General

Learning from Baseball

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There are lessons to be learned from the game of baseball.

A big one is around race.  In this area, baseball operates on the principles of equal opportunity and merit.  Everybody, no matter their race, gets an equal chance to play, let’s say, shortstop for the Yankees, and the person who can play shortstop the best gets the position.  No trying to make up for injustices in the past, no affirmative action, no racial quotas, no idea of adequate competence being the criterion of measure for getting the job.   You have the same shot at playing shortstop as everybody else, and if you can do it better than anyone trying out, you get it.

As a practical matter, minorities (at least minority in the U.S.—non-whites are ninety percent of the world’s population) have flourished under this arrangement.  I checked last night’s Yankee’s lineup, and of the ten starters—the eight position players, the pitcher, and the designated hitter—seven, including the shortstop, were minorities.   They are truly excellent, they deserve to be there, and no one is complaining about their right to be in those slots.  Compare that outcome with those in any area of society which operates under another arrangement than equal opportunity and no-exceptions merit—schooling, the workplace, grants and contracts, or the arts.

People tend to rise to the level of expectation.  If they know they have an equal chance at something and that no one is going to cut them any slack, they’ll do their best at it and succeed on their merits.  Everyone will get the benefits of their contributions and they’ll feel good about themselves and earn the respect of others.  If they don’t make the grade, they’ll get into some other endeavor where they can achieve results without somebody doing them a favor.   Whites don’t whine about not being in the National Basketball Association (last night, the Boston Celtics didn’t have a white player on its twelve-man game roster) and insist on preferential treatment for themselves at the expense of black players; they play games, broadly defined, where they can compete successfully.

Recently, I took other lessons from baseball.

Another Yankee example: a Yankee player slid hard, spikes high, into the lower leg of the Red Sox second baseman.  The second baseman could have been badly hurt; luckily, he wasn’t.  Right away, the Red Sox second baseman let the Yankee player know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t appreciate what had just happened.

 

(Boston MA, 04/11/18) Boston Red Sox second baseman Brock Holt tags out New York Yankees first baseman Tyler Austin during the first inning of the MLB game at Fenway Park on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Staff photo by Matt Stone

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Operation Excalibur: Back to Church, Bucko! Part 1

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Then, He said to them, “But now…he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” (Luke 22:36)

“Talk is for lovers.  I need a sword to be king!” Excalibur Opening Scene (Battle of the Knights) 1981

Setting the Scene

Images of Excalibur, King Arthur’s legendary sword, typically mirror the mythic iconography of the Christian Cross.  Note the cosmic aura surrounding the gleaming hilt of the sword in the stone on the cover of my book, Dissident Dispatches.  Its mysterious magnetism beckons the man of destiny.  Only a true hero, uniquely possessed of the strength to pull the fearsome blade from the rock of ages, will be endowed with the sacred majesty of kingship.  Excalibur was a fearsome weapon, striking down the king’s enemies in a spiritual struggle between good and evil.  Of course, as a figment of literary imagination, Excalibur is more useful as an instrument of psychological or cultural rather than physical warfare. Accordingly, like any other popular meme, it can be deployed in cyberspace by any number of combatants, for fun or in deadly earnest.

On the Alt Right, the most famous, politically effective meme has been the seemingly innocuous cartoon image of Pepe the Frog.  Amidst the tumult and confusion of the Trump campaign, Pepe helped the Alt Right movement sort out amused friends from outraged enemies. The sorting process was a two-way street, however.  As part of the wider push by corporate and political wire-pullers to de-platform the Alt Right, the powerful Jewish activist organization, the Anti-Defamation League conducted a concerted, well-funded campaign of its own to brand Pepe memes as anti-Semitic and racist “hate speech”.  The goal was to outlaw reproduction of the Pepe meme by Alt Right publishers, broadcasters, and bloggers.  The tool chosen to achieve that outcome was copyright law.  Simply for featuring Bishop Pepe on the cover of a book, Arktos Media, already well-known as a dissident right publisher, found itself the target of legal action organized by the ADL.

The response was both unexpected and disproportionate.  Bishop Pepe triggered determined, well-resourced, and crafty enemies.  The frog cartoon cover art was quickly leveraged into a credible threat to the survival of Arktos Media.  In its campaign against Alt Right Pepe , the ADL had enlisted Matt Furie, a cartoonist who had drawn a primitive Pepe in a comic book, more than ten years ago.  In the meantime, thousands of green frog images had appeared on the internet and IRL during the meme wars of 2015–2016.  The ADL supported Furie in his claim to copyright ownership and hence all profits derived from the commercial use of Pepe the Frog memes.  A major corporate law firm was engaged (putatively pro bono publico) to enforce Furie’s putative proprietary interest in Pepe against all the world.  In practice, only parties associated in some way with the Alt Right or the Trump campaign received notices to cease and desist their use of Pepe memes and to hand over to Matt Furie any profits they may have earned therefrom.  In their letter to Arktos, Furie’s lawyers threatened substantial legal and commercial penalties should the publisher not capitulate to this demand.  Read more

Letter to The Wall Street Journal re Jewish Involvement in Immigration Policy

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The Wall Street Journal published my reply to Abraham Miller’s op-ed critical of my work on Jewish involvement in immigration policy. They had a very limited maximum word count (272) and removed the references. I previously posted a longer version on this site.

12 COMMENTS

In dismissing my argument that Jewish organizations have been disproportionately influential in U.S. immigration policy, Abraham Miller fails to confront the data compiled in my 1998 book “The Culture of Critique,” which also describes changes in academic attitudes on race critical to passage of the 1965 Immigration Act (“The Theory Behind That Charlottesville Slogan,” op-ed, April 3). It was absolutely understood by both restrictionists and antirestrictionists in Congress that Jewish organizations spearheaded opposition against the 1924 law’s national origins, despite little public support. Jewish organizations also organized, funded and performed most of the work of a variety of umbrella organizations aimed at combating the 1924 law. The 1965 reform was thus not the result of popular pressure but rather of a 40-year program of activism.

Rep. Michael Feighan did indeed shape family based immigration in the 1965 law. But family based, rather than skills-based immigration, had been advocated by Jewish organizations since at least the 1920s. Feighan would be horrified at the results given his long record of support for the 1924 law (see NPR.org: “In 1965 A Conservative Tried to Keep America White. His Plan Backfired”). He may well have been deceived by the 1965 reform’s proponents, who insisted it wouldn’t change the ethnic balance of the U.S. by dramatically increasing non-European immigration.

Far from being unusual, my view of the role of Jewish organizations is shared by, e.g., University of California, Santa Barbara historian Otis Graham and Vanderbilt University historian Hugh Davis Graham.

Em. Prof. Kevin MacDonald

Calif. State University, Long Beach

Second Reply to Nathan Cofnas

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I have posted a second reply to Nathan Cofnas, this one on his comments to my first reply. It is long and tedious but I thought I would post the Introduction and an excerpt from the exchange on immigration.

Introduction

Nathan Cofnas has responded to my reply to his review of The Culture of Critique. Prior to getting into the details of his rejoinder, there are several general points that should be kept in mind.

  1. CofC stands or falls depending on whether I have adequately described certain specific intellectual and political movements as Jewish. In doing so, I focused on movements that were or are influential and provide evidence of their influence. In describing these movements, I focus on the main figures, discuss their Jewish identities and their concern with specific Jewish issues, such as combatting anti-Semitism. I discuss the dynamics of these movements—the authoritarian atmosphere, the guru phenomenon, ethnic networking, and non-Jews who participate in the movement. I am not attempting to discuss all well-known Jewish intellectuals if they are not part of these movements. Thus, I never claim that Marx was part of a specifically Jewish intellectual/political movement, since he died long before the rise of the Jewish left in the twentieth century which is the focus of CofC. Noam Chomsky is a well-known Jewish intellectual, but he doesn’t fit into any of the movements I discuss, and I have never investigated the nature of his Jewish identity (or lack of it) or how he sees Jewish interests. The same could be said for someone like Paul Gottfried who is linked to paleoconservatism. Paleoconservatism is not a Jewish intellectual movement, and indeed neoconservatism, which I argue is a Jewish movement, played a decisive role in the eclipse of paleoconservatism (see “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement”). Or one could point to a Jewish supporter of the populist positions of President Trump, but the existence of such a person does not make populism a Jewish movement or erase the effective opposition of the New York Intellectuals to American populism in prior decades as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 of CofC.
  2. Individual influential Jews or a separate influential Jewish intellectual movement may be critical of a specific Jewish intellectual movement that I discuss. The split beginning in the 1930s between the Stalinist left, which is the topic of Chapter 3, and the Trotskyist left which is a topic of Chapter 6 and “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” comes to mind. It is possible that opposition to the Israel Lobby may also be reasonably analyzed as a Jewish movement. I have not attempted this, although I have noted in several places that criticism of Israel is increasing among Jews and non-Jews. But in order to establish that critics of Israel constitute a Jewish movement, one would have to pursue the program presented in CofC: discuss whether participants have a Jewish identity and whether they see their activities as furthering Jewish interests as well as explore the dynamics of these movements—whether there is any evidence for an authoritarian atmosphere, the guru phenomenon, ethnic networking, and the status of non-Jews who participate in the movement.

This project would thus go well beyond the “default hypothesis” of Jewish IQ as explaining Jewish involvement in intellectual movements. Such situations may be analogized to arguments between different factions in the Knesset—both dominated by Jews but with different perceptions of Jewish interests.

  1. I am therefore not attempting to develop a general theory of Jewish viewpoint diversity. I am studying certain specific intellectual and political movements that I attempt to establish as influential. I am not trying to develop a theory of why each Jew or most Jews believe what they do—a much more ambitious project. Thus, for example, I have no interest in describing or explaining the diversity of Jewish attitudes on affirmative action—an interesting question, but not relevant to the thesis of CofC which is that certain specific Jewish movements have the features I describe and that they have been influential. Nevertheless, as discussed below, at particular times and places, there is often substantial consensus within the Jewish community on particular issues, e.g., immigration and refugee policy and church-state relations.
  2. My writing in CofC is restricted to the movements discussed therein—movements that I have argued have been influential in the twentieth century and whose influence often extends into the present. In addition to these movements, it may well be the case that I have left out individual influential Jews, such as Steven Pinker, whose Jewish identity and sense of pursuing Jewish interests would bear investigation and may result in a broader perspective on Jewish influence. Pinker’s recent book, Enlightenment Now,[1] is reminiscent of the hostility toward American populism that characterized the New York Intellectuals whose Jewish identities and sense of Jewish interests were discussed in CofC. However, whatever the results of such an investigation, they would be subsumed into the general topic of Jewish viewpoint diversity.

[1] See Ricardo Duchesne, “Steve Pinker’s Anti-Enlightenment Attack on White Identitarians,” Occidental Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 49–68; in press. Read more

Rape-Gangs Unlimited: Third-World People Mean Third-World Pathologies

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The horseshoe crab is a living fossil. So is the Daily Mirror. It was traditionally the newspaper of the respectable White working-class in Britain. They voted Labour and believed in hard work and education, but they were hostile to Third-World immigration. They were socially conservative too, rejecting the prurience and soft-core pornography peddled by the staunch philo-Semite Rupert Murdoch in newspapers like the Sun and News of the World. Of course, the Mirror was owned by the Jewish mega-fraudster Robert Maxwell (né Ján Hyman Binyamin Hoch). And it supplied the amoral thug Alastair Campbell as chief propagandist for the very philo-Semitic and Murdoch-friendly Tony Blair.

Abandoned by Labour

But the Mirror has retained enough of its old values to do something today that the modern Labour party would never do: stand up for the White working-class against predatory brown-skinned Muslims. In early March 2018, its Sunday edition ran a “special investigation” into the vibrant activities of Pakistani men in the small and obscure Midlands town of Telford:

Britain’s ‘worst ever’ child grooming scandal exposed: Hundreds of young girls raped, beaten, sold for sex and some even KILLED

SPECIAL SUNDAY MIRROR INVESTIGATION: Authorities failed to act over 40 years – despite repeated warnings to social workers – with up to 1,000 girls, some as young as 11, abused in Telford

Up to 1,000 children could have suffered in Britain’s worst known abuse scandal – where sex gangs targeted girls as young as 11. The rape hell of vulnerable young girls in one town – Telford – went on for a shocking 40 years, the Sunday Mirror can reveal. As many as 1,000 children could have suffered at the merciless hands of perverts and torturers in Telford since the 1980s. Girls as young as 11 have been lured from their families to be drugged, beaten and raped in an epidemic that, say victims, is still ongoing. THREE people were murdered and two others died in tragedies linked to the scandal.

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Reply to Nathan Cofnas’s Review of “The Culture of Critique”

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“Cutting the Throat of Whiteness”: The Suffering of White South Africans May Redeem the West

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“The time for reconciliation is over. Now is the time for justice.”

These are the words of Julius Malema, the head off South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party/gang. To use a contemporary cultural reference point, Malema is essentially the Killmonger to Nelson Mandela’s T’challa, a more nuanced take on Black power, but both of which have proved symbiotic.

The words in the quote came in a speech supporting a new bill that was overwhelmingly passed  by the South African Parliament by 241 votes to 83 that makes it now legal for the South African government to seize land and other property without compensation.

The bill was brought before parliament by Malema, who also said, “We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land” 400 years ago. And even more ominously: “We are cutting the throat of Whiteness.”

The ANC, seeing the enormous opportunities for graft and personal enrichment as happened in Zimbabwe where the main beneficiaries were politically connected to Mugabe, quickly fell in line, coming up with some choice phrases of their own.

ANC deputy chief whip Dorries Eunice Dlakude said, “the current policy instruments, including the willing-buyer willing-seller policy and other provisions of Section 25 of the Constitution may be hindering effective land reform,” while ANC rural affairs minister Gugile Nkwinti added, “The ANC unequivocally supports the principle of land expropriation without compensation. There is no doubt about it, land shall be expropriated without compensation.” Read more