Media Watch: Mainstreamest of the MSM admits: Yes, minority loans stoked the economic crisis

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For weeks, writers like Steve Sailer and Ann Coulter have been pointing out that the economic crisis was likely caused, in large part, by the massive drive to give mortgage loans to blacks and Hispanics.

The reaction was easy to predict: Loony right-wingers and racists want to “scapegoat” minorities for economic problems that are really the fault of greedy whites.

But those critics are going to find it harder to dismiss the latest outlet for that observation:  The New York Times.  In a lengthy and wide-ranging Sunday piece, the paper puts the minority-loan angle up high, with a front-page photo and the caption, “In June 2002, President Bush spoke in Atlanta to unveil a plan to increase minority homeownership.”

An inside photo shows a proud Bush touring a new development in heavily-black Atlanta, presumably staged to show what a Great White Father he is.  One sentence in the story began, “He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors.”

I can overlook the NYT for wanting to append “greedy whites” to that sentence, given how surprised I am that it was written at all.  In my modest role as a pro-white media critic, I sometimes wonder, “How much racial reality needs to be breaking down our doors before the media will acknowledge it?”  Well, you might say this economic crisis has broken down the door — and the media leader, the NYT, felt compelled to at least mention it.

The problem with the story is that the minority-loan angle is mentioned early, but dropped.  The rest of the story takes the traditional MSM tack of blaming the evil and incompetent whites in government, from Bush on down.

Still, it’s a good sign.  When the mortgage meltdown began, the media’s coverage was expectedly misdirected:  The narrative was one of greedy white bankers, brokers and other finance characters who were aided and abetted by incompetent white Republicans who were derelict in their regulatory duties. But the only “regulation” or “oversight” I can think of that would have prevented mortgage defaults is one that said, “Don’t make that loan.  It’s too risky.”  Of course, that would have gone squarely against Bush’s goal of more loans for minorities.

Bundled mortgages and derivatives aside, an individual mortgage is not a complex transaction.  A bank extends a loan for the purchase of a house, and the purchaser agrees to pay back the loan, with interest, at certain amounts and on certain intervals.  However complex the apportionment of interest (I did not realize, until the purchase of my own house, that the interest in usually heavily front-loaded), the lender will make it simple for you:  Pay this amount by the first of the month, or we’ll take back the house and kick you out.

It does not take a PhD-holding economist to figure this out.  So, when mortgages are defaulting, there’s usually a devastatingly simple reason:  The homeowner isn’t paying the mortgage.  Who are these people?  Why aren’t they paying the mortgage?  Yet for all the media’s manpower, nobody asked that question.  Nobody said, well, let’s look at all the defaulters, and go out and talk to a few.

This is partly because of one media rule that applies to the controversies they cover, even beyond the context of political correctness on race:  Problems are never the result of everyday people.  Problems are always the fault of a big bad business, or government, or something institutional.  For instance, when the topic of bankruptcy is covered, the media will focus most of its attention on “predatory lenders” who dangle credit cards in front of college kids, evil banks and their pushy lobbyists, etc.  They’ll never hone in on Wanda Sanchez, who, while unemployed, went on a weekly shopping spree at Saks, and now has to file for Chapter 7.

The media thinks of itself as protecting “the little guy” against bigger and more powerful forces, which doesn’t strike me as a too-terrible approach. (I long ago dropped my mainstream conservative reflexive defense of “big business”, and I sure as hell haven’t ever felt an instinct to defend government.) But the problem with this approach is that it overlooks a fundamental truth:  Some people (of all races) are problematic.  They tend not to be reliable.  They’ll sneak a little extra where they can, and they’ll free-load when nobody’s looking.

With minorities, of course, this reality is magnified:  Blacks do, in fact, tend to be less intelligent and less conscientious, which in turn makes them even less reliable when it comes to paying off loans.  I am confident that same holds true for Hispanics, though I am not as familiar with data on the Hispanic IQ.

The lower creditworthiness of blacks in general is significant.  Early on, before racial consciousness, I was motivated to concern over what was presented to me as the problem of “racism in lending,” i.e., bank refusals to lend blacks money.  I had started to dismiss other forms of “racism” as the explanation for black failure, but this one seemed legitimate to me, if all that were needed for black success was a loan.

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But the statistics didn’t bear out the concern. As Peter Brimelow has shown: They were going by the credit ratings, and, as you can imagine, it did so happen that blacks had absolutely terrible credit.  I’ve seen plenty of anecdotal examples of this as an attorney.  But never mind:  Today, financial institutions face a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t quandary:  If they loan to blacks, they’re accused of “predatory lending,” and if they don’t, they’re accused of “redlining.”

And when it comes to Hispanics, many of whom are not here legally to begin with, the responsibility of paying off a mortgage is surely even more compromised.

Needless to say, none of these realities were contemplated by the forces that decided to gamble with America’s economy in the name of racial equality.  And while I don’t expect the NYT‘s mention of this angle to shift the debate entirely, it’s a welcome crack in the ice.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

The problem with explicit processing: Christian evangelicals

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One of my intellectual bedrocks these days is the psychological distinction between explicit and implicit processing. Implicit processing is how the animal part of our brain operates. It’s basically a set of psychological reflexes that take care of the routine business of living — like seeing colors and shapes when we look around the room and recognizing the faces of people we know.

From an evolutionary perspective, the systems of implicit processing have been meticulously designed by natural selection to promote survival and reproduction. They make us enjoy sex and they make us want children and enjoy nurturing them— most of the time. They make us want to associate with people like ourselves. They also make us more likely to contribute to public goods like education and health care if the likely beneficiaries are people like ourselves.

But then along comes explicit processing to make it all really complicated. Explicit processing includes our verbal, cultural world—how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. Patrick Hardin sums it up beautifully in his cartoon: For eons our animal ancestors were governed by three simple rules: “Eat, survive, reproduce.” But at the very pinnacle of evolution, we ask “What’s it all about?”

And we are not very good at answering that question. Humans are prone to a mind-boggling array of ideologies that answer the question “What’s it all about?” But pretty much all of the ones circulating in the mainstream culture of the West are guaranteed to be incompatible with the long term survival and reproduction of the people holding them.

In illustrating this point, I could choose from a very wide range of ideologies held by large groups of white people—from benighted leftist college professors toyoung urban professionals who read the New York Times, admire rap artists, and agonize about recycling. But right now I would like to make some comments on Christian evangelicals.

Actually, I probably shouldn’t be picking on them at all. When compared to most other whites, Christian evangelicals are definitely on the psychologically healthy end of the continuum. They believe in strong families, they have children, and they are very concerned about their children’s welfare. Many of them send their children to Christian schools, opting out of the great multicultural public education propaganda machine at great personal expense.

They are the embodiment of implicit whiteness—that is, they tend to live in white ethnic enclaves and they worship in predominantly white churches. But the whiteness of it all is never mentioned publicly and doesn’t even seem to be part of their conscious awareness. Living in Southern California, I have had occasion to attend several services at Saddleback Church—the pulpit for Rick Warren, one of America’s most well known Christian religious figures. Located in a very ethnically diverse area, it’s a sea of white people.

I was reminded of all this recently while listening to two of Terry Gross’s interviews with evangelicals on NPR — one an interview with Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, and the other with Frank Schaeffer, an evangelical who now rejects the anti-abortion movement that has been a major political cause among evangelicals.

The interviews were both focused on the political activism of the evangelicals—an important topic considering the status of the evangelicals as a critical component of the Republican base. So what were the driving political issues that were singled out as motivating the evangelicals: abortion and homosexuality.

To a considerable degree, both of these issues reflect the fundamental psychological health of the evangelicals. The issues that motivate them relate to constructing cultural supports for a family-friendly culture that promotes fertility and heterosexual marriage. (The phrase “heterosexual marriage” seems odd, but is necessary now that the concept is no longer redundant.)  Below-replacement fertility is a problem for whites around the world, and there can be little doubt that freely available abortion contributes to the problem. The good news is that Christian conservatives have considerably higher fertility than other white groups.

As a biologically oriented psychologist, I am not surprised that research indicates the importance of biological influences on homosexuality. (It is remarkable that biological roots of homosexuality are one of the very few areas where it is politically correct to argue for biological influences. In general the cultural left loves the idea that people are infinitely malleable, but it proudly stands with science if non-malleability suits their political interests.)

The fact that homosexuals have become pillars of the cultural left is deplorable —and quite unnecessary. Homosexuals have ethnic interests just like everyone else, and they can promote those interests even if they don’t themselves have children. It seems to me that one way for homosexuals to promote their ethnic interests is to acknowledge heterosexual marriage as a specially protected cultural norm — its special status guaranteed because of its critical importance in creating and nurturing children.

But I digress. Both of these issues require a more lengthy treatment. The main point here is that even if evangelicals managed to enact their views on these issues into law, it would not be enough to stave off the steady erosion of their political and cultural influence. If present trends continue, evangelicals — like the rest of white America — will become increasingly irrelevant.

The problem is that immigration and its disastrous consequences for white America are simply not on their radar screen, at least at the explicit level. Presumably, a large part of the groundswell against illegal immigration in recent years came from Christian conservatives. But in this case, the only principle conservatives focused on was that illegal immigration was, after all, illegal. And that’s not enough. If illegal immigration was stopped tomorrow, it would only delay the inevitable eclipse of white America.

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In the case of abortion and homosexuality, evangelicals base their views firmly on the Bible. But when it comes to immigration, the Bible isn’t much help. There is a strong strain of universalism in Christianity. Indeed, when I was doing research on the origins of the Church as an anti-Jewish movement in the ancient world (see Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents), it was striking to notice that the Church fathers perceived Judaism as based on biological descent and ethnic identity. They thought that Christianity was morally superior to Judaism because it was a community of religious believers with no ethnic connotations.

In short, Judaism has always had a fairly tight congruence between their evolutionary interests and their explicit ideology. Indeed, in a previous TOO column I noted the triumph of racial Zionism in Israel. On the other hand, Christian sects are communities with a variety of explicit ideologies that are at best only tangentially related to their ethnic interests. Indeed, it might be argued that Christianity often works well as an ideology for a more or less homogeneous white society. But, at least without some big changes from the current varieties, it is abysmally inadequate as an ideology of ethnic defense. This is especially so in a culture dominated by an intellectual and cultural elite that is hostile to all forms of Christianity and ridicules everything they believe in.

This contrast between Judaism and Christianity persists today: Ethnic particularism and biological descent continue to be robust trends within Judaism. On the other hand, a great many Christian denominations, including some evangelical groups, are strong supporters of multi-racial immigration and quite a few Christian groups avidly seek converts from all races and ethnicities. My impression is that most white Christians live in an implicit white world. Their gut instincts are to preserve an America that has at least a vague resemblance to the world in which they grew up. But the displacement of white America is simply not something they talk about among themselves. Leaders like Rick Warren rarely mention immigration as an issue, and when they do, they uphold conventional views that would certainly not ruffle any feathers at the New York Times.

Evangelicals are engaged in culture wars that are a sideshow to the main event. Of course, the same can be said about the other conservative cultural warriors — people like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.

And the same can also be said about other hot-button cultural issues, such as the legitimacy of Christianity in the public square. The mainstream media, aided and abetted by the organized Jewish community, have indeed been waging a war on public manifestations of Christianity. But the idea that Christianity could retain any public presence at all when whites become a minority seems preposterous. Unless evangelicals and other Christians vigorously oppose legal and illegal immigration, the idea that America is a Christian country is bound to go the way of horse-drawn buggies (and the American automobile industry?).

I suppose Christians could dream that these immigrants would be sufficiently Christian to ensure a Christian America. But Christian religiosity is not a criterion for immigration to America and its adoption as a criterion would certainly be a major violation of the cultural Marxist zeitgeist that dominates these issues now. Abe Foxman would probably have a stroke if the issue was debated in Congress. And at a gut level, I don’t think that most evangelicals really want a white-minority, multicultural America.

As an evolutionist, it is natural to urge explicit assertions of white identity and interests as an ideology for survival.  But such an ideology resides in another galaxy — light years removed from the world of the evangelicals. Left to their own devices, it seems impossible that the evangelicals would be any more than implicit supporters of white America. And that is not enough. As noted previously in TOO:

It might be possible for the Republicans to adopt a Sarah Palinesque identity of Christianity and traditional small town values. But even if they do, they would still have to oppose legal and illegal immigration in order to remain a majority. The left has shown repeatedly that they will label as racist any criticism of immigration—even those based on economic or ecological arguments. And they would surely do so if a party composed almost exclusively of European-Americans advocated an end to immigration. It won’t matter what surface ideology they adopt.

So the prospect of developing a powerful evangelical religious ideology in opposition to immigration seems hopeless. (Bill Barnwell made a heroic efforton Vdare, but he doesn’t seem to have inspired a mass movement; he was careful to note that arguments on the basis of race or ethnicity are foreign to Christianity).

Not only is there a very long history of universalism embedded in the origins of Christianity, there is also intense policing of all issues related to immigration by the cultural left. The last thing that establishment religious figures like Rick Warren want is to challenge the consensus on race. But that is exactly what they would be accused of if they became activists against immigration in the way that evangelicals have been politically active on issues like abortion and homosexuality.

The likely result is that things will have to get a whole lot worse for white America in order for evangelicals to adopt an explicit white identity and act on the basis of their interests with the same emotional intensity that has often characterized their efforts on abortion and homosexuality.

And if it does happen, it’s really hard to see how they could remain evangelicals, at least in the sense that their religion is their primary source of identity and motivates their pro-white political behavior as it often motivates them on the issues of abortion and homosexuality.

Until the victimization of whites as whites by crime, affirmative action, and general dispossession becomes too obvious for even the most steadfast ostriches among us to ignore, things are unlikely to change. It will be much harder to right the ship when whites are a minority than it would be now when whites are a majority. But righting the ship just doesn’t seem likely to happen with the help of the evangelicals in the near future.

Conceptually, it’s not any different than some of the obviously maladaptive ideologies that have dotted human history. My favorite is the Shakers, a religious group that is opposed to sexual relations; not surprisingly it has dwindled to only a handful of believers.

Blame it on the explicit processor. Even the simplest organism understands (implicitly) what life is all about. But those simple truths were not programmed into the big brain of the smartest creature of them all. The same type of mechanism that allows us to imagine hypothetical things like high-tech devices and then to actually build the devices makes it possible for us to create religious ideologies and then to live our lives as if they are true — even when the ideologies will lead to the long term demise of the people who believe them.

See Comment from a reader below.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
KevinMacDonald.net

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I find the intensity of the debate to be a manifestation of white status games, not actual science, since nearly all of the useful implications of evolution (such as your work) are relatively short-term intra-species adaptations; evangelicals call this microevolution.

From my involvement in the local Republican party deep in the Bible belt, I see very few people who identify primarily as a Christian.  Christianity in practice is mostly a private struggle against sin (or maladaptive behavior) and church is mostly about providing a community of people who at least outwardly agree to commit themselves to this struggle.  There are a few individuals I come across who are motivated solely by pro-life (they’re generally the loudest and most energetic), but not many.  Most are “patriots” at the grassroots, who tend to see all of these issues, including immigration, as part of a big plot to destroy the country.

Unfortunately, most are all too eager to say they are “fine” with legal immigration and aren’t racists.

We have to be careful though in taking that too far.  Most people are not rational or logical, and so because they say A and A implies B doesn’t mean they would agree they agree with B, even if it’s a logical conclusion.  For example, most patriots would not agree that they welcome whites becoming a minority in the US (if asked quietly in private), but neither would they admit that their support for current legal immigration policies makes this inevitable; upon closer inspection, their support for legal immigration is very conditional (no Muslims, no criminals, must be fluent in English, American history).

This is why politics is always a struggle between elites manipulating masses who lack the coherence to govern anything.  The elite advocating for alien interests is dominant, while the elite advocating for white interests is growing but tiny.

Race as a social construct? No — and Yes!

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Are the PC and non-PC crowds still arguing over the meaning of race? Of course. But a recent and quite useful review in The Occidental Quarterly (Fall, 2008) by Alexander Hamilton (“Taxonomic approaches to race”) shows that genetic differences imply that race is a valid biological category, on a par with sub-species in the rest of biology.

However, we will point out here that, actually, there is at least a modest role for social constructs.

Hamilton explains that the criterion for species differences is the absence of successful reproduction of fertile offspring between such groups. On the other hand, interbreeding can be successful between sub-species even though the individuals are somewhat different genetically. Since biologists routinely categorize other organisms as members of sub-species on the grounds of significant and meaningful genetic differences, why isn’t it reasonable to consider human races as sub-species and, hence, equally legitimate, valid, and useful biological categories? Hamilton then goes on to review the taxonomic problem scientists have had in deciding on the number of races.

As he notes, species become species only when the original population of a species divides and the resultant groups are somehow blocked from further contact and interbreeding; subsequent independent genetic changes in each group accumulate to the point that interbreeding is no longer possible. Normally this all happens because of geographical barriers. And this isolation is the reason why so many racial (genetic) characteristics cluster together.

Hamilton notes that race deniers complain that Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, whose research is considered standard in the field of human population genetics, sampled people from different geographical areas in a search for genetic differences, as if he were somehow artificially jacking up the amount of genetic difference. The race deniers suggest obtaining random samples aimed at finding genetic relatedness. However, it is that very geographical isolation and the resulting clustering that helps make race meaningful as a category.

Why? Because the clustering allows one to make predictions about what is likely to accompany a particular racial classification. If I know that you have aboriginal ancestry, I would be well advised to avoid encouraging you to drink alcohol. Alcohol is really a poison for a great many Indians because of their biological ancestry, and they may need all the help they can get in refraining from it. (There obviously are non-Indians for whom alcohol is a poison, too. It’s just that alcoholism seems less of a racial characteristic for some other races.)  

Of course this is racial profiling. But racial profiling improves prediction about what people are like, so it’s a problem mainly for people who do not want their behavior predicted.

It’s interesting that some species don’t interbreed because of quite trivial obstacles. Two species of birds may not reproduce together only because they have, say, a slightly different song For example, the red-legged partridge and the rock partridge look similar but remain separate because of their mating calls. In other words, some different species look to us as more similar to each other than do many members of the same human race, not to mention people of different races. Thus, being different species doesn’t imply different appearance.

On the other hand, if races are biologically different because of clusters of genetic differences, they can (like species) still vary in precisely how different they are from each other, especially when the isolating barriers are not totally impermeable. Biologists use the term cline when there are gradients in the distributions of the genes responsible for the racial differences. This variation in degree of genetic difference is the basis for conceptualizing trees of genetic relatedness. The following illustration is from Frank Salter’s important On Genetic Interests and is based on Cavalli-Sforza’s work:

Next note that the genetic differences that make the races different need not be visible to the human eye. For example, reproductive isolation over many generations could make one race more susceptible to diabetes than another. Who would know? It’s not something one can see in another person even though it represents a genetic difference.

This is probably why people have trouble agreeing on the number of races. Anthropologists and people generally differ according to which differences they experience as salient or dramatic and they do so for psychological and socialreasons as Pierre van den Berghe recognized.

The number of races is not set in stone but a more a matter of where one wants to draw lines. The figure below results in seven different racial groups, but one could easily combine some groups together and get a lower number.

The second author of this article has described several ways in which human psychology influences racial classification. First, using our rational faculties, we can decide how to carve up the racial landscape to best suit our political and genetic interests. For a European-American, it makes much more sense to identify with others who can trace their ancestry back to Europe before 1492, but possibly excluding Jews given the unusually long history of hostility and mistrust between Jews and other groups and  because most of their genetic background derives from the Middle East. On the other hand, it would be a poor strategy to identify only with Scottish Americans or Italian-Americans because these relatively small groups have much less political potential in multicultural America than the category of European Americans.

Secondly, psychological research on race shows that people’s perceptions of others are typically tinged by racial stereotypes. At the unconscious level, the social construction of blacks in America is tinged by our images of black criminality and poor academic performance. But at the conscious, explicit level, we tend to construct race according to what the mainstream media like the New York Times tells us we should believe. Needless to say, there are very large penalties in store for people who publicly dissent from the official view.

The score? Both sides are right. Race exists as a biological reality and, as Frank Salter reminds us, it is an important storehouse of genetic interests for all humans. But how we behave on the basis of this information is not at all determined by the genetic data. We Europeans must define ourselves in a way that makes strategic sense. And we have to make explicit assertions of racial identity and explicit assertions of our racial interests. No other strategy will succeed in staving off the dispossession of European America.

Anthony Hilton is Assoc. Prof. (retired) in the Psychology Department, Concordia University, Montreal.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

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Media Watch: The audacity of black demands: Black president must be covered by black reporters

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Before he’s even inaugurated, one question about the effect of electing Barack Obama is getting an answer.

The question:  Will a black president quell black demands for affirmative action?

The answer:  No.

In a recent article on the new black-oriented, Washington Post-owned website “The Root,” writer Sam Fulwood fumes that “racism” has kept blacks from the White House press corps, and quotes another writer, Jack White, as saying that “the job of interpreting this president to the world is too big and too important to be left just to white reporters and editors.”

Sam Fulwood

What Mr. White means is this:  Whites don’t understand blacks, and can’t be trusted to report on them.  This has always been a strangely accepted holding of the minority-racialist community:  They demand that whites cease all ethnocentric activity and behavior, but that blacks ramp up their own — while being “treated equally” (usually better) by whites.  Under this reasoning, it’s perfectly acceptable to have both a black-only newspaper like “The Afro-American” and demand that “white” newspapers hire more black reporters.

There are too many examples of this in other areas of life to recount, but its manifestation in journalism has always amused me.  As a college journalist, I recall that it wasn’t unusual to hear calls for blacks to report on blacks, for Hispanics to report on Hispanics, and so on.  But you would never hear that whites should cover whites.  Whites, you see, should also be covered by blacks.  This pattern continued after I left college and joined the working press, first in Washington and later in Philadelphia.

And that brings to mind an alternative reason why blacks aren’t “represented” (as they say) in the White House press corps:

They aren’t very good.  Especially at print journalism, as opposed to radio or television journalism. (As a print snob, I don’t really count the ubiquitous black news anchor for the local station as a “journalist” — they read what scrolls before them on the teleprompter.)

We’ve all heard of Janet Cooke, the disgraced black reporter for the Washington Post who faked her way to a Pulitzer, and Jayson Blair, the disgraced black reporter for the New York Times who faked his way — for a while — through life at the nation’s newspaper of record.  But I’m here to tell you that Cooke and Blair aren’t bizarre outliers.  They’re just a bit more outrageous than your typical black “journalist” — and they got caught.

I recall that in the varied papers I worked for, black males were virtually non-existent, despite editors’ desperate attempts to reel them in.  They never even came ’round, so it’s a little hard for Mr. Fulwood to argue that rafts of qualified black men are being kept from the profession.  Print journalism, truth be told, is a low-paying and, probably to the black mind, pretty uncool job.  Whites, especially if they tend liberal, think it’s cool, but in the way they see working for a non-profit as cool (a la Stuff White People Like).  So right away, I don’t see black men clamoring for it.

There were a few black women, however.  But these black women were invariably at the back of the pack when it came to performance.  In the lead were white men, white women, and, of course, Jews.  Asians did alright, but generally weren’t aggressive enough to make much of a splash.

One black woman hired (through affirmative action channels) by a paper I worked for barely stayed awake on the job — literally.  She would fall asleep during working hours.  She produced an abysmally small number of stories, and, before we knew it, disappeared.  And the stories themselves were quite unremarkable.

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I can even recall the one black woman who worked on my high school newspaper staff.  She was let go for… reviewing a movie she hadn’t seen.  Even for the staunchly liberal white adviser to the paper, this was too much.

I doubt much will come of Mr. Fulwood’s demand.  Another hard truth is that even the most ridiculously liberal white editor still feels sharply competitive with other media outlets, and would be loathe to have anyone less than a crackerjack covering the White House.  That’s necessarily going to mean a big drop-off in the number of eligible blacks.

That focus on quality aside, even if President Obama decreed that spots at the front of the briefing room be reserved for black reporters, it’s unlikely that the stream of crap that is American journalism would be affected much.  I agreed with the assessment of Noam Chomsky, a left-wing Jewish intellectual, when he called the American media “the servant of power.”  He is correct.  However much it fancies itself a “watchdog,” it is no such thing.  It exists to prop up and propagate the system.

And, whether covered by affirmative-action black reporters, white-hating Jews or self-hating whites, the most obvious and pressing issue of our time — the fundamental failure of the multiracial experiment — will likely be ignored.  With his demand, Mr. Fulwood shows just how far from that understanding he is.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Ben Stein’s Expelled: Was Darwinism a Necessary Condition for the Holocaust? And Was Boas an Honest Scientist?

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In my previous column, I noted the Stalinist tendencies of the leftists that are so entrenched in the academic world. The fact is that the academic left has never been concerned about truth when truth is incompatible with their political objectives. This is the fundamental message of my book, The Culture of Critique where I trace the involvement of Jewish intellectual activists in producing a leftist academic culture that promoted specifically Jewish goals, including lessening the political power and cultural influence of European-derived peoples and the eradication of anti-Semitism.

Chief among the bogeymen of these Jewish intellectuals is Darwinism. The war against Darwinism is a major theme of The Culture of Critique, and it persists as a constant drumbeat in our culture—from the cultural Marxists who are in charge of socializing our college students to a great many examples in popular culture.

Consider Ben Stein’s film Expelled. Stein depicts Darwinism as a stifling orthodoxy that suppresses free inquiry into how things got this way. And in particular, the triumph of Darwinism has meant that the theory of intelligent design has been banished from the realm of reasonable discourse in the academic world.

Of course, intelligent design is not a reasonable alternative at all, but a highly motivated effort to legitimize a religious world view in the sciences. But why would Ben Stein produce a movie that panders to religious conservatives? It would doubtless be pretty hard to find anyone in the Jewish intelligentsia who in the privacy of their innermost thoughts believes in God.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that the mainstream Jewish community regards Christian religious sentiment with fear and loathing. For example, Elliott Abrams, whose title in the Bush Administration (Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy) sounds like a neocon wet dream, acknowledges that the mainstream Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.” According to Abrams, because of this vision, Jews have taken the lead in secularizing America.  In fact, the key role of Jewish organizations in shaping the Constitutional law on Church/State relations is well known.

The deep structure of Expelled can be inferred from another comment by Elliott Abrams.Abrams thinks that a strong role for Christianity in America is good for Jews:

In this century we have seen two gigantic experiments at postreligious societies where the traditional restraints of religion and morality were entirely removed: Communism and Nazism. In both cases Jews became the special targets, but there was evil enough even without the scourge of anti-Semitism. For when the transcendental inhibition against evil is removed, when society becomes so purely secular that the restraints imposed by God on man are truly eradicated, minorities are but the earliest victims.

I think Abrams and Stein are on the same page. I make this inference because in his film promoting intelligent design Stein argues that Darwinism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust. In making a movie that attempts to legitimize “Creation Science” in the academic world, Stein is thinking not so much about intellectual honesty or the relative adequacy of Darwinism and Creation Science in producing testable hypotheses and mountains of supporting evidence. He is asking an age-old question: “Is it good for the Jews?” If Darwinism is not good for the Jews, then so much the worse for Darwinism.

In mounting a war on Darwinism or at least attempting to control it, Stein is entirely within the mainstream of Jewish opinion, at least for the last 100 years or so. The triumph of the Boasian school of anthropology over Darwinism in the early years of the 20th century was a watershed event in intellectual history of the West — in effect more or less obliterating what had been a thriving Darwinian intellectual milieu. This era of Darwinian domination of the social sciences included several well-known Jewish racial Zionists, such as Arthur Ruppin, who were motivated by the fear that Diaspora Judaism would lose its biological uniqueness as a result of pressures for intermarriage and assimilation.

Among the Zionists, the racialists won the day. Ruppin’s ideas on the necessity of preserving Jewish racial purity have had a prominent place in the Jabotinsky wing of Zionism, including especially the Likud party in Israel and its leaders—people like Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir. (Here’s a photo of Sharon speaking to a Likud Party convention in 2004 under a looming photo of Jabotinsky.) Jabotinsky believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish, stating, for example: “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

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But it was the Boasians who won the day in the academic establishment of the West. Whereas Jewish intellectuals played a bit part in the wider movement of racial Darwinism, the Boasian revolution which triumphed in academic anthropology in the West was overwhelmingly a Jewish intellectual movement.

And besides the Boasians, a great many Jewish social scientists of the period were also attracted to a thriving cult of Lamarckism — the view that evolution works via the inheritance of acquired characteristics rather than Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Indeed, Lamarckism became official ideology in the Soviet Union because of its easy compatibility with Marxist visions of utopia: Creating the socialist society would biologically alter its citizens.

Both theories combated racialist theories of Judaism that depicted it as having a biological uniqueness. (Actually, Boas’s approach is more an anti-theory because it cast doubt on general theories of human culture common among Darwinian anthropologists of the period, emphasizing instead the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human cultures, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation.) For example, based on skull measurements and IQ testing, racial scientists, including some racial Zionists, concluded that Jews had evolved to have higher IQ, but this was often linked with a tendency toward psychopathology—the “nervous Jew.”

The Boasians and the Lamarckians countered with the view that Jewish traits had resulted from historical conditions. As historian Mitchell B. Hart notes, “the positions taken by Jewish researchers [i.e., the Zionist racialists, the Lamarckians, and the Boasians] were driven in large measure by ideological commitments and political goals.” Three different groups of Jewish social scientists, three different ideological agendas stemming from their different views on how social science can best serve Jewish interests.

Boas’s famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a result of immigration from Europe to America was a very effective propaganda weapon in this cause of the anti-racialists. Indeed, it was intended as propaganda. Based on their reanalysis of Boas’s data, physical anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz do not accuse Boas of scientific fraud, but they do find (pdf) that his data do not show any significant environmental effects on cranial form as a result of immigration. They also claim that Boas may well have been motivated by a desire to end racialist views in anthropology:

While Boas never stated explicitly that he had based any conclusions on anything but the data themselves, it is obvious that he had a personal agenda in the displacement of the eugenics movement in the United States. In order to do this, any differences observed between European- and U.S.-born individuals will be used to its fullest extent to prove his point.

This view certainly dovetails with my research. Boas can now be officially grouped with his student and protégé Margaret Mead as using social science to further a leftist, anti-Darwinian political agenda.

Concerns about scientific fraud have also dogged Larmarckism. Lamarckism was a pillar of the intellectual left in the West during the 1920s but declined rapidly after its major scientific proponent, Paul Kammerer, committed suicide shortly after an article appearing in the prestigious British journal Nature accused him of scientific fraud. Kammerer, who was half Jewish on his mother’s side, was a staunch socialist. He wrote that Lamarckian inheritance offered hope for humanity through education, and he became a hero among committed Socialists and Communists. Despite Kammerer’s disgrace, Lamarckism lived on in theSoviet Union under Trofim Lysenko, with disastrous results on agricultural policy.

Interestingly, Boas, who was also a political radical, continued to accept Lamarckism up until his death in 1942 — long after it had been discredited by accusations of scientific fraud. The moral seems to be that people who use science to advance their political agendas are unlikely to reject politically attractive theories for trivial reasons like lack of evidence and a history of cooked data. Isn’t that how science is supposed to operate? Not surprisingly, that other pseudoscientific charlatan, Sigmund Freud, also continued believing in Lamarckism long after it had been scientifically discredited.

Ben Stein’s brief for intelligent design is therefore in the long line of movements, beginning with Boas and Lamarck, that have attempted to undercut Darwin as a pillar of Western science. Each of them is mistaken (to be generous) and each was highly motivated. Among Jewish participants, the motives can be quite straightforwardly related to their Jewish identity.

But we still must ask what to make of Ben Stein’s claim that Darwinism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust. John Derbyshire characterizes the charge as a “blood libel on our civilization” which indeed it is.  Nevertheless, such a claim should not be taken lightly. For example, it is common among historians to hold views similar to Michael Hart’s statement that “it is impossible to understand the Holocaust without comprehending the degree to which racial science and a medicalized racial ideology occupied central positions in Nazi thought and policy.”

By the same token, I suppose, one could argue that the Palestinian catastrophe is the result of the triumph of the racial Zionists and their Likudnik descendents in Israel. Or one could argue that Darwinism does not necessarily lead to the specific views attributed to the National Socialists.

And one could certainly note that genocides occurred long before World War II and they have continued to occur without any specific Darwinian ideology. Indeed, as noted above, Elliott Abrams places Communism in the same category as Nazism when it comes to the ill effects of removing a religious world view. In April, 2008, the Ukrainian Prime MinisterYulia Tymoshenko petitioned the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to recognize the 1932–1933 Ukrainian famine as an act of genocide—a genocide carried out by an avowedly Marxist government at a time when Jews formed an elite within the Soviet Union. (See also Charles Dodgson’s lucid comments in TOO on Jewish involvement in the Ukrainian genocide as a blind spot in Jewish memory. Abrams is an example of a Jewish writer who deplores the discrimination against Jews that occurred after World War II in the USSR, but is silent on the pre-World War II period when Jews formeda hostile elite in the Soviet Union and served as Stalin’s willing executioners.) Indeed, it has been estimated that Communist governments murdered over 90,000,000 people in the 20th century, including 25,000,000 in theUSSR. These murders were certainly not carried out under a Darwinian ideology.

And genocides have been carried out under religious ideologies as well. Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Warriors series certainly shows that religious ideology can motivate the most extreme of fanaticisms, from Jihad to much of the West Bank settler movement (including both its Christian and Jewish supporters). (The Christian and Muslim segments are still on You Tube. But the Jewish segment has been removed, presumably by the same Jewish fanatics featured in the segment. But you can still see two rebuttals put out by the pro-Zionists: Part I and Part II.  My description and commentary on the Jewish segment ishere.)

Ben Stein is wrong. There is no reason at all to suppose that adopting a religious world view immunizes against genocide. Perhaps he and Elliott Abrams are simply expressing their belief that present forms of Christianity would not lead to a Holocaust even if they achieved a great deal more power over public policy. This was the view of neocon guru Leo Strauss who is quite possibly the inspiration for both Abrams and Stein. They could be right about that, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

But let’s not be naïve. Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea. In the same way that the evolutionary theory of sex has illuminated the deep structure of the human mating game, evolutionary theory points to the deep structure of genocide as a particularly violent form of ethnic competition. But ethnic competition is ethnic competition whether its carried out in an orgy of violence, or by forcible removal of people from land on the West Bank by Jewish settlers or by forcible removal of Native Americans during the 19th century by white settlers, or by peaceful displacement of whites via current levels of immigration into Western societies.

From a Darwinian perspective, the end result is no different. The genetic structure of the population has changed. Darwin, of course, understood this. Notice, for example, the subtitle of his masterpiece: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

We all have an implicit understanding of human sexual politics. What Darwin did (with the help of Robert Trivers) is to produce an explicit theory which explains sexual politics. But sexual politics and genocide existed long before Darwin came along. And it is at least questionable whether the occurrence of future genocide would be more or less likely if most people had an explicitly Darwinian theory. Humans seem to be able to commit mass murder under multiple ideological umbrellas.

And it could be argued that adopting an explicitly Darwinian perspective would actually lead to less genocide. For example, by understanding that ethnonational aspirations are a normal consequence of our evolutionary psychology, we could at least build societies that, unlike theSoviet Union, are not likely to commit genocide on their own people. Nor would we be saddled with a multicultural cauldron of competing and distrustful ethnic groups. And, as noted in a previous article, societies based on ethnonationalism would have other benefits as well: Greater openness to redistributive policies; greater trust and political participation; and a greater likelihood of adopting democratic political systems based on the rule of law.

So three cheers for Darwin and for science. Long may they live. And please, no more Ben Steins trying to send us back to the Dark Ages.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

KevinMacDonald.net

The Ukrainian Holocaust and Jewish Pride

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November 22, 2007 was the 75th anniversary of the mass murder of up to 10 million Ukrainians by Stalin’s political police, the dreaded NKVD. This bureaucracy was the apogee of political correctness, murdering tens of thousands of farmers and small-town people because the region resisted collectivisation. The practice of mass political murder was initiated by Lenin immediately after Trotsky brought him to power. Stalin inherited and extended the practice and its apparatus.

Until after the Second World War the senior ranks of the NKVD were disproportionately Jewish. These were secular Jews who as good communists rejected divisions of ethnicity and race as products of bourgeois society. Nevertheless they retained their identity as Jews; they knew who their ancestors were.

Jews do not feel remorse for the Ukraine famine. They do not apologise for it. They do not point to it as a failing of the Jewish character or culture. That is an enormous inconsistency. For one thing Jews feel pride in the positive achievements of other Jews, whether religious or secular. But how can pride be ethnic and unconditional while shame is conditional and compartmentalised? Is it not inconsistent for someone to feel pride in the achievements of his ethnic group but to feel no shame for its failings?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a similar point in his last book, Two Hundred Years Together. Group pride goes hand in hand with group shame. He wrote: “[The] Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.”  Regarding white shame, our own Michael J. Polignano has argued cogently that those who condemn whites for the behaviour of other whites are implicitly admitting the case for white pride in the achievements of the West (Occidental Quarterly, Spring 2008, pp. 3-6).  

I suppose inconsistency is one of the prerogatives of being human. However, in this case the inconsistency is larger than a failing of human nature because other ethnic groups and nations are not permitted to forget their sins, at least when they sinned against Jews. The Germans are taught by their media and schools to feel shame for the actions of a pagan secret service that murdered millions of Jews and Gypsies during the Second  World War. Responsibility is levelled at Germans in general, not only pagans or those who supported Hitler’s extermination policy. The shame is ethnic and unconditional. Only German pride must be conditional and compartmentalised.

The same sort of general ethnic shame is taught to whites of many nations. It seems that we have all done something terrible at one time or another, whether it is colonialism, exploitation, discrimination, segregation, etc. And it is understood that “we” means fellow ethnics. The crime varies but the shame remains the same.

There is a good deal of truth to many of these accusations. The German state did commit the Holocaust. The British, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch and French states did displace native peoples in the Americas, Africa and Australasia. Blacks were discriminated against in the United States. Colonialism and ethnic expansion have their dark sides.

There is also some moral truth to the accusations, even if they are over generalised. But it is a conditional morality such that group identity combined with even vestigial pride makes it hypocritical to feel pride but not shame for group behaviour. A history of Germany that did not mention World War Two or the Holocaust would be rightly dismissed as propaganda. Can anyone imagine a history of the United States that did not admit the evils of slavery or Jim Crow?

But we don’t need to imagine a history of the Jews that fails to mention the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution or in communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe in the post-WWII period or the attempted Bolshevik revolutions in Germany after the First World War or in Soviet espionage. Simply consult any of the seemingly endless parade of tribal histories, many produced by departments of Jewish studies at taxpayer-funded universities.

The inconsistency goes even further. Jewish organisations are as one in condemning Western societies, Western traditions, and Christianity, for past crimes against Jews. Yet they never talk about Jewish crimes.

It is difficult to say what the effect of this asymmetrical shame and shaming has had on the West’s ability to defend its interests in the culture wars; except that the effect has surely been negative. A level playing field will not be achieved until Jewish history texts, Holocaust museums, and Jewish Studies departments make the same effort at self-knowledge and self-shaming that Jews have urged on non-Jewish nations.

Charles Dodgson is the pen name of a social analyst living in England.

Media Watch – Implicit whiteness, with pyrotechnics: Or, the night white people took over Washington, DC

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The other night I saw AC/DC at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C.  For those out of the know, AC/DC is an aging Australian hard rock band (founded 1973) famous for thundering, simple-themed songs that revolve around alcohol, women, and rock.  Its guitarist, a pale, slight Scotsman named Angus Young, is known for performing while wearing a British schoolboy uniform (jacket, tie and shorts) which he sheds (except for the shorts) mid-concert and duck-walks the length of the stage with sweat and hair flying.

Of the thousands of human beings packed into the arena, I did not see a single non-white face.  They may have been there, but in numbers that can only be described as statistically insignificant.  They were working-class class whites, for the most part, spanning a range of ages, with the occasional obvious yuppie-with-a-black-T-shirt-for-the-occasion thrown in.

The swarms of whites did not go unnoticed by the smaller crowds of blacks orbiting the Verizon Center that night.  They seemed slightly alarmed by the rugged whites, many of whom sported Celtic cross tattoos, Germanic cross T-shirts, and other signs of what psychologist Kevin MacDonald calls “implicit whiteness.”  Some taunts were thrown in our direction by a group of black girls, and one black man was prompted, for reasons I could not discern, to bellow “suck my d***.  Suck my big black d***” for all to hear.

The only blacks who interacted with whites were ticket scalpers, whose activities were ignored by the all-black police force on the scene.

Inside, the concert was an electrifying spectacle of deafening anthemic rock that drove the crowd nuts.  Smoke, lights, a giant inflatable “Rosie” (you had to be there) and, for the finale song of “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You,” six full-sized battlefield canons were wheeled onto the stage and blasted at the appropriate moment.  Women wore flashing devil horns, which went nicely with songs like “Hell’s Bells” and “Highway to Hell.”

I had a blast.  But the pro-white observer in me could not help but play field anthropologist at the same time.  Here I was, in the thick of thousands of whites, all communing, if you will, around what was essentially a pagan convergence.  The same folks who heaped hatred on Sarah Palin could not have been much more comfortable with this panorama:  a sea of white males all thrusting their fists in the air and yelling “oi!”, and the occasional buxom white woman — probably a non-feminist — gyrating with glee.

I am sure that conservative Christian whites would not have approved of much of it.  But if we as whites are looking for what works, we should not overlook the “Viking” whites as an element of healthy, vigorous white life.  They like the beer, the fighting and the sex.  Properly directed, this is what a race on the survival track does.

In considering it further, I decided that the real function of AC/DC’s music is to whip up whites for war and male fertility.  Again, these aren’t bad things for a race declining in numbers and influence across the Western world.  And it all operates free from the scrutiny of the SPLC and other “hate hunters”, because it’s just too attenuated from anything explicitly pro-white (this explains why the criticism of “Lord of the Rings” as “racist” wasn’t taken seriously by anyone — though it was certainly accurate).

I have heard that at shows by another hard rock band, Pantera (with which I’m totally unfamiliar, except to know that they are not a skinhead or “white power” band), the implicit slips into explicit with occasional yelps of “white power”!  Good.  The more of this, the better.

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There is a wonderful mystery to the dark forests of our European ancestors — the sprites, the gnomes, the elves, the swords, the axes, the knights, the maidens, the witches and warlocks, the war-party bonfires.  It’s a bottomless lake for the white imagination, and I am sure that an experience like an AC/DC show taps into it.

Whatever is going on, whites show up, in large numbers, ready to rock.  That’s about all we need, if you think about it.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.