The Shadow Over England: H.P. Lovecraft and the Conflict between Civilization and Savagery

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born 130 years ago on August 20 and dead only 46 years later, continues to be one of the most prominent American writers of horror fiction, and his ideas form a key part of popular culture. Along with fiction, rock music, and numerous films, at least 60 video games have shown the influence of his work. One reason for this is doubtless that the major themes of his “weird tales,” although superficially fantastic, were not so far from human realities which persist to this day.

Lovecraft’s work was undoubtedly influenced by his own personal experiences with mental health problems. When he was only two years old, his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was institutionalized for mental problems apparently caused by syphilis, and five years later died in the institution. When Lovecraft was twenty-eight his mother Sarah Susan was committed to the same hospital and died there two years later. It has never been specified exactly what her condition was, although a neighbor recalled that she had spoken of seeing “weird and fantastic creatures.”

H. P. Lovecraft himself suffered from health problems which were never entirely understood. He was taken out of school several times in his youth, and at one point before graduating high school in 1908 he experienced what he described as a “nervous collapse.” He later wrote in a letter that he was still plagued by “intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevents my continuous application to any thing.”

It is likely that he inherited a predisposition for mental illness from his mother. Considering this, it is easy to see how he developed an interest in some of the persistent themes in his work. Many of his characters lose their sanity, but mental illness is also analagous to two other connected themes in his work — inherited evils, which often persist over many generations and the conflict between civilization and savagery, both of which end in tragedy. Lovecraft’s focus on these themes can also be read as a comment on race and ethnicity. Although Lovecraft identified more with Anglo-Americans and the British than with the White race as a whole, his concerns were similar to many intellectuals of his generation concerned about immigration and culminating in the 1924 immigration restriction law. His concerns resonate with the racial tension experienced today by many White Americans and Europeans, who see their society as under long-term threat by backward outsiders.

These should be familiar to racially conscious readers today. Our society suffers from a multi-generational affliction which leads it to disregard the natural boundaries between groups of people. The results have already been tragic, eroding civilization and enabling barbarism.

“Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” deals with a man whose ancestors have had an unusual appearance for several generations, as well as cases of insanity, severe disabilities and violence, including murder. Ultimately he discovers the cause — he is the descendant of a union between a man and an ape. The revelation drives him to suicide.

“The Rats in the Walls” deals with a man named Delapore who through a tragic fire is deprived of a sealed envelope from his father which was meant to inform him of a family secret. Three hundred years before, his ancestor Walter had murdered his entire immediate family; they had been so hated that he was able to escape punishment entirely. The cause of this crime, though, was still unknown.

The contemporary Delapore becomes curious about the house in which his ancestors lived and eventually leads a team of investigators into a hidden cavern beneath the cellar. He discovers that his ancestors had for centuries maintained an entire city of human cattle – people raised to be eaten. Some of them had even devolved to the point of walking on all fours. Walter’s crime, although it had led to the starvation of these people, had been excused because he had put a stop to the crimes of their masters.

Delapore is called into the darkness by the imagined sound of rats. He has increasingly strange and disjointed thoughts, and soon reverts to savagery. He attacks one of the party members and begins eating him, uttering a mix of human languages and gibberish, before being taken to an insane asylum. Those who take him away are heard whispering something about his “heredity,” as if he still carries a cannibal gene.

“The Dunwich Horror” deals with the two sons conceived by a monstrous alien creature, Yog-Sothoth, with a deformed human woman. One son, Wilbur, has grown to adulthood at more than twice the normal rate, and is widely shunned due to his animalistic appearance and terrible smell. His brother is invisible, but perpetually growing, feeding on live cattle until he fills the entire house in which he has been kept. It is implied that he even devours his mother. While attempting to break into a library to steal a magical spell book, Wilbur is killed by a guard dog; the animal is enraged by his strange odor. The invisible creature ultimately destroys the house and goes on a rampage, killing several families before being brought down through magical means.

All of the above deal with the degeneration of human beings to a more primitive level, and characterize the resulting barbarism as genetic. The Shadow Over Innsmouth, one of Lovecraft’s few book-length works, makes a similar point, but presents this as a deliberate attempt by an alien group to assimilate human beings into their society.

Innsmouth locals pursuing the main character in The Shadow Over Innsmouth (artist’s impression). Image credit: Joshua Hoffine, 2015.

Innsmouth is the fictional name given to a declining fishing village in Massachusetts. The narrator is on a visit to investigate his family history, but immediately finds something strange about the inhabitants. He ultimately learns that almost no one in the town is entirely human. His great-great-grandfather Obed Marsh established a cult which offered human sacrifices to a race of amphibious creatures known as the Deep Ones in exchange for delicious fish and exotic jewelry, which the impoverished town greatly desired. When the police arrested the cult members, the Deep Ones attacked the town and slaughtered much of the population, so the survivors agreed to continue the sacrifices. They also agreed to breed with the Deep Ones once they learned that this would make their descendants nearly immortal.

The result of this miscegenation is that, while usually born with a human appearance, the townspeople gradually change over the course of their lives to resemble the monstrous fish-like Deep Ones, and finally join them to live under the sea. The narrator ultimately realizes that the same is happening to him, as he is a descendant of Obed Marsh and a Deep One wife. His uncle Douglas had committed suicide to escape this fate, and he considers the same course of action. But like the townsfolk, he comes to accept his future under the sea, and even plans to bring his similarly transfigured cousin with him.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward deals with a long-term curse perpetuated by those who are not physically alien, but only morally inhuman. Still, they manage to reach across many generations to bring disaster on the protagonist. It is the story of a young man by the same name who becomes obsessed with a distant ancestor by the name of Joseph Curwen. Curwen, unbeknownst to Ward, had committed many atrocities including torture and murder in a quest to resurrect the long-dead and extract information from them. Two other necromancers also worked with Curwen on this project and have somehow managed to survive through the intervening years until the time in which the story is set.

Before his own death, Curwen had made arrangements to magically influence subsequent generations so that one of his descendants would resurrect him. Curwen died in the eighteenth century, and Ward was born in the twentieth, but strangely the two look almost exactly alike. It is implied that Curwen meant for this to be the case.

Ward studies Curwen’s techniques, locates his remains, and manages to bring him back from the dead. Curwen, though, does not see eye-to-eye with Ward. The young man’s refusal to accept or participate in Curwen’s unethical methods soon leads to the elder necromancer murdering Ward and impersonating him to cover up the deed. The new “Ward” is so obviously out of place in the twentieth century that he is committed to a mental asylum.

The family doctor, who has been investigating the case, ultimately discovers the truth and confronts Curwen, using the necromancer’s own methods to return him to dust. During the course of his investigation, the doctor had accidentally resurrected an ancient enemy of Curwen’s. The latter’s co-conspirators are soon found dead themselves, and it is implied that this entity was responsible.

Even one of Lovecraft’s more fantastic themes, that of alien beings lying dormant for eons before awakening to menace mankind, is arguably another expression of the two themes already mentioned — civilization versus savagery and inherited evils. The threat the aliens pose is that of savagery overwhelming civilization, while much like the long-term genetic pollution in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the threat persists unchanged, albeit in a dormant state, generation after generation.

Cthulhu, priest-king of the Great Old Ones (artist’s impression). Image credit: Andree Wallin, 2019.

In “The Call of Cthulhu” we learn that millions of years before homo sapiens emerged, creatures called the Great Old Ones had come to Earth from elsewhere. For reasons unknown, they exist in a sort of suspended animation; although their minds continue to function, their bodies lie still in their houses in a city which has now sunk beneath the ocean. They have strange mental abilities, and have been able to influence the dreams of men, giving rise to many cults around the world who worship them and their priest-king Cthulhu. This influence over humanity began at the beginning of civilization, and even when the Great Old Ones have lost contact with them, the cults still pass on their strange traditions. Thus it is another example of a long-term inherited evil.

Many of the cultists are so primitive or deranged that they cannot speak, but, from a particularly communicative one, investigators learn that they anticipate a time when they will conduct rituals to awaken the Great Old Ones. At this point mankind will already be in a chaotic and degenerate state, and the aliens, being similarly amoral, will goad humanity on in its mindless violence and hedonism.

At the Mountains of Madness describes an intelligent race called the Elder Things or Old Ones who, like the Great Old Ones, populated the earth long before mankind appeared. Explorers in their former territory in Antarctica find what they believe to be ancient remains of the Elder Things, but learn at the cost of several explorers’ lives that some of the creatures are still alive. Like the Great Old Ones, they have been resting for millions of years, and cause problems for those who wake them up.

The Elder Things not only pose a threat to those who discover them, but represent Lovecraft’s main themes in another way. They had created a race of slaves called the shoggoths, who represent the threat of barbarism and chaos in contrast with the more civilized Elder Things. Even their physical form is chaotic, as they are like enormous amoebas, changing their shape at will. The shoggoths were originally mindless drones, but after millions of years, some developed independent thinking and rebelled against their masters, sparking a war. Ultimately the Elder Things defeated and re-subjugated the shoggoths, although many of their own race were killed in the process. But the shoggoths still pose a threat; the human explorers barely escape being killed by one such creature themselves.

Shoggoth (artist’s depiction). Image credit: Nottsuo, 2016.

Beyond the psychological chaos and decay involved in degenerative conditions like syphilis and dementia, there are other real-world parallels with Lovecraft’s main themes. The most obvious is interracial marriage, now increasingly common, which Lovecraft found repellent and damaging to the gene pool. However, most people at the time shared his view, making the practice quite rare. A more pressing issue was the influence of other ethnic groups on Anglo-American culture.

Lovecraft was very attached to British culture, to the point of even rejecting American English. Partly due to the influence of various immigrant dialects on popular American speech, he considered contemporary trends in the language to be another case of uncivilized influences causing degeneration. He believed that his countrymen should write and speak as the British did, and expressed this view as president of the United Amateur Press Association. His father had held a similar view and affected a British accent, so that he was sometimes mistaken for an Englishman.

Lovecraft wrote during the first decades of the twentieth century, a time during which, as in the present day, immigration was a very prominent issue. Popular opposition to mass immigration was so high that it led to almost all immigration being cut off in 1924, particularly from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many immigrants around this time lived in informally segregated slums which harbored organized crime, and Lovecraft considered such people a barbarous threat to civilization. Today, similar feelings are evoked by “no-go zones” throughout Europe, where many people from alien cultures live without even a pretense of assimilation into the host society. Like the shoggoths, then and now, these unofficial outposts of foreign nations have been created and tolerated due to a desire for cheap labor and left-leaning votes, despite the risks they pose.

Shoggoths represent not only an uncivilized and potentially dangerous underclass, but the replacement of one group of people with others who are fundamentally different and can only imitate the original group’s culture superficially. In At the Mountains of Madness, the human explorers examine the carvings made on the walls of an area of a cavern inhabited by the Elder Things. They conclude that these were the product of a decadent civilization, but soon enter an adjacent area where the artwork is of a very different type. One explorer guesses that this new set of carvings was created after removing an earlier design, and they seem to be a parody of the others, created by tasteless and crude minds. The implication is that they were created by rebellious shoggoths who had invaded an area inhabited by the Elder Things, killed them, and replaced the original inhabitants’ art with their own mockery of it. These creatures had no culture of their own, nor even their own language, but could only manage a primitive imitation of that of their creators.

Of course, the peoples comprising the current replacement migration throughout the West do have cultures and languages of their own, and many would like these to replace those of the native people. They can superficially adopt their host country’s identity – for example, many of the offenders in the Rotherham rape gangs have British passports. But this is only a mockery of British identity, considering what they thought of British girls — members of an out-group to be victimized.

Even when newcomers to the West are not hostile, they are still fundamentally different from the native people, ethnically and culturally. Things like classical music or freedom of speech do not fit equally well in every nation around the world, but are an expression of the psychology of particular peoples. Even if they wished to, others could not carry on the same cultural traditions, whether aesthetic or political, in the same spirit. Only a decadent society, lacking a healthy sense of itself, would welcome them in large numbers. This was a common attitude in Lovecraft’s time, and is increasingly common today.

It is easy to point merely at the most sensational parallels to Lovecraft’s horror in the real world — our own people being preyed on by outsiders in a manner hardly more civilized than cannibalism, for instance. There is surely some kind of curse on our civilization, but the curse is not the atrocities we hear of in the news, but what lies at the root of them.

Everywhere in the West we see a loss of connection with our nation, race, and spirit – everything which would motivate us to set boundaries between ourselves and others and act in our own defense. In their place, we get cheap consumer goods and “diversity.” Lovecraft saw the beginnings of this, calling the modern era “one of frank decadence,” but would have been shocked to see how far it has now advanced. Some say that this is a genetic weakness of Western white people, and in any case many parents pass it down to their children. But our quality of life, and most importantly our spirit, depends on our ability to resist it.

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When Jews Define Fascism

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Concluding one of America’s more infamous obscenity trials in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart absolved a controversial French motion picture with an opinion that has since passed into common parlance: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” The opinion was celebrated at the time as a victory for freedom of expression, and paved the way for a later deluge of Western cultural degradation. Of greater significance, however, is the fact that almost 60 years later “I know it when I see it” has become a political philosophy in its own right, adopted and pursued by a radical Left intent on curtailing that very same freedom by claiming an exclusive and unaccountable ability to define Fascism. This was the starkest message from The Burkean’s unprecedented recent Irish Antifa Project, which was designed to infiltrate and expose self-styled Antifa networks in mainstream Irish academia and politics.

In my view, the most predictable revelation from the Irish Antifa Project was the extent of historical and cultural ignorance among the profiled activists. None of the intellectually and professionally mediocre individuals exposed by The Burkean appeared capable of articulating what Fascism was, or is alleged to be today. Fascism instead seems to have been adopted by these non-entities as a vague catch-all for anything touching upon capitalism, conservatism, religion, or tradition. Equally vague are the proposed activist methodologies of these individuals, which range from the compiling of databases with the names of those deemed to be Fascists, to tentative but deniable support for violence. With the exception of a small number of fanatical Jews like Trinity College student Jacob Woolf, “anti-Fascism” has evidently been adopted by the majority of those concerned as a kind of half-hearted virtue signaling hobby or political side gig, albeit one with sinister potential.

Unfortunately, the problems posed by an uninformed, unaccountable, and unhinged “anti-Fascist” radical Left aren’t helped by the fact confusion about the nature of Fascism is endemic in society as a whole. There are essentially three traditions when it comes to explaining Fascism. One can be found within Fascism itself, and demonstrates how self-defined Fascists see themselves. This material is overwhelmingly historical. Another tradition can be found in contemporary mainstream academia and, although biased, it is at least academic in style, serious, and relatively comprehensive. The work of the late Roger Griffin is perhaps the best available in the English language in terms of this tradition, and is also largely concerned with history. The third tradition, on the other hand, is popular, highly politicised, always concerned with contemporary politics, and is abridged to the point of being a pop-Left caricature of serious studies of Fascism. It is particularly problematic because it has tremendous traction among the masses and, despite being propaganda for extremist politics of its own sort, always presents itself as objective and neutral.

The individuals profiled by The Burkean are unquestionably disciples of the latter tradition, a recent example of which is Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018). Stanley, a Jewish professor at Yale whose background is in language and epistemology and not history or politics, hasn’t published any peer-reviewed material on Fascism or anti-Fascism, but his 2018 book proved a moderate publishing sensation because it represented a thinly veiled attack on the Trump administration. The same administration provoked similar ill-conceived and unhelpful monographs on Fascism from Cass Sunstein (Can it Happen Here?), Madeleine Albright (Fascism: A Warning), and Harvard duo Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die). All of these individuals are Jews, and this is not a coincidence. In fact, since the production of Leon Trotsky’s Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It (compiled between 1922 and 1933) and the Frankfurt School’s project on the “Authoritarian Personality,” Jews have been at the forefront of paving the cultural, as well as political, path to Antifa activity. They do so by bastardising public understanding of the nature of Fascist politics, thereby shaping “anti-Fascism” as a vehicle for the undermining of the White nation. When it comes to Fascism, “Jews know it when they see it,” a pronouncement we are all encouraged to accept without question.

Jewish Definitions of Fascism

A common theme in influential books like Stanley’s, destined for a modicum of success in the paperback mass market thanks to dramatic titles and relentless marketing, is their incredibly—and deliberately—vague definition of Fascism. These Jewish activists know this, of course, but they push ahead regardless. Stanley, for example, excuses the gaps and logical leaps inherent in his dubious study by arguing that “generalization is necessary in the current moment.” But if he is defining the “current moment” as Fascist under his generalized definition, isn’t he simply using generalization to excuse the same generalization? Isn’t this tantamount to saying to his readers: “The present moment is so obviously Fascist that we really don’t need to define Fascism”? Such considerations don’t slow Stanley down for a second, and this celebrated Yale professor slips off the hook to pronounce, even more unhelpfully, “I have chosen the label “Fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety.” What variety? What’s his definition of “ultranationalism”? It doesn’t matter. What is clear in texts like Stanley’s is that you aren’t here to be encouraged to think or ask questions, but to absorb a discourse and accept a dogma. The authority behind such demands stems predominantly from emotional blackmail — Stanley cashes in his card as the son of “Holocaust survivors,” and explains that “My family background has saddled me with difficult emotional baggage. But it also, crucially, prepared me to write this book.” His lack of education and reading in the subject is therefore apparently more than compensated for in the fact he is emotionally distressed by it. Right.

Jason Stanley: Bravely struggling with his emotional baggage

Not only are Jewish definitions of Fascism deliberately inadequate and disingenuous, they’re often completely wrongheaded. Stanley in his first chapter “The Mythic Past,” for example, describes Fascist propaganda as relying on a unique blend of mythic, romanticised, and normally rural evocations of the past, and that the same propaganda offers a future return to this idyll. It goes without saying that this provides an extremely convenient way for Jewish and Leftist activists to attack almost all genuine conservatives as Fascists. But is such propaganda even inherently Fascist or even right-wing? We might consider the following quote from a well-known historical figure: “The position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780, with regard to his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect, amusements etc., is an ideal never attained again since that time.” The ideologue behind this quote proposed a future in which the national community of citizens enjoyed something like a return to this pastoral idyll, filling their days with productive work, music, and leisure (“hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise [literature] in the evening”). It really is quite a vision. But the problem is that these proposals aren’t from the works of Sir Oswald Mosley, but from Karl Marx’s Capital and The German Ideology, and they were a key aspect of the early promotion of Communism. The idea that Fascism uniquely appeals to notions of making one’s country “great again” is an unsophisticated trope and, ultimately, a political weapon.

The truth of the matter is that politicised nostalgia and visions of national rebirth are common to ideologies of all stripes, and are useless as tools for examining the specific nature of genuine political and cultural manifestations of Fascism. The only possible exception is Roger Griffin’s highly nuanced theory of palingenetic ultrationationalism, which is corrupted and glossed in Jewish treatments of the subject in order to indict all expressions of White discontent in modernity. Presentations of ideal pasts and futures are quite obviously utilised by all political actors keen to exploit the public instinct to reject the status quo. Barack Obama’s campaigns based on “Hope,” “Change,” and “Progress,” and Trump’s “MAGA” are not substantially different in style or method, the only significant dissimilarity being the demonising of the latter and the feverish and irrational presentation of its ethos as an early symptom of an impending Fascist takeover. The preoccupation of Cultural Marxist anthropologists with describing putatively utopian modes of life in primitive societies can also clearly be seen as a call to “make society great again” by demolishing capitalism, the family, etc. The oldest and most profound political expression of resurrecting a glorious past rooted in the land is, of course, not even to be found in European Fascism at all, but in the quintessential palingenetic ultranationalism of Zionism, a subject strangely never covered by our Jewish authors, presumably because of other “difficult emotional baggage.”

Similar definitions of Fascism, this time refracted through a lens of Leftist pop-culture garbage, can be found in Cass Sunstein’s 2018 Can It Happen Here? Sunstein’s expertise is ostensibly law, though his most successful work is apparently The World According to Star Wars (2016). In another time and context, someone like Sunstein would cut a ridiculous figure, in much the same way that the Romans found it hilarious that the people squatting in the hovel that was 1st century Judea regarded themselves as a superior nation. Sunstein has shaped his career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School around such efforts as inaugurating a “celebrate tax day” and ending all government recognition of marriage. But Star Wars books and outlandish schemes aside, Sunstein is a deeply sinister individual. He is particularly concerned by “conspiracy theories,” and has developed policy suggestions that governments engage in the “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups” by entering “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.” In other words, Sunstein is a major contributor to the concept of “thought crime” and a high-profile advocate for the same kind of law enforcement online disinformation and entrapment activity that regularly snares exuberant White teenage gamers and presents them to the media as right-wing terrorists.

Cass Sunstein: “We need a cognitive infiltration of extremist groups”

Sunstein edited, and contributed to, Can It Happen Here?, along with a motley of other Jews, including Eric Posner, Jack Balkin, Tyler Cowen, Jack Goldsmith, Tom Ginsburg, Noah Feldman, Jonathan Haidt, Bruce Ackerman, Jon Elster, Martha Minow, David Strauss, and Geoffrey R. Stone. In fact, of the 17 essays comprising the volume, 13 are written by Jews. One of the non-Jews is Sunstein’s Irish-American wife, the shabbos goy and ADL darling Samantha Power, and two are Muslims. Can It Happen Here?, subtitled Authoritarianism in America, is therefore little more than an exercise in Jewish paranoia and a glaring example of the way in which Jews invoke vague caricatures of Fascism in order to attack the traditional structures of White nations. Posner, for example, cites Trump’s hostility to elements of the press and the fact his initial success occurred somewhat outside the two-party structure of American politics as sufficient evidence of a Fascist threat. In other words, Jews, who dominate the press and have very significant financial interests in the trajectories of both major parties, regard anything not fully within their control as tantamount to Fascism.

The same fearmongering yet vague template is followed by Levitsky and Ziblatt in How Democracies Die (2018), which opens with the authors declaring that authoritarianism has been for them an “occupational obsession.” Levitsky and Ziblatt “feel dread … We worry.” What has them most worried is “intimidation of the press” and the fact some politicians “view their rivals as enemies.”  Trump terrifies due to his “clear authoritarian tendencies.” He is said to follow in an American tradition of “extremist demagogues” that includes “Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace.” America “failed the test” when it elected Trump in November 2016.  Like Sunstein and Posner, Levitsky and Ziblatt are especially concerned by “extreme partisan polarization,” which is another way of saying that they are very worried that the two main political parties may actually diverge in a meaningful way from one another and therefore run the risk of engaging in a genuine politics. Since the same complaint is made by Stanley and Sunstein, we might assume that Jews are most comfortable with two-party systems in which the parties and their policies are almost indistinguishable and in which there is a high level of ideological consensus. Anything outside this comfort zone is Fascism.

Levitsky and Ziblatt: “We feel dread … We worry.”

Equally terrified is Madeleine Albright, whose Fascism: A Warning (2018) is derived from an identical playbook to that employed by Stanley, Sunstein, Levitsky, and Ziblatt. Albright opens the 2019 edition of her book with a new preface in which she poses as a benevolent granny, writing with detachment and objectivity, she claims, at her “farm” in Virginia. Granny Albright, who once declared the Serbs to be “disgusting” and opined that starving half a million Iraqi children via UN sanctions was “worth it,” now spends her days tending to her tomatoes and pondering with great bemusement why a reporter recently branded her a “war mongering ghoul.” As she observes the serenity of the evergreens around her, it is quite the mystery why multicultural America seems to be “at each other’s throats.” We might think that Granny Albright could answer such a question by leaving rural Virginia and moving to America’s multicultural heartlands. But no, from her safe and isolated vantage point she has it all figured out. Her answer is simple, and has nothing to do with the fact multiculturalism is itself a poisonous doctrine —  multiculturalism isn’t working because Donald Trump and Fascism are on the verge of a devastating takeover. But what is Fascism? This is never clear anywhere in the book. Albright vaguely explains that Fascism is a “spread of anti-democratic trends.” [Translation: “The controlled two-party system has been weakened”] Fascist “attitudes” develop when “the perception grows that everybody lies.” [Translation: “The goyim know”] Fascism is “a doctrine of anger and fear.” [Translation: “I’m worried. Shut it down.”]

Andrew Rawnsley, Guardian journalist, aware of the this glaring weakness in the book, interviewed Albright prior to writing his review: “I suggest to her that the book struggles to offer a satisfactory definition of fascism. ‘Defining fascism is difficult,’ she responds. ‘First of all, I don’t think fascism is an ideology. I think it is a method, it’s a system’.” In other words, Fascism is a label that can be applied to any kind of politics that unsettles Jews and offers authentic alternative political methodologies. By refusing to acknowledge Fascism as a specific historical political ideology with identifiable and fixed traits, Albright and the other Jewish activists mentioned here can free it up as a system of mere “methods” that can then be interpreted in general terms in order to attack those elements of White society deemed oppositional to Jewish interests. So-called Antifascism, which draws all of its cultural power from this kind of Jewish propaganda, is therefore not against Fascism at all, but against any “methods” or “trends” that aren’t conducive to Jews.

Madeleine Albright: Wrote a book about something she can’t define

Stanley’s book is an excellent guide to Jewish paranoia about the “methods” hinted at by Albright. His text is divided into chapters titled “The Mythic Past,” “Propaganda,” “Anti-Intellectual,” “Unreality,” “Hierarchy,” “Victimhood,” “Law and Order,” “Sexual Anxiety,” “Sodom and Gomorrah,” and, since Jews inevitably view all dissent from their interests as leading ultimately to outlandish forms of mass murder, the final chapter is headed “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Each of these chapters deals with entirely subjective material and ideas, and there is no serious engagement with any scholarly literature on historical Fascism.

As discussed above, “the mythic past” is only a problem for Jews like Stanley when the past in question isn’t conducive to Jewish goals. Fictional multicultural pasts where ancient “Cheddar Man” Britons had dark skin, Africans lived in England before the English, and Whites demonstrated unique evil, are currently the height of intellectual and cultural fashion. These are the versions of “the mythic past” that Jews celebrate and promote. On the other hand, conceptions of the past as involving mono-ethnic cultures, celebrations of European racial glory, and acknowledgement of White group achievement are branded Fascist and beyond the pale. In the Jewish vision, the histories of Europeans are irredeemably shameful and therefore any attempt to make one’s nation “great again” is both irrational (“they were never great in the first place!”) and threatening. In this reading, all positive reflections on the European past are part of the Fascist methodology and should therefore be ruthlessly opposed. When Jews like Stanley and Albright include references to “the mythic past” in their “warnings” about Fascism they are in fact warning and shaming Whites against asserting their own interests and group pride.

The same framework is employed in discussing the alleged propaganda and “anti-intellectual” qualities of Fascism. Stanley argues that Fascists “attack and devalue education, expertise, and language.” This argument is, at best, entirely subjective and at worst complete nonsense. The idea that Fascists have been against intellectualism in general is simply ridiculous. As John Whittam writes in his Fascist Italy:

Fascism suffered not from the lack of ideas but from too many. Despite their rhetoric and pronounced hostility towards the intellectuals of the old liberal establishment, Futurists, syndicalists, ex-socialists, and even the ras professed an ideology and invariably had access to a newspaper where their views could be expressed. After the conquest of power one of the major problems was the formulation of an ideology from the bewildering array of distinctive ideologies within the Fascist movement.[1] [emphasis added]

Underlying Stanley’s accusatory statement is the simple fact that Fascists oppose liberal, left-wing, and Jewish intellectualism. Jewish activists like Stanley believe, of course, that theirs are the only legitimate and authentic intellectual activities in the public sphere. An attack on their position is therefore seen as an attack on all genuine intellectualism. The accusation that Fascists are anti-intellectual thus speaks of a profound arrogance in the accuser.

Equally revealing are Stanley’s chapters on “Sexual Anxiety” and “Sodom and Gomorrah.” These chapters are more or less an apologetic for Weimar-style sexual degeneracy, and insinuate that all attempts to prevent descent into such an abyss are pathological and Fascist. Some interesting context in this regard can be found back in 2016 when Stanley became embroiled in controversy after a Facebook exchange with fellow Jewish academic Rebecca Kukla, of Georgetown University, was widely disseminated. The pair had been discussing Richard Swinburne, an Orthodox Christian philosopher, and were incensed after Swinburne addressed the Society of Christian Philosophers and lectured on Christian ethics, including the religion’s stance on homosexuality. Swinburne made the argument that homosexuality could be understood as an illness, even a form of disability, since it acted against the otherwise natural imperative to reproduce. Stanley, in a conversation with other Jewish academics, accused Swinburne of “promoting homophobia,” paving the way for another Holocaust, and then finished his tirade with “Fuck those assholes. Seriously.” The charming Dr. Kukla, presumably equally engaged in employing vigorous intellectualism against the Fascist encroachment of Prof. Swinburne, added, “Those douche tankards can suck my giant queer cock.”

Rebecca Kukla: Stunning and brave intellectual fighting against Fascist anti-intellectuals

When the exchange went viral, both Stanley and Kukla scattered like cockroaches under torchlight, hiding under pity narratives and accusations of anti-Semitism. In a remarkable piece worth quoting here at length, Stanley wrote shortly afterwards:

I wanted to address the situation that has arisen from the series of articles in right-wing media outlets about me, and then me and Professor Kukla, that resulted from a private Facebook exchange being published and taken out of context … I was almost always the only Jewish person in my classes growing up. In my high schools in tenth and eleventh grade, I was the first Jewish person to attend. I am very familiar with the isolation that is involved, even when there is no overt discrimination (though I grew up being asked if I had horns and such like, this was ignorance and not malice). It is woven into the tapestry of my existence what it is like to be in a minority faith among a majority … My central concern right now is entirely about our gay colleagues in academia who have been watching this episode in horror, rightly concerned that any complaints about discrimination they may raise, even in private spaces, will result in the kind of incredibly intense retribution that Rebecca Kukla and I have been singled out and subject to over the past week. And those concerns would be legitimate. I need to end with the issue of anti-Semitism. On my public post, someone posted a disturbing comment about Swinburne’s death. I contemplated deleting it but then wanted to wait to see if anyone would ‘like’ it before addressing its horrors (no one did). It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the media discussion starting with the September 28th piece in The American Conservative, and then the Washington Times, is straightforwardly anti-Semitic. How did a non-story about the complexity of communication that results when screenshots from private conversations are made public, become a national story about two leftist Jewish professors and the dangers they pose? At first, the story was solely about me. Then, the other Jewish philosopher who posted on that thread, Rebecca Kukla, was also targeted. What ensued was a terrible anti-Semitic narrative, channeling a virulent 20th century form of anti-Semitism.

When I first read this piece, I have to confess without exaggeration that I laughed so hard I was literally gasping for air. It positively drips with a comic level of Jewish stereotype. Consider the speed with which Stanley morosely explains how he felt as “the only Jew in the class.” Observe the fake worry about the “Other,” in this case his “gay colleagues.” And reflect on the final, truly beautiful, example of the shameless Jewish recourse to the protective embrace of the anti-Semitism accusation — and not just any anti-Semitism but that infamous “virulent” kind. Every ingredient of “crying out as they strike you” is present here in perfect, distilled form. All my differences with him aside, Stanley is to be congratulated on being an excellent student of his people’s craft.

When we therefore read Stanley’s chapters on “Sexual Anxiety” and “Sodom and Gomorrah” we know precisely the kind of attitudes that our esteemed Yale professor brings to the table. He advances a theory that Fascists merely pretend to be upset about the rape of White women in order to reinforce the patriarchy. Take, for example, his outlandish claim that “The crime of rape is basic to fascist politics because it raises sexual anxiety and an attendant need for protection of the nation’s manhood by the fascist authority.” For Stanley, all rhetoric with the purpose of supporting stable, growing White families is Fascist, along with any attempts to challenge the “liberation” of women into sterility, promiscuity, vacuous careerism, grooming gangs, and abortion. But the deeper problem here is that there is no serious literature on any such fixation on rape within Fascism, and Stanley seems to pluck his concept of rape as “basic to fascist politics” from thin air. In reality, antifascist propaganda has been noted many times in the scholarly literature for its reliance on rape metaphors to attack the psychological appeal of Fascism (e.g. “Fascism rapes the mind of the masses”[2]). We can quite easily surmise that Stanley is probably aware that his argument is nonsense, and that he simply prefers to stigmatise any attempt to protect White women. The same methodology is employed when Stanley proposes that homosexuality and race-mixing are inherently good, being valiant sins “against Fascist ideology.” This is what now passes for an education at Yale.

Conclusion

Stanley, Sunstein, Levitsky, Ziblatt, and Albright have produced quite typical examples of Jewish propaganda disguised as “anti-Fascist” literature. The key features of such works are invariably a vague definition of Fascism, an attempt to relate “warnings” to some aspect of contemporary politics, melodramatic admonitions about a putative future violent catastrophe that must be avoided, and maudlin appeals to personal family history and “emotional baggage.” Underlying the surface veneer, these works are highly focussed efforts to pathologise aspects of White culture and politics deemed oppositional to Jewish interests. These efforts, and their framing, are quite obviously derived from Cultural Marxism, especially Adorno’s work with the Frankfurt School on The Authoritarian Personality, and from earlier forms of Jewish activism witnessed from the end of the 19th century and culminating in Weimar Germany (e.g. the work of Magnus Hirschfeld). The family, the acknowledgement of heterosexuality as culturally and biologically normative and preferential, the desirability of mono-ethnic cultures, and the acknowledgement of inequality among human beings are reframed in this kind of “warning literature” as inherently Fascistic.

It is very worrying that our culture has bequeathed a great deal of respect and legitimacy to Jewish intellectuals, especially in relation to the subject of Fascism. We have allowed them to assert that “they know it when they see it.” The fundamental crisis of our civilization is that they see it everywhere, and they won’t rest until this phantom of their paranoia, and us with it, are abolished.

[1] J. Whittam, Fascist Italy, (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 81-2.

[2] See, for example, S. Chakotin, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda (1940).

 

Ellie Williams Case Reveals How Britain Tries to Cover Up Grooming Gang Rape

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We all know that Britain has a serious grooming gangs problem, involving gangs of mainly Pakistani men grooming, raping, and pimping underage or teenage English girls.

We also know that the British authorities are terrified that news of this will destroy the “sacred” myth of multicultural harmony, with English people finally getting so enraged by this evil that even uneasy coexistence will be an impossibility.

From this it is easy to deduce exactly what the British authorities will attempt to do in grooming gang cases. Namely they will try to stop the abuse happening as quietly as possible, with the emphasis squarely on “as quietly as possible.” In short, they are more interested in covering things up or damage limitation than in dealing with the real problem — although they probably want to do that as well.

The ongoing case of Ellie Williams in the Northern English and Labour-run town of Barrow-in-Furness suggests this is exactly what is happening. Here there has been a long investigation into allegations of grooming and rape gangs that basically went nowhere, with a compliant media playing along. As an additional safeguard, one of the alleged victims, Ellie Williams, was muted by counter accusations of making false allegations. So much for #BelieveAllWomen when the victim is a working-class White girl and the alleged criminals are Muslim men.

Here is the Guardian being forced to report on this case after public disturbances broke out in the town:

An MP has appealed for calm after protests in a Cumbrian town in support of a teenager accused of lying about being raped by a grooming gang.

A harrowing Facebook post in the name of a 19-year-old from Barrow-in-Furness went viral last week, alleging she had been trafficked for sex across the north of England for years.

The post said the latest assault had taken place last Tuesday, in which the woman was allegedly raped by three men and beaten as a punishment for not attending their “parties” during the coronavirus lockdown.

Two days later she was in court being remanded in custody. She was sent to jail to await trial after Barrow magistrates found she had broken bail conditions imposed after she was charged with perverting the course of justice earlier this year.

She is accused of making false allegations about five men and falsifying evidence about rape and sexual assault between October 2017 and October 2019. […]

Det Ch Supt Dean Holden of Cumbria police insisted in a video message last week that officers had conducted a year-long investigation alongside the National Crime Agency and found no evidence of sex grooming gangs in Barrow.

The officer’s remarks fell on deaf ears as graphic photographs purporting to show the woman’s injuries were widely shared online as supporters demanded action.

What we can reasonably deduce from this is that the police investigated the allegations of a grooming gang in the town but could not — or would not — find enough “hard evidence” to follow through.

This is probably because it’s a pretty normal part of life in the UK now for teenage White girls to be pimped out by Muslim gangs. The assumption is that the girls are willing participants, unless clear evidence exists to the contrary.

There is indeed an element of willingness in crimes like this, with the victims — usually children from poor or broken homes — being lured in by initially friendly male attention, presents, drink, drugs, etc. This is why they are called “grooming gangs” instead of just “rape gangs,” which they also are. But this voluntary element is also intermixed with increasing amounts of violence, abuse, intimidation, and outright degradation as the girls fall deeper into the traps created by these gangs.

In this case, Ellie Williams appears to have rebelled against the system. She was clearly extremely unhappy with the police’s inability to make progress in their “investigation” and with their apparent heavy-handed attempts to shut her up, especially as, she claims, the gang continued to abuse her. This led her to make a post on social media about her unhappy situation that went viral, and which therefore breached the conditions that required her silence in the case.

Her post included convincing photos of the injuries she had suffered at the hands of the gang and explained that she had been attempting to use the coronavirus lockdown to distance herself from them, but that they had responded by increased violence and abuse:

“I think this is the hardest post Im ever going to write” Williams wrote on Facebook on the 19th of May. “Last night I went missing as some of you may be aware as Lucy shared it. Sorry for concerning people I’m safe now. I didn’t want to share this because I’m scared of the judgement that will come with it, it’s why I keep quite about what has happened to me, but people have asked me to tell my story. When people have asked why I have had a black eye or bruises I’ve made every excuse, from falling over to banging it on a door. I didn’t want to share this but people need to know about this local and very real issue. People need to be looking out for young girls and protecting them. If me sharing my story helps raise awareness and helps just one person then it will make this worth while.

Yesterday I was put into the back of a car, taken to an address to have sex with 3 Asian men. Afterwards I was beaten because I was in debt to these men for not attending “party’s” for over 7 weeks due to crona virus. The organisers of the party decided to beat me to teach me a lesson. They decided that I don’t learn from being battered as I’ve received beatings before but “still continuing to make the same mistakes” so they decided to try and cut my finger off! They then continued screaming in my face, waving a knife around saying they would kill me.

These are evil yet clever men. They know how to manipulate, convince and threaten girls into staying, when they can’t they use extreme violence! I used to believe that these people loved me, I realise now that they used me for their own gain and profit. They have beaten me on multiple occasions sometimes for no reason at all. They have given me drugs to the point I was nearly addicted to herion! They have stripped me naked, beaten me and dumped me in the middle of nowhere with nothing, I mean nothing, no money, phone, ID, clothes, shoes, nothing! They did this once in winter we’re I got found with bad hypothermia. They have broken my ribs, many bones in my face, they have split my ear, cut my throat, attempted to cut my boobs and nipples  off, they have carved words into my body, branded me with letters, they have dislocated my elbow, they have stabbed me, they have burnt me and used me as an ashtray to stump cigarettes out, they have beaten me black. I have had a bleed on the brain from a head injury, I have lost some vision in one of my eyes from being smacked so badly. Now I have had my finger cut. They have put lit petrol rags and threatening letters thru my letter box, they have followed me home, tried to drown me, strangled me and they have stalked me. They have had guns they have waved around and held to my head. They have abused me in every way possible. They have emotionally abused me calling me every name. It got to the point we’re I was being abused all the time and being hit and hurt weekly! I am incredibly lucky not to be dead already! I thought the only way I could escape this life was to marry one of them, get pregnant or kill myself.

I used to just laugh these situations off, pretend like I was invisible and I would always be okay There’s only so long you can pretend everything is alright before you break. I did break and tried to kill myself to escape. I lost all my self respect and I didnt  actually care if I was killed because at least then all of this would be over. I know now that this has gone to far and everything is not okay. I have scares across my body that won’t go away but even worse I have memories that won’t disappear that I can’t forget!

This has been years of me being trafficked to places across Manchester, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. Mostly Leeds, Huddersfield, Oldham, Preston, Blackpool, Lancaster and Morcombe. I have also been to other places as well as attending “party’s” locally in Barrow. This is to have sex with Asian men with me receiving nothing for it. I am not the only girl in barrow who has gone thru this or is going thru this. I know plenty of girls involved…

She clearly hoped that her post would reinvigorate the year-long investigation mentioned by the Guardian, and even advised other victims to contact the police:

I want to encourage any other girl to go to the police and speak and also remind them that this isn’t a normal life. I hope me sharing this means that people can notice signs. If anyone suspects a girl to be involved, report it to teachers, social services, child line, police, parents. Parents gain trust with your children so they won’t be afraid to tell you things, so they don’t hide things, so they don’t become secretive! Don’t cause unnesassary drama which will push them away from you but closer to there abusers.

The authorities’ panicked response, however, was to rush her to court and remand her in custody, awaiting trial for “perverting the course of justice.”

The legal rationale for this kind of action is that media coverage of a case before a trial will somehow prejudice potential jurors and make them incapable of processing evidence and testimony.

This is patently absurd. Instead this weasel-worded phrase is just a modern British euphemism for “We don’t want you to talk publicly about this delicate case until we make it go away,” and is constantly deployed to prop up Britain’s dysfunctional multicultural state. The compliant British media, as ever, is happy to go along with this, and only ever comments on cases like this when they are forced to.

The public reaction in this instance is heartening. There have been online campaigns, fund-raising drives, and somewhat rowdy public protests.

This suggests that each time the authorities try to make cases like this “go away,” they travel less and less, and soon return. The irresistible force of the establishment’s desire to protect the myth of multicultural Britain may be about to meet the immovable object of pent-up White working-class rage.

Exchange with Gerhard Meisenberg on Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

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I replied to a review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition by Gerhard Meisenberg, editor of Mankind Quarterly, and it ended up being an exchange as he replied to my comments and I replied to him. Issues discussed  include 1. the origin of the ancient Greeks; 2. the genetic basis of individualism; 3. altruism in tribal moral communities; 4. populism and the intellectual elite; 5. tribalism and assimilation as they relate to immigrant communities in the West; 6. whether resisting immigration of genetically dissimilar peoples is adaptive; 7. ethnic genetic interests vs. genetic interests based on social class membership.

Moral Outrage as a Sign of Trustworthiness and Long-Term Mate Value

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One of the themes of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is that the West is characterized by the paramount importance of moral communities rather than communities based on kinship. Another fundamental feature of the West is monogamous marriage. Thus I found it fascinating that a recent study undergoing the review process found that moral outrage, especially by males, acts as a cue to mate value in monogamous marriage.[1] Since women want mates who fit into their moral community, men who signal moral outrage compatible with the values of that community are seen as good marriage prospects. All of the subjects were White and they were given images of opposite-sex people—leading me to wonder whether the paper will be rejected because it implicitly endorses opposite-sex relationships and White-White relationships as standard.

That may seem completely over the top, but just recently two professors, one at Michigan State and one at the University of Colorado, wrote a paper promoting a moral panic because people may be unconsciously performing microaggressions during Zoom videoconferencing that is now so common because of the virus.

From the article:

“In a recent videoconference, we were asked the ‘most fun thing you’ve done with your family during quarantine.’ Participant answers ranged from ‘gardening with my husband’ to ‘dance parties with my family,’” Viveiros said.

MSU’s article explains that sharing these types of experiences “crowd out the experiences of people with minoritized social identities and that “asking about ‘fun family things’ prevented several Latinx attendees from sharing their experiences of losing family members to novel coronavirus.”

So I wouldn’t be surprised if the paper was rejected because it didn’t have a diverse subject sample and didn’t depict all the possible mating scenarios—male-male, female-female, with all the possible racial combinations. But I digress.

The images in the moral outrage experiment depicted White people as performing

behaviors designed to connote both anger toward perceived injustice and an effortful response to it that could not be construed merely as virtue signaling (e.g., advocacy work to pay NCAA athletes, working to end human trafficking, removing plastic straws from beaches to help sea turtles), or control activities (e.g., intramural sports, working as an RA, playing video games).

Since the most obviously exploited NCAA athletes are Black stars in football and basketball who pack the stadiums and field houses of college campuses and thereby paying the multi-million dollar salaries of the (predominantly White) coaches, this would bring up images of Whites behaving altruistically toward oppressed Blacks.

One can imagine how this plays out on college campuses. Boy meets girl and wants to show that he is a good long-term possibility as a mate. (If he wanted to communicate that he was a good short-term mate, he should be working on his biceps.) A good way to do that would be to be aware of what moral community the women is part of. And that would typically mean the moral community of the mainstream media and the academic left which is being propagandized by pretty much the entire faculty. So he might steer the conversation to current events and, knowing she is your typical liberal arts major, he could express moral outrage at the latest Trump outrage. Or at the Georgia shooting of the Black “jogger.” He would thereby indicate that he is not only a good person but someone who promises to be a pillar of their shared moral community, whether at the university or in the wider society of young urban professionals. And it would be even better if he told her that he is a sociology major and is donating his free time to a Black charity, thus implying that he is not merely virtue-signaling. All else equal, he’d be well on his way to establishing a relationship.

Of course, all else won’t be equal, and he might get docked for other qualities like earning potential—not good for sociology majors. But he could help himself in that department by saying he’s going to get into a good law school when he graduates. Not a bad strategy because having a social justice background would certainly be a leg up in the application process.

It’s interesting that all of the subjects in the experiment were White college students. I rather doubt that results would be similar for non-Western peoples. There is certainly overlap in some of the desired traits, like social status or potential social status (earning power). It is my observation that Blacks don’t judge politicians by their moral pronouncements or their behavior (like corruption), but by their appealing to Black identity and interests (welfare, the criminal justice system, affirmative action). Otherwise Maxine Waters would be long gone. The moral pronouncements of such people are strictly for White consumption.

Here’s a relevant passage from Chapter 8 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition:

The conviction of self-righteousness … need not be rational:

What feels like a conscious life-affirming moral choice—my life will have meaning if I help others—will be greatly influenced by the strength of an unconscious and involuntary mental sensation that tells me that this decision is “correct.” It will be this same feeling that will tell you the “rightness” of giving food to starving children in Somalia, doing every medical test imaginable on a clearly terminal patient … . It helps to see this feeling of knowing as analogous to other bodily sensations over which we have no direct control.[1]

In other words, the sensations of rightness and nobility act as psychological reflexes, and they are so pleasurable that people are inclined to seek them in their own right and without regard to facts or the long-run consequences to themselves.

Talk to an insistent know-it-all who refuses to consider contrary opinions and you get a palpable sense of how the feeling of knowing can create a mental state akin to addiction. … Imagine the profound effect of feeling certain that you have ultimate answers. … Relinquishing such strongly felt personal beliefs would require undoing or lessening major connections with the overwhelmingly seductive pleasure-reward circuitry. Think of such a shift of opinion as producing the same type of physiological changes as withdrawing from drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.[2]

Feelings of moral righteousness may thus be pleasurable and lead to addiction. “Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again.”[3]

The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong. Or, that your method of helping others is so purely motivated and correct that all criticism can be dismissed with a shrug, along with any contradicting evidence.[4]

This type of sanctimoniousness is, of course, particularly common among the people labeled “Social Justice Warriors.” These are the people screaming “racist,” “misogynist,” “white supremacist,” etc. at any seeming violation of the norms of the moral communities of the left. And, because of the cultural hegemony of the left, such people can often be seen on social media (and in op-eds in the mainstream media) expressing their moral righteousness—a moral righteousness that fits with or extends the boundaries of the cultural left.

Another aspect of this is competitive altruism or competitive virtue signaling. Given that expressions of moral righteousness are typically communicated in a social setting and are aimed at solidifying or enhancing one’s reputation within a group, there may be competition for ever more extreme expressions of self-righteousness—even among people who are not biologically inclined to be high on the Love/Nurturance system. Extreme expressions of moral righteousness are not only addicting, they may also raise one’s status in a social group, just as it’s common for religious people to express “holier than thou” sentiments. Strongly religious people compete to be most virtuous in their local church. On the left, we see vegan fanatics shunning vegans who even talk to people who eat meat or eat in restaurants where meat is served—even family members. I imagine there is a dynamic within antifa groups—the shock troops of the establishment’s views on race and migration—where people who do not condone violence or are unwilling to crack heads themselves are ostracized or at least have much less status.

The result is a “feed forward” process in which the poles of political discourse move ever farther apart. For example, well-publicized attacks on Confederate statues have quickly morphed into attacks on Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus. Sympathy among liberals for granting amnesty to illegal immigrants has morphed into calls by prominent Democrats to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), make border crossing legal, and give them health care, driver’s licenses, voting rights, and ultimately citizenship. Inviting anyone remotely associated with conservative ideas—much less the racialist Right—to give a talk at a college campus has morphed from a tolerated rarity to a context for angry protests, rioting, injuries to conservatives, and damage to property.

Indeed, I suggest that this competitive virtue signaling is a major cause of the increasing polarization that we see in the United States and throughout the West in the age of social media. A Pew Research Center survey on changes in U.S. political culture from 1994–2017 found that the increasing divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially on immigration and race, was much more due to the median views of Democrats shifting left.[5]

Nevertheless, a theoretically similar phenomenon exists on the right as, for example, when individuals condemn others for being insufficiently militant or ideologically pure. However, because the left dominates the cultural landscape, such competitive virtue signaling has had most of its effects on the left. Such competitive virtue signaling from both the left and the right is highly characteristic of the social dynamics of social media sites and journalism.

People on the right face the danger of “doxxing,” having their identity and personal information made public. Hosts of shows in the mainstream media may have to cope with losing sponsors and hence their livelihood; e.g., as of March, 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson had lost around 30 sponsors, mainly because of his comments on immigration.[6] Or people may fear losing their job as a result of a phone call to their place of employment by a self-described “civil rights” organization such as the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League. This may well be why it is the left that has become more extreme in recent decades, whereas far too many on the right attempt to mollify their leftist critics by knuckling under to their moral righteousness.

The cultural domination of the left has meant that certain views are off-limits for all but the most daring. Thus, media sites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, while definitely to the right of the mainstream media, avoid explicit advocacy of White identity and interests. Such constraints are much less apparent on the left, with the result that the left continues to get more and more extreme in their views. As I write, views on immigration noted above and on abortion (making abortion legal up until or even shortly after birth) that used to be virtually non-existent among Democrats are increasingly being espoused by mainstream Democrat politicians and pundits.

A critical consequence of this is racial polarization. White Americans have been shifting toward the Republican Party—the last Democrat president to get a majority of White votes was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In general, this is an expression of implicit Whiteness (discussed below), as non-White groups coalesce in the Democratic Party. The point here is that such trends are likely to increase and polarization become more severe.

[1] Robert A. Burton, “Pathological Certitude,” in Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 131–37, 135.

[2] Ibid., 136.

[3] David Brin, “Self-addiction and Self-righteousness,” in Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 77–84, 80.

[4] Ibid., 80.

[5] Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider” (October 5, 2017).

https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/

[6] Jeremy Barr, “Without Major Sponsors, Tucker Carlson’s Show Leans on Ads for Fox Programming,” The Hollywood Reporter (March 22, 2019).

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/major-sponsors-tucker-carlsons-show-leans-fox-news-house-ads-1196257

[1] Mitch Brown et al., “Demonstrate Values: Behavioral Displays of Moral Outrage as a Cue to Long-Term Mate Potential,” unpublished ms, Fairleigh Dickinson University (2020).

 

The End of American Empire?

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From Republic to Empire

America began life not as a democracy, but as an “aristocratic” republic. Under this model of elite governance, also known as federalism, civic participation was restricted to propertied White males. The basis for this particular exclusion was traditional English jurisprudence, which maintained autonomous agency was not possible without ownership of property. John Adams, a prominent Federalist, spoke for the majority of American Founding Fathers when he wrote:

“Such is the frailty of the human heart that very few men who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest …. [They are] to all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents.”[i]

The Federalists were defeated in the presidential election of 1800 by the Democratic-Republicans, who ushered in the age of Jeffersonian democracy. There were more White males who had been accorded full suffrage in 1824, which saw the end of Jeffersonian democracy, than in 1800, when it began. The mid-1820s witnessed the dissolution of the Democratic-Republicans and the growth of the highly influential movement for Jacksonian democracy, which opposed the continued disenfranchisement of non-propertied White males. During the 1840s and 1850s, the movement continued to gather momentum until by 1860, White male suffrage was recognized in all 33 states of the American union. In the aftermath of the Civil War, male suffrage was further expanded to include Blacks. The effect of the new legislation was mitigated by post-Reconstruction state governments, which used grandfather clauses and literacy tests to keep Blacks away from the polls.

Women were accorded full suffrage in 1919, another watershed in American history. This would have far reaching consequences for contemporary US politics. Female suffrage would shift electoral voting patterns in a more leftward direction.[ii] The next piece of momentous legislation was the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, which dismantled racial segregation in the South, putting an end to freedom of association. Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act because it violated states’ rights, lost the 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the modern American welfare state. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, delivering the final death knell to what was left of the old republic.

Meanwhile, decolonization had begun in 1945. This period of turmoil witnessed the emergence of independence movements and guerrilla insurgencies across the Third World, all of them agitating for the full evacuation of colonial personnel. In response, European metropoles dismantled their colonial empires, having lost the will to govern them after years of fighting in Europe and the Pacific.

Having abandoned their Third World outposts, the West’s deracinated and Judaized elites decided among themselves to transform their own nations into empires. This would be achieved by importing large numbers of migrants from Third World countries to live under a single sovereign authority. In the years since passage of the 1965 immigration act, America would place herself on a similar trajectory.

The Curse of Diversity

Once a nation embarks on a path to imperial hegemony, i.e., to become a multicultural, multiracial cesspool like Alexander’s Macedon, ancient Rome and Hapsburg Austria, its fate is already sealed in blood. Far from being an exception in this regard, the United States is representative of the problems that come with having a racially heterogeneous population. Indeed, racial conflict has been interwoven into the fabric of American history since the arrival of the first English settlers in 1607.

We must look to human biology to understand why diversity always fails. The separate evolutionary histories of each human race, which inhabited different ecological niches for thousands of years, entails average differences in intelligence and temperament between populations. This makes conflict inevitable when racial groups must live together under a single roof. As far as human relations are concerned, the greater the diversity, the greater the severity of the ensuing conflict. If group differences are too wide, the prospect for internal stability is diminished considerably.

In America, immigration policy has increased the potential for race conflict. The most destructive wave of mass migration so far, the post-1965 mass Third World immigration, would not have been possible without the mass European migration of 1880 to 1924, which brought inter-ethnic conflict, of the kind well-documented in the Culture of Critique, to American shores. As a result, there has been large-scale erosion of social cohesion in towns and cities across America. What was once a homogeneous ethno-racial community, a nation, is now the location of the world’s largest marketplace.

Without any social glue to hold America together, government must step in and resort to micromanagement of its citizens’ personal lives. By directly managing diversity, bureaucratic elites do their best to prevent America from exploding like a powder keg. Traditionally, management of diversity entailed maintaining the boundaries that separated whole neighborhoods, cities, regions and even nations largely populated by a single ethnic or racial group. For example, in America, segregation in the South and the tribal reservation system were meant to diffuse and manage the race problem. Soviet “multiculturalism” wasn’t integration of ethnicities, but a federal model that respected the ethnic diversity within each of its autonomous regions and socialist republics.

These days, American elites go against the conventional wisdom by forcibly integrating their own citizens, regardless of racial and ethnic differences. Since diversification is forced, limits must be imposed on freedom of speech to manage diversity. These are enforced by means of social ostracism and economic sanction. Critics of diversity have been deplatformed, fired from their jobs or have had their books removed from general circulation. As the high-profile case of James Watson demonstrates, even so much as expressing dissident views on race and intelligence in modern-day America can ruin careers and turn celebrities into virtual non-entities overnight.[iii] Multiculturalists, in their desire to create a nondiscriminatory and egalitarian society, have created an environment where the easily offended can dictate their own agendas with impunity.

The traditional Western canon is among the first casualties of political correctness, having been marginalized on colleges and universities across America in favor of gender and ethnic studies. Apparently, the achievements of the Western canon tower so highly above the achievements of other peoples and nations they must be slowly forgotten or attributed to some other racial or ethnic group, otherwise post-modern beliefs about cultural relativity wouldn’t be credible. Sometimes, the marginalization of the Western canon can be quite dramatic. The ongoing controversy over Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a shining example of the excesses of political correctness. This classic work of fiction has been subject to outright bans and expurgation, all because it uses the word nigger some 213 times.[iv]

Not only must the Western canon be replaced, but certain fields of inquiry are declared verboten, all in the name of managing diversity. Since World War II, academia has aggressively marginalized scientific researchers who have refused to adhere to the ideology of political correctness. Anyone who conducts research in a field deemed off-limits by political correctness can expect no financial support from the universities and colleges. For example, if not for the Pioneer Fund, an alternative source of funding for dissidents, the famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study (MISTRA), one of the most important studies ever conducted on race and intelligence, would never have gotten off the ground.

The limiting of public discourse to politically correct discourse and only politically correct discourse will make society weaker in the long-run:

First, political correctness impoverishes American culture by ensuring art and literature do not violate multicultural orthodoxy, with violators marginalized and treated with oppobrium. A similar, but more extreme situation existed in the Soviet Union, where socialist realism was imposed on artists and writers by government officials. This not only suppressed individual creativity, but perpetuated the wealth and power of the ruling communist party. With few exceptions, the art and literature churned out by Soviet literati were bland, utilitarian, propagandistic and kitschy. The regime of political correctness in America has had a similar effect on contemporary American art and literature, without any of the pretensions to neoclassicism. Clearly then, creativity cannot flourish in an environment where racial hypersensitivity and racial orthodoxy are the norm.

Second, political correctness makes America less stable politically. Dissidents will be forced underground, where they will continue to undermine the stability of the multicultural order as they challenge it from within. If the ideas are credible and reach a large audience—which they will because political correctness is intellectually vacuous—the elite narrative will be threatened. But as a consequence, political repression will increase in severity. If ideas must be suppressed in the name of diversity, their supporters will have to seek other, more clandestine avenues to get their message across. Continued repression will inevitably lead to further unrest.

As JFK once said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

The Future of the American Empire?

When queried about the new American government, Benjamin Franklin said: “A republic … if you can keep it.” There was uncertainty as to whether the political arrangement agreed upon by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would continue indefinitely. By the 1790s, there were already signs the new arrangement was beginning to unravel; by the mid-1960s, the spread of universal suffrage had forever consigned the nation’s republican institutions to the trash bin; by the early 2000s, America was a burgeoning imperial colossus, but one that strode the world with feet of clay.

The mass immigration that has played an instrumental role in America’s rise to imperial status has turned American culture into one that worships death. Death, both racial and cultural, permeates American culture and society to the extent it has become ubiquitous; Western borders are porous; state propaganda encourages Third World colonization; miscegenation and antinatalism are everywhere promoted among Whites; and racial integration is considered the normative ideal. By handing over their major financial and administrative centers to non-Whites, Whites are gradually ceding power and control to a growing and increasingly hostile class of imported serfs. In other words, Whites are committing race suicide, while giving non-Whites the means to destroy them when they become powerless minorities in their own racial homelands.

Is America destined to end up “… in fragments, forgotten … in ruins, like old Memphis and Babylon,” as prophesied by Oswald Spengler in Man and Technics?

What happened to Rome during the fourth to fifth centuries is similar to what is going on right now in modern-day America. After the Punic and Macedonian wars, which paved the way for Roman political and military ascendancy in the Mediterranean, the same moral degeneracy affecting modern-day Americans had set in, to rot the empire from within; birth rates fell; cosmopolitanism thrived; high culture declined; foreigners replaced citizens in the main urban centers[v],[vi]; government positions were occupied by foreigners and the defense of the nation was entrusted to foreign mercenaries. In short, the Roman polis had become a cosmopolis, much like modern-day America, everywhere unworkable because people are local, not global in their attachments.

The collapse of Rome is a warning to America—a warning that will, of course, go unheeded. If the ethno-racial differences between Near Easterners and North Africans, Germanic tribesmen and Italian plebeians—small though they were—were enough to cause social and political instability in Roman imperial times, the even more racially divergent Third World colonization will be much, much worse when the time comes for the indigenous populations of the West to finally surrender all political and economic power to the newcomers.

While Spengler did not foresee America’s transformation into a multicultural, globalist empire, he was right that the West’s future would eventually be decided by race. Given the fate of all empires, the passivity of Whites in the face of their own demise, and the vicious avarice of globalist elites, we can be certain race will be America’s undoing.

[i]“Founders Online: From John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776.” Founders.Archives.Gov, founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0091.

[ii]Lott, John R. “How Dramatically Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” SSRN Electronic Journal, 1999, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=160530, 10.2139/ssrn.160530.

[iii]“DNA Pioneer Loses Honours over Race Claims.” BBC News, 13 Jan. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779.

[iv]Page, Benedicte. “New Huckleberry Finn Edition Censors ‘n-Word.’” The Guardian, 5 Jan. 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/05/huckleberry-finn-edition-censors-n-word. ‌

[v]Frank, Tenney. “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire.” The American Historical Review, vol. 21, no. 4, July 1916, p. 689, 10.2307/1835889.

[vi]Antonio, Margaret L., et al. “Ancient Rome: A Genetic Crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean.” Science, vol. 366, no. 6466, 7 Nov. 2019, pp. 708–714, science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/708.full, 10.1126/science.aay6826.