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Neocons flock to Biden: It’s All About Jewish Values

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Probably the least surprising news you will hear in this election season, from Philip Weiss, “Neoconservatives are flocking to Biden (and let’s forget about the Iran deal.”

Neoconservatives are flocking to the Biden campaign. The DC braintrust that believes in using US military power to aid Israel in the Middle East has jumped parties before– to Clinton in ’92, and back to Bush in 2000– and now they’re hopping aisles to support Biden, with Bill Kristol leading the way.

Last night on an official Biden campaign webinar led by “Jewish Americans for Biden”, and moderated by Ann Lewis of Democratic Majority for Israel, two prominent neocon Republicans endorsed Biden, primarily because of Trump’s character posing a danger to democracy. But both neocons emphasized that Biden would be more willing to use force in the Middle East and reassured Jewish viewers that Biden will seek to depoliticize Israel support, won’t necessarily return to the Iran deal and will surround himself with advisers who support Israel and believe in American military intervention. …

Eliot Cohen, a Bush aide and academic, echoed the fear that Israel is being politicized. “A lot of Jews made a big mistake by taking something I was in favor of, moving the embassy to Jerusalem and obsessing about that,” he said. But there was huge political risk in that: if the United States is internally divided, at war with itself, and “Israel has become a partisan issue, which it should never ever be…. That’s not in Israel’s longterm security interest.”

Biden will reverse that trend by appointing strong supporters of Israel, Cohen said.

“Joe Biden has a long record as a friend of Israel. I think we’re both quite familiar with the kinds of people who will go into a Biden administration and I think we feel very comfortable that they will have a deep and abiding concern for Israel which is not going to go away.”

Edelman also said that Trump has created many “dangers” in the region by not being aggressive:

“By withdrawing or threatening to withdraw US forces, by repeatedly not replying or dealing with Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf or against Saudi oil infrastructure, he’s created a sort of vacuum that is being filled in Libya by Russia and by Turkey…”

Biden will work with allies and be ready to use U.S. military in the region– or as Edelman said, “to play.”

“The region is a mess,” Edelman said. “And yet the president continually says he wants the U.S. to withdraw from the region. The reality is that the withdrawal of US power form the region has helped create this morass of threats.”

He cited three war zones in which the U.S. or proxies’ bombing is essential to U.S. security, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

In Syria, “The Trump administration pulled out and said, we don’t want to play here,” Edelman said.

“Other forces are going to fill the vacuum created by the absence of US leadership and they won’t be benign forces,” Edelman said. Iran, Russia, or Turkey will come in and create a “vortex of instability that can potentially come back to haunt us” — with terrorist attacks or the disruption of energy markets.

Cohen and Edelman opposed Obama’s Iran deal, and both predicted that Biden will be hawkish on Iran.

In other words, Trump has failed the Israel Lobby because he has tried to pull our US forces from the Middle East and, although he has laid down sanctions against Iran, he has not gone to war. Of course, these are the people who promoted the ongoing disaster of the Iraq war. They are probably right that Russia and Turkey would benefit from US pulling out completely (Libya??), but where are legitimate US interests in all this? Trump ran on ending Middle East wars and getting out of the region–the original reason the neocons jumped ship (in addition to fears of a nascent Orange Hitler). Despite being president he has been unable to do so. He has been strongly opposed by the foreign policy establishment and the Pentagon — a testament to the extent to which the US security establishment is Israel-occupied territory.

Lurking in the background of the attitudes of Cohen and Edelman is the idea that Biden would tame the forces on the left that have been so critical of Israel in recent years. With Biden they get it all: Strongly pro-Israel even to the point of initiating a war with Iran, taming the anti-Israel voices on the left (Kamala Harris with her Jewish husband s not among them), and perhaps a Senate led by Israel operative Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile the Republican Party would default to the Chamber of Commerce and the remaining neocons, and the hope of a nationally competitive GOP, much less a truly populist GOP, would die. Bill Kristol loves the prospect of a long-term Democrat domination.

And of course, all of these bellicose proposals are cloaked in a veneer of “Jewish values” — not so ironic if one assumes, as is certainly the case, that promoting war for specifically Jewish interests is indeed a Jewish value.

Cohen … spoke about Jewish values. He and his family belong to an orthodox synagogue and have raised four children with a religious education. “I’ve tried to live my life by Jewish values. One thing that’s very important for Jewish Republicans. Obviously the issue of Israel is important, it’s the only Jewish state, it’s important to look after it and for it to thrive, but what is our approach to politics?” Jews don’t believe that you Render unto God the things that are God and render unto Caesar the thing that are Caesar’s and therefore not take issue with a politician’s character “so long as they do what we want them to do.” He said, “That’s not the Jewish way.” In the Book of Samuel, the king engages “in despicable behavior,” and the prophet storms into his bedroom. “We believe that character matters.” And this election is about character.

Okay, Trump is not a saint. But given that Biden is up to his eyeballs in scandal doesn’t bother Cohen at all — despite overwhelming documentation. So we are not supposed to care that the Biden family raked in millions by using Biden’s influence to alter US foreign policy or that China could easily blackmail him into doing their bidding on trade and military issues. So in the end, it’s really about what Cohen, Edelman, Kristol, et al. think is good for Israel (Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot jumped the GOP ship even before Trump was elected). Again, count me unsurprised.

And of course, the other thing is that neocons have always been on the left within the Republican Party. One might say they have attempted to not only make Israel a bi-partisan issue (their first priority) but also promoting the liberal/left social agenda, such as replacement-level non-White immigration, as a bipartisan issue — both values strongly promoted by the mainstream Jewish community. They jumped ship mainly because Trump was promising to undo the liberal/left social agenda as well as disengage from foreign wars and US occupation of the Middle East. During the 2016 campaign, some of the strongest denunciations of Trump came from neocons (“Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump: Neocon Angst about a Fascist America”).

If you haven’t seen it, Carlson’s interview with Bobulinski is damning, and the documents he refers to have been thoroughly authenticated.

 

Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7

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“Aren’t the Chicago 7 all Jews?”
President Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon was wrong when he assumed that every member of the Chicago 7 was Jewish, but he was close enough. The 1969 trial of seven leftwing activists for inciting a riot at August 1968’s Democratic National Convention was an intensely Jewish moment in American history. Of the seven activists on trial, three were Jews (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner), and a further two (Tom Hayden and David Dellinger) lived their lives in a heavily Jewish milieu and dedicated themselves to Jewish causes. The judge in the trial, Julius Hoffman, was Jewish, as were both defense attorneys (William Moses Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass) and one of the prosecutors (Richard Schultz). For several reasons, I’ve always regarded the ultimately chaotic and clownish trial of the Chicago 7 as nothing more than a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art, demoralising to the American justice system and energising to a new generation of Judeo-Anarchist activists. These shambolic events of 1968/9 have now been disinterred for Netflix’s propagandistic and revisionist account of the episode, The Trial of the Chicago 7, in which Jewish writer/director Aaron Sorkin attempts to refashion its “lessons” for application in Trump’s America. The result is both historically disingenuous and artistically bland.

Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 opens with a montage of eight [including Bobby Seale] activists preparing to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There are several clear dogwhistles to Black Lives Matter, with barely veiled justifications of violence, including an exchange in the opening montage between Black Panther Leader Seale and a woman named Sondra. Sondra attempts to reason with Seale that his presence as a Black leader at a potentially violent rally will be taken “out of context” by “every White person in America.” As Seale persists in his preparations, Sondra begins to invoke “Dr King” before Seale responds:

[King] Is dead. He has a dream? Now he has a fuckin’ bullet in his head. Martin’s dead, Malcolm’s dead, Medgar’s dead, Bobby’s dead, Jesus is dead. They tried it peacefully, we gonna try something else.

This “something else” isn’t explored in any significant way because the film proceeds from the understanding that the violence and unrest in Chicago was purely the result of police brutality and bad local government. Painfully unaware of itself, the film sits uneasily in the aftermath of catastrophic policing and government during Charlottesville’s 2016 rally, an event that has unfairly gone down in history and popular consciousness as an exemplar of a “bad protest.” The ghost of Charlottesville, for me at least, hangs heavily over The Trial of the Chicago 7, highlighting its hypocrisy and lending the film a somewhat satirical or parodic quality that is entirely unintended and which, to my mind, is never shaken off.

The necessity of portraying the radical defendants as sympathetic has required a remarkable taming of all the characters involved, to the extent that all appear innocent to the point of mediocrity. Almost everyone in the film is two-dimensional with the possible exception of Hoffman and Rubin who are nevertheless portrayed as harmless, big-hearted clowns. Noted in history for their vulgarity and aggression (Abbie Hoffman declared of his intentions on going to Chicago:” We are dirty, smelly, grimy and foul. … We will piss and shit and fuck in public. … We will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man”), Hoffman and Rubin are reduced by Sorkin to rather bloodless and timid comic relief. We are given no indication as to the motivations or life trajectories of either Jewish activist, or indeed any of the Chicago 7, presumably because we are meant to assume that they were simply “good people” who wanted only to end the war.

As The Times of Israel has noted, the film represents a trial bleached of its intensely Jewish qualities. I’ve written previously that the 1960s New Left was indisputably a Jewish subculture. Jerry Rubin, given no backstory in Sorkin’s film, had “solidly Jewish roots” and after receiving his baccalaureate “he attended Hebrew University and later returned to Israel to spend a year there with his brother.”[1] His ‘Youth International Party,’ or Yippies, was co-founded with fellow Jewish radicals Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. He married a Jewish woman, Mimi Leonard. Rubin conceived of himself as being at war with the White race. By his own admission, Rubin stated that in forming the ‘Yippie’ movement he had “dropped out of the white race and the Amerikan [sic] nation.”[2] Rubin believed that Jews in particular were “obligated to resist the fascism of whiteness.”[3] He was motivated by narcissistic notions of Jewish moral superiority, indicating a strong identification with his fellows Jews. In a book he wrote while in County Jail, he noted that “It is the Jew who should always be on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the underdog, the wretched of the earth. … And thousands of ex-Amerikan, ex-Jews are. Three of the kids killed at Kent State were Jews. An unusually high proportion of hippies and revolutionaries are Jews.”[4]

Despite having no attachment to the religious content of Judaism, Abbie Hoffman was undoubtedly also deeply connected to his Jewishness and the “invisible” Jewish subculture. He attended Brandeis University (mentioned in the film) at a time when it was basically a refuge for blacklisted Jewish academics, such as the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, that had been rooted out from Harvard and MIT as ‘subversive’ by McCarthy. Brandeis survived the purge unscathed because McCarthy refused to target the university for fear of being branded anti-Semitic.[5] One of Hoffman’s psychology professors was Abraham Maslow, who imparted to the young Hoffman that society needed changing, and that nonconformity was “a positive sign of mental health.” Hoffman adored Maslow, later reflecting on his Brandeis days by stating, “Most of all I loved Abe Maslow.” During Hoffman’s attendance at Brandeis, Maslow formed a committee of correspondence which widened the circle of Jewish intellectuals who would essentially incubate the younger generation of Jewish radicals who would comprise the new Jewish subculture. As Gerald Sorin puts it, “Jewish overrepresentation in New Left movements looked like Jewish overrepresentation in old left movements.”[6] Maslow began corresponding with fellow Jewish gurus Eric Fromm, Kurt Goldstein, Paul Goodman, Ashley Montagu, and David Reisman among others, and together they founded The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Hoffman, awed by these fellow-ethnic subculture figures, referred to them as “giants” who “walked in the space of my intellectual world.”[7] Hoffman was clearly engrossed in non-religious expressions of Jewish identity and in the Jewish subculture, writing in his autobiography that “I came into this world acutely aware of being Jewish and I’m sure I’ll go out that way.”[8]

None of this is probed in the film, which altogether dodges the prospect of exploring Jewish radicalism in the New Left. What is offered instead is a watered down, ethnically ambiguous, court procedural designed to act as a feel-good movie for comfortable, immature, middle-class leftists who daydream about sticking it to an image of “the Man” that hasn’t had any relevance for over 50 years.

After the opening montage, the film shifts forwards to the trial, returning during key witness testimonies to important moments from the protest. This has the doubly negative effect of both stalling any potential for building tension within the courtroom setting, and splintering any coherent narrative of how and why the protest/riot was planned and executed. John N. Mitchell, the Attorney General, appoints Tom Foran and Richard Schultz as the prosecutors, while all the defendants except Seale are represented by William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass (played by the Jewish actor Ben Shenkman). Schultz, who in reality was highly ambitious and quite aggressive during the trial [transcripts are available here], is played by the Jewish actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a mawkishly written role as very much in sympathy with the protestors, and as clashing with an oppressive and legally questionable WASPish system that he has reluctantly become entangled with. The overall impression, despite Sorkin’s bleaching of Jewishness from the trial, is that of brave, big-hearted Jews and Blacks against cruel WASPs and violent police.

Judge Julius Hoffman, played here by Frank Langella (not Jewish), demonstrates clear bias for the prosecution as well as total incompetence, bad hearing, and poor memory. The trial is constantly interrupted by Hoffman’s inadequacies and biases (exaggerated in the film), by shouts from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and by the interventions of the defense lawyers. In reality, the leftwing audience in the gallery during the trial was notoriously noisy, violent, and difficult, which caused many breaks in proceedings. In the film, however, the gallery is extremely well-behaved with Hoffman himself responsible for most of the disruptions. Judge Hoffman, who is as two-dimensional as every other character in the film, is used mostly as a foil for the childish activities of Abbie Hoffman and Rubin, who show total contempt for the entire judicial process. Hoffman, inept more than malevolent, makes for a poor villain, but since his worst excesses are intercut with faceless, helmeted police wielding batons, we are presumably supposed to perceive him as the representative of “the System” against which the Chicago leftists are “bravely” warring against. Notably stripped from the film is any reference to the real-life exchanges between Abbie Hoffman and Julius Hoffman that involved Jewishness. In particular, Abbie Hoffman accused the judge of betraying Jewish interests, calling out in Yiddish during the trial that Julius Hoffman was a ““Shande fur de Goyim [Disgrace for the Gentiles]” a “Front man for the WASP elite,” and a “disgrace to the Jews, you could have served Hitler better.” During one episode, Hoffman and Rubin entered the courtroom in judges robes. This is repeated in the film with very one notable omission — in reality the robes had yellow stars on them. Sorkin’s omission can be attributed to the desire to clean the film of explicit allusions to Jewishness, and possibly also the desire to absolve the pair of a tastelessness that was in fact their hallmark.

In his  The Ordeal of Civility (1974, 193) John Murray Cuddihy notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment.

Seale’s attorney is not present due to illness, but Seale is repeatedly told by Judge Hoffman that he can’t represent himself. The constant silencing of Seale, historically accurate, along with some broader subtle commentary on police violence against Blacks, is the only clearly sustained narrative of the film, and was the only aspect I found remotely interesting. Deprived of legal assistance, Seale takes informal advice from his associate Fred Hampton. Seale finds out during the trial that Hampton has been killed during a police raid. This prompts Seale to become more assertive in pushing for his right to defend himself. Judge Hoffman responds by having Seale taken to another room, beaten, and returned gagged and shackled. The sequence is milked in the film for propaganda value, omitting the fact that, in reality, Seale had violently lunged at prosecutor Schultz and that it was the plan of the defendants to have Seale “bound and gagged so they could demonstrate to the world that the federal courts were racist.” The scene ends with Hoffman, losing control of the courtroom, taking Schultz’s suggestion of declaring Seale’s case a mistrial.

Aside from the propagandistic treatment of Seale’s experiences, The Trial of the Chicago 7 lacks authenticity and emotion. With Seale released from the trial, the film loses even more narrative direction. Kunstler and Weinglass decide to call Ramsey Clark, who was Attorney General during the riots, as a witness. Although Clark is willing to co-operate, and is willing to go on record that violence was started by the police, Judge Hoffman refuses to let the jury hear his testimony. Dellinger reacts furiously, punching a bailiff, resulting in his arrest, but since Dellinger has hardly featured in the film apart from waving to his wife and son, it’s difficult to care. There is a last-minute scramble to introduce tension by focusing on the discovery of a tape in which Hayden is heard, prior to the riot, declaring “Let blood spill everywhere.” The sequence is treated in a very ham-fisted way by Sorkin, and is destroyed by being explored, yet again, in flashbacks. Bringing the movie to a close, Hayden uses his closing statement by naming over 4,500 soldiers that died in the Vietnam War since the trial began, in spite of the judge’s instructions and objections. This prompts many in the court room to stand and cheer, and even Schultz joins in. This closing sequence prompted the real-life Schultz to comment: “That never happened. It was a total fantasy for Hollywood.”

The film closes by listing the various convictions for contempt handed down by Judge Hoffman, all of which were later overturned by other courts. We then find out that Tom Hayden went on to become a politician, and that Jerry Rubin became a stock trader. The seeming incongruity in these career choices, and the feeling that it undoes the trite anti-establishment theme we’ve been presented for two hours, embodies the fact that, stripped of the dirty reality, this is a film without any clear message at all. It isn’t focused enough to be an anti-war film, it hints at commentary on police violence but never directly engages with it, and it never explores the motivations of the radicals and so can never explicitly endorse them. In this sense, Sorkin’s movie is a perfect work of filmic neoliberalism, capable of digesting leftist radicalism and regurgitating it in a more palatable, marketable fashion while ignoring its glaring contradictions and ethnic identifications. Sorkin’s film has absolutely nothing to do say about the way in which these “radicals” became part of the System, or rather that they became an iteration of a new system of control via their participation in politics, the stock market, and, in Lee Weiner’s case, the ADL.

Weiner, a sociology professor and the last surviving Jewish member of the Chicago 7, has perhaps two lines in the entire film. Known in reality as the “quiet one,” this is perhaps justified, but his post-trial career trajectory is probably the most interesting. A 1976 article in Mother Jones reported that Weiner “is said to be somewhere near New York, leading a quiet life, sorting out what being Jewish means to him.”[9] Weiner in fact began working for the ADL where, according to Spencer Tucker, he has been directing “special projects” for years.[10] When contacted in 2007 by Jeff Kisseloff for a phone interview, Weiner responded that he was “raising money to fight hate.”[11] So Weiner, the “free speech” radical has become a key member of one of the most significant censorship organisations in the world.

Never explicit, it’s in the contradictions and subtleties of the film that it’s Jewish subtexts are revealed. I found it especially interesting that, during a heated exchange between Tom Hayden (played by the very WASPish Eddie Redmayne) and Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron-Cohen), there is a very prominent poster of Hitler in the background (with the caption “Visit Chicago” above it). The actual history of the poster is a play on contemporary accusations that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was an authoritarian anti-Semite (he did in fact at one point shout at Senator Abraham Ribicoff: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”) In any case, Hayden stands directly in front of the Hitler poster, while Rubin, Hoffman, and Weiner stand on the other side of the room, giving the momentary impression of Jews vs WASP/Hitler. This takes on greater significance when one considers that there was some real-life antagonism between Jewish leftists and non-Jewish radicals like Hayden. Hayden was known to have disparaged “the New York intellectual culture,” prompting Irving Howe, especially worried by New Left anti-Zionism, to denounce Hayden for his own authoritarian proclivities and to suggest that the New Left was becoming more “Christian” and “utterly American” (his most scathing insult) due to declining Jewish influence.[12] Howe needn’t have worried — Hayden went on to work closely with Jews to innovate Holocaust reparations legislation in California (Holocaust Victims Insurance Act), to be celebrated by the Jewish National Fund for his support for Israel, to employ a Jewish press secretary (Ralph Brave), and to help pioneer “Holocaust education.”

In some ways, it’s the chaos underlying both the real trial, and its filmic representation, that embody the Jewishness of it best. As I wrote at the outset, I’ve always regarded the ultimately chaotic and clownish trial of the Chicago 7 as nothing more than a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art, demoralising to the American justice system and energising to a new generation of Judeo-Anarchist activists. There was ultimately no meaning to the trial, just as there is no meaning to the film, other than directionless Jewish protest. As Jon Stratton has noted, echoing the comments of John Murray Cuddihy in The Ordeal of Civility, regarding the historical and ethnic issues underpinning the real trial:

The point I want to make here about these people, about the personas they presented which merged with the performances they undertook, is that they lacked civility. Their disruption was, at bottom, a public unsettling of the civility that orders American sociality … The Jews’ lack of civility, and therefore the failure of Western people’s attempts to develop reciprocally civil interactions with Eastern European Jews spread shockwaves through nineteenth-century society. In arguing a larger alienation — since the norms of civility merely spell out and specify for face-to-face interaction the more general values of the culture — the failure of civility came to define the “Jewish problem” as this problem reconstituted itself in the era of social modernity.[13]

The trial of the Chicago 7 was ultimately a demonstration of Jewish tastelessness, chaos, and discord in the midst of American society, involving more than the specific antics of Rubin and Hoffman. The entire episode was a demoralising demonstration of Jewish disruption within the legal system, and the fact that basic Western values and modes of behavior have been viewed by Jews as hostile and oppressive. The trial of the Chicago 7, like so much Jewish activism, was essentially a war on civility. The same antagonisms can be seen today in the quintessentially Jewish vulgarity of comedians like Sarah Silverman, in the riots of Antifa, and in the increasing degeneracy of our cultural and political life. The spirit of the trial lives on in the ceaseless absolving of Antifa rioters of any legal responsibility for their violence and vandalism. Today’s Antifa, of course, will be tomorrow’s politicians, stock traders, and ADL speech monitors, certain to reminisce, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, on the good old days when they fought “the Man.” They might even make a film about it.

 

[1] S.R. Lichter and S. Rothman, ‘Jewish Ethnicity and Radical Culture: A Social Psychological Study of Political Activists,’ Political Psychology, Vol.3, No.1, (Spring 1981), 135.

[2] E. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, (Harvard University Press, 2005), 350.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] M. Jezer, Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (Rutgers University Press, 1993), 21.

[6] G. Sorin, Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 223.

[7] Jezer, 25.

[8] Ibid, 8.

[9] Mother Jones Magazine, Aug 1976, 8.

[10] S. Tucker, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (ABC-CLIO, 2011), 192.

[11] J. Kisseloff, Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, An Oral History (University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 83.

[12] E. Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001),198.

[13] J. Stratton, Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma Through Modernity, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 182.

Head-Chopping for Muhammad: How Trotskyism and Truth Don’t Mix

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A teacher is beheaded in France for showing his pupils some satirical cartoons of Muhammad. How do Britain’s noisiest defenders of free speech respond? They shout as loudly and urgently as they can: “Look, a squirrel!”

No morality outside the Party

Yes, the articles published at Spiked Online about the murder of Samuel Paty prove once again that Trotskyism and truth don’t mix. Spiked writers like Brendan O’Neill were stalwarts of the now-disbanded Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Trotskyist cult headed by the Hungarian-Jewish sociologist Frank Furedi. But while Furedi and his disciples no longer operate as the RCP, they certainly still think like the RCP. Leon Trotsky himself said this in 1924: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” Spiked, like the RCP before it, supports open borders and unlimited immigration from the Third World.

This is why, when a Muslim cuts someone’s head off in the name of Muhammad, Brendan O’Neill resolutely refuses to address the central role of Muslim immigration in the murder. Instead, under the virtue-signalling headline “Je suis Samuel,” he announced that “The beheading of Mr Paty was a militarised expression of cancel culture. That killer was the armed wing of political correctness, a self-styled enforcer of the now mainstream idea that it is ‘phobic’ (that is, evil) to criticise Islam.” In other words, Whites and their ideologies were to blame, not Muslim immigration into France. Brendan didn’t want to discuss that very modern phenomenon, instead calling the murder “positively medieval,” and saying it was committed in “deranged, pre-modern fashion” out of “7th-century fury.”

Feud-ridden and thoroughly macho

He’s wrong. The murder wasn’t “positively medieval”: it was positively Muslim. It wasn’t “deranged”: it was highly rational. And it belonged very firmly to the twenty-first century, as we will see more and more in coming years. Nor was the killer, Abdoullakh Anzorov, influenced or emboldened by “political correctness” and “cancel culture.” He was an 18-year-old “refugee” from one of the least politically correct cultures on earth: that of Chechnya, the feud-ridden, thoroughly macho Muslim republic that had previously supplied the Boston Bombers to America. Chechens have a well-deserved reputation for violence, intolerance and killing in defence of honour. If you allow Chechens into your nation, you are asking for trouble. France allowed Abdoullakh Anzorov and his family in, and trouble predictably followed. Just as predictably, Brendan O’Neill refused to be honest about what had happened. But he surpassed himself in another article on Samuel Paty’s murder:

The silence of the anti-fascists: Where is the outrage over the medieval murder of Samuel Paty?

Anti-fascists are incredibly quiet about the fascist in France who cut off a man’s head because he displayed some cartoons in a classroom. It is two days since the gruesome Islamist murder of schoolteacher Samuel Paty for the supposed crime of showing caricatures of Muhammad to his pupils during a classroom discussion about freedom of speech. And yet the self-styled anti-fascists of the European and American left have said barely a word. There have been no big protests outside of France, no angry rallies, no Twitterstorms, no knee-taking or fist-raising, no promises by ‘Antifa’ to face down these extremists who slaughter schoolteachers for talking about liberty. Their craven, cowardly silence is as revealing as it is depressing. (The silence of the anti-fascists, Spiked Online, 18th October 2018)

If Brendan and Spiked are shouting so loudly and self-righteously about a “fascist” murder committed overseas in France, can you imagine what they’d do if a similar murder happened on British soil? Ear-drums would surely shatter all over the country. There would definitely be no “craven, cowardly silence” from Spiked.

Gentle, tolerant and ignored: Ahmadi murder-victim Asad Shah

Or would there? In fact, you don’t need to imagine what Brendan and Spiked would do in such circumstances, because a near-identical murder did indeed happen on British soil in 2016. And Spiked responded just like those “craven, cowardly” anti-fascists: with silence. As I’ve described several times before at the Occidental Observer, in 2016 a gentle, tolerant Ahmadi Muslim called Asad Shah was stabbed and stamped to death in Glasgow by a violent, intolerant Sunni Muslim called Tanveer Ahmed, who was defending the honour of the Prophet Muhammad just like the Chechen murderer in France: “Ahmed targeted Mr Shah after seeing the shopkeeper’s own videos on YouTube, where he had claimed to be a prophet of Islam — regarded as blasphemy by some sects [i.e., by mainstream Sunni Muslims]. The videos were only viewed a handful of times, among hundreds of others uploaded by Mr Shah calling for peace, love and unity across the world, but garnered angry comments and threats.”

Praying at a martyr’s shrine: Mumtaz Qadri is honoured in Pakistan

A murderer from 1929: Hero and Martyr Ilm Ud-Deen

Tanveer Ahmed was a Pakistani immigrant inspired by his fellow Muslims Mumtaz Qadri and Ilm Ud-Deen, both of whom murdered in defence of the Prophet against free speech. Mumtaz Qadri murdered the politician Salmaan Taseer in 2011 after Taseer supported Aasia Bibi, an innocent Christian woman sentenced to death under Pakistan’s harsh and regularly abused blasphemy laws. Ilm Ud-Deen murdered a Hindu in 1929 for publishing a satirical book about Muhammad. Both Qadri and Ud-Deen were executed for their crimes, and in modern Pakistan each is honoured as Ghazi, “Hero,” and Shahid, “Martyr.” Tanveer Ahmed followed their righteous example, slew to defend the Prophet against free speech, and has duly been named Ghazi, “Hero,” as you can see in this recent image circulated online by his supporters:

The Hero and the Liar: Ghazi Tanveer Ahmed and Kazzab Asad Shah

In the image, Tanveer Ahmed, the murderer, is called Ghazi while Asad Shah, his victim, is called Kazzab, or “Liar.” Mainstream Sunni Muslims believe that Ahmadi Muslims are heretics who should be killed for their lies — that is, for exercising their free speech. The entirely Pakistani roots of Asad Shah’s “medieval murder” therefore give the lie to these dishonest words by Kenan Malik, another former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party who responded to Samuel Paty’s murder with a loud cry of “Look, a squirrel!”:

The unwillingness of liberals to stand up for basic liberal principles, their readiness to betray progressives within minority communities, nurtures reactionaries, both within Muslim communities and outside it. The more society gives licence for people to be offended, the more people will seize the opportunity to feel offended. And the more deadly their outrage will become.

Liberal pusillanimity also nurtures anti-Muslim sentiment, feeding the racist idea that all Muslims are reactionary, that Muslim immigration should be stemmed and Muslim communities more harshly policed. We must reject both kinds of bigots. In a plural society, much of what we say, others will find offensive. If we want a plural society, we need to defend the freedom to offend. (The freedom to offend is a priceless commodity, The Guardian, 18th October 2020)

Well, I’m a massive racist and I am very happy to acknowledge that not all Muslims are reactionary. In fact, I’ve written repeatedly at the Occidental Observer about a group of gentle, non-reactionary Muslims who sincerely believe in “Love for All, Hatred for None” — namely, Ahmadi Muslims like Asad Shah. When Tanveer Ahmed angrily confronted Shah in the latter’s shop in Glasgow, Shah responded in true Ahmadi fashion by offering to shake his hand. Tanveer Ahmed rejected the offer in true Sunni fashion by stabbing and stamping Asad Shah to death.

Only inbreds oppose mass immigration

How did Kenan Malik, another passionate defender of free speech, respond to this “medieval murder” in 2016? In the same way as his Trotskyist comrades at Spiked: with silence. But Malik was much less tongued-tied in 2005, when he presented a TV documentary called Let ’Em All In!, which argued, in true RCP fashion, for open borders and unlimited immigration. The documentary mocked anti-immigration British Whites with blasts of theme music from the red-neck-baiting American movie Deliverance. As Jesus said: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)

You can also know them by their silence. And the silence of Brendan O’Neill and Kenan Malik about Asad Shah’s murder looks even worse when you learn that his murderer Tanveer Ahmed continued to issue “medieval” propaganda from behind bars. After he was jailed, Ahmed recorded messages for his many supporters, including this top tip for wannabe censors: “There’s only one punishment for insulters [of the Prophet Muhammad]: cut off their heads, cut off their heads, cut off their heads.” The Chechen murderer of Samuel Paty followed that top tip. In other words, the same free-speech-hating ideology so loudly condemned by O’Neill and Malik in 2020 had struck on British soil in 2016 — and Britain’s noisiest defenders of free speech did absolutely nothing to confront and condemn it.

MADE IN PAKISTAN AND CHECHNYA

Why were they silent? Because confronting the murder of Asad Shah would mean confronting the truth about Islam and free speech. Like Trotskyism and truth, the two things don’t mix. Tanveer Ahmed was absolutely unrepentant about his crime and had wide support among Muslims in Britain. After all, when Mumtaz Qadri was executed in Pakistan for his sterling work against free speech: “One of the largest mosques in Birmingham said special prayers for Qadri, describing him as ‘a martyr’, as did influential preachers in Bradford and Dewsbury.” The Qadri-fan Tanveer Ahmed sent a message from jail celebrating Asad Shah’s dispatch “to hell with the help of Allah, the prophet, angels and saints … I have the honour of sending him to hell forever.” In Ahmed’s eyes and the eyes of millions of other Muslims, the killing of Asad Shah wasn’t a crime at all, but a righteous defence of the Prophet against literally Satanic free speech. And Ahmed celebrated his righteous deed in Pakistan’s national language of Urdu, which is further proof that the Muslim war on free speech is not a product of “cancel culture” or “liberal pusillanimity.” Asad Shah’s murder came firmly stamped MADE IN PAKISTAN, just as Samuel Paty’s murder came firmly stamped MADE IN CHECHNYA. The role of “liberals” in these murders — and countless other acts of Muslim barbarism — lay in allowing Muslims into the West to practise authentic Islam.

Because Brendan O’Neill and Kenan Malik support unlimited Muslim immigration, they didn’t speak the truth about Samuel Paty’s murder and they ignored Asad Shah’s murder altogether. If they properly acknowledged that Ahmadis are being murdered and imprisoned for their words by the Sunni majority, they would have to admit that mainstream Islam is poison for free speech. But it’s not too late for these two misguided Trotskyists to repent. I’d like to invite Brendan and Kenan to use the headline “I Am Asad” and to break their silence about the murder of a gentle, tolerant Ahmadi Muslim by a free-speech-hating Sunni Muslim on British soil in 2016. If they want further details of what mainstream Muslim “fascists” are doing to Ahmadi Muslims, I can recommend a report called Suffocation of the Faithful: The Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan and the Rise of International Extremism, which was issued by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in July 2020:

Suffocation of the Faithful — front-cover of the parliamentary report

This report, the first of its kind, was commissioned against the backdrop of a shocking pattern of sustained persecution against Ahmadi Muslims including killings, assaults, attacks on places of worship, hate campaigns, deprivation of jobs and denial of education.

This is severest in Pakistan and what is unique about the persecution of this peace-loving community is that the persecution is state-sponsored, with laws passed explicitly targeting Ahmadi Muslims. I cannot think of any parallel in the modern world for such persecution where a religious community has been denied — by law — the right to self-identify as Muslims. Not only that, the law then prescribes that should an Ahmadi call himself a Muslim or practice Islam then that is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment (and even death under the blasphemy laws). These are the draconian anti-Ahmadi laws that Pakistan has had on its statute books for nearly half a century.

Such is the extent of persecution that it is no exaggeration to describe the life of an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan as one that faces persecution from the cradle to the grave. At every step of their lives they remain ever at risk of arrest, attack or harassment. Ahmadis have been denied their fundamental right to vote, they cannot possess their religious texts and even after death, their graves are targeted and bodies exhumed. …

[In 2020] Pakistan’s State Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Mr Ali Muhammad Khan supported an anti-Ahmadiyya twitter campaign by calling for Ahmadis to be punished by death. This resulted in a tirade of abuse and hate speech against Ahmadi Muslims. Such proclamations feed a climate of hate and the most recent targets of this [were] Ramzan Bibi, a 55-year-old Ahmadi Muslim woman and Rohan Ahmed, an Imam of the community in Pakistan, both of whom have been arrested on false allegations of blasphemy. Over the past few years Ahmadi mosques have been demolished, homes and businesses set on fire, leaflets and hate speech [have] been rampant declaring Ahmadis ‘liable to be killed’ and Ahmadis have been subject to brutal target killings. (Suffocation of the Faithful: The Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, 2020)

Thanks to mass immigration from Pakistan, this mainstream Muslim pathology is growing fast in Britain. Brendan, Kenan and the rest of Frank Furedi’s disciples claim to support free speech and to defend those who suffer for trying to exercise it. Ahmadi Muslims are regularly paying the same price as Samuel Paty: censorship-by-murder at the hands of entirely orthodox Muslims of the kind Brendan and Kenan want to see entering the West in unlimited numbers.

The contradiction between their support for both free speech and unlimited Muslim immigration is glaring. And I’m completely confident of two things. First, Brendan and Kenan can’t resolve the contradiction; second, they won’t break their “craven, cowardly silence” about the “medieval murder” of Asad Shah by a “fascist.” As I said right at the beginning: Trotskyism and truth don’t mix.

True Q:  Elements of Truth in the QAnon Conspiracy

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Sympnoia panta (“All things conspire”).
Hippocrates[1]

“I know nothing about QAnon.”
Donald J. Trump[2]

What can be more fun than a conspiracy?  Conspiracies are sneaky, salacious, cryptographic, lurid, and enticing.  They promise secret knowledge of the inner workings of society—knowledge that only a relative few possess, thus empowering the knower.  They claim to identify and expose evil wrongdoers, thus holding out hope for retribution, true justice, and a better world.  And they bring a kind of order and coherence to an otherwise incoherent time.  If, in the end, they turn out to be incomplete, or partially wrong, so what?  No harm in investigating the machinations of society, and in any case, some elements of truth are certain to be flushed out in the process.  Much to gain, little to lose.

Conspiracy theories have been around for thousands of years—at least.  Claims of secretive and malevolent Jewish schemes, for example, go back to 300 BC.[3]  Anti-Christian conspiracy theories date to the early second century, as found in the writings of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.  In the Middle Ages, stories about the Inquisition, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, and the papacy all gave rise to a variety of conspiracy claims.  For centuries, it was a “conspiracy theory” to believe that the Donation of Constantine—a document granting ruling authority to the Catholic Church—was fraudulent; but this conspiracy was proven true by Lorenzo Valla in 1440, when he exposed the charade.  Catholic conspiracies continue to serve as grist for popular exposés, both fictional and nonfiction, to the present day.

But what, exactly, is a conspiracy?  In the most general terms, it is a secretive, hidden effort by a relatively small group of people to steer events in a chosen direction.  Literally, it is a group of people who “breathe together” (con+spirare, ‘to breathe’), but it also has a connotation of the Latin spiritus (‘spirit’), meaning ‘those of a shared spirit.’  A conspiracy is thus a group of people with a shared spirit, a common outlook, who, at least in part, work closely together—“breathe together”—to achieve their hidden ends.

Thus understood, it is clear that there are countless conspiracies at work in the world today, as there have been throughout history.  Every governmental office that works behind closed doors to enact policy, every corporate boardroom that crafts strategy and action, every leadership group of virtually any organization that coordinates any action whatsoever, is technically a conspiracy.  Each of these act, at least in part, “secretly,” and does so on behalf of certain beneficiaries—such as the citizens, the stockholders, or the members of the organization.  Of course, in most cases, we don’t call such actions ‘conspiracies’; in common usage, we restrict the term to a deliberately secretive, conniving, scheming group of individuals, usually a handful in number, who work illegally or immorally to gain wealth or power.  In this restricted sense, virtually any criminal effort, if it involves more than one person, is a conspiracy.  But it applies as well to countless corporate and governmental actions, many of which are illegal or immoral or both.  Suffice to say that conspiracies of all stripes are alive and well in the modern world.  To believe in conspiracies—that is, to be a “conspiracy theorist”—is simply to acknowledge reality.

But this is not good enough for our global elite.  They want to restrict the term even further.  Media, government, and academia would have us believe that a conspiracy—any conspiracy—is by definition a false, baseless, and sophomoric notion that only a fool or an idiot would believe.  They want us to think that simply by labeling something as “a conspiracy theory” that we will see it as both ludicrous and grossly untrue, and that therefore any believer of such a thing must be an ignorant, deluded, or hopelessly confused person.  Thus the term adds to a long line of similar slanders, insults, and ad hominem fallacies; a ‘conspiracy theorist’ is akin to a ‘racist,’ a ‘bigot,’ a ‘far right-winger,’ a ‘Holocaust denier,’ an ‘anti-Semite,’ and a ‘White supremacist.’ These favored elite catch-phrases offer shorthand dismissal and vilification of inconvenient ideas or individuals.

That said, what can we meaningfully say about the QAnon conspiracy theory?  Here is one summary published in August 2019 by Salon.com, based on an interview with a Washington Post reporter:

QAnon is based upon the idea that there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything.  They control politicians, and they control the media.  They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially.  And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump.  Now, Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal’s wrongdoing.  But one of the reasons that Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically.  And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Trump and the US military—that everyone backs him and the evil cabal—were it not for ‘Q.’

Q, of course, is the secret governmental source who has special inside knowledge of such things, and who leaks them out regularly and often on web-based imageboards like 4chan, (the now-defunct) 8chan, and (currently) 8kun.[4]  The letter ‘Q’ allegedly refers to the highest level of security clearance—“Q clearance”—at the US Department of Energy.  Q first appeared in late 2017, with a post on an alleged forthcoming arrest of Hillary Clinton (“HRC”):

HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run.  Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am.  Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. …

This was followed soon thereafter by a related claim that John Podesta would be arrested, again with subsequent riots.  Needless to say, no such arrests or extraditions have yet occurred.  But these were only the first of many predictions to come.

Now, three years later, Q has amassed a large body of posts, or “drops,” numbering almost 5,000—an average of about five a day.  They vary in length and subject matter; some are clear and straightforward, but many are cryptic—involving vague allusions, mysterious acronyms and abbreviations, and tantalizing implications.  Members of QAnon spend countless hours deciphering and interpreting Q’s many clues.  They further repost all Q drops at various Internet sites; qalerts.app, www.qanon.pub, and qposts.online are three good sources.[5]  Technically, these posts from Q himself are the only “legitimate” sources of conspiracy information.  Anything else has been grafted on by followers (or opponents, as the case may be).

Evolution of a Conspiracy

The QAnon phenomenon emerged in late 2017, most notably with the Twitter-backing of (Jewish) celebrity Rosanne Barr.  But the story didn’t get real media coverage until early 2018.  The Daily Beast, for example, wrote in March of that year that “[Q] claims to be a high-ranking government official with inside knowledge of the White House where, he claims, Trump is planning mass arrests of top Democrats for allegedly being involved in a satanic child-sex-trafficking ring.”  The mass arrests constitute an event referred to as “the Storm,” which is yet to materialize.[6]  But Q-spiracists have faith that it is coming, and soon.

Before long, Q signs and slogans began showing up in Trump rallies around the country.  Web journal Mashable.com wrote about the movement in August 2018, using a boatload of pejoratives, including “mountain of bullshit,” “insane,” “batshit crazy,” “irrational,” and so on.  Mashable argued that QAnon was a kind of right-wing diversion from actual pedophilia and sexual abuse/harassment cases against prominent Republicans, including Dennis Hastert, Roy Moore, and Jim Jordan.  They then blamed execs at Facebook, Twitter, and Google for allowing this “batshit-crazy” conspiracy to gain traction—as was the case, they claimed, with so-called Holocaust denialism.[7]

Around March 2019, the Q-stories got weirder.  Vox.com reported on QAnon as “based on the idea that special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks) and then send them to Guantanamo Bay.”  QAnon-ers also believe, they claimed, that Hillary Clinton “was executed by lethal injection,” and that “John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive”—neither of which were asserted by Q himself.[8]  Such claims came from outside sources, quite possibly to discredit the nascent movement.

By August of that year, as reported in Salon, the story turned ominous.  The original “satanic” had now morphed into “Satan-worshipping,” and worse, the “pedophiles” were now “a worldwide cabal” who “rule the world”; as cited above, “they control politicians, they control the media, they control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence.”  There is, of course, only one such group that fits that description: Jews.  More on them below.

Also by this time, mainstream journalist-critics began emphasizing the putative “religious” nature of Q’s ideology.  Salon.com reported on the “apocalyptic” quality of the conspiracy, on the group’s vision of a coming battle “between absolute good and absolute evil,” and Q himself was depicted “like [a] religious millennialist.”  There is some truth to this.  Q refers to God on countless occasions, and frequently cites the Bible.  He is particularly fond of Ephesians 6:10, especially the passage calling for us to “put on the full armor of God,” in preparation for the coming struggle.[9]  References to Jesus, by contrast, are almost nonexistent; this suggests that Q is an ardent Catholic, perhaps of a fundamentalist bent.   He is certainly a typical conservative: pro-God, patriotic, pro-Trump, anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, etc.  But the religious language has caught fire with American Christians in particular, and seems to be a driving force behind Q’s rise to prominence.

The religious angle thus attained top priority.  In June 2020, Atlantic was writing of “The Prophecies of Q.”  “The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q movement,” they wrote (disregarding the utter lack of references to Jesus).  “Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute.”  One true believer is quoted as saying “I feel God led me to Q.”  One of the supposed “best-known QAnon evangelists,” according to Atlantic, is David Hayes, aka PrayingMedic.  Atlantic’s view is summarized thusly:

It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values.  And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end.  The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging.  The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new.  To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

Mainstream media’s view is clear:  QAnon-ers are irrational, unhinged, quasi-religious lunatics who are detached from reality.  For their part, Atlantic simply can’t make heads or tails of such people; “QAnon is complex and confusing.”  We will see why they say this momentarily.

QAnon and Jew-Anon

It was also at this time that our intrepid journalists began to reveal perhaps their greatest fear: the connection between QAnon and anti-Semitism.  Atlantic wrote that “the most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media platforms and imageboards.  The Q universe encompasses … alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism.”  Indeed, they say, Q-like conspiracy theories “have helped sustain consequential [social] eruptions, such as … anti-Semitism” at all points in time.

Here, finally, we seem to be getting to the root of media hysteria over QAnon.  Backing Trump was bad enough, but once Q-ers started turning anti-Semitic, well…time to crush that bug.  The issue went bigtime in July of this year, in such pieces as Wired’s “The dark virality of a Hollywood blood-harvesting conspiracy.”  As the Jewish writer Brian Friedberg explains in his subtitle, “A centuries-old anti-Semitic myth is spreading freely on far-right corners of social media—suggesting a new digital Dark Age has arrived.”  Now we get to the rub.  As Friedberg sees it, QAnon-ers are resurrecting and modernizing the ancient “blood libel” charge against Jews, which was traditionally based on the idea that Jews would kidnap and kill Christians—typically children—in order to use their blood for various religious rites, for its alleged healing powers, and to consume in various food products.

For Friedberg and others, the charge of blood libel is nothing more than “an anti-Semitic myth that pervaded Europe throughout the Middle Ages.”  Wikipedia calls it “an anti-Semitic canard.”  Unfortunately for Friedberg and other Jews, this “myth” has a large basis in fact.  The earliest reports of Jewish human sacrifice date to 300 BC, and the use of body parts was cited in the first century BC by Apollonius Molon and Posidonius, and mentioned again circa 0 AD by figures such as Damocritus and Apion.[10]  More specifically, the blood libel charge, which emerged in popular form in the twelfth century in Europe, has an extensive factual basis, as documented in the now-infamous 2007 book by Israeli scholar Ariel Toaff, Passovers of Blood (details here).  Jews have in fact historically valued and used human blood, preferably of children, for its alleged magical healing powers.  The killing of Christians actually served a double benefit, also acting as a kind of revenge against the Gentiles for the prior killing of Jews throughout history.  As Toaff demonstrates, trafficking in human blood was undoubtedly true in the Middle Ages, and given its grounding in basic Jewish theology and psychology, may well still be the case today.  There may in fact be certain present-day groups of orthodox Jews who still find ways to capture and kill Gentile children, perhaps even by crucifixion, to attain both symbolic vengeance and the “potent” youthful blood.  Needless to say, this situation, if proven, would have huge implications for current Jewish-Gentile relations.

In its latest QAnon form, the historically-grounded blood trafficking by Jews has turned into a bizarre variant based on a substance called ‘adrenochrome.’  This compound, with chemical formula C9H9NO3, results from an oxidation reaction of the hormone adrenaline—according to that indubitable source, Wikipedia.  For a period of time in the past, adrenochrome was studied in connection with schizophrenia, either as a cause or treatment, but no clear outcomes resulted.  According to some researchers, in concentration it is both cardiotoxic and neurotoxic.  But in the mass media version of QAnon, it is now an essential part of the conspiracy.  The Satan-worshipping elites now not only kidnap children and youth to have sex with them, they then kill them for the adrenochrome in their blood; this is the “cannibalistic” aspect of the conspiracy.  The adrenochrome is said to be the key element of the blood, something that provides either a chemical ‘high,’ youth-restoration, or both.  Based on my initial research, however, neither adrenochrome nor any substance in the blood does anything of the sort.

Medically speaking, blood transfusions are quite common, but they provide no fountain of youth, produce no ‘high’ of any kind, and in fact carry significant risks.  Transfusions are useful for anyone who has lost a lot of blood through accident, surgery, or other illness.  They can help people with specific diseases, like anemia, hemophilia, sickle cell, and certain cancers.  But for ordinary people, a transfusion does virtually nothing for one’s health, and invites risks of blood diseases and immune system reactions.  People have nothing in general to gain from injecting, or consuming, human blood from any source, even children.  Blood-trafficking Jews acted, and still act, on the basis of tradition and superstition, nothing more.

But consider this:  If you wanted to discredit both the “anti-Semitic” QAnon and the (true) blood libel charges against Jews, you could do little better than to inject an entirely bogus element into that discussion.  First, under a fake name, you portray yourself as a Q-fanatic, and then you make up nonsense about a real blood-based substance like adrenochrome.  And then, under a different name—perhaps your real name—you attack the very forums that you just posted on, as being “insane,” “irrational,” “batshit crazy,” and so on.  It’s a nifty trolling trick, surely indispensable to many Jewish journalists and Internet activists.

Furthermore, it would seem to be significant that Q himself has never, in some 5,000 drops, explicitly mentioned adrenochrome, blood libel, or anything of the sort.[11]  The whole topic, to the extent that it is real, was introduced by outsiders, likely as a discrediting tactic.

Not only is it not mentioned by Q, but as Friedberg points out, “adrenochrome harvesting isn’t outwardly blamed on Jews” at all.  In fact, the word ‘Jew’ virtually never appears in any Q drops.  So how can Q, and by extension the QAnon followers, be considered anti-Semitic?

It seems that Q, being an unrepentant cypher, prefers to list specific Jews by name, and then leave it to the “anti-Semitic” reader to make the obvious generalization.  Or at least, that’s what our faithful journalists would have us believe.  Among the many Q drops, one finds several references to such Jews as George Soros (approx. 36), Jeffrey Epstein (54), Anthony Weiner (18), and “the Rothschilds” (21).  This may seem like a lot, but it represents a small fraction (less than 2%) of the total drops.  Furthermore, references to these individuals are typically situation-specific, without any obvious extension to other or all Jews.  Other potentially suggestive references seem largely absent.  Such words as ‘cabal’ appeared a few times in 2018, but not since then.  Words like ‘ruling’ and ‘elite’ are almost nonexistent in the relevant contexts.  Q’s alleged anti-Semitism consists of little more than criticizing a few Jews by name, but without even identifying them as such.

Still, it begs certain questions about the Jewish role in sexual abuse and child molestation, and in their dominant standing in elite Western society.  It is truly remarkable to consider, for example, the number of prominent Jews who, in the past few years, were caught up various sexual assault or harassment scandals.  In addition to above-mentioned Epstein and Weiner, we have Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Andrew Lack, Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Woody Allen, Alan Dershowitz, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (currently on his fourth wife), Ari Shavit, and Steven M. Cohen, to name but a few.  As disproportionate as they are in elite circles, Jews are also disproportionate in the realm of reprehensible crimes against women and youth.

And what about the “world-ruling elite” that QAnon-ers are supposedly so obsessed about?  Again, we find little from Q himself.  Words like ‘elite’ and ‘rulers’ appear rarely in the drops, and when they do, it is typically as part of a biblical passage.  Surely Q knows, however, that Jews hold massively disproportionate power throughout the West, and therefore throughout the world.  This sad story is widely known by now, but a short recap is in order.  Jewish control over Hollywood is so banal as to be a trivial observation.  Jewish money dominates American government, to the point that at least 25% of conservative money and 50% of liberal money comes from Jews.[12]  American Jews own or control up to half of the private wealth in the US, potentially amounting to some $50 trillion.  This is why they exercise such considerable influence in American government and media.  A similar situation holds in the UK, France, Canada, Australia, and in Russia’s oligarchy.

Here, then, is another bit of truth behind the QAnon hysteria.  Prominent Jews, in the guise of “Soros” and “the Rothschilds,” really do run the show, to an astonishingly large degree.  If innocent Q readers start to search on these and other Jewish names, they will surely come across some rather nasty factual data that our Jewish elite would rather not have them know.  Since they can no longer stifle or censor the movement, the elite’s second-best strategy is to slander it like mad.  Thus we see headlines like the recent “QAnon is a Nazi cult, rebranded.”  Here is the leading paragraph of that story:

A secret cabal is taking over the world.  They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood.  They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church.  They want to disarm the police.  They promote homosexuality and pedophilia.  They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Elements of truth:  Yes, there is a “cabal” of wealthy Jews who have obscene levels of power in the West, and via the American superpower, functionally have “taken over the world.”  They certainly have in the past, and may well continue to, kidnap Gentile youths, exploit and abuse them sexually, and in certain cases, kill them and extract their blood for psychotic Judaic religious ceremonies, for purposes of anti-Gentile hatred and revenge, or for utterly unscientific health reasons.  They do in fact control high positions throughout America and much of the West.  Liberal Jews are in fact leading the charge to “defund the police,” to promote LGBTQ rights, and to provide so-called “open door” immigration policies in the US and Europe—with a net effect, if not intent, of racially diluting and debasing every traditionally White nation on Earth.

QAnon Meets the Holocaust

The article cited above also informs us of the growing global nature of the movement.  QAnon, we read, “has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany.”  Of particular concern to our media elite is a small, decades-old, right-wing group known as Reichsbürger (“Reich citizens”), who have joined in the Q party and adopted some of its themes.  In a recent report from CNN, we read that “Reichsburger followers deny the Holocaust happened” and traffic in other “anti-Semitic tropes.”  More generally, online journal Venturebeat.com writes that “QAnon attaches itself to a variety of issues, such as anti-mask protests, child trafficking conspiracies, and Holocaust denial…”

Unfortunately for our all-knowing media, we find here another element of truth:  It turns out that the evil “Holocaust deniers” are on to something, that the traditional Holocaust story is riddled with holes, falsehoods, and logical inconsistencies, and that all reasonable arguments point to a Jewish death toll substantially less than 6 million.[13]  Should our intrepid QAnon-ers stumble upon this truth, they are in for another eye-opener, one of monumental importance.

Trump, the Savior

But not to worry, because Trump will save the day!  This is the final piece of the picture.  As it happens, Q rarely mentions Trump by name, much preferring that silly but long-established acronym “POTUS” (“president of the US”) instead.  It is clear that Q is on Trump’s side, and supports him against the “Democratic party corruption” embodied in Obama, Clinton, and now Biden.  A typical (and typically cryptic) recent drop is this one:

Why was POTUS framed re: Russia collusion?  Protect truth re: Hillary/DNC Russia collusion? Why was POTUS impeached re: Ukraine?  Protect truth re: Biden/[CLAS 1-99] Ukraine collusion?  Blame ‘opponent’ for what they themselves are guilty of?  [DNC media push echo submitted ‘talking points’ generate false narrative]. Q (drop #4872, 15 Oct 2020)

But the “mass arrests” story—the Storm—is almost nonexistent in the past two years.  One has to go back to late 2018 to find such suggestive posts as this:  “Are you ready to see arrests?  Are you ready to see PAIN?  Are you ready to be part of history? Q” (drop #2344, 4 Oct 2018).  But again, here we are, two years later, and no mass arrests of anyone.

So this begs another important question:  What is Trump actually doing against the cabal that is behind Democratic corruption, sexual abuse, and human trafficking?  The answer is:  almost nothing.  Trump has shown little appetite for confronting and dismantling the Judeocracy that runs our country; and worse, he has positively supported it.  We all know about his daughter Ivanka, who married the orthodox Jew Jared Kushner, converted to Judaism, and had three children with him.[14]  Trump has always had a large number of Jewish friends, colleagues, and confidantes.  As I wrote a year ago, these include such prominent donors as:

Lew Eisenberg, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Mel Sembler, Ron Weiser, Steve Wynn, Elliott Brody, Laurie Perlmutter, and Carl Icahn, not to mention Bernie Marcus.  Then we have his many Jewish personal and professional associates, who include, among others, Avi Berkowitz, Michael Cohen, Gary Cohn, Reed Cordish, Boris Epshteyn, David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, Larry Kudlow, Stephen Miller, Steven Mnuchin, Jay Sekulow, David Shulkin, and Allen Weisselberg.  All those Trump-defenders out there in America should be dismayed at his vast linkage to the people of Israel.

In terms of policy, Trump placated hardline Jews by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018.  He also recognized Israel’s claim of sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and his “peace process” has been consistently on the side of Israel.  He has defended Israel in the UN, and has done nothing to cut foreign aid—some $5 to 6 billion per year—to that country.[15]

Where, then, is the Storm?  It’s certainly not against the real power structure, the real “swamp,” that is pulling the strings in Washington.  Against them, he’s doing nothing.  Worse, he seemingly panders to them at nearly every occasion.  Once in a while Trump throws a small bone to White nationalists and the dissident right, but he quickly retracts or denies his statements.  It’s just a tease.  Trump is fully in bed with the Hebrew wirepullers, and he knows it.  He has no intention of doing otherwise.  It’s simply too much in his own personal interest to continue pandering to them.

Q likes to make predictions.  Here’s one of mine:  No Storm, no mass arrests, no reining in of the Jewish Lobby—even if Trump loses the election.  And until this happens, no meaningful change in Washington, period.

Meanwhile…

And so, in the final run-up to the election, media bashing of QAnon goes on.  The group constitutes the “ultimate conspiracy theory,” according to Foreign Policy.  QAnon-ers have “attempted political violence,” and are linked to “apparent acts of domestic terrorism,” they state with due qualifications.  The group is the ideological successor to “dark ideas like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” again bringing in the anti-Semitic angle.[16]  Indeed, “apocalyptic vibes radiate through all of Q’s messages” they say, without the slightest bit of exaggeration.  In sum, Q’s many drops comprise “a constellation of bullshit.”

In just the past few weeks, CNN repeated the emphasis on the Protocols, attributed to the group the idea that “the coronavirus is a hoax,” and associated Q-ers in Germany with the neo-Nazis.  Perhaps most surprisingly, this nominal news organization is now taking unilateral, proactive measures to stifle QAnon.  As they admit, “CNN recently sent Facebook details of dozens of groups and pages that embraced QAnon conspiracy theories.  Facebook said it would investigate them and had begun removing some pages.”  This is a remarkable admission; Jeff Zucker at CNN is collaborating with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook to suppress a global free-speech movement that they jointly dislike.  The global elite strike again.

As we count down the final few days until the election, anti-Q stories appear almost daily.  So we see headlines like “How QAnon uses satanic rhetoric to set up a narrative of ‘good vs. evil’.”  NPR airs a story attacking the “QAnon candidate” Marjorie Greene.  The New York Times informs us that TikTok is cracking down on “QAnon and hate speech”—as if they two were synonymous.  They also explain how Republican voters took QAnon mainstream.  And the Washington Post, ever helpful, warns us that QAnon is “tearing families apart.”

No matter who wins the upcoming election, some elements of truth are guaranteed to emerge.  The country may be worse off, but truth will take a small step forward.  And more people than ever will begin to understand exactly how the US, and the world, truly operate today.

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

[1] Circa 400 BC, as quoted by Leibniz in his Monadology (sec. 61).

[2] Town Hall meeting hosted by NBC, 15 October 2020.

[3] See the writings of Hecateus of Abdera, in my book Eternal Strangers (details here).

[4] The full domain name is www.8kun.top.  An imageboard is an online forum based on short postings of images and accompanying text.  Most of the posters are anonymous.

[5] There are technical questions about the identity of Q over time—in other words, it is an open question if the Q posting today is the same man (or woman, or group) who posted back in 2017.  Imageboard posters have a unique identifier code—a “tripcode”—that proves that the poster is the same source over time.  But Q’s tripcode (currently it is this string:  !!Hs1Jq13jV6) has changed at least three times over the past three years.  It is strictly an article of faith that it was the same person all along.  For sake of simplicity, I will assume that Q is the same individual, an unidentified male, who has been posting from the start.  But nothing much turns on this assumption.  I furthermore note that, of the many online articles I have reviewed, none has given the details of where to find the Q drops—almost as if they didn’t really want the reader to find out for himself.  This in itself is revealing.

[6] For example, “Prepare for the storm” (drop #3880, 20 Feb 2020), or “You didn’t think the statement by POTUS re: ‘CALM BEFORE THE STORM’ was just random did you?” (#4011, 30 Apr 2020).

[7] Zuckerberg recently decided to ban “Holocaust denial” sites from Facebook.

[8] There seem to be only a handful of drops referring to John Jr., and just one old post mentioning Tom Hanks.

[9] “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.  Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.  For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.  Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.  In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.  Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

[10] For further accounts by these and other individuals, see again my Eternal Strangers (here).

[11] It is always difficult to say for certain, however, what exactly Q means by his various hints and clues.  References to “human trafficking / sacrifices” (drop #586, 22 Jan 2018) and “ability to harvest” (#2319, 3 Oct 2018) are occasionally cited as references to adrenochrome, but these are too obscure and indirect to be meaningful.

[12] See also here.

[13] For a concise account of this story, see my book The Holocaust: An Introduction (here).  For the full version, see my Debating the Holocaust (here).

[14] Ivanka seems to really have a “thing” for Jews.  According to Wikipedia, she dated at least two Jews prior to Kushner: investment banker Greg Hersch, and “documentary producer and playboy” James (“Bingo”) Gubelmann.  For someone allegedly raised Presbyterian, this is remarkable.  It suggests some natural affinity to Jews, perhaps through some unknown Jewish family connection.

[15] Yes, he did recently support the Catholic jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace the Jewess Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, but this is a minor concession to American Christians.

[16] ”Notably, QAnon builds heavily on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the world’s most enduring conspiracy theories.”

Why It’s Important for Trump to Win

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Trump’s 2016 victory was seen as nothing less than a cataclysm by the American establishment—the greatest shock to the system in memory and perhaps in the entire history of the Republic. After all, Trump was vehemently opposed by the entire establishment  from far left to the neoconservative and Chamber of Commerce right. It was, one might say, a hostile takeover.

The left was on the cusp of going into end-game mode, so losing was incredibly frustrating, especially since Hillary Clinton was expected to win easily. But Trump won. Whatever you think of Trump’s actual performance, the fact is that throughout the campaign and since taking office the media and pretty much the entire left has been labeling him a Nazi and White supremacist (I wrote 5 articles for Vdare on this). And it’s continued, even into the recent presidential debate and the town hall hosted by Savannah Guthrie.

When Trump won, they were apoplectic — on the verge of complete victory with a “sure thing” Hillary victory, to having “White supremacists” in the White House. The tears that flowed after Trump won were replaced by anger and sheer hatred. The practical result was that Trump’s victory has had the effect of mobilizing the left.

And because this was framed from the beginning as a contest between the forces of good (our glorious multicultural future) versus evil (the “White supremacist” American past being promoted by the Orange Nazi in the White House), anything was justified. The media ought to throw out normal standards of journalism and do everything they can to destroy Trump’s image. Violence against Trump supporters and certainly against the dissident Right is entirely justified.

The result is a level of political polarization not seen in this country probably since the Civil War. But the polarization is what had to happen for any possible movement in the direction of the dissident right. The absolute worst thing would have been another Hillary-vs.-Jeb-type election where America keeps sleep-walking to Armageddon. The mobilization of the left has made clear the fault lines. This is about removing the traditional culture of America, and it is about removing Whites from the center of the American story. It is about replacement — first the monuments and the culture, then the people.

Solid majorities of Americans oppose removing the statues, and ratings for the now-politicized NFL, NBA, and MLB are way down, even though former sports fans are trapped in their homes with nothing much to do because of the pandemic. This means the traditional American majority is moving down the road toward being explicitly aware of what the game is. Reasonable White people watching this unfold cannot possibly believe that the glorious multicultural future will be anything but a disaster for White America. The hatred for White America that has been so obviously directed against activists on the dissident right is inevitably seeping through to “just plain White folks.” The hatred will only intensify when Whites have less power. And this means that the racialization of politics that we have emphasized so much here will accelerate. The ~60% of White America that votes Republican (not including Jews and other people grouped as Caucasians deriving from the Middle East and North Africa) will increase.

If the left wins they will go into end-game mode. They will establish a more-or-less permanent hegemony (via massive surge in legal and illegal immigration, amnesty to illegals and Dreamers, adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states, and packing the Supreme Court). A Democrat victory would mark the end of the First and Second Amendments and likely lead to eventually locking up dissidents, as is already the case in Europe.  There is now a rich body of academic literature by leftist academics (but I repeat myself) on reining in speech related to diversity. Their mantra is something like, “We won the intellectual war on issues related to race and gender. It’s all over, so anyone disagreeing with our pronouncements on race and gender can and should be shut down — your words do violence to muh feelings.” And liberals like Elena Kagan would love to use these ideas in majority opinions — indeed, she has already written on this.

With enough of a mandate, the Biden-Harris administration would also get rid of the Electoral College and two senators per state, resulting in the complete domination of the left-leaning urban centers—the issue has certainly been raised by many leftists since 2016. This is already the case in many states, such as California, where rural areas are effectively disenfranchised and all the statewide offices are held by Democrats, including around 75% of the State Legislature. The only Republican who could possibly win would be one who can fit into this new context, but even such a person could likely only win by taking advantage of some major Democrat screw up, like an economic depression or rampant corruption. In other words, once this happens, there’s no turning back. It’s over.

A Democrat victory would speed up the transformation of the educational system. Already, Critical Race Theory, which is basically anti-White hatred and guilt-tripping, has a strong foothold in the public schools and corporations. Trump outlawed teaching it to government workers, but that would change and there would likely be federal money for such programs at all levels of the educational system and for corporations.

Could the fact that Trump is attempting to appeal to Hispanics and Blacks undermine the GOP as the party of White people? It’s common for politicians to try to expand their base, and the fact is that these groups would benefit from many of the same policies that would benefit White America—opposing the defunding of police, curtailing immigration, and ensuring a robust economy (which Trump delivered on until the virus-induced lockdowns). Latinos in particular may be more open to Trump because of the national obsession with Blacks in the Summer of George.

No one is saying Trump is the savior, but the reality is that a great many White people are hopelessly caught up in the liberal/left mindset. This is especially true of educated Whites—the White working class has been solidly pro-Trump. These educated urban and suburban Whites are not going to vote Republican in the face of the constant stream of propaganda from the elite media and universities which has resulted in the left dominating the moral high ground, and in massive virtue-signaling and mindless conformity by great masses of liberal Whites whose hatred toward Trump has been fanned into a fever pitch by the elite media. No one on the dissident right saw Trump as the solution, but only as a stepping stone to a more explicitly White candidate. That is still possible, but only if Trump wins. In the meantime, trying to get non-Whites to vote for Trump makes a lot of sense.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the Trump victory in 2016 energized the left. There were riots in the immediate aftermath of the election and off-and-on throughout his term, crescendoing in the Summer of George—~130 straight days in Portland, with no serious effort to rein it in. The leftist media became nonstop Trump hate, and university professors routinely expressed their hatred in classrooms and in op-eds. Could one argue that a Biden victory would result in the civic peace and tranquility so eagerly desired by all those urban and suburban liberal Whites? I suppose it could, although in Portland the BLM-antifa have made leftist mayor Ted Wheeler a consistent target of their attacks, and they also turned on the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey; riots have continued to occur in cities dominated by very liberal-left mayors, such as New York and Atlanta.

But the question is, would a Biden victory be good for the dissident right, and the answer is no. The worst possible outcome would be to return to elections between Hillary types and Jeb types. Flip a coin, it really wouldn’t matter. We don’t really want peace and harmony. Polarization is good because the bipartisan center-left—center-right consensus is suicide but would just take a little longer than if Trump hadn’t come on the scene. But now that he attained the presidency, a victory by the energized, radicalized left would result in hegemonic, authoritarian control by the left and a complete eradication of expressions of White identity politics, opposition to immigration, public discussion of the genetics of race, likely the eventual shutting down of sites like The Occidental Observer, and even putting dissenters in prison. When I hung out with radicals in the 1960s, it was common to hear opinions like “worse will be better”—if the present system gets worse, it will ultimately result in a revolution of the left. But when a revolution of the left gains power, as would happen if Biden-Harris win, they will arrogate all power to themselves and ensure that it won’t be possible to give it up. Revenge and punishment will the the order of the day. Just recently Robert Reich, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, suggested Truth and Reconciliation commissions should be set up in the wake of a Biden victory on the model of South Africa after 1994—although what he really has in mind may more resemble Nuremberg and denazification that occurred after World War II.

A victory by Biden would be a green light for a return to power of neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin (who have more or less defected to the Democrats, but they would be happy to return to the GOP so that fanatically pro-Israel policies  like war with Iran would be bipartisan). Another group eager to seize power in the wake of a Biden victory would be political operatives like those associated with the Lincoln Project, such as Rick Wilson and George Conway. Forget about a populist GOP. The GOP would once again be the party of Big Business (and hence liberal policies on legal and illegal immigration), wars for Israel, and tacit, if not overt, support for Critical Race Theory indoctrination. I realize that Trump has been gung-ho about doing things Israel wants, but he has stopped short of war and, in my opinion he has done all he can to extricate U.S. troops from the Middle East in the face of powerful opposition from the military (Trump accused them of gunning for post-career sinecures with defense contractors), the Israel Lobby, the media (where the left is dominated by liberal interventionists), and many politicians on both sides of the aisle. Just today Trump renewed pressure on the Pentagon to lower troop levels even further in order to fulfill his election promise, but the Pentagon is resisting the move.

On the other hand, another Trump victory would cement the populist wing of the party, where opposition to immigration is a major issue. Trump’s victories on immigration have been largely ignored by all sides, but as the LA Times notes,

He has targeted the Silicon-Valley based tech industry by squeezing high-skilled foreign labor, and has restricted immigration based on family reunification even as he’s separated thousands of migrant families at the border.

He has attempted to repeal federal protections for young immigrants who entered the country illegally as children and sidestepped the Supreme Court’s rejection of his plans. California has more residents covered by those protections, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, than any other state. He has also ended Temporary Protected Status for refugees from El Salvador and other Central American countries, a disproportionate number of whom live in the state.

And his administration has discouraged thousands of other students, refugees [refugee admissions dropped precipitously], asylum seekers, workers, and entrepreneurs — many headed to California — from coming to the United States at all, most recently by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification for largely shutting the nation’s borders.

Even more importantly, legal immigration has dropped by an astonishing 92 per cent in Fiscal Year 2020. Moreover, the fall in immigration workforce population predates Covid—apparently due to regulatory tightening. “Thanks, in part, to Trump’s (relatively) hard line on immigration, expressed basically via administrative measures, the Trump years saw a labor market where native-born Americans lost relatively fewer jobs than immigrants. This is not quite what Trump supporters had in mind in November 2016. But it’s something.”

Yes, and a Biden victory would end up being a radical reversal of these trends.

And finally, the Center for Immigration Studies:

Two new analyses of recently released Census Bureau data show that the total number of immigrants in the United States grew much more slowly 2017-2019 than in prior years, despite economic growth and low unemployment. This shows that the level of immigration is not a force of nature beyond our control, as many have suggested, but rather responds to policy changes. …

Trump administration policies that may have caused the slowdown include:

—A significant reduction in refugees allowed into the country;
—Requiring immigrant self-sufficiency through reform of the public charge rules;
—Mexico & Central American countries agreeing to offer safe haven to asylum seekers;
—Increased barriers and fencing at the border;
—More worksite enforcement against illegal workers and some employers;
—Efforts to end TPS and DACA, may have discouraged illegal immigration;
—Other modest administrative changes that may have had a cumulative effect.

A Trump victory would exacerbate the social unrest and polarization that has already reached levels not seen at least since the 1960s, but another Trump victory would unleash far greater violence than in the wake of his 2016 win. We have already seen the huge BLM-antifa crowds in urban areas and seen what they can do. It would be much worse as the left, anticipating another victory, would be plunged into despair and become further radicalized. Rioting in all the major cities is to be expected; indeed, the NYPD has already issued a memo saying “We should anticipate and prepare for protests growing in size, frequency, and intensity leading up to the election.” Riots are sure to exceed the violence that occurred after the 2016 election and the riots of this past summer, and continue for long thereafter. Attempts to shut them down, especially by the feds would likely look a lot like civil war—a civil war that I think the right would win at this point. But the longer this thing festers, the less likely that becomes.

As noted at the outset, the 2016 election was a huge defeat for our hostile elite, including the media. Another defeat would be an even greater catastrophe for them and a great victory for everyone else. Not only are the liberal-left media going all out to defeat Trump, now we have social media companies actively censoring information on covid from high administration officials and medical experts. Recently the social media companies and left-leaning newspapers and television (i.e., virtually all of them) have buried the New York Post series on the Hunter Biden-to-Joe Biden kickback scandal. The Trump administration is finally fighting back, suing Google under antitrust laws and reviewing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “If Trump wins, Big Tech will know it’s screwed. The tech giants want to rig the election. Trump won’t forget that, and he will have the power and political capital to pay them back.” If Trump loses, this iron grip on information would be further empowered, even without going after the First Amendment. In effect, it would be a Ministry of Truth run by the private-sector and decidedly on the left.

Finally, the #1 reason to want a Trump victory would be simply to see massive crowds of Trump haters weeping on TV, a repeat of 2016, but much worse. I would just love to see the likes of Nicole Wallace, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Lawrence O’Donnell, their faces grim, lashing out at Trump voters as racists, misogynists, haters, etc. Get out the popcorn!

 

 

 

The Empress’s New Clothes: Leftist Self-Worship and the Cult of Artemisia Gentileschi

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“She was a genius,” says the Guardian. She was a “uniquely gifted artist who should be considered among the all-time greatest painters,” says the BBC. I say, no, she was not. The Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) was not a genius, was not uniquely gifted and should definitely not be considered a great painter. But don’t take my word for it — see for yourself. Here is one of her most famous and extravagantly praised paintings:

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1640), Artemisia Gentileschi

Given the title of Gentileschi’s self-portrait, you can’t fault her ambition and egocentricity. But you can fault her perspective, her composition, her colouring, her grasp of her own anatomy, and her ability to represent fabric, flesh, and hair. Here for comparison is a self-portrait by a genuinely gifted female artist, the French Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (1755–1842):

Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782), Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun

Vigée-Le Brun represents herself as attractive and enjoying both life and being a woman. Feminists don’t want women to be attractive and happy like that. They want women to be unhappy, angry and militant. That’s one big reason they prefer the untalented Gentileschi to the highly talented Vigée-Le Brun. I don’t think Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting even rises to the level of bad art. The words that come most naturally to my lips are “bloody awful.” The first time I saw the painting in a book of art history, I wondered whether its inclusion was a joke or mistake. How could any art-historian or critic take that mess seriously?

The siren-song of solipsism

Very easily, it became apparent. And very prudently too. Anyone at the Guardian, BBC or other leftist institution who spoke the truth about Artemisia Gentileschi’s sometimes execrable art would be in serious trouble. If Gentileschi had been a man and painted to the same low standard, she would quite rightly have been forgotten long ago. But she was a woman and a “rape-survivor,” so feminists in the 1970s decided to create a cult around her. By worshipping her, they were really worshipping themselves, because I think some or perhaps most feminists don’t see other women as individuals or even as human beings in their own right. Instead, those feminists see other women as reflections of themselves or as counters in the feminist struggle for power and self-assertion.

But this inability to see others as real applies more generally to leftists and their supposed objects of concern. I was struck by this passage in The Liar (1991), an autobiographical novel by the near-ubiquitous British leftist Stephen Fry: “For Adrian other people did not exist except as bit-players in the film of his life. No-one but he had noted the splendour and agony of existence, no one else was truly or fully alive.” Fry is homosexual and half-Jewish, which may also be significant, but his solipsism is, I’d argue, an important feature of leftism. For leftists, collectivism is really the simplest and surest way to exalt the self. And you can see these aspects of leftism in the cult of Artemisia Gentileschi — and also in Gentileschi herself. Her bad art is now being worshipped in a major exhibition at the National Gallery in London. Here’s how Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett of the Guardian reacted when she overheard some truth-telling at the exhibition:

Artemisia’s features, in the guise of myriad saints and figures from myth and religion, are everywhere. As Laura Cumming wrote, she “seems to live inside every role she depicts”. I delighted in this, but other visitors did not. “Self-obsessed”, said one older man, and I laughed to myself because, really, his remark was just too perfect, too predictable, too tediously sexist for words. The history of women and art has been, in the main part, a history of bodies. Bodies stripped of clothing and imagined and objectified by men. Yet running alongside this parade of breasts and bottoms as conceived by the male gaze is a subversive counterhistory: that of women artists seeing themselves. (The history of art is full of female masters. It’s time they were taken seriously, The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett)

Yes, Gentileschi did see herself. She then put herself down on canvas, over and over again, in awkward, ugly, ill-coloured ways. That is subversive, I suppose. It’s definitely self-obsessed. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett says the remark by the “older man” is “tediously sexist” because she can’t say that it’s untrue. Gentileschi also sometimes looks self-pitying, as in her Self-Portrait as Martyr, the painting on the left below:

Some of Artemisia’s subversive self-obsession: self-portraits as martyr, lute-player and St Catherine

Cosslett both explains and echoes the self-pity: “Artemisia was a survivor of male violence, just as I am. Tears sprang to my eyes when I looked at the transcript of her torture during her rapist’s trial, and read that she had repeated ‘è vero, è vero, è vero’ (‘it is true, it is true, it is true’).” I’d suggest that Cosslett wept for herself, not for Gentileschi. That is, Cosslett sees Gentileschi as a reflection of herself, not as an individual. That’s why objective standards of good and bad art don’t apply in the cult of Artemisia Gentileschi. She and her art serve to reflect feminists back at themselves.

And her art is probably even more appealing to feminists because, unlike Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s, it is bad art. Leftists hate beauty, truth and goodness, and delight in the destruction of those things. The cult of Artemisia exalts ugliness and insists on untruths: Artemisia was a “genius,” a “uniquely gifted artist … among the all-time greatest painters.”

Chopping off White men’s heads

The cult also celebrates the overthrow of White men, because this is Gentileschi’s most famous painting in its two versions:

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Many painters have represented the ethnocentric Old Testament story of a Jewish heroine killing a gentile to defend her people, but few have done it as badly as Gentileschi did. And here is another of her bad paintings on a similar theme:

Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1615)

Gentileschi places herself on canvas, dealing death to White men, and feminists can again see themselves reflected in her bad art. If you want to see how a real genius represents Judith’s death-dealing, here is Caravaggio:

Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes (1599)

Compositionally, that isn’t one of Caravaggio’s best paintings: it isn’t a realistic portrayal of what such a beheading would have looked like (according to the apocryphal Book of Judith, Holofernes was drunk and helpless when Judith cut off his head as her maidservant kept watch at the door of his tent, but painters have understandably chosen more drama and less drunkenness). Gentileschi understood Judith’s task better, which is why she shows the beheading as a collaboration. After all, men are on average far more physically powerful than women, as Gentileschi presumably learned when she was raped by her father’s assistant, Agostino Tassi.

Victimhood valorizes

So yes, she was the victim of a bad crime and yes, the crime was compounded by the torture she endured to prove her accusation against Tassi. But her victimhood does not “valorize” her art (to use an ugly neologism found in this feminist art-criticism on Gentileschi). Her art is still bad and Caravaggio’s is still sublime. I’m not disturbed by Gentileschi’s decapitations. They might be more realistic, but they don’t look real. Caravaggio’s decapitation does look real.

And while Gentileschi painted herself as a martyr and saint, as you can see above, Caravaggio painted himself as a sinner, as you can see below:

Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ (c. 1602)

The figure on the far right, holding up a lantern to assist the taking of Christ for trial and crucifixion, is probably Caravaggio himself. That is a very simple and effective way to represent a difficult but essential Christian doctrine: that we all bear responsibility for the crucifixion of God’s only-begotten son.

Anatomy out of whack

It’s also significant, I think, that Caravaggio has given a determinedly gentile face to the kiss-bestowing Judas, an archetypal Jewish villain in so much Christian iconography. There’s no evasion of responsibility here: Caravaggio is saying “I did it; you did it; we all did it.” But if Artemisia Gentileschi had attempted the same scene, I think her first impulse would have been to give Christ her own features and thereby play the victim again. She certainly couldn’t have painted to Caravaggio’s sublime standards. He could represent reality; she couldn’t. Even the Guardian and BBC acknowledge Gentileschi’s artistic failings:

Her anatomy is sometimes out of whack, her details occasionally glossed over (or perhaps painted by assistants). … the single light source in [Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (1623-5)] — a candle near Judith’s upper arm — is in the wrong place. It is too far behind Judith, who has her left hand held out catching the light that is clearly behind it, which is not possible. The mistake is compounded by a poorly painted shadow covering much of Judith’s face, which is also not possible. It’s a splodge and a botch. (Artemisia review — overwhelmingly present, The Guardian, 4th October 2020; Artemisia Gentileschi: Will Gompertz reviews her show at the National Gallery, BBC, 3rd October 2020)

Will Gompertz of the BBC then says: “And yet. Who cares?” I care and so should everyone who wants to defend artistic standards. Gentileschi’s failings aren’t minor and incidental, but major and characteristic. It matters that her “anatomy is sometimes out of whack” and that Caravaggio’s isn’t. She aimed for realism like him and didn’t achieve it. And without the example and inspiration of male painters like Caravaggio, she wouldn’t have reached even the low standards that she did. Whether feminists and other leftists like it or not, artistic genius and creativity are largely male things — more specifically, White male gentile things.

Some risibly bad art by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Feminists and other leftists don’t like it, of course, which is why they have created cults not just for Artemisia Gentileschi, but also for the risibly bad Black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the parodically minimalist Jewish artist Mark Rothko (see Brenton Sanderson’s three-part study of Rothko). Unlike them, Gentileschi valued realism, even if she didn’t achieve it. Basquiat and Rothko are part of what Tom Wolfe calls The Painted Word, that is, art that depends for its success not on its own merits, but on the spinning of verbal webs by disproportionately Jewish critics, academics and dealers. But Caravaggio’s realism — his ability to capture reality in paint — was not an isolated act of genius. It is no coincidence that his great art belongs to the same period as the birth of modern science and anatomy. Other White men were looking at the world and trying to understand and represent it in objective ways. Caravaggio was obsessed with light; Gentileschi was obsessed with herself.

The might of the “male gaze”

So are many of the feminists who now celebrate her and her subversive gynocentric reclamation of “breasts and bottoms as conceived by the male gaze,” as the Guardian journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett put it. But if Cosslett wants true subversion, she should consider the fact that female breasts and bottoms were actually created by the male gaze. You could almost say that the human female is a work of art created by the human male, because countless acts of sexual selection down the course of evolution have favoured some types of women and disfavoured others. The sexual selection has worked in the other direction too, shaping male bodies according to female preferences.

But humans are not like Birds of Paradise, with drab, selective females and spectacular, attention-seeking males. The shaping of women by the “male gaze” may have been particularly strong in Europe when women were competing for the attention of skilled hunters in the colder and harsher European environment. The anthropologist Peter Frost argues that this female competition explains the variety of eye- and hair-colours found in Europe, where genes for blue eyes and blond hair appeared under pressure of the male gaze. In prehistoric times, White women were evolving special beauty even as White men were evolving special creativity.

Opposing beauty, pursuing power

In modern times, that White female beauty was celebrated by the art of White male creators. Later still, both the art and the beauty were attacked by leftist ideologies invented or decisively influenced by an alien group called Jews. I agree with a fascinating article at National Vanguard arguing that “Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people” and that “Jews, as a group, oppose beauty.” Indeed, the Talmud advises Jews not to regard physical beauty as important in marriage: “For ‘false is grace and beauty is vain.’ Pay regard to good breeding, for the object of marriage is to have children” (Taanith 26b and 31a).

The cult of Artemisia Gentileschi is a product of those leftist ideologies, celebrating a painter who was mediocre at her rarely achieved best. And just as Gentileschi’s art was not beautiful, nor was Gentileschi herself. She looks masculine and muscular, with high testosterone that may have given her the ambition and drive to promote herself in a way that her art could not do on its own merits. And she had novelty value as a female painter, of course. Cosslett says that a “large part of why Gentileschi captivates is because she triumphed against patriarchy.” But feminists like Cosslett don’t genuinely care about patriarchy or about rape. It wasn’t the Guardian or BBC that exposed the Muslim rape-gangs of Rotherham and numerous other British towns and cities. But it is the Guardian and BBC that support the continued growth in Western nations of Islam, which competes with Orthodox Judaism for the title of the world’s most patriarchal and misogynistic religion.

Instead, feminists like Cosslett care about themselves and about warring on truth, beauty and goodness. The cult of Artemisia Gentileschi is a small but characteristic battle-front in that war. Gentileschi was a bad artist who created ugly art. There are thousands of male artists far worthier of exhibitions at the National Gallery and of praise in the mainstream media. But those male artists don’t receive the attention they deserve. Not while leftism rules the media and inverts reality in its perpetual quest not for truth and beauty, but for power and revenge.