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British Free Speech and J.S. Mill

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Article 19 is an organization which monitors global free speech, and it issues an annual report which grades countries into five categories of freedom of expression: Open, Less Restricted, Restricted, Highly Restricted, and In Crisis. In its most recent report, the United Kingdom has been demoted from the highest category to the second for the first time since records began. From 2000, the UK’s grading had held steady at 88/100 before dropping to 87 in 2014. The decline accelerated, and Article 19’s latest report rates it at 79. Of the 161 nations for which data are available, Denmark ranks first with 94, and North Korea last with 0. The US, with its famous First Amendment, is in 21st place with 85.

Disparities are not necessarily regional. Nicaragua is at 160, just above North Korea, with a rating of 1, whereas neighboring Costa Rica — in which I am writing this –— comes in level with the US on 85. This means I have more freedom of expression in a Central American country than I would in my native UK. Although Article 19 notes that a downward slide is apparent across Europe, there is something particularly unnerving about the UK’s declining freedom of speech. To attempt to discover why this is so, perhaps it may help us to go back 170 years, from the heart of one declining empire to the center of one long vanished, and revisit a philosopher who has much to say about freedom in general and freedom of expression in particular.

In January of 1855, John Stuart Mill, the English radical philosopher and Member of Parliament, was in Rome. One beautiful morning, he climbed the Capitoline Hill and had an epiphany he noted in his Autobiographical Study. Mill had, the previous year, written a short essay on the subject of liberty. Now, he knew he had not said enough, and that he had to grow this fledgling into a book. He says of the revelation: “[O]pinion tends to encroach more and more on liberty, and almost all the projects of social reformers in these days are really liberticide”.

Friedrich Nietzsche was 15 years old when Mill published On Liberty, but the German would have appreciated both Mill’s epiphany — won by walking, as Nietzsche said his own best ideas were — but also that the line with which liberty bisects free will and determinism is as fine as Penelope’s thread. Indeed, the opening line of Mill’s treatise takes up that very thread: “The subject of this essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity…”

Free will and determinism, that age–old philosophical agon, are present in today’s conflicts over free speech, with Western governments determined to erase the former and replace it with the latter. But this is determinism in what we might call a genetically modified form. Free will — whether it exists or not — is now what it always has been throughout the history of philosophy, that of the individual. Determinism has a mixed provenance. It could be scientistic, religious, or philosophical. Now, the source of the deterministic matrix has changed into something else, something highly temporal and hidden in plain sight; the State. On Liberty is not so much about “freedom to” as it is “freedom from”.

Mill is what we would call a “free speech absolutist”: “If the teachers of mankind are to be cognizant of all that they ought to know, everything must be free to be written and published without restraint”.

I don’t want to give an overall review of On Liberty, but rather a forensic audit of its second chapter, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”. This is the key in terms of the modern debate among Mill’s countrymen concerning free speech, and “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” calls directly to the British state as it stands, although possibly doesn’t shout loud enough. But before noting any congruencies between Mill’s account of liberty and our present predicament, a note on the important difference between Mill’s age and our own.

Where Mill, in Chapter 2 and thus talking about freedom of expression, writes “the press”, we must read “everyone online” today. Thus, the American Constitution’s famous protection of freedom of assembly must be similarly extended into the virtual community. Freedom of assembly today does not mean a mob of ranchers gathering at the Union Hall to make their feelings known to the Governor, it means billions of people who don’t even have to leave their homes to assemble freely. On Liberty was written a century and a half before the internet would amplify expression and make information more readily available to both the rulers and the ruled than it could ever have been in his time. This discrepancy is analogous to the argument that America’s Second Amendment is seriously outmoded because it was written in the age of musket and flintlock, not our present era of the AK47.

But, at its core, On Liberty has much to say to us, and has taken on a particular resonance all these years after Mill’s death. Once merely a humdrum, course-work, stock-issue, university–curriculum regular, On Liberty has suddenly come to life. Mill’s country is today under scrutiny because its rulers are blatantly curtailing the freedom of its citizenry, and in particular their freedom of expression. Keir Starmer, who looks permanently startled to begin with, was not expecting Donald Trump and Elon Musk (before he went rogue) to upbraid him over free speech in the Oval Office. “Two men will not be together for half an hour”, writes Dr. Johnson, “but one will try to get the better of the other”. It took Trump around half a minute with Starmer, which is the behavior of a ruler. But what of Mill’s ruler?

Mill presents the ruler and the ruled already imbued with a mutual tension. His simple analysis of societal dichotomy is anatomically precise:

“It was now perceived that such phrases as ‘self-government’ and ‘the power of the people over themselves’, do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised”.

If you are outside the political class in Britain, you will be becoming increasingly aware that they are no longer your peer group. They neither serve the state nor pay it undue respect, because they are the state, supposedly there to protect its citizenry, but increasingly that from which the citizens feel they need protection, as they did for Mill.

But it is not merely the apparatus of the state that citizens need to be shielded from: “Protection… against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling…”

We’ll return to opinion and feeling, but for now the tyranny of the magistrate may be precisely what the British public do need protection from. Legislation is being proposed to abolish jury trials for rape cases in the UK and, if it goes through, there is no reason to think this government will stop at rape. In a jury trial, the judge represents the state, the jury the citizenry. Remove the jury, and a defendant’s guilt or innocence will no longer be decided by a jury of his peers, but directly by the state. How long before “hate speech” cases are tried by a judge alone, with the state deeming “12 good men and true” superfluous to requirements?

Mill’s argument in Chapter 2 revolves around the encroachment of tyranny through the suppression of dissident opinion. But in Mill’s time this suppression was of opinion, often religious, the authorities fervently believed to be false. Now, the tyrant knows perfectly the opinions it suppresses to be true, and the citizenry can go hang, or at least go to jail: “[I]t is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government … will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public”.

Today, the intolerance of the public means nothing. They have no tolerance to spare, in any case, as it has all been requisitioned by the government and expended on foreigners. But governmental control of the expression of opinion has two facets, the actual performative, the expression of opinion by an individual agent, and the meaning and significance of the opinion itself: “First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging”.

The question of authority has today come to the fore. Authority is implicitly bound up with the social contract, which the government honors if authority is used in a representative fashion, and disabuses if it uses its authority merely to instantiate that very mode of domination and keep itself in power. The beginning of tyranny. And authority can even tinker with epistemology, despite Mill’s rather Nietzschean dismissal of this: “There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life”.

Mill is, of course, the great utilitarian. He is not selling his utlilitarianism here, however, merely offering up the idea of utility as a deciding factor in deciding what is true and what isn’t: “This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness”.

“The truth of an opinion is part of its utility”, he writes. Truth under the auspices of utility does have something of the casino about it. And what happens in a casino is not merely down to the behavior of the gamblers, but also depends on the policy of the management.

This section on truth and certainty is relevant to us moderns, seeing as we do have a ruling class which is attempting to conflate the truth of what it says with mathematical truth: “The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections”.

This was exemplified by the command to “follow the science” during Covid.

But Mill is aware of the tyrannical turn, and its roots in the nature of the true. Thus, the ruler may “assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty”. If not, they can manipulate it until it is certain. I believe President Obama was the first to talk of the necessity for “curating the truth”. Such a religious term for such an irreligious act.

Truth should also be communal, Mill believed, and the necessity of sharing it is a social contract broken by interfering with freedom of expression: “But the particular evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it”.

Mill finds a sense of duty in the transmission of improving information, an office each individual owes to a wider humanity: “To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it has been mistaken … is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow-creatures”.

In fact, it is the intellectual wellbeing of his fellow–creatures which completes the objections to the censorship of freedom of expression for Mill: “But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy”.

And social relations are the salve for erroneous beliefs: “He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone”.

This is Socratic, and Mill devotes a page or so of On Liberty to Socrates rather than Plato. And the transmission of opinion is also one of the checks and balances democracy requires: “If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility”.

What of those most affected by the suppression of free expression, those ultimately imprisoned for it? And what is the nature of their crime? “To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feel much interest in seeing justice done them”.

This is increasingly becoming the case in the UK, where the appellation “far Right” has been mobilized to segregate the patriotic who are prepared to voice their opinions. Thus, truth is molded via social engineering creating an ideologically atomized populace: “[T]here is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... [and this leads to] the dread of heterodox speculation.”

This leads, in turn, to “The deep slumber of a decided opinion”. Public opinion, acceptable public opinion, has now been formed by social coercion.

But Mill also discusses the giving of offence, perhaps the element today which has taken on supreme importance. “Our merely social intolerance kills no one,” Mill writes, and the litmus test of opinion versus offence is made clear: “[I]f the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful…”

It is worth noting that when “freedom of speech” is discussed, what is generally meant today is freedom of writing. Unless speech is recorded, each speech act is discrete and non-scriptive. Litera scripta manet, as John Dewey noted. “That which is written down remains”. That which is spoken and unrecorded is not. Recording it turns it into a type of writing, a type of inscription. Without straying too far into Jacques Derrida territory, speech and writing are intertwined, but freedom of speech itself appears to remain untouchable in the absence, for example, of witnesses. Now, the British government is seeking to change that with its Employment Rights Bill.

This is one of those legislative instruments which hides behind an apparently beneficent title. Who could argue against the rights of employees, particularly the right not to be harassed in the workplace? But in practice the bill has no interest in physical or sexual harassment, but rather that of overhearing speech which may offend the hearer and thus count as harassment. And the punishment for heresy is not just reactive, but also proscriptive.

An English YouTuber by the name of Andre Walker told a very indicative story in a recent episode. Talking to his friend’s teenage boy and his friends about their experience in school, the boy told him of a lesson they had on slavery. The teacher sternly informed them that if anyone even mentioned the fact that Britain was instrumental in dismantling the slave trade, they would be dismissed from the class.

For Mill, the price society must pay for the suppression of opinion is high: “But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind”.

And if what is required seemed unattainable to Mill then, what prospect does it have now? We would have to reach “a stage of intellectual advancement which at present seems at an incalculable distance”.

We have the intellectual advancement, but the political class are concerned that it is being shared around and democratized. A technocratic elite operating the machinery of state has no need of a populace keen and able to use its collective intellect.

Some politicians are not even attempting to hide the suppression of free expression. The new Mayor of New South Wales in Australia informed his citizens that they did not have the same freedom of speech as America. That was it; that’s how policy gets made in the area of freedom of expression.

Mill was areligious, if anything. But On Liberty often displays a Biblical framework. There is a lot of “Do unto others” in there. Civic Christianity can set good laws, so there is nothing wrong with that, but for a man so seemingly uninterested in the religious impulse, his own is analogous: Doing unto others certainly adequately describes the current British government, just not in the traditional, Biblical sense.

But there was enough cynicism in Mill to span the ages: “But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes”.

On Liberty is a work of limits and boundaries, transgressed and untransgressed, and, although it speaks again from the past to the UK’s present predicament, Mill perhaps did not go far enough, and could not see, could not have seen, what might happen with the return of tyranny to the country of his birth. He did not see just how far power was prepared to go: “In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of law is lighter, than in most other countries of Europe; and there is considerable jealousy of direct interference, by the legislative or executive power, with private conduct”.

The yoke of law is not so light now, 170 years after Mill walked the Capitoline Hill. And it is weighing heavier on the shoulders of the British people week by week, month by month, as more of them are arrested for social media posts than in Russia. There is still a long way down from Mill’s country’s position in Article 19’s league table, but that just means there is further to fall.

Tucker Carlson at Turning Point USA: Epstein was a Mossad agent and IDF soldiers should lose U.S. citizenship

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Things are looking up for being able to be honest about Jewish issues in mainstream forums. I couldn’t be happier that this is coming out from a mainstream conservative at a major mainstream conservative conference. It’s been a long time coming, and we are still not there. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Carlson is much hated by the ADL which oddly has not commented on this latest faux pas. But they have lots to say about Turker’s endorsement of the great replacement “conspiracy theory.”

Carlson claimed that Epstein had “connections to a foreign government”:

“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government.” “Now no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty.”

Lots of Jewish angst about this — and about Carlson’s statement that Jews who served in  the IDF should lost their U.S. citizenship. Common sense, but since when has common sense been relevant to anything related to Jewish power. Any accusation of dual loyalty is considered anti-Semitism according to the official definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, so I guess Carlson is now officially an anti-Semite, along with Charlie Kirk and a whole lot of people who attended the conference.

From the Forward:

Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and a leader in the Republican Party’s isolationist wing, said that Americans who previously served in the Israeli Defense Forces should have their U.S. citizenship revoked over concerns of dual loyalty. At the same time, he also criticized the Trump administration for trying to deport pro-Palestinian students who engaged in anti-Israel activity on campus.are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF — they should lose their citizenship,” Carlson said in a 45-minute speech on Saturday at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida. “You can’t fight for another country and remain an American, period.”

Carlson, who has promoted antisemitic tropes [simply for saying Zelenskyy is a dictator who has suppressed Christianity] and has been associated with white nationalists [i.e., Darryl Cooper!!], explained that his position is an “obvious recognition of the truth” and applies to all countries. He mocked his critics — “they just write you off as some sort of internet freak, hater, Nazi” — and said it is “fair to demand that the people running my country love it every bit as much as I do.”

The founder of the organization Carlson spoke to is Charlie Kirk, a conservative podcaster who has accused Jews of financing “anti-white causes.” Several Trump cabinet members and Republican officials attended and spoke at the three-day conference.

And of course, Jews in high places deny Epstein had any connections to Mossad.

From the JTA comment on Naftali Bennet’s tweet:

Carlson has long faced allegations of antisemitism, including over his promotion of white supremacist ideas while on Fox News and his hosting of a Holocaust denier on his X stream last year.

More recently, he has been at the vanguard of a different divide within the MAGA movement over foreign policy, centering on Israel. Carlson and others heavily criticized Trump’s decision to join Israel’s military offensive against Iran’s nuclear program, with Carlson accusing Trump of being “complicit” in Israel’s “act of war.”

Carlson sends out a daily email to subscribers. This is from the July 14th email and basically summarizes his points at his talk. Notice he highlights Jewish activist Ben Shapiro as wanting to move on.

It seems likely that Jeffrey Epstein worked on behalf of an intelligence service. Probably not an American one.

So which country was it? The fact that so few reporters have bothered to dig into that question could prove to be this century’s most egregious example of journalistic malpractice. How did the notorious pedophile go from being a high school math teacher with no college degree to having a private island and one of the most luxurious residences in Manhattan? Doesn’t that seem weird? What was the source of his money? Why has nobody ever really looked into it?

To anyone paying attention, the obvious conclusion is that Epstein had direct connections to a foreign government. To the Israeli government. That is true even though saying it out loud is forbidden in mainstream political discourse, but there’s nothing wrong with having the gall to do just that. It doesn’t matter what screeching shills like Mark Levin say. Telling the truth is not hateful, nor is it anti-Semitic or even anti-Israel.

Criticizing the behavior of a government agency, any government agency, does not make you a bigot. It makes you a free person. You are allowed to hold them to account because you’re not a slave; you are a citizen. That means you have the right to expect your government to act in your interest and to demand that foreign governments that suck up your tax dollars do the same. Israel using America’s most famous serial sex criminal as an intelligence asset would not fit that description.

So did it happen? A few people have asked the Israeli government that question, but they’ve received no real answers. That is unacceptable. As long as America keeps cutting generous checks to that foreign power, it should have to report to us. If it refuses, no more payments. The rules are simple.

In the meantime, we can’t help but notice a strange new talking point emerging on the Right.

“The Epstein story doesn’t even matter!” the Ben Shapiros of the world now claim. “So shut up about it already!”

That is obvious nonsense. The truth behind Epstein, his death, his connections, and how he got so rich matters a lot. The pedophile wasn’t killed during a walk down the street or even in his own home. He died in a high-security prison in the heart of America’s largest city. It was supposed to be among the most secure places in the world. That means whatever force is responsible for Epstein’s demise orchestrated the killing in among the most difficult conditions possible, and they did it while hardly breaking a sweat. Whoever pulled that off really runs our country. If they could do it to him, they could definitely do it to you, too.
Why would the Shapiro caucus not want to get to the bottom of that? You know the answer. It’s because they have something to hide

The refrain on the right is that Epstein matters because he is a window into who rules the U.S. And one would be forgiven for thinking that the reason for the cover-up is to hide the involvement of Mossad in an elaborate blackmail scheme. We also deserve to know what the deep state is hiding about the JFK assassination—another phenomenally important event in which there is good reason to think that Israel and the CIA were involved, and another incident where Trump said he would be completely transparent.

Napolitano interviews Mearsheimer: Genocidal Israel and its domination of U.S., the never-ending Ukraine war

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Napolitano’s podcast is the best mainstream podcast out there. Likely the most negative about Trump among conservatives and he has people who are very knowledgeable about Israel, its power over U.S. politics, and its genocide against the Palestinians. I have supported Trump—anyone but Harris, and he is certainly doing some good things, like DEI, deporting illegals, etc. But his foreign policy has been a disappointment to say the least.

Prof. John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, is a foreign policy expert and the best academic critic of Israel. His views are always worth hearing. His critiques of Trump are devastating.

Mearsheimer: Israel is totally dependent on the U.S. The absurdity of warmonger Netanyahu nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, but flattery will get you everywhere. Epstein likely very connected to Mossad and CIA; Netanyahu may have pressured Trump not to release Epstein files. Israel aims for complete dominance of the Middle East. Iran still has nuclear material, setting up another war. CIA Director John Ratcliffe as Mossad’s stenographer. Iran as strategically very important. Iran has learned that cooperating on nuclear deterrence doesn’t work; U.S. and Iran relations were getting better until the Israel Lobby stepped in and said that was unacceptable. Iran did “an enormous amount of damage to Israel” in the 12-day  war and neither Israel nor the U.S. are enthusiastic about another war. Israel wanted to end the war. Iran has missiles that Israel can’t stop, and the Trump administration fears Iran’s ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Lots of people think Iran should not have agreed to stop the war because “they were in the driver’s seat.” Israeli “humanitarian” camps; Israelis as Nazis.

Re Ukraine, Russia won’t change its terms for a ceasefire; they see the war as existential. Unless the U.S.-Ukraine agree to Russia’s terms the war will continue indefinitely. The negotiating is a charade. Trump will end up being Joe Biden 2.0 in Ukraine and the Middle East. Trump administration is “the gang that can’t shoot straight.” Russians are slowly but surely “rolling back the Ukrainians.” At some point Ukraine is likely to collapse, and we will have something like the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe all over again. Neocons have basically triumphed despite Trump’s rhetoric prior to the election. Expects a “frozen conflict” with Russians taking a big chunk of Ukraine. This will result in forever conflict between Russia and the West even long after the results are settled on the battlefield. “You can’t trust anything this administration says.” Gabbard has been marginalized and has fallen in line with Trump’s line. Trump uses intuition to solve problems, as he said on his tariff policies; doesn’t make calculations or consult others, thinks he’s a genius. Result is a lawless president who thinks he can lie and get away with it. “We are paying a serious price for this.”

Knife on Earth: Exploring the Idiocy and Arrogance of Two Atheist Icons

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The Genetic Book of the Dead is a good read by Richard Dawkins. Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder is a bad read by Salman Rushdie. One is about science, the other is about society. The two books are very different and so are the two authors. Dawkins is White; Rushdie is brown. Dawkins is ancestrally Christian; Rushdie is ancestrally Muslim. Dawkins is a scientist; Rushdie is an egotist. Dawkins has earnt his success; Rushdie has been given his.

Good read and bad read: Richard Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead and Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder

But Dawkins and Rushdie are united by two big and important things. They’re both atheists and they’re both members of a political cult. It’s a cult dedicated to the destruction of everything its members claim to hold dear. In other words, it’s a suicide cult and it’s called leftism. Dawkins’ leftism is intermittent and indirect in The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is about evolution and genetics. Rushdie’s leftism is overt and obtrusive in Knife, which is about the near-death experience he underwent in 2022. He was attacked with a knife whilst appearing at a literary festival in upstate New York. In his own words, he was at the festival “to talk about the importance of keeping writers from harm.” Rushdie, of course, recognizes the irony of that.

A logolatric littérateur

At the festival, he was very seriously harmed by a New Jersey man called Hadi Matar. And Rushdie does not recognize the full irony of that. Like all mainstream leftists, he sees absolutely no contradiction between a description like “New Jersey man” and a name like “Hadi Matar.” Leftists like Rushdie believe in what Vox Day satirically calls magic dirt, that is, the ability of residence on Western soil to transform Third-World folk into First-World folk — in effect, to turn non-Whites into Whites. But the dirt isn’t magic, as Rushdie found out in upstate New York. Or rather, as he didn’t find out. You can see that from the book he wrote about nearly dying at the hands of a New Jersey man called Hadi Matar.

Knife proves that Rushdie doesn’t believe only in magic dirt, but also in magic words. Again, that’s mainstream leftism. Rushdie and other members of the suicide-cult believe that words govern reality. Indeed, Rushdie is not merely logocentric, or centered on words, but logolatric, or worshipful of words. He may claim to be an atheist, but in fact he bows deep and long in the temple of Vayu, God of Wind. Rushdie’s worship of words and wind is part of what makes Knife a bad read. It’s partly a form of self-worship, because Rushdie regards himself as a great writer, a master of words and lord of language. So do leaders of his suicide-cult. That’s why they’ve showered him with honors, decade after decade, and why they paid such fulsome tribute to him after he was nearly murdered by that “New Jersey man.” In Rushdie’s words again, the festival was supposed to be a place “where ideas were debated in an atmosphere of openness, tolerance and freedom.” Instead, it was turned into a place of butchery.

The triumph of Enlightenment values

But Rushdie has neatly turned the tables in Knife. Or so he and his leftist readers will fondly imagine. Part of the book consists of a dialogue he imagines taking place between himself and “the A.,” as he calls Hadi Matar. That abbreviation stands for the “would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation,” as Rushdie states explicitly (p. 5). It can also stand for “the Asshole,” as Rushdie surely meant his readers to infer. He’s a master of ambiguity, irony and implication, after all. He’s also master in the pages of Knife. He writes this of “the A.”: “He does not really want to talk to me, but as this is my imagination at work, he has no choice.” (p. 136) That’s the magic of words. “The A.” has no choice but to have a “conversation” with Rushdie and be defeated by Rushdie’s eloquent exposition of Enlightenment values. At the end, Rushdie informs his imagined interlocutor that he has been on the wrong side of “a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without.” (p. 167)

Take that, Islamists! You have no sense of humor! You should be like Christians and let your religion be mocked, satirized and subverted by leftists like Salman Rushdie. Did Christians try to stab anyone after a homosexual poet called James Kirkup published a poem about a Roman centurion having necrophilic sex with the freshly crucified corpse of Jesus Christ? No, they didn’t. Did they try to stab anyone after a “transgressive artist” called Andres Serrano published a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine? Again no, they didn’t. But Rushdie never mentions those attacks on Christianity or the forbearing Christian response. When Christianity was strong, Christians punished their enemies and critics; now that Christianity is weak, Christians turn the other cheek. Unlike Salman Rushdie, Islamists have no “sense of humor.” And unlike Salman Rushdie, Islamists understand the rules of power. They can see that Christianity in the West is decadent and dying, which is why they have no intention of behaving like Christians now that they are in the West.

Shah Shmah…

And who imported them into the West? Who subsidized them to breed and build mosques and steadily expand their power and influence? Leftists like Salman Rushdie, of course. But he doesn’t discuss immigration in his book. He doesn’t discuss the rape-gangs of Rotherham either. Or the murder of Asad Shah in Glasgow in 2016. It would have been instructive for him to do so, but not in a way that assisted the all-important cause of leftism. Like Salman Rushdie, Asad Shah was attacked by an Islamist with a knife for committing blasphemy. Unlike Salman Rushdie, Asad Shah was not surrounded by friends and supporters at the time, so the humorless knifeman got what he wanted: a dead blasphemer.

But noisy defenders of free speech like Salman Rushdie and Kenan Malik, a staunch supporter of Rushdie, have never written about Asad Shah. They’ve refused to explore the fascinating parallels between two knife-attacks separated by the Atlantic and united by Islam. That’s why Asad Shah was the victim of what I call a meteor murder, that is, a murder that flashes throughout the headlines of the mainstream media and then disappears for ever. Meteor murders reveal the truth about Third-World immigration, you see, and leftists like Rushdie and Malik are not interested in the truth. As I’ve described in articles like “Martyr with a Machine Gun” and “Malik’s Moral Compass,” the murder of Asad Shah demonstrated how a long Muslim tradition of censorship-by-murder had been exported from Pakistan to Britain. In other words, when you import Third-World people, you inevitably import Third-World pathologies too. That’s why Rushdie ignored the murder of Asad Shah in Knife, although he did mention the attempted murder of the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 (p. 134). That took place in Egypt, when an Islamist attacked Mahfouz with a knife for “offending Islam.” Egypt is a Muslim country, of course. But why did the same thing later happen to Asad Shah in Britain, which is not a Muslim country, and to Salman Rushdie in America, which is not a Muslim country either?

“The spirit of young Trayvon Martin”

The answer is simple. It’s because the non-Muslim countries of Britain and America have imported ever-increasing numbers of Muslims. There are knife-attacks by “Islamists” all over the earth because Muslims have migrated all over the earth. But Rushdie never points out that obvious fact. Just like the Islamists whom he claims to oppose, he isn’t interested in the truth. No, he’s interested in advancing the cause of his favored ideology. That’s why he ignored the murder of Asad Shah and mentioned the murder of Trayvon Martin. Rushdie and other leftists think it was a murder, anyway:

After the World Voices event, as the audience came out onto Cooper Square beneath the gaze of the statue of Peter Cooper on its plinth, a candlelight vigil in support of Black Lives Matter was taking place. The spirit of young Trayvon Martin, whose murder by George Zimmerman, and Zimmerman’s disgraceful subsequent acquittal, had inspired the movement that became BLM, was also in the air. (p. 27)

That’s a good example both of Rushdie’s leftist love of lies and of Rushdie’s bad writing. The two things go together, in fact. Someone who supports civilization-wrecking thugs like Trayvon Martin will also tend to be a bad writer. And a bad thinker. The ugliness of leftism makes itself apparent in many ways, from the ugliness of leftist punims to the ugliness of leftist prose. But there are exceptions, of course. Richard Dawkins is a leftist, but he has an attractive face and writes attractive prose. That’s why I was able to read The Genetic Book of the Dead in a way I couldn’t read Knife. I got bored and skimmed some of Rushdie’s book. I read all of Dawkins’ book with close attention. And I intend to read it again. Dawkins is talking about fascinating things: genetics, evolution, the dazzling diversity of life on earth. All of his books do that and I still admire Dawkins as a scientist and popularizer of biology. But I no longer admire him as an ideologue. In fact, he and Christopher Hitchens did sterling work in turning me away from leftism. Dawkins is a good writer and Hitchens was a bad writer, but they have three big things in common: arrogance, autism and atheism.

Attractive White scientist Richard Dawkins, inspiring to leftists (photo from Nature)

Ugly Gypsy rapist Ivan Turtak, imported by leftists[1] (photo from Daily Mail)

Like ugly leftist punims and ugly leftist prose, the three things go together. And I can see Dawkins’ autism much better now, reading The Genetic Book of the Dead, than I could reading The Blind Watchmaker in the 1980s. It isn’t just autism and atheism that go together: it’s autism and science. Dawkins is obsessive and dedicated to detail. He likes sorting and systematizing, cataloguing and classifying, and he loves the digitality of DNA. I like all those things too, but Dawkins accompanies them with arrogance and dogmatism, which proved too much for me in the end. Although I’m still unable to believe in God, I don’t want to be an atheist in the style of Dawkins and Hitchens. For one thing, I now see that their atheism is a central part of the leftist suicide-cult. Just as Salman Rushdie claims to love free speech and has spent all his life helping to destroy free speech, so Dawkins claims to hate religion and has spent all his life helping to promote religion. In other words, Rushdie and Dawkins are devout believers in the suicide-cult of leftism, which is replacing the successfully neutered religion of Christianity with decidedly unneutered religion of Islam.

Predatory parallels

How could Dawkins do that, when there are obvious lessons to be drawn from biology about the idiocy of importing alien species? Take the flightless birds of New Zealand, which Dawkins discusses in another good book of his called Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution (2021). They evolved to be flightless because they lived on remote islands, safe from predatory mammals like stoats and cats. So what happens when stoats and cats are introduced to New Zealand? Slaughter, that’s what. And not just of flightless birds like kiwis: New Zealand has lost species of full-flighted birds to introduced predators too.[2] A thousand miles across the ocean, Australia offers more lessons in the harm done by introducing new species to long-established ecosystems. From rabbits to cane-toads, the newcomers have flourished and wrought havoc on native fauna and flora. And leftists long ago learnt those ecological lessons. They would recoil in horror if someone suggested importing a full range of fauna and flora from Pakistan or Somalia or China into Britain or America or France. You should not intermingle ecosystems like that! Delicate balances will be disturbed, ecological webs rent asunder! Native species will be devastated or destroyed!

Imported predators: a stoat and members of a Muslim rape-gang (images from Wikipedia and BBC)

But one species is exempt from the leftist abhorrence of ecological mixing. That species is, of course, Homo sapiens. Leftists believe that unlimited numbers of alien human being can enter new ecosystems of culture and custom without doing any harm at all. The newcomers won’t trigger ecocide. On the contrary, they’ll introduce enrichment. But this bio-transfer is good only when it involves non-White humans migrating into the White West. Non-Whites enrich and enhance, bringing only blessings and benefits to stale pale societies like Britain, America and France. That’s what leftists believe. They’re wrong, of course. There are very obvious parallels between the harm done by introduced animals and the harm done by introduced humans. A biologist like Richard Dawkins should have seen those parallels long ago and begun campaigning against migration from the Third World. Dawkins should also have seen the danger of disturbing the cultural ecosystems of Western society from within. This is one of the clever and illuminating analogies he uses to instruct his readers about biology and genetics:

As for the all-important interactions between genes in influencing phenotype, here’s a better metaphor than the butcher’s map. A large sheet hangs from the ceiling, suspended from hooks by hundreds of strings attached to different places all over the sheet. It may help the analogy to consider the strings as elastic. The strings don’t hang vertically and independently. Instead, they can run diagonally or in any direction, and they interfere with other strings by cross-links rather than necessarily going straight to the sheet itself. The sheet takes on a bumpy shape, because of the interacting tensions in the tangled cat’s-cradle of hundreds of strings. As you’ve guessed, the shape of the sheet represents the phenotype, the body of the animal. The genes are represented by tensions in the strings at the hooks in the ceiling. A mutation is either a tug towards the hook or a release, perhaps even a severing of the string at the hook. And, of course, the point of the parable is that a mutation at any one hook affects the whole balance of tensions across the tangle of strings. Alter the tension at any one hook, and the shape of the whole sheet shifts. (pp. 189-90; Dawkins’ emphases)

Dawkins’ analogy obviously applies not just to phenotypes but also to ecosystems and to societies. Dawkins himself created the idea of cultural genes or memes, which evolve and interact, survive or go extinct. And he wants to drive one set of memes, one memeplex, into extinction. It’s the memeplex for belief in God and religion. But by his own analogy, that would be a reckless and irresponsible thing to do. As he points out: if you alter the tensions in the strings, “the shape of the whole sheet shifts.” And in unpredictable ways that are much more likely to be harmful than beneficial.[3] By attacking Christianity, something that has been central to Western culture for millennia, Dawkins and other atheists were trying to cut a whole set of strings. At the same time, they didn’t object as a whole new set of strings — those for Islam — were attached to the sheet. These staunch supporters of science, fully aware of the complexity and delicacy of biological systems, were quite happy for the sheet of Western society to be brutally tugged and twisted into radically different shapes.

Mea maxima culpa

In other words, those bio-literate atheists were idiots. But Dawkins, for one, has started to glimpse the size of his idiocy. He has said that he’s a “cultural Christian” and that he prefers the sound of church bells to the “aggressive-sounding” Muslim call to prayer. After he expressed that preference, he was immediately accused of Islamophobia. I share the preference and I have to confess my own idiocy. When I accepted Dawkins’ version of atheism, I too looked forward eagerly to the extinction of Christianity. And I too ignored the encroachment of Islam. I wasn’t as bio-literate as Richard Dawkins, but I should have seen the parallels between biology and society, between importing predatory animals and importing predatory ideologies. And I should have asked how much things like science, which I did value, owed to things like Christianity, which I didn’t value at all. Nowadays, I’m still unsure how valuable Christianity is. How valuable true Christianity is, I mean, not the traitorous parody of Christianity that currently does the Devil’s work all over the West. That parody of Christianity should — and will — be driven into extinction, but atheists like Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie won’t like what replaces it.

And they won’t like the civil wars that will soon erupt all over the West. Nor will the great ironist Salman Rushdie recognize the irony of those civil wars. His bad books have explored the end of the British Raj, when the strings of Western imperialism were cut and the sheet of Indian society shifted sharply into new shapes. They were shapes of civil war, of inter-communal massacre and ethnic cleansing. The bad writer Salman Rushdie, knowing all that history, has worked all his life to reproduce it in the West. So, in his own way, has the good writer Richard Dawkins. Separated by skin-color, culture and the quality of their writing, they’ve been united by the idiocy and arrogance of their atheism. For a good analysis of where that idiocy and arrogance will soon take the West, I can recommend some new posts by a writer called El Inglés at Gates of Vienna. He’s writing for Whites in Britain, but his words apply to Whites everywhere else:

If you are a British man or woman, with a family, living in or close to a part of Birmingham, or London, or Bradford that is likely to be caught up in communal violence, you deserve to know what might be heading your way. Making a hard decision in advance might allow you to save your family, your wealth, your health, your sanity. The government and its various satellites will always insist everything is under control. Do you trust them?

I do not want British people to end up in this situation. Forewarned is forearmed, and it is in this spirit that I offer the only publicly-available, open-source analysis of this subject matter that is ever likely to be made available to them. And who knows — by openly analysing that which cannot be mentioned in polite circles, this document may yet compel official institutions to quietly model those same unspeakable futures. (“Crown, Crescent, Pitchfork: Part One,” Gates of Vienna, 6th July 2025)

[1]  Ivan Turtak and his two fellow rapists are described as “Slovakian” in newspaper reports, but I think they’re Gypsies.

[2]  But the island has struck back, because New Zealand has exported harmful species of its own, like the New Zealand flatworm and pigmyweed.

[3]  As Dawkins often points out in his books, there are far more ways to damage a functional system like an engine or genotype than to improve it.

Argentina’s “Libertarian” Revolution Was Brought to You by Chabad

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Behind Argentine President Javier Milei’s “chainsaw economics” stands the quiet power of Eduardo Elsztain, a devout Jewish oligarch with deep ties to Israel and Wall Street.

Eduardo Elsztain whispers to Shabbos Goy Javier Milei

Before his monumental victory against Sergio Massa in November 2023, Milei was an eccentric political analyst who had a flair for controversy and had sharply criticized the Argentine political establishment. Milei made a name for himself by appealing to libertarian principles and even naming his dogs after libertarian intellectual Murray Rothbard.

Before 2023, the idea of Milei becoming president of Argentina would have seemed far-fetched to casual political observers. But when one enters into a Faustian pact with Elsztain and the powerful networks of Argentina’s Jewish elite, even the most unlikely of political ambitions can suddenly materialize.

Elsztain is a prominent Argentine businessman who has been widely recognized as one of South America’s most influential Jewish leaders and business figures. Born on January 26, 1960, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Elsztain has built a vast construction business empire while maintaining deep connections to Jewish communities worldwide and establishing significant ties to Israel.

Elsztain is the chairman and CEO of IRSA (Inversiones y Representaciones Sociedad Anónima), Argentina’s largest real estate company, which trades on both the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. His grandfather, Isaac Elsztain, a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived in Argentina in 1917, founded IRSA in 1943.

Beyond real estate, Elsztain controls a massive agricultural empire through the agricultural company Cresud, which operates approximately 850,000 hectares of farmland across Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. He also serves as president of Banco Hipotecario, Argentina’s leading mortgage bank, and has extensive mining interests through Austral Gold Limited.

His business success has been remarkable. According to reports, his rise to prominence began in the 1990s when he received a $10 million investment from billionaire George Soros, which helped transform his grandfather’s struggling company into Argentina’s largest business empire. Contrary to popular mythology that portrays this as a chance encounter, Argentine newspaper La Nación revealed that the meeting with Soros was actually arranged through Elsztain’s contacts within Buenos Aires’s Jewish community who were responsible for opening doors to the powerful businessman.

His ascent, backed by elite networks, did not go unnoticed abroad. Israeli media frequently refer to Elsztain as “South America’s richest Jew.” With respect to his connections to broader Jewry, Elsztain’s relationship with Argentina’s Jewish community runs deep and spans several decades. He is the President of Chabad Argentina and serves as Chairman of the World Jewish Congress Governing Board. His involvement with Jewish institutions began in the late 1970s when his parents participated in Kabbalah classes given by Rabbi Avraham Yosef Polichenco, which led the family to become closer to Chabad.

Chabad—also known as Lubavitch, Habad, or Chabad-Lubavitch—is a major branch of Hasidic Judaism distinguished by its intellectual approach to Jewish mysticism and its expansive global network. The movement’s name, Chabad, is an acronym for the Hebrew words Choḥmah (חָכְמָה, “wisdom”), Binah (בִּינָה, “understanding”), and Da’at (דַּעַת, “knowledge”), and has become a powerful vehicle for Jewish influence in the United States, Russia, and Argentina. Elsztain has been a crucial partner for Chabad activities not only in Argentina but globally, supporting everything from educational programs to social services. Elsztain was a follower of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. In a famous story, when Elsztain asked the Rebbe for advice about investing $15 million in the stock market in 1991, the Rebbe advised him to focus on real estate instead—advice that proved to be extraordinarily prescient and profitable.

Widely recognized as a key donor to the Taglit-Birthright project, which arranges educational trips to Israel for young English-speaking Jews, Elsztain also holds the title of president of Taglit-Birthright Israel in Argentina. That said, Elsztain’s most significant connection to Israel came through his major investment in IDB Holding Corp., one of Israel’s largest conglomerates. Beginning in 2012, he invested over $100 million to rescue the struggling company from Israeli businessman Nochi Dankner.

Through his control of IDB, Elsztain held significant ownership in several major Israeli corporations. These included Cellcom, the country’s largest mobile phone operator, as well as Shufersal (also known as Super-Sol), one of Israel’s leading supermarket chains. Elsztain’s investment in IDB was described as his “first major investment in Israel.” For the Jewish magnate, investing in Israel marked a personal turning point; as he put it, “The best part of my life began when I invested in Israel.”

Despite facing significant challenges and eventually losing control of IDB in 2020, Elsztain maintained his commitment to Israel, saying he invests “for my great-grandchildren” and views Israel as “a wonderful place to invest.”

What’s particularly notable, however, is where Milei and Elsztain’s trajectories converge. Elsztain and Milei first met at the Llao Llao Forum in April 2023, an annual gathering of Argentina’s business elite hosted by Elsztain at his luxury hotel in Bariloche. This meeting of the “Círculo Rojo” (Red Circle) proved to be the starting point of what would become an intimate relationship. Chilean newspaper La Tercera reported that the two formed such a strong bond that the businessman is now considered the president’s closest associate.

Most significantly, Elsztain served as a key spiritual link between Milei and the Jewish community, especially the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement. Multiple sources confirm that Elsztain was the key figure who introduced Milei to the Chabad community. As one source explained to the Argentine digital news website La Política Online: “Eduardo is the key to the Chabad in Argentina.” This connection was facilitated through Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt, director of Chabad Argentina, who reportedly “connected [Milei] with some big businessmen,” including Elsztain.

Elsztain has continued to offer Milei key platforms to engage with Argentina’s business elite. One notable example was the 2024 Llao Llao Forum, where Elsztain hosted Milei as a featured speaker before an audience of top CEOs.

Elsztain’s political activities have been complicated by his involvement in several high-profile international financial scandals. In the 2016 Panama Papers, he was named as operating offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens during the 1990s. These entities were reportedly used for Venezuelan real estate investments and were managed in partnership with his then-business associate Marcelo Mindlin.

The following year, the 2017 Paradise Papers further exposed Elsztain’s use of offshore structures. These included Latin America Capital Partners II LP in Bermuda, a fund connected to George Soros, as well as Elsztain Realty Partners Master Fund LP and Dolphin Global Fund, the latter based in the Isle of Man and holding $400 million in assets. These offshore dealings also revealed links to Luis Caputo, who served as Finance Minister under President Mauricio Macri and now holds the position of Economy Minister in Javier Milei’s administration.

Behind the libertarian theatrics and economic reform lies a deeper arrangement—one that speaks less to populist revolt and more to elite consolidation. In Javier Milei’s Argentina, it seems certain doors only open if you know the right rabbi.

How the Aryans Broke the Jock-Nerd Stereoype

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Everybody is familiar with the stereotype, beloved of American coming-of-age movies centred around High Schools, of the Jocks and the Nerds. The Jocks are tall, muscular, testosterone-pumped sportsmen who, though appealing to girls and socially skilled, are not especially intelligent or academic. The Nerds are short, skinny and unattractive to girls but they do very well in school and are extremely intelligent (often more or less explicitly Jewish, as in Addams Family Values[1]). The “cope,” the way in which Nerds are taught to psychologically deal with this situation, is to tell themselves that, one day, the Nerds will be eminent and well-to-do, while the Jocks will most likely be pursuing some low-status job.

A fascinating new study in the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics has provided some evidence for this stereotype, and, indeed, found that European peoples, specifically, have managed to achieve the best of both worlds: the ideal Jock-Nerd balance. Perhaps this helps to explain the manifest extreme success of Europeans in relation to other races. It is particularly intriguing as you might actually expect the “cope” referred to above to be just that and to be empirically inaccurate. It certainly appears to be inaccurate at the individual level.

As I have explored in my book Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, at the individual level intelligence is part of a general Fitness Factor that has been strongly selected for across time, leading to different adaptive traits becoming pleiotropically related. In other words, there was positive selection for genetic physical health, mental health, pro-social behaviour and intelligence, so they became bundled together. Similarly, there was sexual selection, by females, for high-status (and thus intelligent) males, as these betokened adaptiveness and could provide them with resources, and for height, as taller men are more likely to win fights and survive.

This is a serious problem for the Jock-Nerd division and its related “cope.” The literature is telling us that intelligence is positively associated, in males, with height and it is more generally associated with being mentally stable (not a neurotic Nerd), socially-skilled, genetically healthy and physically fit, which would involve being attractive to girls and being good at sport. In fact, university students who are more intelligent are more likely to participate in sport while they are at university. We would expect males of low intelligence, by contrast, to be short, weak, unfit and neurotic.

But, at the group level, there are evolutionary mechanisms via which the stereotype might work. For example, in an unstable yet easy ecology, in which you could be wiped out at any minute, there is no point cooperating with people (as cooperation may never be repaid) and immediate needs are met. Accordingly, intelligence is not selected for. Height and muscularity will aid winning fights in a lethal environment, so they may well be selected for. By contrast, in a stable yet harsh environment, you must cooperate with people in order to survive, and your immediate needs are not met. This would cause intelligence to be strongly selected for and it may even pay to take bio-energetic resources away from height and muscularity and direct them towards growing a larger, thus more intelligent, brain.

This is something like what Italian anthropologist DavidePiffer finds in his Twin Research and Human Genetics study “Polygenic Selection and Environmental Influence on Adult Body Height: Genetic and Living Standard Contributions Across Diverse Populations.” There are genes that relate to your maximum and minimum possible height, with environment explaining where you end up between these two limits. This allows you to calculate polygenic scores for height; the prevalence of “tall alleles” in a population. Piffer, and his colleague the Danish researcher Emil Kirkegaard, analysed 5000 ancient European genomes, some of them dating back 12,000 years.

Bronze Age herders from the Eurasian Steppe (like the Yamnaya; the Indo-Europeans or Aryans) carried genetic variants for height, explaining why their skeletons often measure over 5 foot 8, in a context of poor nutrition. Piffer explains that Europe was first occupied by Western Hunter Gatherers. These people were reasonably tall but they weren’t very intelligent; they were low in polygenic scores for intelligence. They were then joined, and often displaced, by Anatolian farmers, the kinds of people who built Stonehenge. These people were shorter, in terms of genetics, but they were much more intelligent. So, here we see, in a sense, the Jock-Nerd idea: stupid tall people are displaced by clever, short ones. Height and intelligence are following divergent paths. The Anatolian farmers are smarter but they pay for this by being shorter. Indeed, farming – which compels you to plan and think about the future and thus to be more intelligent – seems to cause us to become more intelligent; those who are too stupid to farm are selected out.

Something changed around 3000 years ago when Steppe herders invaded much of Europe. These people were both tall and highly intelligent. In invading Europe, they made the areas where they had the most genetic influence, such as the Netherlands and Scandinavia, both very tall and very intelligent. With their influence, height went back up, after which it would have been selected for alongside intelligence and other markers of fitness.

Aryans, therefore, broke the Jock-Nerd mould, possibly because they were adapted to relative cold, which would militate in favour of heat-preserving larger bodies. They are both intelligent and tall, giving them two means of dominating other groups in the battle of group selection.

[1] from The Culture of Critique, Ch. 1:

A recent, perhaps trivial, example of this type of intellectual ethnic warfare is the popular movie Addams Family Values (released in November 1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by Paul Rudnick. The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair (the exception being an overweight child), and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes. (Indeed, having blond hair is viewed as a pathology, so that when the dark-haired Addams baby temporarily becomes blond, there is a family crisis.) The featured Jewish child has dark hair, wears glasses, and is physically frail and nonathletic. He often makes precociously intelligent comments, and he is severely punished by the blond-haired counselors for reading a highly intellectual book. The evil gentile children are the opposite: blond, athletic, and unintellectual. Together with other assorted dark-haired children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and white gentile children rejected by their peers (for being overweight, etc.), the Jewish boy and the Addams family children lead a very violent movement that succeeds in destroying the blond enemy. The movie is a parable illustrating the general thrust of Jewish intellectual and political activity relating to immigration and multi-culturalism in Western societies (see Ch. 7). It is also consistent with the general thrust of Hollywood movies. SAID (Ch. 2) reviews data indicating Jewish domination of the entertainment industry in the United States. Powers, Rothman and Rothman (1996, 207) characterize television as promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values, and Lichter, Lichter and Rothman  (1994, 251) find that television portrays cultural pluralism in positive terms and as easily achieved apart from the activities of a few ignorant or bigoted miscreants.

James Edwards Interviews Mark Weber

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What follows is an interview conducted by talk radio host James Edwards with Mark Weber, Director of the Institute for Historical Review. Mr. Weber is a historian, lecturer, and current affairs analyst. He was educated in both the United States and Europe and holds a master’s degree in modern European history. 

* * *

James Edwards: As a result of your three visits to Iran, you are unusually well-informed about that country and its relations with the United States. What do you think is most important for Americans to understand about Iran?

Mark Weber: Iran is a much more complex, important, and fascinating country than the mainstream US media and many American politicians suggest. Fox News and similarly slanted media outlets give an especially distorted, cartoonish portrayal of Iranians and their government.

With a population of some 90 million, Iranians are justifiably proud of their rich and impressive heritage, history, and culture. Iranians are Muslim, but their heritage, culture and ancestry are very different than that of the other Muslim countries of the region. Iranians are not Arabs.

Iranians are a proud people. They remember and deeply resent how foreign powers, especially Britain and the US, for many years humiliated, exploited, and oppressed them. Along with many millions around the world, Iranians are angered and perplexed by America’s record of one-sided support for Israel and its aggression and brutal treatment of non-Jews.

The large Iranian crowds that shout “Death to America,” are venting anger at the US government, not the American people. In fact, and as visitors to the country can readily learn for themselves, Iranians have a remarkably friendly attitude toward Americans.

Edwards: While in Tehran, you delivered a lecture to hundreds of university students and spoke at a conference of government leaders, which the country’s president also addressed. What else can you tell us about Iranian society and government that the US media either omits or distorts?

Weber: Iran is a much more open and “pluralistic” society than, say, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or some other countries in the region. While Iranian elections are certainly not as ‘free” as those in the US, they are not rigged. Iranian elections are real contests of candidates who present different views on important issues. Some recent presidential candidates were elected in spite of disapproval by the religious “establishment.”

Iranians are very aware of what’s going on in the world. Iran is not a “closed” country like North Korea. Many Iranians routinely travel from their country and return home. Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit and travel widely in Iran. As any visitor to the country will easily discover for himself, Iranians are quite open about expressing their views and complaints, including criticisms of the government.

Although the Iranian press is restricted, it’s at least as “free” as that of Ukraine or Saudi Arabia. “Reformist” daily newspapers are often critical of government policies.

Women are a majority of Iran’s university students. Women hold four cabinet-level posts in the current Iranian government.

Contrary to the impression given by some US politicians and much of the media, very few Iranians regard American society as any kind of model. Especially outside of the relatively well-to-do neighborhoods of north Tehran, most Iranians are religiously and socially rather “conservative.” For example, only a tiny minority of Iranians would tolerate the “gay pride” parades that are accepted in the US and western Europe.

It’s true that many Iranians, probably a majority, are unhappy with their government — but not in the way that the US media and American politicians suggest. The main complaint of most Iranians is not about whether women should or should not have to cover their head, but rather about the sluggish economy, inflation, and a lack of good jobs and economic opportunity. Many Iranians blame their economic problems on the country’s aging, dogmatic and inflexible political leadership. A common complaint is that Iran’s religious “establishment” plays an oversized, intrusive and bureaucratized role in the national economy, and thereby stifles innovation and free enterprise.

In recent weeks, the Israeli government and the pro-Israel media in the US have promoted the idea that Iranians are desperately eager for “liberation” and “regime change.” Prime minister Netanyahu has been pushing the son of the Shah who was ousted in a popular uprising in 1979 as the ideal person to head a new government in Tehran. Some US Republicans, including John Bolton and Rudolf Guiliani, have promoted the bizarre MEK cult as an alternative Iranian government. The chance that either of these foreign-based opposition groups will take power in Tehran is just about zero. Neither has any popular support among Iranians. Any new “regime change” government is much more likely to emerge from Iran’s military, and it would almost certainly be less religious and more nationalistic than the current one.

Edwards: What was Israel’s motive in launching its “preemptive” attack against Iran on June 13? Were Israel’s leaders really concerned that Iran would soon acquire nuclear weapons?

Weber: For decades Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed for the destruction of Iran, and indeed of any regime in the Middle East, that does not accept Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Netanyahu has a long record of skillfully lying to Americans. For more than 30 years, he and other Israeli leaders have been pressuring the US to attack Iran, based on bogus claims that Iran is just one or two or three years away from having nuclear weapons. If Iran had really wanted to build nuclear weapons, it would have done so years ago. Iran is certainly as capable of doing so as Pakistan or North Korea.

Netanyahu has promoted other lies, which America’s pro-Israel media and politicians readily accept. For example, he pressed the US to invade, bomb, and occupy Iraq in early 2003. Shortly before that ill-fated attack, Netanyahu assured members of the US Congress that “if you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

In 2015 Iran and the US concluded the JCPOA agreement whereby Iran accepted years of comprehensive, intrusive international inspections to ensure that it was not developing nuclear weapons. Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China also signed the agreement. US national security experts overwhelmingly endorsed it. Even the former head of Israel’s atomic energy agency, Uzi Eilam, publicly said: “The bottom line is the agreement is good for Israel.”

Netanyahu’s fierce opposition to the agreement was motivated, above all, by fear that it would “normalize” relations between Iran and the US and Europe, which would greatly help Iran’s economy, and boost Iran’s stature and influence in the world.

Anyone who is serious about wanting Iran not to have nuclear weapons should support the revival of the 2015 JCPOA agreement. Even assuming that Iran’s leaders are deceitful and untrustworthy, the JCPOA is much better than no agreement at all.

Pressed by Netanyahu, President Trump tore up the JCPOA agreement in 2018.

Edwards: You were a live guest on my radio program on June 21, just as news broke of the US bombing of Iran. What were your thoughts when you heard the news?

Weber: My first reaction was surprise. Along with millions of other Americans, I had been deceived by President Trump, who had assured the world that he wanted to reach an agreement with Iran about nuclear weapons, and who had warned Israel not to attack Iran while negotiations with Tehran were still ongoing.

I also immediately thought that Trump’s decision to attack was a dangerous gamble. If Iran responded to the US bombing by striking back hard at the US, and thereby expanding the war, Trump would quickly lose public support, even among his loyal “base.” Fortunately, the quickly arranged ceasefire seems to be holding.

Edwards: In less than two weeks, Israel launched a full-scale air attack against Iran, Iran forcefully retaliated with missile strikes against Israel, the US joined with a bombing raid against Iran, and Trump announced a ceasefire that abruptly ended the conflict. How would you explain such an astonishing turn of events over such a short period of time?

Weber: Short answer: Trump’s unpredictable personality and incoherent outlook.

Just before Israel launched its massive June 13 attack against Iran, Trump publicly warned Israel not to strike Iran while negotiations are still ongoing. But after Israel struck, Trump said he approved the attack and acknowledged that he had known about it in advance. On June 17, Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” but now he talks as if he wants to make a “deal” with Tehran. Which is it? Who knows?

Although some consider Trump’s incoherence and unpredictability a virtue, such behavior is dangerous. A harmful consequence of Trump’s record of repeatedly breaking his word, and trashing even formal agreements that he himself had signed, is that no one, not even traditional friends of the US and certainly not Iran, can ever trust him or the US government about anything. The resulting global instability is bad for Americans and the world.

Edwards: What consequences might there be because of President Trump’s unilateral decision to attack another sovereign country?

Weber: The Trump administration has acted in blatant violation of the UN Charter, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and even his own public pledges. Leaders of both major US political parties have accepted Trump’s brazen scorn for solemn international agreements. As a result, leaders in Europe, Russia, China and everywhere else in the world cannot trust any pledge or agreement made by an American government.

Trump ordered US bombers to strike Iran without even a pretense of authorization by the US Congress. Some people might think that’s just fine. But that means accepting the principle that a US president, acting solely on his own authority, can plunge the US into war against a country that is not even an immediate threat. Accepting that means that Americans will have no basis on which to object when future US presidents decide, on their own authority, to drag the US into foreign wars.

Edwards: Because the international situation is still uncertain, things could again change drastically by the time this is published. All the same, what do you see as the longer-range consequences of the dramatic events of recent weeks?

Weber: One possible far-reaching consequence is that some regional powers, notably Iran and Turkey, may conclude that because they cannot trust either the US or Israel, they should follow Israel’s example and begin to build — covertly and in violation of international agreements — their own nuclear arsenal.

Iran apparently continues to insist on its right to develop a peaceful nuclear program, a position that Russia publicly supports. That stance may provide a pretext for Israel’s Netanyahu to demand that the US once again attack Iran, if necessary with ground troops and a full-scale invasion, to compel Iran to “surrender.” Israel’s cheerleaders in the US Congress and media would then predictably press Trump to “finish the job.”

The events of recent months and weeks have also encouraged ever more Americans to question the dubious premises on which this country’s decades-long support for Israel have been based. During the past two years, sympathy and support for Israel have fallen sharply in the US and around the world. Even many of Israel’s long-term supporters have been shocked by the brutality of Israel’s Jewish-supremacist government in oppressing Palestinians.

If the ceasefire holds, world attention will return to Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, and the US military, economic and diplomatic support that makes it possible. The events of recent months will also further encourage growing public awareness of the power and influence of the organized Jewish community, which is the basis for America’s crucial, decades-old backing of Israel.

Edwards: How likely are President Trump’s recent decisions on behalf of Israel to erode support among his loyal “base,” and thereby discredit those policies his supporters regard as really important?

Weber: That’s not likely, at least in the short term. Trump supporters, like most Americans, are normally not concerned with US foreign policy. Americans mostly care about policies that directly impact their day-to-day lives. They become unhappy with foreign policy measures only when they result in many American deaths, or when the costs become so exorbitant that they begin to hurt working and middle-class people economically. Fortunately, the dramatic events of recent weeks have not resulted in American deaths.

Edwards: Why does Trump continue to be such an emphatic supporter of Israel? What’s in it for him?

Weber: That’s a good question, for which no one seems to have a satisfactory answer.

Trump must realize that even among his loyal, hard-core “base,” there’s very little support for US involvement in foreign wars, and markedly declining sympathy for Israel. Moreover, and as Trump has repeatedly complained, in spite of giving Israel “everything,” American Jews overwhelmingly still do not like or trust him.

Despite occasional outbursts of impatience with Netanyahu or exasperation with Israel’s leaders, Trump shows no sign of abandoning his ardent support for the Zionist state. At least with regard to the Middle East, Trump is still very much an “Israel First” president.

This article was originally published by American Free Press – America’s last real newspaper! Click here to subscribe today or call 1-888-699-NEWS.


Mark Weber

When not interviewing newsmakers, James Edwards has often found himself in the spotlight as a commentator, including many national television appearances. Over the past 20 years, his radio work has been featured in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide. Media Matters has listed Edwards as a “right-wing media fixture” and Hillary Clinton personally named him as an “extremist” who would shape our country.