Trump and the Jews, #6: Ramping up the hate (and paranoia) as we approach the finish line

With precious little time left to go in the election, it seems like Jewish angst is ramping up, although of course, not all Jews see Donald Trump as a disaster (see previous articles in this series). Here’s a typical Trump rally as imagined by New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait.

Much of the recent furor concerns Trump’s final ad, a 2-minute masterpiece of populist rhetoric that depicts a “global power structure” that is “bleeding America dry” with horrible trade deals that enrich elites and open the gates to mass immigration. Activist Jews watching it focused on the people depicted as behind this globalist takeover: George Soros, Janet Yellen, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman of Goldman Sachs, with the implication that Clinton is their minion. As he noted in his famous West Palm Beach speech which also triggered activist Jews and cucks like Rick Wilson:

The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.

This was enormously triggering for the ADL which tweeted:


But of course, this is an egregiously stupid tactic for Jews and cuckservatives to take. Why call attention to Jewish involvement in international banking when their involvement and their general commitment to a globalist model for Western countries is well-known? As Jonathan Taylor  noted in Counterpunch:

For our tiny size, we are by far the most politically influential. The worlds of finance, media, journalism and law are home to extremely disproportionately high numbers of Jews. Leading globalist institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO have high numbers of Jewish executives and staffers, as do organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, which one informal estimate claims is around 50% Jewish. Half of the US’s billionaires are Jewish. Jewish donors play an enormous role in funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The normally Republican and predominantly Jewish neoconservatives have thrown their support behind Hillary. … Bringing up anti-Semitism then just reminds people of how much influence and power Jews have.

A November 7 article at JTA focuses on Jewish responses to these statements by Trump as tapping into a wellspring of anti-Semitism that will unleash another holocaust (“Anti-Semitism unleashed by Trump followers chills Jewish voters“). It begins ominously: “Pieties? Out. Passports? In. Paranoia? On its way.”

I’d have to say that paranoia is already here if this is any indication. Another sample:

“My sister and her son didn’t have passports, but I pushed her to get them this summer,” said Suzanne Reisman, 40, a New York City-based writer who has been harassed by anti-Semites on Twitter. “My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I hope it won’t come to it, but if we have to flee, we are ready.”

At the extreme (psychiatric case) end of this paranoia is an article in the Forward (“How Do I Explain My Trump Nazi Nightmare to My Mexican American Daughter?”) that begins by recounting the author’s nightmare of a naked Trump appearing with a swastika headband and saying things like “I’m deporting your daughter even though she was born in New York.” For her, it’s the 1930’s all over again, and we all know what that means:

I watch the news. Here is what I see: On a recent interview with CNN Trump says that he is for a ban on Muslims coming into the United States. I check the date to see if it’s still 2016 and I’m living in New York City or if it’s 1936 and I’m living in Nazi Germany, because for one to say, “Muslims shouldn’t be allowed into the United States,” to me is the same thing as saying “Jews should wear a yellow star when they walk down the street.”

This paranoia is an integral part of Judaism’s bunker mentality — a marker of strong ingroup identification and central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. As I noted in Chapter 7 of A People That Shall Dwell Alone (pp. 218-219):

A permanent sense of imminent threat appears to be common among Jews. Writing on the clinical profile of Jewish families, Herz and Rosen (1982) note that for Jewish families a “sense of persecution (or its imminence) is part of a cultural heritage and is usually assumed with pride. Suffering is even a form of sharing with one’s fellow-Jews. It binds Jews with their heritage–with the suffering of Jews throughout history.” Zborowski and Herzog (1952, 153) note that the homes of wealthy Jews in traditional Eastern European shtetl communities sometimes had secret passages for use in times of anti-Semitic pogroms, and that their existence was “part of the imagery of the children who played around them, just as the half-effaced memory was part of every Jew’s mental equipment.” …

Woocher (1986) shows that Jewish survival in a threatening world is a fundamental theme of Judaism as a civil religion in contemporary America. Within this world view, the gentile world is conceptualized as fundamentally hostile, with Jewish life always on the verge of ceasing to exist entirely. “Like many other generations of Jews who have felt similarly, the leaders of the polity who fear that the end may be near have transformed this concern into a survivalist weapon” (Woocher 1986, 73). Thus, for example, Woocher (1986) notes that there has been a major effort since the 1960s to have American Jews visit Israel in an effort to strengthen Jewish identification, with a prominent aspect of the visit being a trip to a border outpost “where the ongoing threat to Israel’s security is palpable” (p. 150).

Self-deception is another important aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy and the focus of Chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents. Perhaps the most self-deceptive comment comes from Julia Ioffe, a journalist who was offended by Twitter comments after her hit piece on Melania Trump appeared in GQ. Ioffe, who writes for Foreign Affairs and Politico, said she was “personally glad to see the outpouring of antisemitism” because it restored Jews’ status as a persecuted minority.

For a long time I was very frustrated by the discussion on kind of the liberal side of the political spectrum, where Jews, like Israel, were no longer seen as the underdog, no longer seen as the persecuted minority, in fact, this kind of scurrying line of anti-Semitic stereotype of us as the establishment, and people who run and control everything.

This was too much even for Jeffrey Goldberg, who, as a leading pro-Israel journalist (who, as editor-in-chief of Atlantic, also has a perch in the elite media) is quite aware of Jewish power:  “Two things can be true at once,” implying that Jews could be a persecuted minority and yet a dominant part of the establishment. Indeed, one might say that in general Jews as an elite with different interests and attitudes than other sectors of society, are the main cause of historical anti-Semitism.  Without going into a laundry list of Jewish power in America (Jonathan Taylor’s comments above are a good start), let’s just say that writing for elite publications and being attacked by a bunch of mainly anonymous Twitter trolls (some of whom are doubtless on the payroll of the ADL) is not exactly a sign that you are on the outside looking in.

Also in the running for most self-deceptive pre-election comment is the above-mentioned Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine (“The GOP’s age of authoritarianism has only just begun.”). For Chait, Trump is a reincarnation of a decades-old Jewish bogeyman in American politics: right wing populism.

The party has grown increasingly reliant upon White identity politics to supply its votes, which has left an indelible imprint on not only the Republican Party’s function but also its form.

Right-wing populism has had the same character for decades — in 1950, Theodor Adorno described the fear of outsiders, and the veneration of law and order, as “the authoritarian personality”; in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described a similar tendency as “the paranoid style” — but until recently, those movements lived outside both political parties.

The work of Adorno and Hofstadter remains central to Jewish intellectuals’ understanding of American politics. Chait’s comments are a good example of how Jewish intellectuals are able to plug into influential pseudoscientific movements led by strongly identified Jews who were pursuing Jewish interests (Adorno and Hofstadter are covered in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique).  For these Jewish intellectuals, a particularly noxious aspect of populism is distrust of elites and “experts” such as those vetted by the American university system — a view that obviously dovetails with Jewish interests as an elite. Hofstadter’s view that departures from liberal thinking derive from “status anxiety” may seem relevant. However, Hofstadter framed status anxiety as nothing more than psychopathology, while the anxieties of Trump voters are not at all a psychopathology. In fact Trump voters have very real fears about their future in non-White America (here, here, here and here), and for good reason (see comments on David Brooks, below).

In making such statements, Chait ignores research that Trump voters are not actually more authoritarian than non-Trump voters. They are actually populists whose main characteristics are support for American nationalism and distrust of elites — people like Chait and Brooks and their employers. [Trump’s voters aren’t authoritarians, new research says. So what are they? Washington Post, March 6, 2016]

What Chait fails to mention, of course, is that authoritarianism is rampant on the left, most notably in universities where free speech is a distant memory and we even see threats of physical assault.

thiel

Then there’s Marissa Robbins in Newsweek

Over the past 16 months, Trump’s campaign has openly and unabashedly stirred up hatred against women, people of color, Muslims and immigrants. He has refused to condemn some of his explicitly White-supremacist alt-right supporters and has even promoted images and tweets created by these individuals on his own Twitter feed.

Trump has also recently incorporated the anti-Semitic trope of an international banker/media/elite conspiracy into his rhetoric, dog-whistling to the White-supremacist, neo-Nazi portion of his base.

It’s pointless to go into what’s wrong here—pretty much everything. But the point I want to make is that there are indeed people on the Alt Right who make statements that are, shall we say, less than refined (I have proposed that people with IQ’s less than 120 and who haven’t read much about Jews should not comment on Jewish issues; all it does is give Jews easy targets to parade in the mainstream media.) However, what is invariably missing in these rants is whether the Alt Right critique of Jewish power has any basis in fact. Context is never provided.

For example, from her statements on the Melania Trump article fallout discussed above, Ms. Ioffe clearly has a very strong Jewish identity, and her article, by all accounts was hostile toward Melania (who said that the article “provoked” the attacks). As I have documented, there has been an outpouring of hostility toward Trump by strongly identified Jews who clearly are motivated by their sense that Trump will be bad for Jewish interests. It is not much of a stretch to assume that Ms. Ioffe was motivated to write her negative portrayal of Melania because of her Jewish identity and sense of Jewish interests. But journalists like Ioffe expect that they will be able to write such things without anyone calling attention to their Jewish identity. Sorry, but those days are over.

And underneath the hostility from many on the Alt Right is the general view that Jews are indeed a critical linchpin of the establishment that is hostile to the entirely legitimate interests of Whites in retaining political and cultural control, particularly on immigration and refugee policy, multiculturalism, and globalism generally.

Again, I won’t rehearse the mountain of data that show how the organized Jewish community and many activist Jews in the media, politics, and academia have been a necessary condition for the present power of the anti-White movement, but Ioffe’s idea that Twitter harassment proves that Jews are not the establishment is ludicrous. If Trump wins it will be in the teeth of a unified establishment, from the far left that dominates academia and much of the mainstream media to the neoconservative right that has dominated conservative media and foreign policy. It would be a yuge defeat for the entire elite class that dominate the US, as Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev (an Israeli who is horrified by Trump’s statements on immigration) notes:

Trump’s election as president wouldn’t only sully America’s image in foreign eyes, it would crush it in the eyes of many Americans, including the overwhelming majority of its elites. The leaders of America’s cultural, intellectual, academic and financial sectors would immediately be plunged into shock and depression. They would look in the mirror and be hard put to convince themselves that America, with Trump as president, can still be considered great. They won’t leave the country in droves, as some have threatened, but their country would certainly be diminished forever in their eyes.

Ah the weeping and gnashing of teeth in all the elite enclaves, from the Hamptons to Beverly Hills.

Finally, I want to make a point about how the fact that Trump is supported by working class Whites is used against him. In general, the people who run this unified, oligarchic establishment are more educated than average. But this education gap is used as a self-reinforcing weapon against Trump by writers like David Brooks, another writer who, like Ioffe, is a member of the barred-from-the-establishment persecuted minority. Brooks writes for the New York Times and appears regularly on PBS. As summarized by RealClearPolitics, Brooks noted on PBS that

the less educated and non-college educated Whites are going to vote for Donald Trump no matter what. He added, “people are just going with their gene pool.” Brooks said demographics is the reason why Clinton is making a campaign stop in the state of Michigan, normally a Democratic stronghold, because “there are a lot of White people.”

“Basically, less educated or high school-educated Whites are going to Trump,” Brooks told host Judy Woodruff. “It doesn’t matter what the guy does. And college-educated going to Clinton.”

“Sometimes, you get the sense that the campaign barely matters,” a dejected Brooks said. “People are just going with their gene pool and whatever it is. And that is one of the more depressing aspects of this race for me.” …

“It’s a campaign of hate,” he said of Trump. “Obama is a campaign of at least hope. At least his first campaign was. This is just a campaign of hate. And, you know, people who don’t like Trump really don’t like Trump. And I guess I’m among them.”

Three points:

  • Brooks is being interviewed on PBS, a media outlet with an educated viewership. He is basically telling his educated audience that people like them are voting for Clinton. There is a sense of superiority and the implication that only the unwashed would vote for Trump.

The domination of elite media by people hostile to the traditional White majority remains a problem for those of us in opposition to the establishment. The problem is that intellectually insecure White people look to the elite media for their ideas. Most people are quite insecure about their intellectual ability. But they know that the professors at Harvard, the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and PBS are all on page when it comes to immigration and the benefits of diversity. This is a formidable array, to the point that you almost have to be a crank to dissent from this consensus.

Brooks, then, is appealing to these intellectually insecure Whites, hoping that educated Whites will cast enough votes for Clinton to keep this corrupt establishment going a while longer before it inevitably goes down in flames.

If you’d like to continue the destruction of our manufacturing base, and the jobs that went with it. If you like the uncontrollable immigration, if you like the string of stupid wars from Iraq to Libya to Syria. If you want to say yes to all of that, if you want to keep this all the way it is, fine, then vote for Hillary Clinton.

  • Brooks is clearly saying that White identity politics is driving the Trump campaign (“going with their gene pool”), and I (along with Jonathan Chait, as quoted above) wholeheartedly agree. The problem for Jews is that the forces unleashed by Jewish activism in favor of immigration and multiculturalism have inevitably unleashed a rise in White identity politics, either implicitly, as among most Trump supporters, or explicitly, as among the Alt Right (which has been the only intellectual movement supporting Trump). And once this process starts gaining momentum, it’s only a matter of time before there is a critical mass of Whites who are dialed into the Jewish role in White dispossession.  Psychologically, we expect that racial identity and a sense of racial interests will be increasingly important as Whites become a minority.

This is especially the case given that Whites are routinely subjected to hostility in the media and the educational system. An article in The Federalist by a Jewish writer, David Marcus (no fan of the Alt Right) notes:

Until recently I would have been unlikely to use the term [“anti-White’]. Not because I didn’t believe some people harbored animosity towards Whites, but because that was a fringe attitude removed from power, which represented little real threat. That is no longer the case. Progressive rhetoric on race has turned an ugly corner and the existence of “anti-White” attitudes can no longer be ignored….What started as irony turned into an actual belief that White people, specifically White men, are more dangerous and immoral than any other people.

And a student, “College Republican,” comments on an article in The American Conservative by Scott McConnell, also critical of the Alt Right:

I am in college and nearly all of my conservative friends are at least sympathetic to the alt-right. Even if they don’t openly talk about it, they’re regularly browsing 8chan’s /pol/, The Right Stuff, Radix, VDare, Occidental Observer, AmRen, etc.

How did this come about? It’s harder for older people to understand, but we younger Whites have been vilified all our lives. Throughout elementary school high school, I was regularly demonized for being White. (I attended public and Christian schools and it was even worse at the latter.) And now it’s even more extreme in college. Our entire White race is regularly trashed on a daily basis. … We have the right to oppose our own dispossession and extinction — just as every other race does. It’s time for younger Whites to pick up the gauntlet because we’re the future.

The anti-White hatred originating from the highest moral ground of our culture is palpable, and it is only going to get worse — much worse — if our future is indeed a non-White America.

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