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Jewish Paranoia: Scientific and Cultural Perspectives

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“The term ‘Esau hates Jacob’ symbolizes the world which Jews experience. It is deeply embedded in the Jewish folk tradition.”
    C.S. Liebman, “Myth, Tradition and Values in Israeli Society,” 1978.[1]

“Increased rates of paranoid states are commonly found among migratory and immigrant groups.”
    Maizel et al., “Folie à trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel,” 1990.[2]

It surely isn’t coincidental that the two best twentieth-century novels on the theme of paranoia were written by members of the Jewish race. Although differing slightly in approach and direction, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), with its focus on jealous paranoia, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), which emphasizes conspiracy-based paranoia, are probably unsurpassed in their dissection and communication of paranoid emotions and associated mental and social disturbance.[3] Both authors, with their schizoid and labyrinthine visions, came to mind recently when I read that Jewish financiers and academics are developing artificial intelligence in order to ceaselessly scan the internet for “hidden antisemitism on social media.” Britain’s The Times reports:

Workers on the Decoding Antisemitism project will write algorithms to find codes such as “Juice” instead of “Jews” and look for anti-Jewish narratives, conspiracy theories and stereotypes that are harder to detect automatically than explicit racism. They hope to develop a tool that can scan websites and social media profiles for implicit antisemitism.

This strange venture is being staffed by a motley of Jews and grant-hungry Europeans, eager for some of the several million Euro donated by the German Jewish Alfred Landecker Foundation, an organisation that is as tragic-comic as its new pet project. The Alfred Landecker Foundation was established recently by the Reimann family, German billionaires who own controlling stakes in Krispy Kreme, Dr Pepper and other major players in the nutrition-devoid, diabetes-inducing goy-feed market. The Reimann’s will initially support the Foundation with an astonishing 250 million euros over the next ten years. The family is not Jewish, but, in what appears to be a new “reparations” tactic to fill the coffers of Jewish “defense bodies,” were subjected last year to what amounts to an international public relations blackmail by several influential Jewish journalists and organisations who highlighted the family’s National Socialist past. Devra First, for example, a Jewish journalist at the Boston Globe, led one of the early attacks with an article titled, “I found out Nazi money is behind my favorite coffee. Should I keep drinking it?”

The New York Times later reported that the campaign resulted in Reimann employees (there are over 180,000 globally) reporting that customers accused them of “working for Nazis.” A boycott campaign then followed, after which the family meekly announced that it was “relieved to have the truth come out” and that it would make large donations on behalf of Jews. In the end, the Reimann’s renamed their family foundation after a Jew “murdered by the Nazis,” handed over control of the Foundation to an “independent” (mostly Jewish) council, and promised it would henceforth be dedicated to fund projects that “honor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and of Nazi terror.”

The international organized Jewish community thus found itself, after relatively little effort, with a ready-made, lavishly funded vehicle for their interests. A new website for the Alfred Landecker Foundation says its mission is to educate “about the Holocaust and the terrible price that is paid when intolerance and bigotry reign.” This extremely wealthy foundation now professes that it will employ its considerable financial arsenal against “populism and nationalism.” The Decoding Antisemitism project is merely the latest surreal twist in this rather sordid tale.

What exactly “Decoding Antisemitism” will, or can, achieve remains to be seen. The most that one can say at present is that it’s part of a larger problem. As Gilad Atzmon recently asked, “What is it that causes some to constantly measure how much they are hated?” Jews now not only constantly measure how much they are hated, in the form of the usual surveys and so on, but also dedicate themselves to the innovation of new techniques of measurement. The “Decoding Antisemitism” project is, by any estimation, a form of technologized eavesdropping. And, like most eavesdropping endeavors, it is unlikely to bring much in the way of relief or profit to the eavesdropper. As my mother used to say, “eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.” Jews fully expect to be hated, and they devote significant resources to proving it to themselves and others, before declaring that “something” must be done about it. This “something,” aside from pushing for mass migration and censorship, inevitably involves further surveys or social surveillance, and thus the cycle of expectation, confirmation, and renewed determination continues. The key to the cyclical nature of this process is the Jewish expectation of irrational and inexplicable hatred from the outsider. In other words, Jewish paranoia plays a significant role in the seemingly endless provocation of anti-Semitism. Paranoia among Jews is therefore surely worthy of some consideration.

Understanding Jewish Paranoia

Gaining an evidence-based understanding of mental pathology among Jews is surprisingly difficult. Victor Sanua has noted the fact that although “mental illness among Jews has been a subject of interest and controversy for centuries,” the “dearth of studies on the mental illness of Jews is striking when compared to the number of Jewish professionals in the field.”[4] The reluctance of Jewish psychologists and psychiatrists to turn an analytical gaze inwards corresponds with the general pattern of Jewish interpretations of anti-Semitism, which is overwhelmingly portrayed as originating independently of Jews and their behavior. Jews are notable for their strong aversion to considerations of personal or group-level wrongdoing, and the fact that there are few studies of Jewish mental health is also confirmation of some of the findings of those studies that have taken place; namely, that Jews score significantly lower on guilt-associated pathologies, especially those involving self-criticism and suicide.[5] In this area, Jews more closely resemble populations with higher levels of psychopathy, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent, rather than populations with higher levels of anxiety and conscientiousness like Europeans and East Asians.[6]

Open hostility to the idea that Jews are particularly prone to certain mental illnesses is often conveyed within Jewish academia and psychiatry, something that further stifles discussion of the subject and the gathering of evidence. Sander Gilman, for example, an historian of medicine, has accused Jewish psychiatrists who studied Jews and mental illness of being self-hating Jews and complicit in the advancement of anti-Semitism:

In differentiating himself from the Jew as madman, the Jewish psychiatrist reified his own tenuous position in the power structure of medicine. The doctor and the patient are not to be confused, especially not by the doctor. The myth of the madness of the Jew can serve as a means of exploring how groups react to rhetoric aimed at them from their primary reference group.[7]

Although presented in Marxist terminology, what Gilman is essentially arguing is that Jewish psychiatrists betrayed their racial origins by producing studies that agreed with what Gilman believes to be little more than racist tropes — the idea, current from the 1860s to the present day, that certain mental illnesses are more prevalent among Jews than other populations. The major problem with Gilman’s 1984 study is that it fails to explore even a fraction of the relevant literature, simply making the assertion that the early twentieth-century studies were prejudiced and proceeding from that to a sweeping narrative of internalized anti-Semitism.

This is not to say that certain historical medical beliefs about the tendency of Jews toward some mental illnesses were always rooted in reality. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was commonly believed that Jews were more predisposed to schizophrenia than Europeans, something that scholarship had reversed entirely by the 1930s.[8] (In 2013 a genetic mutation was found that makes Ashkenazi Jews more prone to schizophrenia compared to other Ashkenazi Jews but this does not imply that Ashkenazi Jews are more prone to schizophrenia in general.) Misinterpretation, or poor cultural contextualization of data, has also led to the development of new tropes. For example, much of the scientific literature on an alleged link between Jews and hypochondriasis has been based on army recruitment data, with Jews and Italians noted as much more likely than Irish, British, or German recruits to report apparently non-existent illnesses or to exaggerate pain or incapacity.[9] Hypochondriasis can hardly be considered an appropriate diagnosis in such a context, however, given the well-known, and deeply historical, tendency of some young men to wish to avoid military service through simple malingering. As discussed in Derek Penslar’s Princeton-published Jews and the Military, Jews have a very long tradition of malingering in order to evade serving in the militaries of host nations, including acts of self-mutilation. Thus the link in the psychiatric literature between Jews and hypochondriasis based on army recruitment data is extremely naive.[10]

What does emerge from the existing literature on the mental health of Jews is a rather clear tendency towards forms of manic-depressive psychosis, a tendency toward paranoid siege mentality at the group level, and a generally very poor level of psychological adjustment to living among Whites. Ball and Clare (1990) found that Jews “are prone to suffer from affective disorders,” and added that “the possibility of a genetic contribution to the genesis of these illnesses must be considered.”[11] Halpern’s very early study of Jews in Palestine (1938) also found manic-depressive psychosis and paranoia to among the most marked manifestations of mental pathology among Jews.[12] Cooklin (1983) noted, like Ball and Clare, that there were significant differences in manic-depressive psychosis between Jews and non-Jews, and also made the argument that this difference was most probably genetic in origin.[13] In 1999, Kohn et al. responded to counter-arguments from individuals like Sander Gilman who advanced arguments that there was no scientific basis for the belief that Jews differed from non-Jews in terms of mental health. After employing a historical review and meta-analysis, Kohn et al. demonstrated conclusively that Jews had at least a “20% greater risk for affective disorders than non-Jews.”[14] In the recently-published Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry (2020), Loewenthal and Marcus add that “there is evidence that Ashkenazi Jews are more likely than others to possess genetic variations that may or may not predispose to heritable psychiatric syndromes such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.”[15]

Some of the scientific literature also provides greater insight into the tendency of Jews towards conspiracy paranoia. This is certainly relevant because the received wisdom about the nature of anti-Semitism has, since the late 1950s, essentially embodied paranoid Jewish thinking about the conspiratorial nature of out-groups. A particularly interesting aspect of the work of the Frankfurt School is the way this thinking on the part of Jews was reflected back onto a supposedly pathological out-group culture. In fact, as Jay (1980) notes, in such works as Prophets of Deceit and The Authoritarian Personality, the Frankfurt School presented Jews as victims of “paranoid projection.” The work of the Frankfurt School stunned many socialist contemporaries because of the manner in which it abandoned classical Marxist theory in favor of an almost obsessional dedication to psychologizing the out-group:

The generally psychologistic orientation of the work as a whole led some observers to believe that the Frankfurt School had abandoned its Marxist past entirely. Moreover, nowhere in the work was an attempt made to see anti-Semitism in essentially class terms.[16]

The available scientific literature strongly suggests that projection in fact operated inversely in this instance, with maladjusted Jews constructing paranoid narratives about non-Jews, in this case, European Americans. Rinder’s (1963) exploration of psychological adjustment in American populations, for example, found that Jewish “assimilation” only worsened the neuroses and mental health of Jews:

Every Jewish generation group scored lower in adjustment than the matched Gentile group on obtained Rorschach scores. The inner maladjustment of American Jews, on the basis of this evidence, seems to be greater than that of their Gentile peers, and the greater the Americanization, the greater the maladjustment.[17]

Some of this Jewish maladjustment is expressed in what Maizel et al. (1990) describe as “socially shared psychopathology,” with the additional comment that “increased rates of paranoid states are commonly found among migratory and immigrant groups.”[18] Jews have been noted as a unique “middleman minority” population that continues to behave culturally, economically, and politically, as if in a permanent state of transience. This is precisely the fertile context for socially shared psychopathology to develop.

Jews are also strongly ethnocentric, and their behavior in a diaspora condition corresponds closely with what Bar-Tal et al. (1992) found in their study of siege mentality among Israelis.[19] In this study, it was discussed that paranoid siege mentality emerges when “a significant and influential part of the group believes that outsiders have intentions to do wrong to or inflict harm on their group. … the crucial focus of the belief is on the rest of the world or out-groups.[20] This dovetails very well with the fact that Jews score very low on self-criticism or guilt-based emotions, and associated behaviors like suicide. This critical focus on the rest of the world or out-groups also explains the very strong reaction of Jews towards any sign of self-criticism within the group (e.g., accusations of “Jewish self-hatred”), and further explains the extraordinary tendency of Jews to obsessively develop theories psychologizing or pathologizing host populations, even in times of relatively peaceful co-existence, and to engage in endless monitoring of the attitudes of the out-group.

Paranoid siege mentality beliefs have serious behavioral implications, which in turn have very serious repercussions for intergroup relations. Bar-Tal et al. remark that “individuals and groups behave in ways which are consistent with their beliefs. … They may take drastic measures, even out of the range of the accepted norms for the intergroup behaviors, to prevent possible danger and avert the threat.”[21] Such drastic measures are clearly in evidence throughout Jewish history where, in bids to obtain maximum profit or security, Jews have engaged in high-risk aggression towards European masses (e.g., requesting harsh punishments from monarchs, assisting enemy armies). These measures have only ever been successful for as long as Jews could maintain strong links with a powerful elite. In times of weakened reigns or transitional stages at the top level, Jewish fortunes have suffered significantly, in the form of outbursts of violence or expulsions.

That paranoid siege mentality is a driver of the cyclical nature of anti-Semitism is more or less suggested implicitly within the scientific literature. Sanua (1992), for example, found the psychological profile of Jewish political radicals in the United States to be “paranoid-masochistic” with “the expectation of victimization seen as justifying aggressive acting out.”[22] The trend was also noted even among some Jewish psychoanalysts, with Stanley Rothman and Howard Stein suggesting that Jews, especially aggressive Left-leaning Jews, were beholden to group fantasies and had “developed a shared repetition compulsion rooted in the need for punishment.”[23]

Especially interesting in light of the recent move by Jewish groups to create software in order to monitor even the most nuanced of discussions of Jews on social media, Bar-Tal et al. remark that a key feature of paranoid siege mentality is the development of “special sensitivity to cues indicating negative intentions emitted by out-groups.”[24] There is probably no ethnic group on earth that has so finely developed its sensitivity to cues indicating negative intentions omitted by out-groups than the Jews.

Equally important to note is that this phenomenon is not indicative of low self-esteem on the part of the paranoid group. In fact, the trend again is towards low self-criticism and psychopathic levels of high self-esteem. Bar-Tal et al. explain:

Not surprisingly, Siege Mentality is related to Ethnocentrism. The belief that the world has negative intentions towards the group indicates its evil, malice, and aggressiveness. In this context, the group not only feels victimized and self-righteous, but also superior to the out-group.

Conclusion

One of the remarkable aspects of anti-Semitism is its repetitive nature. The surveyed literature offers some valuable insight into the etiological factors of anti-Semitism, especially the ways in which supremacist Jewish paranoia about anti-Semitism justifies, and operates in tandem with, aggressive behaviors against out-groups. This aggression then provokes real anti-Semitism, which consequently offers further impetus for the “shared repetition compulsion” to continue. Jews unquestionably differ from non-Jews in terms of their psychological profile, a fact that is increasingly being attributed to genetic differences, and they appear to remain significantly psychologically maladjusted to life among Whites. The continued dedication of “significant and influential” Jews to the close monitoring of out-groups, in the form of surveys, software, and government surveillance, and the intense involvement of Jewish groups in restricting the freedoms of host populations, suggests that Jewish paranoid siege mentality is in fact worsening, even entering the phase of “drastic measures” in an effort to obtain what is perhaps an unobtainable level of psychological comfort and security. Certainly these measures go “out of the range of the accepted norms for the intergroup behaviors.” A reasonable prediction, based on historical precedent, would therefore be that the further acceleration of this trend, and the ongoing neglect of the real causes of anti-Semitism, would lead to genuine intergroup conflict and the continuance of the cycle of Jewish history.

[1] C.S. Liebman, “Myth, Tradition and Values in Israeli Society,” Midstream, 24 (1978), 44-53, 44.

[2] Maizel S, Knobler HY, Herbstein R., “Folie à trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel,” British Journal of Psychiatry (1990), 157, 290-292, 290.

[3] Proust’s father was apparently native French. His Jewish mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was a descendant of wealthy Alsatian moneylenders. Harold Bloom comments that Proust’s “love for his Gentile father was real, but his passion for his Jewish mother was overwhelming.” See H. Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 369. Proust’s Jewish identity was complex but strong. See I, Ebert, “Le Premier Dreyfusard”: Jewishness in Marcel Proust,” The French Review, 67(2), 196-217; J. Hyde, “Proust, His Jews and His Jewishness” The French Review, 39(6), 837-848; and J. Brami, “Strange Jewishness: Essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust,” in A. Benhaim (ed), The Strange M. Proust (New York: Routledge, 2009).

[4] Sanua, Victor D. “Mental Illness and Other Forms of Psychiatric Deviance Among Contemporary Jewry 1.” Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 29, no. 3 (January 1992): 197–233., 197-8.

[5] Ball, R. A., and Clare, A. W. “Symptoms and Social Adjustment in Jewish Depressives.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 3 (1990): 379–83, 379, 381-2. Israel has historically had a very low suicide rate, in contrast to nations like Japan which have a culture high in self-criticism. Sanua (1992) found that Jews in Britain had a suicide rate roughly half that of British non-Jews.

[6] Lynn, R. “Racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality,” Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 32, Issue 2, 2002, 273-316.

[7] Gilman, Sander L. “Jews and mental illness: Medical metaphors, anti‐semitism, and the Jewish response.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 20, no. 2 (1984): 150-159, 158.

[8] See, Halpern, Lipman. “Some data of the psychic morbidity of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.” American Journal of Psychiatry 94, no. 5 (1938): 1215-1222, 1218. A survey of the literature found that international rates of schizophrenia (from highest) were predominantly northern European: Ireland, Norway, Scotland, Switzerland, England, Sweden, NY State, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and Finland.

[9] See, Ball, R. A., and A. W. Clare. “Symptoms and Social Adjustment in Jewish Depressives.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 3 (1990): 379–83, 381.

[10] Penslar, Derek J. Jews and the Military: A History. Princeton University Press, 2015. Malingering and service-avoidance are discussed on pages 11, 27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 45, 46, 48, 256.

[11] Ball, R. A., and A. W. Clare. “Symptoms and Social Adjustment in Jewish Depressives.” British Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 3 (1990): 379–83, 379, 381-2.

[12] Halpern, Lipman. “Some data of the psychic morbidity of Jews and Arabs in Palestine.” American Journal of Psychiatry 94, no. 5 (1938): 1215-1222, 1220.

[13] Cooklin, Ruth S., A. Ravindran, and M. W. P. Carney. “The Patterns of Mental Disorder in Jewish and Non-Jewish Admissions to a District General Hospital Psychiatric Unit: Is Manic-Depressive Illness a Typically Jewish Disorder?” Psychological Medicine 13, no. 1 (1983): 209–12, 211.

[14] Kohn, Robert, Itzhak Levav, Stacey Zolondek, and Michaele Richter. “Affective Disorders among Jews: A Historical Review and Meta-Analysis.” History of Psychiatry 10, no. 38 (June 1999): 245–67, 261.

[15] Loewenthal, K. M. & Marcus, B, “Jewish Stereotypes in Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment,” in Moffic, H.S. (ed) Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry: Recognition, Prevention, and Interventions (New York: Springer, 2020), 186.

[16] Jay, Martin. “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Anti-Semitism.” New German Critique, no. 19 (1980): 137-49, 141-2.

[17] Rinder, I D. “Mental health of American Jewish urbanites: a review of literature and predictions.” The International journal of social psychiatry vol. 9 (1963): 104-9, 108.

[18] Maizel S, Knobler HY, Herbstein R., “Folie à trois among two Soviet-Jewish immigrant families to Israel,” British Journal of Psychiatry (1990), 157, 290-292, 290.

[19] Bar-Tal, Daniel, and Dikla Antebi. “Beliefs about Negative Intentions of the World: A Study of the Israeli Siege Mentality.” Political Psychology 13, no. 4 (1992): 633-45.

[20] Ibid, 634.

[21] Ibid, 643.

[22] Sanua, Victor D. “Mental Illness and Other Forms of Psychiatric Deviance Among Contemporary Jewry 1.” Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 29, no. 3 (January 1992): 197–233., 212.

[23] See, Stein, Howard F. “Judaism and the group-fantasy of martyrdom: The psychodynamic paradox of survival through persecution.” The Journal of Psychohistory 6, no. 2 (1978): 151; Rothman, Stanley (1978). “Group Fantasies and Jewish Radicalism.”Journal of Psychohistory 6:211–240.

[24] Bar-Tal, Daniel, and Dikla Antebi. “Beliefs about Negative Intentions of the World: A Study of the Israeli Siege Mentality.” Political Psychology 13, no. 4 (1992): 633-45, 642.

Dissecting Tucker Carlson

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For many on the dissident right, Fox News’ primetime anchor Tucker Carlson is a kind of hero.  He’s pro-Trump and anti-liberal.  He comes off as a true (“paleo”) conservative, and rails against the neo-con agendas of the dominant Right.  He calls out attacks on Whites, both physical and ideological.  He exposes lies and hypocrisy in the liberal mainstream media, especially at CNN and MSNBC.  He is blunt, funny, and smart.  What more could a White alt-righter hope for?

Lots, it turns out.

Night after night, Carlson manages to pull off a remarkable feat:  He manages to criticize the self-serving lies and hypocrisy of the Left with an opposing but, in its own way, often misleading and deficient presentation.  This is no small task.  He and his crew of scriptwriters must put in hours of work each day, to prepare for his nightly one-hour performances.  And surely they have their own in-house censors and ideological gatekeepers who must approve all final topics, themes, wording, and guest-lists.  But they succeed.  Carlson’s Fox team is to be congratulated on achieving their goals.  Much of what they produce is enlightening and important.  But unfortunately, they are to be equally condemned for all their implicit biases, shallow analysis, and vital omissions.  In what follows, I will attempt to dissect Carlson and his crew, in order to lay bare both the insights and the deceptions that he offers up each evening.

Let me start with his upbringing and family background.  Now, in general, I try to avoid assigning blame for an individual’s faults to his past or his family.  People are, for the most part, responsible adults, and must be held personally responsible for their own actions.  But in this case, Carlson’s family history reveals a fairly lengthy tale of woe, malfeasance, and assorted immoralities; surely this has some bearing on his beliefs and actions as an adult.  At a minimum, it helps us to better understand the man and his motivations.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson was born in 1969 in San Francisco to Dick Carlson and Lisa McNear Lombardi.  Both parents led troubled lives.  Dick Carlson was born in Boston in 1941, to a 21-year-old male and a 15-year-old girl—a situation that today would qualify as statutory rape.  Ashamed of her pregnancy, the girl gave baby Dick up for adoption.  At the age of two, he was adopted by the Carlson family and took their name.  Moving to California in his 20s, Dick became a freelance journalist, eventually becoming involved in a libelous story against the mayor of San Francisco.  In the 1970s, Dick tried his hand at banking, but was soon involved in a political patronage scandal and accusations of dubious lending practices.[1]  In the 1980s, after a failed run for mayor of San Diego, he was appointed chief propagandist (though of course they didn’t call it that) at the Voice of America radio station, under Reagan.  In 1991, George H. W. Bush appointed him ambassador to Seychelles.  Today, at age 79, he has settled into a comfortable retirement.

As for Tucker’s mother, Lisa, she was evidently a very—shall we say—flaky person.  She married Dick in 1967, had Tucker in 1969 and then another boy in 1973, and then simply abandoned the family in 1975, when Tucker was six.  Only a very disturbed woman would up and leave her husband and two young children for no apparent reason.  Lisa’s whereabouts since that time remain a mystery.

Dick would eventually marry another troubled woman, Patricia Swanson, in 1979, when Tucker was 10 years old.  Fortuitously, Patricia was an heiress to the Swanson Foods fortune, built up in the 1930s and 1940s by her grandfather, Carl Swanson.  Her marriage to Dick was her third; at 18, she married a Jew, Howard Feldman, only to divorce a year later, and a second marriage ended in 1975.  At any rate, Dick at least “married into money,” attaining by current standards a modest fortune.  As they approach 80, both will soon be passing along a fair amount of money to Tucker.

In any case, Tucker led a privileged life from birth, despite his parental troubles.  He grew up in the wealthy community of La Jolla, California, and was schooled in Switzerland and at the prestigious Trinity College in Connecticut, eventually earning a degree in history.  Drawing on his father’s connections, he held various reporting and journalistic positions, eventually gaining his first television stint with CNN in 2000.  Tucker jumped to MSNBC in 2005, and finally to Fox in 2009.  In 2016, he was given his own program at that station.

Thus, by all accounts, Tucker is doing quite well for himself these days.  His show on Fox recently earned the highest ratings ever for a cable news show.  His salary is in the neighborhood of $6 million per year,[2] and his net worth is variously estimated at $20 million to $30 million.  At least his critiques of the wealthy corrupt of our country are well-sourced, given that he is a member of the very club that he loves to lambast.

The Tucker Model

Carlson seems to have been a life-long conservative, even during his tenures at CNN and MSNBC, where he played the conservative foil to the dominant liberal voices.  So we need not doubt his sincerity on that matter, at least.  But like all TV figures, he quickly learned how to “play the game” in order to get his share of airtime.  The primary rule: never question, challenge, or ‘out’ your bosses; always stick to the party line.  This of course is true pretty much everywhere, but in the news media, when your very job is to be an honest, diligent, and brave presenter of the truth, it seems particularly appalling to have to sacrifice basic morals—both personal and professional—simply to keep your job.  Yes, much of the blame goes to the corporate bosses, who demand ideological conformity from their news teams, but blame also goes to the individual TV figures who allow themselves to be used and corrupted for the money and fame (an old story, I know).

This is particularly troublesome for the dissident right, because there are many who view Carlson as a real voice for their concerns, and as a courageous defender of the truth.  But all too often, his real concern seems to be for himself and his fellow members of the wealthy elite, and his version of “the truth” leaves much to be desired.

Let’s start with what Carlson gets right.  Yes, the Democrats are appalling hypocrites and liars.  In the whole Covid crisis, Carlson has made much hay by exposing their double standards on things like mask-wearing, quarantine, haircuts, and salon visits.  Yes, they will say and do nearly anything to defeat Trump and win the White House, and perhaps even Congress.  Yes, Joe Biden is a near brain-dead dupe of party operatives, lacking in anything like personal principles or convictions.  Yes, Miss AOC—or now, “Sandy” Cortez, as Tucker prefers—carries an outsized liberal influence and indeed has many “radical” policies she wants to implement.  Yes, Democrats feign being environmentalists of the highest sort, and yet when in power they do little or nothing—witness the eight years of Clinton-Gore in the 1990s, or the eight Obama years.  Democrats also claim to “support our troops” but find it impossible to end our hopeless foreign wars and bring the troops home, or to dismantle our global network of imperial military outposts that costs taxpayers upwards of $500 billion a year.

It’s a similar story on the media side:  Yes, Tucker’s competing news celebrities at CNN and MSNBC are appalling hypocrites and liars.  He rightly calls out the blatant stupidity and ethical lapses of people like Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon.  CNN and MSNBC both are utterly predictable in which stories they present and which they don’t present, and Carlson has a field day with this.  These are the kinds of things that rightly earn him praise from the alt- and dissident right.

But let’s look a bit more closely at Tucker’s universe.  In his world, things are relatively black-and-white.  There are good things, and there are bad things.  The Tucker ‘goods’ include:  America, the American way of life, God (of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, of course), a second Trump presidency, capitalism, free trade, personal wealth, and unrestricted freedom of choice.  These things are standard goods for conservatives, both paleo and neo-con, but not necessarily for the dissident right.  Many in the DR see America as a failed state, as a disaster—at least in practice, if not also in theory.  Many would like to see our present corrupt nation vanish into oblivion.  Few in the DR are rich.  Many see Trump as an embarrassment or worse, hardly worth defending.  And many are at least skeptical, if not downright contemptuous, of the Judeo-Christian hoax and its ridiculous sky-god Jehovah.[3]

More troubling are the Tucker ‘bads,’ which include:  racism, anti-Semitism, White nationalism, Black Lives Matter, Antifa,[4] riots and anarchy in the streets, unwinnable foreign wars like Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks (involving “the Saudis”), Chinese global aggression (especially vis a vis Russian aggression), and climate change “alarmism.”  Clearly and obviously for those in the DR, many of these things are in fact not bad, and some are unconditional goods.  Let’s go down the list in a bit of detail:

  • Racism, Tucker loves to repeat, is a great evil. “All men are created equal,” after all, according to his beloved Declaration.  Both of these assertions are, of course, utter nonsense.  The proper, positive reading of ‘racism’ is (a) to think in racial terms about all aspects of human society, and (b) to have an appropriate self-pride in one’s own race.  Any sane and rational person would likely agree with this definition.  Science, genetics, anthropology, and sociology all testify to the overriding importance of race or ethnicity in accounting for human values and behavior.  And to not be proud of one’s own race is akin to hating one’s own family; normal, well-adjusted people have a positive self-image, and this applies to themselves, to their extended family, and to all those of their kind.  Consequently, there is no meaningful sense in which all humans are equal—not in interests, abilities, values, predispositions, inclinations…nothing.  If anything, humans are radically unequal.  “Equal before the law” is trivial, relatively meaningless, and functionally-speaking not even true.  “Equal under God” is sheer absurdity.  Human equality is a fiction.  Thus, any thinking, intelligent, and morally-intact person ought to be a ‘racist.’
  • Likewise, any thinking White is necessarily anti-Semitic, meaning, they recognize Jews as the primary threat to their collective well-being and indeed to the well-being of all humanity. To be openly and proudly anti-Semitic is to take a stand against the gang of criminals—the “planetary master criminals,” in the words of Heidegger—that have been plundering Western civilization for some two millennia.[5]
  • White nationalism and White interests are of course the raison d’être of White activism. Whenever the topic crosses Carlson’s lips, however, it morphs into ‘white supremacy’ or ‘neo-Nazism’ and is explicitly or implicitly condemned.  Whites never have valid interests as Whites, in his mind.
  • Antifa and BLM are motley collections of confused, self-hating, opportunistic, vicious, and mindless individuals, of all races (including Jews). They are loosely organized, if at all.  Isolated hit-squads, perhaps assembled for pay, leap into action under their banners and make a big splash; but for the vast majority of Whites and the vast majority of American cities, they pose no real threat at all.  Yes, they are contemptible, as Carlson says.  Yes, they should be jailed, or worse.  But no, they pose no existential threat to the DR movement.  (Carlson’s main concern with them seems to be that they often target the wealthy, which hits too close to home for his comfort.)
  • Likewise, Tucker hates riots and anarchy because they threaten the comfortable order of the economic elites. But let’s get this straight:  There are plenty of good reasons to be rioting in the streets—but George Floyd is not one of them.  If we’re going to have riots, let’s do it, for example, over the American Judeocracy that has destroyed any semblance of fairness and justice in our society.  Or over the $1 trillion spent every year in this country to maintain a global military hegemony, much of it on behalf of Jews and Israel.  Or over the obscene accumulation of wealth by American Jews, amounting to as much as $50 trillion (see here).  It’s not the rioting per se that is wrong; it’s the motivation behind it that matters.  But Carlson will have none of this.
  • Both Iraq wars (1991 and 2003) and the war in Afghanistan were Jewish-instigated neo-con wars on behalf of Israel—period. They had nothing to do with American security.  To this day, there are still some 5,000 troops in Iraq and about 7,000 in Afghanistan, fighting “terrorists” who might someday threaten Jews in Israel.  This is an utter disgrace, and even a crime against humanity.  It must end now, as Tucker says—though he will never speak the truth about these conflicts.
  • As for the 9/11 attacks, suffice to say that, once again, they seem to have been conducted on behalf Jewish and Israeli interests. To demonize the Saudis, as Carlson does, is to distract from the real issues at hand.
  • Distraction, too, seems to be his motivation for a focus on Chinese aggression rather than Russian. As a widely-detested global hegemon, the US naturally faces continual threats on many fronts.  To pick out one or the other of these threats is to distract from the deeper issues involved.  The short solution here is:  stop being a hegemon, and you will have far fewer enemies.
  • Carlson claims to be an environmentalist, but it’s clear that he qualifies only as one of the shallow and instrumentalist types. By contrast, many in the DR have legitimate concerns about climate change and would like see this nation move toward less fossil fuels, while expanding protections for wilderness and undeveloped rural areas.  Dare I add that the original dissident right, the National Socialists, placed great value on nature.  Once again, Carlson seems primarily concerned with the potential hit to his bottom line, and that of his fellow elites.

Tucker and the Jews

Finally we come to the black hole at the center of Carlson’s galaxy.  And a supermassive one it is, too.  Of that most influential, most wealthy, most corrupt, and most destructive of minorities, he offers us precisely nothing.  Jews are all but invisible on the Tucker Carlson Show.

Correction:  Jews qua Jews are invisible.  He has plenty of them on his show, but they are almost never identified as such (of course not—because that would be RACIST!).  Carlson’s regular Jews include Dr. Marc Siegel, Rick Leventhal, Mark Steyn (part-Jewish), and Dave Portnoy.  The past few weeks have included several other Jewish appearances, including Glenn Greenwald, Alex Berenson, Seth Barron, Lester Friedman, and Dov Hikind.  As on every news outlet, left, right, or center, Jews are massively over-represented.  This is not an accident.  For his part, Tucker seems more than happy to give the Jewish voice yet more airtime.

Yes, he condemns the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, and of Jeff Zucker and Michael Cohen, but again never as Jews.  Their Jewishness is, for him, utterly irrelevant.  Those of us who know better can see consistent patterns of behavior, clannish in-group defense, masterful lying, and an absolute lack of morality in these individuals.  This is not a coincidence.  We are dealing here with genetic, in-born traits that reach their highest and most ruthless fulfillment in such men.  Wherever Jews number more than a fraction of a percent of the population, there will be Weinsteins and Epsteins, Zuckers and Cohens.

A typical Carlson viewer, however, could be excused for thinking that such people as Jews didn’t even exist—unless it involves calling attention to anti-Semitism and Jewish victimhood.  Apart from that, the word ‘Jew’ is virtually never uttered.  Not even when it is most relevant; and not even when it involves the very people he loves to criticize the most.  Consider the highly relevant and surely uncoincidental relationships between Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Jews.  Take Biden, who has long had a cozy relationship with Jews, dating back at least to his fond memories of meeting Golda Meir in 1973.  In early 2007, he famously stated that “I am a Zionist,” adding “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist” (true enough).[6]  This certainly helped his political future, considering that the Judeophile and Judenknecht Obama soon thereafter chose him as his running mate.

But what secured Biden’s support among the American Judeocracy was surely his family connections.  Joe had three children by his first wife: Beau, Hunter, and Naomi.  The wife and one-year-old Naomi were killed in a car crash in 1972, but the two boys lived to adulthood (Beau died of brain cancer in 2015).  Joe then had a fourth child, Ashley, by his second and current wife, Jill.  Ashley married a Jewish doctor, Howard Krein, in 2012.  Beau married a Jewish dry-cleaning scion, Hallie Olivere, in 2002; they had two children before he died in 2015.  After his death, Olivere (now Hallie Biden) shamelessly began an affair with the alcoholic and married younger son, Hunter—he of the Ukrainian Burisma scandal fame.  Hunter then divorced his first wife (Kathleen) to take up fulltime with the Jewess Hallie, but that relationship fell apart in 2018.  After getting a stripper pregnant, Hunter then took up with another Jewess, “filmmaker” Melissa Cohen.  They married in 2019 and had a boy in 2020.

Bottom line:  All three of Biden’s adult children married Jews, and he has at least three Jewish grandchildren.  This is remarkable, and surely not accidental.  Jews flock to power, and those in power, at least the most depraved and corrupt ones, are only too happy to cement their Jewish family connections.  The same holds, as we know, for the Clintons, Trump, and Nancy Pelosi, among many others.[7]

For her part, Kamala Harris married the Jew Doug Emhoff in 2014.  As the offspring of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father, and now married to a Jew, Harris is a poster child for the degenerate racial mixing that passes for normality in liberal-Democratic circles these days.  We can see why they praised her selection for VP.

But rest assured, you won’t be confronted with any of these ugly facts on the Tucker Carlson Show.  No sir!  Because that would be RACIST!

Perhaps the biggest Jewish problem, from Carlson’s standpoint, is the possible (likely?) Jewishness of his Fox corporate owners, the Murdoch family.  The family patriarch, Rupert, now 89, has managed to obscure details of his family background.  His mother, the former Elisabeth Greene (1909-2012), is claimed by some to have been Jewish.  Journalist Richard Curtiss stated as much in 2003 (see here).  There is a weird, possibly-doctored photo showing her looking quite chummy with an Australian rabbi (ibid.).  And Rupert’s sister, Anne, apparently married a Jew named Kantor.  Suggestive, but far from definitive.

But what is not in dispute is that the Murdoch empire has been relentlessly pro-Israel, pro-Jewish, and pro-Zionist for decades.  Whether for personal, religious, or commercial reasons, the Murdochs have found it in their interest to sidle up to the Jews.  This stance unquestionably works its way down the entire Fox media network, and thus we are unsurprised that the anchors avoid the whole topic whenever possible.  The Jewish Question is, as always, That Which Shall Not Be Spoken.[8]

It is particularly frustrating, though, when folks like Carlson actually provide cover and defense for the Jews.  On many occasions, for example, he has stated or implied that Jews are White—that they benefit from “White privilege” or that they are targeted “because they are White.”  Let me make this as clear as possible:  Jews are not White—not in any relevant sense.  Jews are White like Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal are Black; that is, only to the extent that it serves their interests to deceive.  Yes, Jews’ skin tone matches ours, but that is merely an unfortunate and superficial fact of biology.  To further obscure the issue, they use plastic surgery to hide the nose and to minimize the uniquely repulsive effects of Jewish aging.  This allows them to circulate in White society unnoticed.  But they are not White.  Neither are Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, nor any other light-skinned Arabs or Middle Easterners.  ‘White’ refers only to the indigenous people of Europe, Ukraine, and Western Russia.  Jews are not White.

But Carlson seems unable to comprehend this fact, and thus he continues to perpetuate the “Jews are White” myth.  Apparently he is unwilling or unable to grasp the alternative, namely, that Jews are a distinct ethnicity with distinct genetics, and therefore with distinct skills, abilities, values, and group interests—many of which directly conflict with those of Whites.

His sins against Whites are compounded by the fact that he himself is White.  This situation is particularly galling to me and many in the DR.  We can at least understand the patent self-interest when Jewish anchors like Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow (half), Chuck Todd, Ari Melber, Mark Levin, and John Berman offer us biased reporting or lies of omission that benefit Jews.  But for Whites and other non-Jews to do the same is disgraceful.  Carlson, at least, manages to salvage some dignity in his willingness to openly criticize Jews, even if without naming them as such.  But for left-leaning White broadcasters like Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, and Chris Hayes to provide active cover and defense for Jews is utterly appalling.  They are among the leading and most damaging race-traitors in the mainstream media.  For them, no punishment can be too severe.

Despite all this, Carlson has a path to salvation.  Tucker, here it is:  Pick a random night in the not too distant future, and go off script, live, and tell the truth about the Jews.  You’re smart, you know the truth, just say it.  When the inevitable firing comes, take it like a man.  With $30 million in the bank, you’ve got more than enough for yourself, your kids, and your grandkids.  Then use your money and fame to become a real advocate for the truth.  Speak out against the Jewish monopolization of our power structure, and against Jewish malfeasance at all levels of society.

They say you might even run for president in 2024.  Imagine the commitment and support you would gain by speaking the truth.  But do it now.  There isn’t a moment to lose.  We’ll be waiting.

 

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books, including a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the book Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020).  For all his works, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com

[1] Dick Carlson ended up being interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes, as part of the larger scandal.

[2] Significantly less than his competitor, Anderson Cooper at CNN, who earns around $12 million per year.

[3] Nietzsche’s account of Christianity is particularly appropriate on this count; see here.

[4] Both the term and the ideology have long roots, having been founded in Germany in the early 1930s.  Only in the past four or five years has the concept assumed prominence in the US.

[5] For more on Heidegger, see my book Eternal Strangers (2020).

[6] On this and other related statements, see here.

[7] One wonders what the children of these power-elites are thinking.  What sane person would willingly marry into the lowest and most despicable minority on Earth?  And then have children with them?  Were they bribed?  Coerced?  Brainwashed?  The topic is surely worthy of a book-length treatment in itself.

[8] I’m tempted to call it “the elephant in the room,” but that would be an insult to elephants, so I won’t.

Walk Away, Western Man: A Declaration of White Independence

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The Declaration of the White race of America, When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that White men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the White race; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present Jewish Regime, the Zionist Occupied Government otherwise known as the System, or multiracial, egalitarian mass democracy, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over our brutalized and subjugated White people. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The System has obstructed the Administration of Justice, having selectively enforced its Laws and cast aside those most wholesome and necessary for the public good, imposing a structure of anarcho-tyranny, an egregious double standard whereby law-abiding Whites are punished instantly and ruthlessly for minor or nonexistent infractions, including self-defense and the expression of heterodox thought which was considered to be common-sense only one generation ago, while non-Whites are permitted to commit heinous acts of rapine and murder against us almost entirely unopposed and unpunished.

The System which held itself to be the guarantor of our God-given rights now usurps those very rights, employing its agents, sworn to uphold the Constitution, to enforce the ever-shifting whims of the postconstitutional State with the single end of effectuating the cultural and physical dispossession and genocide of the White race, ceaselessly pillorying and desecrating its achievements, the greatest of any race in the history of the earth.

The System has denied our people their freedom of association, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

The System has expanded the franchise so to have made it meaningless; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large, irrespective of race or qualification, for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

The System has endeavored to transform the population of the nation; for that purpose, obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and importing a new race of heathen serfs to replace our own, the people whose blood and toil built this nation.

The System has perverted the Administration of Justice, by practically suspending our own Legislatures and making unaccountable gods of kritarchs disguised as impartial Judges, dependent on its Will alone, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever, to which we enjoy no recourse whatsoever.

The System has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

The System has kept, in times of peace, Standing Armies across the earth entire while neglecting to secure either its own borders or the Consent of the people in whose name it acts.

The System has affected to render the Military a mercenary force for the State of Israel and global finance capital, independent of the Civil power and of the society in whose name it acts. The Military no longer serves any interest but that of the System, and combines with a militarized array of domestic enforcement agencies to wage War against the best interests of our people.

The System has combined with International Jewry to subject us to a New World Order, a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

The System has destroyed our industrial capacity and subjected us to the whims of global market “capitalism,” yoking us to our inferiors and placing our economic well-being in the hands of our enemies, transferring incalculable amounts of wealth from our pockets into the coffers of those enemies.

The System has excluded the White race from the enjoyment of the fruits of its own labor and prevented us from achieving the successes which our merits made due, through a series of discriminatory anti-White racial preferences that have established a perverse class hierarchy, the bottom rung of which is occupied by White men, those who created the nation whose eviscerated corpse the System draws its sustenance from.

The System has imposed devastatingly usurious Taxes on us without our Consent, and then used our expropriated incomes for the express purpose of annihilating our Lives, Liberties, and Happiness.

The System has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of its Protection and waging War against us.

The System is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries, a “Camp of the Saints,” to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. These alien races have plundered our treasuries, ravaged our women, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

The System has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our urban ghettoes and public housing projects, the merciless Black Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A System whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to the non-Whites in our midst, or to their Jewish overlords. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their cabal to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, only to find that they hold native neither justice nor magnanimity, only Satanic hatred for our people and their ways. We have conjured them by the ties of our common humanity to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the White race of America, , appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of our good People, solemnly publish and declare, That the men of the White race are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent, and that, as such, we henceforth establish a White State; that the White State is Absolved from all Allegiance to the Jewish System and its colored footsoldiers, and that all political connection between the White State and the Regime, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent State, we have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Harvey’s Homies: The Weinstein Scandal as Paradigm of Collectivist Jewish Predation on Atomized Gentiles

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Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
Ronan Farrow
Fleet paperback 2020

Ideas always sound classier in French: Lisez le blanc, lisez ce que je n’ai pas écrit et ce qui y est pourtant – “Read the white, read what I did not write and what is there nonetheless.” That was the eighteenth-century Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani (1728–87) urging a French correspondent to read one of his books with greater care. Galiani couldn’t express himself openly or he would have made dangerous enemies in the church and aristocracy.

Unorthodox thoughts

And so he concealed his true opinions from hostile eyes,  trusting that an intellectual elite in his audience would nevertheless know how to “read the white” and discern his true meaning. I came across that quote by Galiani in a fascinating compilation made by the probably Jewish political scientist Arthur M. Melzer to accompany his book Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014). Melzer is a Straussian and says that Galiani, like Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, Machiavelli and a host of other influential figures, was an adherent of “philosophical esotericism,” the practice of “communicating one’s unorthodox thoughts ‘between the lines’.” After all, as Tacitus (c.55–c.117) himself said: “Seldom are men blessed with times when they may think what they please and say what they think.”

Many centuries after Tacitus, Westerners are definitely not blessed with times to speak freely. Jonathan Sacks, then the Chief Rabbi of Britain, pointed out in 2007 that Western politics had been “poisoned by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for rights, then for special treatment.” Sacks next said something that would have got him into serious trouble if he hadn’t been Jewish himself: “The process … began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women and gays.” Sacks was right: the process did begin with Jews. And it’s continued with Jews, as they use their verbal fluency, psychological intensity and massive over-representation in the media and law to intensify what I call minority worship, or the treatment of minorities like Jews and Blacks as the saintly victims of White oppression.

Clear patterns of Jewish misbehaviour

For example, the anti-White hysteria and criminality of the Black Lives Matter movement have clear Jewish connections. And so do lots of other pathologies, from vulture capitalism to the flooding of Western nations with hostile, corrupt and low-IQ Third-Worlders. But it’s dangerous to refer even obliquely to the central Jewish role in these pathologies. Or it’s “verboten,” as Newt Gingrich put it when he was rebuked on Fox News for identifying “George Soros-elected, left-wing, anti-police pro-criminal district attorneys” as enablers of the BLM riots that have racked America during the “Summer of George.” Yes, the pro-criminal attorneys are indeed elected with money from the Jewish billionaire Soros, but you can’t say so, because it’s “anti-Semitic” to link a Jew with political subversion and the misuse of wealth. In other words: “Reality shmeality, so shut your truth-telling traps, goyim!”

These taboos on discussing clear patterns of Jewish misbehaviour in Western politics and culture mean that lots of mainstream writers are staying quiet, despite seeing perfectly well what is going on. But I also wonder whether some mainstream writers are resurrecting philosophical esotericism, the “writing between the lines” that Arthur Melzer defines as relying “not on secret codes, but simply on a more intensive use of familiar rhetorical techniques like metaphor, irony, and insinuation.” I think Ronan Farrow (born 1987), the journalist who exposed the Jewish sex-criminal Harvey Weinstein, may well have used esotericism in his book on the Weinstein scandal, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (first published in 2019). As I described in my own article “Lies, Spies and Harvey Weinstein” (published in 2017, some time before Farrow used the same rhyming words), the Weinstein scandal is a clear example of Jewish predation on gentile victims. Weinstein behaved like the Jewish “movie magnate” Jack Woltz in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather (1969). Woltz was “rough-spoken, rapaciously amorous, a raging wolf ravaging helpless flocks of young starlets.”

Two Jewish predators: Philip Green and Harvey Weinstein

That was in the 1930s and ’40s, according to Puzo’s book. By the 1950s, Woltz had become a paedophile, “aroused now only by very young girls” and raping twelve-year-old shiksas on his private plane. But Puzo didn’t explicitly identify Woltz as Jewish or describe his behaviour as inter-ethnic sexual predation. That was “verboten.” And it’s “verboten” today for Ronan Farrow to write openly that Weinstein was continuing the same Jewish-on-gentile sexual predation that Mario Puzo saw all those decades ago.

“Something good for Israel”

But Farrow could write esoterically. And what do you find on the first page of the first chapter of his book about the Weinstein scandal? You find a journalist called Rich McHugh and his inability to use the Yiddish word “fakakta” right (“fakakta,” or verkakte, means “shitty” or “crappy”). On the next page you learn that Rich McHugh “was barrel-chested, with ginger hair and a ruddy complexion, and wore a lot of gingham work-shirts.” He “looks like a farmer.” (p. 4) In short, he’s a goy! And I think Farrow was using McHugh and his difficulties with Yiddish to represent gentiles and their failure to understand the true “Yiddish” nature of the Weinstein scandal. Like Woltz in The Godfather, Weinstein was a Jewish wolf preying on shiksa starlets. When the hounds of goyish law were on his trail, Weinstein called on the help of Jewish foxes at an Israeli spy-agency called Black Cube. And it was the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak who brought Weinstein and Black Cube together. (p. 12)

And here’s what one Black Cube agent says to another agent of his highly unethical work for Weinstein: “To me, this is like doing a mitzvah. I’m doing something good for Israel.” (pp. 331-2) In that context, a mitzvah means “a divinely approved deed for a fellow Jew or to serve Jewish interests.” And presumably the Guardian journalist Seth Freedman, also working for Black Cube and Weinstein, thought he was performing a mitzvah and doing good for Israel. Freedman had been a “London stockbroker, then moved to Israel and served in the Israel Defence Forces – IDF – for fifteen months in the 2000s.” (p. 310) Then he began working for the fiercely feminist and anti-rape Guardian. This didn’t stop Freedman spying on female victims of the Jewish rapist Harvey Weinstein and trying to help Weinstein evade justice.h

“I am his people”

The feminist credentials of the Jewish lawyer Lisa Bloom didn’t stop her working for Weinstein either. Ronan Farrow had trusted Bloom and “expressed astonishment” that she had betrayed his confidences to Weinstein’s “people.” Bloom replied: “I am his people.” (p. 237) The reply can be read in two ways, of course. Bloom was one of Weinstein’s employees, but she was also one of Weinstein’s  ethnic group. Bloom might not have consciously meant to convey both meanings, but Farrow’s reporting of her words fits a pattern of “metaphor, irony, and insinuation” in his book. As we’ve already seen, Catch and Kill begins with a ruddy-faced goy who “looks like a farmer” and gets the Yiddish word “fakakta” wrong. Farrow uses the same word for the title of the first chapter of Part III, called “Army of Spies.” The goy Rich McHugh is back in that chapter, again getting the word wrong. Farrow tells him: “Please, Rich, no more Yiddish.” (p. 199) The full goy McHugh doesn’t get it, you see, but the Jew-wise Ronan Farrow does.

Or so I would claim. I think Farrow gets the Jewish nature of the Weinstein scandal – the sexual predation, the Jewish spying and the Jewish solidarity – and wants his readers to “read the white, read what I did not write and what is there nonetheless.” After all, Farrow is Jew-wise because his mother is the shiksa actress Mia Farrow (born 1945) and his legal father is the Jewish director Woody Allen (born 1935) (but his possible biological father was Frank Sinatra). Straight after reporting that Rich McHugh “looks like a farmer,” Farrow wrote about his father being “accused of sexual assault by my seven-year-old sister, Dylan,” and beginning “a sexual relationship with another of my sisters, Soon-Yi, eventually marrying her.” (p. 4) In chapter 5, Farrow describes how his father reacted à la Weinstein to the accusations of abuse: “Allen hired what his lawyer estimated to be ten or more private detectives through a network of attorneys and subcontractors. They trailed law enforcement officials, looking for evidence of drinking or gambling problems.” (pp. 32–3)

Singularly Semitic Scandals

Farrow sided with his sister and mother against his Jewish father: “so much of [Mia Farrow’s] talent and reputation was consumed by the men in her life.” (p. 32) And having seen one devious and unrepentant predator at work, he was ready to help when the actress Rose McGowan told him about being raped by another devious and unrepentant predator, Harvey Weinstein. (pp. 30-5) But does Farrow see Jewishness as central to the sexual predation of Allen, Weinstein and the media superstar Matt Lauer, also discussed here? I think he does, and I think Catch and Kill is “communicating unorthodox thoughts ‘between the lines’.”

The unorthodox thoughts are that Jews like Harvey Weinstein are predators on naïve and trusting gentiles. And that Jewish organizations like Black Cube conspire in Jewish solidarity to keep Jewish predators from justice. To repeat the words of that Black Cube agent, as reported by Farrow: “To me, this is like doing a mitzvah. I’m doing something good for Israel.”

It was “verboten” for Ronan Farrow to express those anti-Jewish thoughts openly, but I think he decided to express them esoterically in Catch and Kill. The dumb goy who opens the book misusing Yiddish is a proxy for the dumb goyim who gaped at Weinstein’s crimes, but failed to understand what was really going on. Like Avital Ronell’s abuse of academic power and Jeremy Newmark’s financial fraud, Harvey Weinstein’s sex-crimes were a singularly Semitic scandal.

Why I Vote

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I recall having a discussion/debate decades ago with a well-respected White advocate regarding the efficacy of voting. I’m not going to mention his name because I don’t know if he still holds the same position today, but back then he claimed that participating in elections was legitimizing a perverted political order, or as another commentator put it, voting gives symbolic affirmation to the system.  I believed then, however, as I do now, that voting is a worthwhile activity.

There is no doubt that our present political arrangement is malfeasant beyond reform. But is the passive resistance of non-participation in the electoral process effective? How about the old adage: silence equals assent? The establishment does take notice of voter turnout, giving lip service to promoting participation. The reality on the ground is they’re mainly concerned about motivating their own constituencies.

Even if boycotting elections sends a message that message is rather unclear. Are non-voters on the Left or on the Right? Are non-voters apathetic, or simply satisfied with the status quo?  It should be noted that voter turnout in the US is already low by Western standards. About fifty to sixty percent of those eligible participate in presidential elections, and forty to fifty percent in off-year elections. Yet this low rate has not brought about beneficial political change. So nonparticipation is not an effective strategy for transformation.

A nonvoter might argue that his individual vote is insignificant, so why bother. In an election with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of votes what difference does one vote, more or less, make? Of course if everyone on our side had that attitude we would completely surrender the ballot box to the opposition. Plus low turnout can work to our benefit if we take advantage of it. Several years ago a referendum in my town had a turnout of seventeen percent.  Thus mobilizing just nine percent of the electorate carried the day.

The Left appears to appreciate the efficacy of voting more than the Right.  The Left is better organized and more motivated on the local level. Trump carried my city and county in 2016, yet the city council and board of education are controlled by Leftists. Shame on us for our indolence and apathy.

Another argument against voting: With no candidates worthy of support, it is tiresome to vote for the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils is still evil.  First, it should be remembered that a ballot is not like a multiple-choice test. The voter does not have to take his best guess on every candidate for office.  As long as one candidate has been selected it is a valid ballot. Vote for a third party candidate. Even if he or she does not completely reflect your views, it is still a vote against the establishment.  Still no one to vote for? Most states have provisions for write-in votes that must be duly recorded.

Many years ago William Pierce made the oft repeated observation that we’re never going to vote our way out of this mess. Yet Peirce himself was a registered voter and voted in West Virginia elections. Of course what Pierce meant was that voting and electoral politics is not the solution, but it can be one part of our strategy.

Some might point to the 2016 election as an example of the futility of voting. Certainly Donald Trump has been a huge disappoint, even for someone such as myself who had a rather low expectations from the beginning. I have to believe that those who are most bitterly disillusioned had unrealistic hopes for the Trump presidency.

There were many indications during 2016 that if elected Mr. Trump would have a rough time of it. First, he ran against both the Democratic and Republican parties.  Thus after his surprise victory he did not have firm control of his party in Congress. As for his own executive branch, he did not have a likeminded cadre to staff his administration. This might not have been an insurmountable problem if Trump had had patience and a firm ideological grounding. But his temperament interfered with finding and supporting strong lieutenants with administrative skills.

Trump was elected as an outsider, a businessman, a game changer. Is politics the only profession where a lack of experience is considered an asset? Reflect on Lyndon Johnson who came to the White House after thirty years as first a legislative aide, then a congressman, senator, and vice president. Johnson knew how get his agenda implemented. Who would want to fly with a neophyte pilot whose claim to fame is as an expert entomologist?

So now in 2017 Trump, without firm party backing and with limited experience, had to confront the Deep State. The term Deep State may have the whiff of conspiracy theory, but it simply refers to the permanent bureaucracy, especially the security and intel community. Any intro to political science textbook will confirm that career bureaucrats have quite a bit of discretionary authority when interpreting and implementing policy.  This entrenched bureaucracy is guided by the neoliberal/neocon elite consensus. They saw the Trump administration as illegitimate, so, in coordination with the Democrats in Congress, they attempted what amounted to a not entirely unsuccessful coup attempt.

With his executive branch stonewalling and subverting his policies, with a largely hostile media and judiciary, and without the full support of his own party, it is no wonder Trump has floundered. It was naïve to believe that Trumpism could quickly take over the Republican Party whose operatives have long-standing vested interests. The party coopted Trump rather than the other way around. It is possible that a nationalist-populist ideology could take over the Republican Party, but it would take many years and much effort to accomplish.

To sum up Mr. Trump: The transformation he promised and we had hoped for in 2016 would have required a skilled and focused politician who could have rallied his party and public opinion to support the radical changes the system needs.  That would have taken the determination of a revolutionary genius such as V. Lenin. In the end we received more rhetoric than action, and much of the rhetoric was not very articulate.

Did Trump energize the Left? To an extent yes, but any reassertion of White identity has and will continue to enrage the Left regardless of who is in the White House. The bottom line is this: would a Clinton administration have been better for our people? Will a Biden administration benefit our cause?

I’ve acknowledged that the system is terminally corrupt, and that electoral politics has limited capacity to effect change. Why then is it still important to vote? First, we should keep in mind that voting involves no risk, no expense, and very little effort. Thus any benefit obtained from this activity comes at a low cost. The main value in voting is derived from civic engagement. It is important for our people to stay involved in the process.  Under present political and social conditions, it is easy to become discouraged and resigned to degeneracy. Our young people especially need to avoid the severe alienation that can impact their ability to function in the real world, to establish careers and families. I hesitate to make a biblical reference, but we need to be in this world, but not of it.

Participating in electoral politics can build connections and provide valuable experience. At present we cannot elect a president or senator, but how about a city councilman, school board member, or county commissioner? (One caveat: do not contribute money to establishment candidates or organizations. Our people and organizations need those funds.)  Voting should be part of a broader community participation. While it is important to prepare ourselves and our families for stormy weather, we cannot retreat into a bubble or ideological ghetto. Write a well-crafted letter to the editor of your local fish wrap, join a local organization, a garden club or a gun club or both. Stay informed. If you live in an area where such opportunities are not available to you that’s strong evidence you need to move to a more congenial locale.

Vampires vs Crosses: Why Jews and Leftists Hate White Men, Christianity and Western Civilization

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“The most merciful thing in the world,” said H.P. Lovecraft, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” But what’s the most risible thing in the world? That’s the inability of the Guardian to correlate all its contents. Here, for example, the Guardian exposes the racist stereotyping of “black, Asian and minority ethnic men” in Britain:

Prejudice against black men in the department [Department for International Development] came to the fore last year after Dfid published two images that appeared to portray black, Asian and minority ethnic men as sexual predators. … “Whilst black male voices have largely been silent on the issue of race, that changed in August 2019 when an image was posted on the front page of Insight [Dfid’s intranet] to publicise Dfid’s new sexual harassment guidance, showing a black male aggressor’s hand over [the hand of] a white woman,” it claimed. A few weeks later, another image warning of sexual harassment appeared again on the front page of the department’s magazine, this time showing a white woman being followed by a BAME [Black And Minority Ethnic] man, prompting further anguish. (Racism endemic at DfID, staff claim, The Guardian, 26th August 2020)

Chiller killers: Zahid Younis and Mujahid Arshid

But if the Guardian could correlate its own contents, it would discover that “black, Asian and minority ethnic men” are indeed sexual predators at much higher rates that White men — and often in much worse ways. A few days later, for example, the Guardian ran the headline: “Man jailed for murder of two women found in freezer in London flat.” You won’t be surprised to learn that the man’s name was Zahid Younis or that he was a “convicted sex offender” with a long history of exploiting and abusing women. His two known victims — there could easily be many more — had suffered “very significant violence” and seem to have been stamped or kicked to death before lying undiscovered in Younis’s freezer for years.

“The world’s most unsafe country for women”

Back in 2018, the Guardian had news of another femicidal freezer feature, when another “man” was jailed for “kidnapping, raping and slitting the throat of his niece before putting her body in a deep freezer.” This man was called Mujahid Arshid. So that’s two Muslim men, three horrendously brutal and misogynistic murders. But the Guardian has also recently informed its readers that a non-Muslim nation is no slouch at murderous misogyny either:

Over the past month, the Lakhimpur Kheri district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has witnessed four incidents of girls being raped and brutally murdered. At least two of the girls were Dalits, the lowest caste in the Hindu system of social hierarchy, who were previously referred to as “untouchables” and cast out from society. Last week, a 14-year-old girl Dalit girl was found hanging from a tree in a village, having been raped and murdered. Just a few days before, a three-year-old girl was raped and strangled to death. On 14 and 24 August, two girls, a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old, were both raped and killed in Lakhimpur Kheri. … India remains the most unsafe country for women in the world, with a woman raped every 20 minutes. Lower caste women in particular bear the brunt, with little to no access to justice. It first came to light in a 1999 report by Human Rights Watch that documented how Dalit women in Bihar were raped and then had their breasts cut off and were shot in the vulva. (Dalits bear brunt of India’s ‘endemic’ sexual violence crisis, The Guardian, 16th September 2020)

The Guardian claims to have a deep concern for women’s welfare, but refuses to tell the truth about which kind of men pose the biggest threat to women. It’s “black, Asian and minority ethnic men.” The Guardian also refuses to admit that mass immigration from the Third World is therefore very bad for Western women. After all, the Guardian and other leftists react to truth in the same way as vampires react to crucifixes: with horror and loathing. And that comparison is entirely apt, because leftists hate Christianity quite as much as they hate White men and Western civilization. This is perfectly logical for leftists, because the three things go together. The Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc summed it up in a pithy formula: “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.”

Anti-White, anti-male, anti-Christian

And so leftists are very eager to promote everything that attacks White men, Christianity and Western civilization. For a paradigmatic example, take the BBC’s remake of its own acclaimed television series Civilisation (1969), which was presented by the White male Christian Kenneth Clark as a celebration of European art. In 2018, the BBC attacked its own legacy in a new series called Civilisations, with three presenters, David Olusoga, Mary Beard and Simon Schama, who seem to have been deliberately chosen as the antithesis of the White male Christian Kenneth Clark. David Olusoga is Black, Mary Beard is female and Simon Schama is Jewish. In other words, the three presenters are anti-White, anti-male and anti-Christian. And while Clark was a genuinely brilliant and subtle critic and historian, Olusoga, Beard and Schama are united in their mediocrity and slavish adherence to leftist orthodoxy: “White bad, non-White good; male bad, female good; Christian bad, non-Christian good.”

Anti-White, anti-male, anti-Christian: the three presenters of Civilisations

For reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads the newspaper, the Guardian has no problem with mediocrity. And it was very pleased with the BBC’s attack on its own legacy, noting with approval that while the “first part of Civilisation went to France, Italy and Middlesex,” the new and improved Civilisations “visits Switzerland, Spain, South Africa, Greece, China, Mexico, and Honduras.” Not to mention “New Mexico, Egypt, Greece, and China.” The plurality of the new title — Civilisations — is of course an implicit rebuke of Clark’s belief in the supremacy of Western civilization. The new title promotes instead the leftist dogma of equality between different cultures, which are all civilised in their own special way. But that dogma isn’t honest, because the leftist intent all along is undermine and destroy Western civilization. As George Orwell might have put it: “All cultures are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

And while David Olusoga and Mary Beard were very useful as collaborators in the project of negating Clark and attacking his legacy, there was no doubt who was in charge. As the Jewish Chronicle put it: “Simon Schama takes the lead on BBC’s new art history show Civilisations.” The Guardian reported that “Schama begins and ends the series — and presents five of the total nine shows.” Andrew Joyce has documented at the Occidental Observer that Schama is an energetic agent of Jewish supremacism and anti-White activism. Indeed, you could almost say that Kenneth Clark foresaw Schama’s attack, because Clark said this in the last episode of the original series: “It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.”

A core tradition of Judaism and leftism

The Jewish culture of critique is designed to promote exactly that despair, cynicism and disillusion in White Europeans. And Schama’s ethnocentrism was obvious in the series, as the Jewish Chronicle was pleased to report: “For the final episode in Civilisations, [Schama] looks at some of the pictures painted by children incarcerated by the Nazis in Theresienstadt concentration camp which are on display in the Pinkas Synagogue, Prague.” I didn’t see (or want to see) the new series, but I would guess that the pictures upheld a core tradition of Jewish art down the ages: active and unrepentant ugliness. Ugliness is, of course, also a core tradition of leftism. As Steve Sailer has pointed out: “white Antifa rioters seem disproportionately to be … physically unattractive.”

It should be no surprise, then, that Antifa are so enthusiastic about setting fire to Western civilization, both literally and metaphorically. Personal ugliness goes naturally with the urge to destroy beauty, order and harmony, and to overturn the aesthetic and artistic standards whereby one is judged. Hilaire Belloc once again had a pithy summation of how things stand: “[T]here is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others.”

Leftists know that the same is true of White men, Christianity and Western civilization. You cannot attack one of these three without at the same time attacking both the others. And leftists are indeed energetically attacking all these three things. At the same time, they’re attacking the “indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.” Leftists obviously think that the two sets of three go together. And leftists are right. After all, they have to recognize truth in order to hate it, deny it and seek to destroy it.

Semitism and Capitalism: The Merits and Inadequacies of Middleman Minority Theory in Explaining the Jews, Part II

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Go to Part I

“American Jews do not fit the sojourner pattern, since their political involvement goes far beyond the support of Jewish causes. … Much Jewish political activity, whether right, center, or left, can be related to a perception of how to make America and the world safe for Jews. American Jewish support for domestic liberalism and internationalism can be interpreted in this way.”
Walter Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of Middleman Minority Theories,” 1980.[1]

Merits of Middleman Minority Theory

The most obvious merit of middleman minority theory is that, like Kevin MacDonald’s theory of a group evolutionary strategy, it places an unusual and welcome emphasis on rational resource competition as the basis for social conflict involving certain minorities. By offering a socio-economic explanation for hostility toward Jews, middleman minority theory represents a unique space within academia where the otherwise ubiquitous “pure prejudice” idea that host hostility is self-generated (from psychological problems or cultural traditions) is summarily and comprehensively dismissed. Although this has not come without criticism, as seen in Robert Cherry’s denunciation of Edna Bonacich’s work as reinforcing bigotry[2], this emphasis has been able to continue largely untroubled thanks to its advancement under a hardline traditional Marxist interpretive veneer.

Middleman minority theory, especially the variant advanced by Bonacich, also insists that host populations do have interests, and that these interests are genuinely and seriously threatened by middleman minorities who drain away resources. These minorities then use their accumulated resources to build up power and influence, sometimes even to the extent of gaining considerable economic, social, and political monopolies over the hosts. Since these monopolies can be very difficult to dislodge, and since monopolies may satisfy some interests of host populations or segments of host populations, middleman minority theory insists that it is rational and somewhat inevitable that increasingly harsh and even violent measures will be taken against the offending minority. As a result, middleman minority theory offers a far more plausible and objective understanding of group conflict than many of the ideas that dominate the academic discussion of group conflict, especially conflict involving Jews. In addition, the outright rejection of “scapegoat” theories as “superficial,” and the lack of appeals to concepts of victimhood in such a framework, can only be described in the context of the current academic climate as utterly refreshing.

A second major merit of middleman minority theory is the emphasis that some strands place on the characteristics of the minorities themselves. Middleman minority theory contains within it three basic theoretical approaches. Context-based theories like that of Roscher, and revived to some degree by Nathan Cofnas (who is particularly concerned with the urban environment-context), argue that middleman minorities are essentially creatures of the societies in which they are found, and are for the most part created by opportunities, status gaps, and vacuums over which they have no control and which have nothing to do with their inherent characteristics (a slight advantage in intelligence being the only characteristic that Cofnas feels comfortable in applying). Situational theories, like that advanced by Simmel are similar, but place more emphasis on the culturally-located role of the trader, the Stranger, and the “sojourner as trader,” as the determinant factor in the creation of middleman minorities. Culture-based, or characteristic-based, middleman minority theories, however, tend to be more numerous, and more convincing. These theories, like that advanced by Weber and given tacit assent by Bonacich and Zenner, place strong emphasis on the broad range of traditions, ideologies, behaviors, and aptitudes of middleman minority groups.

The most frequently highlighted of such traits within middleman minority theory is ethnocentrism, which again dovetails with the primary emphasis of Kevin MacDonald’s theory. Ethnocentrism is acknowledged as a central factor in the maintenance of self-segregation among middleman minority groups, and is often supported by ideological beliefs such as the caste system, or what Zenner describes as “the Chosen People complex.”[3] Ethnocentrism in middleman minorities is presented as crucial to understanding host hostility not only because of the way it facilitates the draining of resources from the host population, but also because of highly antagonistic correlates such as dual loyalty and a willingness to engage in lucrative but morally destructive (for the host) trading. Walter Zenner speaks of a “double standard of morality” that is

Expressed in dealings with outsiders, such as lending to them with interest, unscrupulous selling practices, and providing outsiders with illicit means of gratifying their appetites, while at the same time, denying the same means to in-group members.[4]

An excellent example of this process in action is the fact Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites, while making it illegal for its own citizens to use such sites. Of course, we are talking here about a nation state rather than a minority population, but this contradiction, and the nature of Israel within the international community, will be discussed in a critique of the narrowness of middleman minority theory later.

A further merit of middleman minority theory is the heavy emphasis the cultural-characteristic interpretation places on group strategies. Middleman minorities, again with Jews being held up by both Zenner and Bonacich as an exemplar or especially acute case, are said to engage in constantly adaptive activity in order to manage their visibility, ensure their safety, advance their interests, accumulate power and wealth, and entrench themselves ever deeper within the host. Bonacich has indicated that Jews are especially keen to remain entrenched in the West, and the United States in particular, because it is financially and politically lucrative, and only a catastrophic weakening of their monopolies would bring an end to existing strategies.[5] Zenner goes as far as to claim that “much of the content of American Jewish life can be seen as visibility strategies. Strategy here includes both unconscious mechanisms of coping with situations and consciously formulated plans.”[6] Zenner speaks of a “dynamic process” whereby Jews minimise visibility to avoid hostility, maximise visibility when pursuing certain interests, and generally work unceasingly to make their image more favorable in the minds of the host. Again, all of this corresponds very well with one of the central themes of the Culture of Critique — the idea that Jewish involvement in certain intellectual movements could be seen in the context of a pursuit of Jewish interests either consciously or in ways that involved unconscious motivations and self-deception. It also maps very closely to MacDonald’s framework on Jewish crypsis and other attempts to mitigate anti-Semitism, advanced in the sixth chapter of Separation and Its Discontents.

Problems in Middleman Minority Theory

Given the prevalence of Jews in the development and promotion of the modern incarnation of middleman minority theory, including Georg Simmel, Edna Bonacich, Abner Cohen, Abram Leon, Walter Zenner, Werner Cahnman,[7] Donald Horowitz,[8] Gideon Reuveni,[9] Ivan Light, Steven J. Gold,[10] and Robert Silverman,[11] a reasonable concern might be that middleman minority theory is itself an intellectual “visibility strategy.” Just as it has been posited that Jews tend to support mass migration because it will result in Jews becoming “one among many” ethnic minorities, and thus in their logic less conspicuous and therefore safer, middleman minority theory can act to reduce Jewish visibility by offering the idea that Jews are just one among many diaspora trading groups and their history and behavior is therefore not unique or worthy of special attention. It remains the case that even in those interpretations which highlight negative Jewish behavior and portray host responses as rational (e.g. the work of Bonacich and Zenner), the proposed framework still insists on some level of commonality, no matter how tenuous, with the experiences of other minority groups, and it ultimately places the blame for conflict on a much broader context, often the impersonal historical development of capitalism.

In other words, while the framework can deny that Jews are “victims” of host nations, these theories also deny that host nations are truly the victims of Jewish exploitation. Both are simply argued to be the victims of capitalism, and any sense of individual or group agency is rhetorically dissolved. Again, this acts to lower Jewish visibility and culpability and remains attractive for that reason. There are certainly good reasons along this line of thought for proposing that Steven Pinker’s promotion of the theory over Kevin MacDonald’s ideas has less to do with a serious engagement with the content of the work of Bonacich et al. and significantly more to do with deflecting the entire conversation into an area of discussion in which Pinker feels Jews are less visible.

A major problem with middleman minority theory is that it has a very uncomfortable and unsatisfactory way of handling the obviously unique aspects of the Jewish experience, especially in relation to the unprecedented involvement of Jews in post-Enlightenment Western culture and politics, something for which there is absolutely no parallel among other diaspora trading groups anywhere. As has been discussed, middleman minority theory was essentially first created, consciously or unconsciously, by scholars anxious to find a way to explain the Jewish experience. Attempts to connect this experience, amounting to some two millennia of history, with the much more modern and straightforward experiences of, for example, the Chinese in the Philippines or the Japanese in America, have been doomed to the grossest of generalizations and the clumsiest of associations. This has resulted in a steady stream of admissions within the field that the best way to interpret middleman minority theory is simply that it proposes an “ideal type” (essentially the Jews) with unfortunate “problems of fit between any actual ethnic group and this picture [the Jewish experience].”[12] Zenner has conceded that the concept has been very “difficult to define so as to cover all groups so designated.”[13] All of which calls into question whether this concept possesses any real efficacy as an analytical or predictive tool in a comparative sense at all.

An interesting point of difference between the Jewish experience and that of other diaspora trading peoples is that the latter are acknowledged as possessing a genuine sense of sojourn. In other words, their first generations tend to be truly temporary, semi-nomadic groups who aim to make money before eventually returning to a homeland. A subtly different experience is observed in the Jews, as noted by Jack Kugelmass in his 1981 PhD thesis Native Aliens: The Jews of Poland as a Middleman Minority. For Kugelmass, “the so-called “middleman” character of the Jew is seen as an aspect of the Jewish sense of sojourn, which unlike most sojourns is ideological rather than sociological in nature.” [emphasis added] Another way of phrasing this would be to say that the Jewish sense of sojourn is cultural-biological rather than contextual, and since the concept of sojourning has been a major feature of Jewish life since at least the writing of the Exodus, this difference between other groups is really so stark as to require a distinct analysis — something offered to an unparalleled degree in Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone. In this analysis, it would appear that, unlike a relatively small number of other peoples who have merely adopted some tactics in order to pursue a specific diaspora trade role, Jews have, from time immemorial, given themselves over entirely to these strategies as an entire way of life — the “middleman minority” as a raison d’être.

This absolutely crucial distinction is linked to the remarkable fact of contemporary political life that the state of Israel exists largely according to the same strategies employed by Jews when in a diaspora condition. As stated above, an excellent example of the dual morality process in action is the fact Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites, while making it illegal for its own citizens to use such sites. The creation of the state of Israel has also exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, issues of dual loyalty in Jewish minority populations, even if these issues are more or less kept out of the public eye through diplomatic soothing around Israeli spying and the maintenance of certain taboos in the mass media. Israel itself would appear to be a kind of middleman minority archetype within the international community, cultivating close and lucrative ties with the elite (the United States), while engaging in more or less unchallenged exploitative and oppressive activities against lower social orders (Palestinians, and other vulnerable or indebted population groups in South America).

Like the “ideal type” of middleman minority, Israel heavily drains the resources even of its allies (U.S. military and diplomatic aid) and pursues its strategies in a ceaseless quest for security, while maintaining moral double standards and being rather shameless in engaging in what Zenner has described as the classic overrepresentation of middleman minorities in “morally shady” activities.[14] Even in recent years, Israel has become notorious in the international organ trade, moneylending, and allegations of humanitarian atrocities. Israeli newspapers have also described their country as a “monopoly nation” due to the intense tendency towards economic monopoly in the country’s business life — a key feature of middleman minority life that Jews appear to continue to embody to an extent unparalleled in any other ethnic group. Further evidence for the apparently deep-seated, rather than contextual, nature of “middleman” traits in Jews might be found in studies indicative of a biological underpinning to Jewish ethnocentrism, such as that described by Kevin MacDonald in the Preface to the Culture of Critique:

Developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany. The Israeli infants were much more likely to become “inconsolably upset” in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite — findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

As well as dealing poorly with obviously unique aspects of the Jewish experience, a significant portion of middleman minority theory is devoted to context-based narratives that are often in stark contrast to, or completely disproven by, the historical record. With the exception of the work of Kevin MacDonald, which demonstrates a very extensive engagement with works of history, a general weakness in all of the late twentieth-century sociological studies discussed above is the fact that, despite their incredibly ambitious claims about the historical trajectory of capitalism or middleman minority populations, there is a quite serious neglect of any of the relevant historiography. This leads, in the case of the modern adherents of Simmel, Roscher, and Leon, to the constant repetition of error-laden tropes such as the idea that Jews turned to commerce because they were prohibited from owning land (rather than arriving as profit-seeking financiers), that Jews were most often invited into nations by elites seeking a financial stimulus, or that Jews were banished from countries once their position as loan merchant was superfluous. In fact, these three tropes, all of which remove Jewish agency and characteristics from consideration, are essentially the pillars of context-based middleman minority theory pertaining to Jews, and are absolutely crucial to Roscher’s ideas in particular.

The historical record is now acknowledged as more or less complete in relation to the issue of the Jewish ownership of land. It has been conclusively established, for example, that the general trend across Europe was that Jews were in fact able to possess and own land during the centuries immediately following their initial spread and expansion in Europe (c.1000–1300). Restrictions on land ownership were later enacted as penalties for exploitation or as part of a system of elite land transfer—e.g., the desire of the English kings to obtain the land of indebted lesser knights, and doing so by financially compensating Jewish moneylenders for forfeited lands they could no longer legally hold.

One of the correlates of the land ownership trope is the astonishingly naive assumption that land ownership would preclude involvement in financial speculation. Again, the historical record contradicts this. Mark Meyerson’s Princeton-published A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (2010), for example, offers an expansive analysis of Jewish landowners in Spain who “did not necessarily cultivate the land themselves” and combined wine production operations worked by non-Jewish peasants with “lending operations and tax farming.”[15] Pointing to the prevalence of early Jewish land ownership in Poland, France, and Germany, in which Jews enjoyed a “privileged status available to few Christians,” Norman Roth has described the trope that Jews were forced out of agriculture by restrictive laws and the violence of the Crusades as “patently absurd.”[16]

The theory that Jews, and by tenuous implication other middleman minorities, were most often invited into nations by elites seeking a financial stimulus or to fill a “status gap,” is also contradicted by the historical record. The early entry and expansion of Jews in Europe is relatively well-documented, the dominant trend being that Jews either presented themselves before elites in order to solicit business, or that they acted as financiers for conquest and then followed in the wake of the conquerors (e.g., the well-documented role of Jewish financiers in Norman Conquest of England and Strongbow’s conquest of Ireland).[17] Ireland’s Annals of Innisfallen (1079 A.D.) record: “Five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [King of Munster], and they were sent back again over sea.” Unless Tairdelbach (Turlough O’Brien, 1009–86) had undergone a dramatic change of mind, it’s likely that the arrival of the Jews hadn’t been preceded by an invitation. In fact, unsolicited approaches for request to settle and establish financial activities are in evidence from the time of O’Brien to the 1655 “Humble Address” of Manasse ben Israel to the English government.

A very common form of government documentation found in the study of Early Modern Jewish communities are the charters outlining their terms of settlement, and these are very revealing. Rather than act as economic catalysts, Jews are more frequently observed following the trail of already economically improving areas, hoping to profit from their advancement. As Felicitas Schmeider has pointed out, in terms of the German context, “permission to settle Jews in a newly privileged town is one thing kings were frequently, if not regularly, asked for, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”[18]

The theory that Jews were banished from countries once their position as loan merchant or general role as a middleman minority was superfluous is also forcefully contradicted by the historical record. Just as medieval Jews perceived that they were the innocent victims of evil Gentiles, so Jewish historiography has overwhelmingly portrayed the expulsions as the result of “rumors, prejudices, and insinuating and irrational accusations.”[19] Context-based middleman minorities theories absorbed these tropes and reinvented them in narratives that blamed the expulsions on the fact that Capital had simply exhausted the usefulness of the Jews. Such understandings of the expulsions have only very recently come to be revised, most saliently in the work of Harvard historian Rowan W. Dorin, whose 2015 doctoral thesis and subsequent publications have for the first time helped to fully contextualize the mass expulsions of Jews in Europe during the medieval period, 1200–1450.[20]

Dorin points out that Jews were never specifically targeted for expulsion qua Jews, but as usurers, and notes that the vast majority of expulsions in the period targeted “Christians hailing from northern Italy.” Jews were expelled, like these Christian usurers, for their actions, choices, and behaviors. What the period witnessed was not a wave of irrational anti-Jewish actions, or for that matter an impersonal reflex of glutted Capital, but rather a widespread ecclesiastical reaction against the spread of moneylending among Christians that eventually absorbed Jews into its considerations for common sense reasons. A number of laws and statutes, for example Usuranum voraginem, were designed in order to provide a schedule of punishments for foreign/travelling Christian moneylenders. These laws contained provisions for excommunication and a prohibition on renting property in certain locales. The latter effectively prohibited such moneylenders from taking up residence in those locations, and compelled their expulsion in cases where they were already domiciled. It was only after these laws were in effect that some theologians and clerics began to question why they weren’t also applied to Jews who, in the words of historian Gavin Langmuir, were then “disproportionately engaged in moneylending in northern Europe by the late 12th century.”[21] The Church had historically objected to the expulsion of Jews in the belief that their scattered presence fulfilled theological and eschatological functions. It was only via the broader, largely common sense, application of newly developed anti-usury laws that such obstructions to confrontations with Jews became theologically and ecclesiastically permissible, if not entirely desirable. And once this Rubicon had been crossed, it paved the way for a rapid series of expulsions of Jewish usury colonies from European towns and cities, a process that accelerated rapidly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The lack of engagement with developments in historiography is worsened to a large extent by the absence of a truly cross-disciplinary approach in most, if not all, existing middleman minority analyses. This is particularly glaring in the works of Bonacich and Zenner which, while making multiple and apparently crucial references to conscious and unconscious group “strategies,” fail to engage in any kind of historiographical or psychological scholarly contextualization. How exactly such strategies as “visibility strategies” can operate at group level are left completely unexplained and without any substantial evidence beyond common sense observations of Jewish behavior. The lack of a cross-disciplinary approach in such instances doesn’t necessarily mean that these ideas are wrong, or that “visibility strategies” don’t exist, but it does mean that explanations and evidence are still required. To date, the only convincing attempt to fill in such gaps, and offer a truly cross-disciplinary approach (incorporating history, sociology, and psychology) to the idea of group strategies, is found in the work of Kevin MacDonald.

Conclusion

As stated at the outset of this essay, it isn’t at all clear how any of the aspects of middleman minority theory obviate the need for a deeper theoretical framework in which to understand the behaviors and contexts under study. Middleman minority theory, as remarked above, is an incomplete tool, and has little to offer in terms of deeper explanatory value for such relevant key concepts under discussion as resource competition, ecological strategies, visibility strategies, and social identity theory. Middleman minority theory, or at least some strands of it, is useful and valuable in the study of Jews to the extent that it places an unusual emphasis on group conflict as arising from resource competition, the characteristics of Jews (including Jewish ethnocentrism), and the existence of group strategies. There are, however, multiple, serious inadequacies in middleman minority theory, including the possibility that it is in part itself a “visibility strategy,” that is has a general problem of definitions, that it fails to adequately deal with unique qualities of the Jews and their experiences, that it generally fails to engage with the historical record, and that it has no real explanatory or predictive frameworks for many of the ideas it discusses, including group strategies. I am forced to concur with Edna Bonacich that, in regards to the study of Jews, middleman minority theory should be conceived, at best, as “a useful sensitiser to a host of interrelated variables.”[22]

[1] W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 18.

[2] R. Cherry, “American Jewry and Bonacich’s Middleman Minority Theory,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 22 (2-3), 158-173, 161.

[3] W. P. Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 18.

[4] Ibid.

[5] E. Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583-94, 592.

[6] W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 23.

[7] W. Cahnman, ”Pariahs, Strangers and Court Jews,” Sociological Analysis 35, 3 (1974): 155-66.

[8] D. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

[9] G. Reuveni (ed) The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship Between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn, 2011).

[10] I. Light & S. J. Gold, Ethnic Economies (Bingley: Emerald, 2000).

[11] R. Silverman, Doing Business in Minority Markets (New York: Garland, 2000).

[12] E. Bonacich, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980), 22.

[13] W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 13.

[14] Ibid, 15.

[15] M. D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 111.

[16] N. Roth, Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003),

[17]  J. Hillaby, “Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century,” in P. Skinner (ed), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 36.

[18] F. Schmeider, “Various Ethnic and Religious Groups in Medieval German Towns? Some Evidence and Reflections,” in, Segregation, Integration, Assimilation: Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 15.

[19] Joseph Pérez, History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60.

[20] R. W. Dorin, Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200—1450 (Harvard PhD dissertation, 2015); R. W. Dorin, “Once the Jews have been Expelled,” Intent and Interpretation in Late Medieval Canon Law,” Law and History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2016), 335-362.

[21] G. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 304.

[22] Ibid, 24.