaft is unhappy that VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow gave a talk at CPAC as part of a panel on “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity.”

What’s so great about being an anti-White columnist like Rosensaft is that he feels no need to do research. He just trots out statements by people like Brimelow as self-evidently wrong or evil—no need to show whether they are factual or not.

Brimelow wrote that “it’s still ‘about race’. It is no coincidence, comrades, that the backlash is overwhelming white. Whites in America voted heavily against Obama. White Protestants (‘let’s face it, they are America’ — Phillip Roth, American Pastoral, p. 311) still make up nearly half (42%) the electorate and they voted 2-1 for McCain. But are even 4% of Obama’s appointments white Protestants?”

No word from Rosensaft on how many of Obama’s appointments are White Protestants. Read more

A Closer Look at What Happened to Pat Buchanan, Part 1

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Pat Buchanan has not appeared on MSNBC since October, when he began promoting his book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? He expressed concern about “the end of white America” and the shrinking of the “European and Christian core of our country.” In January 2012 MSNBC’s president Phil Griffin said, “The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.”

Following his dismissal from MSNBC, Buchanan named what he regards as the provocateurs of his downfall (see “The New Blacklist”). Buchanan blames “an incessant clamor from the left,” itemizing the Black-advocacy group Color of Change, Media Matters, and an unnamed LGBT group. After them, at the end of the list, Buchanan adds, “On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.” Likewise  Congressman Tom Tancredo: “MSNBC’s decision to dismiss Pat Buchanan shows the depths to which the mainstream media has caved to far-left pressure groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Council of La Raza, Color of Change and Media Matters. There can be no doubt that these smear operations were responsible for Buchanan’s dismissal.”

I disagree with this, the prevalent view. I argue that what many people think were the causes of Pat Buchanan’s dismissal probably were not. What really hurt Buchanan was probably not the horde of angry enemies circling the walls of MSNBC and blowing trumpets, not the ADL, not Media Matters, not even Color of Change or the LGBT group. While the public is disposed to equate making noise with exerting influence, the decision of an executive in an office need not have been influenced by any of that in the slightest. I suggest that the decision to fire Buchanan from MSNBC may have been based on a consideration that is relatively or even completely obscure to the general public. Read more

Alan Dershowitz: Policing Jewish Opponents of a War with Iran

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Israel Firster and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz addresses soldiers wounded fighting in Iraq.

Jews have always policed their own—a basic element of any successful group and a central idea behind the cultural group selection model of Judaism. A good example is the drama playing out now on the attempt to police Jews who are critical of Israel’s desire for a war with Iran. Media Matters, the leftist news organization whose main goal has been to attack Fox News, has hired MJ Rosenberg, the former AIPAC operative who is now a prominent critic of Israel, to beef up its foreign policy coverage. Rosenberg commits the sin of using the phrase “Israel Firster” to refer to people like Alan Dershowitz and the Israel Lobby generally. (Rosenberg did not invent this label. As discussed here, the phrase had been used long before by Wilmot Robertson, David Duke, and the Vanguard News Network.) As Rosenberg has noted, saying that AIPAC has dual loyalty is giving them credit for one more loyalty than they actually have.

Rosenberg’s argument bears quoting:

Right now, there is only one interest group in the United States that absolutely opposes any diplomacy to avoid war with Iran and which insists that the United States expressly state (as it has) that war with Iran is definitely “on the table.”

In fact, that interest group, AIPAC, actually got Congress to pass a bill, which President Obama signed, that bans any diplomacy with Iran without express approval of four Congressional committees in advance — as if AIPAC will ever let that happen.

Just read this AIPAC-drafted language that is now law:

(c) RESTRICTION ON CONTACT.-No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that-
(1) is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran; and
(2) presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organizations.

(d) WAIVER.-The President may waive the requirements of subsection (c) if the President determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.

Frankly, this makes me sick. Banning diplomacy almost guarantees war with Iran, a war that must not be fought.

I oppose war with Iran unless Iran attacks the United States directly. Period.

I do not want America to be dragged into a war that Netanyahu provokes and which the United States would then be dragged into. I favor diplomacy, unconditional diplomacy, with all issues on the table.

Another very ominous sign is that the Congressional forces advocating war have now settled on a weaker criterion for war—that Iran simply possess “the scientific knowledge and industrial means to build a nuclear bomb,” not necessarily actually build one or even intend to build one (LATimes: “Obama likely to resist pressure to further toughen Iran stance“). As Philip Giraldi, writing at Council for the National Interest, notes: “There are about 50 countries in the world that have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon if they chose to do so, making Iran far from unique but for its persistence as a thorn in the side of Israel and Israel’s powerful lobby in the United States.” The LATimes article notes that 38 senators also signed a resolution that the Obama administration not pursue containment of Iran, a policy that leaves a military strike the only realistic option. The pressure on Obama is intense, especialy with all the Republican candidates except Ron Paul eager to flog him for not doing enough for

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