The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 2

/10 Comments/in , /by

Go to Part 1

Legal Work for the Movement

When she returned to Berkeley, Fay “felt energized.”[i] So did other returnees. Mario Savio, fresh from Mississippi, launched the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley that fall, kicking off the wider radical crusade of the 1960s. When the police began to clear Sproul Hall of protesting students in the early morning of December 3, Bob Treuhaft was the first one arrested; he had been called by Savio and arrived just in time for the bust.[ii] The Free Speech Movement—surprise—was every bit as Jewish as Freedom Summer. The occupiers of Sproul Hall held a Hanukkah service during the sit-in, and the biggest base of support for the radicals came from the Jews in the student body.[iii] Fay “relished seeing the Berkeley campus develop into a hotbed of Movement fervor.”[iv] The fact that it was a Jewish movement was presumably a source of pride for her, given her strong Jewish identity.

The arrestees called for legal help and Fay jumped into action. Her energy at times like this could be awe-inspiring, and the FSM members “secretly fell in love with her.”[v] Over the years, many people would describe Fay as attractive, intelligent, and generous, especially when she could immerse herself in a cause. She helped arrange for bail and performed other legal work in a blur of activity.

Shortly afterward, Fay held a Seder (a ceremonial Passover dinner) for SNCC personnel at her home. She “incorporated into it references to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement.”[vi] This was fitting because the Jews had invested heavily in the movement; indeed, they had generally succeeded in guiding the direction of the civil rights campaign from the time they initiated the NAACP in 1909.[vii]

Fay had another reason to feel good in the spring of 1965. She and Marvin reunited and leased a house in the Berkeley flats. They made their home a haven for movement friends, who were excited by yet another looming cause: the Vietnam War. (No rest for the wicked.) They plunged into an effort to help young men resisting the draft and others demonstrating against the war.[viii] Fay, Marvin, and their lawyer friends Peter Franck and Aryay Lenske set up the Council for Justice (CFJ) to provide legal services for the entire range of leftist causes. The Executive Committee of the CFJ included Beverly Axelrod, who would soon make Eldridge Cleaver famous.[ix]

The CJF didn’t last long, but not to worry; there is always another cause, another front in the war against White society. Sure enough, one soon appeared, one that carried a menacing—murderous, even—revolutionary swagger, so calculated to set Jewish hearts aflutter. Better yet, this group was Black, and so would be entirely dependent upon Jewish brains and money.

Eldridge Cleaver and the Revolutionary Glorification of Black Criminality

In the wake of Freedom Summer and the racial rancor it generated within the civil rights movement, more pugnacious Blacks rose to ascendancy in SNCC and other civil rights organizations. Stokely Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in May 1966, and quickly repudiated civil disobedience. He embraced “Black Power” and Black separatism, and by the end of the year he expelled Whites from the SNCC. A position paper worked up to explain the move stated, “All White people are racists.”[x] Jewish revolutionaries were outraged; one cited Jewish support of civil rights organizations and their “strategic role in organizing and funding the struggle,” and concluded “it was clear to everyone that [Jews] were the primary target” of Carmichael’s new racial militancy.[xi] Jews can get awfully sensitive when their revolutionary proxies get it into their heads to steer their own way.

It was in this context that the Black Panthers appeared in the Bay Area in October 1966. The Black Panthers reviled the “White power structure” but were open to alliances with White radicals. Jewish leftists immediately connected with their movement. Advocacy for the Panthers would become the dramatic climax of Fay’s career. She would throw herself into the maelstrom of pro-Panther activism with total incomprehension of their true nature, just like many other Jewish revolutionaries.

We begin with Eldridge Cleaver, because his career was so largely a Jewish creation, and provides necessary background for Fay’s new endeavor. In1966 Cleaver was doing time for attempted rape and attempted murder. His infamous predilection for violating White women would soon be broadcast by Jewish publicists. He read politics and history in prison, but his ideas crystallized upon reading George Breitman’s book, Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. Breitman, a Jew, depicted Malcolm at the end of his life as less a religious leader than a socialist revolutionary. “The Malcolm X of the Breitman book went far beyond seeing racism as a flaw in the hearts of the American people. It was endemic to the nation’s economic system, a necessary feature of capitalism. The whole structure had to go.”[xii] The book impacted Black inmates “like a lightning strike.” They now spurned mere reform or talk of civil rights; “[t]here was nothing to be gained by trying to fit in. The very structure of the society would have to be razed.” Cleaver was the inmate “who followed this line of thought most closely.”[xiii] A Jew thus lit yet another spark for Black revolution.

From prison, Cleaver managed to contact Beverly Axelrod, a Jewish lawyer and veteran radical. He hoped that he could pay her legal fees with his writing, and she could win his parole. Axelrod smuggled forbidden literature into prison for Cleaver, and he gave her his numerous tracts, which she sent to Norman Mailer, whose 1957 essay “The White Negro” reminded more than one critic of Cleaver’s scribblings. With Mailer’s enthusiastic approval, she was able to get Ramparts magazine, soon to become the most prominent publication of the New Left, to publish selections.[xiv] Robert Scheer, editor at Ramparts (son of a Russian Jewess and a German Gentile), also helped place Cleaver’s work in the magazine; his role would become big enough to earn the description of “perhaps the key person to launch the career of Eldridge Cleaver.”[xv] Eldridge Cleaver was a Jewish creation, and the Jews were on their way to replacing the SNCC as their controlled vehicle of social demolition.[xvi]

In August 1966, Ramparts published Eldridge’s “Letters from Prison,” which included this famous passage: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the White man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”[xvii] Whatever Beverly Axelrod thought of this passage, it didn’t stop her from falling in love with him. By the time she got him out on parole at the end of 1966, they were lovers and planned to marry. Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice came out in the spring of 1967. The book “whipped tough cultural observations in with a froth of sexual lore, and the result was a violence-steeped Maileresque Black sexual-political myth …”[xviii] It featured letters to and from Beverly and was dedicated to her, “with whom I share the ultimate of love.”[xix] Jewish media sources received it rapturously; the lefty Jewish critic Maxwell Geismar in his introduction to the book wrote that Cleaver was “simply one of the best cultural critics writing today.”[xx]

Cleaver could portray his crimes as politically motivated all he wanted, but without Jewish publicists, it would have amounted to nothing. Because he was able to gain the ear of radical Jews, the myth of the criminal-as-revolutionary was born: “crime . . . became a revolutionary challenge to the state.”[xxi] This idea—putting the final touch on a dangerous concoction—created “room for criminal male violence in the ideology of the New Left.”[xxii] A direct path was laid down to domestic revolutionary violence and terrorism. It led in a straight line from the Black Panthers, to the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and now, Antifa.

Huey Newton and Fay Stender

At a party celebrating the publication of Soul on Ice, Fay Stender met Cleaver and toasted his engagement to Axelrod.[xxiii] (The engagement would not last long; Cleaver soon abandoned her for a much younger woman. Cleaver later admitted that he used Axelrod, eleven years his senior, to get out of prison.) It was through Axelrod that Fay would become involved in the case that made her famous.

However, Fay was depressed again. She was no closer to a full partnership in the firm of Garry & Dreyfus; she mostly did research for the “name” partners. She was envious of Beverly Axelrod, the toast of the radical community, and Marvin had embarked upon yet another affair. She needed a new cause. As it happened, it wasn’t long in coming: in the early morning hours of October 28, 1967, the thuggish founder of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, murdered John Frey.

Oakland police officer John Frey had pulled over a vehicle with Newton and a friend inside. Ten minutes later Frey was dying of five bullet wounds, two in the back from close range.[xxiv] An hour later Newton showed up at Kaiser Hospital with a gunshot wound in his abdomen. There the cops caught up to him; so did Charles Garry and Fay Stender. Eldridge Cleaver, who had joined the Panthers after his release from prison and now stepped up as leader, had called Axelrod for help and she called Garry.[xxv] Fay “would never forget the impact of seeing Huey Newton lying half-naked under armed guard. . . . At first sight, she felt a strong sexual attraction.”[xxvi] Her depression vanished; she “instantly realized this might be the career break she was looking for.” She would be at the center of the “hottest Movement case around”: a capital murder trial for a Black man “struggling” against the “racist” American system.[xxvii]

Huey Newton in Beverly Axelrod’s apartment, 1967. Props by Cleaver.

Fay wasn’t the only turned-on radical. Newton (who reportedly had a Jewish grandfather[xxviii]) and the Panthers had already gotten major press coverage; less than three months before Frey’s murder, Israeli-born Sol Stern had done a write-up on the Panthers for New York Times Magazine (August 6). This was the first exposure the Panthers had received in the mainstream press. “Stern had asked Newton if he was truly prepared to kill a police officer; Newton replied that he was.” Stern couldn’t help concluding that, for the Panthers, “the execution of a police officer would be as natural . . . as the execution of a German soldier by a member of the French Resistance.”[xxix] In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Frey, the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb (owned and run by the Jew Max Scherr[xxx]), which had been covering the Panthers steadily since early 1967, “hastily concluded” that the Newton case was a “clear case of police provocation” and declared him a political prisoner.[xxxi] The Barb would continue to cover Newton’s case full-blast.

Many radicals believed that Newton had killed Frey, and hoped it presaged a real revolution.

Fay would assist Garry in the case, along with Barney Dreyfus and another partner, Alex Hoffmann, a diminutive Viennese Jew. Garry planned a “super-aggressive defense . . . raising every possible factual and legal issue,” with a maximum of publicity to arouse sympathy for Newton.[xxxii] Fay, who had virtually no experience in criminal trials, would do research and write motions and briefs that challenged everything that might lead to plausible grounds for a subsequent appeal. Garry would conduct the trial in the courtroom. Nevertheless, the case looked very bad for the defense; everything pointed to Newton having an electrifying end to his career.

Garry planned to put the “racist” American system on trial and the prosecutor on the defensive. Lise Pearlman describes it as the first “Movement trial”; the Chicago Seven Trial was yet to come.[xxxiii] The Panthers and their White backers would mount large demonstrations around the courthouse at each pre-trial hearing and all through the trial, and the leftwing press and its Jewish scribes would provide fawning coverage.

The Panthers at the time of Frey’s death numbered only about a dozen people. With a cause célèbre like Newton imprisoned in a racially explosive murder case, Blacks flocked to the Party. Within eighteen months, there were over forty chapters around the country with 5,000 members. Their paper, The Black Panther, launched in Beverly Axelrod’s apartment, grew to a circulation of over 100,000.[xxxiv] Newton, many remarked, was more valuable in prison, a likely martyr, than free.

The prosecutor quickly obtained an indictment from a grand jury. Fay and Barney Dreyfus immediately prepared a constitutional challenge to the composition of the jury, because it was too White. It didn’t reflect a “cross-section of the community.”[xxxv] They invested immense effort and time on this angle. (Their argument would fail; they would appeal; again denied.[xxxvi]) This, together with their later agitation against the composition of the trial jury, would have the terrible effect of making juries and the judicial process subject to identity politics, and lead to rampant Black juror sabotage of criminal cases against Blacks.

In January 1968, Fay began visiting Newton regularly in the Alameda County Jail. She was “delighted at his warm reception,”[xxxvii] and began dressing more attractively, with makeup, on her visits. She was “but one of a growing number of his new female devotees.”[xxxviii] Newton was able to bamboozle her completely. He told her he learned to read after high school by repeatedly attempting Plato’s Republic. She in turn shared personal details with him, and was soon panting, “he is truly a great man. Huey is a loving, gentle, kind person . . . He has a righteous force, a fierce combination of moral outrage and anger.”[xxxix] What is this but pure female emotion, utterly duped by radical ideology and a dangerous but charming poseur?

In late February 1968, the government released the Kerner Report. It infamously blamed White racism for Black failure and the Black inner-city riots of the preceding few years, providing top-level government backing for the claim that Huey Newton’s actions were simply the result of frustration with oppression.

Five weeks later, after a night of whoring in Memphis, the Reverend Martin Luther King met God, unexpectedly.[xl] In protest, Blacks across the nation attacked and burned down their own communities.[xli] President Johnson had to call in 13,000 troops to quell the violence and arson in Washington, D.C. Amidst the excitement, Eldridge Cleaver gathered four carloads of heavily armed Panthers and set out to “off” some “pigs” and “stoke the image of [the Panthers] as the future revolutionary vanguard.”[xlii] A shootout ensued. Police killed one Panther and hauled Cleaver off to prison. Cleaver insisted he and the Panthers were innocently “preparing a picnic” for the morrow.[xliii] “To the Bastille!” brayed the Berkeley Barb at this “police outrage.” Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, among others, demanded Cleaver’s release.[xliv]

Meanwhile, Fay worked round the clock on the case. She attended Panther meetings, read books that Huey assigned her, and prepared motions. When the state rejected her challenge of the grand jury, she assembled a panel of sociologists to help her strategize for the trial. This was “a novel concept. Today professional jury consultants are often used in high profile . . . cases . . . but back then the use of sociologists . . . was pioneering.”[xlv] They specifically sought ways to shape a jury to their liking, i.e., one with as many minorities as possible. Fay reached out to David Wellman, a friend and movement journalist who was working on a Ph.D. in “race relations” at Berkeley. He brought his colleagues Bob Blauner, a “confirmed Marxist,” Professor Jan Dizard, and Dr. Bernard Diamond to meet with Fay.[xlvi] Fay and her “experts” prepared hundreds of questions that Charles Garry could ask prospective jurors to root out racial “bias.” This is another example showing that outsiders or Jews will not play by the “gentleman’s rules” that bind together a homogeneous high-trust society. They literally act as a social corrosive.

Garry and Fay knew full well that their chances of winning an acquittal, or a hung jury, rested on whether they could seat Blacks on the jury. Did they really think that Blacks would judge the evidence with greater acumen and dispassion than middle-class Whites? Not bloody likely. They were well aware that minorities on juries were prone to siding with their racial brothers at the expense of facts.[xlvii] Garry wanted “to create the impression that every member of a minority group would understand his client’s perspective better than Whites, but he knew better” [emphasis added].[xlviii] He knew many Blacks in Oakland did not view the Panthers positively. He was banking on naked racial solidarity to spring a murderer and increase his own fame. Did Fay think of the implications of their strategy? Or did she simply accept the idea that Newton was justified in his actions because of White racism?

The Newton Trial     

The trial began with jury selection on July 15, 1968. Judge Monroe Friedman presided. The prosecutor was the tall, courtly, almost ridiculously decent Lowell Jensen. Even Pearlman points out the contrast in style and behavior between the prosecution and the defense; it was exactly what one might expect between a WASP and a group consisting mostly of Jews.[xlix]

Security for the trial was unprecedented. Outside, Panthers and thousands of supporters marched, chanted, and screamed. Some held signs reading, “The Nation Shall be Reduced to Ashes, the Sky’s the Limit if Anything Happens to Huey.”[l] It was blatant intimidation of the judge and jury, orchestrated by the radicals, and should never have been permitted.

For three days, Fay trotted out her experts to explain to Judge Friedman how biased Whites were: Jan Dizard, Bob Blauner, Alex Hoffmann, Dr. Sanford (one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality), Dr. Diamond, and even Hans Zeisel from Chicago.[li] It is hard to see how the affair could have been more Jewish; only Dizard and Sanford were Gentiles. The judge denied most of the defense’s requests, but did permit a longer questioning period for possible jurors. Questioning of the jury pool then took nearly three excruciating weeks. One defense strategy ironically backfired; most Blacks stated under oath that they couldn’t impose the death penalty under any conditions, and Jensen logically proceeded to exclude them, greatly reducing the number of Blacks who could sit on the jury. Both Fay and Garry had actually hoped that minorities would lie about their feelings on the death penalty so they could be seated and vote against death, if it came to that.[lii] The fact that the defense assumed they would lie, and that they were eager to profit from it, says everything we need to know about their ethics. Such are the imperatives of tikkun olam.

The jury seated five minorities, including one Black man. Jensen, fair to a fault, didn’t strive to exclude minorities just because they were minorities.

The defense put Newton, a good speaker, on the stand. He denied shooting Frey. Then, with Garry prompting him, he “talked at length . . . about hundreds of years of oppression,” over the objections of Jensen, because Judge Friedman “was fascinated” by the history lesson.[liii] Newton, of course, had no direct knowledge of “hundreds of years” of oppression; his “testimony” was totally extraneous to the case. Newton swore that the Panthers were committed to nonviolence, at virtually the same moment protestors outside were chanting, “Revolution has come – Time to pick up your gun,” and “Off the pigs.”[liv]

The Black juror, David Harper, “found himself profoundly affected” when Newton testified about racism in American society.[lv]

When cross-examined by Jensen, Newton claimed that Officer Frey had been rough with him, called him “nigger,” and pushed him; he fell, Frey pulled his gun, and Newton felt a hot flash on his stomach. He claimed he remembered nothing more.[lvi] Garry brought Dr. Diamond to the stand to testify that soldiers shot in the stomach commonly experience amnesia and unconsciousness.[lvii]

Jensen’s final remarks included a “chilling” account of the killing. Only Newton could have fired the fatal shots, he concluded. Garry then closed. He compared Newton to Christ and invoked both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. With tears in his eyes, he embraced Newton and implored the jury to find him innocent.[lviii]

During jury deliberations, the lone Black man and a Cuban held out for acquittal. Finally they compromised by opting for a verdict of manslaughter. It was a “stunning” victory for the defense, but it left Fay and Alex Hoffmann devastated (Pearlman speculates that Hoffmann, a homosexual, may have been in love with Newton).[lix] Newton was sentenced to two to fifteen years, under the “indeterminate” sentencing law. It was an outrageous violation of justice, worked by Jews and non-Whites at the expense of a White policeman and White society. The demoralization of White society consequent upon such a violation of justice would be hard to calculate, but surely it would have serious and long-lasting effects.

Fay began working on the appeal the next morning. Garry was busy with other cases, and handed it over to her. She would read the 4,000-page trial transcript, and eventually write a near 200-page brief arguing for a reversal of the verdict, even though historically there was very little chance for success. She threw herself into fund-raising, recruiting celebrities to lend their names to the “Free Huey” campaign, and speaking at colleges, all with her customary full-bore intensity.[lx] She also reached out to rabbis involved in civil rights work: “Fay relished making connections between her religious heritage and her current mission. In her view, Newton’s freedom should be the rabbis’ cause as well.”[lxi]

She visited Newton in prison, along with Alex Hoffmann. As his attorney, they could meet in a small room with some privacy. She felt it her duty to keep Newton’s spirits up. “She seemed . . . to be almost in love with Newton. They looked deeply at each other during her visits, sometimes touching when the guards’ attention wandered.”[lxii] They did more than touch; once “a startled guard reported seeing Stender bent down apparently engaged in oral sex with Newton.”[lxiii] It was a combination Fay couldn’t resist: her own powerful sexual appetite, a poor victim of brutish White racism, an intimate moment with a real revolutionary. Did she think of her husband? Her children? Venereal disease?

In the summer of 1969, Fay and Marvin took time for a trip to Europe and Israel. They “marveled at the transformation in Israel wreaked by the collective blood, sweat and tears of so many Jews.” A relative with an Uzi on his back showed them around what Lise Pearlman calls the “newly liberated” West Bank.[lxiv] Fay would later become “distanced” from other leftists over the issue of Palestine (they often denounced Israeli imperialism); she acknowledged the Arabs had a right to the land, but so did “the survivors of the Holocaust.”[lxv]

When they returned, Fay left Garry & Dreyfus and joined with Peter Franck (her old friend from the Council for Justice) in a new radical law “collective” in Berkeley: Franck, Stender, Hendon, Hill, & Ziegler. All but Hill were Jewish. Collectives were the new thing; they would have no distinctions in status or pay. Naturally, they would devote themselves to “Movement” work.

She finished her brief for Newton’s appeal in January 1970. In what amounted to a grand fishing expedition, she claimed, among other things, that the grand jury and the trial jury did not reflect Newton’s “peer group,” despite the fact that the prosecutor had not excluded minorities per se. Fay and Garry presented oral arguments on February 11. The appellate decision would come down in late May.

Go to Part 3.

[i] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 98.

[ii] When protestor Joe Blum reached Santa Rita prison after dawn, he heard a voice call out, “Hey Joe! How many of you motherfuckers are coming out here?” It was his friend from Merritt College, Huey Newton, in prison for assault. From Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther (Addison Wesley, 1994), 73.

[iii] Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 68.

[iv] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 98.

[v] Ibid., 100.

[vi] Ibid., 100-01.

[vii] See Kevin MacDonald, “Jews, Blacks, and Race” here, and E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Chapter 16.

[viii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 101-02.

[ix] Ibid., 102. Franck is Jewish; so was Axelrod.

[x] Heineman, 42.

[xi] David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 227.

[xii] Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 97.

[xiii] All quotes from Cummins, 97.

[xiv] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 113.

[xv] Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 104.

[xvi] “Cleaver . . . would do more than anyone else to facilitate Huey Newton’s Black Panther Party replacing SNCC as the national symbol of Black disenchantment.” Pearson, 104.

[xvii] Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: The New Press, 2009), 69-70.

[xviii] Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 100.

[xix] Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue, 121.

[xx] Ibid., 122-23. Cleaver’s warden from San Quentin had a different view of his writing. He thought it was “racist as hell, talking about the White honkies and death to the White man and that sort of thing . . . I consider[ed] it garbage, the words of a diseased mind.” (from Cummins, 98.)

[xxi] Cummins, 103.

[xxii] Cummins, 103.

[xxiii] Lise Pearlman, American Justice, 110-11.

[xxiv] Horowitz and Collier, 29.

[xxv] Pearlman, American Justice, 133.

[xxvi] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 118.

[xxvii] Pearlman, American Justice, 110.

[xxviii] Pearson, 292.

[xxix] Richardson, 92-3. Stern probably knew the “French Resistance” was largely Jewish; see “Was the French Resistance Jewish?” in the Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/201308/was-the-french-resistance-jewish

[xxx] See here for Scherr.

[xxxi] Cummins, 113-14.

[xxxii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 119.

[xxxiii] Pearlman, American Justice, 112, 136.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 38.

[xxxv] Ibid., 117-18.

[xxxvi] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 121.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 122.

[xxxviii] Pearlman, American Justice, 151.

[xxxix] Ibid., 151.

[xl] In his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Ralph Abernathy, close associate of Martin Luther King, testifies that King spent time with two women that night, neither one his wife, and beat up a third. See http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-12/books/bk-1880_1_ralph-david-abernathy/2

[xli] After the Watts riots in August 1965, in which the Blacks of Los Angeles had destroyed much of their community, they nevertheless felt that they had “had chastised the White power structure.” Heineman, 41.

[xlii] Pearson, 154.

[xliii] Pearson, 155.

[xliv] Cummins, 121.

[xlv] Pearlman, American Justice, 161-62.

[xlvi] Ibid., 177.

[xlvii] Ibid., 217.

[xlviii] Ibid., 223.

[xlix] Ibid., 215.

[l] Pearson, 167.

[li] Pearlman, American Justice, 210-13.

[lii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 126.

[liii] Pearlman, American Justice, 284-85.

[liv] Ibid., 286.

[lv] Ibid., 327.

[lvi] Ibid., 287-88.

[lvii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 130-31.

[lviii] Pearlman, American Justice, 298-302.

[lix] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, xiv.

[lx] Pearlman, American Justice, 357-58.

[lxi] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 143-44.

[lxii] Horowitz and Collier, 31.

[lxiii] Pearlman, American Justice, 358.

[lxiv] Both quotes from Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 150.

[lxv] Ibid., 336.

The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 1

/12 Comments/in , /by

Introduction

Fay Stender earned fame as a radical attorney in the 1960s and 1970s, defending two of the most prominent Black Panthers in highly publicized court cases. During the course of her career in left-wing activism, she embraced numerous “causes” with a passion as flamboyant as it was unbalanced. She worked strictly within the stream of Jewish anti-White activism, but inside that framework her aims were essentially random, a consequence of her peculiar personality. She displayed during the course of her work a toxic combination of Jewish radicalism, selfishness, ambition, egotism, and unrestrained female emotion. The blend eventually destabilized social institutions and got people killed.

Fay was the personification of psychological intensity, a classic marker of Jewish activism. Her personality traits were etched in bold lettering. People “who knew her intimately . . . regarded her as one of the most forceful persons they had ever met.”[i] Her sympathetic biographer mentions her “extraordinary” ego, and even her husband was appalled by her “analytic, calculating ambition.”[ii] She was “deeply typical” of the radical movement, says a fellow 1960s leftist, “the paradigmatic radical—relentlessly pushing at human limits; driven to a fine rage by perceived injustices; searching for personal authenticity in her revolutionary commitments.”[iii] Like many subversives of the 1960s, she was also a strongly identified Jew, and consciously linked the supposed values of her Jewish heritage with her social activism.

Her life story is a revealing case study in Jewish activism.

Early Life and Education

Fay Stender was born in San Francisco in 1932, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her grandparents hailed from the old country: Brest-Litovsk, Hungary, and Germany. Her father, Sam Abraham, was a chemical engineer; her mother, Ruby, was a teacher. They were a conventional family, not “political” or activist. Sam was Orthodox, but Fay and her only sibling, Lisie, were raised Reform, and they observed the Sabbath and other Jewish rites.[iv]

Fay began piano lessons at four years of age, and quickly showed real talent. By the time she entered her teen years she was on track to become a concert pianist. She earned the privilege of performing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony when she was just fourteen years old.

Not long afterward, she rebelled against her rigorous schedule. She wasn’t happy with her stunted social life (she was attending private school to maximize practice time); she demanded to be allowed to attend Berkeley High School with her friend Hilde Stern. She also wanted to reduce her practice time. Her parents submitted only after much argument. She did not fit in very well in high school, however, because Hilde’s circle of friends considered her arrogant. She was “a loner, restless and impatient with frivolity.”[v] She read much in her spare time and made the National Honor Society.

Fay and her family evinced a good deal of neurosis. Her mother was “controlling” and “tended toward hypochondria,” frequently dragging Fay around to doctors and imposing unnecessary therapies on her. Fay herself suffered periods of serious depression throughout her life, and may have suffered from bipolar disorder.[vi] She also enjoyed provoking authority. At public institutions, she would open doors marked “private” and, boldly entering, implicitly challenging the White social order.

At seventeen, Fay followed Hilde Stern to Portland, Oregon, to study English at Reed College. Reed had a reputation as left wing and iconoclastic. Fay reveled in her freedom from parental control, and began dating for the first time. She was, like many young people, almost painfully idealistic. A letter of advice to her younger sister featured this earnest impression: “The real meaning of life is in three things, love, beauty and pain. And these three are all really one which is God or Truth. And you will only come to know and understand this by giving, and giving too much.”[vii]

A young Fay Stender at Reed College

Jewish idealism does not frown upon unorthodox modes of sexual expression. Sex is also, of course, a well-known tool of revolutionaries. In her sophomore year she fell for a youthful professor, Stanley Moore, a womanizing Communist with a taste for bondage (Fay’s biographer Lise Pearlman describes the relationship as “sado-masochistic.”[viii]) Moore turned her strongly to the left and “convinced her to reject her cloistered upbringing and bourgeois Jewish values.”[ix] It began to dawn on Fay that “there was something wrong with this country, something I wanted to change.”[x] She quickly embraced radical ideas, a rare example of a Gentile converting a Jew to revolution.

In her junior year she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. There she befriended a fellow student, Chinese immigrant Betty Lee, and, talking “a million miles a minute,” “passionately expounded on Communism, racism and imperialism.”[xi] Her knowledge of these issues must have been superficial, but her passion wasn’t. She was vocal enough with her new beliefs that the FBI opened a file on her and Betty as suspected Communists.[xii] The FBI would track Fay through much of her life. Read more

Sociology as Religion, Part 2

/21 Comments/in /by

The author returns to the Project’s origins in Chapter Four, and here is where I diverge from Smith’s analysis. As mentioned in discussing Chapter One, the author sees the Project as perhaps the ultimate stretch of Western liberalism and individualism. I see the Project more as a discontinuity, not only from Western tradition generally, but specifically from the men who established sociology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

First, consider that liberalism, and the Enlightenment were products of the minds of Western White men; while the Project is explicitly anti-Western, anti-White, and anti-male. Second, though the Enlightenment celebrated the individual, it did so in a restrained way. Here it is useful to look at the political and social applications of Enlightenment thought, rather than the Enlightenment as a purely philosophical movement. In Western Europe and North America the Enlightenment can be represented by the republicanism of the Founding Fathers and their antecedents. These men often wrote and spoke of the need for virtue and self-control, and the requirements of the common weal, the common good. In Central and Eastern Europe the Enlightenment was embodied by the Enlightened Despot, the absolute monarch who would reform his society from the top down. Both variants were far removed, if not the antithesis of the snowflake, “do your own thing” individualism of the Project.  A third factor – the Enlightenment developed in tandem with the Scientific Revolution. One of Smith’s motifs is the loss of scientific objectivity in sociology. The Project is faith based, a secular religion. It is not scientifically based. It indulges in a sophisticated manipulation of the social and life sciences to serve its agenda.  The Dissident Right is more firmly based on science then the contemporary Left.

The author briefly discusses Lester Ward, Edward Ross, and other “early American sociologist pioneers and textbook authors” (122). What Smith chooses to ignore is the profound influence that evolutionary theory, racialism, and eugenics had on the nascent social sciences of the period.[5] Take Lester Ward, the first name on Smith’s list. Ward established the sociology department at Brown University, and served as the first president of the ASA. Born in Illinois from New England stock, he saw heavy combat with the Union army during the Civil War. Yet Ward had a well-developed racial conscious. He “drew a distinction between ‘historic’ or ‘favored’ races which originated in Europe, and other great groups of black, red, and yellow races. . . . He spoke frankly of ‘superior,’ ‘inferior,’ and ‘decadent’ races.”[6] And despite his background Ward appeared to have a sincere concern for the safety of Southern White women.

The lower races, Ward maintained, experienced an unusual amount of sexual desire for members of the higher races because they dimly and instinctively realize that improvement of their own race is involved. A Negro who rapes a white woman, Ward declared, is impelled by something more than mere lust. ‘This is the same unheard but imperious voice of nature commanding him at the risk of lynch law,’ said Ward, ‘to raise his race to a little higher level.’ On the other hand, the fury of the white community in which such an act takes place is equally natural.[7]

Sentiments of the first president of the American Sociological Association.

In the past when the establishment was confronted with the racialism of foundational figures such as Ward they often tried to minimize or dismiss such beliefs as simply outdates prejudges of an earlier age that society has discarded along with erroneous views on medicine or astronomy. In today’s more polarized environment such beliefs are seen as proof of pervasive individual and institutional racism, past and present, that must be extricated root and branch. White racial consciousness and preference was, of course, taken for granted in the past.  His experiences fighting for the Union did not lessen Ward’s concerned for the welfare of White women in the South. Blood is thicker than regional differences. It is obvious that he thought deeply about the issue and analyzed it from an evolutionary perspective.

Another name on Smith’s list, Edward A. Ross, was even more explicated in his racial views. A strapping six foot six advocate of the strenuous life and a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, Ross coined the term “race suicide” later used by Roosevelt and Madison Grant. Ross received a PhD from Johns Hopkins and went on to help establish the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin where he taught for 31 years. He also served as the third president of the ASA. Ross was skeptical about giving Blacks the franchise: “One man one vote does not make Sambo equal to Socrates.”[8] He also vigorously pushed for limiting immigration. He believed “Hebrew money . . . was financing the anti-restriction campaign, which pretended to benefit all immigrants, but was, in fact, ‘waged by and for one race.’ According to Ross, the Jews had repaid the gift of American asylum by undermining America’s capacity to control its own racial destiny.”[9] Ross also authored one of the early introduction to sociology textbooks, Foundations of Sociology (1905). Sections of this book could have been written by Madison Grant. It needs to be repeated that men such as Ward, Ross, and even Grant were progressives who fought corporate interests and went to bat for the working man. They were true progressives whose study of social science led them to race realism. I cannot understand why today’s writers on the Right refer to their opponents as progressives.

It would appear from the evidence presented above that there has been a sharp discontinuity in sociology during the twentieth century. The Project is indeed revolutionary. There has been a 180 degree turn on social issues, especially involving race and sex. While Smith concedes the influence of Marxism and feminism on contemporary sociology I do not believe he fully appreciates, or at least does not acknowledge, the profound changes that have occurred. The Project has adopted elements of Trotsky’s permanent revolution of social transformation along with the continuous Cultural Revolution of Mao, with no end in sight.

Smith ends Chapter four by stating that sociology’s embrace of the Project was not inevitable. Again, the evidence above would definitively support that conclusion. The social sciences as a whole could have continued with their naturalist approach, one informed by the life sciences, especially evolutionary biology, throughout the twentieth century. There is a natural tendency to read history backwards, to see events or developments that occurred decades or centuries earlier as inescapably leading to present conditions. A more balanced view of the past sees numerous turning points when alternative paths could have been taken.

Chapter five is entitled, “Consequences,” but in keeping with Smith’s religious motif I think a better title would have been, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Sociology.” The sins are: Dishonesty – “the discipline is being dishonest with itself, its students, their parents, college and university administrators and donors, and American taxpayers” (134).  Sociology is too often propaganda disguised as social science. Hypocrisy – “For a discipline that is obsessed with social inequality as a moral wrong American sociology turns out to be just as structured and driven by status hierarchy, rankings, elitism, excluding social processes, and protection of privilege as just about any other institution in society” (136).

The next four sins are closely related: “Standardized Thinking” – excludes dissenting ideas; “Myopic Socio-logic” – the inability to think outside the box; “Corruption of the Peer-review Process” – the Weitzman scandal is an example; “Alienated Sociologists” – the alienating and purging of dissident students and scholars from the discipline. The seventh deadly sin is “Self as Blind Spot.” The Project’s “very obvious righteousness in the eyes of those committed to it tends to make it invisible to its disciplines. For them it is just self-evident reality” (176).

Chapter seven’s title asks: “What Is Sociology Good For?” Smith has trouble answering this question. At times the author thinks “that sociology as an enterprise should simply be shut down,” or perhaps just “downsized” (184).  Sociology can be very good at describing social characteristics, problems can come with the interjection of ideology and politics, “under the guise of theory and interpretation,” that distort sociological research. The obvious solution is to replace the perverse and destructive ideology of the Project with a healthier, more objective orientation that serve the needs of society.

Chapter eight “Conclusions,” is largely a summarized restatement of Smith’s main points. There is then an appendix where the author briefly describes his personal beliefs. Earlier in the book Smith states that while he opposes the sacred project, which I clearly identify with the Left, he is no conservative, and he is definitively not man of the authentic Right. His own ideology – Critical Realist Personalism – emphasizes “the person over the individual and community solidarity over atomization” (200). It is unclear from this short description how the author defines community.  Critical Realist Personalism is described in more detail in Smith’s To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, and Evil (2015).

So what can we take away from this book? First, if you are teaching or studying sociology, or plan to, you should read this book. Obviously a short review cannot fully develop Smith’s thesis, nor discuss all of his evidence. Plus, my interpretation of this work any not be the same as yours.

For the layman the main points are: (1) The contemporary Left is a secular religion. This is clearly the book’s main message, and it is really nothing new. Commentators a hundred years ago were comparing the Bolshevik party to a religious order. Religions, secular or sectarian, are largely based on faith, so reason or empirical evidence will not dissuade true believers. They do not want dialog or debate. The social justice warriors of today are as fanatical as any religious zealots of the past.

(2) The book points out that those opposed to the Project’s takeover of sociology have largely acquiesced, offering passive resistance at best. This has also been true in the larger political/social arena. Science and reason are not enough. Something spiritual is required. The Right needs the “intense emotional commitment” to a common cause, and the “subordination to a higher collective purpose” that Smith notes on the Left. Conservatives do not have this spirit and never will.  It is obvious that unless the Left can be confronted by a greater counter force it will prevail.

(3) Academic departments are closed systems that medieval guilds could not match. Especially in the liberal arts and social sciences grad students are often recruited and faculty are hired and promoted on ideological grounds.  These departments are subject to little or no oversight or accountability.

One last note, the increasing number of books such as this one, critical of the academy, may indicate that more people are finally taking notice of the Left’s corrosive effect on Western scholarship. However, of all the institutions in society, higher education may prove to be, for some of the reasons cited above, the most difficult to restructure.

[5] See: Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Reviewed in: The Occidental Quarterly 16 no.2 (Fall 2016) 105-113.

[6] Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963). 164.

[7] Ibid, 166.

[8] Ross quoted in Leonard, Illiberal Reformers, 50.

[9] Ibid. 158.

Sociology as Religion, Part 1

/3 Comments/in /by

Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

The Left’s seizure of the academy has been manifest for some time. Christian Smith’s The Sacred Project is a case study of this phenomenon in a discipline where the Left’s grip is near total, analyzed from the perspective of his specialty — the sociology of religion.

Smith, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, believes academic sociology had an auspicious beginning as a scientific, secular, and naturalistic enterprise. Over time, however, it lost much of its scholarly objectivity. Today, “American sociology is, rightly understood, actually a profoundly sacred project” (X).  The author uses the term sacred in the Durkheimian sense of something holy, revered, and beyond question.[1]

To my mind the sacred project that Smith describes in Chapter 1 bears a striking similarity to the cultural Marxist or Social Justice ideologies, though he does not use those terms.  This sacred project (thenceforth, the Project) is a spiritual quest, a secular religion that seeks to end human inequality, human hierarchies, and constraints on humans by other humans, and even by nature. Such utopian and unobtainable goals have in the past, and will in the future, lead to frustration and fanaticism.

Political ideologies can, at times, be nebulous concepts, and some dislike using the Left-Right axis. But that model is useful here for contrast. The authentic Right believes that it is noble to be bound by duty and loyalty to one’s family, community, and ethny. Rather than equality they celebrate excellence — strength, beauty, and intelligence. Inequality and hierarchy are intrinsic to the human condition, and constraint upon individuals and groups is often a positive necessity. And while the Right, if in power, would seek to end injustice, exploitation, and poverty these efforts would not be global, but focused on their own ethnic communities.

In contrast, The Project is ultimately self-centered individualism. It seeks “the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous self-directing individual agents . . . [who should] live their lives as they personally so desire by constructing their own favored identities, entering and existing relationships as them choose . . .” (7-8). Though he concedes that “the Marxist tradition” adds a “revolutionary and socially utopian edge,” and “a therapeutic outlook . . . received from the Freudian tradition,” has influenced it, Smith believes the Project is, at its core, simply Western individualism within the larger Enlightenment tradition (9). This is certainly one perspective, the Project as liberalism taken to its illogical extreme.  I disagree with this assessment, and the author returns to the Project’s origins in Chapter four, so more on this later.[2]

The author is certainly not on the dissident Right, and though he does seem to hold some traditional social views he claims he is not even a conservative. I would perhaps place him as a Christian centrist on the ideological spectrum. While highly critical of the Project, he has mixed feelings about its goals. He probably faults their means more than their ends. The Project’s current agenda is simply a bridge too far. But worse, it has hijacked sociology, “the queen of the social sciences,” to serve as its vehicle, compromising the discipline’s scientific impartiality and scholarly integrity in the process.[3]

Smith characterizes the Project as “transformational,” “radical,” even “revolutionary,” not remedial or reformist. This seems to contradict his above assertion that it is rooted in an earlier tradition. The Project is elitist because, “in the end most ordinary people cannot be trusted (because they do not ‘get it’)” (13).

One of a Project’s goals is the redefinition of the family. Half measures, such as civil unions for homosexual couples, are unacceptable. Only same-sex marriage can “ensure the kind of social and moral approval, validation, appreciation, and approbation that people are believed to need to feel good about themselves” (14). The Project believes that inherited and ascribed identities such as race and sex can be reconstructed if so desired. Thus Rachel Dolezal can become a Black activist, and Elizabeth Warren a Cherokee princess – well, at least for a while. This one remains an aspirational goal.

How hegemonic is the Project within academic sociology? Smith estimates between 30 to 40 percent of sociologists are hardcore true believers. Another 50 to 60 percent are adherents, but less zealous. That leaves, at most, 20 percent who might not be on board, but go along to get along.

In Chapter two, by far the longest chapter, Smith presents his evidence of the Project’s takeover of sociology. He starts by examining the titles displayed at the book exhibit during a recent American Sociology Association (ASA) annual conference. These included: The Price of Paradise: The Cost of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America; Breaking Women: Gender, Race and the New Politics of Imprisonment; The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth Activism and Post-Civil Rights Politics; and Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (32). Many of the books explicitly supported the Project; none explicitly opposed it.

Next the author looks at the books reviewed in a recent issue of Contemporary Sociology, an official periodical of the ASA. Only a limited number of books are selected for review, so the ASA considers these works particularly important. The titles included: Equality with a Vengeance: Men’s Rights Groups, Battered Women, and the Antifeminist Backlash; and Creating a New Racial Oder: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (38).

The Project’s reach extends to journal articles as well as books and book reviews. Smith notes that while journal articles may appear to be “more scientific” than the sociological monographs mentioned above, many of these articles also have a bias. The author looks at some recent pieces from the American Sociology Review (ASR). Like Contemporary Sociology, ASR is an official publication of the ASA, and “is commonly regarded as American sociology’s best journal” (47). One area of research is an effort to discredit work, such as by Robert Putman, that points to a “loss of social capital,” and increasing social isolation in America. This is often done by claiming research errors, sloppy data collection, etc. Another area for damage control focuses on worries about “the breakdown of stable nuclear families” and “the loss of a shared cultural language of community and responsibility” (48).  Because such concerns are associated with conservatives, and because the Project “is implicated in the sociocultural changes that can be criticized for being socially destructive” it needs to be shown that “all of the sociocultural changes since the 1960s, that critics have associated with the decline of social capital, connectivity, and community are not, in fact, really problems at all” (49).

Next, Smith notes that the Project involves not just “scholarship,” but also activism. “The ASA has organized a number of ‘activist’ conference programs for its national meetings” to promote social change and inclusion while fighting oppression and inequality (60). “[T]he ASA is explicit that American sociology is not only about conducting and sharing scientific scholarship, but also promoting social-change activism” (62).

Another category of evidence is sociology textbooks. Introduction to Sociology courses are often part of a required core curriculum for undergrad college students. So each semester thousands of impressionable 18- to 21-year-olds take these courses. I can remember little about my “Intro to Soc” taken many years ago, but today these courses sound akin to cultural Marxist indoctrination classes. According to Smith the typical undergraduate sociology course: “disabuses [students of] their common-sense view of freedom and responsibility . . . ‘empowers’ students to set out with others to change society . . . and causes students to doubt the value of their own cultural ways of life, thus paving the way for a tolerant multiculturalism” (73).   The chapter on “Sex and Sexuality” in one widely used textbook includes topics such as “homophobia, queer theory, hooking up (which has advantages and disadvantages)” as well as extramarital sex (i.e., adultery) (84).

Leaving textbooks, Smith has a section of evidence he terms “revealing anecdotes.” Here he writes that tenure can depend on a candidate having the “correct perspective” on social and political issues. It should be mentioned that obtaining tenure is usually the last hurdle in achieving a full-time academic position. First a student must be admitted to a doctoral program, complete a dissertation under the direction of a tenured faculty member, and be hired for a tenure-track position. Each of these steps acts as a filter preventing dissident academics from moving forward.  It is a closed system with little or no outside accountability. And over the years this has led to Leftist hegemony in the liberal arts and social sciences.

One result of this groupthink is falsified research that takes years to uncover and decades to refute. An egregious example is Lenore Weitzman’s study on the economic consequences of divorce. Weitzman, a radical Jewish feminist, published a study that reported a 73 percent decline in women’s standard of living after a divorce while men’s standard of living increased by 42 percent.[4] “Her study won the ASA 1986 Book Award for ‘Distinguish Contribution to Scholarship.’ It was reviewed in at least 22 social science journals and 11 law reviews. Weitzman’s findings were cited in more than 170 newspapers and magazine articles, 348 social science articles, 250 law review articles, 24 state court cases, and one US Supreme Court decision” (100).

At least one sociologist, Richard Peterson, remained highly skeptical of Weitzman’s findings and wanted to review her data which she refused to make available. After nearly 10 years of stonewalling “the National Science Foundation, which had funded Weitzman’s research, finally threatened to list her as ineligible for future research funding  if she did not release her dataset to Peterson – so she did” (98). What Peterson found was a mess of ‘inaccuracies,” “inconsistencies,” and a large amount of missing data. He replicated the study as best he could and found only a 27 percent decrease in standard of living for women and only a 10 percent increase for men. Meanwhile, another larger, better designed study found that both women and men suffered economic decline after a divorce.

Smith points out that this research on divorce was not merely an academic debate. It had real-world consequences. Weitzman’s findings were used by courts and legislatures to rewrite divorce laws, and men suffered real financial losses as a result. “In the end, the admitted huge errors in her research – which helped shape major legal and cultural changes on divorce, including some that profoundly affected divorced men – have not hurt Weitzman’s career. She is currently the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Sociology and Law at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia” (101). And here the final kicker, nearly twenty years after they were discredited, “Weitzman’s erroneous findings continue to be cited today in the best-selling Introduction to Sociology textbook on the market” (104).

The Weitzman scandal is a stark example of confirmation bias, and the double standard used to evaluate social science research. Often if the research reaches correct conclusions—i.e., if it supports the Project’s agenda, such as Weitzman’s startling report regarding divorce, it is accepted at face value. On the other hand, if research findings are at variance with the Project there are inevitably serious flaws in the study’s design and analysis. No amount of evidence is efficient to establish a conclusion.  Such scholarship can be dismissed (in that favorite Leftist term) as pseudo-science. This laudatory praise versus over-the-top criticism is an effective method for guiding future research.

In Chapter Three Smith shows how closely the practices of academic sociologists resemble those of a priesthood of the spiritual enlightened.  First, there is the requirement of “a long apprenticeship of demanding training in graduate school to learn the right ways of seeing the ultimate truth about reality [and to] learn to transcend ordinary understanding of lay men and women” (115). Once one has obtained priesthood there is the need to “recruit new convert neophytes to the sacred project from among the most promising young students, identifying those who are truly called” (116). Finally, the chosen must be “alert and ever vigilant against false sheep, heretics, and traitors within the fold who threaten to betray the project.” (118).

Go to Part 2.

[1] Taken from the French Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

[2] I agree with the dissident Canadian scholar Ricardo Duchesne that we should not blame the Enlightenment for cultural Marxism. See: Gregoire Canlorbe, “A Conservation with Ricardo Duchesne,” The Occidental Quarterly, 19 no. 2 (Summer 2019) 32-35.

[3] In a footnote on page nine Smith approvingly quotes Gordon Marshall: “Sociology is sometimes seen (at least by sociologists) as a queen of the social sciences, bring together and extending the knowledge and insights of all the (conceptually more restricted) adjacent disciplines.”

[4] Lenore Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (New York: The Free Press, 1985).

Harold Bloom (1930–2019): Unconventional Jewish Guru

/99 Comments/in /by

“The defense of the Western canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. If multiculturalism meant Cervantes, who could quarrel with it?”
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

It’s been remarked that in the last two decades of his life, the infamous Yale literary critic Harold Bloom was sufficiently preoccupied with his eventual demise that, when a student ran into him in a bathroom and asked “How are you, Professor?,” Bloom, at the urinal, replied, “I am born unto death.” The anecdote dates from when Bloom was 69, and does a marvelous job of conveying just how the incomparably melodramatic Bloom had come to personify bathos itself. Bloom would live for another two decades, dying in mid-October and leaving the literary and journalistic worlds scrambling to debate his politics, Jewishness, and critical legacy. Quite aside from these debates, to my mind the most fascinating aspect of Bloom’s career was his almost entirely unique position as a Jewish intellectual guru who resented WASP America but possessed an exuberant love of Western literary culture that led him, ironically, into direct conflict with many of the forces assailing the same group. Although his reasons and motivations are complex, in the case of Harold Bloom, the enemies of his enemies were not his friends. In the following essay I want to explore Bloom’s position as Jewish activist and guru, his attitudes to the old Yale WASP elite, and the nature of his defense of the Western literary canon. Read more

Why I Owe Jim Bakker an Apology and Thank You                         

/48 Comments/in /by

Recently, I wrote an article, posted here, on the 1969 Academy-Award-winning film “Midnight Cowboy.”  I’m old enough to have seen it in a theater back when it was first released—of course, no DVDs or streaming in those years.  I hadn’t seen it again until this year, a gap of a half-century no less.  What particularly struck me this time around is how the film was replete with social/cultural messages that I wasn’t consciously aware of back then.

One of the messages or themes, of “Midnight Cowboy” was a negative take on Christianity, which, I realize now, was to be expected coming from the Jewish, gay, and leftist creators of the film.  I took note of their identities this time around; I wouldn’t have known to do it back then.  Examples:

  • The protagonist Joe Buck, Texas-born and raised, now in his twenties, on a bus to New York City, has his transistor radio to his ear listening to a gospel program called “The Sunshine Hour.” “Oh yes, sweet Jesus! I tell you, faith healin’.  I got a letter here from a sister enclosing ten dollars.”

Christianity as a money hustle.

  • A flashback: Ten-year-old Joe, looking frightened, being baptized, dunked in a river by a tall, lean, rural-looking man, a preacher, in a shirt and tie standing hip deep in the water. People on the shore, their arms raised high in the air, swaying back and forth, lost in Pentecostal rapture. An unsettling image; a bit scary.

Christianity as alien.

  • Joe in a shabby apartment in New York City with a stranger named O’Daniel—fifties, short, bald, fleshy, wearing only a loosely tied bathrobe, an odd manner. Leering at Joe, O’Daniel has him turn around so he can get a good look at him, pats Joe’s body.

Out of the blue, O’Daniel says, “Why don’t you and me get right down on our knees right now?”  He opens the bathroom door to reveal, attached to the inside of the door, the toilet in view, electric lights flashing, an altar with a statue of Jesus.

Joe bolts for the door to the outside.

“No!  Don’t run from Jesus!” implores O’Daniel.

As Joe nears the door, a pole with a sign attached that says “God is love” falls in his way.  He frantically thrusts it aside and charges out of the room.

Cut to Joe running down the street as fast as he can go.

Christianity as something to get away from.

  • Joe in a hotel room, invited by one Townsend P. Lock, late middle age, in New York, he says, for a paper manufacturer’s convention. Locke had picked Joe up at a carnival shooting gallery.

“What you want?” Joe demands.  “What you got me up here for?”

“Oh, Joe, it’s so difficult. . . . Oh, God, I loathe life.  I loathe it.  Please go.  Please.”

“You want me to leave?”

“No, I mean, yes, yes.  Please go.  Come back tomorrow.  Promise?  I want to give you a present . . . for your trip.  [Joe had told him he was going to Florida.]  Please take it.”  Locke takes a chain with a Saint Christopher medal off his neck and hands it to Joe.  “I want you to have it.  You don’t have to be Catholic.  Saint Christopher’s the patron saint of all travelers.  I want you to have it for helping me be good [refrain from engaging in homosexual sex].”

Joe doesn’t want a useless Saint Christopher medal, especially from someone like this, and gives it back to him.

Christianity as a pointless religion of lesser beings.

“Midnight Cowboy” is associated with the song “Everybody’s Talking” sung by Harry Nilsson—it’s prominent background music in the first scenes and then again in the last ones.  It starts out:

Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Those lyrics certainly didn’t apply to me in my formative years.  I heard every word the people talking at me were saying—the Hollywood movies, the network television shows, the popular music, the mass circulation magazines, all of them.  I had no critical understanding of what they were saying and its implications for my life, but I heard it and I took it to heart and I lived by it.

Which gets me around to Jim Bakker.   This was back in the mid-1970s to the late-‘80s, which is getting to be 35 years ago, so I suppose a lot of people these days know little or nothing about him.  He was a very big deal back then.  He and his wife Tammy Faye hosted a daily Christian talk show called “The PTL Club,” which was seen widely on a satellite network Jim had created.  It was never clear what PTL stood for—Praise The Lord or People That Love, one of the two or both—later on, after Jim and Tammy got in trouble, more on that later, people said it stood for Pass The Loot.

The two of them were diminutive—Jim 5’4’’ and Tammy 4’10’’.  Jim decked himself out like his idol Johnny Carson and Tammy piled on the makeup and did some business with her eyebrows and eyelashes and teased her hair to the max.

To give a sense of the success of PTL, within four years, more people watched it than tuned in to Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” It was America’s most viewed daily television program. I watched the Jim and Tammy show regularly; or sort of watched it, in the same way I sort of watched “Midnight Cowboy.”   It wasn’t that I was religious and watched Jim and Tammy to hear God’s Holy Word.  I had been baptized an Episcopalian, my immigrant English mother’s nominal denomination, but I’d had no contact with organized religion growing up or as an adult.   For me, watching Jim and Tammy, or going to see “Midnight Cowboy,” was like what George Mallory said back in 1923 about climbing Mount Everest, I did it because it was there.

Jim was originally from Michigan and Tammy grew up in northern Minnesota.  Both had modest upbringings.  They met in a bible college in Minneapolis and married and quit school to try to make their mark as traveling evangelists.  Their first television show was a kids’ puppet show.

“The PTL Club” began in a Charlotte, North Carolina furniture store.  It ran from 1974 to 1989.  In addition to putting together the satellite television network, Jim set up a headquarters for his and Tammy’s ministry in North Carolina he called Heritage Village, and he started up a Christian theme park just over the border in South Carolina he called Heritage USA.  A good amount of the time on PTL was given over to soliciting viewer contributions to expand Heritage USA.  It’s estimated that Jim’s donation pitches resulted in up to two million dollars a week coming in.  In time, Heritage USA became the third largest theme park by attendance in the U.S., behind only Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California.  What have you done lately?

Being in the know as I was back then because I had heard the people talking at me—how else would I have known, I hadn’t experienced anything first hand—I knew for a fact that Christians, particularly fundamentalists, were on the wrong side of the heroes/villains divide in life’s drama, and that all televangelists were phonies, hypocrites, and con artists.  It came as no surprise to me when Jim got caught in a sexual dalliance in a Florida hotel room a 21-year-old church secretary (not Jim’s) named Jessica Hahn.  Jim’s people doled out thousands of dollars in hush money to Jessica, but that didn’t do the trick, if you’ll pardon the expression—Jim’s transgression became front page news.  Tammy, who was dealing with a bad prescription pill problem at the time, was devastated by Jim’s betrayal and the humiliating notoriety.

Just as I knew would happen, the Bakkers got caught with their fingers in the till.  Jim (Tammy got off clean) was charged with the misuse of ministry funds to finance his and Tammy’s lavish personal lifestyle.  The media went after him with a vengeance.  After a highly publicized trial—again, front page—Jim was sentenced in 1989 to 45 years in federal prison.  This picture after the verdict—which became the iconic photo of him–was used to mock him and get it across that the SOB got what was coming to him.  I was fully on board: what a despicable loser.  I can’t think of an American in my lifetime who was as universally reviled as Jim Bakker.

As it turned out, he got out after five years, in December of 1994.

Jump forward to 2009.   I’m writing an article called “Message in the Inbox”—it’s on my website, www.robertsgriffin.com—which includes this:

History moves fast, so for those who don’t know about the infamous Jim Bakker—his wife, Tammy Faye, who recently died, got off clean—he was a television evangelist who got jail time for having his hand in the till.  Jim and Tammy Faye would emote that their Heritage USA religious theme park would have to be abandoned if the viewers didn’t send them heaps of cash right away.  In would come the money and Jim would throw a few bucks at the park and pocket the rest.

The truth of the matter was that I didn’t know what I was talking about in that paragraph, even though I was sure that I did (there’s no delusion like self-delusion).  I had glanced through a few newspaper articles and watched some television segments, that was it.  What I knew about the Bakkers, as my mother used to phrase it, you could put in your eye.  I got my basic angle from my sources, “Midnight Cowboy” and all the rest of the mediators of reality—that’s why they’re called the media—who had been talking at me.

Nobody has ever questioned what I wrote about the Bakkers, because the same people that had been talking at me had been talking at them and so it rang true.   If I had been so bold, however, as to defend the Bakkers in that 2009 piece—which, as you can surmise, I’m tooling up to do here—I would have been questioned big time and given a bad rating.  As writers of articles, along with stand-up comics and university professors, know well, the best way to go over with people is to confirm what they already believe.

It’s not just Jews, gays, and leftists that have it in for Christianity.   I’ve written a couple of articles this past year for this publication that run up against this idea.

“William Pierce and Cosmotheism” was posted in February of 2018.  Pierce, who died in 2002, was a prominent white racial advocate.  I wrote a book about him—The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds (FirstBooks Library, 2001).   In the 2018 Cosmotheism article, I outlined Pierce’s criticisms of Christianity in light of his racial commitments.  He argued that Christianity’s egalitarianism, universalism, other-worldliness (which distracts whites from attending to their compelling racial business here on earth in this life), and “superstition and craziness” were detrimental to white racial advancement.

The second article, posted in October of 2018, was on William Gayley Simpson (1892–1991), a white nationalist, and entitled “William Gayley Simpson on Christianity and the West.”  It included this quote from my book on Dr. Pierce which was taken from Simpson’s book, Which Way Western Man?

In Which Way Western Man? Simpson informs the reader that in his twenties he had read about the life of Francis of Assisi and found it an inspiration and personal challenge.  In Simpson’s eyes, St. Francis exemplified what Jesus meant for his most dedicated followers to do in the world.  At 28 years of age, during a month alone on an island in the St. Lawrence River, Simpson made the decision to incorporate this ideal into his own life.

Simpson lived a Franciscan life for nine years.  Centering his efforts in large cities, he made his way across the American continent trying to better the circumstance of people who were having a tough go of it in life.  He toiled as a common laborer, giving his work as a gift and living on whatever others chose to give him in return.  It proved to be an experience that was not only a test of what Simpson was made of as a person but also a test of the very foundations that had heretofore directed his life: liberalism, idealism, and Christianity.

Simpson ended this phase of his life when he reached the conclusion that the way he had been conducting himself for nearly a decade was neither the best way for him to serve others nor consistent with his own personal makeup.  As laudable as it seemed on the face of it, he decided, what he had been doing hadn’t gotten at the heart of what was wrong with mankind, because it isn’t so much the conditions of human beings that need improvement but rather their caliber, and the way he had gone about things hadn’t gotten at that.

Simpson had tried to become equal to the lowest and the least of individuals, and that just wasn’t him, that wasn’t his path in life, it wasn’t his way forward.  It became clear to him that he wanted to affirm the life of the mind and connect with the aristocratic instinct and taste that he felt strongly was natural to him.

Simpson gave over the rest of his life to pointing the way to a finer human existence with particular reference to those he increasingly came to see as his people, whites of northern European background.  For them especially, he described a life of health, robustness, beauty, nobility, and meaning far beyond what they were currently seeking and achieving and far more in keeping with what he considered their true nature and possibilities. 

It’s now October of 2019 as I write this.  Well into retirement as I am and sitting here on this leather couch pretty much from dawn to bedtime, with the last big event in my life coming right up, I’m finding myself drawn to giving energy (such that I still possess) to making sense of what I did with my life and why.  I’m learning that a review of my biopic movie, as it were, complete with how many stars I think it merits, is a central feature of old age.  There’s much on the line in this endeavor, because we only get to make one movie; no opportunity for re-shoots or sequels.  The “Midnight Cowboy” investigations and reflections came out of this “movie review” impulse, as was the decision I made a few weeks ago to look into what went on with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

With the Bakkers, I started with a book by John Wigger, who is a history professor at the University of Missouri, entitled PTL; The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017).  I went from there to a memoir Jim wrote just after he got out of prison called I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL’s Power to Prison and Beyond (Thomas Nelson, 1997).  Then it was Jim’s book written with the help of Ken Abraham, The Refuge: A Look into the Future and the Power of Living in a Christian Community (Thomas Nelson, 2000).  I read James A. Albert’s book on the 1989 trial, Jim Bakker: Miscarriage of Justice? (Open Court, 1999).  Albert is a law professor at Drake University.   And I read articles.  All of them totally trashed Jim (Tammy does better); not one positive word about him, zero.

Somewhere in all of that, I watched a 2000 documentary called “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” which was sympathetic to her.  The blurb for it:

Twelve years after the scandalous collapse of the multimillion-dollar Christian empire built by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” tells the fascinating inside story of the rise, fall and resurrection of “the Queen of the Eyelashes.” One of the most adored and reviled women of her time, the film follows her amazing tale from her love at first sight encounter with Jim, through the glory days of PTL, to the scandal that brought both their empire and their family tumbling down.

In the documentary, Tammy reads from Psalm 91.

He shall cover thee with His feathers,
and under His wings shall thou trust.
Because He has set His love upon me,
Therefore I will deliver Him.
I will set Him on high,
because He hath known my name.
He shall call upon me,
and I will answer Him.
I will be with Him in trouble.
I will deliver and honor Him.
And with long life I will satisfy Him,
and show Him my salvation.

Jim and Tammy divorced in 1992 while Jim was in prison.  Tammy re-married and died of cancer in 2007.  Jim, now bearing in on eighty—white hair, such as there is left of it, close-clipped beard, looking fit—with his second wife Lori does a television show out of Missouri that gets minimal attention.   I know nothing about the new show or what Jim is up to generally these days; my focus is on what happened during the PTL and prison years.

Jim Bakker with his second wife Lori

I’ll be darned, I didn’t expect it, after reading a fair amount on Jim and Tammy, I’ve come to the conclusion that both of them were for real, that they did very good work, and that arguably Jim was innocent of the charges that sent him to prison.  I feel awful about the dumb, heartless, and cruel depiction of them I mindlessly tossed off in that article I wrote.

I’ve watched some old YouTubes of PTL as part of my little research project, and this time I picked up on the way Jim ended all of his shows.  He looked into the camera and said, “God loves you . . . He really does.”  Maybe I’m losing it in my advanced state of geriatricness, but all I can do is report that I don’t think it was a con.  I think he really believed it, really meant it.  Plus, I’ve decided that in getting across to millions of people that they are loved, as he did so effectively, Jim made an enormous positive contribution to people’s lives.  To many, many people, hearing from Jim Bakker that they were loved was the only time in their lives they heard that, and it meant the world to them.

Jim Bakker was able to communicate to millions of people who felt alone, discarded by the world, and that they were nobodies and nothing, that God values them and that they belong, to the Christian community.  I’m reminded of the advice the novelist Kurt Vonnegut gave to people who feel cut off and isolated: go to your local church next Sunday morning.  Jim getting across to people that they count and are connected to something immensely significant and worthy was a great gift to a whole lot of people.

Jim was ridiculed for calling his Heritage USA donors “partners”—so it went, that was his ploy to shake money loose from them.  Here I go again, I think he was sincere; it wasn’t a ploy.  For a $1,000 donation, people felt they had a stake in something where otherwise, for many of them, they didn’t have a stake in anything.  They and their family were entitled to free lodging for four days at a Heritage USA hotel every year for the rest of their lives.   Despite what the media implied at the time, thousands upon thousands of people took advantage of that option; and even if they didn’t, just knowing that they could have done it gave them the feeling of being involved in an endeavor they believed in.  Plus, they had the uplifting knowledge that there was a place for them and their children to go where there would be other Christian people like them.  Jim set that up and it lasted for fifteen years; quite an accomplishment for someone who started from nothing.

In Jim’s book I Was Wrong, he gets into his personal failings.  The Jessica Hahn business got a lot of space.  He makes it clear that he now realizes that the prosperity gospel he bought into in a big way got out of hand.  He describes getting financially over-extended with the theme park, but he denies siphoning off money designated for it as I had him doing in the 2009 article.  He acknowledges that he and Tammy got ostentatious in their personal lives.  A board set Jim’s and Tammy’s salaries, which rose to around $1M Jim/$300K Tammy yearly.  He describes studying the Bible intensely in prison and coming to realize that the prosperity gospel was inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus.  His book The Refuge reflects the changes in his religious orientation from the PTL days.

It came through to me in Jim’s memoir, and from the Wigger book as well, that he was a decent, honest, well-intended person, sincere in his religious beliefs and projects, and a remarkably hard and productive worker.  A literacy program for inmates he and another inmate put together when he was in prison particularly impressed me.  As I read through his memoir, to my surprise, I grew to like him and, yes, admire him.  From everything I have been able to pick up about Jim Bakker, he was no fraud, and yet that is precisely the consensus wisdom about him.

Jim ends I Was Wrong with a description of preaching for the first time after being released from prison.

“I’m scared to death and I’m going to tell you that.  This is my first time in the pulpit in many, many, many years.”

“We love you, Jim!” someone shouted.

When I looked around the room and saw so many friends who were still serving God after surviving all that had happened at PTL, I was reminded afresh of God’s promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” 

The faith of many in this room had been severely tried, and they had come through the refining fire as pure gold.  They had not gotten bitter; they had become more loving, more kind, more Christ-like.  PTL was not a group of buildings; it was the people of God, in whom God was working.   They truly were the People That Love, the people who, no matter what, have continued to Praise The Lord, 

Slowly and with deep emotion, I began to read the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord in my shepherd; I shall not want. . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. . . . Thou prepares a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.”

I once thought God had abandoned me.   I thought my days of ministering for the Lord were done.  I thought that I would never preach again.

I was wrong.

And so too was I wrong—about you, Jim.  My apologies.

Looking into the lives of Jim and Tammy Bakker surfaced and underscored some rules to live by, call them that.

  • Listen carefully to what people have to say, but don’t just take it in. Question it, work with it, compare it to what others are saying, come to your own conclusions about whatever it is.  Don’t uncritically buy into somebody’s narrative and run with it, plugging everything and everybody into that particular story.   Look straight at reality: discern what each particular circumstance, event, and human action really is about rather than simply going by what your assumptions and generalizations and authoritative sources say it is.  Create your own narratives.  That’s what I tried to do with “Midnight Cowboy,” and that’s what I’m trying to it here with the Bakkers.
  • Keep in mind that intellectual autonomy and integrity takes courage. Sometimes your truth won’t play well with your audience, but put it out there anyway. You’ll take hits, but you’ll feel good about yourself, and at the end of your life, you won’t be living with the painful conclusion that you sold out in your one shot at life on this earth.  Develop your integrity and courage the same way you develop anything else, by practicing.  The next chance you get, do the honest and courageous thing.
  • Because something is true doesn’t mean it’s everything; there can be other important truths that need to be taken into account too. William Pierce contributed insightful observations about how Christianity can be problematic to whites’ wellbeing and advancement. But there’s also what he didn’t talk about: how Christianity can give peace, joy, meaning, direction, strength, and impetus to one’s life.  I offer the list in this last sentence not as insider who has experienced those things but rather as an outsider who hasn’t experienced them and wishes that he had.  In any case, we need to ask ourselves with respect to anything, what else is there that matters besides this?  What’s all of it?
  • Because something is right for one person doesn’t mean it’s right for some other person. To his credit, William Gayley Simpson was speaking only for himself when he said he wanted to affirm a life of the mind and connect with the aristocratic instinct and taste he felt natural to him. I’m sure he would have agreed that this approach might not work for, say, those who dropped out of school after trying and trying and failing and failing, and who take any job they can get and struggle to pay the minimal amount due on the credit card and then get laid off, and who are drinking or taking drugs more than they should and aren’t there for the people that need them as much as they ought to be.  Christianity may be a way for these people to feel their lives have meaning and worth, and it could give them the strength to get it together and be better for themselves and for the people in their lives.
  • Last, assume your adversaries know what they are doing. People who have it in for white people also tend to be the most bent on pulling the props from under the Christian religion. As brilliant a man as William Pierce was, and I know from personal experience he was brilliant, I’m coming to the conclusion that his opponents know better than he did the positive role Christianity plays in the wellbeing and fate of the white race.

I have a 15-year-old daughter, a sophomore in high school, who lives with her mother in another state from where I live.   This week, I sent her a gift of a CD by a Christian singer named Lauren Daigle, “Look Up Child.”  I feel good about doing it, and I wouldn’t have thought to do it if I hadn’t looked into the life of Jim Bakker and come to the conclusions I did.  Thank you, Jim.

I included a note to Dee, as I’ll call her here, with the CD.  Here’s what I said:

Dear Dee— 

This is a CD by Lauren Daigle, who sings Christian music.   The song “You Say” on this album has been a surprise hit—you can check out the video for it online.  Also, check out the video for “Rescue.”  You will pick up that Lauren is very different from rap artists or Billie Eilish [Dee recently went to a concert of hers]. 

75%—three of every four people—in the United States identify themselves as Christians, but how often in school are you encouraged to study them and their way of life, their culture?  You should learn about Christian people, and from a position of respect; often, schools and the media put them down as “uncool” and somehow bad.

Christians believe that God exists and loves them and looks out for them. 

 In these lyrics from “You Say,” the “You” being referred to is God.  

You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
And you say I am held when I am falling short
And when I don’t belong, oh You say I am Yours
And I believe
Oh I believe
What You say of me
I believe 

In these “Rescue” lyrics, the “I” who will find you and rescue you is God. 

I will send out an army to find you
In the middle of the darkest night
It’s true, I will rescue you
I will never stop marching to reach you
In the middle of the hardest fight
It’s true, I will rescue you 

See if you can do a report on Christians in one of your classes—what they believe and how they live.  Let me know what you learn. 

Love always,

Daddy

The Nobel Prize in Literature and the Politics of Selective Outrage

/11 Comments/in /by

In an era in which every work of art is scrutinized by establishment critics according to prevailing political sensitivity, it is not surprising that the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature is now mired in controversy. Perhaps calling it a controversy might be a bit of a stretch considering how little impact literature –or most art, for that matter– has in public conversation these days, but it is still telling that the award’s winner, Austrian writer Peter Handke, is facing the wrath of cancel culture.

What was Handke’s transgression? His stance toward Serbia during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) and the Kosovo War (1998-1999). It is likely that his Slovenian heritage –he is the son of a German soldier father and a Slovenian mother– prompted him to defend his ethnic homeland, especially when Serbia waged war against the separatist ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo, a pro-independence –and clearly anti-European– effort backed by the Clinton administration and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is just as likely that Handke was outraged because of the double standard so typical of these international crusades led by Western globalist governments, where a foreign leader is designated as this season’s Hitler (Milosevic, Assad, Hussein, etc.), a group of “freedom fighters” is identified and properly armed and supported (the ethnic Albanians, the anti-Assad forces in Syria, the “rebels” who destroyed Gaddafi’s Libya, etc.), and war crimes and atrocities are selectively played up or down by the subservient Western media.

Handke’s collection of essays “A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia” is a slim tome that was published in Germany in 1996 and then translated to English the following year. It has never been reprinted since and copies go for $1,000 on Amazon. Based mostly on his experience travelling through the country, Handke expounds on how the media “relentlessly portray the Serbs as evil.” These fair observations are nonetheless undermined by his one-sided view of the conflict between Serbs and Croats. Handke pans Croats almost as unilaterally as the mainstream media maligns the Serbs.

In a subsequent interview with the left-wing French newspaper Liberation in 1996, he went even further. “True, there were intolerable camps between 1992 and 1995 on the territories of the Yugoslav republics, especially in Bosnia,” he said. “But let us stop automatically connecting these camps to the Serbs in Bosnia. There were also Croat camps and Muslim camps, and the crimes committed here and there are and will be judged at The Hague.”

Handke is an accomplished novelist and playwright, but interestingly enough, his career as a screenwriter of films like German director Wim Wenders’s acclaimed “Wings of Desire” came to a halt shortly after he made his views on Serbia known.

A few years later, liberal establishment writer Salman Rushdie zeroed in on Handke and nominated him for an “International moron of the year” award for his “series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of [Serbian President] Slobodan Milosevic.” By then, Handke was already getting the full non-person treatment by fellow mainstream writers, ever so diligent when it comes to shunning those who deviate from liberal orthodoxy. As it is, Rushdie ended up granting his inane award to actor Charlton Heston for his work as president of the National Rifle Association.

Milosevic died in prison while awaiting a trial for genocide and war crimes at The Hague, where Handke visited him. Handke’s final politically incorrect gaffe was attending Milosevic’s funeral in Požarevac, Serbia in 2006, where he delivered a eulogy.

The unexpected awarding of the Nobel Prize to Handke has unleashed a virulent wave of criticism. In the interim between the end of the Kosovo War and 2019, freedom of speech in the West has suffered increased attacks. European countries in particular have strengthened their so-called hate speech laws and debate of certain topics as well as adopting some political stances is simply impossible unless you are willing to face censorship, hefty fines, and imprisonment.

The award was even more surprising considering how the Swedish Academy was just coming out of an embarrassing #MeToo-type scandal last year in which the husband of one of its members was accused of rape. The academy had to cancel 2018’s prize announcement and, as part of its public atonement campaign, its members committed to be less “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric.”

One of the first organizations to object to Handke’s Nobel was Pen America, which describes itself as standing “at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.”

PEN America President Jennifer Egan issued a statement on behalf of the organization. “We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth,” the statement said. “At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this. We deeply regret the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice.”

The condemnation is double-fold because not only it rejects Handke’s apparent questioning of “historical truth” but the fact that the prize is being awarded at a time of “rising nationalism.” In Pen America’s view, it goes without saying that nationalism is something to be denounced.

The attack is in line with the stated rationale for American and European intervention in the Kosovo War twenty years ago, which led to NATO’s aerial bombing of former Yugoslavia for 78 straight days. Needless to say, since the Western establishment has designated the Serbs as the main culprits in this conflict, the crimes committed against them are not even acknowledged when condemning supposed Serbian “apologist” Handke. Nationalism is a mortal sin and the Serbian people’s fight to preserve the unity of their state is to be forever repudiated.

As United States Gen. Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000, said shortly after the war in Kosovo started: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th-century idea and we are trying to transition it into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”

One has to wonder what Clark thinks of the more ethnically homogeneous state of Israel considering he comes from a long line of rabbis. According to a story from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during the time when Clark was trying to use his “war hero” status to run for President in the Democratic Party primary of 2003, he “revels in his Jewish roots.”

Clark’s troubling statement about multi-ethnic states, which did not get much play by mainstream media, did catch the attention of more perspicacious commentators like the late paleocon writer Sam Francis, who saw through the incipient attempts to suppress identity and homogenize cultures on a global scale. “In that order, particular identities – race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, cultural tradition, class, gender and any other category that distinguishes one “person” from another – will be forbidden. There are enough statements on record from the architects and prophets of this new order to know that national sovereignty itself will have vanished. And the order will not just be somewhere else, it will be everywhere, including in what used to be the United States,” Francis wrote in 1999.

It is no mystery that awards in the arts are politicized and hence not surprising that numerous writers or even the average reader responding to bombastic media accounts have joined Pen America’s repudiation of Handke. As of this writing, more than 40,000 people have joined in on the hysteria and signed a petition asking the Academy to revoke the prize.

It is more unusual, however, to see academics from other disciplines join the fray. Take, for example, American historian Deborah Lipstadt, a Jewish ethnic activist whose main claim to fame is her storied libel trial against her British colleague David Irving. With her characteristic lack of nuance, Lipstadt tweeted on October 13, 2019: “A Novel (sic) Prize to a Genocide denier. How did this happen?” and a few minutes later tweeted again: “Where’s the outrage?”

In a letter to The New York Times published five days later, Lipstadt criticized a column in defense of Handke, claiming that its writer ignored “the immense platform or megaphone the Nobel committee has awarded Mr. Handke. There will be those who will be convinced that his false claims must have some legitimacy, simply because he is a Nobel winner.”

The Swedish Academy has a long history of snubbing deserving recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It has been said that the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, an author whose short stories and essays displayed a breadth of erudition and inventiveness that earned him international recognition, was nevertheless denied the Nobel due to his politics. As the Argentinean once said, “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition.” Critics have since speculated that Borges was shunned by the Swedish Academy for his conservative political views and his admiration for strongmen like Spain’s Francisco Franco, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and Argentina’s Jorge Rafel Videla.

Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno, one of the most influential men of letters in the Spanish-speaking world, is also said to have been skipped over by the Swedish Academy due to an apparently unforgivable political sin. One of Unamuno’s admirers was the young leader of the nationalist Falange movement, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. In spite of being a strong defender of Western culture, Unamuno was not aligned with any particular political movement and yet he accepted Primo de Rivera’s request to meet in early 1935. Unamuno was impressed by his young admirer’s intelligence and publicly praised him, describing the Falangist leader as “very talented” and capable of accomplishing anything he wanted. According to Unamuno’s biographer Francisco Blanco Prieto, meeting with Primo de Rivera and attending one of his rallies likely cost him the Nobel.

Similarly, the Swedes shunned American poet Ezra Pound because of his allegiance to Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline for his anti-Jewish writings during World War II.

It is pointless to speculate why Handke obtained the world’s most prestigious literary award amid an inquisitorial political climate. What we can expect, however, is that the Nobel will ultimately succumb to the same cooptation of other literary prizes as more writers follow the diktats of the political institutions that grant them subsidies, history as a discipline conforms to an official narrative, and the arbiters of artistic excellence are compelled to operate like commissars and censors.