Featured Articles

“Moneybull”: An Inquiry Into Media Manipulation

/79 Comments/in , /by

The film Moneyball was well-received by both audiences and critics and an Academy Award contender for best film at the 2012 Oscars.   It was based on Michael Lewis’ 2003 nonfiction book by the same name and directed by Bennett Miller from a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin (who I understand was the guiding force behind the film) and Steven Zaillian.  Moneyball recounts the story of the 2002 season of the Oakland A’s major league baseball team.  The film centers on A’s general manager Billy Beane’s efforts to put together a winning team that year despite a limited budget.  The thesis of this writing is that Moneyball is a good illustration of how the media distort reality and transmit negative perceptions of white people and their ways.

The dramatic conflict in Moneyball revolves around Beane, portrayed by Brad Pitt in a superb performance, trying to interject new ways of assessing players and thinking about game strategy amid strong opposition from the tradition-bound A’s player personnel people and field manager.  Beane is advised in this effort by his young, mid-twenties, assistant, Peter Brand — short, pudgy, non-athletic, baseball outsider.  Brand is portrayed by Jonah Hill in an impressive performance — both Pitt and Hill were nominated for Academy Awards.  The Brand character, the only one who doesn’t go by his real-life name, is based on Paul dePodesta, an assistant to Beane at that time.

Brand makes the case to Beane that statistics should guide player selection and game decisions rather than the experience and judgment of the team’s baseball-lifer scouts and field manager.   Beane, in his early forties, is himself a long-time baseball man as a player and front office executive.

Brand underscores the importance of OBP (the percentage of times at bat a hitter gets on base by any means — hits, walks, and being hit by a pitch) as a key indicator of a player’s productivity.  The numbers reveal, says Brand, that the more times on base the more runs, and the more runs the more wins.  Brand points out to Beane that, contrary to accepted thinking in the game, bunts, stolen bases, and fielding count for little in producing victories.  He also makes the case that productive players have been overlooked when putting together the team in the past because they didn’t look or act like ballplayers by the conventional standards of the A’s scouting department.  Outcomes, Brand insists, which statistics measure objectively, are what matter in winning games, not antiquated notions about the physique or face a player needs to possess, or requisite personality traits or personal habits. Read more

Excerpt from “Human Sin or Social Sin”

/20 Comments/in /by

Below is an excerpt from my book Human Sin or Social Sin. It will be of interest to those concerned with the intersections of politics, immigration, and ethnicity. The book is endorsed by Paul Gottfried and Tom Sunic. See the Amazon page for more information regarding endorsements.

During the nineteenth century, sex and the body were viewed as evil, but notions of race, class, gender, or “society” were viewed as good and legitimate. With sexual liberation, we displaced evil to the public sphere. With the displacement or socialization of evil, now the body is viewed as legitimate, even glorious, but race, class, gender, and “society” are viewed as evil, illegitimate and to be purged. As “society” during the nineteenth century was viewed as glorious, and the body as sinful, now the body is viewed as glorious and society as sinful. As the evils of the body were to be purged, now the evils of “society” or the social body are to be purged. As the individual was viewed as potentially sinful or “hegemonic,” so we now view the social body that way. Specifically, the resistance to race science, or any other “hegemonic discourse,” results, it is shown, from the perception that it is socially hubristic or evil.

This perception in turn resulted from the fact that the traditional Seven Deadly Sins were, with sexual liberation, displaced from the body to the social sphere, thereby creating the pathological Seven Deadly Social Sins, which need to be purged through social and political action. These deadly social sins are (1) Pride, which became Racism; (2) Covetousness: Class Elitism; (3) Lust: “Sexism” and “Gender” existing “Out There”; (4) Gluttony: Consumer Fetishism; (5) Vanity: Media Images of Beauty; (6) Envy: National Honor and Expansionism, the National Socialists’ irredentist impulses being notorious; and (7) Sloth: the Lack of Social Action: “Are you fighting for diversity?” As it was once imperative to purge the sins from our body, so it is now imperative to purge the sins from the social body. Read more

Thoughts on Jews, Obscenity, and the Legal System

/119 Comments/in /by

“Moral techniques are policies ‘to weaken the spiritual resistance of the national group.’ This technique of moral debasement entails diverting the ‘mental energy of the group’ from ‘moral and national thinking’ to ‘base instincts.’ The aim is that ‘the desire for cheap individual pleasure be substituted for the desire for collective feelings and ideals based upon a higher morality.’ [Raphael] Lemkin mentioned the encouragement of pornography and alcoholism in Poland as an example.
Dirk Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History

I first encountered the above comment by Australian academic A. Dirk Moses several years ago, during the course of his discussion of Raphael Lemkin’s eight ‘techniques’ of genocide. Along with political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, and religious assaults, Lemkin argued that a targeted population can also come under moral siege, with the goal of destroying its sense of itself as a collective. I remember being struck by the last sentence of Moses’s summary of this technique, even though my reading of it involved a radically different interpretation than that offered by its author. Both Lemkin and Moses were referring specifically to policies enacted in post-invasion Poland by the National Socialist regime, with Lemkin remarking in his own enunciation of the eighth technique: “Therefore the [National Socialist] occupant made an effort in Poland to impose upon the Poles pornographic publications and movies. The consumption of alcohol was encouraged, for while food prices have soared, the Germans have kept down the price of alcohol, and the peasants are compelled by the authorities to take spirits in payment for agricultural produce. The curfew law, enforced very strictly against Poles, is relaxed if they can show the authorities a ticket to one of the gambling houses which the Germans have allowed to come into existence.”[1]

The pertinence or veracity of this claim that National Socialists enacted such policies as a means of exterminating the Poles was of only secondary concern to me. Much more pressing, in my reading, was the obvious fact that the National Socialists were merely copying and expanding upon what they understood to be the pre-existing tactics of cultural domination in that country (and others in Europe). Indeed, Jews were widely understood by both Poles and Germans as having been intimately involved in the alcohol industry of Poland prior to the invasion of 1939, with the Tablet even affirming in a 2014 article that Jews “ruled Poland’s liquor trade for centuries” in a system in which Polish peasants were compelled to purchase Jewish alcohol (also, see here for a podcast I recorded with Patrick Slattery last year on the nature of the Jewish tavern system in Eastern Europe). Jews have also long been associated with dominating the gambling industry (Israel is currently the global center for online gambling). In those areas of nineteenth century Poland where local nobles granted tax exemptions to Jewish communal institutions, Jews continued to sell liquor and run inns and taverns, in which they established gambling facilities to further squeeze the Poles. And in the sphere of obscenity, in 1913 a “filthy press” in Warsaw “belonging to a certain Zimmerman,” was confiscated by Polish police after it was discovered disseminating pornography throughout the Russian Empire — activities described by the newspaper Przegląd Katolicki as a “Jewish atrocity.”[2]

My question then, on considering the remarks of Moses and Lemkin, was both simple and stark: If, by promoting vice, the National Socialists were employing a genocidal technique against the Poles, what had the Jews been doing? Read more

Wicked Muslims, Innocent Jews: The Deceit and Double-Think of Mark Steyn

/113 Comments/in /by

My late father simultaneously abhorred Muslims and adulated Jews. Muslims were savage, stupid and very bad for the West. Jews were civilized, intelligent and very good for the West. What more need be said? A lot, I thought. I pointed out that Muslims were in the West because of Jews. My father dismissed this as nonsense. Jews weren’t stupid and Muslims were enemies of Jews. Therefore Jews could not possibly want Muslims in the West.

Reality shmeality

I produced copious evidence to back my claim, but it didn’t alter my father’s views in the slightest. If his subjective logic said Jews opposed Muslim immigration, while objective reality said they supported it, then so much the worse for reality. Muslims were bad, Jews were good. End of story. It should be no surprise, then, that my father was also a big fan of Mark Steyn, the shape-shifting neo-conservative who has recently aired one of his favourite themes:

Islamophobe Mark Steyn

Pre-war Europeans would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Malmö to Marseilles. But post-war Holocaust guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, enabled the Islamization of Europe. The principal beneficiaries of the Continent’s penance for the great moral stain of the 20th century turned out to be the Muslims — with the Jews on the receiving end, yet again. (Butcher Bob Out of His Job?, SteynOnline, 15th November 2017)

He then said, with unblushing chutzpah, “It would help to be able to talk about this issue honestly.”

It would indeed, but there is no honesty in what Mark Steyn says about “the Islamization of Europe.” Take the idea that Jews have been on the “receiving end” of Muslim violence in Europe, as though Jews have been its first and worst victims. Steyn himself knows that this is a lie:

In the current issue of the Mark Steyn Club newsletter, The Clubbable Steyn, I recount my visit to Rotherham to meet some of those “raped and exploited white girls”. Actually, I’m not sure the general term “raped and exploited” quite covers the particular horrors inflicted on them — urinated on by groups of Muslim men, dangled over balconies, doused in petrol as their tormentors danced around them with cigarette lighters, etc. (The Mood Music of Mohammed, SteynOnline, 28th August 2017)

Read more

Lenin’s Willing Industrialist: The Saga of Armand Hammer, Part 5: Coda to a Life of Lies

/11 Comments/in , , /by

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Doctor Armand Hammer made it clear that he would be remembered and that, not only would his memory be secure in immortality, but he would also exert influence over what didn’t get remembered about him. The memory of the bad things that he had done would die with him, while the good he wanted people to believe he’d done would be his legacy, even if it was largely a lie. Armand Hammer claimed that he “pursued two of the greatest goals I can imagine — world peace and a cure for cancer” (Hammer 468). These may have been his stated goals, but it’s doubtful that they were ever his real intentions.

***

The idea that Hammer wanted world peace is directly at odds with how he earned his money. War, upheaval, and revolution had provided his point of entry in the two major ventures that created his empire and helped make him one of the largest players on the geopolitical scene in the twentieth century. His friend and fellow titan-of-industry John Paul Getty reminded  Hammer of this fact in his autobiography As I See It. According to Mr. Getty, when someone cornered him at a party and made the requisite “‘tell-me-the-secret-of-making-millions’ question I furrowed my brow and said, ‘Actually, there’s nothing to it. You merely wait for a revolution in Russia’” (Hammer 150).

War had been good to Armand Hammer. Although Armand Hammer talks proudly in his autobiography of supporting the campaign to bomb Germany into submission in World War II, the good Doctor also had a blast in the aftermath of the Great War. Read more

Lenin’s Willing Industrialist: The Saga of Armand Hammer, Part 4: The Real King of Oil, and the Importance of using a Bagman

/17 Comments/in , , /by

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Although the definitive biography of the Jewish billionaire Marcel Reich is called The King of Oil, the title probably belongs to industrialist Armand Hammer, for perhaps no one did as much to alter the political and economic geography of the global oil scene than he did. Others may have accumulated more wealth with oil, but few used their wealth to exert such leverage.

As in all of Armand Hammer’s endeavors, the narrative he prefers to tell of how he succeeded in gaining a foothold in the global oil scene is a self-serving fairytale that doesn’t bear close scrutiny. In Hammer, he claims that he managed to outbid the Seven Sisters oil cartel by extending an offer to King Idris to search for an oasis in Kufra, Libya. Just as Armand Hammer ostensibly wanted to feed the Russian peasants so many years before, he would now quench the thirst of an impoverished and tiny Middle Eastern nation languishing in “its medieval poverty” (Epstein 228). This story, which “has all the elements of a fairytale — a good king, a kingdom imprisoned by lack of water, and a wise man who shows the king how to lift the curse from his small kingdom — became the conventional account of how a small, inexperienced American oil company got the richest prize in Libya” (Ibid.).

His narrative of supposed “enlightened altruism” (Epstein 23) hid the fact that he had paid a “multimillion dollar bribe to a key official in the Libyan royal court” (Ibid.). In Hammer’s defense, a certain level of bribery was de rigeur when operating in oil concessions at the time. A “financial editor who specialized in the internal operations of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, the parent company of Esso Libya” (Blumay 116), told Hammer’s PR flack that any “company involved in the Libyan auction bribes the ministry” but that what distinguished Armand Hammer’s bribe from the usual ones on offer was “the astonishing amount of money that Doctor Hammer threw around” (Ibid.). Read more

Lenin’s Willing Industrialist: The Saga of Armand Hammer, Part 3: The Faberge Fraud and Other Sleaze

/11 Comments/in , , /by

Part 1
Part 2

One day while Armand Hammer was browbeating his PR man Carl Blumay by rattling off his list of accomplishments, he mentioned that in addition to being a “great industrialist” (Blumay 362) he was also a “distinguished philanthropist and art collector” (Ibid.). He capped his speech by claiming that he may, in fact end up living forever.

Art was very important to Armand Hammer, or rather being perceived as someone who was a knowledgeable collector of great art was important to the public image he was intent on constructing.

In his autobiography Hammer explains that his goal was to amass an eclectic collection of the world’s greatest artworks to share with the public who otherwise wouldn’t get to enjoy fine art. In an interview with Charlie Rose he declared that “Great works of art should not be held in the private and exclusive property of rich men. They should be shared with and enjoyed by everybody, for the education of the young and the enrichment of the lives of all humans” (Hammer 260). That his philanthropy was really an enterprise linked to everything from tax fraud to forgery should come as no surprise to those familiar with the wide chasm between Hammer the PR creation and the real Armand Hammer. He told Carl Blumay, his trusted employee of more than a quarter-century, the following when talking about what he was going to do with a particular batch of paintings: “I’m not going to sell them. … If I donate them to a museum or a school, the tax law enables me to base my deduction on the appreciated value, not on the purchase price. The more I inflate their value, the more I’ll be able to write off” (Blumay 22). Blumay’s recollection is corroborated by a Washington Post review headlined “An Exhibition of Losers by Major Masters,” by Paul Richards, who “speculated that the entire [exhibition] was an attempt by Hammer to inflate the value of the collection so that he could claim a fat tax deduction” (Blumay 173). Read more