Catholic Church

Alex Hannold, Free-Soloing, and a Christian View on Race

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Alex Honnold 

Free Solo, instead, is largely about the intensity of knowing a person like [Alex] Honnold, of having someone so unusual in your life, and the ways in which he bewitches, excites, and frightens the people around him simply by doing his job.

Free Solo Is a Staggering Documentary About Extreme Climbing by David Sims, Atlantic Magazine (September 27, 2018)

I hate heights.

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My fear of heights has increased with age — I do not recall it being an issue when I was younger. While I have no fear of commercial air travel, I have developed an intense fear of heights — even modest ones. It struck me a few years ago when I hiked Crowders Mountain near Charlotte, North Carolina with my family. I took the “easy” path of seemingly hundreds of trail rock steps to the 1,600-foot summit, which offers incredible views of the surrounding area. Upon reaching it, I took one look around and decided that the view itself was too much: I began to have something more than anxiety but less than a full-blown panic attack. I almost immediately (and embarrassedly) tucked tail and made haste to descend the mountain. There are even more embarrassing episodes of my fear of heights that I will not belabor here (like my anxiety on Ferris Wheels) but the nub of my fear appears to be when the place of height lacks adequate (at least to me) safety measures. In any event, I am certainly — and markedly — afraid of heights now.

Understanding my fear of heights is important in understanding my reaction to the 2018 documentary Free Solo. Free Solo is not just a documentary about rock climbing in its most extreme form — it is an incredible journey in the psychological portrait of an obsessive type of Western man. The film follows professional rock climber Alex Honnold as he prepares to free solo El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Free solo rock climbing is a form of climbing where the climber ascends without the use of ropes or protective gear, relying solely on their climbing shoes and chalk for grip. This style of climbing emphasizes the climber’s skill and mental fortitude, as any fall can result in serious injury or death. While extreme sports have become a fad of sorts in the last forty years — mostly individual sports that simultaneously push adrenaline and limits beyond measure — free solo rock climbing is perhaps the most extreme of them all.

El Capitan — or the El Cap — is a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. The granite monolith is about 3,000 feet from base to summit along its tallest face and is a world-celebrated location for big wall climbing. To see it — to see its almost flawless granite verticality — it is be stunned that anyone could climb even with the most prophylactic safety equipment let alone climb with none. Just looking at it gave me chills — it is that impressive. Alex Honnold was the first man ever to free solo this mountain — and this first was captured by Free Solo. It is never lost on the viewer (or at least this one) that this was easily a film that could have never seen the theaters had Honnold slipped to his death on camera. Watching him scale the face of El Cap is itself a marvel that he did not.

Three things stand about the work as a documentary. First, it is visually stunning. Any nature footage of Yosemite is bound to impress, and everything there seems almost prehistoric and larger than life. It is creation in its purest and most unadulterated form. The film captures this beauty and grandeur as well as any nature documentary has. The film zeroes in on Honnald’s climbing — and moves in, as it were, to the crevices, cracks, and depressions on the face of the mountain. Instead of the smooth appearance that El Cap has from a thousand feet away, it is a highly textured labyrinth of creases that the film highlights. Second, the film is a study into the mind of an extreme athlete — Honnold is a very unusual psychological specimen. The film does its best, albeit in very brief interludes, to offer some insight into the mind of a free soloist. Third, the documentary is drama-filled with ethical dilemmas and emotional strain. The people who assist and accompany Honnold on this journey — from his film crew to his fellow rock climbers who train with him; from his girlfriend to his mother — are struck by the problem of helping Honnold do something that is so incredibly dangerous on its face. That the filmmakers, who are Honnold’s longtime friends, might be filming contemporaneously his death is never lost on them. That his climbing companions may be training with him for the same is similarly difficult for them to process.

It is a mesmeric film — one that I was late, by seven years, seeing when it was first released. A close friend — someone who shares a similar personality, at least in some ways, to Alex Honnold — recommended the movie to me. Unlike me, this friend is someone who shares an affinity for extreme adventures. In a just a little bit different life, he could have been someone like Alex Honnold.

Alex Hannold at Yosemite

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Free Solo was a documentary that was acclaimed by virtually everyone who saw it. It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2018 — and, based upon my research, every major publication — of every conceivable stripe — seemingly had something (universally positive) to say about it. In an age in which heroes are a dead letter and in which religion is a tacky anachronism, Free Solo strikes a chord for a type of man who is alive in doing something extreme. No, really extreme. It is a perfect statement of secular religion, or, at least, a type of secular religion. Embodied within it is a type of secular holiness that bears a relation, albeit for different reasons, for the hard things done by men in ages past. Man, in the age without God, seeks his Zen in highly idiosyncratic ways but it is to be found, or so he thinks, if that way is authentic and radically his own. I cannot recall a character who exemplifies Zen in the secular sense more than Alex Honnold. To demonstrate how powerful this image is, I, as a man who is deeply committed to the most retrograde and traditional form of Catholicism, found myself mesmerized by him. I too am a creature of my age.

But enough has been written — more in fact — about the mind of the extreme athlete in Alex Honnold. While he is, to say the very least, an intriguing and mystifying human being, most of what has been written about his documentary would be, to the extent he cared, agreeable to him. There is something else that fascinated me about him — something I think he would find it much less fascinating but just as compelling to me. That is, Honnold as the archetype of the Western man — the European man. Let me unpack that: Honnold appears to have generic modern liberal sensibilities. He is a vegetarian and an environmentalist. His foundation is based upon environmental micro-investments for impoverished Third World communities. He grew up in California. He ostensibly is irreligious and shacks up with his girlfriend in his home (a van). Other than his habit for undertaking this extreme activity, he strikes me very much as a man with conventional California liberal beliefs and views. While I would not describe him as a “hippie,” he is seemingly comfortable in their midst and aping their worldview (when he is not thinking about rock climbing, which is evidently not very often). To say that he would disdain what I am going to write it is to put it mildly, yet it was what struck me after taking in the whole of who — and what — this man is.

Let me offer politically incorrect assumptions on several counts and digress for a moment from free soloing. To situate my comments and observation, something must be said of race. First, races exist — not as social constructs, but as durable biological categories. Moreover, various races differ on average in myriad ways. The traditional understanding of race, which is just another word for the biological term “sub-species,” historically subdivided people into five categories: Caucasian (White); Mongoloid (Asian); Negroid (Sub-Saharan African); Australoid (Aborigine); and Amerindian. If race were not such a dirty word, I am sure that greater precision in definitional terms would have developed. Obviously, race is not so rigid that its categories are impermeable, and the borders between groups give way to zones of racial and geographical clines but the general proposition holds that racial groups differ from one another in meaningful ways. While “race” is an objectionable word among Western elites, “population groups” is a more anodyne way of saying the same thing among contemporaries. The meaningful differences between groups are something that can be registered internally but rarely spoken of in so-called polite company. So, that East Asians, for example, generally have a higher intelligence (as measured by a range of intellectual assessments) is noticed but seldom mentioned. That Sub-Saharan Africans surpass other groups in a variety of athletic feats (mostly those that rely upon fast twitch muscles) is similarly noticed.

We are not allowed to mention racial differences, in part, because of the implications of these differences — especially in modern, pluralistic societies like those common in the post-Christian Western world. It is not deemed an acceptable thing to say, for example, that the primary reason that African Americans do not obtain proportional admission (without substantial assistance) as a group to America’s elite universities is because they are, on average, less intelligent than the average intelligence of the competitor groups in Whites (which is just shorthand for European) and East Asians. Likewise, it is similarly verboten to say that the reason why African Americans disproportionately populate American prisons (and therefore disproportionately engage in anti-social criminal activity) is that they generally have a greater average tendency towards anti-social behavior, or, put differently, have lesser levels, on average, of self-control. Explanations for social phenomenon such as these are considered outside of acceptable discourse, and, as such, other explanations for different outcomes among racial or population groups must be considered. If one understands this, it makes perfect sense why, in an era in which racial discrimination is heavily penalized socially and legally, that a concept like “systemic racism” is used to capture an alleged mythical explanation for different racial outcomes — one that has no basis — as opposed to the more obvious one that racial or genetic distinctions largely account for different outcomes.

It is understandable to me why some have deemed race beyond acceptable discourse. There is something unseemly about it — something that offends good manners. If we accept that which we see in front of us — that is, racial differences obviously exist — we sense that there is an unfairness to it because race is, after all, an immutable characteristic that seemingly divests people of agency. The determinism of race has an ugly side. It seems plausible to me that many might accept the reality of race but deny its legitimacy of inclusion in public discourse because to do so would allow the public to use race as a shorthand for intelligence, work ethics, or criminality. Exceptions to average outcomes of course exist, of course; perhaps the thinking is that to allow a greater room for race to be included in public discourse is to allow unfair racial discrimination to flourish and create a self-fulfilling cycle of divergent racial outcomes.

The objections to taking race seriously come from more than Western liberal elites: they also come from the minority of committed Christians in Western societies. Christianity, as the great universalizing force in world history, rejects tribal or racial identity as particularly instructive, let alone destiny-making, in determining whether any man can be saved. To admit racial differences is to call into question, at least superficially, whether that maxim is true in the main. If all men are essentially equal in dignity before God and Church, which is what Christianity posits, then can groups of men meaningfully differ in racial attributes that make effecting that dignity real? I have struggled with that question for many years now as a committed Catholic — my mind and soul want the essential dignity of all men to mean that all groups are of equal abilities and attributes. Parenthetically, beyond religion, is not the American ideal of meritocracy predicated on such an assumption? But, upon years of reflection upon it, there is nothing particularly offensive about racial group differences and the Christian premise of essential dignity of all men. To a finer point on it, Christians readily acknowledge that differences of ability, temperament, and intelligence exist among individual men. Indeed, it is obvious as the day is long. I may be smarter, more athletic, and more peaceful than some but there are many who are better than me in every one of those regards. These differences do not call into question the essential dignity of all men — they co-exist. I do not feel inferior when I am around someone who is my better in some or all regards because I am essentially the equal of any man.

That different families, kinship communities, and nations should have similar group-level differences likewise should not call into question the essential dignity of men. That races, as the outer ring of population distinctions, also have differences as a result likewise should not be offensive. But more to the point, a reconciliation must be cognizable because I believe that Christianity is true and the faith as it is will never contradict natural truths. If race — and racial differences — are true as a matter of nature (and the powerful cocktail of geography, genetics, and time that make racial differences plausible), then racial differences and Christianity must be reconcilable.

For my own part, my intellectual and spiritual reconciliation of race and religion comes with certain moral demands: first, Christianity requires for the group as much as the individual that we exercise a profound humility. All have fallen and therefore no man or no collection of men bound by kinship is permitted to glory in themselves — only in God. That means even if we acknowledge differences, the relative hierarchy of men in view of those differences, whatever they may be, is irrelevant to their dignity as men. East Asians, for example, are not better versions of human beings because they are, on average, smarter than the rest of the world. It is difficult for me to claim that denying, for example, this reality (East Asian intelligence) is itself a virtue. Second, Christians are duty-bound to treat both kin and stranger (which is another way to say those from within and without of our racial group) with the same human dignity. The missionary impulse to convert all nations, given to the Apostles by our Lord, carries with an implicit conviction that all nations are worthy to be saved. Race then may be real, but it never warrants, at least for the Christian, a belief in essential superiority or inferiority of one group versus another on the plane of human dignity. But nor does it require, in service of the notion of essential human dignity, that we deny the existence of differences that exist among individual men or groups of men. They exist and make up what we might term the hard landscape of human existence in this world.

Race then is not a social construct — it is a principle derived from biology and nature. Men tend not to use it as a social concept or organizing principle. Race becomes relevant, at least to me, as a proxy for civilization. If civilization is the outer limit of human social organization and race is the outer limit of group differences, it makes sense, and is indeed borne out, that different races make different civilizations. European civilization is different from East Asian civilization and so on. Obviously, religion plays an outsized influence on civilization but so do racial attributes. The West looks like it does — the people within it have the assumptions and customs that they do — because, in large part, it was created by a particular racial group (Whites) who themselves had collective abilities and temperaments that fit the civilization they created. The same is true for every other civilization.

I am a White (read: European) American who is comfortable in Western Civilization. One of the demeaning characteristics of the elitist crusade against race is that Whites like me are — ironically — told that our particular race and our particular civilization (Western) is uniquely depraved (which violates the seeming social canon that race does not exist as a category and, in any event, should never be used as a cudgel against people born into that non-existent category). I became racially-conscious later in life (at about the same time I discovered my fear of heights) because of the official racial bias and bile that poured forth from elitist circles upon me and my own. To distill this further, when I had the full complement of children that God would give me, I found the racial bias and animus against them far more offensive than it had ever been against me. If my racial consciousness is offensive, and I am sure it is, the people to be blamed are the militant “anti-racists” in positions of power that showered upon me and my own that we are somehow qualitatively worse human beings for being born White. I did not believe that was true for other races; I will not believe it about my own either.

If my racial consciousness was initiated through what was essentially a negation of the official elitist hostility towards Whites, my evolution has been a more nuanced view based upon the positives of belonging to this group and civilization. To put it differently, I may have started this path in protest of racism shown towards me, but I have ended it with an affinity towards my own. To be sure, this is not a matter of racial superiority (indeed, my religion will not countenance it), but it is a recognition that my people — that is, Whites — are reasonable in wanting the perpetuation of their civilization, which can only come if Whites perpetuate themselves as a group. Under conventional conversational mores, it is perfectly acceptable for an African-American to indicate his or her preference for a Black spouse or their children’s marriage to a Black man or woman; to swap out, however “White” for Black in that sentiment is to, evidently, ride with the Klan. In that sense, I have a strong preference that my White children marry others from my racial group. While Catholicism trumps race in terms of marriage for my children, race is something too in the way that I think about it. Perhaps nothing more offensive could be said by a White man today — the truth is that I care little for the opinion of the people who it would offend. I see now, in a way that I did not see before, that Whites add something special to the world that is worthy of perpetuation. And if I can indulge the thought a bit more, Whites are, as a group, an unusually empathetic group of people — a caring race — which is why, or so it seems to me, God chose them to be the main missionary engine of His Holy Church. There is a double irony there. Whites are depicted by Western elites and race hustlers as uniquely evil as a group — the truth is something far different. To be clear, Whites are not a “new” chosen people and other races have different gifts too that I do not deny. But my view is that my people — my extended kin in the form of Whites — have co-created a wonderful civilization that is laudable. It is something that I can say that I am proud of without any form of customary “White Guilt”. Indeed, I refuse that now.

So native Europeans — both in Europe and in the vast European diaspora — have much to be proud of in the accomplishments of their people and the civilization that they created. They have been on the forefront of virtually every civilizational advance — and what is more, they exported those advances. The Chinese, in particular, match Europeans in many regards in their civilizational greatness but as is well known, they famously built a wall around their civilization instead of sharing it. In any event, from virtually every field of human accomplishment, Europeans have done incredible things for which is more than acceptable to both take cognizance of — and be proud of — as a member of that group and civilization. The world, as it is, organizes itself in a model given to it by Europeans — in arts, sciences, technology, culture, and economics given to it also by Europeans. And the question remains, why did the world tilt in such a distinctively European way? While that is a complex question, it does strike me that there is something uniquely curious in Europeans — something restless and adventurous among them. In every endeavor of human searching, Europeans have been among the forefront of discovery. Why is that? Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s Faustian Man.

In his own unique way, Alex Honnold is an exemplar of this intrepid racial type found among a class of Europeans who fueled Western Civilization’s greatness. To look at him is not to see any particular attribute of greatness — he is seemingly an ordinary man. But his inner drive is Herculean — it is positively Faustian. His desire for excellence is otherworldly. And what makes him so unique is there is almost no hint of vanity or gain — he undertakes this incredible effort only to satiate his innate inner need to do it. Europe has produced men like this in seemingly every generation, and they are the great men of their ages. They did it not for fame — not for money — not for acclaim but because their nature made them reach for something beyond them and focus upon it with a monomaniacal obtuseness that is incredible to behold. In Honnold, I saw Alexander the Great. I saw Julius Caeser. I saw Constantine. I saw Saint Augustine. I saw Charlemagne. I saw Richard the Lionhearted. I saw Jean Parisot de Valette. I saw Columbus. I saw Hernan Cortez. I saw Pizzaro. I saw Oliver Cromwell. I saw Jacques Cathelineau. I saw Napolean. I saw Ernest Shackleton. I could go on, but I won’t. There is fearlessness and restlessness in the greatest of my people that manifests itself in magnitude for nothing other than the greatness of the challenge and the iron will to see it through. And to those who would say that Christianity crimps Western man’s greatness, behold how many of our best men were devoted Christians. Christianity, notwithstanding whatever Frederich Nietzsche said, does not create men without chests. We have had many Christian European men much greater than Nietzsche to ever count.

Even though Alex Honnold, in his breezy California liberalism would balk at the comparison and the point, he is nonetheless prisoner to a legacy that runs through his blood. He is a man who would rather die than compromise. He is a man who seeks something impossible because it is impossible. That Christianity lost my people in the main means that it lost people of singular greatness like Alex Honnold. I may see things more clearly, and I think I do, but I will never touch the greatness of a man like him in this life. And it has little to do with rock climbing but everything to do with the spirit of a warrior willing to sacrifice — willing to not count the cost of the battle before fighting. Alex Honnold is great not because he free soloed El Cap, as incredible as that was, but because he both wanted to do it and was willing to suffer the privations that accompanied it until it was accomplished, or he died. And while he would disown me publicly for my racial acclaim, I am proud that he is of my own kind.

Oh, that the Church might gain men like him again and my civilization and people might rise again. That we may once more put that distinctive European proclivity towards greatness once again at the service of Holy Mother Church. When this greatness is married to grace — when this otherworldly resolve is fixed towards God — the world becomes a European project for Christ. Oh, that might it be again.

Saint Boniface, Pray for Us.

 

Is the new Pope a Catholic?

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It’s not looking good. His predecessor was bad.

The new guy is just as bad, but smoother, silkier. He is mild mannered and polite and smiles more and praises the Latin Mass while restricting it’s use.

Total silence about the takeover of the Catholic Church in China by the Communist Party. There was a shameful deal done with the Communists to allow them to choose bishops. They have naturally taken full advantage of this and are forcing communist priests ón the laity. The anti-Communist trad Catholics beg for help from the Vatican and the first American pope turns a deaf ear. The very old Cardinal Zen is allowed to speak out, but the Pope himself clearly favours the communists.

Leo XIV has criticised deporting foreigners and utters the familiar sickly sweet injunctions to help the poor refugees, even as the refugees attack women and damage churches. As Trad Catholics are quick to point out, the Vatican City has high walls around it and prison terms for entering illegally. The US Church was happy to accept billions fron Biden to facilitate immigration but no Nigerians need apply for asylum in the Vatican. Prevost could fit tens of thousands in there, if he wanted to.

It would take a book to tell the story of every rapist and degenerate protected by Francis. Pope Leo continues the style. Let us examine a representative trio. Father Rupnik got expelled from the priesthood for assembling a harem of nuns and using spiritual jargon and the various accroutements of religion to seduce them. Not technically a rapist, but definitely a cad. Pope Francis reinstated him as priest and it seems that Chicago Leo sees no problem with his continued presence.

Cupich is Archbishop of Chicago and notorious for his pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ attitude. He wanted to give a “lifetime achievement award” to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a leftist Democrat. Pope Leo has promoted him to the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State.

The king of this trio of rogues is good old King Charles III, brother of Epstein pal Prince Andrew. Charles was friendly for many years with the evil Jimmy Saville, a man who boasted of being catholic. The Royals even gave him a knighthood. What does Pope Prevost do? Give the King some special award. It is sold as a move to convert the English. It is just another example of Prevost’s poor choice of company.

Charles should be careful associating with degenerate Prevost. The most patriotic people in the whole UK are of course the Ulster Prods. They are a million strong, lots of them are Army and they very well informed and critical of the British deep state. Their oath of loyalty to the king is specifically conditional on the king upholding the religion. They dislike the Royal Family intensely. — “A nest of vipers” said one Orangeman. They are renaming streets and digging up trees that the once popular prince planted. They know already that Charles is a degenerate and here he is associating with an equally degenerate Pope?

The Orange Order issued a public letter to the king, urging him to reflect on his coronation oath. Ian Paisley Jr. has called for the king to abdicate. Next summer, if Charles is still on the throne, perhaps the Orangemen will place four figures on top of their towering bonfires. Charles, Andrew, Jimmy and Jeffrey. And all the King’s policemen and all the King’s spies will be too scared to take them down again.

Infiltration in the Church is not new or surprising. A thousand writers will tell you the Protocols are forged, but few dispute the Illuminati documents, from a century earlier. They tell a similar story of a vast evil conspiracy and boast that they had many priests enrolled and they controlled seminaries in Bavaria. This was two hundred years ago, and they have been busy since. Bella Dodd was involved in training a thousand communists in the US to infiltrate the priesthood in the 1930s.

There is a rule for what to do if an evil Pope gets elected.

Pope Nicholas II published a Bull, In Nomine Domini, April 13, 1059:

  • 3. Wherefore, if the perversity of depraved, and iniquitous men, so prevail, that a pure, sincere and free election cannot be held in the City, the Cardinal Bishops with the religious Clerics, and the Catholic laity, even though few, obtain the right of power (ius potestatis) to elect the Pontiff of the Apostolic See, where it might be fitting.

It’s an old rule, and no doubt some will argue that it has been superceded by newer rules. But there seems to be no specific mention of it being repealed, so that means it is still in force.

Either way it doesn’t matter. Rules are wonderful but their application depends ón power. You can no doubt think of many cases where perfectly good and valid rules, widely accepted by all, are broken with smirking impunity by Somebody in Authority. If you draw their attention to it, it is quite common that they will jeer at you and boast of their immunity. Prison officers are notorious for this, but it is increasingly common everywhere.

Even if this law has been officially superceded, we can reinstate it. It is difficult to do but simple to describe. All we have to do is assemble a huge disciplined crowd. 200,000 would do it. Fill St Peter’s Square with people chanting insults about Prevost and urging him to flee.

It’s unlikely the Swiss Guards would open fire. It’s slightly more likely that the masonic Italian state would attack the protest but that is not very likely. A quarter of a million people for 24 hours in St Peter’s Square would do it.

A reasonable definition of a Trad catholic is someone who is aware of masonic and Jewish infiltration of the Church and is not happy with it. At least one tenth of nominal Catholics are Trad. There are enough Trads living in Rome to make the numbers. There are millions more in the rest of Italy and in France and Germany. A little further and we have millions more Trads in Spain and Poland. If one out of every hundred of Europe’s trad catholics decide to make a pilgrimage to Rome, it will all be over for Prevost.

The fake Pope will flee. There are a handful of honest priests. They will appoint Mel Gibson as pope with a mission to clean out the church.

There is a man from New Jersey working on making this happen, Brother Bugnolo (www.fromrome.info). He says he has mailed out about 3500 letters of legal notice to the Clergy of the Diocese of Rome and the suburbican Dioceses, and received confirmation of receipt. He has explained in Italian the legal problems with the Conclave, and has informed them of their rights. He has asked them to speak to one another and put the College of Cardinals on notice, as is their right and responsibility. I don’t know if this Brother Bugnolo guy is legit. Perhaps he will just steal any donations. But the concept he is promoting is reasonable.

He has even priced the organising of the mass assembly of the faithful: Including advertising, posters and permits it amounts to about $250,000.

“As of November 1, 2025, about $25,100 has been raised for this project. Expenses for posters in the City of Rome alone, printing costs & municipal fees for placement, is about $27,500. And so we are just at the beginning of the fund raising. Since posters should be placed in all the cities around Rome inside the suburbican Dioceses, and together that probably would raise this costs for posters and municipal fees to maybe $40,000 to $50,000.”

Br Bugnolo has interesting research on Pope Bob. Prevost is not really his valid surname. Riggitano and Alioto were the surnames his grandfather used to get into America. Riggitano is potentially a Jewish surname. Alioto is potentially a Mafia name. What a coincidence.

Certain businessmen invested millions to overthrow the Tsar of Russia. For less than a million of your US dollars, there is a realistic chance to chase Pope Prevost out of Rome, elect Mel Gibson by acclamation and switch the entire one billion Catholic flock to a remigration platform.

Arrivederci a Roma!

 

Is the Pope Catholic?

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Lots of Catholics think he isn’t. And they’re not shy about saying it.

Browse through trad Catholic webpages. You will see that, sometimes politely, sometimes less so, they accuse Papa Francesco of being a devil worshipping, a freemasonic rape facilitator who has nothing better to do with his time than invite poor deluded post-op transgenders to tea at the Vatican. They accuse the US Catholic bishops of taking “blood money” for facilitating illegal immigration. Strong words.

A favourite trad Catholic quote is when the Pope told a journalist that perhaps there would be a split in the Church under his watch. If anti-Jewish and anti-freemason conspiracy theories are your hobby, you will find plenty in the trad Catholic world. You won’t find anti-Semitism: hatred of people based on their ethnic origin is verboten. But the trad Catholic view is that all Orthodox, Reform and atheist Zionist Jews will roast in hell for all eternity, being prodded with pitchforks by demons.

It’s rare for the clergy to be outspoken. Upsetting the boss often means the loss of your job. But some priests are speaking out, despite the danger of punishment. A couple of bishops, Strickland and Schneider. There’s even Archbishop Vigano, the highest ranking cleric to explicitly accuse Pope Francis.

The Pope is not trying to smooth things over with his critical flock. He is openly goading them, accusing them of being backward and rigid:

This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness. … These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.

The trads are upset at the Church cashing in on the mass migration scam. Apparently, various US Church groups got “almost” $2.4 billion (yes, billion with a b) for helping immigration during Biden’s four years. That is why the US Bishops are whinging about the Trump deportations.

And the rumour is that Francis will appoint 30 pro-migration bishops in the US to counter Trump’s deportations.

During his recent illness, the Vatican asked people to pray for his recovery. Trad Catholics considered the request and concluded that they were NOT obliged to pray for his recovery. Instead, they are praying that he will repent of his sins and have “a good death”. Rumour has it that the chap has been dead for several months already, and they are keeping his corpse in the freezer to be produced at the right time.

If he is a agent, how did he get to the top?

Some say Christianity was a Jewish invention from the start. It’s certainly true that it was stupid to accept the blood soaked Old Testament at the Council of Nicaea, and odd that so few Protestant churches have ever protested about this aspect of the faith.

Even if that were true, there were still many times in history where popes, priests and laymen acted against Jewish interest, often at great inconvenience, expense and personal danger to themselves. The Reconquista, the Crusades, the battle of Lepanto. And all the expulsions from Christian countries. Expulsions of Jews were rare in Muslim, Pagan, Hindu and Chinese societies.

The Popes of the 19th century were perhaps the strongest. They repeatedly preached against secret societies and Judaism.

Zionist leader Theodore Herzl met Pope Pius X in January 1904 and asked him to support Jewish settlement in Palestine. The pope was rude. “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people.” That’s not just a refusal to support the Zionists, that’s a rude refusal. Wouldn’t it be fun if the next Pope started talking like this?

The New York Times gloated in 2014 that Pope Francis “became the first Vatican leader to lay a wreath of signature yellow and white flowers on the tomb of Theodor Herzl”

There was a huge push to infiltrate the Church in the 1930s. Bella Dodd says that she personally trained 1000–1,200 communists to infiltrate the Church and train as priests in America. A similar effort was underway in Europe. She knew four communist cardinals in Rome. Polish Priest Maximilian Kolbe was shocked during WWI to see freemasonic marches glorifying the devil taking place in the Vatican. Nowadays, they market Kolbe as an anti-Nazi, but anti-Freemason is more truthful.

Pope Francis got to the top because he had a legion of supporters in high places already.

Who can we replace him with?

There is one high-ranking priest who has criticised and mocked the mass migration of the Great Replacement. If he were elected Pope, it would be a disaster for the Kalergi Plan.

His Eminence Cardinal Sarah is from west Africa and is as Black as the ace of spades.

But he has spoken out against mass migration to European countries..

Some people exploit the Word of God to justify the promotion of multiculturalism and gaily take advantage of the excuse of hospitality to justify the admission of immigrants.

That is a direct attack on multi-culturalism. He implies that the Word of God does not endorse multi-culturalism. He accuses the multi-culturalists of twisting Christian doctrine to justify mass migration.

Can you think of any other Black or brown man who has spoken out so strongly against the mass migration, barring the occasional comedian or podcaster?

It is possible that Cardinal Sarah is simply controlled opposition, and his handlers provide him with carefully scripted speeches. Even so, it would be a huge metapolitical win for him to get the top job.

As of now, the institutional Catholic church is a big part of the Great Replacement. It provides ideological support and administers much of the movement.

But imagine if Cardinal Sarah was elected Pope and if he was true to his word? He could pull the Church out of the mass migration business and sack all the freemason Bishops. It would be very dangerous for him personally, of course. Pope John Paul II was also an honest man. He barely lasted a month before he died suddenly in suspicious circumstances. Black people score lower than whites in IQ tests. But perhaps they score higher than us in the “lack of fear of death”?

The African bishops have shown themselves to be bravest of all in relation to our Argentinian Anal Pope. A new “infallible” papal documement says it’s now kosher to bless homosexual couples. This is in stark contrast with the New Testament criticism of homosexuality and trad Christian opposition to it. The Ugandan Catholics have a group of martyrs who were killed by the King because they refused to have gay sex with him. The rest of the Catholic bishops organisations were too cowardly to oppose it. The Africans opposed it to a man, and the Pope had to back down, making sarcastic remarks about African culture. Not one African bishop is prepared to bend over for the Argentinian.

Any male Catholic can be elected Pope. The votes are restricted to about 125 Cardinals. All Cardinals are selected by the Pope. As a recent TOO article showed, every Pope since the 1960s has found time to meet with B’nai Brith, the Jewish masonic group. It’s very probable that almost all the cardinals are dodgy too. However, even a crooked Pope might appoint an honest men as Cardinal, as a camouflage or even by accident. Some crooked Cardinals might, possibly, suffer an attack of conscience and become honest.

Five Cardinals have publicly sent Dubia (doubts) to the Pope. The African cardinals would vote for a strongly anti-homosexual, pro-Remigration pope. Possibly some of the Spanish and French. Cardinal Pizzaballa has said Mass in Gaza, under the Israeli bombing. Perhaps he is an honest man? For every Cardinal who has spoken out, let us assume there is another Cardinal who agrees, but is too scared to say so in public.

Perhaps there might be as many as a dozen honest cardinals?

Perhaps we should target a dirty dozen of the worst cardinals and force them to resign, before the next conclave. This would take out a dozen dishonest men. Several US cardinals are potentially vulnerable, if Trump, or better still Vance, were to make fun of them. The unpopular Robert McElroy was recently appointed to as Cardinal for Washington DC. Cardinal Cupich of Chicago has his weaknesses.

If Trump were to attack US Cardinals for taking “blood money” to facilitate illegal immigration, for covering up child abuse, for conniving with the abortion industry, for turning a blind eye to Chinese Communist party control of the Chinese Church, he would have plenty of ammunition to use against them. The Trad Catholics would love it!.

Trump’s man in the Vatican, Brian Burch, is supposedly a trad Catholic. What would happen if he started making critical remarks about non US Cardinals? Cardinal Pietro Parolin, for example, will be in charge of the Conclave and his fingerprints are all over the CCP/Vatican deal (see previous link). An easy target!

Another revolting specimen is Cardinal Fernandez, author of a book on kissing, and a flunky for Francis. Or the newly appointed Cardinal Radcliffe, an enthusiast for the trans crowd.

If he is really a trad Catholic, at some point Ambassador Burch will have to grab his whip and start chasing the moneychangers out of the temple. Or at least make some hurtful remarks about them.

Even if we could force a dozen Cardinals to resign, we are still left with a solid majority of crooked Cardinals. How can we convince them to vote for Our Guy?

Three suggestions, offered half in joke and wholly in earnest:

1. Homosexual honey traps: “Dear Cardinal, we owe you an apology. You thought you were coming to a gay orgy with us, but actually we want to talk to you about your vote in the next conclave. If you don’t cooperate, we will release the recordings we have made of our conversations”

2. Staging spiritual events: This used to be quite a common prank in the old days. You might hide behind the wall of the graveyard when you knew the Cardinal is about to walk past. You make ghostly sounds and tell the Cardinal to repent of his sins, and to make sure he votes for a Remigration Pope in the next conclave. Or, a loud bang wakes the cardinal at night. He runs to the window and sees clouds of red smoke, and a man dressed in a devil suit roaring personalised insults at him, and warning him that unless he repents, he will roast in Hell. By the time the police arrive, there is so sign of anything.

An excellent place to ambush our targeted Cardinals would be in the privacy of the confessional box. The Cardinal is expecting the little old lady to reveal her little sins to him, but she has another agenda, and starts accusing him of what she thinks he is guilty of. This will probably break into a roaring match very quickly. Little old ladies planning this should ensure they have backup in the form of a couple of strong men nearby, ready to jump on the Cardinal if he gets violent.

Even the most criminal of Catholic cardinals cannot totally avoid contact with honest Catholics. The housekeeper, the cleaner, the junior priest, the cook, the driver. They can potentially enable devastating staged spiritual events..

3. Encourage a micro-mutiny in the Swiss Guards. Imagine if two of them put up a huge Remigration banner in St Peter’s Square: “Cardinal Sarah is right: Remigration now! God bless Africa.”

Vatican security is in the hands of the Swiss. Remigration and transgender operations on children are hot topics in Switzerland. The Swiss Guards have a tradition of going loco, and for a non-violent stunt like that, they would lose their jobs, but are unlikely to be jailed or injured. For those Swiss Guards who didn’t want to risk their jobs, they could hiss insults, without moving their lips, as criminal Cardinals walk past.

Viva il Papa!

A Traditional Catholic Ponders the West and Its History, Part 2 of 2: Review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

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Go to Part 1.

Sometimes the question is more about us and not them — namely, who we are and why are we who we are. Again, I think what drives me in the most elemental way towards an interest in this topic — beyond truth for the sake of truth itself — is my interest in the history and culture of my people. It is, in fact, more than an interest — I am proud of the contribution of Western Civilization; indeed, I do not think any Traditional Catholic could feel differently. The modern gloss — i.e., the Jewish gloss — on Western Civilization and its history is as atrocious as it is mendacious. While we are, just like every other group historically composed of saints and sinners, our culture and history should not be cloaked in shame — our culture and history should be celebrated for their unique contributions to mankind in virtually every conceivable way. When we say something like “Whites” should be celebrated, there is something unsavory about it: perhaps the better way to say it is that Europe, its people, and its civilization are worthy of acclaim. And while my pride in confessing Jesus Christ as the Lord over my life is paramount, I nonetheless take a human pride in belonging to such an august people and rich and unique civilization as that of Europe — in much the same way as a son takes human pride in belonging to virtuous and noble parents. In all of this, I manifestly do not see myself as a supremacist or racist but rather living within the ancient tradition of Patria. Indeed, the great expanse of the Christian message from one end of the world to the other is yet another unique contribution of my people — for whatever reason, God raised us to be the messengers of the Gospel in the age of the Church. Parenthetically, that is another reason why Jewish enmity towards Europe runs as hot as it does. So, while Kevin MacDonald has written extensively on who the Jews are, and why the Jews operate as they do wherever they are, his latest book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is not particularly concerned with the Jews.

It is a fascinating question to be asked — why did the world tilt in the direction of Europe — her institutions, her languages, her way of thinking, her religion, and her sensibilities — over all other peoples? Why did she dominate, and more to the point, why did she develop as she did? MacDonald would be the first to concede that Europe was not the richest in resources; nor was she populated by the smartest people, but she nonetheless forged something exceptional and impactful — why is that? While MacDonald can be at times a meandering author, on balance, he offers one fascinating take after another on why this is — and he goes way back to begin. Almost all modern historians and cultural authors who reluctantly acknowledge European predominance attribute it to something evil about us or something lucky for us (e.g., Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel). We dominated because we were uniquely bad, or so they hammer our ancestors over and over again. What is refreshing about MacDonald is that he is meeting those critics — really, he is destroying them — but not in a polemical way. Indeed, the corpus of modern history as it pertains to Europe is polemical and designed to insult and demean our history, our fathers, and our civilization. MacDonald does not respond in kind; this is not a work of rousing European Exceptionalism (like, for example, how Guillaume Faye wrote). Instead, MacDonald approaches the question scientifically and antiseptically. Indeed, he approaches more like Spock and is devoid of hyperbole. While I enjoy reading something rousing from time to time, it is energizing all the same to read an account of my people and their history that is tied to a factual predicate and reason and not to emotion.

Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition is segmented into nine chapters. The first looks at the pre-historic migration of various peoples that coalesced to make the modern European people, their attributes, and cultures. The second reviews the ascendancy of the Indo-European mark of “Aristocratic Individualism.” The third explores the competing European cultural legacy, that of “Egalitarian Individualism.” The entirety of the book rests on the competition between these two European cultural and social paradigms of our people. The fourth explores the unique structure of the European family and the role of women in particular in northwestern European society. The fifth and sixth look at the role of Christianity in the form of medieval Catholicism and Puritanism. For both, MacDonald views Christianity as complimenting and advancing earlier European practices that elevated individualism, monogamy, trust, and moral standing. The seventh looks at the application of European moralism and individualism as it became detached from historic Christianity in the example of the “Second British Empire” and the antislavery movement. The eighth chapter reviews the psychology of moral communities. The final chapter brings us to the modern day with the liberal tradition giving way to a multiculturalist approach that is, in effect, cannibalizing it and destroying Western individualism.

There is much to be said for this book. Indeed, some of it is wonkish and its appeal is limited to people interested in the minutia of population genetics and migrations. But it does highlight several themes that make us and are worth unpacking. It lays bare how we let this (i.e., our destruction) become something we have ended up cheering. Plot spoiler: the irony is that the thing that we are — the thing that ultimately made the world, made us, and is now destroying us — is opposed to what we are accused of being: we built the modern world because we are empathetic and trusting people. While no people are “good” in the sense of a righteous nation or race, we have nothing for which we ought to self-flagellate, especially as compared with any other nations or races. While all men ought to self-flagellate because of their sin and the sins of their fathers, other than being the race through whom God converted much of the world, we have no special reason to condemn ourselves or our fathers.

*        *        *        *

As this is a book about Europeans, MacDonald starts with the pre-historical science of who we are. There is now a consensus that three pre-historic population migrations make up the modern European stock: Western hunter-gathers (WHG); early farmers from Anatolia (EFs); and Indo-Europeans of the Yamnaya culture of Pontic Steppe (I-Es). Modern genetics tells us a lot about the admixture and geography of these peoples in modern Europe: EFs remain the predominant people in Southern Europe and WHG remain the predominant people of Northern Europe. MacDonald argues that the difference between these regions and peoples makes for two distinct genetic clines.

MacDonald addresses the cultural attributes within these peoples who would come to define us. For the I-Es, MacDonald describes what has been called “Aristocratic Individualism.” The I-Es spread far and wide — Europe was not their only conquest and they traveled as far as China and everywhere in between in the known Northern Hemisphere. They were a warlike people who demonstrated favoritism for the proto-meritocratic over strict kinship ties. This is a factor in our legacy that MacDonald hammers over and over again — the essential paradigm for social relations is either kinship based, or not kinship-based. For societies that are kinship-based, trust is invested by blood. For I-Es, reputation and fame became a currency for trust that rivaled blood ties. The warrior culture — and the Mannerbunde way of life — allowed for the cooperation of non-kin in what amounted to roving and fighting fraternal organizational models. I-Es brought with them a hyper-masculine society that allowed for the strongest and most warlike men to ascend in conjunction with their abilities — at least in the domain of warfare. This ethic was one marked by social reciprocity — not blood or despotism. The widespread currency of social reciprocity is one of the key differentiators between us and the rest of the peoples of the world.

The I-E warriors fought like a “band of brothers” for honor and glory. While MacDonald does not fix the free marketplace, as it were, of military advancement as the generator of European individualism, I-Es, when mixed with the EFs and WHGs, built societies that were also more individualistic as opposed to those predicated primarily upon kinship ties. I-E societies were less prone to despotism because men had an expectation of control and freedom over their own lives and political and social arrangements. That freedom is marked in the histories first among the Greeks who exemplified the I-E aristocratic individualist/warrior societies. For MacDonald, the development of these types of societies (as opposed to the predominant worldwide model of kinship primacy) had enormous ramifications. Science itself — a permeable society of intellectual inquiry in which defection is allowable — is an extension of the I-E aristocratic idealism. That said, the Greeks were also relatively ethnocentric in their polis and in world compared to other Western cultures. Two other factors contributed to I-E culture; one, they were exogamous in marriage and procreation — they married among the people they conquered; and two, they were generally monogamous in marriage.

MacDonald believes that the I-E culture and influence are enormous in history even if the aristocratic individualism that has been such a vital part of European history is recessive in modern European peoples today. Their contribution is multifaceted: vigorous, expansive, meritocratic, exogamous, exploratory, inventive and curious. Indeed, when we think of Europe’s audacity — its boldness, its self-assertiveness, its competitive juices, and its greatness — we are seeing the ancient contribution of an I-E culture melded together with the preexisting stock of Europe’s people when the I-Es conquered them.

*        *        *        *

If the I-Es contributed to our history and temperament by giving us our audacity and our love of freedom and prerogative, the WHGs gave us another vital component as well — our “Egalitarian Individualism.” MacDonald notes that WHGs were individualist in orientation as well but in a different strand — whereas I-Es were egalitarian only within their relative peer groups, WHGs were egalitarian without qualification. WHGs too had a culture of reciprocity, which, parenthetically according to MacDonald, the melding between WHG and I-E cultures created an overarching one of reciprocity that is very different from the world model of kinship primacy. MacDonald’s general thesis is that these two strands of egalitarianism — peer-based versus absolute — that make up European culture and people have vacillated in predominance and the soft and “nice” absolute egalitarian individualist culture of European peoples today — i.e., the ones that are committing demographic suicide — is predominant.

WHG culture was less patriarchal — women were empowered to a much greater extent. MacDonald maintains that the reason for this lies in the geographic reality of Northwest Europe: the climate and land, at least at that point, did not permit large, fixed settlements or polygamy that such large, fixed settlements and wealth would provide; they had large complex settlements but they were forced by the ecology to disband them for part of the year. Monogamy is thus another attribute of WHG culture that is critical. The harsh northern environment has an evolutionary impact on who we latter-day Europeans are — simply put, survival in these regions favored the more intelligent, rewarded planning for the future, and paternal provisioning of children. Part of the long-standing development of WHG was that of cooperation — trustworthiness in this migratory setting contributed to our unique psychology.

Another factor important for understanding Western Europe — one that MacDonald will hit again and again — is our exogamy. Much of the world restricts marriage within kinship bounds — cousin marriage is a common worldwide phenomenon that reinforces and strengthens kinship structures. Marriages among WHG were more egalitarian, and, in a sense, presaged the coming Christian religion’s focus on consent. Women were given far more say and direction in whom they married, and that choice proved to be a very strong factor in improving us over time. Personal attraction as the basis of marriage selection changed our complexion and eye color as men and women progressively found lighter-skinned, blue-eyed mates more attractive. Long before the age of chivalry and romanticism, WHGs chose marriage for “love” as much as for any other reason. MacDonald argues that the relative emancipation of women created more nurturing societies as the spouses themselves were more nurturing towards one another and provided a high-investment environment for their children.

MacDonald spends a great deal of time discussing non-kinship marriage patterns for WHGs and subsequent Europeans — especially in Northwestern Europe. Our marriages tended to be monogamous, and marriage occurred later in life, with spouses of similar ages who set up their homes independently from their families. Unmarried individuals were not uncommon. All of these factors favored a more egalitarian matrimonial unit in which the woman was more than a domestic servant and child maker but a true partner in life. It is perhaps one of the great ironies of MacDonald’s work that he lays bare that our women co-created Western Civilization and were the most (comparatively and relatively) emancipated women in the world. Modern feminism, illogical and angry as it is, bemoans the plight of women in our world but never considers the other comparative models in which all of the women elsewhere live.

MacDonald then digresses a bit and discusses WEIRD people — that is modern Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people based on the work of Joseph Henrich. WEIRD people have attributes that have been etched in time such that — notwithstanding their general trust in diversity and pluralism — makes them different than other peoples. Compared to other peoples, we tend towards altruism, altruistic punishment (that is, punishing “free riders”), and cooperation with non-relatives. We have also internalized a notion of justice that is based upon abstract principles, unlike a kinship-based society that evaluates justice in terms of whether something or another is “good” for the group. WEIRD people are also more inclined to analytical reasoning as opposed to holistic reasoning, and we categorize things independent of function whereas non-Westerners categorize based upon context.

In three chapters, MacDonald addresses the religious changes within Europe (Catholic medieval era, Puritan America, and the British Empire in the nineteenth century). Christianity in both its Catholic and Puritan flavor magnified, per MacDonald, preexisting traits within European stock. Creed, trust, and reputation again trumped kinship and blood. Ideas that stressed a moral community, abstract ideals for which one strives, and the concept of individualism and consent were reinforced. The Church in particular stressed monogamy fanatically and, by doing so, helped make Europe what it would become. Interestingly, the former Catholic MacDonald acknowledges the utter uniqueness of the Catholic Church in its moral suasion and ability to bring powerful and lecherous men to heal at the height of its moral powers. That height was driven by a society that accepted its ideals and was guided by men in the Church who “walked the walk” of the Christian life. The Church lost its battle with Henry the VIII because, by that time, the moral high ground she once possessed had slipped away into the hands of less righteous Christian leaders. In any event, MacDonald lays out something that should be clear — the way back for us is an uncompromising orthodoxy and militant set of ethics. There is no other way for us to reclaim what was lost.

While egalitarianism — whether aristocratic or not — is a predominant feature of the European psyche, ethnocentrism remained a feature as well. Ethnocentrism is more pronounced in kinship-based societies (as opposed to morally based societies) but the typical in-group/out-group mentality remained for us. In some sense, MacDonald argues, the seeming human need to differentiate between “our” people and “other” people — between in- and out-groups — was satiated in Europe by conceiving of the community in moral terms — i.e., where reputation as upholding the moral strictures of the community provides the “social glue” of the society as opposed to kinship relatedness. Both Catholicism in its flourishing medieval model and later Puritanism were explicit moral communities that exerted almost incomprehensible levels of sway, at least from a modern perspective, over the lives of their constituents. When the basis of the moral community changed — and we see that in the transformation of Europeans, at least in part, from Catholicism to Puritanism to post-Christianity — the basis for exclusion, condemnation, and preference were likewise changed. MacDonald’s observation that we ought to see the modern liberal fascism and attempts to control the thoughts and feelings of the broader society as an extension of the Puritanical model of totalitarian control over its members. As an aside, MacDonald sees Jewish influence helping to contribute to this self-hatred of Whites: because of their influence in the media and academia, they have foisted upon us a “culture of critique” in which our moral sentiments of trust and empathy were instrumentalized against our group interests. More can be said of that, but I will leave MacDonald’s critique for now (his thesis was developed and explained in his series of books on the Jews).

We understand modern liberals better if we liken them then to latter-day secular Puritans than if we try to place them within the liberal tradition of individualism and tolerance. MacDonald argues that the development in Western societies of moral universalism and altruism turned European sentiment and practice into something opposed to the perpetuation of the European peoples themselves. In other words — and we see this painfully today — our moralism has been profoundly turned against ourselves. MacDonald classifies this development as both evidencing “pathological altruism” and “dependency disorder”: in essence, we have become, at least the European elites among us, a psychologically extreme version of the “Love/Nurturance” system. We crave social approval (e.g., our need to virtue signal) and we are overly prone to guilt and empathy to the point of self-sacrifice. Women, more than men, are more prone to this psychological extreme because they rate higher on the “Love/Nurturance” system given their role with children. Ironically then, we condemn ourselves for being the worst and least empathetic people when in fact we are the opposite of that.

MacDonald spends some time discussing the cognitive and psychological requirements necessary for Whites to navigate the predominant morally pathological community in which they find themselves. Instinctively and implicitly, Whites tend to want to preserve their way of life and their ethnic community. Explicitly, however, expressions of this type of desire are suppressed by the higher parts of the brain — that is, the explicit type of brain function centered in the prefrontal cortex that controls conscious thought and effort and is able to suppress the more evolutionarily ancient, instinctive parts of the brain — e.g., media messages processed by the higher brain centers are able to suppress ethnocentric impulses. So, for example, psychological experiments that reveal instinctive preferences for one’s ingroup (e.g., race) show that Whites will consciously suppress that instinct in much the same way that a religious person will self-consciously suppress a temptation of the flesh. Truly, our world makes much more sense if we liken the political and cultural battles as one between two religious factions (traditional versus progressive) as opposed to one of religion versus non-religion. MacDonald sees evidence of this in the ways that Whites sort themselves on an instinctive level — White flight, for example, is never an articulable action plan but one tied to an instinct of comfort that works itself out without much thought (and often despite conscious thought).

*        *        *        *

MacDonald’s book is an interdisciplinary account of our people with a focus on our psychological profile that was fused over evolutionary time. To summarize with ultimate brevity, Europeans or Whites developed a civilization that was more individualist because it relied less on kinship as the primary social currency. Our women — ironically when the modern feminist critique is considered — were empowered to a much greater extent than anywhere else in the world. MacDonald goes so far as to suggest — although not explicitly — that allowing our women to choose spouses based upon their assessment of their prospective spouses’ character and fitness improved our collective gene pool. While we see today that White women have eagerly supported feminism, which is an exaggeration of their historic empowerment, we who want our civilization to continue should not be “anti-feminists” as much as we should be rightly ordered feminists. Our political and cultural salvation does not lie in an oppressive patriarchy but in a more naturally ordered spousal relationship. That is one point of the book that took me by surprise and contributed to the way that I see the problem and solution to the collapse of Western Civilization. Misogyny is a lazy response to a pendulum swing of women’s empowerment that has gone off the rails. Our greatness, in reality, lies in our treatment of our women, which Catholicism in particular amplified and nurtured within us.

In any event, MacDonald is not sanguine regarding a renaissance of the European peoples. He does offer some observations about how we might shake off the more extreme elements of what has become pathological self-hatred. First, while we were not particularly ethnocentric, ethnocentrism is a natural human psychological reality. We are programmed on the genetic level to be attracted to people who look like us (as are all people) (i.e., J. Philippe Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory). This helps explain why all people to marry another who is closer to them genetically than the general population. He thinks our intense and unhealthy and explicit suppression of White ethnocentrism could be mitigated by a few developments. One is that the pending minority status of Whites in their historic home countries could trigger greater cohesiveness among Whites — a group strategy. In light of becoming a minority, we may consciously resist the explicit suppression of our natural attraction to our own. At the very least, some Whites will begin to question why we are suppressing it. MacDonald says that the explicit anti-White hatred itself may lead to a newly found appreciation among Whites for their own. Anecdotally, as mentioned above, this was a driving factor in my self-discovery of an appreciation for my kind.

But for Whites to coalesce as a self-conscious group dedicated to its survival — a very questionable prospect to say the least — MacDonald concludes with a series of arguments why such a self-conscious strategy is morally defensible. Stated differently, MacDonald spends the entirety of his book explaining who and what we are with an emphasis on why. In some sense, the very act of explaining who we are is an act of self-conscious care for our community — we matter enough for him to explain who we are. He takes that act of explanation to another level when he argues that the pathologies that are destroying us today are worthy of resistance and may yet be overcome. In a sense, MacDonald as the ever-determinist and evolutionary strategist reverses course in the final chapter — he makes an appeal to something that may overcome our destruction as a people. To that end, he lists eleven reasons why we ought to be preserved:

  1. Genetic differences between peoples imply that different peoples have legitimate interests on that account (i.e., race is fact of life);
  2. Ethnocentrism has deep psychological and genetic roots; and as it relates to Europeans, it facilitated high-trust, homogenous societies among our people.
  3. Relatively homogenous societies are more likely to be redistributive of public goods given our natural ethnocentrism; i.e., studies show we are more generous when the recipients of that aid are more like us.
  4. Our people create societies that are freer, more democratic, and more rules-based than other people.
  5. The particular opprobrium fixed upon our people is misplaced; all people and every race has had their forms of collective moral depravity. There is nothing special about us in terms of collective evil.
  6. We have created fairer and more economically viable societies than any other people, which is why the rest of the world’s people and races do everything they can to move to the West.
  7. Our people have relatively high IQ compared with the elements who are being introduced to our societies through massive immigration; as such, they represent a net negative in terms of social services and criminality.
  8. High levels of immigration produce a net depression in wages and economic well-being for the lower end of our intellectual spectrum of people; in other words, we are hurting the most vulnerable of our people by embracing heterogeneity as a policy.
  9. Heterogeneity leads to political conflict and instability. Continued fractionalization and fragmentation can be expected as we continue down the political road of massive immigration.
  10. Heterogeneity in historic White countries has ironically led to an ever-increasing amount of hatred towards Whites.
  11. Massive immigration has negative ecological impacts.

In the end, MacDonald is not optimistic about the future of the historic European peoples. For my part, I agree with his pessimism, and I agree mostly with his moral case for our historic people. What remains to be seen is whether enough Whites eventually agree in principle to make a difference — but, as I have written elsewhere, the only thing that can save us as European people is a broader return to a militant Catholicism. Only through a robust return to God and the traditions of our fathers can we preserve our status as a people.

Our Lady of Sorrows, Pray for us.

A Traditional Catholic Ponders the West and Its History, Part 1 of 2: My Intellectual Journey

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All the utopias dreamed up by the Left inevitably lead to bloodshed—because they conflict with human nature. The classical Marxist Utopian vision of a classless society in the Soviet Union self-destructed, but only after murdering millions of its own people. Now the multicultural utopian version that has become dominant throughout the West is showing signs of producing intense opposition and irreconcilable polarization.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future by Kevin MacDonald

Something broke in me.

*        *        *        *

To the extent that I have “future” readers — ones who will have read my observations and musings chronologically in my many reviews and articles — I will not now belabor how it is that I arrived here. Suffice it to say, my opinions have dramatically changed over several years. While I have always been politically minded and politically literate, my conventional conservatism gave way to something much more, at least in modern terms, extreme. To be sure, I do not view myself as an “extremist,” whatever that means, but many of the authors I now read and consider — and, indeed, with whom I now agree — are veritable intellectual and cultural pariahs. Even though I am far from a public figure, publicizing my agreement with these social excommunicates would be career suicide for a relatively successful professional. That says much more about the world we live in than it does me or my views, but, regrettably, such is the world we now live in. The dystopic realm of thought crimes and thought punishment is well upon us. Notwithstanding the social opprobrium associated with it, I refuse to concede the privacy of my mind. While there is no particular courage in recording my thoughts and saying “NO” in the secrecy of my mind, the first “NO” must be articulated privately before it is expressed publicly. Eventually, however, that “NO” must be said publicly.

My journey into, euphemistically anyway, political “nonconformity” had an important antecedent; I had been “red-pilled” many years ago if one counts Traditional Catholicism. More than anything else, Traditional Catholicism, which is a dissent from the modern heterodoxy and effeminacy of the flaccid, homosexual-ridden, modern Catholic Church, opened my mind to the idea itself of challenging an omnipresent narrative. Part of coming to terms with Traditional Catholicism is an openness to skepticism, which, in and of itself, is ironic given that Traditional Catholicism is based, at least in part, on a robust return to living within the dogmatic past and truth of historic Catholicism. In other words, Traditional Catholics are now revolutionaries (or, perhaps more aptly, counterrevolutionaries) who are undermining and destabilizing the authorities who govern the very institution that Traditional Catholics wish to save and rehabilitate. Like virtually all Western institutions, the Catholic Church was co-opted during the 1950s and 1960s by Leftist revolutionaries bent on destroying the established understanding and role of the institution. As a result, we, as Traditional Catholics, do more than worship God in an antiquarian way — we are latter-day Catholics who seek to demolish the destroyers (and present-day leaders), who are now firmly entrenched in power. The world is always rich with irony when the revolutionaries themselves become entrenched in power and become, as it were, the establishment — as if true to a political axiom, they are always better at destroying than governing (see, e.g., Lenin, Castro, Mao). For an otherwise conformist conservative, the migration into Traditional Catholicism made a vast difference, and I moved from someone seeking modestly to “conserve” the traditions of my fathers into someone who was in open revolt against those who were actively destroying them. Traditional Catholicism was the first time in my life that I saw myself as subversive, but it would not be the last.

Traditional Catholicism was then a gateway to much more than traditional worship. It carries within it a scathing critique of the entire Enlightenment project and many of the philosophical tenants that we take for granted as ordinary Americans. To be deep into Traditional Catholicism then is to make it difficult to remain a typical conservative Americanist. Indeed, what was Vatican II if not a triumph of the Americanist forces over the retrograde forces of medieval “fortress Catholicism”? Thoughtful Traditional Catholics (pardon the redundancy) are more than merely subversive concerning the leadership of the modern Catholic Church, they begin to subversively question many American sacred cows like “freedoms” of religion, speech, economic exploitation, and eventually democracy itself. While I do not suggest that Traditional Catholicism led me to consider — or even hold — the particular views discussed below, it certainly opened my mind to think more critically. Put differently, if I could not trust the messaging of the contemporary Catholic Church and my Americanist public schooling, then what else was untrustworthy and potentially wrong?

Long after I became a Traditional Catholic, I began to question still other maxims of American social and political life. If I could organize the threads of dissent that put me firmly outside of the mainstream in political and social thought, it has been the slow and painful recognition of reality based, at least in part, around groups. Namely, things like: “diversity” and “pluralism” are destructive notions; “race” is a meaningful scientific concept; the respective races differ on average in various talents and attributes and create different civilizations on account of those differences; relative racial homogeneity — and its preservation — is positive for a given society; and that European people (i.e., “Whites” for a lack of a better term), have an interest in perpetuating their race and associated cultures and civilization. These ideas, taken together, are verboten among American elites of all stripes, conservative, liberal, or otherwise. Indeed, it is socially appalling and “racist” to suggest otherwise — meaning that the self-evident propositions that diversity is good and racial homogeneity are negative (at least among Whites), the non-existence of biological race and biologically based racial differences, and the obvious evil of a conscious White racial identity (unless that identity is invoked to apologize or otherwise self-flagellate) are ideas that no respectable American should hold. Indeed, holding such views publicly is to invite social and economic ostracism.

But my unconventionality goes further. If the celebration of diversity, the denial of race, and the destruction of European-peopled societies in terms of their self-sought racial extinction are cultural and political axioms that must be accepted without question or complaint, the question becomes who created the axiom, and why. In other words, who turned the world upside down and began the process of dissolution of European-peopled countries? The answer that I arrived at, again painfully, is that the Jews are the revolutionary agents who have not only sowed racial disharmony in the United States (and elsewhere), but they are largely responsible for the rapid moral degradation in our societies. True enough, Jews are not singularly responsible, but the point is that their contribution to the social well-being and flourishing of the non-Jews with whom they share territory — from a collective point of view — is always negative.

As I have cataloged repeatedly, given my profession and my geography, individual Jews have played an outsized and unique role in my life — and it goes without saying that whatever views I hold towards Jewry as a whole are not animated by personal animosity towards any particular Jew that I have ever known. Indeed, if anything, I hold the views about Jewry generally despite my long and varied history with individual Jews. Parenthetically, this is a key distinction that is not allowed within the intellectual framework of the post-Christian, multicultural West — that is, recognition of group dynamics and group predilections are not allowed. Put simply, we are not allowed to stereotype anymore based on group activity even though the basis for the stereotypes is punctuated by the reality of what we see and experience. It is like a type of lobotomy in which the brain is no longer allowed to process and analyze data because the conclusions are deemed socially impermissible. Notwithstanding my affinity towards most of the Jews that I have known, the moral rot, the manic push towards racial heterogeneity in European-peopled countries, and social dysfunction in the modern West are collectively a Jewish project. Thus, if it weren’t enough that I hold odious “racist” views, I also hold equally odious “anti-Semitic” views.

Truly, I am who Secretary Hillary Clinton described as “deplorable”.

*        *        *        *

Now, of course, I am no racist or anti-Semite but holding the views that I hold now makes me liable to the charge per se. No, if I get down to brass tacks, the change that occurred in me was a willingness to see what I refused to consider before: namely, that groups exist along racial lines, that they exist with differing talent and attributes, and further that they exist with differing moral sensibilities and with differing social aims. Moreover, I have grown to see Jews as a special group that collectively — and euphemistically — is always unhelpful to their non-Jewish neighbors. If there is such a thing as Western/European conceit, it is not that which we are typically accused of; rather it is that we project on to non-Western and non-European peoples our sensibilities, temperaments, and talents — we assume that everyone essentially is just like us. As it turns out, at least in my provisional thoughts, that projection and assumption are wildly unwarranted, i.e., all men cannot be us, all men do not make the civilizations we make, and simply uploading non-Europeans in our midst will not transform them into us. The reverse is true too: adding Europeans to another civilization will not transform us into East Asians or Africans. We are who we are, and they are who they are. Without being biologically fatalistic or deterministic, there are real biological differences and temperaments between the various races. That America and Western Europe are rapidly becoming Third World countries in which systems, infrastructure, and bureaucracies no longer function and our national moral consensus is disintegrating is proof positive that the pluralism, which is hailed as a great social benefit, is instead a great social evil. In particular, my steadfast belief in the essential individuality of people and their functional malleability — a bedrock component of conventional Americanism — gave way to seeing myself and others from a group perspective. And the supreme irony of my change of heart, as it were, is that it was driven precisely by the elites who relentlessly preach something that can only be described as true cognitive dissonance: (i) race and groups do not exist except that (ii) Whites, as a group, are uniquely evil and all other groups are good. Imagine, our institutions and our media uncompromisingly tell us that there are no groups or group attributes, but if there are groups and group attributes, the only salient thing that we are allowed to express is that Whites are bad, and non-Whites are good. The predominant ethic is that whatever is bad for Whites collectively is good for the rest of the world. It took this sustained expression of antipathy directed at Whites for me to see myself as White and begin to puzzle over who was driving that expression of antipathy.

While recent events and political and cultural phenomena all contributed to this awakening of sorts, what initially changed was my willingness to read books by authors whom I once considered off-limits. So, reviled authors such as Jared Taylor, E. Michael Jones, J. Philippe Rushton, Edward Dutton, Charles Murray, Israel Shahak, Gilad Atzmon, Jean Raspail, and Guillaume Faye introduced me to a new world of nonconforming dissidence. After limiting myself for many years to either the classical works of Western Civilization or Catholic works (that is, studying the patrimony of my civilization), I branched out in a new direction. In doing so, I wanted to make sense, within a workable prism of Traditional Catholicism, of the questions of race, religion, and the Jewish question. Invariably, they are always tied together. Parenthetically, when I have an intellectual knot, I seek to untangle it by writing through it. In that sense, my writing is a type of therapy for an intellectual who experiences discomfort from an intellectual disorder. My corpus of work, which is now long and varied, is essentially a journal of working out my intellectual conundrums, one page at a time. True to the maxim that the life unexamined is not worth living, I have examined my life, which is synonymous with my mind and intellect, by reading and writing on the topics that confounded me until that confounding was ameliorated.

There is no consensus among these dissident writers: the various anathematized authors that I have read, the question of the dissolution of the West, the withering of a Eurocentric culture and civilization in its wake, and the looming disappearance of Whites is something that is approached from different angles. Some, like Taylor and Dutton, approach the issue from a cultural and biological perspective — race for them is the predominant question. Others, like Atzmon, and Shahak, are fixated on the Jewish Question and the Jewish supremacism as something particular odious. Some approach it in terms of the superiority of Western Civilization like Faye and Raspail. Still others, like Murray, approach it from the perspective of salvaging the Enlightenment by acknowledging that different racial outcomes are to be expected and tolerated based on differing talents and aptitudes. Others, like Jones, approach the Jewish question as predominant but approach it as something born out of religious history. One author fuses the Jewish question and race in a synthesis that I find most plausible and appealing — namely, Professor Kevin MacDonald. While he is a lapsed Catholic and does not write from the perspective of the truth of Catholicism, I find that MacDonald recognizes the Jews for who they are, and, more importantly, by what they do collectively. He analyzes our situation like Taylor (in terms of a statement on race and the need for Europeans to preserve their identity and culture) but with the added benefit of providing the necessary context of why Europeans are under attack from Jews as the primary agents of our destruction. Add Jones’s Catholic critique of the Jews to MacDonald’s critique of race and the Jews and one arrives, at least in my opinion, at a very sensible statement of where we are. MacDonald then is a key intellectual in my opinion and his various works on the Jews as well as his academic periodical, The Occidental Quarterly, is necessary reading to understand the situation we face. While I do not agree with everything he says, he addresses the Jewish question without “Jew-baiting” or gutter anti-Semitism. Rather, he looks at us and them academically and without guile. The portrait he dispassionately paints may not be affirming but what he writes says more about them than it does about him.

*        *        *        *

The questions of race and the Jewish question, however, have proved to be nearly intractable — immune, as it were, from a simple working out. I know this is so because I keep reading and writing on these questions over and over again because I have not yet reached an internal coherence in what I think. That said, certain things have become clearer to some extent. Through this process, I have a better understanding of the science of race, what it is, and why it matters. The question of the reality of race, mercilessly suppressed, is both obvious and meaningful: there are races, and they differ on average in qualitative ways. This is not an invitation to discriminate against people, but it is nonetheless an acknowledgment of the way the world is. I readily admit it is an unpleasant fact, but its unpleasantness is not a reason to suppress it or ignore it. For example, instead of alleged and phony “systemic racism” or the like, the reason that African Americans disproportionately populate American prisons or require special quotas to obtain admission to America’s elite universities is that they are more temperamentally violent and less intelligent on average. That is an ugly truth but a truth all the same. And even if my consciously stating it is likewise an ugly thing, most Whites in the United States implicitly (and in their private thoughts) know that this is true, which is why so-called “White Flight” remains a persistent reality because no Whites want to live in a community dominated by African Americans.

Parenthetically, as I have written before, my intellectual acceptance of racial groups and differences therein conflicts, at least superficially, with my Catholic belief in terms of the universality of man’s dignity. Before God and Church, we are essentially equal — even if I hold the view that certain groups of men by race are not equal in talents and temperaments. I concede that that distinction bothered me for a long time — it was a stumbling block and a moral conundrum. While I would be the first to acknowledge that individual men differ in talents and temperaments, the extension of that reasoning to groups of men (especially by something inherent such as race) nonetheless rankled me. That a wolf and a domestic dog differ in temperament and intelligence as subspecies of Canis genus does not bother me; that an African and an East Asian may differ, however, does bother me. Interestingly enough, as if to demonstrate that my queasiness is a product of an overarching cultural matrix within which I was raised, men of the Church in years past had no issue with taking cognizance of the problematic nature of the Jews (see e.g. Civilta Cattolica, the official voice of the Vatican on political affairs, on the negative aspects of Jewry on European Christian countries in 1890), and, at the very least, the leaders in the Church, even if they did not accede to the modern notion of “race,” acknowledged that differences among people by group could be acknowledged without calling into question the essential dignity of all men. In any event, race differences stare us in the face — as do the overarching negative consequences for non-Jews of forging a society with a significant Jewish population.  That Christ is Lord, and He is surely, is something I have to reconcile with what I believe is reality. That both are true is what it is.

There are two lines of thought here at play as it relates to race and religion. One could say that the ultimate questions are ones of faith so the issues surrounding race, racial homogeneity, ethnic ties, and the like are red herrings designed to distract us from the Great Commission to baptize all nations. There is something to be said for that view — after all, I have much more in common with an African Traditional Catholic than I do with a homosexual White Episcopalian. True enough. But herein lies the rub: when we think of the Great Commission, there is an emphasis on nations, which is a type of surrogacy for race. In other words, the Great Commission takes for granted that men are not to be thought of atomistic individuals (that is a distinctly Enlightenment notion) but as members of tribes with a particular culture, language, history, and future. The destruction of tribalism — and not acknowledging people as members of a group — is not something that is within the remit of Christianity. Christianity is undoubtedly a universal religion, but its universality operates on the plane of a spiritual brotherhood that preserves the notion of tribe and nation — not a necessary amalgamation of people into one race. More to the point, the globalist version of universalism — the one that seeks to obliterate the historic races through miscegenation between them — makes the Great Commission more difficult to accomplish. It deracinates whomever it touches and the atomization that occurs makes the Gospel less receptive than when it is encountered in an organic community of kin and family. Deracination is a type of lived-out cynicism — it cuts off man from his father and mother, from his soil, and from his culture and language. My working hypothesis is that our Lord commissioned evangelism to the “nations” because God works corporately among men. True enough, we accept the Gospel individually, but we live out the Gospel in a community. At least that is the argument.

Traditional Catholicism itself played a part in my thinking too because it is necessarily a rejection of the philosophical schools and projects since the Enlightenment. Once I became “paleo-religious” — my mind was opened to other “paleo” schools. The moral anguish over what I describe above is uniquely modern and born out of a post-Enlightenment milieu. Once I saw the best society as a Catholic kingdom — not a mixed capitalist, technocratic, democratic nation-state — I began to see other things too. Moreover, to be a Traditional Catholic is to stare at the courage, ingenuity, and generosity of the European people. Sure, we have long had our share of great sinners (as much as anyone else), but to love the cult of saints is to stand in awe of the many of the men and women who made Europe what it became. So, while I reject a Eurocentrism that is racial, I cannot help but love my mother continent and my European cousins (both here and there) as extended kin. Without delimiting the contributions of any other groups, I am fortunate to be European and I belong to a legacy of people that have often been uniquely exceptional in world history. To put it in trite terms, I migrated in my soul from a youthful “American Exceptionalism” to something in my mature mind that amounts to a Catholic “European Exceptionalism”. My children — and every other White child — should be proud to be European in that Europeanness should be expressed within the milieu of Catholicism.

Go to Part 2.

Jones vs. KMac: Spirit or Material? Toward a Synthesis

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By now, healthy numbers of informed people are generally aware of the work of our editor Kevin MacDonald and traditional Catholic thinker E. Michael Jones. Much of their influence comes from the fact that both have devoted major portions of their careers to writing about what is absolutely the most pressing issue of our age: The Jewish Question.

What has long fascinated me is the fact that both writers have considered Jews and their collective behavior in quite contrasting ways — yet in my estimation, they are both right. How can that be? Thus, for a decade or so, I’ve attempted in my own mind to reconcile KM and EMJ. Better yet, I’d love to attempt a synthesis of the two approaches to understanding Jews. Given that the present essay marks my 100th contribution to The Occidental Observer, I’d say that a conversation about the attempt to reconcile KM and EMJ is worthy of the occasion.

In my estimation, the contrasting foundations of these two men’s analyses mirror the larger Western conflict we’ve all seen for five hundred-plus years with the struggle between our inherited Christian past, with belief in faith, souls, spirits, and—most of all—God, vs. rationalism, humanism, and materialism—in other words, a strongly scientific worldview. Obviously, Catholic traditionalist E. Michael Jones falls into the former group, while Kevin MacDonald, an academic evolutionary psychologist, falls into the latter. When views from these two competing and conflicting worldviews consider a wide range of topics, they barely ever share common ground, but with KM’s and EMJ’s approaches, they share so much that they are almost complementary in some respects. How can this be? What, then, is the nature of Jews? Why are they so unique among humans? What can they teach us about humanity in general — if not the greater meaning of existence itself?

My consideration of these questions is biographical in that I’ve grappled with these competing worldviews for most of my life and have actually wavered between them over the decades. To my own surprise, I’d now say that Jones’ Christian approach is the more conclusive narrative in that Christianity — as with religion in general — posits a beginning, a middle and an end, which even to many of us post-Christians is a familiar story encompassing “In the beginning,” Adam and Eve, the life of Christ, the struggles between Good and Evil, everlasting souls, heaven and hell, angels, and always an omnipotent, all-loving God.

In an exchange among KM, EMJ and their hostess, Jones explained some aspects of this religious view:

Man is a composite being made up of body and soul (if that word sounds tendentious to the sociobiologists, they can substitute “mind” in its place). He has both a brain and a mind. These two entities are related but distinct. Human beings, unlike angels, can’t have minds unless they have brains, which function according to the laws of chemistry, biology, electricity, etc. and are a direct product of our DNA. Our thoughts, however, are a function of our minds, and, although we can affect our minds by manipulating the chemistry of our brains through alcohol and drugs, the logic of our thoughts is independent of the functioning of our brains.

In contrast, MacDonald grounds his trilogy on Jews in a post-Christian world, one is which God is dead and therefore plays no role in the universe, where scientific laws impartially govern eternity, among which are those laws in evidence with respect to Darwinian evolution. Sadly (for me personally) this modern view of scientific materialism allows for no obvious purpose in existence beyond mere survival. And while survival is nice, it’s still does not provide a convincing reason to struggle and survive. In this sense, The West in general has been demoralized for the past few hundred years, depending on the pace and degree of an acceptance of the atheism — implicitly or explicitly — that has appeared alongside the rise of science.

In short, should you warm to either KM or EMJ, it will likely come down to the worldview you tend to accept already — the general Christian one of historical Europe or the modern scientific view. Personally, I can’t imagine many people changing their worldviews from one to the other simply based on a careful reading of Jones vs. KMac, but that has in fact been happening to me. I’m not back to a belief in God yet, but due to the facts surrounding the Jewish Question, I’m inching my way away from the Existential belief that our presence here on this Earth is meaningless, for it appears indisputable that Jewish existence has some sort of meaning, and, if their existence has meaning, so should ours.

Having just argued tentatively in favor of the religious or supernatural, I will allow that KM likely has the advantage in this debate in that the modern West and its institutions have largely abandoned a spiritual, Christian approach and accepted “science,” which can be as seemingly solid as physics and math or as malleable as the social sciences have been across time. As a rule of thumb, “educated” Westerners have shed Christianity and a belief in God, while “the unintelligent, hicks and charlatans” still embrace them. Witness today’s knee-jerk reaction to the Catholic Church’s repression of Galileo or the respective fates of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” such that Darrow is still respected to this day while Bryan is knowingly mocked.

Without question, the largest institutions of The West such as academia and the media, but also the government that rules over us, are functionally anti-Christian and pro-science. Few would argue otherwise. (Let’s leave out the Covid debate for now.) So it is within these structures of support that MacDonald has advanced his career. His project on Jews in the 1990s admits as much in the opening words of the 1994 book that began the trilogy: “The project attempts to develop an understanding of Judaism based on modern social and biological sciences. … The fundamental paradigm derives from evolutionary biology, but there will also be a major role for the theory and data derived from several areas of psychology, including especially the social psychology of group behavior.” (vii)

Though it’s been many years since I read the trilogy, I still have a strong impression that A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994) and Separation and Its Discontents (1998) hew more closely to what appears to be MacDonald’s mid-to-late career dedication to impartial scientific inquiry. In contrast, by the time of the more famous Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (also 1998; hereafter usually CofC) there is the impression that this scientist-author, as a member of the group being “critiqued” and therefore harmed, has experienced a number of “Aha!” moments and realized that his earlier efforts at impartial research were insufficient when encountering a hostile group that undermines the very power of impartial science in the service of, well, a “group evolutionary strategy.” This does not imply that MacDonald did not think that the theory and data in CofC would not hold up to the same standards of scientific rigor as the other books in the trilogy. However, from 1998 onward, I would say, MacDonald has become a partisan—and for many good reasons. (In fact, here he writes as much: “As a result of reading about various Jewish intellectual and political movements, I came to see Jews as advocating policies that are opposed to the interests of European peoples. It was this cognitive awareness based on a great deal of reading and thinking that led me to my current beliefs.”)

Careful readers of the trilogy will spot this shift, I believe, with the first two books relying more heavily on evolutionary theory straining to be as evidence-based as possible, whereas CofC moves on to “the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York intellectuals.” What is critical, KM points out, is that these venues and ideologies were promoted for their “scientific rigor” for decades, when in fact, as MacDonald discovered, they were perversions of real science employed in the course of anti-White ethnic warfare, with Freudian psychoanalysis being a prime case in point.

Perhaps more than any other thinker in the English-speaking world, MacDonald has exposed this form of ethnic warfare and really captured the critical conversations about race, Jews and Whites in the first two decades of the 21st century, despite robust efforts by Jewish-led interests to stifle this knowledge.

To be sure, KMac’s account could be right — and probably is. Over the millennia, Jews have evolved adaptive behavior that ensures their survival and puts them on top. But honestly, it’s really just too … “uncanny,” which is why EMJ’s Christian approach has, against my desire, it seems, pulled me toward belief in a spiritual battle rather than a merely biological and social one. Let’s consider Jones’ account.

I first ran across the writings of Dr. Jones through his journal Culture Wars, and I actually stopped buying it after a number of issues because the editing and format were often so atrocious that I could not take it seriously. I returned to it, however, because Jones’ writing on Jews was so blasphemous — meaning so good, touching always on our current culture in ways that were highly instructive. Only Kevin MacDonald, many of us TOQ/TOO writers and a tiny handful of others were doing something similar. And Lord knows the mainstream press and academia wouldn’t touch an approach like Jones’ (though any number of Jewish academics were in fact writing similar things in books that were rather obscure, in part because far fewer people read books this century).

I’m pretty good about keeping up with these topics and am happy to say that both MacDonald and Jones, despite opposition, have been getting great exposure for some twenty years. No doubt this is due in part to their successful use of non-written forms of discourse, such as YouTube, other podcasts, speeches, interviews, etc. And for some years, all their works were available on Amazon but of course those days are long gone as the regime methodically cracks down on White activists (and Jones).

Punishing Heretics

Not surprisingly, both of these modern heretics have paid a steep price for fearlessly addressing the JQ. For instance, beginning in 2006, this attack began against MacDonald:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has initiated a campaign against me. The controversy started in September, 2006 when someone not connected with CSULB emailed all the full-time people in the Psychology Department — except me — alerting them to a comment about me at the SPLC website.  Heidi Beirich of the SPLC came to Long Beach from November 12–15, 2006 to interview faculty and administrators about me. During the 2006–2007 and 2007–2008 academic years there was also a great deal of discussion and debate about my work and associations on faculty email lists. Eventually several departments issued statements dissociating themselves from my work and, in some cases, condemning my work.

The result was a hostile working environment for the next eight years (until he retired) where “[c]old shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.” Fortunately, MacDonald mounted a robust defense, arguing that “The SPLC is paying me attention because it wants to suppress my academic work.” Further, he argued that the two authors of the SPLC created a report that was “a compendium of ethical lapses.” Unlike others, he survived this attack on his career.

It’s been far from smooth sailing since, however. The ADL currently has 88 entries on MacDonald, and one way or another, MacDonald’s family and neighbors have heard nefarious stories about the retired professor, leading to discomfort and ostracism that most people never experience. And, of course, The Occidental Quarterly (an academic journal) and the online Occidental Observer, both of which MacDonald edits, have been de-platformed by PayPal and credit card processors.

E. Michael Jones has also endured his fair share of opprobrium as well, beginning with the almost surreal story of his first teaching appointment:

In the fall of 1980, E. Michael Jones was an assistant professor of American Literature at St. Mary’s College. After receiving his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1979, Jones had moved his wife and two children to South Bend, Indiana to begin what he thought was going to be a career in academic life. But God had other plans. One year into the six years of his tenure track position, Jones got fired because of his position on abortion. Getting fired for being against abortion at what called itself a Catholic college was something his professors at Temple found difficult to understand. Taking his cue from their incomprehension, Jones decided to abandon academe and start a magazine instead. Initially known as Fidelity and now as Culture Wars, that magazine set out to explore the disarray in the Catholic Church that led to his firing.

What Jones eventually found was that America’s kulturkampf, which long had a Protestant-Catholic dimension as well as a glaring racial one, found itself with a rapidly growing Catholic-Jewish battle as well. Increasingly after the year 2000, Jones wrote about this conflict in Culture Wars, culminating in collecting these essays into a truly magisterial book in 2008 titled The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (JRS). No reader of Jones’ writing in that tome can be surprised that Jones has been met with Jewish opposition. Jones, of course, seems entirely right about his arguments and observations, but many Jews don’t necessarily want the world to read such truths about them.

In particular, the SPLC has been aggressive in chasing Dr. Jones. And in 2008 they realized what initially appeared to be one of their greatest successes. As Jones relates:

I was in the middle of a tune when I got the call. On Monday nights I play Irish music at a pub in South Bend. On Monday, February 11, I was planning an early departure on Tuesday morning to speak at the Catholic University School of Architecture, as part of a lecture series on Building Catholic Communities….

Tim Ehlen was now on the phone explaining that the entire lecture series was cancelled by the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.   The Architecture department was the host for this lecture series.  I was scheduled to speak in less than 48 hours. … Just as Dr. Carlson was beginning his presentation, an email was sent from the Southern Poverty Law Center to Ehlen …

“These are not the Latin Mass traditionalists,” Mr. Potok continued, referring to me and John Sharpe of IHS press. “These are the people who reject Vatican II reforms. They are out of [actor Mel Gibson’s father] Hutton Gibson’s world, in saying that the Jews are destroying the world.”

When confronted with the usual SPLC shtick, Dean Ott panicked and canceled the entire lecture series.  Six months of effort on the part of Ehlen to put this series together were all over.  I would be less than candid if I were to say that cancellations come as a surprise to me. The SPLC, the group which pressured CUA to cancel, employs people whose job it is to find out when I speak and get me canceled.

Another cancellation came some years later when Jones had bags packed for an appearance at a Traditionalist Catholic conference in Gardone, in northern Italy. As before, a telephone call relayed the information that yet another Jones speech would be canceled, “thus aborting an opportunity to discuss the thesis of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit in the Traditionalist circles who had gone out of their way to avoid the issue.”

Of course, Jones understood all along what was happening because of his writing and speaking on Jews: “There were certain opinions which were left better unsaid.” Sage advice, no doubt, but based on literally thousands of instances, when that choice arises, Jones is sure to utter them anyway, which is why I titled a 2018 TOO essay on Jones: “Too Reflexively Ornery”:  E. Michael Jones and Culture Wars. In fact, a decade ago I labeled Jones as a “Catholic iconoclast” and noted how Culture Wars had run cover stories such as “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame,” and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” This Philadelphia boy knows how to shock.

Reviews

Next, we come to the issue of how the works of MacDonald and Jones have been accepted, beginning appropriately in academia, since both men earned Ph.D.s and taught at universities. While there have been extensive scholarly reviews of MacDonald’s books, neither MacDonald nor I are aware of any instance of these highly relevant books being used in any classroom in American universities, which speaks volumes about the intellectual poverty of today’s humanities and social sciences, as well as the censorship applied to much dissident thought. (MacDonald keeps a superb website cataloging these reviews and so much more; one can follow the links for weeks on end.)

The same can be said for Jones’ books on Jews, particularly The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. In my own field of American cultural history, Jones’ work far exceeds in explanatory power what has been happening in America for a century and a half over the depressing pablum that now dominates the humanities everywhere. Yet we know of no instance of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit being used in the classroom.

Fear not, however, for both MacDonald and Jones are quite adept at using the Internet to propagate their knowledge and arguments, which is likely why MacDonald emerged as the de facto intellectual leader of the Dissident or Alt-Right and Jones has become increasingly popular among younger White males. I invite readers to consider writing (or creating videos) about the Internet presence of both men.

Fate of Their Books

Some of Jones’ books are still available on Amazon, such as Degenerate Moderns, Libido Dominandi and The Slaughter of the Cities, though not JRS (old or new edition) or Logos Rising. (Oddly, Barren Metal, which appeared between JRS and Logos Rising, is available.)

In MacDonald’s case, the first book in the Jewish trilogy, A People That Shall Dwell Alone, is available at Amazon, as well as an earlier book, but not the second book in the trilogy, Separation and Its Discontents. Of course, CofC and Cultural Insurrections, the two most important books in his oeuvre, are unavailable. In contrast, Barnes and Noble sells both A People That Shall Dwell Alone and Separation and Its Discontents, and most importantly CofC (but not Cultural Insurrections). We find another split in sales where Amazon does sell Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future (2019) (which, as you might expect, takes a social science perspective on the history of the Catholic Church and its influence), but Barnes and Noble does not. Go figure. In any case, searching for each book on both sites can take some extra steps, so, again, just buy them via links on KMAC’s site.

God and Spirit

As indicated above, I’ve found myself involuntarily drifting toward a suspicion that it’s actually Jones and his belief in traditional Catholicism who is setting us further along the track than Kevin MacDonald. I say this with full knowledge of the fact that Jones resolutely disavows a belief in race, the importance of DNA and related matters. Of course, Jones is dead wrong about this, but weighed against the mass of superb scholarship Jones has done over thirty years, I intellectually ding him only about 3% for his odd claims dismissing race. Perhaps this intellectual chasm between the two men is all the more reason to achieve a synthesis of MacDonald and Jones.

Another relevant point is that over the last two decades I’ve found myself accepting a belief in the existence of Satan and Evil, and undeniably, from the perspectives of Whites and other non-Jews, Jews are inextricably associated with Satan, though I’ll leave it to others to argue whether they are, in some sense, actually Satan or more along the lines of being under the spell of that malicious being.

MacDonald can never go that route because science rejects believe in God, spiritualism, the supernatural realm, etc. For his part, Jones accepts the linkage of Jews and Satan but does this properly through the most basic of Christian doctrines—one of the Gospels. St. John writes in the Book of the Revelation (2.9, 3.9) that “those who call themselves Jews” are really liars and members of the “synagogue of Satan” (JRS, 15).

On page 32 Jones again quotes St. John by writing “The Devil is your father, and you prefer to do what your father wants. He was a murderer from the start and was never grounded in the truth; there is no truth in him at all.” I will not begin to try to unpack all of that here, but in the Introduction to JRS and here in Chapter One, titled “The Synagogue of Satan,” Jones makes a case that St. John was revealing that at the foot of the cross, when many Jews rejected Christ as the Messiah, a transformation in the term “Jew” was introduced, and no longer has “a clear racial meaning.” Further, “When the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos, and when they rejected Logos … they became revolutionaries” (p. 15). The following thousand-plus pages is a story of their revolutionary actions, which can be seen as “the history of the Jews and the attacks on the Universal Christian Church by heretics linked to Jews or heavily influenced by Jews” (p. 20). On that count, Jones succeeds hands down in making his case.

(It is interesting to note that on the following page Jones approvingly cites Kevin MacDonald’s observation that movements are led by the few — which Jones indeed shows in his discussion of The Enlightenment, the birth of modern England, the Russian Revolution, the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the American Empire. That neither Jones’s insights nor those of MacDonald are recognized at all in education in the entire Anglo-sphere is, then, an unspeakable crime and we can thank both scholars for doing their best to right this wrong.)

I know I have given far more attention to the writing of Jones than to MacDonald, but that is because I am de facto in MacDonald’s camp, writing as I do for The Occidental Quarterly and The Occidental Observer, where I explicitly support MacDonald’s work and implicitly follow it at all times as well. With Jones, however, it takes a bit more effort. MacDonald writes with unbroken clarity in a social science style, so his own prose speaks for itself. In contrast, Jones is more of a storyteller whose constant goal is to reveal “the unwritten grammar” of events both old and new. The only other scholar I’ve seen succeed in this so successfully in the cultural sphere is the late Jewish professor Stephen Whitfield (American Space, Jewish Time, 1988), though Whitfield covers only a fraction of the story Jones does. The style is fun but can take a little getting used to.

Jones uses other metaphors for exposing “the unwritten grammar” of reality. For instance, in Chapter 71 of Barren Metal, “Andrew Jackson and the Monster Bank,” Jones argues that “Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’ is the key which unlocks the door to understanding.” This passage highlights both the beauty and the utility of Jones’ writing, in this instance in a critique of usury:

What [author] Meyer failed to mention is that usury is, as Ezra Pound would have put it, contra naturam, and, by its very nature monstrous. Far from being a mysterious lapse into incoherence, Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’ is the key which unlocks the door to understanding his stake in this fight. A monster is something unnatural. Usury is monstrous because it is contra naturam. The bank war of the 1830s arose because neither Andrew Jackson nor his opponent Nicholas Biddle could articulate the real issue which had plagued the American System from its inception in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, namely, usury.

I suspect our editor Kevin MacDonald will not be overly persuaded by my foray into religion, but these unhappy, desperate times push me to desperate thoughts. By all rational, material measurements, the White race has been defeated by Jewry. Point to even one area in which Whites hold a credible counter to Jewish power. There are none. Except — and this is where desperation comes in — a turn to the possible existence of God, and the Christian God at that. Remember, if I can be convinced that Satan is alive and well, I can well consider that Satan’s opponent, God, also exists. It’s a start.

And I’m not the only one thinking this way. Much to my utter surprise, none other than enfant terrible Andrew Anglin has headed in much the same direction, to the extent that he, too, is turning to E. Michael Jones. In a blog on September 24, 2021, he posted this lecture by Jones:

Commenting on this video, Anglin wrote:

When I read about the way homosexuals have infiltrated the Catholic Church, my resolve in the belief that there is only one true faith is strengthened, as it makes perfect sense to me that in this time of ultimate, total, global satanic Jewish evil, that the Catholic Church would be under such aggressive assault by the Devil….

I will admit, however, that a big part of this is the fact that I really believe that E. Michael Jones is the only relevant living Christian intellectual. However, if that is the case, then why? Surely, God will offer us a guide in this time of darkness? I’m only seeing one guide, who actually seems like an adult.

I am personally cursed to see clearly what is happening in the material world. But I am not any clearer than you on what is happening in the spiritual world. So I am left in as much of a conundrum in trying to figure out what the true nature of religion is as anyone else.

Like Jones, Anglin believes that the Catholic Church “is a top target of Satan.” And any regular reader of The Daily Stormer knows that Anglin sees Jews at the center of all of this. Anglin and Jones are strange bedfellows indeed, but if Jesus could forgive a former prostitute and welcome her among his most intimate followers, Jones and the rest of us might also accept Anglin in a similar way.

Isn’t there an inescapable feeling that we are at a crossroads of history? MacDonald emphasizes that if Whites cannot adopt a counter strategy to the current Jewish group evolutionary one, our prospects are doubtful. Anglin, too, has admitted that The West has lost to the Jews and now is the time merely to survive. Jones, however, offers hope. In the closing of JRS, he writes:

The final collapse of Jewish resistance to Logos will take place when they have reached the pinnacle of worldly power. At no time in the past 2000 years have Jews had more power than now. …

The conversion of the Jews did not seem imminent. The Jews had never been more powerful; the Church, the antagonist of the synagogue of Satan for 2000 years, had never been weaker. But appearances can deceive. Benedict XVI, the author of Dominus Iesus, had said, even before becoming pope, that he looked forward to the conversion of the Jews. Reversal was in the air. (1073–77)

Perhaps we can only pray that this is so.

Conclusion

As stated above, both MacDonald and Jones, based  particularly on their books CofC and JRS, appear to be right with respect to the JQ. One cannot, for instance, read the writings of MacDonald and conclude, “No, he is wrong.” On scientific terms, he has nailed it. With Jones’ writing on Jews, it is not as easy to declare outright that “This is true” because it revolves around religion, and belief is a chief characteristic of religion. It is simply not susceptible to scientific proof. Still, when a reader gets to the end of JRS, the overwhelming response has to be, “Dr. Jones has made his case about the revolutionary (and destructive) nature of Jews.”

This is such an important point to grasp. Take, for instance, last year’s George Floyd incident, BLM violence, and what has since flowed from them. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s it was pretty much common knowledge that Jews were using Blacks as a battering ram against White society, yet by my estimation, about 90% of the writing on Blacks and American society since last year either states or implies that it is Black agency and power themselves that are responsible for this. Of course, that is preposterous. Blacks don’t have any power. Jews are responsible, and KM and EMJ have written brilliantly on this in an historical context. KM did so in his essay “Jews, Blacks, and Race,” which appeared in Cultural Insurrections, while Jones did so extensively in JRS (specifically chapters 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 26 and 29). This should be common knowledge still but is not.

Again, I must stress how critical it is to openly talk about Jews and the JQ, precisely as KM and EMJ have done. As Jones wrote in Culture Wars in the December 2020 issue, Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu told us, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” That is why Jones ceaselessly names the enemy: “If you want to succeed in the culture wars, you must identify the enemy.”

Elsewhere (Part 1 & Part 2; also here) I’ve cited TOO writer Andrew Joyce on both naming the Jew and describing their destructive (and often revolutionary) behavior. Just recently he contributed a new TOO essay in which he reviewed a new Arktos book by New Zealander Kerry Bolton, a book which gets to the heart of both MacDonald’s and Jones’s cases. Not mincing words, Joyce writes that “a very Jewish cast of characters were responsible for developing, spreading, and implementing many of the most destructive ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the heart of these ideas is the desire to fracture the host society/mass culture.” Joyce quotes Bolton for a specific argument:

The focus of this Neo-Freudianism is on the individual detached from society. It is therefore a means of deconstructing and fracturing the social organism, which is why the Marxian theorists who created the Frankfurt Institute in 1923 found Freudianism to be such a useful ingredient in creating a new revolutionary synthesis. The organic bonds of family, state, faith, and ethos, disparaged as ‘primary ties’ in need of cutting, were portrayed as injurious to the individual well-being and as repressing the individual’s path to self-actualisation.

Bolton, Joyce notes, shows that “The primary weapon employed by all factions is the Freudo-Marxism Synthesis, which touted social engineering as a ‘therapy’ but possessed social control as its aim. This synthesis and its early promotion were of course Jewish in origin, and Bolton makes sure to hammer this point home.” Fortunately for us, Bolton is as tenacious as Joyce and “repeatedly stresses that many of these figures are Jews, and that the Frankfurt School, its funders, and many other peripheral associations involved in early Cultural Marxism were ‘largely Jewish.’” This corresponds completely with the scope of the writing of MacDonald and Jones, both of whom are referenced in Joyce’s essay. I’m completely astonished at this late date that so many otherwise intelligent people either fail to see this or opt not to mention it.

In any case, for years, a tiny minority of us Whites have labored mightily to inform fellow Whites (and fellow Christians) of the threats posed by our enemy. We have done what we can but it appears not to suffice. Perhaps, then, E. Michael Jones has it right in the video above when he says to change the question from “What can we do?” to “What can God do?” Maybe so. In our desperate hour, maybe that’s all we can do. I’m running out of other ideas.

Review of David Skrbina’s The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years

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The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Year
David Skrbina
Creative Fire Press, 2019

David Skrbina is a professional philosopher who was a senior lecturer at the University of Michigan from 2003–2018. In addition to the book under review, he has written and edited a number of books, including The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2014), Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2017), and the anthology Confronting Technology (Creative Fire Press, 2020).

The Jesus Hoax attempts to convince the reader that there is no rational basis for Christianity and that the motivation for its main originator, St. Paul, was antagonism toward the Roman Empire. Within this framework, Paul was a Jewish nationalist whose goal was to recruit non-Jews to oppose the Roman imperium: “Since the biblical Jesus story is false, it was evidently constructed by Paul and his fellow Jews in order to sway the gullible Gentile masses to their side and away from Rome” (43). Indeed, Skrbina claims that Paul may have been a Zealot, i.e., a member of a Jewish sect dedicated to violent resistance against the Romans, concluding “it seems clear that he was an ardent Jewish nationalist opposed to Roman rule, as was the case with most elite Jews of the time” (37).

Skrbina argues that there is no convincing evidence for the truth of the Jesus story, either within the canonical New Testament or from non-Christian sources. The earliest reference from a non-Christian source is a paragraph from the Jewish writer Josephus dated to 93 recounting the basic story, that Jesus was crucified “upon the accusation of the principal men among us”—i.e., the elite Jews of the period. Here Skrbina raises a general issue: the earliest source for the passage from Josephus is from the Christian apologist Eusebius in the fourth century, and the oldest sources for the gospels themselves are dated much later than they were supposedly written (70–95), leaving open the possibility of redactions and interpolations. For example, the oldest copy of the complete Gospel of Matthew, which, as noted below, contains the most inflammatory anti-Jewish passage of all, dates from the mid-fourth century, well after Constantine had legalized Christianity in the Empire and anti-Jewish attitudes were rife among intellectuals like Eusebius and the Church fathers such as St. John Chrysostom.”[1] The extent of redaction and interpolation remains unknown and presents obvious problems of interpretation.

The first Romans to comment on Christianity were Tacitus and Pliny (~115), both of whom disliked Christianity. As Skrbina notes, “the Romans were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this group” (60).

And Skrbina is well aware that an analysis of the entire early Christian movement must be aware of Jewish issues, quoting Nietzsche: “The first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews” (34). He is quite accurate in his assessment of Jewish ethnocentrism: Jews “saw themselves as special, different, ‘select,’ and thus they put these ideas into the mouth of their God. Certainly, no one would deny a people pride in themselves. But these extreme statements go far beyond normal bounds. They indicate a kind of self-absorption, a self-glorification, perhaps a narcissism, perhaps a conceit. To be chosen by the creator of the universe, and to be granted the right to rule, ruthlessly, over all other nations, bespeaks a kind of megalomania that is unprecedented in history” (63).

Not surprisingly, such a people have often been hated by others, and Skrbina recounts the many examples of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions in the ancient world: “where the Jews settled amongst other peoples, they seem to have made enemies” (65), noting particularly the recurrent theme—a theme that continued long past the ancient world—of Jews allying themselves with ruling elites against the native population. I was particularly struck by a passage Skrbina quotes from recent scholarship referring to advice given in 134 BC to King Antiochus VII, the Greek ruler of the Seleucid Empire, to exterminate the Jews: “for they alone among all the peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy; their forebears, impious and cursed by the gods, had been driven out of Egypt. The counselors [cited] the Jews’ hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws, which forbade them to share their table with a Gentile or give any sign of benevolence.”[2]

Skrbina concludes that there is a “deeply-embedded misanthropic streak” in Jews that continues into the contemporary era, quoting the famous passage from Rabbi Yosef who, in 2010 stated, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world—only to serve the people of Israel. They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [a man of high social standing] and eat” (Jerusalem Post, October 18, 2010). Skrbina: “There is something about Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred” (79).

Based on the extensive citations to the Old Testament, Skrbina concludes that the Gospels, commonly dated well after Paul’s writing, were also likely written by Jews. Skrbina notes that the latest-dated gospel, John, is addressed to “intra-Jewish squabbling” (41) over the issue of Jesus being the Messiah—obviously a view rejected by Orthodox Jews. In other words, John identifies as a Jew but as a Jew battling the Orthodox Jewish establishment. Importantly, John contains anti-Jewish passages that would echo down the centuries: Jews “sought to kill Jesus,” and the gospel represents Jesus as saying, “You [Jews] are of your father the devil… He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) (41). Many contemporary scholars accept the view that anti-Jewish statements in the Gospels are intramural disputes about whether Jews or Christians were the chosen people of God.

Of course, there are many other anti-Jewish statements:

  • John 5:18: For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill [Jesus], because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
  • John 7:1: After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.
  • John 7:12–13: And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
  • John 8:37: I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.

And the most influential of all:

  • Matthew 27:25–26: When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but thatrather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Such sentiments are not only found in the Gospels. St. Paul: 

  • 1Thess 2:14–15: For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they haveof the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.

Skrbina, discussing the Gospel of Mark, notes that Paul et al. had two enemies, the Romans and non-believing Jews like the Pharisees who “wanted to kill Jesus” (95). Mark therefore blamed both, and Skrbina concludes that “Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews … got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place” (95).

Later in Matthew and Luke, “the anti-Jewish rhetoric heats up a bit; the Jews are called ‘a brood of vipers’ (Mat 3:7, 12:34, 23:33) and ‘lovers of money’ (Lu 16:14). And there are repetitions of the message of revolution, including armed confrontation (“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” [Mat. 10:34]) and it depicts that the coming confrontation would split families.

Skrbina’s reconstruction of the trajectory of Christianity is presented as tentative (“I’ll not claim certainty here” [81]). For example, he imagines a soliloquy by Jewish patriot Paul asking, “What message could our ‘Jesus’ take to the masses,” answering “we need them to be pro-Jewish, not make them Jews–no, that would never work. We need something new, a ‘third way’ between Judaism and paganism. Maybe for a start, we could get them to worship our God Jehovah, and not that absurd Roman pantheon” (84; emphasis in text). And the whole point was to encourage revolt: “Throughout [Paul’s] letters we find numerous references to enslavement, revolution, insurrection, war, the importance of the disempowered masses, and so on. In the early Galatians we read of the need for Jesus to ‘deliver us from the present evil age’ ([Galatians] 1:4)” (90). Skrbina considers the following passage, from 1Corinthians 1:4 “decisive” (92): 

For consider your call, brethren, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. (Skrbina’s emphasis)

Militancy increases in Luke and Matthew, both dated to 85. Matthew (10:34): “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

If one agrees with Skrbina on all this, then he suggests that you “go to your local church leaders and confront them with the evidence (or lack thereof). Their response will confirm everything you need to know. Then, make it clear to them that you have been swindled” (112). And: “Christians need to own up the fact that they have been swindled, and then see if anything can be salvaged of their religion. Keep the social club, do charity work, help the poor—just dump the bogus metaphysics” (116). 

Discussion

Since I am not a believer and since I am quite cognizant of Jewish efforts to manipulate the beliefs and attitudes of non-Jews—the thesis, after all, of The Culture of Critique—I am quite open to Skrbina’s interpretation. However, there are a few things that bother me. 

Liars? In Skrbina’s view, the entire project was based on lies, lies made possible by Jewish contempt for non-Jews. In a section titled “Paul, Liar Supreme,” we find “The Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt. … They could be manipulated, harassed, assaulted, beaten, even killed if it served Jewish interests” (99). The gospel writers were also likely liars: “Even in ancient times, people were not idiots. How could Mark accept without any apparent evidence or confirmation, such fantastic tales? And accept them so completely that he would write them down as factual truth, as real and actual events? And then how could the same thing happen three more times, to three different individuals?” (106). And Paul is even more unlikely to have actually believed what he was writing because he was so close to the events he wrote about, and because he was a “clever man. How could he possibly have fallen so completely for a bogus Jewish messiah that he would dedicate his life to spreading the story?” (106).

This is presented as an issue of cleverness, and it is certainly true that there is a small but consistent negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity.[3]  But the weakness of the association—explaining around four percent of the variance—indicates that there are plenty of intelligent people who are quite religious. This would have been even more likely in the ancient world—a context in which religion was taken very seriously, where miraculous events were taken for granted by many, and where there wasn’t already a long history of philosophical skepticism about religion, as there is in the contemporary West. Or consider the medieval period in the West that produced highly intelligent believers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas or William of Occam. Or the ultra-religious but very intelligent Puritans who settled New England and quickly founded Harvard University and the other elite Ivy League universities. We live in an age where science has become the height of respectability—hence the attempts to manipulate what can pass as scientific to serve other interests and have a dramatic impact on contemporary culture. However, the cultural context has been much different in the past, and I suspect that correlations between intelligence and religiosity would have been approximately zero in many historical periods.

Another issue related to lying is martyrdom. The proposal that Paul and the gospel writers were liars must deal with the issue of “Who would die for a lie? … as Jews, they were all, already, under persecution from the Romans. As extremist, fanatical Jews they were willing to do anything and suffer any punishment, in order to help ‘Israel’” (110). It’s certainly true that Jews died and were enslaved in droves when the Romans put down the Jewish uprisings, and this was presumably on the minds of the putative gospel writers (the first Roman-Jewish war was in 70), so the extreme altruism of martyrdom for the benefit of the group seems possible, particularly among Jews—there is a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom that continues to be an important aspect of Jewish identity. However, stories of martyrdom in both the Christian and Jewish traditions may well be at least exaggerated if not entirely apocryphal (e.g., here) because of their usefulness in creating a strong sense of ingroup identity.

Again, there are the questions of who wrote the New Testament and when was it written, including possible redactions and interpolations. I am not at all a scholar on the New Testament, but I note that a recent scholar, Robert Price, dates the first collection of St. Paul’s letters from Marcion in the second century, with the authorship of some letters highly contested, and a strong possibility of interpolations by later collectors:

The question of authorship would have little bearing here one way or the other. In this process, interpolations were made and then gradually permeated the text tradition of each letter until final canonization of the Pastoral edition (and concurrent burning of its rivals) put a stop to all that. … But the first collector of the Pauline Epistles had been Marcion. No one else we know of would be a good candidate, certainly not the essentially fictive Luke, Timothy, and Onesimus. And Marcion, as Burkitt and Bauer show, fills the bill perfectly. Of the epistles themselves, he is probably the original author of Laodiceans (the Vorlage [i.e., original version] of Ephesians) and perhaps of Galatians, too. Like Muhammad in the Koran, he would have read his own struggles back into the careers of his biblical predecessors.

But there are other scholars who continue to uphold the view that the New Testament is a reliable account, or at least reliable enough (see, e.g., Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs). I am certainly not in any position to evaluate what continues to be a very contentious area which has been covered in minute deal for at least 200 years, often by highly motivated scholars. At this late stage of scholarship, it seems unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached, especially because a great deal of the scholarship may well be motivated by a desire to defend deeply held religious beliefs—or dispute them; e.g., Blomberg describes himself as “a Christian believer of an evangelical persuasion” (xxv), which doesn’t mean that he is incorrect, but indicates that he would be motivated to defend his beliefs.

Given all this complexity I take that path of humility in trying to assess these issues, resulting in my being an agnostic about the historicity of the New Testament, whether whoever wrote it were liars, and what their real agendas were. I am persuaded that there is no consensus on what was actually written in the first century, and I accept the possibility that the writings that survive as the canonical writings of Christianity may well include later redactions and interpolations that reflect very different perceptions and interests from those of the putative first-century writers.

The Anti-Jewish Statements in the New Testament. I noted above that there are quite a few anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament, including from St. Paul himself. Skrbina claims that “The scattered anti-Jewish statements in all the Gospels—especially John—more reflect an internal Jewish battle over ideology than an external, Gentile attack” (107–108). This is a common scholarly view, but if you are trying to recruit Gentiles to your movement to serve Jewish interests, would you really want to litter your writing with anti-Jewish statements? In fact, these statements, particularly the claim that Jews committed deicide, have been used by Christians against Jews throughout the succeeding centuries, most notably “His blood be on us, and on our children.” Although the major outbreaks of anti-Semitism have always involved far more than Christian religious beliefs—they have typically occurred during periods of resource competition of various sorts (MacDonald, 1998)—I have no doubt that Christian beliefs about Jews fed into and exacerbated anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in the past when vast sections of the European population were deeply religious—e.g., during the Middle Ages when religious beliefs motivated the Crusades and long, arduous pilgrimages to sites where miracles were said to have occurred. It was a period when, e.g., Notre Dame de Paris, the symbol of traditional France, was adorned with anti-Jewish imagery.

Ecclesia (right) and Synagoga, illustrating Jewish blindness in rejecting Christianity

Indeed, Jewish perceptions of the anti-Jewish nature of Christian theology have resulted in Jewish activism to essentially rewrite or reinterpret the New Testament in their interests. Antonius J. Patrick summarizes this strand of Jewish activism in his review of Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion:

The pronouncements on non-Christian religions and the declaration Nostra aetate passed in the Fourth Session of the Council (1965) accomplished almost all that the Modernists had hoped for. In effect, these pronouncements repudiated nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on the Jews. Ever since, the Church has continually bowed to Jewish pressure in regard to its liturgy, the naming of saints, and in the political realm—its most infamous decision in the latter being the recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.

Poncins, who closely covered the Vatican II proceedings, wrote of the declaration:

. . . a number of Jewish organizations and personalities are behind the reforms which were proposed at the Council with a view to modifying the Church’s attitude and time-honored teaching about Judaism: Jules Isaac, Label Katz, President of the B’nai B’rith, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, etc. . . . These reforms are very important because they suggest that for two thousand years the Church had been mistaken and that she must make amends and completely reconsider her attitude to the Jews.

The leading figure in the years prior to the Council was the virulent anti-Catholic writer Jules Isaac, and he played an active role during the Counsel. “Isaac,” Poncins describes, “turned the Council to advantage, having found there considerable support among progressive bishops. In fact, he became the principal theorist and promoter of the campaign being waged against the traditional teaching of the Church.”

Isaac had long before begun his hostile campaign to overturn Catholic teaching on the Jews with his two most important books on the subject: Jésus et Israel (1946) and Genèse de l’Antisémitisme (1948). Poncins accurately summarizes the main thrust of these works:

In these books Jules Isaac fiercely censures Christian teaching, which he says has been the source of modern anti-Semitism, and preaches, though it would be more correct to say he demands, the ‘purification’ and ‘amendment’ of doctrines two thousand years old.

Moreover, whatever the beliefs and motives of St. Paul and the Gospel writers, the Church had essentially become an anti-Jewish movement by the fourth century when Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire:

The proposal here is that in this period of enhanced group conflict, anti-Jewish leaders such as [St. John] Chrysostom [who retains a chapel named after him at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome] attempted to convey a very negative view of Jews. Jews were to be conceptualized not as harmless practitioners of exotic, entertaining religious practices, or as magicians, fortune tellers, or healers [as had been the case previously], but as the very embodiment of evil. The entire thrust of the legislation that emerged during this period was to erect walls of separation between Jews and gentiles, to solidify the gentile group, and to make all gentiles aware of who the “enemy” was. Whereas these walls had been established and maintained previously only by Jews, in this new period of intergroup conflict the gentiles were raising walls between themselves and Jews….

The interpretation proposed here is that group conflict between Jews and gentiles entered a new stage in the 4th century. It is of considerable interest that it was during this period that accusations of Jewish greed, wealth, love of luxury and of the pleasures of the table became common (Simon 1986, 213). Such accusations did not occur during earlier periods, when anti-Jewish writings concentrated instead on Jewish separatism. These new charges suggest that Jews had increasingly developed a reputation as wealthy, and they in turn suggest that anti-Semitism had entered a new phase in the ancient world, one centered around resource competition and concerns regarding Jewish economic success, domination of gentiles [especially enslaving gentiles], and relative reproductive success. …

Jews were increasingly entering the imperial and municipal service in the 4th century until being excluded from these occupations in the 5th century—an aspect of the wide range of economic, social, and legal prohibitions on Jews dating from this period [particularly prohibitions on Jews owning Christian slaves—itself an indication of the superior wealth of Jews]. These factors, in combination with traditional gentile hostility to Judaism (because of its separatist practices and perceptions of Jewish misanthropy and perhaps of Jewish wealth), set the stage for a major anti-Semitic movement. The proposal here is that this anti-Semitic movement crystallized in the Christian Church. (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 3, 96, 98, 99)

It is quite possible that the anti-Jewish statements in the New Testament are interpolations made much later by anti-Jewish writers motivated by resource competition and Jews enslaving Christians. If so, the liars were not Paul and the Gospel writers, but Christians concerned about Jews in the third and fourth centuries. J. G. Gager suggests that the extant literature from the early Church was deliberately selected to emphasize anti-Jewish themes and exclude other voices, much as the priestly redaction of the Pentateuch retained from earlier writings only what was compatible with Judaism as a diaspora ideology (J. G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 1983), 7; N. deLange, “The origins of anti-Semitism: Ancient evidence and modern interpretation,” In Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, S. L. Gilman & S. T. Katz (NYU Press, 1991, 30–31). It’s quite conceivable that, rather than reflecting real intra-Jewish squabbles in the first century, as suggested by Skrbina, these early works were deliberately embellished in order to emphasize anti-Jewish themes in the originals—or they were completely fabricated—at a time when these writers had become strongly anti-Jewish for reasons that would not have been salient in the first century. In any case, this possibility is highly compatible with the view that there was a qualitative shift toward the conscious construction of a fundamentally anti-Jewish version of history during the formative period of the Catholic Church.

Consequences of the Lies. Skrbina ends by claiming that Paul’s lies were successful: “It took a few hundred years, but when enough people fell for the hoax, it helped to bring down the Roman Empire” (122). And he describes the lies as a “mortal threat”: “eventually drawing in 2 billion people, becoming an enemy of truth and reason, and causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities” (101).

I have never seen a scholarly argument that the institutionalization of the Catholic Church contributed importantly to the fall of the Empire. The Eastern Empire, although losing substantial territory to the Muslims, was only overthrown in 1453 after centuries of battling them. However, it’s certainly a reasonable idea given that Christian religious ideology was the polar opposite of thoroughly militarized Indo-European culture upon which Rome was built. Ancient Greco-Roman culture was fundamentally aristocratic and based on ideas of natural inequality and natural hierarchy. Thus, Plato’s “just society” as depicted in The Republic was to be ruled by philosophers because they were truly rational, and he assumes there are natural differences in the capacity for rationality—a modern would phrase it in terms of the behavior genetics of IQ and personality. Aristotle believed that some people were slaves “by nature” (Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 52), i.e., that the hierarchy between masters and slaves was natural. Reflecting themes common in Indo-European culture emphasized by Ricardo Duchesne (The Uniqueness of Western Civilization), the ancients prized fame and glory (positive esteem from others) resulting from genuine virtue and military and political accomplishments—but not labor, because laborers were often slaves and the rightful booty of conquest.

So the Christian ethic of prizing meekness, humility, and labor was quite a change. Within Christian ideology the individual replaced the ancient Indo-European family as the seat of moral legitimacy. Christian ideology was intended for all humans, resulting in a sense of moral egalitarianism, at least within the Christian community, rather than seeing society as based on natural hierarchy. Individual souls were seen as having moral agency and equal value in the eyes of God—a theology that has had very negative effects in the contemporary world.

However, universalism and the Christian virtues of meekness and humility are not the only story and indeed, as Skrbina notes, the sword also makes an appearance in the New Testament. In the Middle Ages Christianity was Germanized (James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Oxford, 1996), making it much more compatible with an aristocratic warrior ethnic. And in the medieval period and beyond, Christianity facilitated Western individualism and essentially ushered in the modern age of science, technological progress, and territorial expansion (Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World, 2020; MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).

As a direct result, Christians who had a firm conviction about their beliefs eventually conquered the world and have been responsible for essentially all of the scientific and technological progress that created the modern world. Indeed, in his The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich argues that the medieval Church invented Western individualism by insisting on monogamous marriage and by “demolishing” extended kinship relations, presented by Henrich as an attempt to understand, as phrased in his subtitle, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Harvard, 2020). I have quite a few objections to his approach (see here), but he is certainly correct that the Church was influential in opposing the power of extended kinship groups and preventing concubinage and polygyny among elites, thereby facilitating a relatively egalitarian marriage regime. Essentially Henrich ignores the ethnic basis of Western individualism that reaches back into pre-historic Western Europe and is certainly reflected in the classical Western civilizations of Greece and Rome. Henrich also ignores genetic influences on IQ and personality. But I agree with a much weaker version—that the Church facilitated Western individualism and so helped give rise to the modern world (Chapter 5 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).

So it’s not entirely a story of “causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities.” But the sad reality is that contemporary Christianity, or at least the vast majority of it, is utterly opposed to the interests of the people who have historically made it their religion. For example, Prof. Andrew Fraser has interpreted fundamental Christian texts in a manner consistent with an ethnic form of Christianity (e.g., “Global Jesus versus National Jesus”, and in The Sword of Christ (2020; this book seems to have been banned by Amazon), Giles Corey attempts to rescue an ethnically viable Christianity from the ruins of contemporary, leftist-dominated Christian theology. As I note in my preface:

Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable [so that, for example, redactions and interpolations on the New Testament could easily have been adapted to create a fundamentally new theology]. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity, [territorial expansion], and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world. …

Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. [Guillaume Durocher notes that only 6–12 percent of the French population are practicing Catholics, indicating that Catholicism cannot be blamed for France’s current malaise.] On the other hand, [American] Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel. [In general, they have rejected an explicit White identity or a sense of White interests.]

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.”  This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.

The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. …

In fact, intellectual movements of the left—disseminated throughout the educational system and by the elite media—have exploited the Western liberal tradition. The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and the media were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism by essentially creating a moral community that appealed to these traits but also served their interests. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of the activist intellectuals reviewed there, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.

The triumph of the cultural left to the point of substantial consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil. Moral communities rather than kinship are the social glue of Western societies. Westerners, being individualists and relatively unconcerned about the prospects of their kin beyond their immediate family, willingly punish other Whites who oppose their moral community, even at cost to themselves (altruistic punishment). Their main concern is to have a good reputation in their moral community which is now defined by the media and the educational system—a moral community that was created by hostile elites out of fear and loathing of the traditional White American majority (see Culture of Critique, Ch. 7).

Finally, Skrbina asks, “Can it really be beneficial to accept a myth as truth? Can one really live a happy, successful, and meaningful life dedicated to a false story or a lie?” (16). I think that the answer is that yes it can. As an evolutionist, my working hypothesis is that when it comes to the realm of ideas, evolution does not aim for truth but rather for success in continuing one’s family and increasing the prospects of one’s tribe. Certainly the religious beliefs of other groups, say Muslims, Jews, or Mormons, may well be false and based on inventions. But the people believing in these lies have often done very well in evolutionary terms and are continuing to do so. Ashkenazi Jewish eugenics proceeded for centuries in a religious context, resulting in a highly intelligent elite able to wield vast influence throughout the West. Islam expanded over hundreds of years, controlling vast territories, with leaders rewarded by large harems and many descendants; Islam is now rapidly expanding in Europe and has higher fertility than native Europeans. It’s well known that seriously religious, fundamentalist Christians in the West have more children on average than non-Christian Europeans, which is certainly adaptive. But they are also more likely to swear fealty to the interests of Israel and in general they are entirely resistant to being informed about the negative effects of multiculturalism or about Jewish cultural influence (whose effects they despise) or even Jewish traditional hostility toward Christianity.

And it can scarcely be doubted that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have been completely corrupted and actively subverted so that millions of White Americans have been swept up by the multiculturalism and replacement-level immigration as moral imperatives. Jewish activism has certainly been part of this, but traditional Christian universalism and moral egalitarianism are also part of the equation. One might say that Christianity, despite periods when it was highly adaptive, carried the seeds of its own destruction—a chink in its armor that made it relatively easy to subvert once the culture of the West had been subverted by our new hostile elite.

So, in my view, it’s a complex story, and one that is far from finished.

[1] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (AuthorHouse, 2003; originally published: Praeger, 1998), Ch. 3.

[2] Quoted in Emilio Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism or the Greek Attitude toward the Jews.” In W. D. Davies & Louis Finkelstein (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 2: The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 614–656, 645).

[3] Miron Zuckerman, et al., “The Negative Intelligence–Religiosity Relation: New and Confirming Evidence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 46, no. 6(2020): 856–868.