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What’s good for the Jews? Stephen Miller.

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Editorial comment: This article was originally posted on February 8, 2018. I thought that, since Stephen Miller has now been officially outed as a “White nationalist”  by the SPLC it would be a good time to revisit it.

Young right-leaning Jews don’t have many Jewish figures to look up to.  Illustrious elder scholar and “alt right godfather” Paul Gottfried. Taki columnist and revisionist David Cole Stein.  Brilliant neoreactionary thinker and half-Jew Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug).

But thankfully we now have Stephen Miller, the 32-year old Trump advisor and immigration hard-liner recently blamed by Democratic senators for scuttling their desired amnesty deal for illegal immigrants. Transparently, the Dems are trying to spoil Trump’s relationship with Miller, as they did with Bannon, by insinuating that Miller is pulling Trump’s strings. Of course it is absurd to suggest that Trump is anything but his own man. But Miller is a crucially important figure in the Trump administration and his influence is, from what I can tell, entirely positive for the interest of Americans concerned with mass immigration and the very tangible threat of Europeans and people of European descent becoming minorities in their own countries.

Jews, and Americans overall, need more Stephen Millers. Brash, unafraid, quick-witted, verbally formidable, and unabashedly “America First,” Miller is a powerful spokesman for economic nationalist positions, anti-globalism, and for preserving this country’s original culture and people against the Democratic scheme to flood it with illegal and legal immigrants whose main gift to America will be their reliable Democratic votes in every future election. Miller is roundly despised by the establishment for his positions and rhetoric. Nancy Pelosi has called Miller a “White supremacist,” while others on the left have compared him to Joseph Goebbels. He’s the only Jew I can think of offhand that the mainstream media actively encourages the country to hate.

But we Jews should be honest: for every mensch like Miller, we have shmucks like  Tim Wise, Noel Ignatiev, Rob Reiner, Charles Schumer, and thousands of other high-profile Jews who seem to hate or fear White Christian Americans and seek to hasten their demise as the ethnic majority of this country. Yes, we Jews have Miller, but we also have the ADL and the SPLC — powerful well-funded groups who conduct witch hunts against anyone who dares speak out against multiculturalism, open-borders, globalist doctrine, or who dares to criticize Jews. Jewish political influence in the US is still overwhelmingly negative, despite the great work of a few good Jews.

As an American (first) and Jew (second) who supports Trump and Trumpism, the European New Right, and anyone concerned with the long-term impacts of mass immigration, I want to see more Jews, particularly younger, Generation Z Jews move to our ideological side. I have tried to explore my own motivations for this. Why do I find myself so far to the Right on the issue of immigration and of protecting European cultures and peoples?   Why do I hope other Jews follow me on this ideological journey?  And there is growing indication they are. Read more

The Way Life Should Be? Vol. XVII (Finale): Get Woke, Shoah Invoke

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It’s a sad state of affairs when charity becomes weaponized, but here we are. It certainly wasn’t always this way—it was once an integral part of the old WASP establishment’s noblesse oblige to those less fortunate than they. As Alison Powell, Willa Seldon, and Nidhi Sahni write:

Throughout the 20th century, large US institutional foundations such as the multiple Carnegie foundations, the Ford Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation played an outsize role in philanthropy. By virtue of their large share of the philanthropic marketplace, these institutions were able to shape the thinking of policymakers, attract social innovators, and exert influence to bring together the private sector, government, and civil society. As a result, they played a vital role in underwriting social change: They helped to eradicate polio in the United States and then across most of the world; they provided 96 percent of Americans with easy access to free libraries; they helped to reduce smoking in the United States by more than 60 percent; and they promoted a “green revolution” that dramatically increased agricultural production.[1]

Certainly these magnates were not without fault by any stretch of the imagination, and a strong executive such as Teddy Roosevelt proved necessary to rein them in. There’s a lesson in that, an essential one, in that strong and responsible governance on behalf of the people and the environment is an essential counter-point to the all-consuming profit motive.

Our current government hasn’t the spine to curtail the cravenness and grotesque gluttony, the likes of which would’ve made the robber barons blush—for they are bought and sold, for one, and the true power brokers are not of the same Anglo-Saxon stock, for another. We have a government run by financial institutions and corporations for financial institutions and corporations; when it no longer serves its purpose, it will be discarded along with the country itself. As it stands, we have watched America become little more than an economic zone, a gigantic market, its founding stock the target of ultimate erasure through a mixture of malice and greed.

In Revolution from Above, Kerry Bolton extensively documents the bankrolling of feminism, “civil rights,” and other causes that have proven corrosive to the moral foundations of this country by foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. As with virtually all of the philanthropic charities established by America’s old financial and industrial magnates, once the original benefactor had died, the foundation was co-opted to be re-fashioned in order to undermine the communities and society it was ostensibly there to help. These foundations are becoming obsolete in the 21st century, however, with the predominance of private equity and the private equity model.

The private equity model has actually been adopted by philanthropies to some degree, but what is far more prevalent is the treatment of philanthropic organizations as investments. Lobbying is such a dirty business and has such negative PR, but charity and philanthropy…well, that’s another story. That’s how big business can couch the importation of a new labor force in humanitarian terms. That’s how big capital and multi-nationals can super-charge their efforts to knock down borders, socially re-engineer entire populations, and even ethnically cleanse those populations proving to be reluctant or troublesome.

The rise of the private equity model is one way in which Jewish capital was able to effectively corral the old WASP establishment; the growth potential of private equity and its relative complexity could rapidly out-strip the resources of the extant American ruling class and first enfold and then subsume them into the burgeoning neo-liberal system. Not that the WASPs were entirely hoodwinked—they had plenty of willing collaborators to do their dirty work in the World Wars, transformative immigration, the erosion of civil liberties, et cetera. In terms of adapting to the new model, Jeffrey C. Walker catalogues:

Over time, larger, more professional private equity businesses emerged, with whom the wealthy families couldn’t compete. Instead, those families began to invest through the new PE funds. The PE industry then began offering funds specializing in particular industries (such as health care, tech, media, industrial, or consumer), geographies (including the United States, Europe, China, and Latin America), and deal sizes. Focused on pursuing higher rates of investment return, these specialized PE funds enjoyed [a] competitive advantage.[2]

Now here’s where things get interesting; returning to Walker:

Like PE funds, these philanthropic funds are focused on specific objectives—for example, the sustainable development goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations. Like PE funds, they are managed by experienced, knowledgeable leaders who can apply the most current knowledge of impactful program design to their investment decisions. And like PE funds, they allow wealthy families to channel their funds to a larger number of organizations than they could reach if they tried to seek out one well-run, effective nonprofit organization at a time.[3]

This is almost surely the primary reason that “social change” has accelerated so rapidly. Speaking at the 2017 Global Steering Group for Impact Investment Summit, Sir Ronald Cohen, an “impact investing innovator and advocate,” believes that the field’s rapid growth will reach a tipping point and “spark a chain reaction in impact creation,” touching investors, big business, foundations, and social organizations.[4] We are witnessing that already. Susan Wolf Ditkoff and Abe Grindle concur: “Many of today’s emerging large-scale philanthropists aspire to…audacious successes… Steady, linear progress isn’t enough; they demand disruptive, catalytic, systemic change—and in short order.” Recalling a number of sentiments discussed in the previous installment, from Bank of New York Mellon Wealth Management’s paper “From Philanthropy to Social Investment” (2018):

Demographic shifts are poised to bring about significant changes in the philanthropic market, and this evolution is being accelerated by the emergence of newer, more dynamic models for giving and changes to the U.S. tax code. It’s imperative for both institutions and the individuals they serve to recognize how these changes will affect their philanthropic endeavors and learn how to navigate them in the most efficient manner possible…The continued evolution of the philanthropic market…will have a profound effect on how we view giving—less as charity, and more as a social investment…As philanthropists come to think of themselves as social investors, non-profits must also redefine themselves as “for-purpose” institutions. This must be more than a rebranding. An effective for-purpose institution must…aid in identifying opportunities across the investment spectrum…A “social investor” will endeavor to compile a portfolio of solutions that draws from both the non- and for-profit worlds…According to the Global Impact Investing Network, measurable investments in impact vehicles reached $228 billion in 2016, equal to 55% of the traditional philanthropic market. These vehicles, which fall under the umbrella of “social finance,” do more than just pursue a positive societal or environmental impact; they also seek to offer a satisfactory financial return…To [younger givers], environmental, social and governance issues are intertwined with financial health and long-term, corporate sustainability.

To some degree, this last point may be a “life imitating art or art imitating life” question, but most likely these “younger givers” have been conditioned to hold this view and are simply reflecting the neo-liberal architecture back at itself. In any case, the ruling class has indeed made “environmental, social, and governance issues…intertwined with financial health and long-term, corporate sustainability.” This is precisely the problem, and it goes way beyond “Woke-washing” brands with the rainbow. It is social and political engineering on a global scale. The ability to “seed” money/investments globally has allowed for a synergistic effect which, provided the present architecture remains unchanged or worse is built upon and expanded, can only amplify the stated aims of globalization. Though Walker obviously believes this is a good thing, look past his glowing language to identify the strategy at play here, a strategy I’ve provided countless examples of regarding Maine in particular over previous pieces:

There are now philanthropic funds that focus on supporting great new ideas from top social and system entrepreneurs. This has been a core strategy of groups such as New Profit, Draper Richards Kaplan, Ashoka, and Echoing Green. New Profit, in particular, has been investing in social change for 20 years, and has supported the growth of nonprofits like Teach for America, Kipp Schools, and City Year. Much like venture capital funds, philanthropic funds like New Profit install staff members on the boards of the organizations they support, where they spend three to five years adding value through the counsel, management insights, and useful connections they provide.[5]

This is the essential framework of philanthropic capitalism. The vast network of organizations are linked by personnel, history, ideology, and financial aims and ties. The various charities and philanthropies do not view their works as good for its own sake—there is always an ulterior motive, and it always involves an economic component. Creating social disharmony among whites is also good, too. Regarding the former point, consider the Rise Fund’s calculations on social investment; their charity is filtered through an economic lens of GDP and return on investment: “In the malaria world…organizations can measure the return on dollars invested in mosquito bed nets against lowering health costs and increasing a country’s 10-year GDP. The result has been a 15-to-1 payback.” Saving lives is a nice by-product, but those lives translate into more workers and more consumers. As Chris Addy, Maya Chorengel, Mariah Collins, and Michael Etzel explicate:

The partnership between Rise Fund and Bridgespan Group has produced a forward-looking methodology to estimate…whether corporations or institutions can evaluate the projected return on an opportunity. We call our new metric the impact multiple of money (IMM). Once they have identified the target outcomes, social impact investors need to find an “anchor study” that robustly translates those outcomes into economic terms.[6]

As I discussed with Nestlé and SwissContact, this is not about “empowering women” or “marginalized communities,” it’s about training a semi-educated and compliant workforce who will readily buy from the company store. It really is that simple. The role of capital in this process is essential; Capital Impact Partners provides an illustrative example, in their own words (emphases are mine):

Capital Impact Partners has continued to invest in shared prosperity, equity, and inclusion for its communities nationwide. With income inequality, mass incarceration, wealth stripping, and other forms of structural discrimination continuing unabated, breaking barriers to success for underinvested communities has become ever more important. Capital Impact announced…financing and investment efforts…to serve more than 14,500 beneficiaries and create more than 515 permanent and construction-related jobs…Transforming marginalized communities into places of opportunity comes from disrupting structural racism and discrimination in order to expand economic and social justice…Capital Impact also took a leadership role in exploring how financial institutions can be more inclusive of individuals with criminal records…Capital Impact’s…financing…create[s] new educational opportunities and…safe spaces for immigrants to live in communities across the United States.[7]

Specific examples include:

  • In Bridgeport, CT, Great Oaks Charter School is bringing high-quality education to a census tract with a 71 percent poverty rate. Eighty-six percent of the students who will attend the school qualify for free and reduced-price lunch…Capital Impact supported the construction of a 70,000 sq. ft. facility that will become the permanent home of Great Oaks Charter School…The school will scale up from serving 400 students in grades 6-9 to 750 students in grades 6-12, 15 percent of whom are English language learners and 20 percent of whom have disabilities. Great Oaks has…a focus on professional development for local students.
  • Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools is creating a high school in Dumbo…The majority of the students are expected to be African American, 85 percent of whom will be eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and 32 percent of the student population are going to receive special education at the school. Because of its proximity to technology companies in Dumbo, the school curriculum focuses heavily on technology. 
  • Creating schools that intentionally reflect the socioeconomic, racial, and cultural diversity of the communities in which they operate—diverse by design—is a promising practice within education that is showing results. Citizens of the World Charter Schools (CWC) is the first national school network to follow a diverse by design model, creating an environment in which all students thrive no matter their background, precisely because they are integrated. Diversity is a cornerstone of school leadership as well, with minorities making up 60 percent of the leadership team and 40 percent of the board.
  • Tacoma Community House (TCH) in Tacoma, Washington…has seen an increasing number of farmworkers and refugees, resulting in a significant need for social and legal services…TCH is the only center providing comprehensive services to immigrants and refugees in the region. TCH serves immigrants from 105 countries – approximately 4,000 individuals each year. The majority of their clients are of Latino and Asian descent, with the remainder hailing from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Through partnerships with regional community colleges, businesses, housing providers, local health centers, and government offices, the center provides access to education programs for children and adults and job placement, internships, and training for job seekers. TCH also offers immigration services and advocacy.

Dovetailing with capital and “social justice” are the supports for the architecture of philanthropic capitalism, from the advocacy groups to the law firms. Add to the multitudinous alphabet soup of advocacy organizations the Alliance for Justice (AFJ); Edward Labaton, co-founder and President of the Institute for Law and Economic Policy (ILEP—introduced in Volume V), was honored by the AFJ as its 2015 Champion of Justice; what said “justice” looks like is the usual sentimentalized dreck readers will no doubt be well-familiar with at this point:

Immigration is baked into our DNA as a country. People from all over the world seek refuge and opportunity in America, and how we treat those who are new to our country says a lot about us as humans.

In conjunction with AFJ, a number of organizations co-signed a 2018 letter protesting several judicial appointments of judges who believe a non-Israeli country should have the right to police its borders. Included on the list of co-signing organizations were: the NAACP, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, MoveOn.org, CAIR, Rwandese Community Association of Maine, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine Business Immigration Coalition, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), whose mission is:

To protect and promote the rights and opportunities of low income immigrants and their family members.  NILC staff specialize in immigration law, and the employment and public benefits rights of immigrants. The Center conducts policy analysis and impact litigation and provides publications, technical advice, and trainings to a broad constituency of legal aid agencies, community groups, and pro bono attorneys.

All of this is designed to ensure that the influx of foreigners is not impeded; among their many uses to the neo-liberal order, Third World immigrants are a huge investment opportunity. Mission Investors Exchange says as much: “Venture capitalist investors, philanthropists, and businesses are looking at immigrants and refugees as opportunities for investment.” They then list some of the major players:

  • Nuveen: Nuveen is a private investment manager that recently made an investment in an online-based remittance provider that focuses on channels in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The goal is to invest in technology to lower the cost of remittance for migrant populations.
  • NeedsList: NeedsList addresses the need for massive innovation in the humanitarian sector with a marketplace connecting local NGOs with individual and corporate donors.
  • Refugee Investment Network (RIN): The RIN moves private capital from commitment to active investment by sourcing, structuring, and supporting the financing of projects and companies that benefit refugees and host communities. They are creating an investor-centered knowledge hub targeting business opportunities that support refugee self-reliance; building a pipeline of deals that will speed and scale private investment in communities of displaced people; and articulating investor needs to funders, governments, and the development community.
  • Tent Foundation, or The Tent Partnership for Refugees: This foundation was established by Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani. The initiative, a partnership of over 80 businesses in over 30 countries, grew out of the Obama Administration’s appeal for the business community to engage more deeply with global refugee crises. In addition to sparking a $500 million investment commitment from George Soros, the appeal built a coalition of businesses expressing measurable commitments. 
  • George Soros and Open Society Foundations: Open Society Foundations founder and chair George Soros announced a pledge to invest up to $500 million in startups, established companies, and other businesses founded by migrants and refugees. The assets will be managed by Open Society Foundation and is in addition to its existing grant and program-related investments of the Foundations.
  • Community Enterprise Development Services (CEDS): A nonprofit lender that provides business startup training and micro loans to immigrant and refugee entrepreneurs, as well as entrepreneurs who face barriers accessing traditional sources of capital.
  • OpenInvest: This financial analysis and investing platform developed an investment screen allowing its customers to invest in the companies helping refugees. The company’s #WithRefugees Impact Investment Screen identified 21 public American companies making significant contributions to refugee survival and welfare.[8]

Mission Investors Exchange is a massive network of community foundations, public charities, private foundations, “impact investors,” law firms, investment advisors, asset managers, consultants, and community development financial institutions (CDFIs). Their aim is “to build an infrastructure that assures the sustainability of impact investing and expands [its] ecosystem.” Partnering or affiliate organizations include: the Boston Foundation, AARP Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Deutsche Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the John T. Gorman Foundation, MetLife Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Prudential Foundation, Nutter McClennan & Fish LLP, Community Development and Investment Group at Northern Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, US Trust—Bank of America Private Wealth Management, Graystone Consulting, the Climate Trust, Bank of the West BNP Paribas Wealth Management, TD Bank, Solomon Hess Capital Management, Maycomb Capital, National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders, Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), Cornerstone Capital, and the Omidyar Network.

The name Cornerstone Capital should ring a bell from Volume VI. Self-described “Jewish lesbian” founder and CEO Erika Karp penned an op-ed for Forbes in 2012 where she explicitly ties capitalism, globalism, “social justice,” and her ventures to Judaism, opening with a quote from Hillel and using it as a through-line, along with her Jewish identity—two themes which are echoed in another article by Karp from 2016, this time featured on Cornerstone’s own website. She states:

As we once again approach the Jewish High Holidays — “The Days of Awe” — we return to a theme we have touched upon before: the importance of amplifying the voices of progress…“The Days of Awe” could bring lessons to leverage the power of capitalism towards its best and highest purpose…In reflecting on the future of capitalism, we draw from wisdom of the great scholar Hillel…“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, then when?” These questions posed at around 50 BC are incredibly timely in the context of today’s struggling global economy and threats to our system of capitalism…All the pieces are in place to move forward and leverage the extraordinary power of capitalism on behalf of the entire world. We have everything we need across the broad realms of technology, science, academia, economics, government and finance…There are one thousand asset management firms representing $30 trillion in assets…These firms [are] all signatories of the Principles for Responsible Investment.[9]

The Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) was set in motion by then-United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.[10] It is an official UN-supported network of global capital, “based on the notion that environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, such as climate change and human rights, can affect the performance of investment portfolios and should therefore be considered alongside more traditional financial factors if investors are to properly fulfill their fiduciary duty. The six Principles provide a global framework for mainstream investors to consider these ESG issues.”[11] Just two years after Karp’s second piece, the PRI had swollen to almost $90 trillion in assets under management and rising.[12] For perspective, the annual global gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated to be approximately $80 trillion, and the collective global wealth is about $360 trillion. In other words, one-quarter of the entire planet’s wealth is under the control of this particular international network of neo-liberal capitalists who are facilitating resource consolidation and speculation, mass migration into and erasure of white nations, moral and environmental degradation, and Jewish supremacy.

Karp has also been involved with the World Economic Forum (WEF), the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation “strengthened by a strategic partnership framework agreement with the United Nations.” David Wallace-Wells describes its annual summit as “an orgy of plutocratic comity.” Comprised of NGOs, supra-governmental organizations, venture capital firms, multi-national companies and banks, diplomats, academic institutions, and media figures, WEF is essentially the last word in neo-liberal globalism. Partner and affiliated organizations include: Nestlé, Soros Fund Management, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, Hess, Walmart, Visa, Verizon, Hewlett Packard, Deloitte, ING, Western Union, Tyson Foods, TD Bank, the Rise Fund, Toshiba, Coca-Cola, Silver Lake Partners, Pepsi, Prudential, Pfizer, S&P Global, Nasdaq, Nielsen, the New York Times, Polo Ralph Lauren, Procter & Gamble, NBC, the New York Stock Exchange, Novo Nordisk, Morgan Stanley, Nokia, MasterCard, Allianz, AIG, Alibaba, AT&T, Microsoft, Marriott International, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Advantage Partners, African Rainbow Minerals, Merck, Lloyds Banking Group, Kaiser Permanente, Liberty Global, State Grid Corporation of China, Saudi Telecom Group, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, JP Morgan, LinkedIn, Hyundai, IBM, Infosys, Guggenheim Partners, Gulf International Bank, Hydro Quebec, Huawei Technologies, HSBC, Google, Facebook, Heineken, General Electric, Hitachi, London-Heathrow Airport, Humana, HP, Ericsson, eBay, Dow, Humana, Emirates Group, Deutsche Bank, European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Dell, Discovery, Chevron, BP, BBVA, Citi, Cisco, Barclays, Bayer, the American Heart Association, Amazon, Bank of America, BlackRock, the Blackstone Group, Santander, Boeing, Booking.com, Credit Suisse, McKinsey, LUKOIL, PayPal, Thomson Reuters, UPS, Unilever, Anglo American, Investment Corporation of Dubai, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, Bank Leumi Le-Israel, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Bloomberg, the LEGO Company, Volvo, Anheuser-Busch, Volkswagen, Airbus Defense and Space, AARP, African Development Bank Group, Bain & Company, Expedia, Development Bank of Southern Africa, Iron Mountain, Investec, Ingka Group (includes IKEA), Levi Strauss, the Mayo Clinic, Scotiabank, Royal Dutch Shell, Royal Bank of Scotland, Stanley Black & Decker, Swarovski, African Export-Import Bank, Banco do Brasil, Prudential, Discovery, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the State Bank of India, and Quest Diagnostics.

The future these entities are planning for us in what WEF calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution / Globalization 4.0 is one of unlimited mobility—ie, the mass movements of cheap labor/consumers and goods in the service of the neo-liberal economy. Ultimately, WEF and its affiliates such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) desire to “maximize…foreign direct investment on the economy, society and the environment” and increase “global economic interdependence.” These are central planks of its E15 Initiative, a partnership between WEF, ICTSD, WTO, UN, OECD, the Center for International Development at Harvard University, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Evian Group, Brussels European and Global Economic Laboratory (BRUEGEL), Chatham House, Climate Strategies, the Global Governance Programme, the European University Institute, the Graduate Institute of Geneva Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, the World Trade Institute, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (named after the first president of Germany’s Weimar Republic),[13] the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council, Peking University National School of Development, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, International Institute for Management Development (IMD) International Business School, Kommerskollegium National Board of Trade (a government agency in Sweden that answers to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs), Southern Voice (a network of over fifty think tanks from the Global South that actively supports the UN’s Agenda 2030), and the governments of Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Canada, and Switzerland. Major features of the E15 Initiative include:

  • An emphasis on multi-lateral trade agreements styled after the Trans-Pacific Partnership that undermine national sovereignty and enforce a kind of “trade egalitarianism”
  • An international appeals process to undermine existing bilateral trade agreements
  • The removal of all tariffs by “developed countries” for imports from the Third World; near-removal of all other tariffs
  • “Scale technical assistance from the International Monetary Fund or multilateral development banks to LDC sovereign debt issuers”
  • Increase foreign aid from “developed countries” to the Third World
  • “Mandate within the WTO the disclosure and phased prohibition of fossil fuel subsidies, according special and differential treatment to poorer developing countries”
  • Create a system of global food stamps
  • Emphasize blended finance or hybrid-model capitalism as the preferred method of development
  • “Streamline processes and procedures related to visas and work permits and establish a plurilateral but open ‘innovation zone’…within which skilled researchers and technical personnel would be able to migrate freely for up to ten years”
  • “Establish an Advisory Centre on International Investment Law to level the playing field for developing country governments that lack the legal expertise to defend themselves adequately in disputes, based on the model of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law” (read: standardize all economic systems to neo-liberalism)
  • “Enhance local capacity to conform to global standards”
  • “Develop norms for making regional and plurilateral agreements more inclusive”
  • “Combining improvements in infrastructure, investment climate institutions and workforce skills with openness to foreign direct investment…Emphasize the facilitation rather than restriction of imports and inward foreign investment”
  • Establish a global supply chain
  • Mandate compliance with the Paris Climate Accord
  • Institute export restrictions[14]

Despite using the usual wet cardboard euphemisms such as “sustainability” and “equity,” Karp’s brand of “social impact investing” is not predicated on making a positive impact or anything of the sort—it is about crippling the West and countries like Japan, exploiting the Third World, enforcing globalism, and putting a rainbow paintjob on the contemporary vehicle of Jewish supremacy while generating previously-unfathomable profits for a small coterie of oligarchs. Amy Bennett relates Karp’s rough outline of the Shape of Globalization to Come:

Far from simply catering to progressive individuals looking to “invest their values,” environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors provide critical insight into a company’s viability and long-term economic performance. It’s not ancillary analysis, it’s critical fundamentals. This realization…was a pivotal moment for Erika Karp and a key to success in developing a truly integrated research framework…“Economics is a wonderful way to think about, and put a framework around, social constructs,” says Erika…[Karp] established relationships in different areas of the capital markets—including corporations, non-governmental organizations, regulatory agencies, exchanges, wealth asset managers, investment banks, accountants and others (including the United Nations and the Clinton Global Initiative)… It all involves having a macro capital markets view. Erika notes it’s not about moving millions or even billions, but trillions of dollars towards impact, especially when considering ESG imperatives like climate change, women’s economic empowerment, animal welfare, education, ocean pollution, potable water and increasing broadband access. “To give you a sense, in 2017 maybe $400 billion of venture money was moved towards alternative energy. We need to move $1.5 trillion a year if we’re going to achieve anything like the COP 21 [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] objectives. And that’s just for alternative energy. If you can’t get the capital markets working and having money flow towards progress, we won’t be able to do it…We don’t think of ESG or impact investing as an asset class. We think it should be completely integral to the investing process.”…Donor advised funds and similar philanthropy-focused investment vehicles are critically important “portals” for wealth management clients to access impact investing, Karp adds. “We are seeing a transformation of traditional philanthropy strategies towards impact investing.”[15]

This transformation is all-encompassing and signals a full integration of disparate modes of investment with philanthropic endeavors and different modes of lobbying. Essentially, traditional notions of public versus private are out the window, with governments themselves part of the investment portfolio, so long as they serve as profitable vehicles and/or useful intermediaries. As it is, funneling huge funds through various philanthropic loopholes pads profits through tax exemptions and amplifies the ability of investors and big capital to influence the political process, as we will see below. The goal, as stated by Cornerstone Capital, is for “partnerships, integration of philanthropy into business strategies, and innovative types of investments, including impact-focused investments, [to] transform the traditional economy.”

The integrative approach promises mutual support and amplified profits, in addition to the financial interests and incentives already present in each sphere. For example, the VOLAGs (refugee re-settlement agencies) have already monetized migration through per-head payouts. For perspective, one of the smallest of these VOLAGs, the Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) and its subsidiaries received almost $21.9 million from federal, state, and local government grants in 2016 according to their own financial report on the condensed consolidated statement of activities. They have also received recent donations from the United Way, IKEA, HSBC Bank USA, the Wells Fargo Foundation, Capital One, BB&T, SunTrust Bank, Whole Foods, TD Bank, Susan G. Komen, Ethiopian Airlines, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, E*Trade, Bed Bath and Beyond, PNC, and Golden & Cohen, LLC. They’ve received Open Society and Tides money in the past as well as microloan funding from Citigroup. Further:

ECDC testified before Congress last year that the Unaccompanied Alien Children crisis could “lead to the demise of the refugee resettlement program as we know it.” This was primarily a funding concern…ECDC provides a wide variety of services to refugees, and is involved in other contractual services as well, for example Small Business Administration microloans for new minority businesses.[16]

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) does all of this and more, and has gone one step further in profiting off mass migration into the US—HIAS has an agreement under which it collects on loans given out by the International Office of Migration (“IOM”) to refugees. HIAS keeps 25% of the total amounts collected, and recognizes it as migrant loan processing fees and repayments revenue in the accompanying consolidated statements of activities. HIAS’s corporate partners include Airbnb, 3M, Starbucks, Marriott, and Sodexo. Surely there is no vested interest in having cheap labor by these companies. HIAS also received over $21 million from the US State Department in 2016 and over $3 million from the US Department of Health and Human Services.[17]

The VOLAGs are reinforced by the plethora of law firms, advocacy groups, and other charities that either profit directly from their services or indirectly as covert lobbying organizations, fronts or conduits for illicit financial dealings, and/or social engineering vehicles. ILEP is a perfect case-in-point (incidentally, all five of ILEP’s principal figures are Jews, including Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling donor Marc Gross). While this 501(c)(3) generally stays within the lines of symposia on class action lawsuits and the like, its innocuousness camouflages a deeply subversive agenda. Consider that in 2018, ILEP partnered with Loyola University-Chicago for a symposium on consumer protection that featured Barney Frank as its keynote speaker. Yes, that would be the nipples-protruding (very, very disrespectful) Jewish homosexual Barney Frank who:

Accept[ed] as a gift a round trip fight on a luxury jet from S. Donald Sussman of Paloma Partners, a hedge-fund manager who had previously received a $200 million federal bailout as a subsidiary of AIG. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank oversaw the dispersion of the bailout funds. Frank reported the cost of the 2009 flight from Maine to the Virgin Islands, estimated to be worth $30,000 each way, to Congress as worth only $1,500…Scandal is nothing new to Barney Frank. The Boston Globe asked him to resign in 1989 after it was revealed that he had fixed parking tickets for a male prostitute who was running a brothel out of his Dupont Circle condominium…While serving on the House Financial Services Committee, Frank consistently supported the expansion of questionable mortgage loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while his partner, Herb Moses, was an assistant director of Fannie Mae responsible for relaxing mortgage standards. This policy, of which Frank was a prime mover, led to the largest credit implosion in the history of civilization…Frank, who continued to promote dangerous credit expansionary policies throughout the Bush years, subsequently partnered with Sergio Pombo, who was an employee of the World Bank…Frank consistently reaped campaign money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as from various banks…As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank inserted a special provision into bailout legislation to grant $12 million in TARP funds for One United Bank, a bank connected to the husband of Rep. Maxine Waters.[18]

I’ve used the adjective “incestuous” to describe the ruling class before, and clearly with good reason.

Let’s consider one example of how an earlier version of the (still evolving/metastasizing) neo-liberal hybrid model was able to manufacture consensus for “gay rights issues,” which would prove the harbinger for the recent push toward “transgender rights” and the normalization of pedophilia and other disturbing trends no healthy society would ever tolerate:

After Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2003, the following year 11 states enacted amendments banning same-sex marriage, often by sweeping vote margins. Eager to put substantial funds behind the fight for marriage equality, major funders led by the Gill Foundation and the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund brought together more than two dozen LGBTQ leaders in 2005 to devise a common strategy. What emerged from this gathering became known as the “road map to victory,” which would create an electoral and public opinion infrastructure capable of winning and maintaining support for same-sex marriage, one state at a time. It identified 100 tangible battlefields that could then be pursued in sequence as part of a coordinated field operation…Funders came together as the Civil Marriage Collaborative to support the road map. The Haas, Jr. Fund itself contributed $39 million. Marriage equality was a classic example of using a big bet to wage an advocacy campaign. Here, the role of philanthropy is to take a risk that no one else will take. Such a big bet can provide the critical infrastructure required for movements: materials, people, transportation, legal services, research, and more. It can also represent a vote of confidence, especially when the odds against progress are high. When the Haas, Jr. Fund made its first contributions in support of marriage equality, momentum seemed to be going in the opposite direction, with more and more states amending their constitutions to ban same-sex marriage. Big investments in advocacy offer leaders the time they need to weather defeats and press forward to create change.[19]

The authors then go on to state that this model is being applied to “gun control,” which I have written about elsewhere (side note: this “philanthropic endeavor” is currently being spearheaded by Michael Bloomberg). Gay marriage was a sustained, coordinated, and well-funded campaign to manufacture an issue, wear the traditional institutions down, and ultimately impose an agenda through a combination of dubious legislation, judicial activism, bureaucratic machinations, executive fiat, media manipulation, academic indoctrination, mass marketing, and social pressure. Susan Wolf Ditkoff and Abe Grindle expand on the methods used to institutionalize the objectionable:

Tim Gill and other philanthropists who support LGBTQ rights demonstrated the importance of setting milestones. In the early 2000s, at the urging of movement leaders including attorney Evan Wolfson,[20] they began devoting considerable resources to the very specific objective of legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. For decades the movement had focused on the broad goal of “advancing LGBTQ rights,” and although that work continued, leaders hoped that a significant push on a concrete winnable milestone would more powerfully advance the larger cause. They further concentrated efforts on a targeted set of states in order to build momentum and lay the public and legal foundations for a national victory…The marriage equality movement struggled to connect with the general public as recently as 2008, even losing a well-funded ballot initiative in left-leaning California. In the aftermath of that and other setbacks, supportive philanthropists financed polling and focus groups to help movement leaders understand how to reframe the core message. The research revealed that many voters perceived the movement as driven primarily by same-sex couples’ desire for the government benefits and rights conferred by marriage—and they did not find that a gripping rationale. This insight was pivotal: The movement refocused its communications strategy on equality of love and commitment, arguing that “love is love”—a message that struck a chord. Victories piled up, culminating in the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage throughout the United States.[21]

These 501(c)(3)s serve a vital role in subversion under the guise of charity, among their many other functions, as we’ve seen. Additionally, many of these 501(c)(3)s such as HIAS have diverse investment portfolios that include mutual funds (HIAS also invests in the State of Israel government bonds). As Wesley B. Truitt informs, “A number of mutual funds feature investments that are socially responsible according to criteria advertised by the fund…The Timothy Plan fund avoids investing in companies whose practices are considered contrary to Judeo-Christian principles.” The 501(c)(3)s are often a valuable conduit and/or cover for major profit-making ventures. The ability of the 501(c)(3)s to then invest tax-exempt money in donor-advised funds (DAFs) is one major reason for their increasing popularity among investors. From the Ropes & Gray LLP document, “Beyond the Private Foundation” (March 2018):

With the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, private foundations were required to contend with many new regulatory requirements and restrictions…Subsequent rulings…confirmed the advantages of the DAF model. In 1987, the Internal Revenue Service lost its attempt to deny tax-exempt status to a public charity that existed almost exclusively to maintain DAFs and other donor-recommended charitable projects. Several years later, the Internal Revenue Service granted tax-exempt status to a non-profit organization established to maintain DAFs and affiliated with Fidelity Investments, namely, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund. Since then, DAFs have flourished. In 2016, there were reported to be almost 285,000 DAF accounts holding assets worth nearly $85 billion.

Grants from donor-advised funds to charities increased almost 20 percent from 2016 to 2017, with the number of individual donor-advised funds growing a whopping 60.2 percent. Charitable assets increased 27.3 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 (S&P Index) rose by 18.4 percent, or over 400 points, in 2017.[22] Scholars have found that the “strongest predictor [of individual giving] is the S&P Index…a 100 point increase in the index is associated with a $1.7 billion increase in charitable deductions.” Roughly 60 percent of the contributions to donor-advised funds are non-cash assets such as publicly traded securities, closely held stock, real estate, and personal property.[23] Donor-advised funds are fast becoming the preferred method of choice for investors, though not the only one. More capital and other assets are also flowing through a variety of linked structures, such as LLCs and 501(c)(4)s in an increasingly inter-connected fashion. Alison Powell, Willa Seldon, and Nidhi Sahni explain:

Living donors are also increasingly willing to forgo the tax benefit of putting funds into a foundation and are embracing alternative legal structures that enable both for-profit investing and nonprofit giving, or giving to political donations and advocacy. These structures include limited-liability companies (LLCs, which allow for greater control of funds and stocks, diversity of investment options, and more privacy than a foundation) and the 501(c)(4) structure (which allows social welfare organizations to participate in political campaigns and lobbying while maintaining their nonprofit status). For example, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Omidyar Network, and the Emerson Collective (run by Laurene Powell Jobs) have all set up LLCs to allow for advocacy or impact investing. Even a more traditional institution, the Walton Family Foundation, has set up multiple 501(c)(4)s to support its focus areas.[24]

To tie these last few strands together, we must understand that from the destruction of social cohesion in Western countries to the swollen profits, the nexus of capital and control with philanthropy has triggered the exponential acceleration of globalization and is fast becoming the primary vehicle for a negative social and demographic sea change the likes of which we have never seen. The runaway worship of capital coupled with—and enabled by—the Judaization of society has produced these conditions, and only a radical reorientation back toward productive, substantive, sustainable, and ethnocentric values—not those built on speculation and the veneration of the alien and the dysgenic—can counter-act the destruction. One need look no further than Russia in the 1990s compared to Russia today. Imperfect, yes, but vastly improved.

The Jewishness of Karp and company is not incidental, nor is this some kind of novel outlier. The modern concept of DAFs can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, when the first federated charity, the Jewish Federation, was established in Boston. By the mid-1930s, donor-advised funds began to proliferate within the Jewish community and were usually housed at local Community Foundations and Jewish Federations. As previously evidenced, this remains central to the disbursal of funds, which inevitably come with strings attached. These Jewish Community Foundations are massively profitable in their own right, as Alyssa Ochs reports:

The year 2017 was yet another record-breaking year for the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles (JCFLA) because it gave the highest dollar amount in grants in the funder’s history—$100 million. Back in 2016, the funder gave $81 million, so this was a 23 percent increase. In 2015, the foundation and its donors made $96 million in grants, a 35 percent increase over $71 million the year before…We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Jewish giving is going strong and getting even stronger by the year. At the end of 2017, the foundation’s total charitable assets under management was $1.25 billion, which is a 14 percent increase from 2016. JCFLA opened 58 new donor advised funds just last year as well. Overall, the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles manages assets for over 1,300 families…Jewish donors who work through community foundations like this often have a very global perspective and give a lot of money to Israel and Jewish outreach areas in other parts of the world…Another trend that we’ve been noticing lately among Jewish foundations is an increasing willingness to support non-Jewish groups.[25]

We know this from our early investigation of Catholic Charities. There is also the matter of not just outsourced and internalized Jewishness, but the very essence of Judaism forming the back-bone of neo-liberal capital, as evidenced by Erika Karp’s own admission. What we are witnessing is the next stage in Judeo-neo-liberalism’s evolution; from “internationalism” and communism in the first half of the twentieth century—financed primarily by Jewish capitalists such as Olof Aschberg and Jacob Schiff in its early Soviet days and supported well into the 1950s as an extension of Judaism—to Cultural Bolshevism and the dawn of neo-liberalism in its second half, this third act is far more dangerous for its pervasiveness and intrusiveness, and the fact that an induced paralysis of government and consumer at best, an active facilitation of their own destruction at worst, gives the primary drivers carte blanche to act with impunity and steamroll what little resistance they presently encounter.

That said, the neo-liberal globalist system is also incredibly fragile and is largely built on a house of cards. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the golden gilding of the neo-liberal age is one or two hard shoves away from crashing to pieces. It requires constant maintenance, policing, and expansion to work, and may well collapse under its own weight in the absence of any powerful external force. With a firm grasp of the methods, institutions, actors, and aims in hand, though, the right entity or coalition may well be able to put the shambolic corpse down for good sooner rather than later, and construct a far more fair and natural system. To my mind, the end goal must be to allow for the self-determination of all peoples, respecting the environment and human bio-diversity so that all may have a healthy and happy homeland to call their own.

[1] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/reimagining_institutional_philanthropy

[2] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/attracting_greater_philanthropic_funding_the_private_equity_model

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://hbr.org/2019/01/calculating-the-value-of-impact-investing

[5] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/reimagining_institutional_philanthropy

[6] https://hbr.org/2019/01/calculating-the-value-of-impact-investing

[7] https://www.capitalimpact.org/2018-third-quarter-financing/

[8] https://missioninvestors.org/resources/foundations-and-others-investing-immigrants-migrants-and-refugees

[9] https://cornerstonecapinc.com/hillels-voice/

[10] Yes, this Annan: “Annan’s real legacy was to continue the trend of morphing the secretary-general’s administrative responsibilities into a symbolic role to justify jet-setting across the globe. He continued that in his retirement, flailing hopelessly in Syria (despite his organization’s huge budget), and bankrupting his own Global Humanitarian Forum through gross mismanagement. His son Kojo first used his father’s credentials to make a quick buck, and then took corruption to a new level, as his prominent feature in the Panama Papers.” https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/kofi-annan-represented-all-that-is-wrong-about-the-united-nations

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_for_Responsible_Investment

[12] https://www.unpri.org/annual-report-2018/how-we-work/the-pri-in-numbers

[13] “The FES was a section of the Social Democratic Education and Culture Organisation, and was banned along with the party itself in 1933 by the Nazis. In 1946, the FES was reinstituted at the founding assembly of the Socialist German Student Federation. In 1954, the FES was restructured into a charitable organisation ‘for the advancement of democratic education.’ This established the FES as an independent, self-contained institute. In addition to education programmes, the FES has also worked in the area of development aid since the 1960s. In this effort, it has supported democracy and freedom movements, for instance in the African National Congress (ANC), and played an important role in overcoming dictatorial regimes in Greece, Spain, and Portugal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Ebert_Foundation

[14] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/E15/WEF_Full_Report_Strengthening_Global_Trade_Investment_System_21st_Century.pdf

[15] https://real-leaders.com/the-economics-of-sustainable-and-impact-investing/

[16] https://capitalresearch.org/article/refugee-resettlement-the-lucrative-business-of-serving-immigrants/

[17] https://www.hias.org/sites/default/files/hias_inc._12-31-2016_-_sf_fs_-_final_report.pdf

[18] https://www.wnd.com/2010/10/217209/

[19] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/becoming_big_bettable#sidebar1

[20] Jewish

[21] https://hbr.org/2017/09/audacious-philanthropy

[22] https://www.nptrust.org/reports/daf-report/

[23] Ibid.

[24] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/reimagining_institutional_philanthropy

[25] https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/9/14/two-jewish-foundation-trends-even-secular-groups-should-know-about

Feeding the Dragon: The Left Want Power and Revenge, Not Equality and Justice

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Rights for snakes! Yes, imagine that the Western world is swept by a movement for the liberation of snakes, spiders, scorpions and all other creatures whose naturally gentle and harmless natures have been corrupted by millennia of human bigotry and mistreatment. Tough laws are passed making it an offence to discriminate against these historically oppressed animal groups, which begin to enter buildings, cars and all other human spaces in ever larger numbers.

Mad to the Max

After several decades of this snake, spider and scorpion “uplift,” a conservative writer publishes a book called The Madness of Mandibles in which he ponders why snakes, spiders and scorpions are biting and stinging people more than ever, despite being given all they could ever have wished for. “They’ve been granted equality, so why aren’t they behaving like humans?” the conservative writer asks in bewilderment.

The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

That’s a ridiculous scenario, of course. A conservative writer would never be so stupid. Or would he? I have my doubts, because I’ve based that scenario on a real conservative writer called Douglas Murray, who has just published a book called The Madness of Crowds that seems to be pretty much as stupid as The Madness of Mandibles. Murray’s book was reviewed by the part-Jewish political scientist Eric Kaufman in the Financial Times:

How did our societies become so insane? In The Madness of Crowds, Murray argues that it’s because highly educated people cling to a new religion known variously as “social justice”, “identity politics” or “intersectionality”. Essentially this is the old Marxist faith poured from the class bottle into the race-sex-gender one. Meaning is realised through struggle against those who commit wrongthink.

Identity politics helped reduce prejudice but, having vanquished its foe, began manufacturing phantom enemies. Murray, following the late conservative political theorist Kenneth Minogue, dubs this “St George in retirement” syndrome. Having slain the dragon, he charges off in pursuit of ever-smaller ones and ends by “swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons”. (The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray – Slay the dragon, then stop, The Financial Times, 11th October 2019)

As you can see, Kaufman’s review has the subtitle of “Slay the dragon, then stop.” That is Murray’s injunction to the practitioners of “identity politics.” Once they’d slain the dragon of injustice and oppression, they should have stopped their campaigning and become good little liberally democratic boys and girls (and trans-boys, trans-girls, gender-fluids, etc). Read more

On Migrant Deaths

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“I observe that men run away to other countries, because they are not good in their own.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Culture, 1876.

“Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!”
B. Yeats, Under Ben Bulben

The sight and smell must have been horrific. On October 23, the bodies of 39 East Asians were found in an airtight refrigerated truck container in Essex in eastern England. Bloody handprints smeared the walls, and the bodies, mostly naked, foamed at the mouth. A murder investigation was immediately launched, but the circumstances, despite their horrific nature, were hardly mysterious. The movements of the haulage truck, the racial uniformity of the dead, and the conditions of transport all pointed to a catastrophic attempt at organized illegal entry into Britain. The driver was arrested and charged. Arrest warrants were issued. Documentation was seized and examined. Autopsies and collaboration with foreign police forces revealed that the deceased were Vietnamese, and that their final journey to Britain occurred via Belgium and Ireland. It is, as yet, undetermined at which geographic point the process of suffocation began, though it is believed they were alive in the container for around ten hours before they succumbed, one by one.

It is a story that, in all its macabre and gory features, lends itself to exploitation — and the Left has exploited it to the full. The narrative has emerged that the corpses in Essex were the result of Third World “desperation” and a heartless immigration system that fails to provide “safe routes” for migrants. But is this really what’s happening, both in Britain and across the West? Is this really the explanation for drownings in the Mediterranean, bodies on Turkish beaches, and deaths in the Arizona desert? Much as I empathize with the particularly nasty deaths of the deceased Vietnamese, I argue that they were the victims of their own materialistic and often criminal desire to live in “First World” conditions among Whites, of a sociopathic Irish people-smuggling gang that cared not for their illegal cargo or Europe, but for filthy profit alone, and of a much broader and more profound phenomena — the deepening exploitation of Europe and Europeans under manipulative humanitarian pretexts.

“The Migrant Personality”

A common theme in mass media treatments of migrant deaths is the emphasis on a putative “desperation” among migrants. The term implies a lack of choice, and implicitly suggests that migrants don’t really want to move to the West, but have been forced to do so by circumstances. These narrative strains, undoubtedly cultivated to provoke sympathy and reduce opposition among European natives, are in stark contrast to the reality that Third World migrants to the West invariably pass through many safe and reasonably prosperous countries prior to their arrival. This reality suggests that choice is actually a very strong feature of migrant behavior, and reduces the likelihood that such behavior is motivated by genuine desperation.

Perhaps because of the obvious weakness of “desperation” narratives, much energy has been expended on the development of propaganda on the putative migrant personality, especially aspects concerning ambitions and motivations. For example, an extensive literature has developed in both popular culture and academia suggesting that migration selects for educational qualifications, motivational characteristics, and positive risk-taking behaviors. In line with this thinking, government, mass media and academia in the West have invested heavily in persuading native populations that mass migration from areas as distant as Africa and South Asia is a net gain for receiving countries, since it involves importing highly-motivated and capable people. The problem with arguments such as these is that they are based heavily in nostalgic visions of the (predominantly American) past, and aren’t remotely based in the contemporary global social reality. Ideas of energetic pioneers arriving from abroad are clearly more applicable to the pushing of a nineteenth-century frontier populated by Northwest Europeans than they are to mass migration to fully-established twenty-first century nations with advanced economies and generous welfare provisions.

In 2018, a team of scholars from The Migration Observatory, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, at the UK’s University of Oxford, published their findings on “arguments about a common migrant personality.”[1] The study was one of the first of its kind since the serious analysis of the putative migrant personality has been rare indeed. Rather controversially, the Oxford team’s findings “seem to contradict the arguments about a common migrant personality put forward by social psychologists, as well as most of the predictions of standard economic models. We do find, however, some support for the welfare magnet hypothesis.” [emphasis added] The “welfare magnet hypothesis” is, in the polite expression of the Oxford scholars, essentially the argument that “very generous welfare states can lead to negative skill selectivity.” If one wanted to be less polite, the welfare magnet hypothesis could be usefully explained as the attraction exerted by an abundance of free resources on large numbers of unskilled migrants with poor cultural and behavioral aptitudes, who are thus destined to become net drains on their target nation. In fact, the study found Turks migrating to wealthy European countries to be negatively selected for motivation and aptitude, meaning that only the less capable and talented among the Turks left for Europe.

Despite findings like these, contemporary mass migration is almost exclusively presented to Western populations as a humanitarian matter, and most media treatments of the issue are replete with appeals to emotion and concepts of fairness. It is rarely, if ever, admitted that mass migration is often deliberately pursued by “exporting” nations as a means of relieving the burden of criminal elements and surplus populations, and also a means of generating revenue from money remitted by established migrants. And it is rarely admitted that left in Western societies sees these immigrants as clients and a future voting base, the latter already having profound effects in the United States.

While there has been much talk about Syria as a zone of war and destruction, little has been made of the fact that, like the Russian Jews in 1880 (whose own migration path was eased by largely fictional humanitarian tales of woe), it has one of the highest population growth rates in the world (2.4%). In the seven least-developed of Syria’s 14 provinces, women have between 3.8 and 6.2 children, and their fertility rates are not expected to decline much in the next 15 years. In 2010, Nabil Sukkar, a Syrian economist formerly with the World Bank, said “We have a population problem, no question. Unless we cope with it, it could be a burden on our development.” Sukkar said labor supply was growing about 4.5 percent a year, due to rapid population expansion in earlier decades, outpacing the capacity of Syria’s economy to create jobs for the cohort of 250,000 young people arriving on the job market every year. “Too big a population means a high burden on government services, such as education, electricity and health care,” he said. “Perhaps in 20 years the growth rate will go down to 1.5 percent as in Egypt, but in the meantime we do have a problem.” Since Syria spent the period 2011–2019 exporting its entire surplus cohort under the cover of a perfectly-timed civil war, Sukkar’s problem, like the similar one facing Africa, is now Europe’s problem.

“The Migrant Contribution”

The same pattern is witnessed across the varying ethnic hues of mass migration, even taking into account the dead Vietnamese in Essex. In a study of Vietnamese illegal immigration to the UK and Germany, academic Trang Nguyen found that “immigration agencies and brokers that are affiliated to the Vietnamese government” have been providing logistical support to illegal Vietnamese in Europe because “illegal immigration to Europe is widely recognized by Hanoi as a welcome solution to their unemployment problem and as a source of growing remittances.” Remittances from what? The Vietnamese have rather quickly established themselves in Europe as the dominant players in the sale of illegal cigarettes (Germany) and the mass cultivation of cannabis in indoor plantations (UK).  In 2012, more than 60% of UK arrests for cannabis production involved Vietnamese migrants. The title of Nguyen’s article, and his central thesis, is that this is “government-sponsored crime” in the sense that Hanoi is providing logistical support for the activities of its illegals plying these illicit trades on European soil. Nguyen continues:

They developed methods to turn networks of large houses into clandestine cannabis plantation farms (Luke, 2012). Information from Vietnamese-language online fora in the UK indicates that these houses are rented from housing agents using fraudulent or stolen identity papers. Set-up costs for an operation vary between £15,000 and £50,000 while annual profits from a single ‘grow house’ run from £200,000 to £500,000. According to interviewees and other media reports, Vietnamese-run cannabis farms are mainly located in the suburbs of London, Manchester and Birmingham.

The background of Vietnamese migrants is almost uniform. Nguyen remarks that they overwhelmingly tend to have a rural origin and low educational attainment, and have few ambitions other than finding illegal work in cigarette and cannabis manufacture (males) or in nail bars (females). Despite quasi-Romantic narratives proffered by the Left-Liberal media, these individuals do not come to Europe with visions of cultural synthesis and embracing European “values.” Rather, Europe is seen as a lucrative cash cow, to be milked for welfare or criminal proceeds. Nguyen relates how one illegal told him that “Many of them (cannabis “gardeners”) went to the UK and made a fortune, but came back not knowing a single English word. They probably did not even see the Big Ben tower.”

A significant proportion of these illegal proceeds are funnelled back to Vietnam through a network of “legitimate” Vietnamese businesses operating in Europe, such as grocery stores, logistics companies, or translation agencies, who receive foreign currencies from undocumented migrants and launder it for them. In 2017, the Ministry of Labour of Vietnam set the target of exporting 225,000 migrant workers over a 24-month period. The policy has resulted in Vietnam now being one of the top ten global remittance recipients, receiving between $10 and $14 billion since 2012, accounting for 6–8% of its GDP. Rather than warning prospective migrants about the potentiality of their becoming engaged with criminal elements, Nguyen found the Vietnamese government complicit in assisting “criminal networks to lure and traffic individuals and encourage the undocumented migrants to enter illegal markets.” In fact, many of the same networks are actually “state-owned or stated-affiliated.” At time of this writing, Hanoi has never reported “any investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of officials complicit in human trafficking offences,” and the Vietnamese government has made it extremely difficult for European nations to deport Vietnamese illegals back to their country of origin.

The scale and calculation behind international migration networks, and the complicity of population-exporting governments, surely exposes, or at the very least problematizes, the myth of a humanitarian crisis. In the case of the Essex incident, unfortunately, a willful ignorance has prevailed across the UK media and important sections of society. A good example is an awful piece of journalism that appeared in The Scotsman. The article begins, predictably, with humanitarian and emotional appeals: “Who could ever forget the heartbreaking picture of a toddler lying dead on a Mediterranean shore, or the impact it had on public consciousness? … What happened in Essex this week is simply one small incident in a massive international problem.” What problem? The journalist, Christine Jardine, can’t seem to articulate it, but then she also can’t articulate who the dead people actually were, identifying them instead as originating in “the poor, coastal, province of Fujian, in south-east China.” She continues:

But all victims of incidents whether here, on the continent or on Mediterranean have at least one thing in common. Desperation. Nobody risks their lives clinging to an inflatable raft crossing dangerous sea routes unless they feel that is the only option they have. None of us would put our children at risk, or gamble on surviving thousands of miles in the back of a refrigerated truck if we were looking for an easy life. It is too easy to blame the victims rather than look for solutions.

All the common features of the Left-Liberal narrative are here — desperation; lack of options; not looking for an easy life but a place to pursue their ambitions. But we know that these migrants risked their lives to make a “fortune” in illegal trades, that they have absolutely no affinity with the nation or people they hope to make their criminal proceeds among, and that their government cynically assists them in their efforts. These are unintelligent and otherwise unmotivated people who chose to be criminals in foreign lands, when they could have chosen to remain in their home nations.

Jardine adds:

If we are ever to make progress, ever to prevent these deaths, we need to be looking at ways of providing safety for those whose lives have become intolerable because of war or persecution. We need to look at ways of providing safe passage and work with international agencies, both those who deal with aid and those who tackle crime. Tracking down the traffickers at source and tackling them before the damage is done is vital. We also have to consider that perhaps many of those who fall prey to the traffickers would not do so if they felt there was a realistic hope of a safe legal means of immigration. Looking at our own immigration system to ensure that what we provide is fair, compassionate and effective for those who want to come here is essential. But so is providing international aid to those countries where the desperation for a better life is most keenly felt.

I wonder what international agencies Jardine would propose we work with, in order to relax our borders and prevent this happening again. Perhaps the government in Hanoi? Yes, they’d be very receptive to our decision to open our borders, which could be very lucrative for them indeed. Sarcasm aside, consider the infantile level of a mind that suggests the only ways we can prevent illegal migrants from dying while attempting to enter our nations are to either grant them unqualified access or to throw money at their home governments. What should we give to Hanoi? $10 billion? $12 billion? Do we offer to make up 10% of their GDP, to beat the 8% they already derive from us in cannabis farms and illegal cigarette sales, in the hope they will stop operating criminal migrant networks in Europe? Do we add this to the €6 billion we have now pledged to Turkey in the hope they won’t flood us with more migrants? How many nations do we agree to bribe? How many nations are “desperate”? How many billions are at our disposal to stop bodies in trucks and on beaches?

The truth of the matter is brutally stark: Without a massive strengthening of border control, the West will succumb to mass migration with devastating consequences for native populations and their culture. Jardine’s two options are, in essence, merely the same, since both entail eventual mass invasion and the only difference being that one also offers the prospect of immediate national bankruptcy.

Contradictions of Opportunism

One of the most ferocious and darkly comic novels I’ve ever read is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the text that arguably won the novelist his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel follows the Bundren family as they take a casket containing the family matriarch across state lines so that she can be buried, in accordance with her dying wishes, among the graves of her own well-heeled kin. As this odyssey plays out, each member of the family is revealed as having their own perspectives and intentions. But perhaps none of these quasi-migrants is more reprehensible than the grifting, begging, and selfish patriarch, Anse Bundren, who fantasizes about getting his hands on enough money for “new teeth” and, in doing so, tragically and catastrophically betrays his children. I won’t spoil the ending, but Faulkner’s masterpiece came powerfully to mind when news broke in 2015 concerning the death of the three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach after a failed attempt to cross the Mediterranean. The Kurdi family had been living in relative comfort in Turkey for three years but, according to a large number of sources, a decision was taken to illegally move the family to Europe so that Aylan’s father Abdullah could get free dental treatment and “new teeth” from one of Europe’s welfare states.

Was the Kurdi family “desperate?” What aspects of the “migrant personality” did they exhibit? Shortly after the death of young Aylan, Australian politician Cory Bernardi, a Senator of the then-governing Liberal party, told his country’s parliament that Abdullah Kurdi and his family were not real refugees and suggested many others seeking asylum in Europe were merely “opportunistic.” Bernardi stated, during the course of a debate:

I find it a bit sanctimonious for [Green] Senator [Richard] Di Natale to bring in these emotive arguments, and particularly to characterise this as some sort of humanitarian mission by using the terrible image of that young boy who was picked up from the beach after having drowned at sea … The facts remain that that terrible image was not brought about by recent events in Syria or Iraq. That boy and his family had lived in Turkey for three years. … The money for that boy’s father to pay the people smugglers was sent from Canada. The father sent them on that boat so the father could get dental treatment. … They were in no fear, they were in no persecution and they were in no danger in Turkey. … This seems to me to be becoming an opportunistic cycle.

Bernardi was, predictably, subjected to scathing attacks, being described as an “embarrassment” to parliament and as worthy of being “treated with contempt.” But was he wrong?

Bernardi was of course correct to portray mass migration as “opportunistic” — a term that can serve as the opposite of “desperate” in this case, since it implies the existences of choices and opportunities and, most importantly, it returns agency to migrants. The truth of the matter is that non-European migrants have an abundance of choices in their countries of origin. Those who die on their way to Europe or the United States will have made a sequence of bad and ultimately fatal choices based on their material desires and wants and, indeed, their level of intelligence. We must consider that these same people look upon badly damaged and flimsy boats, or upon airtight refrigerated vehicles with no internal locking mechanisms, and decide that these are appropriate and risk-worthy methods of attempting illegal entry to their destination of choice. To date, no media source has reported on a deceased migrant found to have previously been in a state of severe malnourishment or fundamentally ill health. In other words, deceased migrants invariably appear to have been well-fed individuals facing no immediate threats to their existence beyond their own poor decision-making.

The position of Left-Liberals in these matters can only be considered fundamentally irrational, and Catholics have been notably prominent in indulging this mindset. Sarah Teather, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, has evoked the meme of “desperation” and said:

The desperation of those in the container is an indictment of our failure to provide sanctuary to those in flight for their lives. This horrendous tragedy highlights the urgent need for more safe and legal routes to migrate and to seek asylum. If the government wants to ensure this does not happen again, it is not enough to focus only on criminal gangs — it must ensure that those seeking sanctuary in Britain can get here safely. It must build bridges, not walls. [emphasis added]

That we live in increasingly strange times is evidenced by voices from the Marxist hard-Left, who have also pointed out the irrationality of this position. Slavoj Žižek, for example, recently pointed out:

Pia Klemp, captain of the ship Iuventa which was saving refugees in the Mediterranean, concluded her explanation why she decided to refuse the Grand Vermeil medal awarded to her by the city of Paris with the slogan: “Documents and housing for all! Freedom of movement and residence!” If this means that — to cut a long story short — every individual has the right to move to a country of his/her choice, and that this country has the duty to provide him/her with residence, then we are dealing here with an abstract vision in the strict Hegelian sense: a vision which ignores the complex context of social totality. The problem cannot be solved at this level.

In an ideal world, Žižek would elaborate on what precisely he means by “the complex context of social totality,” but elaboration and clarification are, alas, not his strong points. He is, nonetheless, absolutely correct to counterpose Klemp’s abstract vision of open borders with social totality, which one assumes to refer to Heidegger’s dictum that all essential and great things can only emerge from our having a homeland, from being rooted in tradition. Human beings need both home and homeland. In contrast to a social totality that inheres the delineation and demarcation provided by national borders, the blank openness of a borderless world offers no homeland, and dissolves all tradition. In a world without borders, all identities melt away. Man is reduced to nothing more than an economic integer and, in some important sense, ceases to exist as Man. Again, it is ironic that Žižek, a Marxist of the hard-Left, should be forced to make it clear that “refugees want to have their cake and eat it. They basically expect to get the best of the Western welfare state while retaining their specific way of life, which is in some of its key features incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare state.” In other words, non-Europeans are knowingly exploiting (choosing to exploit) the altruistic and humanitarian aspects of the European personality without any intention (or perhaps even capability) of reciprocation.

Where we diverge from Žižek is his insistence that mass migration can be solved by “change to the global economic system,” by which he obviously means Marxist revolution. While there is undoubtedly an economic component to contemporary mass migration (the welfare magnet, international crime, Globalist desire for cheap and mobile labor, wealth disparities among nations), there are other factors that cannot be overlooked. Mass migration can be usefully understood as a semi-organic phenomenon that is also heavily cultivated. The global expansion of mass media, especially in the last three or four decades, has brought Hollywood’s idealized visions of the multicultural West onto television sets in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Far East, with hundreds of millions of non-Europeans coming to the belief that they too can potentially be part of this wealthy multicultural paradise. Never forget, when considering Hollywood propaganda among Whites, that these products are inevitably pumped into countries outside our own, and that they serve an equally devastating purpose. Muslim visions of Western women arguably originated in Sex and the City as much as they did in the Koran. Hollywood debased our culture and carved it open, before broadcasting the aftermath to the rest of the world — a dunghill certain to attract flies.

What isn’t broadcast to the Third World is the reality of the multicultural West — that it is a bitter and divided condition that only grows more bitter and divided by the day. The migrant sees that the streets aren’t paved with gold as they seem in so many Hollywood productions, but are instead increasingly paved with trash. Still, they are better than “home.” Western women, though you can see their faces (and even their limbs!), aren’t really willing to have sex with just anyone. This comes to the newcomer as a great disappointment, and he becomes resentful and, in his resentment, dangerous. And the native Whites, well, they are a tolerant bunch, but they seem to prefer to live among themselves, and they have a culture that simply baffles and confuses the migrant in those moments where he pays it fleeting interest. What matters most is that he finally got his hands on that welfare payment, thanks to his immigration lawyer Mr. Cohen, and that, in some small way at least, he is living the life once promised on his television screen. And there are grounds for optimism — each day he sees more and more of his own kind on his street, in his town, all across his new country in fact. These Whites really are a tolerant bunch.

Technological advances in communication and transport have facilitated the growth of forms of coordinated international chain migration that would have been unimaginable even fifty years ago, allowing potential migrants in almost every Third World country to plan and execute their own journey to the West with relative (though not risk-free) ease. Since this technological genie cannot be put back in the bottle, and economic changes are simply too gargantuan for transformation even within this century, the only solution to mass migration is a “revolution of the will” in migrant-receiving nations. Tolerance in the West has been nurtured and cultivated by decades of consistent propaganda, of which the “dead migrant” tale is but a minor genre. It must be rejected. And it must be rejected along with multiculturalism which is the form of society that provides illegals with anonymity and opportunity. An illegal Vietnamese in a multicultural society simply vanishes into the mass. An illegal Vietnamese in a mono-ethnic European nation has nowhere to hide. Europe must decide that it wants to live.

Yes, what happened in Essex was nasty and tragic for those concerned. But what’s happening to the West is worse. Without a homeland, it is we who will be trapped with no exit, no internal locking mechanism. We are running out of demographic oxygen. The next time you see propaganda about migrant deaths, cast a cold eye upon it, and pass by.

[1] Polavieja, J. G., Fernández-Reino, M., & Ramos, M. (2018). Are Migrants Selected on Motivational Orientations? Selectivity Patterns amongst International Migrants in Europe. European Sociological Review.

 

Lesson for the West: The Berlin Wall fell but Croatia Balkanized

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Previosly posted by Israel National News. 

The breakup of the artificial state of Yugoslavia was a result of the fall of an idea, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Croatia and Serbia are no better off than before. It seems statehood is not always all it is described to be.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did not occur out of the blue. It was preceded by a fall in enthusiasm for “real socialism” which so many European world-improvers had been in love with for a long period of time.  By the mid-1980s the communist project in Eastern Europe and Russia had turned out badly, to the point that local communists and their Western sympathizers — who had once decorated themselves with the titles of Castroists, Titoists or Maoists — ceased to believe in the Marxian mystique.

However, there is no need to delude oneself too much. Communism, as a social anthropology preaching egalitarianism, society without borders, multiculturalism, and eternal economic progress, had already come to fruition in a more insidious and more elegant way in the West. Even in comparison to famed communist repression in Eastern Europe, its Western counterpart had taken on far more sophisticated  features, of course under another garb and by using different signifiers such as “antifascism”, “multiculturalism”, “diversity”, etc.

The fall of the Wall, followed later by the breakup of Yugoslavia, was therefore a logical consequence of the fall of an idea that had been popular among many Western academics for quite some time. It must be recalled that the communist universe, including the multiethnic now-defunct Yugoslavia, derived much of its intellectual legitimacy from its Western scribes.

The breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and the birth of modern Croatia were not the result of a secret plot devised by Croatian and  Serb nationalists, as the mainstream media in the West often reports. The birth of Croatia in 1991 was an instinctive reaction of Croatian citizens to Yugoslav Army aggression and to the armed uprising by the Serb minority in Croatia.

It suffices to observe the profile of the current Croatian ruling class, Croatia’s higher education professors, as well as the pedigree of major movers and shakers in the Croat mainstream media. Almost all of them are either former communist apparatchiks or their offspring, albeit  rebranded now into proud liberal Europeanists.

In large part the current Croatian leadership used to be staunch Yugoslavs who, at the time of the country’s breakup in 1991, became Croats by default. One could easily draw an anthropological parallel with the Left in France, which around the same time period considered it more advantageous to pontificate about the free market than to continue indulging in Freudo-Marxist scholasticism.

“Every cloud has a silver lining” – goes an old English proverb. Croatia  has less legislative autonomy today than when it was a constituent republic of now-defunct Yugoslavia. The current chest pounding by Croat nationalists about upholding the sovereignty and independence of their country sounds obsolete, given that half of Croatia’s legislation has been imported from Brussels anyway.

Moreover, it should not be forgotten that on the eve of its breakup in 1991 Yugoslavia was highly prized by European leaders who saw in Yugoslavia a prime model of the future multicultural EU.  Praising The European Union to the skies, as Croatian government officials are doing, while at the same time lambasting the defunct communist and multicultural Yugoslavia is a contradictio in adjecto. In psychiatric terms, it is a deliberate self-denial process practiced by an overwhelming majority of Croatian politicians and intellectuals.

While the former Yugoslav yoke is being openly criticized with hindsight and ridiculed by many, Croatia’s ruling class enjoys being subjected to EU  ukases with very few voices to be heard against the grip of the new Brussels-based “euroslav” project. Not very different.

The additional problem consuming the energy of many Croat citizens is neighboring Serbia, a country which serves as an obsessive source of Croat negative identity. In popular Croat lingo one cannot be a good Croat unless one becomes a good anti-Serb first. Even in official discourse, Croatian politicians constantly regurgitate the mantra about “Greater Serbian aggression” without ever venturing to examine the ex-Yugoslav causes and the disastrous legacy of communism which were the origins of the 1991 war. Of course, such an anti-Serb rhetoric  exonerates former Croatian communists of any responsibility for crimes they committed during the Yugoslav era, It also provides them with an alibi for their failure to safeguard Yugoslavia whose eternal life they had preached for decades.

In truth, the war in the former Yugoslavia did not solve anything. For their part, Serbian politicians and historians continue wallowing in their antifascist victimology, inflating the figures of Serbs killed by the Croatian Ustashas between 1941 and 1945. Their victimology is supposed to serve them as a cover to conceal their own geopolitical aspirations of yesteryear and absolve them of crimes they committed during the last war in the former Yugoslavia.

Nor are the Croats lagging much behind in their commemorations. They also display their own brand of victimhood  whose anticommunist trope is especially pronounced among grassroots Croats. Extensive Catholic Church-sponsored commemorations are held for the victims of communist massacres committed after 1945 in early Yugoslavia in which tens of thousands of Croats perished.

Indeed, the Croats seem to suffer from collective neurosis that in many aspects resembles that of the Germans. There is, however, a clear difference. While the historical trauma in Germany results in collective rituals of penitence and self-hatred, the Croat people, in order to bolster its tragic identity, keeps evoking the communist post-1945 killings fields and the real or surreal Serbian evil.

Although the current Croatian government is cozying up to EU directives by mimicking the EU codes of political correctness, Croatia, at least for the time being, has no laws restricting freedom of speech as is the case with France and Germany.

Nonetheless,  being trapped in its World War II historical narrative, it comes as no surprise that little mention is being made in Croatia of large waves of non-European migrants in its neighborhood. For example, in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, a dysfunctional and artificial state, there are around 50,000 non-European migrants en route to the West, whose rush may trigger an even more serious crisis in the Balkans any minute.  Willy-nilly migrants can further aggravate the persisting hatred lingering between Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims.

The fall of the Wall, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the establishment of the European Union  – none of them bode well for the European “happy together.”

Dr. Tomislav Sunic is a writer, former Croatian diplomat, former professor of political science in the United States,  and author of the novel Titans are in Town (2017).  Born in Zagreb, he is an author, former US professor of political science, and former Croat diplomat. One of his recent books is “La Croatie ; un pays par défaut?” (2010). His views are often cited as part of the Nouvelle Droite movement in Europe.

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The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 4

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Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.
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Fay at Loose Ends: Feminism and Gay Rights

Fay was disenchanted and depressed. She had turned forty. She had lost her female lover, was losing her husband, and her most cherished political cause had blown up in her face. It was 1973, and the entire “Movement” had sputtered to a halt and was in the process of metamorphosing; the radicals had lost their faith in militant activism outside “the system” and began to enter that system in droves to work from within. The process was not smooth; many leftists spent years coming to terms with the collapse of the movement.

Since any facet of society could be turned into a “cause,” Fay would not be adrift for long. Soon she turned (along with many other radical Jews) to feminist and homosexual issues. She entered another relationship with a woman, called “Katherine” by Pearlman. One of the cases she became involved with helped push California law into accepting the “rights” of lesbians in custody cases.[i] Another gash in the fabric of Gentile society.

In 1978, Fay went on a tour of Europe with her old friend Hilde Stern. It was a soul-searching jaunt. She wanted to ponder her future direction, and whether to try to save her marriage. Once in Europe, her Jewish identity rose to dominate her consciousness. She visited the synagogues and places of Jewish interest wherever she went. In Athens, viewing the ancient structures on the Acropolis, she felt only “an overwhelming urge to reaffirm her own heritage” and peevishly wondered “why her professors had never credited ancient Jewish culture with any lasting influence on Western tradition.”[ii]

In Geneva she visited friends and gifted them, as if it were a priceless artifact, a letter she had kept from George Jackson. She went to Stockholm for a UN conference on children. There she began to do push-ups in imitation of the imprisoned Jackson, who had done hundreds every day, and worked on manuscripts about Jackson and feminism.[iii] She thought about living permanently in Sweden, but it troubled her that Sweden had continued its relations with Germany during World War II. She proceeded to Warsaw for another conference; she had read up on the Warsaw uprising of 1943, and was angered to find so little commemoration of the event in the city. She was well aware of the Jewish history in Poland and was in high dudgeon against Polish “Anti-Semitism.” At the Warsaw Symphony she was “anguished by the absence of any musicians who looked even faintly Jewish.”[iv] (Would she have any sympathy for Whites, who in the near future will look in vain for fellow White faces in their own nations? Would she see the contradiction if she did not?)

She also thought about her sexual identity. She decided to break up with Marvin for good and reunite with her lesbian lover. In early 1979, she returned to Berkeley. She and Marvin ended their marriage amicably, and Fay kept the house and the children, who lived at home in their young adulthood. Fay resumed her relationship with “Katherine.”

The End

May 28, 1979. The doorbell rang, well after midnight. Fay’s son Neal, used to unexpected visitors, opened the door. A Black man stuck a gun in his face and demanded Fay Stender. Neal led him upstairs and roused his mother from bed. The man demanded an answer to a chilling question: “Don’t you feel you betrayed George Jackson?” Fay calmly denied it. He ordered her to write a dictated note and sign it: “I, Fay Stender, admit I betrayed George Jackson and the prison movement when they needed me most.” She protested but finished writing. He pocketed the note then demanded money; Fay escorted him downstairs and gave him some from her kitchen drawer. He walked past her to the door as if to leave, then wheeled, crouched, and shot her five times with hollow-point .38 caliber bullets.[v]

Fay suffered terrible damage to her liver, chest and arms; she was paralyzed from the waist down. She would face months or years of rehabilitation and would never again lead a normal life. She didn’t leave the hospital until late July, going straight into a rehabilitation center.

The shooting shocked the radical community in the Bay Area. The police shared with reporters a purported “hit list” with the names of Fay and others on it. Fay’s family and friends were terrified; some of them asked for police protection. Marvin obtained a gun permit and sent their children into hiding. A few radicals began to suspect the truth about convicts.

Despite her depression and pain, she resolved to put her assailant away. To find justice, she would need the help of—exquisite irony—Lowell Jensen, still District Attorney. Jensen, incredibly, bore her no ill will, and assigned her case to a good prosecutor.

The police quickly apprehended a suspect, Edward Brooks. He was an ex-con and a member of a prison gang co-founded by George Jackson, the Black Guerrilla Family. He had shot Fay from a sense of loyalty to Jackson and other prisoners whom Fay had supposedly betrayed.[vi]

The shooting of Fay highlighted the hypocrisy in the radical community. Almost all of them now supported the police and district attorney and wanted the shooter prosecuted, even though they had “spent their professional lives denouncing the criminal justice system as an instrument of racial and class oppression and defending accused criminals as social victims.”[vii] The hypocrisy reached a greater poignancy when a former colleague of Fay’s, a member of the Prison Law Project, appeared on the shooter’s defense team, stating later, “I was just seething at the way the White Left reacted to Brooks’ arrest. It was racist. They had never taken this attitude . . . in the past. . . . And yet, when one of their own was shot, they immediately cooperated with the cops.”[viii]

Fay was plunged into despair, alternating between self-pity and bitter anger over how the Blacks had repaid her ministrations. She could barely play the piano and could not sit up for long; she found relief only by lying on her back. She sent her Sapphic lover away, unable to have (what amounted to) abnormal relations. She really wanted Marvin back for his steady strength, but he had a new woman and declined her hints. She resolved to commit suicide, but wanted to see Brooks put away first. She would have to summon the strength to testify against him, in the same courtroom she had defended Huey Newton so long before.

On January 18, 1979, Fay took the stand. Charles Garry was in attendance, but not a single Black recipient of her aid showed up to support her. The jury quickly found Brooks guilty, and a few weeks later he was sentenced to seventeen years.[ix]

Fay then burned all her papers, moved to Hong Kong, and after a good deal of hesitation and anguish, killed herself on May 19, 1980. She was forty-eight. Her body was brought back for a Jewish funeral, attended by 300. David Horowitz, former editor of Ramparts, was present; he was struck by how few Blacks attended. (He would write a long article on Fay, based on his conversations with Eve Pell, who had worked with Fay on the Prison Law Project.) Another radical in attendance observed, “no matter what you do, if you are White, it doesn’t matter if you spent your whole life working for Blacks.”[x]

Huey Newton did not attend the funeral; the next month he would earn a sham Ph.D. from UC-Santa Cruz (submitting—perhaps even writing— a paper entitled “War Against the Panthers: a Study in Repression in America”[xi]). He would be shot dead on an Oakland street in August 1989, also by a member of the Black Guerrilla Family. He was forty-seven, the same age as Fay when she was shot.[xii]

The saga of Fay Stender thus sputtered to an end.

Conclusion

Fay’s life perfectly illustrates the nature of radical Jewish activism and the immense harm that it can inflict upon society. Her work amounted to nothing more than “disruption of White society.” Her Jewish perspective could not register the rationales that underlay the compromises between perfect justice and practicality that form the myriad bonds of a Gentile culture. White society is not perfect; it is not perfect because man’s nature and the world are not perfect. However, it is on balance just, and, above all, workable. To strain mightily to “perfect” the solid patterns of a settled society is to create tensions that inevitably build to an explosion. The explosion in Fay’s case saw guards massacred in San Quentin and five bullets pierce her own body.

Fay Stender indicted the entire justice system as “racist” without bothering to regard the nature of Black social pathology, or the damage that her activism could cause to a society that had settled itself around a workable solution to pervasive Black crime, or the personal danger that she risked for herself and her family.

One last note on personality. I believe that Fay possessed a measure of charity; that is, a will to do good. No one is purely evil, of course, and somewhere in the thicket of ego, ambition, leftist ideology, and blind selfishness that was Fay Stender, there was at least a small core of good intentions. Unfortunately, her good will labored under defects greater than these failings. First, unhampered female emotion crimped her ability to see a reasonable approach to problems. (A Gentile spouse of that era would certainly have forced her to accept far tighter boundaries on her activity.) There was the contempt she felt—possibly amounting to hatred—for Whites and their society. Most importantly, the nature of her Jewish radicalism, as applied to a Gentile society, could be nothing but deleterious. If a mathematical formula could be found to represent the harm that an activist Jew can do to a White society, it would have to incorporate a special symbol representing “one Fay Stender.”

[i] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 313-14.

[ii] Ibid., 330.

[iii] Horowitz and Collier, 50-52.

[iv] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 342-43.

[v] The shooting is described by Pearlman in Call Me Phaedra, 355-58, and by Horowitz and Collier, 52-55.

[vi] Horowitz and Collier, 56.

[vii] Ibid., 56.

[viii] Ibid., 57-8.

[ix] Ibid., 62-3.

[x] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 430.

[xi] Pearson, 287.

[xii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 440.

The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 3

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George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers

Meanwhile, Fay met George Jackson.

Huey Newton had told Fay about George Jackson and asked if she could help him. Jackson (whose family had relocated to California) was serving a life sentence in Soledad Prison for a $70 robbery, according to his sympathizers. The truth is a bit otherwise. He had committed a long string of muggings and burglaries, and the State of California finally wised up and sentenced the teenager to one year to life.[i] He could have gotten out in a year or two, if he had behaved. He didn’t. He and a buddy formed a prison gang, ran a gambling ring, sold drugs and alcohol, and pimped homosexual prisoners.[ii] He fought with guards and beat other prisoners. The prison administration considered him a violent sociopath. Consequently, his sentenced was continually extended, and he spent years in solitary with his cell door welded shut.[iii]

Jackson was intelligent and could express himself well. Like Cleaver, he read revolutionary literature—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon—and wrote feverishly. He believed that America’s Blacks were a “colonized” people (an idea picked up by the Weathermen); that “the country’s institutions depended on their continued enslavement and subjugation; and that this state of affairs could only be reversed by an armed, violent revolution.”[iv] While his yearning for violent revolution was genuine, he would admit that Marxism was his “hustle.”[v] Jackson was a leader and a good organizer, and formed a group of dedicated followers.

In mid-January 1970, shortly before Newton told Fay about him, Jackson had murdered a White prison guard in cold blood. It was his response to the killing (by White prison guards) of three Blacks who were engaged in a prison-yard fight with Whites. Jackson and two others were charged with the murder and became famous—the subversive publicity machine roared into action—as the “Soledad Brothers.”

Fay visited Jackson in Soledad in early February. He spoke to her with feigned diffidence and her “heart melted.”[vi] She immediately felt a strong attraction to him, and decided to take on his case. She assembled a legal team, the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, and worked almost round the clock. Some of her friends smiled at her insistence that this undertaking was (now) the most important cause in the world.

George Jackson

She issued a leaflet: “Three young Black inmates . . . may soon be murdered by the State of California . . . They are innocent. Their right to a fair trial is being systematically and intentionally destroyed by the prison administration . . . They will be railroaded to the gas chamber unless we move to stop this injustice.”[vii] It was a typical effusion from Stender: literally hysterical.

Fay interviewed many Soledad inmates in connection with the Jackson case. Few of them had knowledge of the murder but all of them had grievances to share. Fay believed every word they said, and conceived a major effort at prison reform. This reform was firmly connected in her mind with revolution. Fay was convinced the prisoners were “going to be in the vanguard of the social revolution.”[viii] She “embraced the need for social revolution [and] recognized people might die,” flippantly justifying it all: “People are dying all the time. The important thing is that they die in the right cause.”[ix] She would come to regret these sentiments, but not before blood was spilled. Read more