General

Does America have a health care crisis?

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“My child is one of 30 children in her class and she’s the only Irish child.”

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Tucker interview on the JFK assassination: Israeli involvement?

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Trump has ordered that all the files related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK be released by a little more than a month. I very much doubt this will happen. The problem is that even if the CIA was willing to own up to their (almost certain) involvement—still doubtful because if all this was widely known, it would ruin the CIA’s reputation—the still very powerful Israel Lobby would stop it, just as has happened with the U.S.S. Liberty attack. Beginning around 22:00′ they discuss the idea that JFK strongly opposed the Israel nuclear program and wanted on-site inspections. Relevant documents exist but are heavily redacted. After the assassination, LBJ ordered the end of the request for on-site inspections.

Also discussed are a CIA mind-control program that may have been applied to Sirhan Sirhan and CIA following Lee Harvey Oswald for 4 years but denying any significant knowledge about him.

JFK Assassination Expert Reacts to Trump’s Effort to Declassify Files, and What You Should Expect

Society vs. the Market: Alain de Benoist’s Case Against Liberalism

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Posted also at the NovelleDroite Substack.

Society vs. the Market: Alain de Benoist’s Case Against Liberalism

Review of Alain de Benoist’s “Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market”

What if the very foundations of our modern society—individualism, free markets, and universal rights—are not pillars of progress but harbingers of decay? Alain de Benoist’s “Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market” offers a provocative critique of the ideological forces shaping the West. By dissecting liberalism’s philosophical premises and societal consequences, Benoist calls for a reimagining of our communal and cultural priorities. This review explores his arguments and their implications for our understanding of politics, economics, and identity.

Alain de Benoist’s Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market1 profoundly critiques liberalism, the dominant ideology in contemporary Western societies. Originally published in 2019 under the title «Contre le libéralisme: La société n’est pas un marché», translated by F. Roger Devlin, the work dissects liberalism’s philosophical premises, societal impacts, and its manifestation as an economic, political, and cultural force. Benoist’s central thesis revolves around the assertion that liberalism reduces society to a marketplace, undermining the very fabric of communal, cultural, and moral life. This review explores the book’s structure, key arguments, strengths, and potential shortcomings.

Alain de Benoist’s Against Liberalism opens by establishing liberalism as the dominant ideology of the modern West, characterized by its roots in individualism, market values, and economic rationality. From the outset, Benoist critiques the Enlightenment’s legacy, particularly its emphasis on universal reason and individual liberty. He argues that liberalism’s prioritization of self-interest and economic growth over communal and cultural considerations has contributed to societal decay. This framing sets the tone for a work that seeks to expose liberalism’s philosophical inconsistencies and its societal consequences.

Central to Benoist’s critique is his rejection of individualism as the foundation of social organization. Liberalism, he contends, isolates individuals by prioritizing self-interest and reducing social bonds to contractual relationships. This atomization undermines collective structures such as families, communities, and traditions, which give life its deeper meaning. In contrast, Benoist advocates for communitarian and conservative values that emphasize the interconnectedness of individuals within a shared cultural and moral framework.

Benoist also critiques the dominance of market logic in liberal thought, which he argues reduces society to a marketplace where all values are subordinated to economic principles. He takes aim at the concept of homo economicus—the model of humans as purely self-interested agents—and argues that it commodifies every aspect of life. Neoliberalism, in Benoist’s view, represents an intensification of classical liberal principles, marked by deregulation, privatization, and the erosion of state sovereignty. This, he contends, exacerbates social inequalities and undermines societal cohesion.

A particularly notable section of the book examines Benoist’s critique of Friedrich Hayek, a leading figure in the Austrian School of Economics.2 Benoist challenges Hayek’s emphasis on spontaneous order and market efficiency, arguing that this perspective overlooks the social and moral costs of unfettered capitalism. He accuses Hayek of advancing a vision of society that prioritizes profit over human dignity and cultural continuity, framing it as an inadequate response to the complex needs of human communities.

Another key dimension of Benoist’s analysis is his interrogation of the relationship between liberalism and democracy. He questions whether liberalism is truly compatible with democratic values, suggesting that liberal democracy often privileges individual rights over collective well-being. In his view, this emphasis on procedural fairness and neutrality undermines the substantive values necessary for a cohesive and flourishing democratic society. Benoist argues that participative democracy, rooted in shared cultural and moral principles, is compromised by liberalism’s focus on individual autonomy.

Benoist further critiques liberalism’s embrace of cultural and moral relativism, which he sees as a denial of shared values and traditions. By promoting radical individual autonomy, liberalism erodes the foundations of identity and belonging. This is particularly evident in debates over multiculturalism and globalization, where Benoist argues that liberalism contributes to the dissolution of distinct cultural and national identities.

Grounded in philosophical tradition, Benoist engages with thinkers such as John Locke, Friedrich Hayek, and John Stuart Mill to develop his critique. His arguments draw on communitarian and conservative perspectives, offering a compelling counterpoint to liberal orthodoxy. Benoist’s analysis of neoliberalism and its impact on societal cohesion is especially relevant in light of contemporary challenges, including rising economic inequality, cultural polarization, and the erosion of public trust. His insights resonate with current debates about the limits of market logic and the need for alternative frameworks of social organization.

Importantly, Benoist does not dismiss liberalism outright but acknowledges its internal diversity and historical evolution. He distinguishes between classical and modern liberalism, as well as between economic and political liberalism, providing a nuanced critique that avoids oversimplification. His analysis invites readers to reconsider the premises of liberal thought and its impact on society.

In Against Liberalism, Benoist delivers a thought-provoking critique of liberalism, capitalism, and individualism. The work challenges readers to reflect on the societal consequences of these ideologies and to explore alternative frameworks rooted in communal values and cultural identity. While the book has its limitations—particularly in articulating concrete alternatives—it succeeds in sparking a necessary and urgent debate about the future of modern societies. For those interested in critiques of capitalism from a non-leftist perspective, Against Liberalism offers an essential and stimulating read.

Order Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market here.

1

Benoist, Alain de. Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market. Translated by F. Roger Devlin, Middle Europe Books, 2024.

2

In the coming months, I will be featuring my own translation of this essay, titled ‘Hayek: A Critique,’ which was written in 1990. This essay was originally published in Éléments issue #68 under the title “Hayek: le loi de la jungle” (Hayek: The Law of the Jungle). An abridged English translation first appeared in The Scorpion issue #15 in 1991. The first full English translation appeared in Telos Journal issue #110 in 1998. This essay appears as a chapter in “Against Liberalism” which was translated by F. Roger Devlin.

600,000 Men Died for Anchor Babies

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The 14th Amendment was about former slaves – not Mexicans, Indians or Chinese

This Kushner-less Trump presidency is fantastic! Instead of the president’s son-in-law releasing criminals, Rep. Paul Ryan prioritizing tax cuts over the wall, and Kushner pal Gary Cohn preserving Wall Street’s tax boondoggles, we’re finally getting all that great immigration stuff Trump ran on in 2016. (Maybe he finally read In Trump We Trust and remembered how fantastic he was.)

Trump’s most important executive order is the one that returns to the American people the ability to determine who becomes a citizen. The way things are now, that decision is put in the hands of illegal aliens, who are here against our will and in violation of our laws or — in the case of birth tourism — in the hands of the Chinese government.

Apart from trivialities such as there being no law, no court ruling and no history to support treating kids born to illegals and tourists as “citizens,” it’s preposterous that America would cede control over who becomes a citizen to foreigners.

The media’s incessant references to “birthright citizenship” — I’m looking at you, New York Times — deceptively suggest that the Constitution already contains a right to citizenship for anyone born here. There is no such right, and no sane nation would create one.

The constitutional provision allegedly bestowing this right is the 14th Amendment, one of the Civil War amendments, guaranteeing full citizenship rights to former slaves.

Give me a scenario — it doesn’t have to be true, give me any scenario — where, immediately after the Civil War, Americans felt compelled to amend our Constitution so that, 100 years hence, a pregnant Mexican could run across the border, drop a kid, and that kid would be a citizen, entitled to all welfare and education benefits, who could then bring in six more relatives.

You’re telling me that if a foreigner sneaks into our country and has a baby, that kid isn’t already a citizen? Damn straight we have to fix that!

Obviously, the Civil War amendments were exclusively about slavery — as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held.

The trick was to write an amendment stating that former slaves were citizens — without acknowledging the institution of slavery, an embarrassment in a country founded on the idea that all men are created equal.

To refer to former slaves, the drafters chose the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” At that point, newly freed slaves had been “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. for nearly a century. (By contrast, if we don’t even know you’re here, you can’t be subject to our “jurisdiction.”)

In one misbegotten case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a divided court extended 14th-Amendment citizenship rights to the son of legal Chinese laborers. (The Chinese Exclusion Act had been passed 16 years earlier and would remain in full force and effect for another half-century. Way to read a room, Supreme Court!)

That case was probably wrongly decided — as the Yale Law Journal argued at the time — but in any event, it has nothing to do with Trump’s executive order, which is about illegal immigrants and tourists, not legal residents.

One thing Wong Kim Ark definitely didn’t do was grant a constitutional right of citizenship to anyone who happens to be born here. First, children born to diplomats and heads of state were excluded.

Second, well into the 20th century, white Europeans born on U.S. soil — whose great-grandparents may have come on the Mayflower — were denied citizenship if they were women married to an immigrant.

Progressives have bullied Americans into believing that the post-Civil War amendments had nothing to do with slavery. Forget the Middle Passage, Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant and the 600,000 men dead as a result—- they claim Americans rushed to add these amendments to the Constitution just after a bloody civil war to ensure the happiness and well-being of illegal aliens.

Like everything with the left, in five minutes, we go from the manifestly absurd to constitutional right. We had the body, we had witnesses, we had fingerprints, we had his confession. Damn — we forgot to read him his Miranda rights! You’re free to go, sir…

Emil Kirkegaard: Why did NW Europeans become WEIRD?

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Kirkegaard: ” A more likely explanation for their ban [on marriage between a wide range of relatives] is that the church was trying to break up powerful noble families that the church had conflicts with.”

I agree. From my comment on Henrich (The previous is a link is to the entire comment. E.K.’s article links only to the the abstract):

The Church facilitated individualism by pursuing the policies highlighted
in The WEIRDest People in the World] and Individualism [and the Western Liberal Tradition] (rules on incestuous marriage, developing ideologies and enforcing social controls supporting monogamy, preventing divorce, preventing bastards from inheriting), but did not cause Western individualism. As noted above, similar policies were also customary in Greece during the classical period and in Rome, especially during the Republic. The Church was able to exert its power over marriage because it had created the
image of reproductive altruism by enforcing clerical celibacy and suppressing
corruption as a result of the Papal Revolution beginning in the tenth century and
completed by the High Middle Ages. (Corruption reemerged in later centuries and
was a major cause of the Protestant Reformation.)
Church rules on incestuous marriage were not a response to a common
situation in the late Roman Empire. … The Church was far more concerned about marriages of the nobility; many commoners disregarded the rules and, given the lack of mobility at the time, perforce married individuals within the prohibited degrees of relatedness. This contrasts with Henrich’s claim, without citing data, that the Church’s policies “dissolved intensive kinship from the middle outward. The elites of Europe would be the last holdouts” (p. 180). On the contrary, elites were the main target. Males with little wealth or power could hardly aspire to cementing a powerful kinship group via marriage ties any more than they could aspire to polygyny or having concubines. I know of no evidence that those of more modest means avoided marriage within the
prohibited degrees of relatedness apart from very close blood relatives. The
discussion of actual cases shows little concern with the seven degrees of
relatedness, but much concern with near blood relatives (e.g., uncle, niece) or
affinal relatives. In general:

However much the Church rationalized its position and strove to
enforce it, it is evident from ecclesiastical correspondence, court records,
and well-known scandals of the time that the rules were ignored or honoured
in the breach by many Christians during the Middle Ages, or were
manipulated for personal advantage to get around the principle of the
indissolubility of marriage. … In spite of the determination with which the
Church insisted on its complex rules of who could marry whom, the
ecclesiastical authorities were remarkably lenient in interpreting many parts
of the incest legislation, especially in regard to more distant relations and
affines. It is also clear that many people in the Middle Ages were not
particularly bothered by breaches of the incest rule, such as the marriage of
second cousins [who on average share only around three percent of their
genomes by descent]. (Archibald, 2001:410)

Subscribe to Emil K’s  Substack.

JTA: Dozens of Jewish groups protest Trump’s plans for mass deportation

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“Jewish families — past and present, here and elsewhere — know what it is to live in fear for the immediate and long-term safety of our families,” the letter says. “We have been forced to flee, denied access to safety, scapegoated, detained, and exploited. This history and our Jewish values [notoriously absent in Israel] make immigration policy – including ensuring a functioning and welcoming refugee program and protection of the right to seek asylum – deeply personal to the Jewish community.”

Dozens of Jewish groups protest Trump’s plans for mass deportation

Signatories to the open letter include leading Reform and Conservative Jewish organizations.

By Ben Sales 

Dozens of Jewish organizations have signed an open letter to President Donald Trump protesting his planned mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The letter, published on Jan. 27, demonstrates that as Trump retakes office, a range of major Jewish organizations intend to continue to be vocal in opposing his policies on immigration. The signatories include a range of centrist and liberal Jewish groups with a national presence, including the leadership of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist religious movements. Dozens of local Jewish groups and institutions also signed.

“[W]e write in opposition to your Administration’s plans to launch mass deportations, build massive detention camps, and conduct sweeping raids,” the letter says. “We urge you to chart a different course and change your stated plans for widespread persecution of immigrants. America has long prided itself on being a place of refuge, a beacon of hope for those fleeing persecution and seeking a better life.”

The letter comes as the Trump administration has begun immigration arrests in Chicago and is conscripting the military to deport migrants.

Immigration has historically been an issue of concern for American Jews, many of whom are descended from families that arrived in the United States around the turn of the 20th century, if not later. The letter notes that American Jewry has historically been supportive of immigrant rights.

“Jewish families — past and present, here and elsewhere — know what it is to live in fear for the immediate and long-term safety of our families,” the letter says. “We have been forced to flee, denied access to safety, scapegoated, detained, and exploited. This history and our Jewish values make immigration policy – including ensuring a functioning and welcoming refugee program and protection of the right to seek asylum – deeply personal to the Jewish community.”

When Trump began his first term in 2017, immigration was an animating, and relatively unifying, issue for many U.S. Jewish groups. Groups representing all four major Jewish religious movements opposed his travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries as well as his policy of separating families detained at the border. Jewish groups challenged immigration actions in court, protested at immigration facilities and volunteered and fundraised to aid migrants.

Since then, some major Jewish groups that spoke out during Trump’s first term have become less vocal about immigration. A number of major Jewish groups declined to comment on President Joe Biden’s order last June that effectively shut down the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of those groups also did not sign Monday’s letter.

The letter also opposed a Trump order last week allowing immigration officers to make arrests at houses of worship. “Proposed changes to the immigration policy, including allowing immigration authorities to enter sacred spaces, only serve to exacerbate feelings of fear, panic, and insecurity. People should be able to come together in peace and worship without fear of deportation, detention, or harassment,” it said.

Other signatories included the progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, the Chicago Board of Rabbis, the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Jewish Women International, the liberal Israel lobby J Street, the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet, National Council of Jewish Women and the liberal rabbinic human rights group T’ruah. Jewish Community Relations Councils in eight cities also signed.