Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7
“Aren’t the Chicago 7 all Jews?”
President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was wrong when he assumed that every member of the Chicago 7 was Jewish, but he was close enough. The 1969 trial of seven leftwing activists for inciting a riot at August 1968’s Democratic National Convention was an intensely Jewish moment in American history. Of the seven activists on trial, three were Jews (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner), and a further two (Tom Hayden and David Dellinger) lived their lives in a heavily Jewish milieu and dedicated themselves to Jewish causes. The judge in the trial, Julius Hoffman, was Jewish, as were both defense attorneys (William Moses Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass) and one of the prosecutors (Richard Schultz). For several reasons, I’ve always regarded the ultimately chaotic and clownish trial of the Chicago 7 as nothing more than a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art, demoralising to the American justice system and energising to a new generation of Judeo-Anarchist activists. These shambolic events of 1968/9 have now been disinterred for Netflix’s propagandistic and revisionist account of the episode, The Trial of the Chicago 7, in which Jewish writer/director Aaron Sorkin attempts to refashion its “lessons” for application in Trump’s America. The result is both historically disingenuous and artistically bland.
Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 opens with a montage of eight [including Bobby Seale] activists preparing to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There are several clear dogwhistles to Black Lives Matter, with barely veiled justifications of violence, including an exchange in the opening montage between Black Panther Leader Seale and a woman named Sondra. Sondra attempts to reason with Seale that his presence as a Black leader at a potentially violent rally will be taken “out of context” by “every White person in America.” As Seale persists in his preparations, Sondra begins to invoke “Dr King” before Seale responds:
[King] Is dead. He has a dream? Now he has a fuckin’ bullet in his head. Martin’s dead, Malcolm’s dead, Medgar’s dead, Bobby’s dead, Jesus is dead. They tried it peacefully, we gonna try something else.
This “something else” isn’t explored in any significant way because the film proceeds from the understanding that the violence and unrest in Chicago was purely the result of police brutality and bad local government. Painfully unaware of itself, the film sits uneasily in the aftermath of catastrophic policing and government during Charlottesville’s 2016 rally, an event that has unfairly gone down in history and popular consciousness as an exemplar of a “bad protest.” The ghost of Charlottesville, for me at least, hangs heavily over The Trial of the Chicago 7, highlighting its hypocrisy and lending the film a somewhat satirical or parodic quality that is entirely unintended and which, to my mind, is never shaken off.
The necessity of portraying the radical defendants as sympathetic has required a remarkable taming of all the characters involved, to the extent that all appear innocent to the point of mediocrity. Almost everyone in the film is two-dimensional with the possible exception of Hoffman and Rubin who are nevertheless portrayed as harmless, big-hearted clowns. Noted in history for their vulgarity and aggression (Abbie Hoffman declared of his intentions on going to Chicago:” We are dirty, smelly, grimy and foul. … We will piss and shit and fuck in public. … We will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man”), Hoffman and Rubin are reduced by Sorkin to rather bloodless and timid comic relief. We are given no indication as to the motivations or life trajectories of either Jewish activist, or indeed any of the Chicago 7, presumably because we are meant to assume that they were simply “good people” who wanted only to end the war.
As The Times of Israel has noted, the film represents a trial bleached of its intensely Jewish qualities. I’ve written previously that the 1960s New Left was indisputably a Jewish subculture. Jerry Rubin, given no backstory in Sorkin’s film, had “solidly Jewish roots” and after receiving his baccalaureate “he attended Hebrew University and later returned to Israel to spend a year there with his brother.”[1] His ‘Youth International Party,’ or Yippies, was co-founded with fellow Jewish radicals Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. He married a Jewish woman, Mimi Leonard. Rubin conceived of himself as being at war with the White race. By his own admission, Rubin stated that in forming the ‘Yippie’ movement he had “dropped out of the white race and the Amerikan [sic] nation.”[2] Rubin believed that Jews in particular were “obligated to resist the fascism of whiteness.”[3] He was motivated by narcissistic notions of Jewish moral superiority, indicating a strong identification with his fellows Jews. In a book he wrote while in County Jail, he noted that “It is the Jew who should always be on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the underdog, the wretched of the earth. … And thousands of ex-Amerikan, ex-Jews are. Three of the kids killed at Kent State were Jews. An unusually high proportion of hippies and revolutionaries are Jews.”[4]
Despite having no attachment to the religious content of Judaism, Abbie Hoffman was undoubtedly also deeply connected to his Jewishness and the “invisible” Jewish subculture. He attended Brandeis University (mentioned in the film) at a time when it was basically a refuge for blacklisted Jewish academics, such as the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, that had been rooted out from Harvard and MIT as ‘subversive’ by McCarthy. Brandeis survived the purge unscathed because McCarthy refused to target the university for fear of being branded anti-Semitic.[5] One of Hoffman’s psychology professors was Abraham Maslow, who imparted to the young Hoffman that society needed changing, and that nonconformity was “a positive sign of mental health.” Hoffman adored Maslow, later reflecting on his Brandeis days by stating, “Most of all I loved Abe Maslow.” During Hoffman’s attendance at Brandeis, Maslow formed a committee of correspondence which widened the circle of Jewish intellectuals who would essentially incubate the younger generation of Jewish radicals who would comprise the new Jewish subculture. As Gerald Sorin puts it, “Jewish overrepresentation in New Left movements looked like Jewish overrepresentation in old left movements.”[6] Maslow began corresponding with fellow Jewish gurus Eric Fromm, Kurt Goldstein, Paul Goodman, Ashley Montagu, and David Reisman among others, and together they founded The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Hoffman, awed by these fellow-ethnic subculture figures, referred to them as “giants” who “walked in the space of my intellectual world.”[7] Hoffman was clearly engrossed in non-religious expressions of Jewish identity and in the Jewish subculture, writing in his autobiography that “I came into this world acutely aware of being Jewish and I’m sure I’ll go out that way.”[8]
None of this is probed in the film, which altogether dodges the prospect of exploring Jewish radicalism in the New Left. What is offered instead is a watered down, ethnically ambiguous, court procedural designed to act as a feel-good movie for comfortable, immature, middle-class leftists who daydream about sticking it to an image of “the Man” that hasn’t had any relevance for over 50 years.
After the opening montage, the film shifts forwards to the trial, returning during key witness testimonies to important moments from the protest. This has the doubly negative effect of both stalling any potential for building tension within the courtroom setting, and splintering any coherent narrative of how and why the protest/riot was planned and executed. John N. Mitchell, the Attorney General, appoints Tom Foran and Richard Schultz as the prosecutors, while all the defendants except Seale are represented by William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass (played by the Jewish actor Ben Shenkman). Schultz, who in reality was highly ambitious and quite aggressive during the trial [transcripts are available here], is played by the Jewish actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a mawkishly written role as very much in sympathy with the protestors, and as clashing with an oppressive and legally questionable WASPish system that he has reluctantly become entangled with. The overall impression, despite Sorkin’s bleaching of Jewishness from the trial, is that of brave, big-hearted Jews and Blacks against cruel WASPs and violent police.
Judge Julius Hoffman, played here by Frank Langella (not Jewish), demonstrates clear bias for the prosecution as well as total incompetence, bad hearing, and poor memory. The trial is constantly interrupted by Hoffman’s inadequacies and biases (exaggerated in the film), by shouts from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and by the interventions of the defense lawyers. In reality, the leftwing audience in the gallery during the trial was notoriously noisy, violent, and difficult, which caused many breaks in proceedings. In the film, however, the gallery is extremely well-behaved with Hoffman himself responsible for most of the disruptions. Judge Hoffman, who is as two-dimensional as every other character in the film, is used mostly as a foil for the childish activities of Abbie Hoffman and Rubin, who show total contempt for the entire judicial process. Hoffman, inept more than malevolent, makes for a poor villain, but since his worst excesses are intercut with faceless, helmeted police wielding batons, we are presumably supposed to perceive him as the representative of “the System” against which the Chicago leftists are “bravely” warring against. Notably stripped from the film is any reference to the real-life exchanges between Abbie Hoffman and Julius Hoffman that involved Jewishness. In particular, Abbie Hoffman accused the judge of betraying Jewish interests, calling out in Yiddish during the trial that Julius Hoffman was a ““Shande fur de Goyim [Disgrace for the Gentiles]” a “Front man for the WASP elite,” and a “disgrace to the Jews, you could have served Hitler better.” During one episode, Hoffman and Rubin entered the courtroom in judges robes. This is repeated in the film with very one notable omission — in reality the robes had yellow stars on them. Sorkin’s omission can be attributed to the desire to clean the film of explicit allusions to Jewishness, and possibly also the desire to absolve the pair of a tastelessness that was in fact their hallmark.
In his The Ordeal of Civility (1974, 193) John Murray Cuddihy notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment.
Seale’s attorney is not present due to illness, but Seale is repeatedly told by Judge Hoffman that he can’t represent himself. The constant silencing of Seale, historically accurate, along with some broader subtle commentary on police violence against Blacks, is the only clearly sustained narrative of the film, and was the only aspect I found remotely interesting. Deprived of legal assistance, Seale takes informal advice from his associate Fred Hampton. Seale finds out during the trial that Hampton has been killed during a police raid. This prompts Seale to become more assertive in pushing for his right to defend himself. Judge Hoffman responds by having Seale taken to another room, beaten, and returned gagged and shackled. The sequence is milked in the film for propaganda value, omitting the fact that, in reality, Seale had violently lunged at prosecutor Schultz and that it was the plan of the defendants to have Seale “bound and gagged so they could demonstrate to the world that the federal courts were racist.” The scene ends with Hoffman, losing control of the courtroom, taking Schultz’s suggestion of declaring Seale’s case a mistrial.
Aside from the propagandistic treatment of Seale’s experiences, The Trial of the Chicago 7 lacks authenticity and emotion. With Seale released from the trial, the film loses even more narrative direction. Kunstler and Weinglass decide to call Ramsey Clark, who was Attorney General during the riots, as a witness. Although Clark is willing to co-operate, and is willing to go on record that violence was started by the police, Judge Hoffman refuses to let the jury hear his testimony. Dellinger reacts furiously, punching a bailiff, resulting in his arrest, but since Dellinger has hardly featured in the film apart from waving to his wife and son, it’s difficult to care. There is a last-minute scramble to introduce tension by focusing on the discovery of a tape in which Hayden is heard, prior to the riot, declaring “Let blood spill everywhere.” The sequence is treated in a very ham-fisted way by Sorkin, and is destroyed by being explored, yet again, in flashbacks. Bringing the movie to a close, Hayden uses his closing statement by naming over 4,500 soldiers that died in the Vietnam War since the trial began, in spite of the judge’s instructions and objections. This prompts many in the court room to stand and cheer, and even Schultz joins in. This closing sequence prompted the real-life Schultz to comment: “That never happened. It was a total fantasy for Hollywood.”
The film closes by listing the various convictions for contempt handed down by Judge Hoffman, all of which were later overturned by other courts. We then find out that Tom Hayden went on to become a politician, and that Jerry Rubin became a stock trader. The seeming incongruity in these career choices, and the feeling that it undoes the trite anti-establishment theme we’ve been presented for two hours, embodies the fact that, stripped of the dirty reality, this is a film without any clear message at all. It isn’t focused enough to be an anti-war film, it hints at commentary on police violence but never directly engages with it, and it never explores the motivations of the radicals and so can never explicitly endorse them. In this sense, Sorkin’s movie is a perfect work of filmic neoliberalism, capable of digesting leftist radicalism and regurgitating it in a more palatable, marketable fashion while ignoring its glaring contradictions and ethnic identifications. Sorkin’s film has absolutely nothing to do say about the way in which these “radicals” became part of the System, or rather that they became an iteration of a new system of control via their participation in politics, the stock market, and, in Lee Weiner’s case, the ADL.
Weiner, a sociology professor and the last surviving Jewish member of the Chicago 7, has perhaps two lines in the entire film. Known in reality as the “quiet one,” this is perhaps justified, but his post-trial career trajectory is probably the most interesting. A 1976 article in Mother Jones reported that Weiner “is said to be somewhere near New York, leading a quiet life, sorting out what being Jewish means to him.”[9] Weiner in fact began working for the ADL where, according to Spencer Tucker, he has been directing “special projects” for years.[10] When contacted in 2007 by Jeff Kisseloff for a phone interview, Weiner responded that he was “raising money to fight hate.”[11] So Weiner, the “free speech” radical has become a key member of one of the most significant censorship organisations in the world.
Never explicit, it’s in the contradictions and subtleties of the film that it’s Jewish subtexts are revealed. I found it especially interesting that, during a heated exchange between Tom Hayden (played by the very WASPish Eddie Redmayne) and Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron-Cohen), there is a very prominent poster of Hitler in the background (with the caption “Visit Chicago” above it). The actual history of the poster is a play on contemporary accusations that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was an authoritarian anti-Semite (he did in fact at one point shout at Senator Abraham Ribicoff: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”) In any case, Hayden stands directly in front of the Hitler poster, while Rubin, Hoffman, and Weiner stand on the other side of the room, giving the momentary impression of Jews vs WASP/Hitler. This takes on greater significance when one considers that there was some real-life antagonism between Jewish leftists and non-Jewish radicals like Hayden. Hayden was known to have disparaged “the New York intellectual culture,” prompting Irving Howe, especially worried by New Left anti-Zionism, to denounce Hayden for his own authoritarian proclivities and to suggest that the New Left was becoming more “Christian” and “utterly American” (his most scathing insult) due to declining Jewish influence.[12] Howe needn’t have worried — Hayden went on to work closely with Jews to innovate Holocaust reparations legislation in California (Holocaust Victims Insurance Act), to be celebrated by the Jewish National Fund for his support for Israel, to employ a Jewish press secretary (Ralph Brave), and to help pioneer “Holocaust education.”
In some ways, it’s the chaos underlying both the real trial, and its filmic representation, that embody the Jewishness of it best. As I wrote at the outset, I’ve always regarded the ultimately chaotic and clownish trial of the Chicago 7 as nothing more than a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art, demoralising to the American justice system and energising to a new generation of Judeo-Anarchist activists. There was ultimately no meaning to the trial, just as there is no meaning to the film, other than directionless Jewish protest. As Jon Stratton has noted, echoing the comments of John Murray Cuddihy in The Ordeal of Civility, regarding the historical and ethnic issues underpinning the real trial:
The point I want to make here about these people, about the personas they presented which merged with the performances they undertook, is that they lacked civility. Their disruption was, at bottom, a public unsettling of the civility that orders American sociality … The Jews’ lack of civility, and therefore the failure of Western people’s attempts to develop reciprocally civil interactions with Eastern European Jews spread shockwaves through nineteenth-century society. In arguing a larger alienation — since the norms of civility merely spell out and specify for face-to-face interaction the more general values of the culture — the failure of civility came to define the “Jewish problem” as this problem reconstituted itself in the era of social modernity.[13]
The trial of the Chicago 7 was ultimately a demonstration of Jewish tastelessness, chaos, and discord in the midst of American society, involving more than the specific antics of Rubin and Hoffman. The entire episode was a demoralising demonstration of Jewish disruption within the legal system, and the fact that basic Western values and modes of behavior have been viewed by Jews as hostile and oppressive. The trial of the Chicago 7, like so much Jewish activism, was essentially a war on civility. The same antagonisms can be seen today in the quintessentially Jewish vulgarity of comedians like Sarah Silverman, in the riots of Antifa, and in the increasing degeneracy of our cultural and political life. The spirit of the trial lives on in the ceaseless absolving of Antifa rioters of any legal responsibility for their violence and vandalism. Today’s Antifa, of course, will be tomorrow’s politicians, stock traders, and ADL speech monitors, certain to reminisce, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, on the good old days when they fought “the Man.” They might even make a film about it.
[1] S.R. Lichter and S. Rothman, ‘Jewish Ethnicity and Radical Culture: A Social Psychological Study of Political Activists,’ Political Psychology, Vol.3, No.1, (Spring 1981), 135.
[2] E. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, (Harvard University Press, 2005), 350.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] M. Jezer, Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (Rutgers University Press, 1993), 21.
[6] G. Sorin, Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 223.
[7] Jezer, 25.
[8] Ibid, 8.
[9] Mother Jones Magazine, Aug 1976, 8.
[10] S. Tucker, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (ABC-CLIO, 2011), 192.
[11] J. Kisseloff, Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, An Oral History (University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 83.
[12] E. Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001),198.
[13] J. Stratton, Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma Through Modernity, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 182.
Head-Chopping for Muhammad: How Trotskyism and Truth Don’t Mix
A teacher is beheaded in France for showing his pupils some satirical cartoons of Muhammad. How do Britain’s noisiest defenders of free speech respond? They shout as loudly and urgently as they can: “Look, a squirrel!”
No morality outside the Party
Yes, the articles published at Spiked Online about the murder of Samuel Paty prove once again that Trotskyism and truth don’t mix. Spiked writers like Brendan O’Neill were stalwarts of the now-disbanded Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Trotskyist cult headed by the Hungarian-Jewish sociologist Frank Furedi. But while Furedi and his disciples no longer operate as the RCP, they certainly still think like the RCP. Leon Trotsky himself said this in 1924: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” Spiked, like the RCP before it, supports open borders and unlimited immigration from the Third World.
This is why, when a Muslim cuts someone’s head off in the name of Muhammad, Brendan O’Neill resolutely refuses to address the central role of Muslim immigration in the murder. Instead, under the virtue-signalling headline “Je suis Samuel,” he announced that “The beheading of Mr Paty was a militarised expression of cancel culture. That killer was the armed wing of political correctness, a self-styled enforcer of the now mainstream idea that it is ‘phobic’ (that is, evil) to criticise Islam.” In other words, Whites and their ideologies were to blame, not Muslim immigration into France. Brendan didn’t want to discuss that very modern phenomenon, instead calling the murder “positively medieval,” and saying it was committed in “deranged, pre-modern fashion” out of “7th-century fury.”
Feud-ridden and thoroughly macho
He’s wrong. The murder wasn’t “positively medieval”: it was positively Muslim. It wasn’t “deranged”: it was highly rational. And it belonged very firmly to the twenty-first century, as we will see more and more in coming years. Nor was the killer, Abdoullakh Anzorov, influenced or emboldened by “political correctness” and “cancel culture.” He was an 18-year-old “refugee” from one of the least politically correct cultures on earth: that of Chechnya, the feud-ridden, thoroughly macho Muslim republic that had previously supplied the Boston Bombers to America. Chechens have a well-deserved reputation for violence, intolerance and killing in defence of honour. If you allow Chechens into your nation, you are asking for trouble. France allowed Abdoullakh Anzorov and his family in, and trouble predictably followed. Just as predictably, Brendan O’Neill refused to be honest about what had happened. But he surpassed himself in another article on Samuel Paty’s murder:
The silence of the anti-fascists: Where is the outrage over the medieval murder of Samuel Paty?
Anti-fascists are incredibly quiet about the fascist in France who cut off a man’s head because he displayed some cartoons in a classroom. It is two days since the gruesome Islamist murder of schoolteacher Samuel Paty for the supposed crime of showing caricatures of Muhammad to his pupils during a classroom discussion about freedom of speech. And yet the self-styled anti-fascists of the European and American left have said barely a word. There have been no big protests outside of France, no angry rallies, no Twitterstorms, no knee-taking or fist-raising, no promises by ‘Antifa’ to face down these extremists who slaughter schoolteachers for talking about liberty. Their craven, cowardly silence is as revealing as it is depressing. (The silence of the anti-fascists, Spiked Online, 18th October 2018)
If Brendan and Spiked are shouting so loudly and self-righteously about a “fascist” murder committed overseas in France, can you imagine what they’d do if a similar murder happened on British soil? Ear-drums would surely shatter all over the country. There would definitely be no “craven, cowardly silence” from Spiked.
Gentle, tolerant and ignored: Ahmadi murder-victim Asad Shah
Or would there? In fact, you don’t need to imagine what Brendan and Spiked would do in such circumstances, because a near-identical murder did indeed happen on British soil in 2016. And Spiked responded just like those “craven, cowardly” anti-fascists: with silence. As I’ve described several times before at the Occidental Observer, in 2016 a gentle, tolerant Ahmadi Muslim called Asad Shah was stabbed and stamped to death in Glasgow by a violent, intolerant Sunni Muslim called Tanveer Ahmed, who was defending the honour of the Prophet Muhammad just like the Chechen murderer in France: “Ahmed targeted Mr Shah after seeing the shopkeeper’s own videos on YouTube, where he had claimed to be a prophet of Islam — regarded as blasphemy by some sects [i.e., by mainstream Sunni Muslims]. The videos were only viewed a handful of times, among hundreds of others uploaded by Mr Shah calling for peace, love and unity across the world, but garnered angry comments and threats.”
Praying at a martyr’s shrine: Mumtaz Qadri is honoured in Pakistan
A murderer from 1929: Hero and Martyr Ilm Ud-Deen
Tanveer Ahmed was a Pakistani immigrant inspired by his fellow Muslims Mumtaz Qadri and Ilm Ud-Deen, both of whom murdered in defence of the Prophet against free speech. Mumtaz Qadri murdered the politician Salmaan Taseer in 2011 after Taseer supported Aasia Bibi, an innocent Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s harsh and regularly abused blasphemy laws. Ilm Ud-Deen murdered a Hindu in 1929 for publishing a satirical book about Muhammad. Both Qadri and Ud-Deen were executed for their crimes, and in modern Pakistan each is honoured as Ghazi, “Hero,” and Shahid, “Martyr.” Tanveer Ahmed followed their righteous example, slew to defend the Prophet against free speech, and has duly been named Ghazi, “Hero,” as you can see in this recent image circulated online by his supporters:
The Hero and the Liar: Ghazi Tanveer Ahmed and Kazzab Asad Shah
In the image, Tanveer Ahmed, the murderer, is called Ghazi while Asad Shah, his victim, is called Kazzab, or “Liar.” Mainstream Sunni Muslims believe that Ahmadi Muslims are heretics who should be killed for their lies — that is, for exercising their free speech. The entirely Pakistani roots of Asad Shah’s “medieval murder” therefore give the lie to these dishonest words by Kenan Malik, another former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party who responded to Samuel Paty’s murder with a loud cry of “Look, a squirrel!”:
The unwillingness of liberals to stand up for basic liberal principles, their readiness to betray progressives within minority communities, nurtures reactionaries, both within Muslim communities and outside it. The more society gives licence for people to be offended, the more people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. And the more deadly their outrage will become.
Liberal pusillanimity also nurtures anti-Muslim sentiment, feeding the racist idea that all Muslims are reactionary, that Muslim immigration should be stemmed and Muslim communities more harshly policed. We must reject both kinds of bigots. In a plural society, much of what we say, others will find offensive. If we want a plural society, we need to defend the freedom to offend. (The freedom to offend is a priceless commodity, The Guardian, 18th October 2020)
Well, I’m a massive racist and I am very happy to acknowledge that not all Muslims are reactionary. In fact, I’ve written repeatedly at the Occidental Observer about a group of gentle, non-reactionary Muslims who sincerely believe in “Love for All, Hatred for None” — namely, Ahmadi Muslims like Asad Shah. When Tanveer Ahmed angrily confronted Shah in the latter’s shop in Glasgow, Shah responded in true Ahmadi fashion by offering to shake his hand. Tanveer Ahmed rejected the offer in true Sunni fashion by stabbing and stamping Asad Shah to death.
Only inbreds oppose mass immigration
How did Kenan Malik, another passionate defender of free speech, respond to this “medieval murder” in 2016? In the same way as his Trotskyist comrades at Spiked: with silence. But Malik was much less tongued-tied in 2005, when he presented a TV documentary called Let ’Em All In!, which argued, in true RCP fashion, for open borders and unlimited immigration. The documentary mocked anti-immigration British Whites with blasts of theme music from the red-neck-baiting American movie Deliverance. As Jesus said: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)
You can also know them by their silence. And the silence of Brendan O’Neill and Kenan Malik about Asad Shah’s murder looks even worse when you learn that his murderer Tanveer Ahmed continued to issue “medieval” propaganda from behind bars. After he was jailed, Ahmed recorded messages for his many supporters, including this top tip for wannabe censors: “There’s only one punishment for insulters [of the Prophet Muhammad]: cut off their heads, cut off their heads, cut off their heads.” The Chechen murderer of Samuel Paty followed that top tip. In other words, the same free-speech-hating ideology so loudly condemned by O’Neill and Malik in 2020 had struck on British soil in 2016 — and Britain’s noisiest defenders of free speech did absolutely nothing to confront and condemn it.
MADE IN PAKISTAN AND CHECHNYA
Why were they silent? Because confronting the murder of Asad Shah would mean confronting the truth about Islam and free speech. Like Trotskyism and truth, the two things don’t mix. Tanveer Ahmed was absolutely unrepentant about his crime and had wide support among Muslims in Britain. After all, when Mumtaz Qadri was executed in Pakistan for his sterling work against free speech: “One of the largest mosques in Birmingham said special prayers for Qadri, describing him as ‘a martyr’, as did influential preachers in Bradford and Dewsbury.” The Qadri-fan Tanveer Ahmed sent a message from jail celebrating Asad Shah’s dispatch “to hell with the help of Allah, the prophet, angels and saints … I have the honour of sending him to hell forever.” In Ahmed’s eyes and the eyes of millions of other Muslims, the killing of Asad Shah wasn’t a crime at all, but a righteous defence of the Prophet against literally Satanic free speech. And Ahmed celebrated his righteous deed in Pakistan’s national language of Urdu, which is further proof that the Muslim war on free speech is not a product of “cancel culture” or “liberal pusillanimity.” Asad Shah’s murder came firmly stamped MADE IN PAKISTAN, just as Samuel Paty’s murder came firmly stamped MADE IN CHECHNYA. The role of “liberals” in these murders — and countless other acts of Muslim barbarism — lay in allowing Muslims into the West to practise authentic Islam.
Because Brendan O’Neill and Kenan Malik support unlimited Muslim immigration, they didn’t speak the truth about Samuel Paty’s murder and they ignored Asad Shah’s murder altogether. If they properly acknowledged that Ahmadis are being murdered and imprisoned for their words by the Sunni majority, they would have to admit that mainstream Islam is poison for free speech. But it’s not too late for these two misguided Trotskyists to repent. I’d like to invite Brendan and Kenan to use the headline “I Am Asad” and to break their silence about the murder of a gentle, tolerant Ahmadi Muslim by a free-speech-hating Sunni Muslim on British soil in 2016. If they want further details of what mainstream Muslim “fascists” are doing to Ahmadi Muslims, I can recommend a report called Suffocation of the Faithful: The Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan and the Rise of International Extremism, which was issued by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in July 2020:
Suffocation of the Faithful — front-cover of the parliamentary report
This report, the first of its kind, was commissioned against the backdrop of a shocking pattern of sustained persecution against Ahmadi Muslims including killings, assaults, attacks on places of worship, hate campaigns, deprivation of jobs and denial of education.
This is severest in Pakistan and what is unique about the persecution of this peace-loving community is that the persecution is state-sponsored, with laws passed explicitly targeting Ahmadi Muslims. I cannot think of any parallel in the modern world for such persecution where a religious community has been denied — by law — the right to self-identify as Muslims. Not only that, the law then prescribes that should an Ahmadi call himself a Muslim or practice Islam then that is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment (and even death under the blasphemy laws). These are the draconian anti-Ahmadi laws that Pakistan has had on its statute books for nearly half a century.
Such is the extent of persecution that it is no exaggeration to describe the life of an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan as one that faces persecution from the cradle to the grave. At every step of their lives they remain ever at risk of arrest, attack or harassment. Ahmadis have been denied their fundamental right to vote, they cannot possess their religious texts and even after death, their graves are targeted and bodies exhumed. …
[In 2020] Pakistan’s State Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Mr Ali Muhammad Khan supported an anti-Ahmadiyya twitter campaign by calling for Ahmadis to be punished by death. This resulted in a tirade of abuse and hate speech against Ahmadi Muslims. Such proclamations feed a climate of hate and the most recent targets of this [were] Ramzan Bibi, a 55-year-old Ahmadi Muslim woman and Rohan Ahmed, an Imam of the community in Pakistan, both of whom have been arrested on false allegations of blasphemy. Over the past few years Ahmadi mosques have been demolished, homes and businesses set on fire, leaflets and hate speech [have] been rampant declaring Ahmadis ‘liable to be killed’ and Ahmadis have been subject to brutal target killings. (Suffocation of the Faithful: The Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, 2020)
Thanks to mass immigration from Pakistan, this mainstream Muslim pathology is growing fast in Britain. Brendan, Kenan and the rest of Frank Furedi’s disciples claim to support free speech and to defend those who suffer for trying to exercise it. Ahmadi Muslims are regularly paying the same price as Samuel Paty: censorship-by-murder at the hands of entirely orthodox Muslims of the kind Brendan and Kenan want to see entering the West in unlimited numbers.
The contradiction between their support for both free speech and unlimited Muslim immigration is glaring. And I’m completely confident of two things. First, Brendan and Kenan can’t resolve the contradiction; second, they won’t break their “craven, cowardly silence” about the “medieval murder” of Asad Shah by a “fascist.” As I said right at the beginning: Trotskyism and truth don’t mix.
True Q: Elements of Truth in the QAnon Conspiracy
Sympnoia panta (“All things conspire”).
Hippocrates[1]
“I know nothing about QAnon.”
Donald J. Trump[2]
What can be more fun than a conspiracy? Conspiracies are sneaky, salacious, cryptographic, lurid, and enticing. They promise secret knowledge of the inner workings of society—knowledge that only a relative few possess, thus empowering the knower. They claim to identify and expose evil wrongdoers, thus holding out hope for retribution, true justice, and a better world. And they bring a kind of order and coherence to an otherwise incoherent time. If, in the end, they turn out to be incomplete, or partially wrong, so what? No harm in investigating the machinations of society, and in any case, some elements of truth are certain to be flushed out in the process. Much to gain, little to lose.
Conspiracy theories have been around for thousands of years—at least. Claims of secretive and malevolent Jewish schemes, for example, go back to 300 BC.[3] Anti-Christian conspiracy theories date to the early second century, as found in the writings of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. In the Middle Ages, stories about the Inquisition, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, and the papacy all gave rise to a variety of conspiracy claims. For centuries, it was a “conspiracy theory” to believe that the Donation of Constantine—a document granting ruling authority to the Catholic Church—was fraudulent; but this conspiracy was proven true by Lorenzo Valla in 1440, when he exposed the charade. Catholic conspiracies continue to serve as grist for popular exposés, both fictional and nonfiction, to the present day.
But what, exactly, is a conspiracy? In the most general terms, it is a secretive, hidden effort by a relatively small group of people to steer events in a chosen direction. Literally, it is a group of people who “breathe together” (con+spirare, ‘to breathe’), but it also has a connotation of the Latin spiritus (‘spirit’), meaning ‘those of a shared spirit.’ A conspiracy is thus a group of people with a shared spirit, a common outlook, who, at least in part, work closely together—“breathe together”—to achieve their hidden ends.
Thus understood, it is clear that there are countless conspiracies at work in the world today, as there have been throughout history. Every governmental office that works behind closed doors to enact policy, every corporate boardroom that crafts strategy and action, every leadership group of virtually any organization that coordinates any action whatsoever, is technically a conspiracy. Each of these act, at least in part, “secretly,” and does so on behalf of certain beneficiaries—such as the citizens, the stockholders, or the members of the organization. Of course, in most cases, we don’t call such actions ‘conspiracies’; in common usage, we restrict the term to a deliberately secretive, conniving, scheming group of individuals, usually a handful in number, who work illegally or immorally to gain wealth or power. In this restricted sense, virtually any criminal effort, if it involves more than one person, is a conspiracy. But it applies as well to countless corporate and governmental actions, many of which are illegal or immoral or both. Suffice to say that conspiracies of all stripes are alive and well in the modern world. To believe in conspiracies—that is, to be a “conspiracy theorist”—is simply to acknowledge reality.
But this is not good enough for our global elite. They want to restrict the term even further. Media, government, and academia would have us believe that a conspiracy—any conspiracy—is by definition a false, baseless, and sophomoric notion that only a fool or an idiot would believe. They want us to think that simply by labeling something as “a conspiracy theory” that we will see it as both ludicrous and grossly untrue, and that therefore any believer of such a thing must be an ignorant, deluded, or hopelessly confused person. Thus the term adds to a long line of similar slanders, insults, and ad hominem fallacies; a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is akin to a ‘racist,’ a ‘bigot,’ a ‘far right-winger,’ a ‘Holocaust denier,’ an ‘anti-Semite,’ and a ‘White supremacist.’ These favored elite catch-phrases offer shorthand dismissal and vilification of inconvenient ideas or individuals.
That said, what can we meaningfully say about the QAnon conspiracy theory? Here is one summary published in August 2019 by Salon.com, based on an interview with a Washington Post reporter:
QAnon is based upon the idea that there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything. They control politicians, and they control the media. They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially. And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump. Now, Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal’s wrongdoing. But one of the reasons that Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically. And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Trump and the US military—that everyone backs him and the evil cabal—were it not for ‘Q.’
Q, of course, is the secret governmental source who has special inside knowledge of such things, and who leaks them out regularly and often on web-based imageboards like 4chan, (the now-defunct) 8chan, and (currently) 8kun.[4] The letter ‘Q’ allegedly refers to the highest level of security clearance—“Q clearance”—at the US Department of Energy. Q first appeared in late 2017, with a post on an alleged forthcoming arrest of Hillary Clinton (“HRC”):
HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. …
This was followed soon thereafter by a related claim that John Podesta would be arrested, again with subsequent riots. Needless to say, no such arrests or extraditions have yet occurred. But these were only the first of many predictions to come.
Now, three years later, Q has amassed a large body of posts, or “drops,” numbering almost 5,000—an average of about five a day. They vary in length and subject matter; some are clear and straightforward, but many are cryptic—involving vague allusions, mysterious acronyms and abbreviations, and tantalizing implications. Members of QAnon spend countless hours deciphering and interpreting Q’s many clues. They further repost all Q drops at various Internet sites; qalerts.app, www.qanon.pub, and qposts.online are three good sources.[5] Technically, these posts from Q himself are the only “legitimate” sources of conspiracy information. Anything else has been grafted on by followers (or opponents, as the case may be).
Evolution of a Conspiracy
The QAnon phenomenon emerged in late 2017, most notably with the Twitter-backing of (Jewish) celebrity Rosanne Barr. But the story didn’t get real media coverage until early 2018. The Daily Beast, for example, wrote in March of that year that “[Q] claims to be a high-ranking government official with inside knowledge of the White House where, he claims, Trump is planning mass arrests of top Democrats for allegedly being involved in a satanic child-sex-trafficking ring.” The mass arrests constitute an event referred to as “the Storm,” which is yet to materialize.[6] But Q-spiracists have faith that it is coming, and soon.
Before long, Q signs and slogans began showing up in Trump rallies around the country. Web journal Mashable.com wrote about the movement in August 2018, using a boatload of pejoratives, including “mountain of bullshit,” “insane,” “batshit crazy,” “irrational,” and so on. Mashable argued that QAnon was a kind of right-wing diversion from actual pedophilia and sexual abuse/harassment cases against prominent Republicans, including Dennis Hastert, Roy Moore, and Jim Jordan. They then blamed execs at Facebook, Twitter, and Google for allowing this “batshit-crazy” conspiracy to gain traction—as was the case, they claimed, with so-called Holocaust denialism.[7]
Around March 2019, the Q-stories got weirder. Vox.com reported on QAnon as “based on the idea that special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks) and then send them to Guantanamo Bay.” QAnon-ers also believe, they claimed, that Hillary Clinton “was executed by lethal injection,” and that “John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive”—neither of which were asserted by Q himself.[8] Such claims came from outside sources, quite possibly to discredit the nascent movement.
By August of that year, as reported in Salon, the story turned ominous. The original “satanic” had now morphed into “Satan-worshipping,” and worse, the “pedophiles” were now “a worldwide cabal” who “rule the world”; as cited above, “they control politicians, they control the media, they control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence.” There is, of course, only one such group that fits that description: Jews. More on them below.
Also by this time, mainstream journalist-critics began emphasizing the putative “religious” nature of Q’s ideology. Salon.com reported on the “apocalyptic” quality of the conspiracy, on the group’s vision of a coming battle “between absolute good and absolute evil,” and Q himself was depicted “like [a] religious millennialist.” There is some truth to this. Q refers to God on countless occasions, and frequently cites the Bible. He is particularly fond of Ephesians 6:10, especially the passage calling for us to “put on the full armor of God,” in preparation for the coming struggle.[9] References to Jesus, by contrast, are almost nonexistent; this suggests that Q is an ardent Catholic, perhaps of a fundamentalist bent. He is certainly a typical conservative: pro-God, patriotic, pro-Trump, anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, etc. But the religious language has caught fire with American Christians in particular, and seems to be a driving force behind Q’s rise to prominence.
The religious angle thus attained top priority. In June 2020, Atlantic was writing of “The Prophecies of Q.” “The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q movement,” they wrote (disregarding the utter lack of references to Jesus). “Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute.” One true believer is quoted as saying “I feel God led me to Q.” One of the supposed “best-known QAnon evangelists,” according to Atlantic, is David Hayes, aka PrayingMedic. Atlantic’s view is summarized thusly:
It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.
Mainstream media’s view is clear: QAnon-ers are irrational, unhinged, quasi-religious lunatics who are detached from reality. For their part, Atlantic simply can’t make heads or tails of such people; “QAnon is complex and confusing.” We will see why they say this momentarily.
QAnon and Jew-Anon
It was also at this time that our intrepid journalists began to reveal perhaps their greatest fear: the connection between QAnon and anti-Semitism. Atlantic wrote that “the most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media platforms and imageboards. The Q universe encompasses … alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism.” Indeed, they say, Q-like conspiracy theories “have helped sustain consequential [social] eruptions, such as … anti-Semitism” at all points in time.
Here, finally, we seem to be getting to the root of media hysteria over QAnon. Backing Trump was bad enough, but once Q-ers started turning anti-Semitic, well…time to crush that bug. The issue went bigtime in July of this year, in such pieces as Wired’s “The dark virality of a Hollywood blood-harvesting conspiracy.” As the Jewish writer Brian Friedberg explains in his subtitle, “A centuries-old anti-Semitic myth is spreading freely on far-right corners of social media—suggesting a new digital Dark Age has arrived.” Now we get to the rub. As Friedberg sees it, QAnon-ers are resurrecting and modernizing the ancient “blood libel” charge against Jews, which was traditionally based on the idea that Jews would kidnap and kill Christians—typically children—in order to use their blood for various religious rites, for its alleged healing powers, and to consume in various food products.
For Friedberg and others, the charge of blood libel is nothing more than “an anti-Semitic myth that pervaded Europe throughout the Middle Ages.” Wikipedia calls it “an anti-Semitic canard.” Unfortunately for Friedberg and other Jews, this “myth” has a large basis in fact. The earliest reports of Jewish human sacrifice date to 300 BC, and the use of body parts was cited in the first century BC by Apollonius Molon and Posidonius, and mentioned again circa 0 AD by figures such as Damocritus and Apion.[10] More specifically, the blood libel charge, which emerged in popular form in the twelfth century in Europe, has an extensive factual basis, as documented in the now-infamous 2007 book by Israeli scholar Ariel Toaff, Passovers of Blood (details here). Jews have in fact historically valued and used human blood, preferably of children, for its alleged magical healing powers. The killing of Christians actually served a double benefit, also acting as a kind of revenge against the Gentiles for the prior killing of Jews throughout history. As Toaff demonstrates, trafficking in human blood was undoubtedly true in the Middle Ages, and given its grounding in basic Jewish theology and psychology, may well still be the case today. There may in fact be certain present-day groups of orthodox Jews who still find ways to capture and kill Gentile children, perhaps even by crucifixion, to attain both symbolic vengeance and the “potent” youthful blood. Needless to say, this situation, if proven, would have huge implications for current Jewish-Gentile relations.
In its latest QAnon form, the historically-grounded blood trafficking by Jews has turned into a bizarre variant based on a substance called ‘adrenochrome.’ This compound, with chemical formula C9H9NO3, results from an oxidation reaction of the hormone adrenaline—according to that indubitable source, Wikipedia. For a period of time in the past, adrenochrome was studied in connection with schizophrenia, either as a cause or treatment, but no clear outcomes resulted. According to some researchers, in concentration it is both cardiotoxic and neurotoxic. But in the mass media version of QAnon, it is now an essential part of the conspiracy. The Satan-worshipping elites now not only kidnap children and youth to have sex with them, they then kill them for the adrenochrome in their blood; this is the “cannibalistic” aspect of the conspiracy. The adrenochrome is said to be the key element of the blood, something that provides either a chemical ‘high,’ youth-restoration, or both. Based on my initial research, however, neither adrenochrome nor any substance in the blood does anything of the sort.
Medically speaking, blood transfusions are quite common, but they provide no fountain of youth, produce no ‘high’ of any kind, and in fact carry significant risks. Transfusions are useful for anyone who has lost a lot of blood through accident, surgery, or other illness. They can help people with specific diseases, like anemia, hemophilia, sickle cell, and certain cancers. But for ordinary people, a transfusion does virtually nothing for one’s health, and invites risks of blood diseases and immune system reactions. People have nothing in general to gain from injecting, or consuming, human blood from any source, even children. Blood-trafficking Jews acted, and still act, on the basis of tradition and superstition, nothing more.
But consider this: If you wanted to discredit both the “anti-Semitic” QAnon and the (true) blood libel charges against Jews, you could do little better than to inject an entirely bogus element into that discussion. First, under a fake name, you portray yourself as a Q-fanatic, and then you make up nonsense about a real blood-based substance like adrenochrome. And then, under a different name—perhaps your real name—you attack the very forums that you just posted on, as being “insane,” “irrational,” “batshit crazy,” and so on. It’s a nifty trolling trick, surely indispensable to many Jewish journalists and Internet activists.
Furthermore, it would seem to be significant that Q himself has never, in some 5,000 drops, explicitly mentioned adrenochrome, blood libel, or anything of the sort.[11] The whole topic, to the extent that it is real, was introduced by outsiders, likely as a discrediting tactic.
Not only is it not mentioned by Q, but as Friedberg points out, “adrenochrome harvesting isn’t outwardly blamed on Jews” at all. In fact, the word ‘Jew’ virtually never appears in any Q drops. So how can Q, and by extension the QAnon followers, be considered anti-Semitic?
It seems that Q, being an unrepentant cypher, prefers to list specific Jews by name, and then leave it to the “anti-Semitic” reader to make the obvious generalization. Or at least, that’s what our faithful journalists would have us believe. Among the many Q drops, one finds several references to such Jews as George Soros (approx. 36), Jeffrey Epstein (54), Anthony Weiner (18), and “the Rothschilds” (21). This may seem like a lot, but it represents a small fraction (less than 2%) of the total drops. Furthermore, references to these individuals are typically situation-specific, without any obvious extension to other or all Jews. Other potentially suggestive references seem largely absent. Such words as ‘cabal’ appeared a few times in 2018, but not since then. Words like ‘ruling’ and ‘elite’ are almost nonexistent in the relevant contexts. Q’s alleged anti-Semitism consists of little more than criticizing a few Jews by name, but without even identifying them as such.
Still, it begs certain questions about the Jewish role in sexual abuse and child molestation, and in their dominant standing in elite Western society. It is truly remarkable to consider, for example, the number of prominent Jews who, in the past few years, were caught up various sexual assault or harassment scandals. In addition to above-mentioned Epstein and Weiner, we have Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Andrew Lack, Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Woody Allen, Alan Dershowitz, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (currently on his fourth wife), Ari Shavit, and Steven M. Cohen, to name but a few. As disproportionate as they are in elite circles, Jews are also disproportionate in the realm of reprehensible crimes against women and youth.
And what about the “world-ruling elite” that QAnon-ers are supposedly so obsessed about? Again, we find little from Q himself. Words like ‘elite’ and ‘rulers’ appear rarely in the drops, and when they do, it is typically as part of a biblical passage. Surely Q knows, however, that Jews hold massively disproportionate power throughout the West, and therefore throughout the world. This sad story is widely known by now, but a short recap is in order. Jewish control over Hollywood is so banal as to be a trivial observation. Jewish money dominates American government, to the point that at least 25% of conservative money and 50% of liberal money comes from Jews.[12] American Jews own or control up to half of the private wealth in the US, potentially amounting to some $50 trillion. This is why they exercise such considerable influence in American government and media. A similar situation holds in the UK, France, Canada, Australia, and in Russia’s oligarchy.
Here, then, is another bit of truth behind the QAnon hysteria. Prominent Jews, in the guise of “Soros” and “the Rothschilds,” really do run the show, to an astonishingly large degree. If innocent Q readers start to search on these and other Jewish names, they will surely come across some rather nasty factual data that our Jewish elite would rather not have them know. Since they can no longer stifle or censor the movement, the elite’s second-best strategy is to slander it like mad. Thus we see headlines like the recent “QAnon is a Nazi cult, rebranded.” Here is the leading paragraph of that story:
A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.
Elements of truth: Yes, there is a “cabal” of wealthy Jews who have obscene levels of power in the West, and via the American superpower, functionally have “taken over the world.” They certainly have in the past, and may well continue to, kidnap Gentile youths, exploit and abuse them sexually, and in certain cases, kill them and extract their blood for psychotic Judaic religious ceremonies, for purposes of anti-Gentile hatred and revenge, or for utterly unscientific health reasons. They do in fact control high positions throughout America and much of the West. Liberal Jews are in fact leading the charge to “defund the police,” to promote LGBTQ rights, and to provide so-called “open door” immigration policies in the US and Europe—with a net effect, if not intent, of racially diluting and debasing every traditionally White nation on Earth.
QAnon Meets the Holocaust
The article cited above also informs us of the growing global nature of the movement. QAnon, we read, “has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany.” Of particular concern to our media elite is a small, decades-old, right-wing group known as Reichsbürger (“Reich citizens”), who have joined in the Q party and adopted some of its themes. In a recent report from CNN, we read that “Reichsburger followers deny the Holocaust happened” and traffic in other “anti-Semitic tropes.” More generally, online journal Venturebeat.com writes that “QAnon attaches itself to a variety of issues, such as anti-mask protests, child trafficking conspiracies, and Holocaust denial…”
Unfortunately for our all-knowing media, we find here another element of truth: It turns out that the evil “Holocaust deniers” are on to something, that the traditional Holocaust story is riddled with holes, falsehoods, and logical inconsistencies, and that all reasonable arguments point to a Jewish death toll substantially less than 6 million.[13] Should our intrepid QAnon-ers stumble upon this truth, they are in for another eye-opener, one of monumental importance.
Trump, the Savior
But not to worry, because Trump will save the day! This is the final piece of the picture. As it happens, Q rarely mentions Trump by name, much preferring that silly but long-established acronym “POTUS” (“president of the US”) instead. It is clear that Q is on Trump’s side, and supports him against the “Democratic party corruption” embodied in Obama, Clinton, and now Biden. A typical (and typically cryptic) recent drop is this one:
Why was POTUS framed re: Russia collusion? Protect truth re: Hillary/DNC Russia collusion? Why was POTUS impeached re: Ukraine? Protect truth re: Biden/[CLAS 1-99] Ukraine collusion? Blame ‘opponent’ for what they themselves are guilty of? [DNC media push echo submitted ‘talking points’ generate false narrative]. Q (drop #4872, 15 Oct 2020)
But the “mass arrests” story—the Storm—is almost nonexistent in the past two years. One has to go back to late 2018 to find such suggestive posts as this: “Are you ready to see arrests? Are you ready to see PAIN? Are you ready to be part of history? Q” (drop #2344, 4 Oct 2018). But again, here we are, two years later, and no mass arrests of anyone.
So this begs another important question: What is Trump actually doing against the cabal that is behind Democratic corruption, sexual abuse, and human trafficking? The answer is: almost nothing. Trump has shown little appetite for confronting and dismantling the Judeocracy that runs our country; and worse, he has positively supported it. We all know about his daughter Ivanka, who married the orthodox Jew Jared Kushner, converted to Judaism, and had three children with him.[14] Trump has always had a large number of Jewish friends, colleagues, and confidantes. As I wrote a year ago, these include such prominent donors as:
Lew Eisenberg, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Mel Sembler, Ron Weiser, Steve Wynn, Elliott Brody, Laurie Perlmutter, and Carl Icahn, not to mention Bernie Marcus. Then we have his many Jewish personal and professional associates, who include, among others, Avi Berkowitz, Michael Cohen, Gary Cohn, Reed Cordish, Boris Epshteyn, David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, Larry Kudlow, Stephen Miller, Steven Mnuchin, Jay Sekulow, David Shulkin, and Allen Weisselberg. All those Trump-defenders out there in America should be dismayed at his vast linkage to the people of Israel.
In terms of policy, Trump placated hardline Jews by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018. He also recognized Israel’s claim of sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and his “peace process” has been consistently on the side of Israel. He has defended Israel in the UN, and has done nothing to cut foreign aid—some $5 to 6 billion per year—to that country.[15]
Where, then, is the Storm? It’s certainly not against the real power structure, the real “swamp,” that is pulling the strings in Washington. Against them, he’s doing nothing. Worse, he seemingly panders to them at nearly every occasion. Once in a while Trump throws a small bone to White nationalists and the dissident right, but he quickly retracts or denies his statements. It’s just a tease. Trump is fully in bed with the Hebrew wirepullers, and he knows it. He has no intention of doing otherwise. It’s simply too much in his own personal interest to continue pandering to them.
Q likes to make predictions. Here’s one of mine: No Storm, no mass arrests, no reining in of the Jewish Lobby—even if Trump loses the election. And until this happens, no meaningful change in Washington, period.
Meanwhile…
And so, in the final run-up to the election, media bashing of QAnon goes on. The group constitutes the “ultimate conspiracy theory,” according to Foreign Policy. QAnon-ers have “attempted political violence,” and are linked to “apparent acts of domestic terrorism,” they state with due qualifications. The group is the ideological successor to “dark ideas like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” again bringing in the anti-Semitic angle.[16] Indeed, “apocalyptic vibes radiate through all of Q’s messages” they say, without the slightest bit of exaggeration. In sum, Q’s many drops comprise “a constellation of bullshit.”
In just the past few weeks, CNN repeated the emphasis on the Protocols, attributed to the group the idea that “the coronavirus is a hoax,” and associated Q-ers in Germany with the neo-Nazis. Perhaps most surprisingly, this nominal news organization is now taking unilateral, proactive measures to stifle QAnon. As they admit, “CNN recently sent Facebook details of dozens of groups and pages that embraced QAnon conspiracy theories. Facebook said it would investigate them and had begun removing some pages.” This is a remarkable admission; Jeff Zucker at CNN is collaborating with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook to suppress a global free-speech movement that they jointly dislike. The global elite strike again.
As we count down the final few days until the election, anti-Q stories appear almost daily. So we see headlines like “How QAnon uses satanic rhetoric to set up a narrative of ‘good vs. evil’.” NPR airs a story attacking the “QAnon candidate” Marjorie Greene. The New York Times informs us that TikTok is cracking down on “QAnon and hate speech”—as if they two were synonymous. They also explain how Republican voters took QAnon mainstream. And the Washington Post, ever helpful, warns us that QAnon is “tearing families apart.”
No matter who wins the upcoming election, some elements of truth are guaranteed to emerge. The country may be worse off, but truth will take a small step forward. And more people than ever will begin to understand exactly how the US, and the world, truly operate today.
Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books, including a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the book Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020). For all his works, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com
[1] Circa 400 BC, as quoted by Leibniz in his Monadology (sec. 61).
[2] Town Hall meeting hosted by NBC, 15 October 2020.
[3] See the writings of Hecateus of Abdera, in my book Eternal Strangers (details here).
[4] The full domain name is www.8kun.top. An imageboard is an online forum based on short postings of images and accompanying text. Most of the posters are anonymous.
[5] There are technical questions about the identity of Q over time—in other words, it is an open question if the Q posting today is the same man (or woman, or group) who posted back in 2017. Imageboard posters have a unique identifier code—a “tripcode”—that proves that the poster is the same source over time. But Q’s tripcode (currently it is this string: !!Hs1Jq13jV6) has changed at least three times over the past three years. It is strictly an article of faith that it was the same person all along. For sake of simplicity, I will assume that Q is the same individual, an unidentified male, who has been posting from the start. But nothing much turns on this assumption. I furthermore note that, of the many online articles I have reviewed, none has given the details of where to find the Q drops—almost as if they didn’t really want the reader to find out for himself. This in itself is revealing.
[6] For example, “Prepare for the storm” (drop #3880, 20 Feb 2020), or “You didn’t think the statement by POTUS re: ‘CALM BEFORE THE STORM’ was just random did you?” (#4011, 30 Apr 2020).
[7] Zuckerberg recently decided to ban “Holocaust denial” sites from Facebook.
[8] There seem to be only a handful of drops referring to John Jr., and just one old post mentioning Tom Hanks.
[9] “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”
[10] For further accounts by these and other individuals, see again my Eternal Strangers (here).
[11] It is always difficult to say for certain, however, what exactly Q means by his various hints and clues. References to “human trafficking / sacrifices” (drop #586, 22 Jan 2018) and “ability to harvest” (#2319, 3 Oct 2018) are occasionally cited as references to adrenochrome, but these are too obscure and indirect to be meaningful.
[13] For a concise account of this story, see my book The Holocaust: An Introduction (here). For the full version, see my Debating the Holocaust (here).
[14] Ivanka seems to really have a “thing” for Jews. According to Wikipedia, she dated at least two Jews prior to Kushner: investment banker Greg Hersch, and “documentary producer and playboy” James (“Bingo”) Gubelmann. For someone allegedly raised Presbyterian, this is remarkable. It suggests some natural affinity to Jews, perhaps through some unknown Jewish family connection.
[15] Yes, he did recently support the Catholic jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace the Jewess Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, but this is a minor concession to American Christians.
[16] ”Notably, QAnon builds heavily on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the world’s most enduring conspiracy theories.”
Why It’s Important for Trump to Win
Trump’s 2016 victory was seen as nothing less than a cataclysm by the American establishment—the greatest shock to the system in memory and perhaps in the entire history of the Republic. After all, Trump was vehemently opposed by the entire establishment from far left to the neoconservative and Chamber of Commerce right. It was, one might say, a hostile takeover.
The left was on the cusp of going into end-game mode, so losing was incredibly frustrating, especially since Hillary Clinton was expected to win easily. But Trump won. Whatever you think of Trump’s actual performance, the fact is that throughout the campaign and since taking office the media and pretty much the entire left has been labeling him a Nazi and White supremacist (I wrote 5 articles for Vdare on this). And it’s continued, even into the recent presidential debate and the town hall hosted by Savannah Guthrie.
When Trump won, they were apoplectic — on the verge of complete victory with a “sure thing” Hillary victory, to having “White supremacists” in the White House. The tears that flowed after Trump won were replaced by anger and sheer hatred. The practical result was that Trump’s victory has had the effect of mobilizing the left.
And because this was framed from the beginning as a contest between the forces of good (our glorious multicultural future) versus evil (the “White supremacist” American past being promoted by the Orange Nazi in the White House), anything was justified. The media ought to throw out normal standards of journalism and do everything they can to destroy Trump’s image. Violence against Trump supporters and certainly against the dissident Right is entirely justified.
The result is a level of political polarization not seen in this country probably since the Civil War. But the polarization is what had to happen for any possible movement in the direction of the dissident right. The absolute worst thing would have been another Hillary-vs.-Jeb-type election where America keeps sleep-walking to Armageddon. The mobilization of the left has made clear the fault lines. This is about removing the traditional culture of America, and it is about removing Whites from the center of the American story. It is about replacement — first the monuments and the culture, then the people.
Solid majorities of Americans oppose removing the statues, and ratings for the now-politicized NFL, NBA, and MLB are way down, even though former sports fans are trapped in their homes with nothing much to do because of the pandemic. This means the traditional American majority is moving down the road toward being explicitly aware of what the game is. Reasonable White people watching this unfold cannot possibly believe that the glorious multicultural future will be anything but a disaster for White America. The hatred for White America that has been so obviously directed against activists on the dissident right is inevitably seeping through to “just plain White folks.” The hatred will only intensify when Whites have less power. And this means that the racialization of politics that we have emphasized so much here will accelerate. The ~60% of White America that votes Republican (not including Jews and other people grouped as Caucasians deriving from the Middle East and North Africa) will increase.
If the left wins they will go into end-game mode. They will establish a more-or-less permanent hegemony (via massive surge in legal and illegal immigration, amnesty to illegals and Dreamers, adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states, and packing the Supreme Court). A Democrat victory would mark the end of the First and Second Amendments and likely lead to eventually locking up dissidents, as is already the case in Europe. There is now a rich body of academic literature by leftist academics (but I repeat myself) on reining in speech related to diversity. Their mantra is something like, “We won the intellectual war on issues related to race and gender. It’s all over, so anyone disagreeing with our pronouncements on race and gender can and should be shut down — your words do violence to muh feelings.” And liberals like Elena Kagan would love to use these ideas in majority opinions — indeed, she has already written on this.
With enough of a mandate, the Biden-Harris administration would also get rid of the Electoral College and two senators per state, resulting in the complete domination of the left-leaning urban centers—the issue has certainly been raised by many leftists since 2016. This is already the case in many states, such as California, where rural areas are effectively disenfranchised and all the statewide offices are held by Democrats, including around 75% of the State Legislature. The only Republican who could possibly win would be one who can fit into this new context, but even such a person could likely only win by taking advantage of some major Democrat screw up, like an economic depression or rampant corruption. In other words, once this happens, there’s no turning back. It’s over.
A Democrat victory would speed up the transformation of the educational system. Already, Critical Race Theory, which is basically anti-White hatred and guilt-tripping, has a strong foothold in the public schools and corporations. Trump outlawed teaching it to government workers, but that would change and there would likely be federal money for such programs at all levels of the educational system and for corporations.
Could the fact that Trump is attempting to appeal to Hispanics and Blacks undermine the GOP as the party of White people? It’s common for politicians to try to expand their base, and the fact is that these groups would benefit from many of the same policies that would benefit White America—opposing the defunding of police, curtailing immigration, and ensuring a robust economy (which Trump delivered on until the virus-induced lockdowns). Latinos in particular may be more open to Trump because of the national obsession with Blacks in the Summer of George.
No one is saying Trump is the savior, but the reality is that a great many White people are hopelessly caught up in the liberal/left mindset. This is especially true of educated Whites—the White working class has been solidly pro-Trump. These educated urban and suburban Whites are not going to vote Republican in the face of the constant stream of propaganda from the elite media and universities which has resulted in the left dominating the moral high ground, and in massive virtue-signaling and mindless conformity by great masses of liberal Whites whose hatred toward Trump has been fanned into a fever pitch by the elite media. No one on the dissident right saw Trump as the solution, but only as a stepping stone to a more explicitly White candidate. That is still possible, but only if Trump wins. In the meantime, trying to get non-Whites to vote for Trump makes a lot of sense.
In retrospect, it’s clear that the Trump victory in 2016 energized the left. There were riots in the immediate aftermath of the election and off-and-on throughout his term, crescendoing in the Summer of George—~130 straight days in Portland, with no serious effort to rein it in. The leftist media became nonstop Trump hate, and university professors routinely expressed their hatred in classrooms and in op-eds. Could one argue that a Biden victory would result in the civic peace and tranquility so eagerly desired by all those urban and suburban liberal Whites? I suppose it could, although in Portland the BLM-antifa have made leftist mayor Ted Wheeler a consistent target of their attacks, and they also turned on the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey; riots have continued to occur in cities dominated by very liberal-left mayors, such as New York and Atlanta.
But the question is, would a Biden victory be good for the dissident right, and the answer is no. The worst possible outcome would be to return to elections between Hillary types and Jeb types. Flip a coin, it really wouldn’t matter. We don’t really want peace and harmony. Polarization is good because the bipartisan center-left—center-right consensus is suicide but would just take a little longer than if Trump hadn’t come on the scene. But now that he attained the presidency, a victory by the energized, radicalized left would result in hegemonic, authoritarian control by the left and a complete eradication of expressions of White identity politics, opposition to immigration, public discussion of the genetics of race, likely the eventual shutting down of sites like The Occidental Observer, and even putting dissenters in prison. When I hung out with radicals in the 1960s, it was common to hear opinions like “worse will be better”—if the present system gets worse, it will ultimately result in a revolution of the left. But when a revolution of the left gains power, as would happen if Biden-Harris win, they will arrogate all power to themselves and ensure that it won’t be possible to give it up. Revenge and punishment will the the order of the day. Just recently Robert Reich, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, suggested Truth and Reconciliation commissions should be set up in the wake of a Biden victory on the model of South Africa after 1994—although what he really has in mind may more resemble Nuremberg and denazification that occurred after World War II.
A victory by Biden would be a green light for a return to power of neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin (who have more or less defected to the Democrats, but they would be happy to return to the GOP so that fanatically pro-Israel policies like war with Iran would be bipartisan). Another group eager to seize power in the wake of a Biden victory would be political operatives like those associated with the Lincoln Project, such as Rick Wilson and George Conway. Forget about a populist GOP. The GOP would once again be the party of Big Business (and hence liberal policies on legal and illegal immigration), wars for Israel, and tacit, if not overt, support for Critical Race Theory indoctrination. I realize that Trump has been gung-ho about doing things Israel wants, but he has stopped short of war and, in my opinion he has done all he can to extricate U.S. troops from the Middle East in the face of powerful opposition from the military (Trump accused them of gunning for post-career sinecures with defense contractors), the Israel Lobby, the media (where the left is dominated by liberal interventionists), and many politicians on both sides of the aisle. Just today Trump renewed pressure on the Pentagon to lower troop levels even further in order to fulfill his election promise, but the Pentagon is resisting the move.
On the other hand, another Trump victory would cement the populist wing of the party, where opposition to immigration is a major issue. Trump’s victories on immigration have been largely ignored by all sides, but as the LA Times notes,
He has targeted the Silicon-Valley based tech industry by squeezing high-skilled foreign labor, and has restricted immigration based on family reunification even as he’s separated thousands of migrant families at the border.
He has attempted to repeal federal protections for young immigrants who entered the country illegally as children and sidestepped the Supreme Court’s rejection of his plans. California has more residents covered by those protections, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, than any other state. He has also ended Temporary Protected Status for refugees from El Salvador and other Central American countries, a disproportionate number of whom live in the state.
And his administration has discouraged thousands of other students, refugees [refugee admissions dropped precipitously], asylum seekers, workers, and entrepreneurs — many headed to California — from coming to the United States at all, most recently by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification for largely shutting the nation’s borders.
Even more importantly, legal immigration has dropped by an astonishing 92 per cent in Fiscal Year 2020. Moreover, the fall in immigration workforce population predates Covid—apparently due to regulatory tightening. “Thanks, in part, to Trump’s (relatively) hard line on immigration, expressed basically via administrative measures, the Trump years saw a labor market where native-born Americans lost relatively fewer jobs than immigrants. This is not quite what Trump supporters had in mind in November 2016. But it’s something.”
Yes, and a Biden victory would end up being a radical reversal of these trends.
And finally, the Center for Immigration Studies:
Two new analyses of recently released Census Bureau data show that the total number of immigrants in the United States grew much more slowly 2017-2019 than in prior years, despite economic growth and low unemployment. This shows that the level of immigration is not a force of nature beyond our control, as many have suggested, but rather responds to policy changes. …
Trump administration policies that may have caused the slowdown include:
—A significant reduction in refugees allowed into the country;
—Requiring immigrant self-sufficiency through reform of the public charge rules;
—Mexico & Central American countries agreeing to offer safe haven to asylum seekers;
—Increased barriers and fencing at the border;
—More worksite enforcement against illegal workers and some employers;
—Efforts to end TPS and DACA, may have discouraged illegal immigration;
—Other modest administrative changes that may have had a cumulative effect.
A Trump victory would exacerbate the social unrest and polarization that has already reached levels not seen at least since the 1960s, but another Trump victory would unleash far greater violence than in the wake of his 2016 win. We have already seen the huge BLM-antifa crowds in urban areas and seen what they can do. It would be much worse as the left, anticipating another victory, would be plunged into despair and become further radicalized. Rioting in all the major cities is to be expected; indeed, the NYPD has already issued a memo saying “We should anticipate and prepare for protests growing in size, frequency, and intensity leading up to the election.” Riots are sure to exceed the violence that occurred after the 2016 election and the riots of this past summer, and continue for long thereafter. Attempts to shut them down, especially by the feds would likely look a lot like civil war—a civil war that I think the right would win at this point. But the longer this thing festers, the less likely that becomes.
As noted at the outset, the 2016 election was a huge defeat for our hostile elite, including the media. Another defeat would be an even greater catastrophe for them and a great victory for everyone else. Not only are the liberal-left media going all out to defeat Trump, now we have social media companies actively censoring information on covid from high administration officials and medical experts. Recently the social media companies and left-leaning newspapers and television (i.e., virtually all of them) have buried the New York Post series on the Hunter Biden-to-Joe Biden kickback scandal. The Trump administration is finally fighting back, suing Google under antitrust laws and reviewing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “If Trump wins, Big Tech will know it’s screwed. The tech giants want to rig the election. Trump won’t forget that, and he will have the power and political capital to pay them back.” If Trump loses, this iron grip on information would be further empowered, even without going after the First Amendment. In effect, it would be a Ministry of Truth run by the private-sector and decidedly on the left.
Finally, the #1 reason to want a Trump victory would be simply to see massive crowds of Trump haters weeping on TV, a repeat of 2016, but much worse. I would just love to see the likes of Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Lawrence O’Donnell, their faces grim, lashing out at Trump voters as racists, misogynists, haters, etc. Get out the popcorn!
The Empress’s New Clothes: Leftist Self-Worship and the Cult of Artemisia Gentileschi
“She was a genius,” says the Guardian. She was a “uniquely gifted artist who should be considered among the all-time greatest painters,” says the BBC. I say, no, she was not. The Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) was not a genius, was not uniquely gifted and should definitely not be considered a great painter. But don’t take my word for it — see for yourself. Here is one of her most famous and extravagantly praised paintings:
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1640), Artemisia Gentileschi
Given the title of Gentileschi’s self-portrait, you can’t fault her ambition and egocentricity. But you can fault her perspective, her composition, her colouring, her grasp of her own anatomy, and her ability to represent fabric, flesh, and hair. Here for comparison is a self-portrait by a genuinely gifted female artist, the French Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (1755–1842):
Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782), Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun
Vigée-Le Brun represents herself as attractive and enjoying both life and being a woman. Feminists don’t want women to be attractive and happy like that. They want women to be unhappy, angry and militant. That’s one big reason they prefer the untalented Gentileschi to the highly talented Vigée-Le Brun. I don’t think Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting even rises to the level of bad art. The words that come most naturally to my lips are “bloody awful.” The first time I saw the painting in a book of art history, I wondered whether its inclusion was a joke or mistake. How could any art-historian or critic take that mess seriously?
The siren-song of solipsism
Very easily, it became apparent. And very prudently too. Anyone at the Guardian, BBC or other leftist institution who spoke the truth about Artemisia Gentileschi’s sometimes execrable art would be in serious trouble. If Gentileschi had been a man and painted to the same low standard, she would quite rightly have been forgotten long ago. But she was a woman and a “rape-survivor,” so feminists in the 1970s decided to create a cult around her. By worshipping her, they were really worshipping themselves, because I think some or perhaps most feminists don’t see other women as individuals or even as human beings in their own right. Instead, those feminists see other women as reflections of themselves or as counters in the feminist struggle for power and self-assertion.
But this inability to see others as real applies more generally to leftists and their supposed objects of concern. I was struck by this passage in The Liar (1991), an autobiographical novel by the near-ubiquitous British leftist Stephen Fry: “For Adrian other people did not exist except as bit-players in the film of his life. No-one but he had noted the splendour and agony of existence, no one else was truly or fully alive.” Fry is homosexual and half-Jewish, which may also be significant, but his solipsism is, I’d argue, an important feature of leftism. For leftists, collectivism is really the simplest and surest way to exalt the self. And you can see these aspects of leftism in the cult of Artemisia Gentileschi — and also in Gentileschi herself. Her bad art is now being worshipped in a major exhibition at the National Gallery in London. Here’s how Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett of the Guardian reacted when she overheard some truth-telling at the exhibition:
Artemisia’s features, in the guise of myriad saints and figures from myth and religion, are everywhere. As Laura Cumming wrote, she “seems to live inside every role she depicts”. I delighted in this, but other visitors did not. “Self-obsessed”, said one older man, and I laughed to myself because, really, his remark was just too perfect, too predictable, too tediously sexist for words. The history of women and art has been, in the main part, a history of bodies. Bodies stripped of clothing and imagined and objectified by men. Yet running alongside this parade of breasts and bottoms as conceived by the male gaze is a subversive counterhistory: that of women artists seeing themselves. (The history of art is full of female masters. It’s time they were taken seriously, The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett)
Yes, Gentileschi did see herself. She then put herself down on canvas, over and over again, in awkward, ugly, ill-coloured ways. That is subversive, I suppose. It’s definitely self-obsessed. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett says the remark by the “older man” is “tediously sexist” because she can’t say that it’s untrue. Gentileschi also sometimes looks self-pitying, as in her Self-Portrait as Martyr, the painting on the left below:
Some of Artemisia’s subversive self-obsession: self-portraits as martyr, lute-player and St Catherine
Cosslett both explains and echoes the self-pity: “Artemisia was a survivor of male violence, just as I am. Tears sprang to my eyes when I looked at the transcript of her torture during her rapist’s trial, and read that she had repeated ‘è vero, è vero, è vero’ (‘it is true, it is true, it is true’).” I’d suggest that Cosslett wept for herself, not for Gentileschi. That is, Cosslett sees Gentileschi as a reflection of herself, not as an individual. That’s why objective standards of good and bad art don’t apply in the cult of Artemisia Gentileschi. She and her art serve to reflect feminists back at themselves.
And her art is probably even more appealing to feminists because, unlike Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s, it is bad art. Leftists hate beauty, truth and goodness, and delight in the destruction of those things. The cult of Artemisia exalts ugliness and insists on untruths: Artemisia was a “genius,” a “uniquely gifted artist … among the all-time greatest painters.”
Chopping off White men’s heads
The cult also celebrates the overthrow of White men, because this is Gentileschi’s most famous painting in its two versions:
Judith Beheading Holofernes
Many painters have represented the ethnocentric Old Testament story of a Jewish heroine killing a gentile to defend her people, but few have done it as badly as Gentileschi did. And here is another of her bad paintings on a similar theme:
Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1615)
Gentileschi places herself on canvas, dealing death to White men, and feminists can again see themselves reflected in her bad art. If you want to see how a real genius represents Judith’s death-dealing, here is Caravaggio:
Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes (1599)
Compositionally, that isn’t one of Caravaggio’s best paintings: it isn’t a realistic portrayal of what such a beheading would have looked like (according to the apocryphal Book of Judith, Holofernes was drunk and helpless when Judith cut off his head as her maidservant kept watch at the door of his tent, but painters have understandably chosen more drama and less drunkenness). Gentileschi understood Judith’s task better, which is why she shows the beheading as a collaboration. After all, men are on average far more physically powerful than women, as Gentileschi presumably learned when she was raped by her father’s assistant, Agostino Tassi.
Victimhood valorizes
So yes, she was the victim of a bad crime and yes, the crime was compounded by the torture she endured to prove her accusation against Tassi. But her victimhood does not “valorize” her art (to use an ugly neologism found in this feminist art-criticism on Gentileschi). Her art is still bad and Caravaggio’s is still sublime. I’m not disturbed by Gentileschi’s decapitations. They might be more realistic, but they don’t look real. Caravaggio’s decapitation does look real.
And while Gentileschi painted herself as a martyr and saint, as you can see above, Caravaggio painted himself as a sinner, as you can see below:
Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ (c. 1602)
The figure on the far right, holding up a lantern to assist the taking of Christ for trial and crucifixion, is probably Caravaggio himself. That is a very simple and effective way to represent a difficult but essential Christian doctrine: that we all bear responsibility for the crucifixion of God’s only-begotten son.
Anatomy out of whack
It’s also significant, I think, that Caravaggio has given a determinedly gentile face to the kiss-bestowing Judas, an archetypal Jewish villain in so much Christian iconography. There’s no evasion of responsibility here: Caravaggio is saying “I did it; you did it; we all did it.” But if Artemisia Gentileschi had attempted the same scene, I think her first impulse would have been to give Christ her own features and thereby play the victim again. She certainly couldn’t have painted to Caravaggio’s sublime standards. He could represent reality; she couldn’t. Even the Guardian and BBC acknowledge Gentileschi’s artistic failings:
Her anatomy is sometimes out of whack, her details occasionally glossed over (or perhaps painted by assistants). … the single light source in [Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1623-5)] — a candle near Judith’s upper arm — is in the wrong place. It is too far behind Judith, who has her left hand held out catching the light that is clearly behind it, which is not possible. The mistake is compounded by a poorly painted shadow covering much of Judith’s face, which is also not possible. It’s a splodge and a botch. (Artemisia review — overwhelmingly present, The Guardian, 4th October 2020; Artemisia Gentileschi: Will Gompertz reviews her show at the National Gallery, BBC, 3rd October 2020)
Will Gompertz of the BBC then says: “And yet. Who cares?” I care and so should everyone who wants to defend artistic standards. Gentileschi’s failings aren’t minor and incidental, but major and characteristic. It matters that her “anatomy is sometimes out of whack” and that Caravaggio’s isn’t. She aimed for realism like him and didn’t achieve it. And without the example and inspiration of male painters like Caravaggio, she wouldn’t have reached even the low standards that she did. Whether feminists and other leftists like it or not, artistic genius and creativity are largely male things — more specifically, White male gentile things.
Some risibly bad art by Jean-Michel Basquiat
Feminists and other leftists don’t like it, of course, which is why they have created cults not just for Artemisia Gentileschi, but also for the risibly bad Black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the parodically minimalist Jewish artist Mark Rothko (see Brenton Sanderson’s three-part study of Rothko). Unlike them, Gentileschi valued realism, even if she didn’t achieve it. Basquiat and Rothko are part of what Tom Wolfe calls The Painted Word, that is, art that depends for its success not on its own merits, but on the spinning of verbal webs by disproportionately Jewish critics, academics and dealers. But Caravaggio’s realism — his ability to capture reality in paint — was not an isolated act of genius. It is no coincidence that his great art belongs to the same period as the birth of modern science and anatomy. Other White men were looking at the world and trying to understand and represent it in objective ways. Caravaggio was obsessed with light; Gentileschi was obsessed with herself.
The might of the “male gaze”
So are many of the feminists who now celebrate her and her subversive gynocentric reclamation of “breasts and bottoms as conceived by the male gaze,” as the Guardian journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett put it. But if Cosslett wants true subversion, she should consider the fact that female breasts and bottoms were actually created by the male gaze. You could almost say that the human female is a work of art created by the human male, because countless acts of sexual selection down the course of evolution have favoured some types of women and disfavoured others. The sexual selection has worked in the other direction too, shaping male bodies according to female preferences.
But humans are not like Birds of Paradise, with drab, selective females and spectacular, attention-seeking males. The shaping of women by the “male gaze” may have been particularly strong in Europe when women were competing for the attention of skilled hunters in the colder and harsher European environment. The anthropologist Peter Frost argues that this female competition explains the variety of eye- and hair-colours found in Europe, where genes for blue eyes and blond hair appeared under pressure of the male gaze. In prehistoric times, White women were evolving special beauty even as White men were evolving special creativity.
Opposing beauty, pursuing power
In modern times, that White female beauty was celebrated by the art of White male creators. Later still, both the art and the beauty were attacked by leftist ideologies invented or decisively influenced by an alien group called Jews. I agree with a fascinating article at National Vanguard arguing that “Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people” and that “Jews, as a group, oppose beauty.” Indeed, the Talmud advises Jews not to regard physical beauty as important in marriage: “For ‘false is grace and beauty is vain.’ Pay regard to good breeding, for the object of marriage is to have children” (Taanith 26b and 31a).
The cult of Artemisia Gentileschi is a product of those leftist ideologies, celebrating a painter who was mediocre at her rarely achieved best. And just as Gentileschi’s art was not beautiful, nor was Gentileschi herself. She looks masculine and muscular, with high testosterone that may have given her the ambition and drive to promote herself in a way that her art could not do on its own merits. And she had novelty value as a female painter, of course. Cosslett says that a “large part of why Gentileschi captivates is because she triumphed against patriarchy.” But feminists like Cosslett don’t genuinely care about patriarchy or about rape. It wasn’t the Guardian or BBC that exposed the Muslim rape-gangs of Rotherham and numerous other British towns and cities. But it is the Guardian and BBC that support the continued growth in Western nations of Islam, which competes with Orthodox Judaism for the title of the world’s most patriarchal and misogynistic religion.
Instead, feminists like Cosslett care about themselves and about warring on truth, beauty and goodness. The cult of Artemisia Gentileschi is a small but characteristic battle-front in that war. Gentileschi was a bad artist who created ugly art. There are thousands of male artists far worthier of exhibitions at the National Gallery and of praise in the mainstream media. But those male artists don’t receive the attention they deserve. Not while leftism rules the media and inverts reality in its perpetual quest not for truth and beauty, but for power and revenge.
Jews in the Cathedral: A Response to Curtis Yarvin
8388 words
Having read deeply into the Jewish Question for almost 20 years, I’m always fascinated by novel objections to anti-Semitism. This was the case when I was prompted to turn to the writings of Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin by a recent Keith Woods video (“Unqualified Reservations on Moldbug”). I think I first heard about Yarvin around 8 years ago, but there never seemed to be a “hook” sufficient for me to want to read his work. It was only with the Woods video, and an interesting video response to the Woods post from the academic YouTuber “The Distributist,” that I learned that Yarvin had at some point discussed the Jewish Question, or at least his personal stance on anti-Semitism. It was finally time for me to bite. For the past few weeks, I’ve been giving serious consideration to Yarvin’s short 2007 essay “Why I am not an anti-Semite,” as well as many of his other essays.
Yarvin, probably the foremost thinker of the “Neoreactionary movement,” is in my opinion a talented and generally thoughtful writer. We seem to share a great interest in the writings of Thomas Carlyle, and while I disagree with what I perceive to be Yarvin’s glossing over of Carlyle’s old-form socialist (in a good sense) tendencies with the implication that they were a kind of youthful phase he imbibed from friends and later outgrew,[1] I think we’d have a mutually enjoyable discussion on the subject of the “Sage of Chelsea.” My aim in this essay, however, is not to explore Yarvin’s writings in general, or to critique or otherwise examine the ideas behind the Neoreactionary movement. Quite frankly, there are many people better qualified and well-read in some of these ideas than I am, or ever will be. Instead, since my work is concerned primarily with the history of anti-Semitism, I want to focus specifically on “Why I am not an anti-Semite,” and to tease out and highlight some of its problems.
I have to confess to hesitating in writing this essay for a few reasons. The first is that the Yarvin piece dates from 2007, rendering it 13 years old at this point. How accurately it can be said to reflect Yarvin’s current ideas about anti-Semitism is therefore less than clear. Since he hasn’t issued any further statement on the matter, however, I am left to assume that it continues to represent his fundamental stance on the issue. My second reason is that Yarvin’s essay is, from my perspective, very short — a little over 1,600 words. As someone who regularly writes pieces around 4,000-8,000 words in length, I get the impression that Yarvin’s essay isn’t as complete or evidenced as it should, or could, be in terms of deserving a lengthy critique. I would certainly regard it as somewhat unfair if I’d simply written down a few thoughts, only for someone to invest several thousand more words in an effort to rubbish them. On this matter I can only say (and this is a compliment) that the relative novelty, even strangeness, of some of Yarvin’s comments, at least when compared with rather tired rebuttals to anti-Semitism from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, and stereotypical Jewish apologists, are in fact deserving of a response, regardless of their brevity. Finally, a large part of my work over the last eight years has involved an attempt to offer an evidence-based apologetics for attitudes and beliefs, both historical and contemporary, that are regarded as anti-Semitic. A key part of this effort has been direct engagement with influential counter-narratives (see my recent long essay on the weaknesses of Middleman Minority Theory), and Yarvin’s renewed and ongoing influence in certain Rightist circles really does necessitate the production of a serious corrective view.[2]
“Why I am not an anti-Semite.”
Before critiquing the relevant arguments, we should begin first with a representative summary, using his own words, of the reasons why Yarvin is “not an anti-Semite.” Yarvin opens by explaining the origins of his essay. One of his over-arching ideas is that of “the Cathedral,” a term he coined to describe the elite network of academics, mainstream journalists, media moguls and capitalist oligarchs who preach the official “faith” of political correctness. Yarvin has often characterised “the Cathedral” as fundamentally Christian, especially Calvinist, in origin. In mid-2007, however, Yarvin was challenged on Twitter by “a fan of Kevin MacDonald” who asked why:
in my classification of American castes and conflicts, and my discussion of the belief system of the ruling Brahmin caste, I neglected Jewish influence. Specifically, as per MacDonald, I neglected the importance of Jewish intellectuals in the transition of the American establishment from 1920s style “super-protestantism” to postwar secularism and multiculturalism.
Yarvin’s essay is therefore an extended response to the Twitter user and, more broadly, to MacDonald and those of like mind.
Admirably, Yarvin opens his essay by laying a few cards on the table. He moves first to a definition of anti-Semitism, initially expressing admiration for Murray Rothbard’s definition of an anti-Semite as “anyone who proposes legal disabilities against Jews,” before adding that “by this definition the creed is basically extinct.” Yarvin then asserts that “anti-Semitic” is instead a useful “adjective for anyone with negative views on Jews as a whole.” Yarvin then notes that there are “many bad reasons not to be an anti-Semite. For example, anti-Semitism is unfashionable. If you want to be fashionable, don’t be an anti-Semite.” In fact, Yarvin goes so far as to say:
Anti-Semitism MacDonald style is probably the most courageous political belief anyone can hold in 2007—at least if you live anywhere west of Gaza City. This does not make it right, but it certainly does not give anyone who believes in “diversity” and “the environment” any right to sneer. I admire conviction, I despise cant. Anti-Semitism was cant in Munich in 1936, or in 1886 for that matter. It is cant in Tehran today. In California in 2007, it can be nothing but conviction.
Yarvin also makes it clear early in his essay that his father is Jewish. He explains, “This does not make me Jewish, but surely it makes me suspect, at least to some anti-Semites. But if this was my best reason for not being anti-Semitic, surely it would tend to confirm rather than refute MacDonald’s theories.” With these preliminaries out of the way, Yarvin proceeds to his reasons for rejecting anti-Semitism.
His first reason is that it isn’t at all obvious that Jews have an influential role in the direction of modern culture and politics. He flatly denies that they are in any way key players within “the Cathedral.” He writes:
Basically, the reason I neglected [Jewish influence] is that I don’t see it. But the point is certainly debatable. … The basic question is whether, as I argue, multiculturalism is best understood as a simple development of mainline Protestantism, or whether, as Anonymous believes, it should be seen as a Jewish-Protestant syncretism.
Yarvin rejects any such argument because it fails “the five tests of belief system classification,” something that he himself invented. Why exactly the rather simple and empirically testable idea that Jews are influential in culture and politics, and especially influential in multiculturalism, should be subjected to such a bespoke process is left unstated. Instead, Yarvin concedes that “many multiculturalists come from a Jewish background,” but counters with the assertion that “multiculturalism does not claim to be Jewish, and it’s pretty hard to get from massacring the Midianites to supporting open borders.” So, cutting out a lot of inconsequential and distracting filler, Yarvin’s first reason for rejecting the idea that Jewish influence has played a role within “the Cathedral” is that multiculturalism does not explicitly advertise itself as a tool of Jewish interests, and that ancient Jewish tales of racial genocides on their own soil don’t correspond well with hostile acts among non-Jews in the present.
Yarvin’s second objection to anti-Semitism is that be believes Jews do not act collectively. He argues that: “It’s not just that [MacDonald] believes in group selection—he believes in group action. I believe in human action. A group is not a person.” This is correct, but it’s not at all clear why such a strong distinction in terms needs to be made. I’m sure that Kevin MacDonald believes in individual human action also. The relevant point here is that a group is a collective of “human persons” who might have, or perceive themselves to have, individual interests “in common,” and who act according to those shared interests. In this sense, actions can be shared and steered by a group. Yarvin does accept that “Germans, Sioux or Irishmen” could:
act collectively in ways that favor Germans, Sioux or Irishmen. But in order for this to work, you need a cohesive belief system that rewards altruism on behalf of the group, and discourages “defecting” actions that would otherwise favor the individual. You need, in other words, an actual movement of ethnic nationalism.
Elaborating the point, Yarvin insists that Judaism, which he places in scare quotes, has this only “in theory.” He explains, “The whole Torah is a story of pure asabiya. The Jews get their asses kicked when they’re divided. They kick ass when they’re together.” In reality, Yarvin argues, Judaism is merely “an evolving system like any other,” and has abandoned this kind of system. Jewish ethnic nationalism is said to be found today only “among Zionists, Hasidim, etc., and certainly not among the Reform and socialist Jews who in the middle of the century became part of the American elite.” So Yarvin’s second reason is therefore that Jews in the American elite do not exhibit ethnic nationalism.
Yarvin’s third reason for rejecting anti-Semitism is that Jewish behaviour in twentieth-century America is less like infiltration and more like assimilation. He argues that Jews did not necessarily compete against the WASP elite, but rather imitated them, mimicked their ideologies, and ultimately grafted themselves onto them:
Basically, the Jews (like my ancestors) who came to the US were people who wanted to get ahead—as individuals. They were done with the ghetto and the shtetl. They wanted money and power. Doesn’t everyone? It was only natural, therefore, that they would be drawn to the social patterns of the most prestigious class in their new country—the mainline “super-Protestants.” Like most converts, they adopted the most fashionable views of the Brahmin elite, which was already well down the road toward secularization and Unitarianism in the modern sense of the word. Indeed, for the earlier-arriving and (much as I hate to admit it, since my ancestors spoke “jargon”) more cultured German Jews, much of this process had already happened in Europe. Reform Judaism is pretty much Protestantism in all but name, as is of course “scientific” Marxist socialism. Whereas the Brahmins had no reason at all to adopt Jewish ways of thought. Nor do I see any way in which they did. The assimilation was entirely in the other direction.
So Yarvin’s third reason for rejecting anti-Semitism is that any Jewish presence in “the Cathedral” is really the accidental result of early twentieth-century status-hungry Jewish migrants copying the attitudes and ambitions of American “super-Protestants.”
Finally, and this was the main focus of the Keith Woods video, Yarvin rejects anti-Semitism because it relies on “an enormous mass of corroborating evidence.” Yarvin rather strangely insists that:
A historian is not a mere collator of facts—he or she is creating an interpretation, much like a trial lawyer. The goal of history is to paint a picture of the past. The test, for any reader, is simply whether you find that picture convincing. Volume of evidence has not much to do with it. [emphasis added]
This last sentence, sure to stun every prosecutor and historian in the West, is the curious hill on which Mr Yarvin decides to die in the cause of rejecting anti-Semitism. Not only does he wish to die on it, but, it would seem, he wishes to do so in flamboyant fashion. Yarvin insists that masses of evidence in support of one’s case are in fact
a contrary indicator, because a lawyer with a weak case often feels the temptation to try to inundate the jury with a vast mass of detail. The strategy is essentially to demand that the reader either agree, or do the work of assembling the same detail into a counter-narrative. The canonical example is Johnnie Cochran’s great gambit, “if the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.”
For a canonical example this is extremely poor, and the analogy of the trial lawyer is itself awful. For a start, Johnnie Cochran’s defense of O.J. Simpson, and the entire context of the above quote, wasn’t based on “inundating the jury with a vast mass of detail,” but on finding very small weak points in the prosecution case that could be critiqued and exploited ruthlessly — in this case, whether or not a single pair of gloves fit his client’s hands—hands that were swollen because Simpson stopped taking his arthritis medication. I also think that, rather than being the result of Johnnie Cochran’s often ridiculous defense strategy, O.J. Simpson walked free because the jury was majority Black — a canonical example of group action if there ever was one.
There is simply no methodological comparison to be made, despite the rhetorically attractive style of Yarvin’s presentation. Taken to its logical conclusion, Yarvin’s reasoning would suggest a poor level of evidence produced in support of a history would be a positive indicator of its quality — a theory I urge Mr Yarvin to test by submitting something un-referenced and poorly-backed to any respectable history journal. Alternatively, he can try a new career as a prosecutor while employing the same nonchalant dismissal of detail and see just how successful he can be. For now, however, we need only summarise that Yarvin’s fourth reason for rejecting anti-Semitism is that it boasts too much evidence.
Yarvin’s four reasons for rejecting anti-Semitism are therefore:
Multiculturalism does not explicitly advertise itself as Jewish.
Jews in the American elite do not exhibit ethnic nationalism.
Jews merely copied the attitudes and ambitions of WASPs.
Anti-Semitism relies on an excess of evidence.
Response to Yarvin
In trying to gain my own understanding of Yarvin’s approach, I felt it necessary first to address his Jewishness. Other than his essay on anti-Semitism, I don’t find much in the way of a Jewish identification in his work. This corresponds well with findings that mixed-ethnicity children of Jewish fathers tend to have a much lower sense of Jewish identity than those with Jewish mothers:
A higher ratio of non-Jewish mothers is linked to a lower ratio of Jewish attachments within mixed-married homes. … Every systematic study of the Jewish community has shown that Jewish mothers provide more intensive and extensive connections to Jews and Judaism than do Jewish fathers in mixed-married households. Whether the measure is cultural, institutional, social, or religious, having a Jewish mother in the household (born or converted) makes the households far more likely to incorporate Jewish activities and values.[3]
Having a lower level of Jewish self-identification, of course, doesn’t translate automatically to having no identification with Jews at all. Yarvin’s assertion that having a Jewish father “does not make me Jewish,” probably needs to be problematised, not because Yarvin is Jewish, but because he is extremely likely to hold simple familial sympathies that lend themselves to a certain level of affection or affinity with Jews and Judaism. His employment of the analogy “If your father is Catholic, are you not allowed to be an anti-Catholic?” is also more than a little disingenuous given the rather obvious skirting of the issue that Jewishness is a matter of ethnicity as much as religion; of blood as much as belief. There’s an entirely different social and psychological texture between telling your Italian Catholic father you don’t believe in Christ and, for example, saying you’ve developed a distaste for Italians. For these reasons, Yarvin is correct in explaining that having a Jewish father “makes me suspect, at least to some anti-Semites.” It certainly makes him suspect to me. To borrow the notorious phrasing of Mel Gibson, Yarvin has a “dog in the fight,” even if it’s a little on the small side. Objecting to anti-Semitism, and offering arguments against it, is likely to bring some form of reward, even if in this case it’s limited purely to the psychological relief of absolving one’s paternal kin of certain charges. This understanding doesn’t help to unravel the specific arguments proposed by Yarvin, but it does assist with comprehending their origin, as well as helping to explain the resistant and strange quality they uniformly demonstrate.
Yarvin’s essay opens, very cleverly in my opinion, by mixing surface-level magnanimity with subtle salvos. For example, hidden beneath the early, somewhat patronising, praise of Kevin MacDonald is a barb left glaringly undeveloped for the rest of the essay. This, of course, is the denunciation of anti-Semitism as “cant in Munich in 1936, or in 1886 for that matter. It is cant in Tehran today.” Why exactly negative views on Jews as a whole should be regarded as cant (insincere, hypocritical, sanctimonious, quasi-fashionable speech) in any of these time periods or locations is left undeveloped. In fact, the essay is striking for its overwhelming neglect of history and the antagonistic advance of Zionism, seeming at times to proceed from the idea that the phenomenon began in 1950s America. There’s a clear implication in Yarvin’s phrasing that anti-Semitism was “easier,” or at least more fashionable in Germany (1886 and 1936), an argument that while true in one sense (it was more culturally pervasive) is misleading in its neglect of certain key interim periods. The Weimar Republic, for example, had a wide range of speech laws at least commensurate with those found in modern Europe, and more extensive than anything found in contemporary America. Anti-Semitic speech was prosecuted very regularly,[4] and many of the leading anti-Semitic ideologues of 1936, including the likes of Julius Streicher, had surely demonstrated “conviction” in their beliefs during their many terms in prison before 1933.[5]
Additionally, there are very few periods in history in which anti-Semitic arguments could be regarded as the product of insincere cant. The overwhelming trend has been that anti-Semitic speech has been a risky anti-elite activity, bringing the possibility of death or mutilation under certain medieval European monarchies[6], and the risk of severe social ostracism and imprisonment in more recent times, even for figures of significant public standing such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Henry Ford, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, all of whom underwent periods of extended personal angst or troubles over the impact that expounding anti-Jewish ideas could have on their lives.[7]
The question remains as to the tactical benefit of dismissing historical anti-Semitism, or contemporary middle eastern anti-Semitism as “cant.” Quite simply, one of the major problems facing Jewish apologists is the ubiquity and uniformity of anti-Semitism. Common coping strategies invariably involve attempts to artificially break up the historical pattern, either by suggesting that anti-Semitism “mutated” over time like a virus, that it was carried from one culture into another, that it has been more sane in some time periods than others, or, as Yarvin seems to suggest, that it is more of a fad in certain contexts. By opening his essay with a denunciation of “cant,” even glossed over with praise for MacDonald, Yarvin in fact signposts his work, consciously or not, as being related to the tradition of Jewish apologetics.
Yarvin’s first major argument for rejecting anti-Semitism is that he “doesn’t see” the “importance of Jewish intellectuals in the transition of the American establishment from 1920s style “super-protestantism” to postwar secularism and multiculturalism.” Clarifying his point, Yarvin stresses that “multiculturalism does not claim to be Jewish,” as if this is in any way evidence. It in fact only raises a number of questions:
- “Claims” aside, is there any objective evidence that Jews have a played a special role in promoting pluralism, tolerance, and multiculturalism in Western societies?
- Since multiculturalism is an idea and cannot itself “claim” to be anything, isn’t the better approach to ask if Jews claim to be multiculturalists?
- Is there any evidence that Jews played an important role, as Jews, in the transition of American immigration policies between the 1920s and 1960s?
Is Multiculturalism Jewish?
Have Jews played a special role in promoting pluralism, tolerance, and multiculturalism in Western societies? The historical record is clear that the first advocacy of multiculturalism in its modern political form arose in the works of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the German Jew and proto-Open Borders philosopher who pushed Enlightenment ideas on tolerance to their limit with such questions as: “For how long, for how many millennia, must this distinction between the owners of the land and the stranger continue? Would it not be better for mankind and culture to obliterate this distinction?”[8] Mendelssohn’s primary motivation, in the context of the decline of the absolute monarchies, was to ensure that Jews could preserve their unique identity within the framework of a future multicultural society — a combination he felt would ensure Jewish safety and continuity in Europe. The primary requirement for such a future would be the delegitimisation of the notion of a core, hegemonic culture to which others are expected to assimilate. Mendelssohn was in fact the pioneer of an entire movement (Haskalah) of Jewish intellectuals known as the maskilim, all of whom disseminated the philosophy of tolerant multiculturalism in Enlightenment circles, and who provided the ghetto Jews of Europe with a methodology of superficial assimilation and an ethnically safe Jewish secularism — that of being “European outside, Jewish inside.” Scholar Ephraim Nimni has argued that present-day multiculturalism is inextricably linked to benefits for Jews and represents the accomplishment of Haskalah ideas:
If the Haskalah model was severely undermined by the rigidities of the European nation-state model, a post-Haskalah model is eminently feasible in the era of multiculturalism and multinational states, and consistent with the lifestyle and wishes of secular Jews in contemporary liberal democracies. … Diaspora Jews have a common project with other ethnic and national minorities, and post-Haskalah Jewish communities will find a sense of mission and an imprint of their collective personality. This sense of mission is appealing and mobilising, for it relates to an immediate Jewish interest as well as having a wider application in favour of other minorities … all of which is entirely congruent with the goals and aims of a post-Haskalah Jewry.[9] [emphasis added]
Mendelssohn’s Haskalah ideas, borrowed from, but also contrasted with, the attitude of European atheists, Deists, and liberal Protestant philosophers, especially Rationalists like Bayle and Locke (who, to be fair to Yarvin, were both Calvinists), who believed in a common humanity that could move toward a world of no religion, or of a single religious truth.[10] For Mendelssohn, the notion of a future common humanity was merely territorial — European lands and communities would essentially become home to atomised individuals who were entitled to hold their own beliefs without pressure to assimilate to the values and traditions of a wider culture. In short, Mendelssohn’s multiculturalism would mean little more than the majority giving up its position of political, cultural, and demographic group hegemony as exemplified in the homogenous nation-state.[11] His ideas were also linked to activism for the legislative enforcement of multicultural tolerance and ongoing Jewish immigration. In Austria, for example, Joseph II’s 1781 Edict of Toleration (which Mendelssohn printed and distributed as propaganda) was the result of a literary scene that Mendelssohn had fostered in the cities, as well as the intervention of wealthy Court Jews.[12] Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) the Jewish intellectual behind the readmission of Jews to England under Cromwell, was also viewed as a proto-Haskalah figure by Mendelssohn, who looked at ben Israel’s efforts to promote “tolerance” in the Netherlands as a template for action, and who translated ben Israel’s apologetic The Vindication of the Jews into German in 1782. Perhaps the pinnacle of Mendelssohn’s career was his publication of Jerusalem (1783), a work of Utopian multiculturalism that propagandised the separation of Church and State, religious freedom, and the idea that “a man’s racial origin or religious affiliations would play no part in any sphere of life except that of religion.”[13]
As Jacob Katz has noted, deception about the nature of Judaism has been a central element of Jewish promotion of multiculturalism from the time of Mendelssohn. Because of the decline in power of the European monarchies and the rise of democracy, older Jewish privileges (e.g., tax farming and avoiding conscription) were also declining. The early Jewish promotion of multiculturalism was designed in part to enable Jews to acquire equal rights in legislation with the natives of European nation-states, thus providing Jews with opportunities to establish influential relations with new, rising native elites — parliamentary, commercial, and professional — and to obtain a new set of privileges. To use Yarvin’s terminology, Jews fully intended to become an integral part of, if not to lead or dominate, “the Cathedral.” The push for equal “rights,” and its justification, of course, was, as Katz points out, based on the lie that Judaism was “a broad-minded and tolerant religion.”[14]
This was the ruse presented by the “Grand Sanhedrin” of Jewish representatives convened in Paris by Napoleon in 1807, after which Jews were formally acknowledged within legal proclamations for the first time as Frenchmen, and citizens of the French Empire.[15] In a legal sense, and in terms of meaningful precedent, we can pinpoint the date on which Europe became multicultural as March 17 1808, a fact that is tied directly to the history, activism, ideas, and indeed the deceptions, of the Jews. The consequence was the perpetuation of an ethnocentric nation [Jews] within an increasingly atomised culture [that of the Europeans] in which the very notion of citizenship had been fundamentally diluted. From this proto-multiculturalism derives the intense suspicion of anti-Semites in the post-Enlightenment period that Jews had essentially deceived their way to citizenship, and that their assimilation was purely superficial, with the Jews remaining a “nation within a nation.” The fears of the anti-Semites thus reflected not only their antagonism toward Jewish clannishness and the reality of Jewish privilege, but also a growing awareness of the disintegration of their own ethnic and cultural cohesion. Such has been the fundamental dynamic of Western multiculturalism ever since.
Aside from the philosophy of the Rationalists and the activities of Mendelssohn and the maskilim, and the legal watershed of 1808, Western multiculturalism, in a radical demographic sense, is a very recent phenomenon, dating from the period 1945–1965 and accelerating rapidly over the last 30 years. This event, again, is inseparable from the Jewish historical trajectory, since the Holocaust narrative has been ruthlessly employed to destroy the moral foundations of the claims of Europeans to their own lands, to demonise any European employment of the language and ideas of race, to instigate a culture of European guilt and reparations, and to facilitate a perverse deification of the Jews and the revived “values” of Mendelssohn — tolerance, diversity, and pluralism.[16] The Holocaust is the lynchpin of modern education in multiculturalism and human rights, without which it is difficult to imagine anything on the scale we are currently witnessing in the form of mass migration, White marginalisation, and the endless pushing of the frontiers of “tolerance” into new forms of the Different, be they sexual perversions, psychotic identities, or White radical self-abnegation.
In my forthcoming book On the Jews, I put forth the theory that there have been three sustained “Great Reactions” of long duration against the Jews in European society, between which Jewish populations adapted their positions and increased in strength. Anti-Jewish violence during the Crusades, the evolution of the so-called ‘Blood Libel’ and associated folklore regarding Jews, and the earliest expulsions of usurers, were key elements of the “First European Reaction” (1095–1290). Increased involvement of Church and State, and a somewhat sociological turn in the Church’s view of the Jews (e.g., the activities of Martin Luther in Germany and the war on the conversos in Spain) in the late medieval and early modern periods comprised the ‘Second European Reaction” (c.1380–1535). The “Third European Reaction” (c.1870–1950) was relatively short-lived, but was highly focused on the aftermath of Jewish emancipation and the fulfilment of Mendelssohn’s pluralist vision — the economic, social, and political impact of the Jews on European society. What began as opposition to Jewish political “emancipation” developed into a coherent political philosophy and ideology based on several key precepts:
- Jews are a separate and distinct ethnic group, inherently different in traits and characteristics from Europeans.
- Jews are incompatible with nationalism because they possess cultural and national aspirations of their own, cannot be integrated, and thus represent a state within a state.
- The modern state has become subject to an aggressive, speculative, and exploitative capitalism pioneered, and in many cases operated, by Jews.
- Jewish influence in public life is closely connected with the negative aspects of modernity and European racial decline.
- The excesses of Jewish influence in public life under democracy required the democratic mobilization of anti-Semitism under anti-Semitic parties, an anti-Semitic press, and the expansion of anti-Semitism in culture.
As was the case in previous Reactions, Jews developed a formidable response. In the West, they strengthened existing ties with friendly European elites and formed their first formal, secular defense committees, from which they agitated for speech laws and other oppressive legislation. In the East they had two primary strategies. In the first, they began one of the largest propaganda hoaxes ever conceived and, under the guise of mass pogroms purportedly instigated by Russian elites, mass migrated to the West, especially the United States, accompanied by waves of media-induced sympathy. In the second, they threw their demographic bulk and intellectual aggression into Communism, forming its vanguard and using its momentum to exact revenge on a Russian elite that they felt had failed to support their interests, and against an East European peasantry they often viewed as little better than animals.[17] In a final strategy, the Jews developed Zionism, with Palestine postulated as a Jewish homeland but instead coming to represent a colonial halfway house, a safe haven from which to operate in tandem with a growing and increasingly powerful Diaspora in the United States, and a nuclear-powered “safe space” to be utilized in the event of a Reaction. These strategies would be so successful that they would prompt historian Yuri Slezkine to describe the twentieth century as “The Jewish Century.”[18]
World War II was comprised of a series of overlapping conflicts, one of which, the Third European Reaction against the Jews, unleashed decades, if not centuries, of suppressed inter-ethnic tensions throughout Europe. Jews were frequently active, and violent, participants during the war, meaning mass casualties were inevitable.[19] The number of deaths on all sides was significant. But honest, full, and unbiased accounts of why this inter-ethnic catastrophe occurred, and the true nature of its extent, remain absent from the mainstream, and extremely rare in scholarship. What instead emerged in the aftermath of the war was a “Holocaust Industry” that initiated an era of “White Guilt” that has, in turn, contributed heavily to the Western cultural paralysis and inertia of the present time.
In the aftermath of the Third Reaction, this paralysis and inertia was furthered by the further entrenchment and adaptation of the Jews within European civilisation. The period since 1945 has witnessed growing Jewish influence in Hollywood, academia, and the press, and the truly extraordinary growth in power of the Jewish defense leagues, most notably New York’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Buoyed by the financial support of wealthy Jewish donors from the worlds of international finance and the mass media, the ADL and similar organizations throughout the West have assumed an importance in public life far out of proportion to the size of the population they exclusively serve. Their legacy has been the rapid expansion of speech legislation in White-majority countries, the invention of so-called “hate crime” legislation, the slow creep of mass censorship, and, finally, the ceaseless promotion of the multicultural state.
Multiculturalism can be regarded as the zenith of Jewish adaption in the wake of Third Reaction. Any discussion of a modern-day “Cathedral” of interests that does not take into account the role of Jewish intellectuals and oligarchs in the expansion, promotion, and protection of the multicultural state is simply disingenuous. There is clear and unambiguous evidence that Jews played an important role, as Jews, in the transition of American immigration policies between the 1920s and 1960s, and that Diaspora Jews, generally speaking, continue to describe themselves, and behave, as conspicuous multiculturalists (e.g., see the work of Kevin MacDonald on the United States, and Brenton Sanderson on Australia, as well as my own work on the U.K., Ireland, and the international mass migration scene — here and here).[20] Of further interest is Judith Goldstein’s recently published, and extremely interesting, The Politics of Ethnic Pressure: The American Jewish Committee Fight Against Immigration Restriction, 1906–1917, in the course of which Goldstein writes that:
The AJC was the most active and important anti-restrictionist lobbying group. … It allied with Italian, German, and Scandinavian groups, but none of them displayed the interest, knowledge, and sophistication on the immigration issue that characterised the AJC effort. … In each of the legislation battles the AJC sought to delay consideration of test bills and to block their passage. … In their anti-restrictionist campaign, Jewish spokesmen glorified the long-time policy of open immigration and the practice of “cosmopolitan nationality.”[21]
That the historical relationship between Jews and multiculturalism, and the concept of “cosmopolitan nationality,” has recently dovetailed with the drive of international finance for mass migration and the liquidity of labor does not detract from the deeply historical and intense Jewish interest in, and involvement with, the multicultural project. Modern multiculturalism assists the cultural survival of non-host populations while suppressing the host via “antiracism” legislation, education, and social propaganda. As Stuart Schoenfeld has pointed out, Jews are prime beneficiaries of both.[22]
Do Jews in the American Elite Exhibit Ethnic Nationalism?
It really does defy belief that anyone could deny the strength of ethnic nationalism and identification among Jews in the American elite. In fact, the argument runs so strongly against common sense and popular knowledge that one can only conclude that the argument is being made entirely in bad faith. Jewish ethnic nationalism, in the form of Zionism, is at the forefront of American elite politics, something more than capably demonstrated in Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007). Zionist politics is supported tactically and financially by a considerable number of very influential Jewish politicians and oligarchs, who in turn represent some of the wealthiest figures in the contemporary American elite.
More than half of the top twenty political donors in America are Jews, and of these at least eight are committed Zionists (Sheldon Adelson, Stephen Schwarzman, Donald Sussman, Jeffrey Yass, Michael Bloomberg, Henry and Marsha Laufer, Josh Bekenstein, Bernard Marcus), with the precise political affiliations of Stephen Mandel, Deborah J. Simon, and James H. Simons unclear (Thomas Steyer would appear to be less inclined towards Zionism and is half-Jewish). Of the nine sitting Jewish Senators in Congress, eight (Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Chuch Schumer, Ben Cardin, Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Brian Schatz, and Jacky Rosen) have demonstrated more or less consistent support for Zionism as a political project, as well as legislation strengthening the position of Jews in the United States (e.g. legislation outlawing anti-Semitism). Only Bernie Sanders would appear to have a more ambiguous position on these matters.
The key point here is that these donors and politicians are the driving force of American policy on Israel, and are much more influential than either individual “Calvinist” or “super-Protestant” donors, and certainly much more influential than grassroots relatively less wealthy Christian Zionists who are themselves the puppets of a lucrative propaganda machine. Curtis Yarvin has attempted to explain away the nature of this kind of influence by making the argument that money is not directly linked to power (for a scholarly counter-argument, see here), even stating in a recent podcast “I don’t think [Jeff] Bezos has a lot of power.” With this level of reasoning, tied to Yarvin’s apparent deification of ultra-capitalists, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see a similar denial of reality in the face of obvious Jewish influence and strong Jewish identity in the American elite.
Did Jews want to imitate WASPs, or to topple them?
I agree with Yarvin’s statement that Jewish immigrants to America “wanted to get ahead … They wanted money and power.” I disagree with the emphasis he lays on the individual nature of this drive for money and power. Historically, Jews have placed a very heavy emphasis on economic, political, and social group co-operation. Jews remain notable for high levels of in-group philanthropy, and Jewish defense bodies tend to be extremely well-funded.
Contrary to Yarvin, there is very little evidence that Jews were “drawn to the social patterns of the most prestigious class in their new country—the mainline “super-Protestants.” In many cases, these positions were frankly impossible due to direct clashes of interest. As discussed above, some of the key concerns of the “super-Protestants” in the years of mass Jewish immigration (c.1880–1930) included controlling the demographic make-up of the country via immigration restrictions, and attempting to promote racial hygiene in the form of eugenics. Jews were very strongly opposed to both.
There is little question that Jews were keen to obtain the outward signs of social climbing in America — by, for example, entering certain professions or joining fashionable golf clubs. But underlying many of these economic advances was an outright hostility to the culture, politics, and behavior of the Protestant Brahmin class. In this regard, Yarvin’s definition of “assimilation” needs to be problematised. As I’ve argued elsewhere, and developed further in my forthcoming book, it is highly doubtful whether genuine Jewish group assimilation has ever occurred in any nation at any time. In the United States, Jewish “assimilation” has involved the academic deconstruction of WASP cultural heroes (e.g., T.S. Eliot, Richard Wagner), the pathologization of the WASP family (Freud, the Frankfurt School, and their intellectual followers), and the weaponisation of WASP children during the 1960s “New Left” revolution (perversely caricatured — using a phenotypically WASPish Jewish family — in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral); the Jewish identifications of the Jewish participants in the New Left are well-documented. With the vanishing of the WASPs as a visible cultural elite, the Jewish cultural elite has distinguished itself not by following old paternalistic WASP cultural patterns, but by moving its gaze onto less privileged White classes and targeting them with the same hostile attitude — the denigration and demonisation of rural Whites and their culture, the ongoing promotion of mass migration, and the pathologisation of White identity in its entirety.
The central problem with Yarvin’s argument is that none of the worst ideas and activities at the forefront of what he calls “the Cathedral” are Calvinist or “super-Protestant” in origin. Feminism, Cultural Marxism, modern consumer credit, international vulture fund capitalism, transgenderism and the concept of fluid sexual identities, Whiteness Studies, cosmopolitan pluralism, and open borders philosophies are simply stunning in the uniformity of their Jewish origins. Yarvin implies that because these ideas cannot be found in the Old Testament (“The Midianities!” he cries) then the fact they’ve been innovated by Jews is meaningless. We are expected to believe that these Jews are just wannabe-WASPs, despite their Jewish upbringing, Jewish spouses, and often explicitly Jewish self-explanations. What Yarvin neglects is that old-form Judaism is merely a template for “getting on in the world” and that Jewishness has been divorced from its exclusive reliance to the finer points of Judaism since at least the era of the maskilim. (This is one of the main reasons for the intense Jewish celebration of Spinoza, who was seen as ushering in a new method of “being Jewish.”) As Robert Amyot and Lee Sigelman have pointed out, “Jewish identity has been transformed from predominantly religious to predominantly ethnic.”[23] What we see today is not an accidental elite. It’s not an elite built on mimicry. It is the culmination of the historical trajectory of the post-ghetto Jew — a hostile elite in power.
One need only look to the example of the old Russian Empire to see how Jews tend to view their relationships with elites, relationships that are built on self-interest more than imitation. For centuries Jews were content to be close partners with Russian nobles in the economic exploitation of the peasantry. Once the peasants were emancipated, however, and a new paternalistic attitude took hold among the nobles, resulting in the removal of certain Jewish privileges (tax farming and tavern keeping), Jews threw themselves first into attempts at the financial dispossession of their former partners and, when that failed, into the Bolshevik drive for their total elimination as a class.
Does anti-Semitism boast “too much” evidence?
When I first started looking into anti-Semitism and the history of the Jews, I was struck by the way in which anti-Jewish criticisms were often summarily dismissed in mainstream literature as vague and bigoted accusations built on stereotypes. The standard characterisation of anti-Semitic material has often been that it is based on a kind of lazy reasoning (e.g., “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools”) replete with gross generalisations about “the Jew.” There is certainly some material, normally centuries old, to which these descriptions could arguably be applied.
In more recent periods, however, anti-Semitism has come to rely on evidence and facts, with a certain focus on named individuals and their ideas and actions, as the only possible counterweight to the overwhelming power and influence of opposing forces. With nothing but truth on their side, the anti-Semites have thrown themselves ever harder on the need to offer as much as they can in defense of their arguments. As Hillaire Belloc remarked in his The Jews (1922), when men like German historian Heinrich von Treitschke were silenced for complaining publicly about “the unjust influence of the Jews in the press,” and later had their writings denounced as “the extravagancies of fanatics,” they were ultimately able to frustrate their opponents only “by the quotation of an immense quantity of facts which could not but remain in the mind.” The idea that someone can analyze Jewish power and influence credibly without being well armed with facts and data is ridiculous.
The simple fact remains that writing or speaking about Jews is a very difficult task — not just intellectually in terms of gaining a grasp of the relevant ideas and the vast quantity of literature, but in terms of the extremely negative reception such writings will inevitably meet. In some countries, writing negatively about Jews will lead to imprisonment. In most, it can lead to a loss of livelihood. In all, it will lead to a level of derision, scorn, and dismissal. This is the case regardless of the level of effort and scholarship that might be invested in such a work. I honestly can’t think of a more thankless task, which leads me to the belief that there must be at least some level of fanaticism in all who take up the pen in this way.
I recall my first encounters with the work of Kevin MacDonald, and being impressed with the bibliography and scale of reading involved — much greater than anything I was used to in some of the standard histories I’d read. I was quite stunned then, when I began to read some of the early criticisms of MacDonald’s trilogy, some of which have been regurgitated as recently as the Cofnas intervention in 2018. I’m thinking mainly of the accusation that MacDonald had taken some of his many hundreds of quotations “out of context,” as if taking an objective fact from an author’s book means that we are also bound to adopt or include his or her subjective opinions. Some of the criticisms of MacDonald’s use of texts were so infantile and pedantic that, rather than making me reconsider the utility of MacDonald’s thesis, it drove me to reflect on the absolute necessity of making claims about Jews as “watertight” as possible. Of course, nothing would ever be enough to appease certain elements, but, for the right people, it seemed to me that well-referenced, evidenced-backed work would be the only way of getting past those running intellectual interference. There could simply never be “too much” evidence.
Imagine my surprise, then, on seeing Curtis Yarvin’s claim that anti-Semitism now boasts “too much” evidence. I’ll grant Yarvin this — he is original. His main grievance seems to be that in order to disprove the claims of anti-Semites he’d have to wade through vast amounts of evidence in order to disentangle truth from fiction. His main problem with MacDonald’s work therefore seems to be that he doesn’t want to go through the same two hundred or so texts for each volume in order to offer a different interpretation. Having nothing to respond with, he simply denigrates the need for a response, walks away, and calls that a victory.
Conclusion
All of this, to use Yarvin’s metaphor, is a canonical example of glove waving. Who is really engaged in distraction here? Who is really holding up the trial by asking if the gloves fit, or, rather if they fit “the five tests of belief system classification”? Who is calling for acquittal if these gloves don’t fit? In Moldbug’s world, money doesn’t equal power, Jeff Bezos is a political “average Joe,” and the Jews are just Calvinist WASPs who like bagels. In Moldbug’s world, we live our lives under a “Cathedral” of interests dominated by the ideals of “super-Protestantism.” In Moldbug’s world, anti-Semitism is cant, and our best future lies in the kind of materialistic techno-oligarchy offered by Peter Thiel, the personification of the Republican Party’s surreal combination of stale mercantilism and liberal views on social issues.
I’m glad I don’t live in Moldbug’s world. In my view, if I walk into a Cathedral and find it full of Jews, the chances are that I’ve walked into a synagogue by mistake. And so here we are, locked in together, along with history and a certain uneasy sense of inevitability. How to close the essay? Perhaps with Carlyle:
These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final.
Latter Day Pamphlets, No.1
[1] Yarvin quotes Walt Whitman on the socialist tendencies of Carlyle, adding “You will indeed see Carlyle, especially in his early works—before he has entirely rid himself from his old group of Radical friends, to be exact—take just this tack. Much of it is still found in Chartism (1840).” Carlyle in fact wrote his excellent “Chartism,” a thoroughly socialist anti-establishment work, in his mid-40s, and reiterated some of its ethos in Latter Day Pamphlets around a decade later. It’s quite clear that throughout his life Carlyle had an intense sympathy for the White British working classes, and, unusually for his time, for the Irish as the worst victims of the excesses of imperial mercantile interests.
[2] Yarvin has only been discussed once previously at The Occidental Observer, where he has been discussed, in poor context in my opinion, by Marcus Alethia, as a “brilliant neoreactionary thinker and half-Jew.”
[3] S.B. Fishman, Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 128.
[4] See, for example, C. Levitt, “The Prosecution of Antisemites by the Courts in the Weimar Republic: Was justice served? Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 35. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1990), 151-167.
[5] See R. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Sturmer (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 24. See also the example of Arnold Spencer Leese, an Englishman imprisoned for publishing anti-Semitic pamphlets.
[6] For English examples see J. Gillingham, Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, Volume 25 (Woodbridge, 2003), 145. For French examples see, N. Roth, Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003), 605. There are many examples from medieval Germany of anti-Semitic agitators having limbs severed, or being executed. See, for example, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 12.
[7] For Nietzsche and Wagner see R. Holub, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). For Lindbergh see K. MacDonald’s Preface to The Culture of Critique.
[8] M. Mendelssohn, “Anmerkung zu des Ritters Michaelis Beurtheilung des ersten Teils von Dohm, über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden,” (1783), Moses Mendelssohn gesammelte Schriften, ed. G. B. Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1843), vol. 3, 367.
[9] E. Nimni, The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Fundamentalist Politics in Israel (New York: Zed Books, 2003), 138.
[10] M. Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (Brandeis University Press, 2011), 53.
[11] Ibid, 40. In Mendelssohn’s words, “It is obviously the duty of the stronger to … stretch out his arms and, like Augustus to cry out “Let us be friends!”
[12] A. D. Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia: Ishi, 1979), 17.
[13] J. Katz, Exclusiveness & Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken, 1975), 179.
[14] Ibid, 186.
[15] E. Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 89.
[16] See P. Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
[17] See Haim Nahman Bialik’s poem “The City of Slaughter,” a masochistic pogrom fantasy, which describes Ukrainian peasants as “wild ones of the wood, the beasts of the field.”
[18] Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[19] See B. Ginsberg, How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
[20] See also, Frank, Gelya. “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 99, no. 4 (1997): 731-45.
[21] J. Goldstein, The Politics of Ethnic Pressure: The American Jewish Committee Fight Against Immigration Restriction, 1906-1917 (New York: Routledge, 2020).
[22] S. Cohen, National Variations in Jewish Identity: Implications for Jewish Education (New York: SUNY Press, 2012 ), 146.
[23] Amyot, Robert P., and Lee Sigelman. “Jews without Judaism? Assimilation and Jewish Identity in the United States.” Social Science Quarterly 77, no. 1 (1996): 177-89.
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