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A Critical Look at Rush Limbaugh, Part 1 of 2

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Part One: “Pursuit of Excellence” vs. Getting Along by Going Along

With his millions of listeners, and the many imitators who in turn influence millions more, Rush Limbaugh has been a major force in shaping American politics for a quarter of a century. Recently when Charles Schumer spoke on the Senate floor about the impending announcement of Obama’s “executive action” benefiting illegal aliens, he specifically referred to Rush Limbaugh as the critic who had been causing the public to regard it as an amnesty. Whether or not one has any respect for Limbaugh, he and the nature of his influence are worth evaluating.

When he began his afternoon radio-show on the ABC Radio Network in 1988, Rush Limbaugh seemed to be a fresh populist voice from Middle America. The most conspicuous fact about him, what was probably most important in winning a loyal following, was his flamboyant rejection of White guilt, especially White male guilt. Limbaugh portrayed a calculated pomposity (behind which he seemed genuinely humble) and ridiculed those who would cow the White man with demands of sensitivity for this or that victimhood-group. At times he could even be “racially insensitive” (although not quite as much as Bob Grant, who aired after Limbaugh locally on WABC during the early years and habitually referred to Negro criminals as “savages”). David Letterman’s quip, “Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” which Limbaugh adopted and has repeated thousands of times over the years, is emblematic of Limbaugh’s overall theme of flamboyantly defying and rejecting guilt — especially in the form of demands to show sympathy for various victimhood-groups.

Most of Limbaugh’s targets for insensitive treatment were relatively safe to ridicule — homeless people, feminists, ecologists, sexual deviants, et al.

Regarding Blacks, he would make frequent criticisms, but always maintaining a certain ambiguity — if nothing else, with the pretense that Blacks were potentially equal and could do as well as Whites if only the government would stop setting back their progress by helping them. (Is there anybody who does not understand that the supposed harm done to Blacks is not the real concern there?) It may have been necessary to maintain some ambiguity in his outward attitude toward Blacks in order to continue as a commercial broadcaster touching in a controversial way on racial issues. There can be little doubt that the reason why Limbaugh has retained a Black call-screener for many years is that it creates an impediment to labeling him a racist, despite whatever attitudes might become apparent in his broadcast. Read more

Influencing How Jews Are Seen in China: It’s All about Nobel Prizes and Tolerance of Dissent

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Tablet has an article reflecting Jewish angst over the possibility that the Chinese might think that Jews run America (“The Chinese Believe That the Jews Control America. Is That a Good Thing?“). Unlike in the U.S. where the ADL will threaten the livelihood of anyone who says that Jews have any power or influence, one might think that the Chinese are free to make up their own minds about the subject based on rigorous academic research. Think again.

“Do the Jews Really Control America?” asked one Chinese newsweekly headline in 2009. The factoids doled out in such articles and in books about Jews in China—for example: “The world’s wealth is in Americans’ pockets; Americans are in Jews’ pockets”—would rightly be seen to be alarming in other contexts. But in China, where Jews are widely perceived as clever and accomplished, they are meant as compliments. Scan the shelves in any bookstore in China and you are likely to find best-selling self-help books based on Jewish knowledge. Most focus on how to make cash. Titles range from 101 Money Earning Secrets From Jews’ Notebooksto Learn To Make Money With the Jews.

The Chinese recognize, and embrace, common characteristics between their culture and Jewish culture. Both races have a large diaspora spread across the globe. Both place emphasis on family, tradition, and education. Both boast civilizations that date back thousands of years. In Shanghai, I am often told with nods of approval that I must be intelligent, savvy, and quick-witted, simply because of my ethnicity. While it is true that the Chinese I’ve met are fascinated by—rather than fear—the Jews, these assertions make me deeply uncomfortable.

“Deeply uncomfortable.” The author, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, is proud that the Chinese understand that Jews are powerful and influential in the U.S. But she sees the situation from the standpoint of an American Jew for whom ideas that Jews have power or control are anathema because such ideas touch on major themes of historical anti-Semitism, such as media control.

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“The Wolf of Wall Street” — the Movie

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As we recently saw with my review of Jordan Belfort’s bestseller The Wolf of Wall Street, there are many pronounced Jewish themes in the memoir. Frankly, I’d never noticed the book, but this year I did get the DVD of the film based on the book, and that alerted me.

Begin with this howler: As the diminutive Jewish stock fraudster Jordan Belfort, director Martin Scorsese chose none other than six-foot-tall, (sometimes) blond-haired Leonardo DiCaprio. This has to go down as one of the most egregious miscastings in Hollywood history.

Why did it happen?

I will argue that this is a classic case of Hollywood deceiving the public, and I have plenty of evidence for this.

In the film, at exactly five minutes into the story — just after DiCaprio’s character has snorted cocaine with a hundred dollar bill and done a little trick by making us think “this shit” (cocaine) will make you invincible, when it fact he means the money he is using as a straw — he launches into a speech as he enters his busy trading floor:

See, money doesn’t just buy you a better life — better food, better cars, better pussy — it also makes you a better person. You can give generously to the church, or political party of your choice. Save the fuckin’ spotted owl with money.  [emphasis added]

“To the church.” In his memoir from which the film springs, Belfort is refreshingly forthright that he is Jewish — and that all but one close associate is Jewish — as are the majority of his traders. Now in the film — which “happened” to open on Christmas Day 2013 — we are informed that rich people like DiCaprio’s Belfort can give “to the church,” not synagogue or ADL or Jewish think tank. It is this kind of subtle deception that would, in my view, prevent the vast, vast majority of Gentile viewers from understanding that these financial criminals are Jewish. Read more

“Vote for Us, You Miserable Scum”: Mammon, Marx and Miliband

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“We want your votes, you miserable scum.” That has long been the private attitude of the Labour party to the White working class. Now a senior Labour MP has made it public. No wonder Ed Miliband is said to have been “incandescent.” You’ve heard of point-and-splutter. Here’s some point-and-sneer, a photograph tweeted by a Labour MP called Emily Thornberry during the Rochester by-election, which has just given UKIP its second MP. She was sneering at White working-class patriotism, as expressed by the red cross of St George, England’s patron saint. But there’s more to the photo than that. She was expressing contempt for White working-class men in particular. “White van man” is a shorthand in England for self-employed tradesmen who carry their tools around in a white van. They’re rough, they’re crude and they’re not politically correct.

That’s why the modern Labour party hates them, as a Labour peer called Lord Glasman admitted in 2011:

In many ways [Labour] viewed working-class voters as an obstacle to progress. [Labour’s] commitment to various civil rights, anti-racism, meant that often working-class voters … were seen as racist, resistant to change, homophobic and generally reactionary. So in many ways you had a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working class. (Miliband ally attacks Labour migration ‘lies’ over 2.2m they let in Britain, The Daily Mail, 16th April 2011)

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Ferguson will speed up the racialization of American politics

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Fifty years after the Civil Rights movement and six years into the “post-racial” Obama presidency, we have Ferguson. A TOO theme is that politics in the US and other Western countries is getting steadily more racialized as Whites and non-Whites gravitate to separate political parties with vastly divergent interests and attitudes. Ferguson will accelerate this process. Apart from those Whites who make a living in the bastions of liberal power in the media and academic world (e.g., this incredible piece in Salon [or this one by a non-White professor who complains that the verdict shows that “White supremacy lives on” from her perch at bucolic Hampshire College] or this predictable reaction from a local Black politician), the great majority of Whites will see this as a justified shooting in which an out-of-control, enraged, and very physically imposing Black thug attacked a White police officer.

That’s what the evidence pointed to, and St. Louis prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch made it clear that some of the testimony implicating Officer Wilson was wildly at odds with the facts of the case. To put it charitably, these people saw what they wanted to see, and the Black underclass and the Black activists went all in with that narrative. Obama’s statement that the anger was “understandable” is outrageous since the anger flies in the face of the evidence. And even if you buy the idea that what happened in the past at least makes the reaction understandable, it certainly doesn’t justify an indictment, much less the shooting, burning and looting.

White America watching the TV coverage once again had its stereotypes of the Black underclass confirmed — irrational, violent, White-hating, and prone to criminality. Implicitly at least, there will be an uptick in race realism. Hollywood’s continuing attempts to stereotype Blacks as intelligent computer experts with the wisdom of Gandhi will face an increasingly uphill battle against reality.  Read more

Learning from the EU Experiment (II): Intra-European Diversity Is Also a Challenge

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There is a tendency, particularly but not only, among North American White advocates to downplay the ethno-national, linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe. Richard Spencer has argued that “the Herman Van Rompuys of the world can become our useful idiots in building the infrastructure for a racial and civilizational Superstate on the European continent.” Some European nationalists, such as French New Right writer Guillaume Faye, have argued the same point.

The idea of nationalists hijacking the European Union is an interesting one. But one lesson of the EU experience is that intra-European diversity often poses many of the same problems as inter-continental diversity. Pan-European activists, so quick to see the problems of multiracial and Muslim/Christian diversity, should not forget intra-European diversity — whether linguistic, religious, regional or of any cultural or ethnic type — typically poses similar problems within a given polity.

The EU, with 500 million citizens from 28 countries speaking 24 languages, provides many examples of how this diversity, a wonderful thing and a major source of European civilization’s historic greatness, can become a problem when you try to jam different peoples into the same regime. Many of the Union’s problems today stem from its multiethnic character: Germans, French, Britons, Greeks, etc., do not identify with one another, have different levels of performance (thus increasing inequality), are not willing to share economic burdens (thus reducing the means to fight inequality), are not willing to submit to the laws of a “foreign” European majority. Cultural-linguistic differences mean mutual comprehension is often lacking, and decision-making and even aesthetics are ruined by the need to cater to each ethnic group’s particular tribal sensitivities. The result is that the EU, like other multiethnic regimes, is dysfunctional, sclerotic and culturally barren.

The solution, as Raymond Aron argued, is the ethnically-cohesive Nation-State, in which the brutality of the State and factionalism within the Nation are softened or even sublimated through spontaneous identification, solidarity and cohesion both within the people and between the people and the ruling elite. Read more

Reflections on Jews, “Anti-Semitism” and Free Speech

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“He will appear in our national discussions, not only giving advice, but attempting to direct policy, and will be puzzled to discover that his indifference to national feeling is annoying.”
Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, 1922.

I recently charted the history of Jewish efforts to restrict free speech in Britain, and noted common themes and practices in how they have achieved advances in this sphere. I think that it would be a worthwhile endeavor to elaborate upon the manner in which these measures are affecting Whites in the present, as well as highlighting the fact that Jewish efforts to restrict free speech are ongoing.

The Forward reports that, in late October, European rabbis called on governments throughout the continent to pass laws targeting speech against Jews. The move took the form of a resolution passed by the standing committee of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), which convened in Tbilisi, Georgia. Pinchas Goldschmidt, CER President, told journalists that the CER demanded that “additional countries follow the example set by France and Germany, and devise legislation that targets hate speech against Jews specifically. … It is something that few countries have but is necessary in light of the rise in anti-Semitic violence and hate speech, as we have witnessed this summer.”

Goldschmidt’s comments clearly reflect ongoing Jewish anxieties at the strength of anger against Israel in Western Europe — anger provoked by Israeli atrocities in Gaza. In my previous article, I noted that Jewish activity to restrict free speech is closely linked to specifically Jewish concerns. Thus, while Jewish politicians and activists are often keen to point to the supposedly broader applications and benefits of the legislation they propose (the pretence to “universalism,” and to be against all forms of “racism”), Jewish activity in this sphere is very closely linked to periods in which Jews, and only Jews, feel threatened. Read more