The Yoke of Woke: Nathan Cofnas Is Wrong about the Nature and Origins of Wokism

I admire the moral courage of Nathan Cofnas, the Jewish philosopher and race-realist. He stood out against the dominant ideology of Cambridge University and was duly punished for his crimethink. He’s also stood up for the free speech of heretics like Kevin MacDonald, even though he doesn’t agree with MacDonald’s heresies. But I don’t admire the honesty of Nathan Cofnas. It’s hard to admire something that disappears whenever Jewish interests are at stake. For example, here’s Cofnas on what you might call the yolk of woke — the central principles and origins of wokism:

To explain the appeal of leftism — which increasingly takes the form of wokism — you have to explain what wokism is. I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. (Mainstream conservatives acknowledge the existence of physical sex differences, but they rarely chalk up disparities in, for example, mathematical achievement to differences in innate ability — at least not publicly.) As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities. (“Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem: To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis,” Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter, 2nd January, 2024)

Nathan Cofnas, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the internet meme Wojak

So Cofnas claims that wokism is “wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality.” He’s wrong. Wokism is not a simple phenomenon — not ideologically, not psychologically, not historically. And although I agree that the right has a “Stupidity Problem” and that anti-Semites are often  “emotionally disturbed fools,” I also think that Cofnas has a dishonesty problem. First of all, wokism doesn’t in fact take “the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously,” as I will shortly show. Second, wokism’s concern about “the persistence of racial disparities” isn’t to end them but to reverse them. It wants to place favored racial groups at the top and Whites at the bottom. In his article, Cofnas doesn’t address what are perhaps the core features of wokism: its hatred of Whites and Western civilization, and its desire to harm the former and destroy the latter. That hatred and that desire can’t be explained by egalitarianism or a “background of Christian morality.” But they can be at least partly explained by Jewish activism and the longstanding resentments of Jews against Whites and the West.

The wickedness of Whiteness

Let’s take Cofnas’ claim that wokesters take “the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously.” In fact, no, they don’t. They emit rhetoric about equality while simultaneously believing in the innate evil of Whites or men and innate virtue of non-Whites or women. George Orwell called this kind of contradiction doublethink: the simultaneous holding of “two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” But wokism is increasingly less about doublethink on race and more about singlethink. It’s very easy to find wokesters blatantly contradicting “the equality thesis of race”:

A former Seattle city employee has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging he was a victim of anti-White discrimination due to a “racially hostile work environment.” … As part of his RSJI [Race and Social Justice Initiative] training, the lawsuit alleges, Diemert was required to attend a two-day workshop in 2019 called “Undoing Institutional Racism,” during which facilitators declared, “white people are like the devil,” “racism is in white people’s DNA,” and “white people are cannibals.” … “Mr. Diemert’s colleagues used their work emails to berate and entertain violence against him, referring to him as ‘some a—hole,’ the ‘reincarnation of the people that shot native Americans from trains, rounded up jews for the camps, hunted down gypsies in Europe and runaway slaves in America,’ noting that it was not worth addressing his concerns because he would ‘just come back with more stupidity,’ and that someone should ‘get a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody,’” the lawsuit alleges. (Seattle City Employee Sues Over Anti-White Discrimination, ‘Racially Hostile Work Environment,’ Fox News, 29th November 2022)

If wokesters took the “equality thesis” seriously, they wouldn’t make anti-White statements like those. No, they would condemn statements like those. They don’t. The New York Times, a bastion of woke, happily accepted the Korean wokester Sarah Jeong onto its editorial board in 2018 despite her long history of spreading “hate and poison” against Whites in ways that blatantly contradicted the “equality thesis.” At American Renaissance, Gregory Hood has accurately described woke anti-racism as a “Church of the Damned” for Whites. Nothing Whites can do will ever cleanse them of their hereditary taint — their original sin — of racism. In short, wokism operates more and more explicitly on an in-equality thesis of race. Whites are innately wicked (“racism is in white people’s DNA”) and non-Whites are innately virtuous. Orwell said this in 1945:

Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. (“Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic, London, 1945)

Orwell used the terms “intelligentsia” and “intellectuals.” Cofnas uses the term “smart people.” Orwell described their racial beliefs accurately. Cofnas doesn’t. And Cofnas doesn’t mention the central role of some particularly smart people in fomenting the anti-White hatred that is central to wokism. Here is the Ashkenazi Jew Susan Sontag:

The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. (Partisan Review, 1967)

And the Ashkenazi Jew Noël Ignatiev:

Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed. (See Andrew Joyce’s “Jews, Communists and Genocidal Hate in ‘Whiteness Studies’,” The Occidental Observer, 12th June 2015)

That is the Jewish “Culture of Critique” described by Kevin MacDonald: the anti-White, anti-Western ideology created by highly intelligent Jews and taken up by much less intelligent Blacks and others. In Britain, the Black academic Kehinde Andrews is a woke hero for books like The Psychosis of Whiteness (2023), which implicitly argues for the enslavement and even extermination of Whites. After all, Kehinde believes that rational argument is useless against the psychotic whiteness that has a stranglehold on so-called Western civilization:

Critical Whiteness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades. Central to this project is the idea that if the processes of Whiteness can be uncovered, then they can be reasoned with and overcome, through rationale dialogue. This article will argue, however, that Whiteness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is beyond any rational engagement. (“The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle,” Journal of Black Studies, Volume 47, Issue 5, July 2016)

Unlike Jewish Sontag and Ignatiev, Black Kehinde is stupid. Non-Whites like him couldn’t have created and promulgated the ideology they are applying. But they can certainly adopt the ideology and base successful careers on it. Kehinde’s stupidity is apparent in the self-refuting nature of his thesis. If “whiteness” were so psychotically powerful in Britain, he wouldn’t be able to criticize it as he does. Could a book called The Psychosis of Stalinism have been published in 1940s Russia? Or a book called The Psychosis of Islam in modern Iran? Obviously not. And what would happen in modern Britain or America to a book called The Psychosis of Blackness? It would be anathematized as abhorrently racist, as a genocidal assault on “black bodies.”

What wokesters want

Well, Kehinde’s book is “abhorrently racist” by the “equality thesis of race” that Cofnas claims to be at the heart of wokism. But no wokester has condemned Kehinde or pointed out where his logic is pointing. If he is right in his claims about “Whiteness,” it follows that only physical force will successfully “overcome” its “Psychosis.” But what do wokesters like Kehinde really mean by “Whiteness”? They mean the physical existence and autonomy of Whites. To defeat the Psychosis of Whiteness, then, Whites must be enslaved or exterminated. What other conclusion is possible if rational argument is impossible  and “psychosis” arises inexorably from “Whiteness”?

Cofnas says wokesters want equality. I say wokesters want enslavement and extermination. I think history is on my side, not Cofnas’ side. The Bolsheviks preached equality before they seized control of the Tsarist empire. They then practised enslavement and extermination. Here’s a chilling quote by one of the successful Bolshevik leaders: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” That was Grigory Zinoviev, who launched “the Red Terror” in 1918 after the assassination of Moisei Uritsky and the near-assassination of Vladimir Lenin. Another prominent Bolshevik, Yakov Sverdlov, promised “merciless mass terror against all enemies of the Revolution” after that attempt on Lenin’s life.

Minority rites

Many millions of Russians and Ukrainians were enslaved or exterminated by communists like those. The pattern was very clear: minorities were taking their revenge on majorities. Zinoviev, Moisei, Sverdlov and many other leading communists were fully Jewish, while Lenin was half Mongol, a quarter German and a quarter Jewish. Josef Stalin was Georgian and won supremacy partly because of Leon Trotsky’s reluctance to be the obviously Jewish leader of what was supposed to be a movement for all mankind. You can see the same over-representation of Jews in the proto-woke Weather Underground, a revolutionary movement in 1960s America that claimed to be pursuing equality but planned to enact extermination. The Weather Underground was infiltrated by an FBI agent called Larry Grathwohl, who later described a meeting at which the disproportionately Jewish Weatherfolk discussed how to secure their revolution:

They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter revolution and they felt that this counter revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the Southwest where [they] would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t reeducate that are diehard capitalists and the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say eliminate I mean kill — 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious. (“Patriot Larry Grathwohl, 65, Infiltrated Weather Underground, Indicted Bill Ayers,” The American Spectator, 24th July 2013)

People with “graduate degrees from Columbia” are what Cofnas calls “smart people.” And Cofnas says that smart people “are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.” Bolshevism and the Weather Underground prove that smart people often have other and much darker motives for embracing supposedly egalitarian ideologies. The smart people preach equality, then practise enslavement and extermination.

A golem, not a shabbos goy

Jews were disproportionately involved in both Bolshevism and the Weather Underground. Like Marxism in general, communist movements like those are a vehicle for minority resentment against the majority and for minority revenge on the majority. Wokism owes much more to communism than it does to Christianity. And communism foreshadows wokism in another important way. Both movements were created by Jews to serve Jewish interests, then escaped Jewish control. Jews have recently watched in dismay as their “natural allies” among Muslims and other non-Whites have supported the wrong side in the war between egalitarian Israel and hate-filled Hamas. Wokism is escaping Jewish control just as communism did. Georgians like Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria are more examples of the way communism attracted vengeful minorities. But Jews were one of the groups Stalin sought revenge on after becoming leader. Once he had supremacy, he exiled Trotsky and murdered Zinoviev and many other Jewish communists who had learnt too late that he was a golem, not a shabbos goy. Later he murdered Trotsky too. Stalin was a resentful man who tirelessly pursued revenge. That makes him an excellent example of leftist traits identified in this academic research:

In two pre-registered studies, we investigated the relationship of left-wing authoritarianism with the ego-focused trait of narcissism. Based on existing research, we expected individuals with higher levels of left-wing authoritarianism to also report higher levels of narcissism. Further, as individuals with leftist political attitudes can be assumed to be striving for social equality, we expected left-wing authoritarianism to also be positively related to prosocial traits, but narcissism to remain a significant predictor of left-wing authoritarianism above and beyond those prosocial dispositions. We investigated our hypotheses in two studies using cross-sectional correlational designs. Two nearly representative US samples (Study 1: N = 391; Study 2: N = 377) completed online measures of left-wing authoritarianism, the Dark Triad personality traits, and two variables with a prosocial focus (i.e., altruism and social justice commitment). In addition, we assessed relevant covariates (i.e., age, gender, socially desirable responding, and virtue signaling). The results of multiple regression analyses showed that a strong ideological view, according to which a violent revolution against existing societal structures is legitimate (i.e., anti-hierarchical aggression), was associated with antagonistic narcissism (Study 1) and psychopathy (Study 2). However, neither dispositional altruism nor social justice commitment was related to left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression. Considering these results, we assume that some leftist political activists do not actually strive for social justice and equality but rather use political activism to endorse or exercise violence against others to satisfy their own ego-focused needs. We discuss these results in relation to the dark-ego-vehicle principle. (“Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,” Ann Krispenz and Alex Bertrams, Current Psychology, 2023)

Contra Cofnas, wokism is not “simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality.” Malevolence and hatred are central to wokism. Cofnas also ignores the central role of Jews in wokism. Although Jewish activism was certainly not sufficient to create and empower wokism, I would argue that it was necessary. Cofnas can’t admit that and doesn’t accurately describe what lies at the center of woke. Wokesters don’t in fact take the equality thesis of race and sex seriously. And wokism owes much more to communism than to Christianity.

If you want to remove the yoke of woke, then you have to understand the yolk of woke — the central principles that guide its adherents and power its malevolence. Wokism is driven by hatred of Whites and the West, not longing for equality. That’s why the end-logic of wokism is the same as the end-logic of communism: enslavement and extermination. We’re fortunate indeed that modern wokism has no highly competent leaders like the quarter-Jewish Vladimir Lenin and the fully Jewish Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Moisei Uritsky, Yakov Sverdlov, Genrikh Yagoda, Lazar Kagonovich, Maxim Litvinov, Karl Radek, etc, etc, etc.

Ashkenazic Afterword

Writing about the ethnocentric Ashkenazi Nathan Cofnas reminds me that I owe an apology to the alcoholic Ashkenazi David Cole, whom I criticized in my article “First-Amendment Blues.” I’ve sinned against Cole by both commission and omission. My commission came when I hacked his computer and added some embarrassingly inept insults against myself — Adolf Mentally-Unfitler, Heinrich Dimmler, Reinhard Heydick, Oskar Girlywanger, Horst Wuss-el — to the manuscript of “The Gentile-Jew Death Tango,” his reply to my article.

I knew that Cole would peer blearily at the published text through his latest hangover and attribute all those to himself “not being funny any more” rather than to malicious outside action. Sorry about that, David. I’m not a “sieg heiler” (honest), but I am good at writing like a 12-year-old. And my omission? That came when I failed to acknowledge that by Jewish standards David Cole is remarkably honest about Jewish malfeasance. I think he’s much more honest than I would ever be if I were Jewish myself. He hasn’t matched Larry Auster yet, but maybe he’ll get there in time. As for the genuinely Colean part of the anti-sieg-heiler article: yes, I like the tango metaphor, but I don’t think David has thought it through properly. Maybe he should meditate on “The Human-Mosquito Malaria Tango.” And listen for the sound of one hand clapping. Geddit?

Samefacting Franz Boas – A Review of Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air”

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Charles King
Doubleday, 2019

The description of Charles King at Amazon:

CHARLES KING is the author of seven books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.

We all know the scenario. We see a great cultural shift occurring before our eyes and seek to ascribe a reason. It’s only natural; man is a pattern seeking creature after all. Suppose we see this shift as a net negative and can’t help but notice how a disproportionate number of Jews are behind it. Well, then the Jews and their defenders will most likely respond in two ways: they will downplay the negative (or the Jewish role in it), and they will label their accuser an anti-Semite. On the other hand, if you describe the exact same cultural shift, but as a positive thing—and can’t help but notice all the Jews behind it—well, then you’re all right. The takeaway here is that telling the truth (or not) is less important than whether or not one offends Jews.

I call this phenomenon “samefacting,” and it occurred to me while reading Charles King’s 2019 book Gods of the Upper Air. While the dust jacket summary describes it as a “history of the birth of cultural anthropology,” and while it does emphasize the lives of many of its early gentile adherents (for example, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston), the book focuses most closely on Franz Boas, the German Jew who founded cultural anthropology as an academic discipline at Columbia University in the 1890s—and who planted the insidious seed of cultural relativism in the Western mind.

Because Kevin MacDonald dedicated a chapter in The Culture of Critique to Franz Boas and Boasian anthropology, readers of The Occidental Observer will want to know how much samefacting is going on between MacDonald and King. Answer: quite a bit.

For example, in chapter two of The Culture of Critique, MacDonald writes:

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution, such as those implying developmental sequences, by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity . . .

Just so, claims King:

Without homogenous, easily identifiable “races,” the entire edifice of racial hierarchy crumbled. “The difference between different types of man are, on the whole, small as compared to the range of variation in each type,” Boas concluded. Not only was there no bright line dividing one race from another, but the immense variation within racial categories called into question the utility of the concept itself.

These are same facts, after all. MacDonald and King agree on quite a bit about Franz Boas and his immense contributions to the field of Anthropology. They both recount Boas’ dissent from the prevailing belief that cultures evolve from savagery to barbarism to civilization—with, of course, Nordic Caucasians representing the apotheosis of this process. They both touch on Boas’ abrasive character, his authoritarian control over his students, his irrepressible vigor, and his overtly political and ideological objectives. King states that Boas “wore his political views on his sleeve,” while MacDonald states that Boas and his students were “intensely concerned with pushing an ideological agenda within the American anthropological profession.” They also agree on the cultish nature of the Boasian circle, with MacDonald noting its “high level of ingroup identification, exclusionary policies, and cohesiveness in pursuit of common interests.” For his part, King describes how Boas recruited new anthropologists “with a zeal approaching that of a nascent religion,” and how he excluded certain individuals from his circles, for example Ralph Linton, if they displeased him.

When Ralph Linton, a recently demobilized war veteran, showed up for his doctoral studies dressed in his military uniform, Boas berated him so strongly that Linton soon transferred to a rival program at Harvard. He would later complain that the “Jewish Ring” at Columbia had conspired to keep him down.

In Culture of Critique MacDonald essentially adopts Linton’s perspective in that it is no coincidence that so many of the Boasians were Jews. MacDonald also explicitly states what Linton in the quote above kept implicit—that Boasian behavior accorded with well-known stereotypes of Jews being clannish, stubborn, pushy, and subversive. Oddly, King never disagrees with this. He makes no secret that many of Boas’ students were Jews—in particular, Edward Sapir, Alexander Goldenweiser, Paul Radin, and Melville Herskovits. He portrays Boas at least as being pushy and stubborn. Of Boas’ time at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1890s, King writes

[Boas] had a habit of making himself more respected than liked. His time at the museum had produced new research and exhibitions but also disappointments, professional disagreements, and hurt feelings among his colleagues, who found him confident to a fault, officious, and given to pique.

Further, King describes on many pages how existentially subversive Boas was to the humanities throughout his career. He offers extensive and impeccable evidence of how Boas and his ideological progeny ultimately usurped the race-realists, the Darwinians and the eugenicists who dominated the social sciences at the time. This should come as no surprise, given the subtitle of the book: “How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.”

As with other examples of samefacting, the primary difference is a qualitative one. King praises Boas and trumpets Boasian cultural relativism as a “user’s manual for life” meant to “enliven our moral sensibility.” Meanwhile, MacDonald criticizes Boas and condemns Boasian cultural relativism as scientifically unsound, ethically hypocritical, and ultimately destructive to white majorities since it is the lynchpin for arguments supporting mass immigration.

The question should be whether MacDonald or King is objectively correct—not whether either man likes or dislikes Jews. And a closer analysis of Gods of the Upper Air reveals that Charles King has a lot of work to do to catch up to Kevin MacDonald when it comes to the truth.

As would be expected, King’s book offers much biographical data on Boas. King is a first-rate writer, so if the reader can get past his left-wing biases (which, to be fair, he doesn’t beat anyone over the head with) then Gods of the Upper Air is an engrossing read. King dutifully covers Boas’ upbringing in Germany, his time as a young researcher in the Arctic among the Eskimos, his time as a family man and itinerant scholar in the United States, as well as his triumph at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. King presents the intellectual zeitgeist of the day with a tolerably low level of slant, accurately recapitulating the arguments of race-realists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard and of eugenicists such as Henry Goddard and Charles Davenport. It’s as if he’s confident that such reactionary takes on the human condition will refute themselves. He’s evenhanded enough to humanize his villains. For example, he reminds the reader that Grant was a passionate conservationist who singlehandedly prevented the American bison from going extinct. King also does a splendid job in depicting America at the turn of the last century, a time now gone from living memory.

When setting the stage for the 1893 Chicago Exposition, King offers up this delightful little passage:

The Midway Plaisance featured exhibits on the peculiar ways of the world’s peoples, from a Bedouin encampment to a Viennese café, most of them thin disguises for hawkers of merchandize and cheap entertainment. An entire building was devoted solely to the lives and progress of women, while others highlighted advances in agriculture, electrification, and the plastic arts. A new fastener called a zipper made its debut over the six months of the fair’s operation, as did a chewable gum labeled Juicy Fruit, a tall circular ride presented by a Mr. Ferris, a prize-winning beer offered by the Pabst family, and a breakfast dish with the rather confusing name Cream of Wheat.

The flaws of Gods of the Upper Air become manifest as much for what King doesn’t write as for what he does. Boasian cheerleading aside, King basically commits the same sin Stephen Jay Gould committed in his infamous 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man: he’s content to refute race realism as it was a century ago but not how it is today, or even as it was fifty years ago. Further, he cherry picks some of the more egregious mistakes made by race-realist pioneers with their calipers and head measurements and outlandish classification schemes (for example, “Dolichocephalic Nordics” and “Brachycephalic Alpines”). With the confidence of momentum, King then feels he can safely claim that “[h]ow we define intelligence is the result of a social process, not a biological one.” Never once does he mention the research of Arthur Jensen or J. Phillipe Rushton or the mountain of data proving race-realism to be correct—just as he keeps mum about Kevin MacDonald. To mention any of this would require more refutation than Charles King is prepared (or could ever be prepared) to do. So, he chooses to ignore counter-argument and pretend that he and Franz Boas are comfortably on the right side of history—which they are not, because they are wrong.

King is also blind to the central Boasian contradiction (some would say double standard) which requires unreasonably vigorous standards when proving human differences and almost no standards at all when attesting to human sameness. Numerous times, King describes how Boas demanded that his students never jump to conclusions before assessing evidence. At the same time, however, King happily repeats such glib and unproven egalitarian mantras from Boas such as “Cultures are many; man is one.”

It’s about as cowardly as it is dishonest.

Another dishonorable aspect of Gods of the Upper Air is King’s kid-glove treatment of Boas’ star pupil Margaret Mead. King is not so ham-fisted as to portray her as some genius-level forward-thinking visionary, but his sympathetic take on her does come close at times. On page one of the book he describes this interesting and mysterious young woman as having “left behind a husband in New York, a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman.” These are good things, apparently. Mead, who never seemed to take to sexual discipline, learned the term “polygamy” in anthropology class one day, and then dedicated her life to making the Western world less sexually repressive, possibly so she could engage in the practice herself. And she did this by holding up sexually permissive Third World societies as examples. This amounted to solving the “sex problem,” as she called it—even if the societies she fetishized were in reality not as sexually permissive as she claimed. If this sounds sordid, that’s because it was. King doesn’t help matters by delving into the petty social sniping that Mead and her circle constantly engaged in. Sapir, for example, had been Mead’s lover for a time, and never seemed to overcome being spurned by her. He would constantly dismiss her work to their colleagues, and at one point suggested she be fully institutionalized. In 1933, Mead even formed a triangle between her husband Reo Fortune and her lover Gregory Bateson (both anthropologists) while all three were on site in Melanesia. She and Fortune would argue bitterly, even violently. Alcohol, for Fortune at least, was a major component.

Say what you want about Franz Boas, but according to King he was the paragon of class compared to this.

Mead was disciplined enough to work in the field and write about it. She was smart, serious, and prolific. She deserves credit for that. But, given the historical record, King simply cannot get around the woman’s perverse fixation on sex:

Mead, too, wanted to know about people’s lives: how they thought about childhood and aging, what it meant to be an adult, what they thought of as sexual pleasure, whom they loved, when they felt the sting of public humiliation or the gnawing sickness of private shame.

What he does get around to—somewhat—is Mead’s shoddy scholarship. When doing research for her first book Coming of Age in Samoa in 1925, Mead decided to leave the village of Pago Pago on the island of Tutuila because it had been “corrupted” by the influence of Christian missionaries and the American military. She traveled to the more remote island of Ta’u to continue her research. There she occupied a room in the home of an American family. This is how King describes the experience:

She had worried that this might not constitute real fieldwork. As she wrote to Boas, she was torn between the desire to live like a native and the need to have enough quiet time to write notes and reflect on her experiences, something that would have been difficult in an open-sided, communal Samoan house.

She might have been doing anthropology from the veranda—her room consisted of half of the Holts’ back porch, screened off by a thin bamboo barrier—but she was never short of informants. Children and teenagers flocked to her for conversation and impromptu dance parties, arriving as early as five in the morning and staying until midnight.

Later, after a flash of insight which suggested that primitive societies are not as ritualistic as previously believed, she began to question children and teens about sexual practices, including their own. She then claimed to have learned that sex in Samoa was no big deal compared to how it was in the United States. Samoan kids did not seem to suffer the same growing pains as adolescents did where Mead was from. Thus, Mead came to her grand conclusion about the struggles of youth: “The stress is in the civilization, not in the physical changes through which our children pass.” Thusly, nurture surpasses nature.

Now, I am by no means an expert in the history of anthropology, but having read this I knew something was amiss. Yes, King admits that Coming of Age in Samoa “was full of bravado and overstatement, loose argument, and occasionally purple writing—very much like every other work of anthropology written at the time.” He quibbles about Mead’s small sample size and mentions how many Samoans themselves were displeased with Mead’s portrayal of them. But wasn’t there more? I remembered reading that Mead had done some shady things while in Samoa. Sure enough, three volumes in my library (including The Culture of Critique) recounted some of Mead’s less than scholarly practices.

Steven Goldberg in his 1993 work Why Men Rule (the original edition of which, in the 1970s, Margaret Mead herself reviewed), provides an example of how Mead’s conclusions do not follow from her data. Further, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson recall in their 1996 work Demonic Males how Mead left Pago Pago not because it “had little left to offer,” as King puts it, but because of (as Mead herself describes in a letter to Boas) the “nervewracking conditions of living with half a dozen people in a house without walls, always sitting on the floor and sleeping in the constant expectation of having a pig or chicken thrust itself upon one’s notice.” Mead had spent ten days in a Samoan household in Pago Pago and decided that that was enough.

King is dishonest for not mentioning this. He is dishonest for not mentioning how police reports from Samoa from the time of Mead’s visit contradict many of her rosy conclusions on sexual violence. He is dishonest also for not mentioning how Mead rarely included primitive war-making or violence (sexual or otherwise) in her analyses. (MacDonald bangs this point home nicely in Culture of Critique.) Finally, King is quite sneaky when he downplays Derek Freeman’s withering criticisms of Mead in a footnote on page 368 rather than in the body of his text.

As for samefacting Franz Boas along the MacDonald-King divide, I found one exception. In Culture of Critique, MacDonald writes that Boas “was deeply alienated from and hostile towards gentile culture, particularly the cultural ideal of the Prussian aristocracy.” As usual, he lists his sources right there on the page (George W. Stocking’s Race, Evolution, and Culture from 1968 and Carl Deglers’ In Search of Human Nature from 1991). Yet, in the early 1880s, when a young Boas had just left Germany on a ship bound for the Arctic where he would do his first anthropological research, he wrote in his diary, “Farewell, my dear homeland! Dear homeland, adieu!” This may not mean much, but I did find it surprising. Perhaps Boas became more alienated as he grew older. King certainly doesn’t report any general animosity from Boas towards gentile culture—but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any. In Gods of the Upper Air, Boas reserved most of his ire for anyone supporting biological determinism, or who annoyed him personally.

Either way, however, this does lead us to the only episode in Gods of the Upper Air in which Franz Boas is portrayed sympathetically. During the years before America’s entry into the First World War, he was vocally in favor of Germany and against American intervention. Although I don’t challenge Boas’ Jewish identity making up a big part of his character, I wonder if his Jewishness had anything to do with his ardent pro-German stance in 1916. King seems to believe this came as result of Boas’ natural affinity towards his country of birth—which does somewhat challenge MacDonald’s interpretation above. Further, Boas did walk it like he talked it, and suffered major career setbacks after the war for his unpopular, and some would say treasonous, opinions.

Still, it can be argued that Boas’ support for Germany hinged much more on the relatively high degree of emancipation German Jews enjoyed at the time than for anything inherent about Germans or Germany. This would explain why the Germanistic Society of America (for which Boas was secretary at one point) contained so many influential and ethnocentric Jews as members—Jews such as the future Soviet financier Jacob Schiff. Boas’ support for Germany could also be explained by German antagonism toward Czarist Russia during the war. As MacDonald writes in an ongoing revision of Culture of Critique:

It is sometimes argued that a letter from 1916 decrying criticism of Germany during World War I shows the predominance of Boas’s German identity. However, it should be pointed out that by far the most prominent attitude of Diaspora Jewish communities was to oppose Czarist Russia because of its perceived anti-Semitism and thus support the German war effort. For example, immigrant Jews in the U.K. overwhelmingly refused to be drafted into military service because Germany was fighting Russia.

Regardless, this may be the exception that proves the rule. In many ways Kevin MacDonald’s chapter on Franz Boas in The Culture of Critique reads like a condensed version of the Boas chapters in Gods of the Upper Air. The facts are the same—but as it often is with the Jews, it is how you say them that makes all the difference.

Comments on The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 1

Besides their important position in the sugar industry and in tax farming, they dominated the slave trade…. The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices…. If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed.

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 1: The Jewish Role in the Enslavement of Africans
The Nation of Islam

Once again, I am knee-deep in considering the Jews.

*          *          *          *

To the extent that any ethnographic study of the Jews is less than hagiographic, one can be sure that the long knives will be sharped and the attack on the critic of the Jews writ large will be ruined. In this, I am reminded of Gilad Atzmon’s trenchant observation in his pithy book, The Wandering Who, that, “it is not the idea of being unethical that torments [the Jews] but the idea of being ‘caught out’ as such.” If one keeps this maxim in mind—indeed, if one amplifies this maxim—it serves as a hermeneutic principle to understand why Jews react the way they do to any form of group criticism. Every cognizable group of human beings, no matter the basis of their association, is not beyond group criticism except the Jews—and if there were ever needed a demonstration of the incredible power that Jews possess in Western societies, it is their repeated ability to marginalize and destroy anyone who criticizes the Jews as a group concerning supporting Israel (an apartheid state), questioning the various narratives of Jewish victimology, or offering a counter-narrative of collective Jewish misconduct and abuse of power. This power is amplified since they, the Jews, excoriate other groups as a matter of sport—it is not “group” analysis per se that is the problem, it is a less-than-flattering portrait of the Jews that is objectionable. Conveniently the weapon of choice is prophylactically to brand such opposition, “antisemitism,” and, in this, I am again reminded of Atzmon who noted that, “[w]hile in the past an ‘anti-Semite’ was someone who hates Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone that the Jews hate.” And there is no one that Jews hate more than someone who dares to critique the Jews as a group.

This principle is integral to understanding that the Jews, fundamentally as a group, are congenitally illiberal people who, at least in the main, prostitute the liberal and modern academic tenants of self-criticism, self-reflection, and evidence-based scholarship to criticize and shame other groups. Even though the liberal academy is disproportionately populated by Jews who sanctimoniously make their living disparaging non-Jewish groups (and especially Christians and Europeans and their intertwined histories)—supposedly in concert with liberal principles—they close ranks when someone, really anyone, turns those liberal principles of a critical examination upon the Jews themselves. The blatant hypocrisy of Jewish “liberal” academicians knows no bounds.

Liberal historiography of any group matures from a juvenile self-favoritism and suspicion of the “other” into one that takes the perspective of the “other” and objectifies, at least in a sense, the motives of one’s group. This is fundamental to Western individualism and its universalist moral codes. So, for example, observant Catholics can—and do—take a moral inventory of their history and do not shirk from recognizing where they fell short of their ideals as a people historically. But the Jews have never reached this maturity—and indeed, if anything, they have regressed towards cruder historiographic fantasies in proportion with their power to project such historical lies. As such, there is something deeply unserious about the Jews—a lack of self-reflection that bespeaks an almost adolescent and constant defensive posture. Israel Shahak makes this point regarding the Jews in his incredible study of Jewish group psychology and history, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994, 22), when he writes about the totalitarian mindset of Jewish groups in which studies of Judaism are characterized by “deception, apologetics or hostile polemics, indifference or even active hostility to the pursuit of truth. … Modern totalitarian regimes rewrite history or punish historians. … When a whole society tries to return to totalitarianism, a totalitarian history is written, not because of compulsion from above but under pressure from below, which is much more effective. This is what happened in Jewish history.”

Again, understanding that the Jews are illiberal chauvinists infused with a totalitarian “groupthink” is necessary to reorient their projection of history as something designed, no more or no less, to empower the Jews and disempower the “other” whenever and wherever they find themselves. For the Jews, it would seem, life with the “other” is inevitably a zero-sum game in which the “other” can never be considered a neighbor. And when Jews do treat the non-Jew as a neighbor, it is always despite the dictates of Judaism and never because of it. It is for this reason that true community between Jews and non-Jews is, at least in my opinion, next to impossible to obtain.

*          *          *          *

Jews understand, or at least so it seems to me, that manipulation over the historical narrative operates to control the present and near-future. If groups are assigned historical gloss generally as negative group actors or positive group actors, that gloss itself operates to immunize or disable those same groups from acting in the present. That gloss also provides morale to the positive group actors while disheartening negative group actors. They are, at least in this regard, quite sophisticated in understanding how group dynamics play out. And because most people lack the sophistication, time, or inclination to study the alleged basis for this historical gloss, the gloss itself is reduced to a kind of group stereotype that is implicitly digested by the broader society without much thought. The Jews do everything that they can do to discredit any historian or intellectual who challenges the proffered stereotype of the Jews—the moral group historical gloss, as it were—that the Jews are a light to humanity who have always been unjustly persecuted everywhere. The virtually manic and automatic response of Jews instinctively to destroy any critical scholarship aimed at exploding this self-serving Jewish narrative (or offering a less panegyric narrative) in the most heavy-handed way itself indicates a deep-seated group psychosis. People, such as the Jews who are dominated by “groupthink,” take criticism of the group as always representing an existential threat.

Indeed, when we speak of “the Jews,” we are not necessarily speaking of a conspiracy, which is another way that Jews assert control over the historical narrative. “Conspiratorial” charges are a thin veneer to condemn those who critique the Jews: we are, or so they claim, “crazy” because they trot out the strawman that we assert—presumably wearing tinfoil hats—that the world’s Jews scheme their plot to “control” the world in some sort of group conference. Questioning Jewish power, which is obvious as the day is long, becomes tantamount to the thoughts of an unhinged insane person, which is the perfect example of what “gaslighting” is. The charge of “conspiracy” is yet another defense mechanism put forward by the Jews to make the critic of the Jews seem weird and ridiculous, and therefore not worthy of consideration based upon the lack of credibility of the critic himself (as opposed to the merits of the critique proffered). Like the charge of antisemitism, which is used to paint the critic of the Jews as a moral leper, labeling critics of the Jews as “crazy” is another way to ensure that critic’s marginalization. Either way (crazy or immoral), the Jews seek immunity from group criticism by viciously attacking and ostracizing the messenger. The critique of the Jews, however, does not require a conspiratorial predicate (or a mendacious heart)—it could be that they collectively have lousy ethics (they do); it could be that they collectively are inbred enough (they are) that they have developed certain psychological and genetic predilections to act collectively albeit unconsciously in the way that they do; and it could be that most Jews believe the propaganda foisted upon them by their leadership and respond accordingly. And it could be a conspiracy amongst the leadership of the Jews. Concerted action by a group does not necessarily require a conscious plan and the idea that criticism of the Jews requires it is a deflection by them to silence the criticism itself.

Contrary to the moral historical gloss that the Jews want to put forward, there is another one worth considering. The Jews, everywhere and always, have been terrible neighbors to the non-Jewish people with whom they have co-inhabited geographic space. They have treated their non-Jewish neighbors (the “goyim”), at least as a rule, as something less than human—and because of that, they have always and everywhere attempted (and often succeeded) in taking advantage of their non-Jewish neighbors in every conceivable way. Setting aside their collective psychological profile, they cheat, steal, and kill the goyim without the normal human sense of moral compunction—and they always have. The Talmud itself—the key religious source material for Judaism in the post-Second Temple era—is replete with examples condoning or encouraging exactly that type of behavior towards the goyim. We, the goyim, are objects to be fleeced. And this, as much as the goyim’s alleged “antisemitism,” explains why every non-Jewish nation in history has, at least on occasion, been forced to take punitive actions against the Jews living within their midst. Moreover, it also explains why anti-Jewish sentiment has percolated in so many for so long; it is not that goyim—that is, all of non-Jewish humanity—have had ingrained hard hearts towards the Jews, it is rather that some of the goyim see the Jews accurately for who they are and what they have done (and continue to do) and project back upon the Jews the same level of objectification that the Jews themselves project outward towards the goyim. None of this is said, especially as a Catholic, to justify any harm done to any Jews. After all, we have a different ethic concerning the humanity of the Jews than the Jews have concerning us. That differential ethic means necessarily that we play by different rules and judge our conduct differently than they judge their own. But what continues to amaze me is that the Jews never consider what it is about them that elicits such a universal sense of animosity: for a people allegedly so bright, that they never consider that it might just be them—and not the rest of humanity—is almost beyond credulity. Indeed, it is so far beyond credulity that I don’t believe it: the Jews know they are hypocrites as it relates to the goyim, but they do not care—their hypocrisy is simply another long con.

*          *          *          *

My professional life has been dominated by interactions with the Jews. And, on a personal level, I have no animosity towards any of the Jews with whom I have interacted because they are Jews. Know thyself is a maxim that is crucial to personal growth, and, at least as it relates to the Jews, I know that my opinions about the Jews as a group have nothing to do with a personal animosity that I have towards Jews generally. If anything, my opinions are held despite my affection for so many Jews that have been a part of my professional life. And, to go one step further, I concede that many Jews have been good to me in my career and have even been friends. Candidly, I assume that a similar dynamic would be at play if I worked closely with Muslims or any other non-Catholic group—personal affection towards individuals is not inconsistent with evaluating the working out of group dynamics, for good or for bad. More to the point, there is no disability in racial or ethnic Judaism per se; if any Jew renounces Talmudic Judaism as a religion and as a series of unethical and dehumanizing principles, he can be as good as anyone else.

Perhaps one could accuse me of duplicity: obviously, I do not share my opinions on Jewish group dynamics with my Jewish colleagues. But I assume, for good reason, they have a public face to me, as a constituent of the goyim, and a private face as it relates to the goyim generally. I do not think that many of them see a contradiction in befriending me, as it were, yet still seeing the interactions generally between Jews and non-Jews as zero-sum. In any event, I was born into a Western society that is predominated by Jews in the professional classes—I am forced to navigate them if I too am to be a professional. For my part, I wish the Jews no harm, not at all.  I simply want for my people the same thing that they want:  a homeland in which our shared faith and culture predominates without foreign influence. I recognize that Europe once had that until the Enlightenment freed the Jews to wreak havoc. And I would like that back.

Virtually every Jew that I have ever encountered has a favorable opinion as it relates to the State of Israel. They doggedly support the preservation of that national experiment built upon the backs of the Palestinian people who lived there before the advent of Zionism. Thus, the vast majority of Jews unashamedly supports a homeland for Jews in which the Jewish identity, in all its various forms, is cultivated, respected, and perpetuated. That they could care less that that “homeland” necessarily involved the dispossession of another people ought to be a telltale sign of who they are. That others might feel the same affection about their people—religiously and ethnically—never appears to dawn on the Jews. Indeed, the Jews have a sense that any such aspiration by the goyim (and especially the Christian goyim) is “bad” for the Jews. Parenthetically, there is something so threadbare about Jewish ethics as such—it really can be reduced to evaluating whether something is good or bad by asking the simple question: is it good or bad for the Jews. And worse, my conclusion is therefore that the Jews, as a group, do everything that they can to thwart the same aspiration of identity and autonomy in others (especially the autonomy of Christians and Europeans who are, at least in Talmudic literature, associated with Israel’s eternal foe, Edom). Everywhere they predominate, which is everywhere in our Western societies, they sow discord and distort our history to squelch our aspirations to achieve what we would seek except for their gaslighting. Along with their utter lack of self-reflection, their hypocrisy is so galling.

To put a coda on this, at least personally, I do not hate the Jews—indeed, I am not allowed by my creed to hate them—but I recognize them collectively for what they are: civilizational adversaries, not friends or allies. And yet this is another difference between us and them: they know they are at war with us, and we do not.

But more than anything else, the Jews, at least as a group, are liars, and they are never to be trusted when it comes to their proffered analysis as it relates to group dynamics or their account of history. Everything they say, write, or think on the group level has one goal—to gaslight and convince themselves and the “other” of Jewish moral superiority and the “other’s” moral inferiority. If we keep that principle in mind, we should never trust their account of anything they claim relating to history (or anything else) because it is so often contrived. In that context, they have always possessed a revolutionary spirit of division that is as toxic as it is diabolical. Another way to understand their collective conduct is to realize that their identity as a group was forged by their rejection of Christ, which coincided with the destruction of the Second Temple. As such, they are a people of negation. They are the remnant of people who rejected the direct and personal invitation of the Logos, and they are, as a result, opposed to the Logos in a way that is different from all other groups. It is wrong to consider them to be a people cursed by God, but it is accurate to say that they bear the collective scars of being the people who rejected— and continue to reject—God intimately. Given that their subsequent history as a people after the Incarnation has been one marked by the continuing rejection of Logos, their very identity has been admixed with a special and unique hostility to European Christians. To be a serious Jew then is to harbor a special animosity towards Christian goyim and it follows therefrom that for Christians to entertain anything that Jews have to say about history seriously as beyond naïve. It is dangerous.

Finding and reading work critical of the Jews is no easy task. Not only is such work difficult to publish in the first place because of the social suicide it represents for the author, but it is also difficult to find because the Jews exert their influence to censor such books from commercial venues even after the author is willing to sacrifice himself to publish it. For example, Amazon regularly censors books that the Jews find objectionable. Moreover, websites that present such material are regularly hounded off the internet and often deprived of even the ability to accept electronic payment processing. Just google, “Kevin MacDonald” or “E. Michael Jones”—both bright and scholarly non-Jewish academics who have been reduced to crazy bigots for merely taking cognizance of the Jews with less than encomium. Or google, “Israel Shahak” or “Gilad Atzmon”—both Jews who are openly dismissed as Jewish traitors and Jewish anti-Semites for critiquing from within the malice of the Jews. But a few intrepid souls carry on, and, with a little diligence, the material can be found. And what makes finding it enthralling is how such material exposes the carefully constructed Jewish edifice for what it is: a diabolic structure built upon deceit. Eventually, the Truth is revealed—either now or in the next life—and the ruse of the Jews will not persist in perpetuity.

*          *          *          *

One unexpected book I recently heard about, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: The Jewish Role in the Enslavement of Africans, is an ethnographic study of the Jewish involvement in the African slave trade following the European discovery of the New World put out by the Nation of Islam headed by Minister Louis Farrakhan. Before delving into the work, I must make one more preliminary observation: there is no small irony in the Nation of “Islam” decrying African slavery when the greatest slaving religion known in human history is Islam. While there was something especially toxic about African chattel slavery in the New World, which we Christians sadly own as a part of our history, Muslims enslaved more people (by multiple factors) over a much longer period than anyone in history—all with express religious sanction from the Quran. That fact is glossed over by the Nation of Islam in its work—the most that The Secret Relationship is willing to concede is that the Jews and Europeans were abetted by “African race traitors” who helped procure their fellow Africans for bondage. What is not mentioned is that those “race traitors” were Muslim, and, further, at least as many Africans boarded slave ships during this period were bound for Muslim ports and Muslim slave markets. But what should be remembered is that the Nation of Islam, for good or bad, is not a Muslim sect as much as it is an African American separatist sect with a thin Muslim façade. In any event, as it relates to the slave trade, the Nation of Islam found the rampant Muslim involvement either too inconvenient or too troubling to flesh out.

The Secret Relationship, first published in 1991, is fascinating: it has an unnamed editor and does not indicate personal authorship. The title page declares that it was “Prepared by The Historical Research Department [of] The Nation of Islam.” And it is undoubtedly scholarly with a short bibliography and more than 1,200 footnotes. Its opening “Note on Sources” asserts that it “has been compiled primarily from Jewish historical literature.” The obvious strategy of the authors was to rely upon Jewish sources to document Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Nothing like hoisting your enemy upon his own petard. As a work of scholarship, what then can we say of The Secret Relationship? It is comprehensive and it is academic. It is not a work primarily interested in American slavery but in the entire arc of New World slavery. And the thesis is nothing less than assigning primary culpability for the slave trade to the Jews. In developing that thesis, which, I admit, came as a revelation to me, the compilers work very diligently and methodically to catalog the almost mind-numbing and outsized influence of the Jews in the slave trade.

Every major settlement and colony—no matter its country or trading company founder—is cataloged and the impact of the Jews as it relates to slavery is recounted. The authors work through slavery in Colonial South America and the Caribbean, Brazil, Surinam, Essequibo, Guiana, Barbados, Curacao, Jamaica, Martinique, Nevis, Saint Dominique, Saint Eustatius, and Saint Thomas. The authors then follow the migration of the Jews from the south into Colonial America (New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Georgia, and the West). Historically, the book culminates in consideration of the antebellum United States and the Civil War, the role of the American Rabbinate leading up to and during the Civil War and the lack of an abolitionist movement with American Judaism, the double-dealing profit-making of the Jews during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the eventual exploitation of the freedman following the Civil War by the Jews. The book concludes with a study of census data, Jewish wills, slavery in Jewish law, and the rape of Black slaves by Jewish slaveholders.

Two related themes that play themselves out throughout the book are the almost complete lack of remorse or moral questioning of the slave trade or the degradation of Africans. The Jews, virtually to a person, never took part in the abolition movement in any conceivable way. Relatedly, the opinion of the Jews towards the Africans was one of an almost unrelenting dehumanization. Taken together, the authors paint a picture—again, derived almost entirely from Jewish historical sources, that the Jews of the slave trading and slaveholding era were not merely participants for it but were fanatical supporters of the practice, and in large measure they based their economic livelihood around slavery in one way or another. The Secret Relationship then is their comeuppance. And when the rabbis walked hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights leaders in the 1960s—and when Blacks could be manipulated and used by the Jews for their political purposes—the inconvenient history of Jewish leadership in the economy of the slavocracy had to be whitewashed.

As I said, the book is comprehensive, and every quotation and analysis cited comes from a Jewish scholar’s voice describing the topic (albeit an older voice not attuned to the modern horror at the concept of African slavery). It seems that earlier Jewish scholarship reflected the more positive defense of slavery that was, for the most, put forward by the Jews leading up to the American Civil War. To put it differently, and in a way that serves as an indirect verification of the thesis of the book, the Jews were so knee-deep in slaving and slave-trading for hundreds of years in the Americas without any moral compunction that it took multiple generations of Jews to turn on slaving and slavery. In other words, the first generations of Jewish scholars after the American Civil War carried within them a defense of it and the Jews’ role in it that took time to unwind. Stated still differently, the first instinct among Jews is to defend Jews, and the first generation of Jewish scholars was candid and relatively unapologetic in defending the outsized role in slaving and slavery. Contemporary Jewish scholars would like to silence these older Jewish voices and the Nation of Islam was no small irritant in providing them a venue to be heard again. The moral outrage of today’s academic Jews at slavery is ironic—they have no standing for indignation at others until they address the moral pox upon their own house.

As mentioned above, the book relies upon Jewish secondary sources of a distinct vintage to make the case that the Jews not only dominated the African slave trade but were instrumental in it. It recites statistics, censuses, correspondence, and charters to demonstrate that Jews were integral to founding settlements (particularly Dutch and Portuguese ones), shipping slaves, and creating the sugar plantation system that sprung up all over the Caribbean and Central/South America. As animosity grew between Jews and European Christians, The Secret Relationship shows how Jews would move from one colony to another, from one country to another, to continue their slaving economic practices—switching countries and trading companies without any compunction. The Jews, as has been long pointed out, never possessed patriotism to the various host countries in which they resided—even if they had lived in those countries for hundreds of years. This phenomenon continues to this day—and the only patriotism that contemporary Jews ever show is directed at their fanatical support of Israel.

Taken together, The Secret Relationship exposes a dark underbelly of Judaism, which is made even more nefarious by the constant liberal posturing by today’s Jewish liberals. The whitewashing of history—that is, the leading Jewish role in African slavery—is a vivid demonstration of Jewish gaslighting that is taking place in real-time. Perhaps that is the single biggest victory by the Nation of Islam’s publication of this book: yes, it brings to light the Jewish involvement in slavery in stark relief, but it does something much more. It shows what Jews are doing now is the historical airbrushing to preserve the Jewish cult of moral superiority.

*          *          *          *

The Secret Relationship’s publication was like a broadside against Jewish academics who use the Atlantic African slave trade as a cudgel against European Christians. In one fell swoop, The Secret Relationship deprived the Jews of their customary and favored role as a perpetual victim by casting them as the chief villains in the slave trade and driving a wedge between the relationship between Blacks and Jews that had been carefully constructed by Jews to encourage Black hatred towards Whites. In response to The Secret Relationship, multiple Jewish academics took up the challenge to show that it was wrong, and they published book after book allegedly debunking The Secret Relationship. Interestingly enough, Amazon censors The Secret Relationship but oddly offers myriad rebuttals for sale. For my copy, I had to order it directly from the Nation of Islam. The problem for the Jewish academic rebuttals was that they were forced to have this historical battle on terrain not of their choosing. And the best that they could muster is, and I paraphrase thousands of pages of their rebuttal scholarship by multiple authors, is essentially, “yeah, Jews were involved in the slave trade like everyone else … so what?”

So much for moral superiority. And now, some thirty years later, even a cursory review of the fallout from The Secret Relationship and its rebuttal scholarship is that The Secret Relationship has been allegedly “discredited”—and one only must peruse the Wikipedia entry on The Secret Relationship to see how strident and over-the-top the response to it has been.

The whole thing stinks of “[t]he lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

There is, however, something certainly lurking in the background of the criticism of The Secret Relationship. Why focus on the Jews? The angst is perhaps best summarized by a Jewish historian from Columbia University:

Jonathan Schorsch of Columbia University, has also written about the slave trade—most recently in his 2009 book Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World and in an article published in the journal Jewish Social Studies. Schorsch sees even the facts surrounding Jewish involvement as being contentious. “There seem to have been a handful of Jewish firms, proportionate to their population. A lot of things that don’t make anyone feel good.” About The Secret Relationship, Schorsch said, “The claim in the narrow sense is just. Why are they harsher toward Jews? Is it because they are afraid to antagonize Christians? Jews did their share of persecuting and discriminating, of being persecuted and discriminated. Neither Blacks nor Jews are as perfect as one would wish. Did Black Nationalists want to puncture Jewish pride? There are real stakes here—government funding and so forth. Then there’s the victim game—who’s the biggest victim? It makes some Jews very uncomfortable.”

Here, we get down to brass tacks—yes, why the Jews? It must be that the Jews have been so self-deceived that they cannot comprehend the role that they have played in the world. To read that they have always been engaged in the slave trade, usury, double-dealing, and smuggling—among so many other anti-social and destructive practices as it relates to the goyim—punctures the carefully constructed myth of Jewish moral superiority that most Jews, like Professor Schorsch, have evidently and wholeheartedly swallowed. Thus, Professor Schorsch’s anguished question, “why are they harsher towards the Jews” bespeaks an almost plaintive cry of pain—and it ignores that the Nation of Islam was “harsher towards the Jews” because, notwithstanding the Jews’ self-deception, the Jews merit it. And it is no small irony that this book is about the slave trade, which is something the Jews have trafficked in since time immemorial. Indeed, the Jews did not simply happen into the Atlantic African slave trade after the New World was discovered—they had been long involved with slaving when they sold countless European Christians into slavery in Muslim slave markets for hundreds of years before Columbus.

So, why does the Nation of Islam target the Jews for special recognition? Because the Jews were better at the slave business than their contemporary European Christian competitors—they had been doing it for much, much longer. Only now, when human trafficking and slavery have taken on a special odium do Jews run from their history. “Why us?” Why you? Because you deserve the opprobrium that accompanies the special role you played in, among things, slaving—not just in the Americas but everywhere. That is why.

The Jews have a playbook for disciplining White Christians who critique them, and they likewise have a strategy to marginalize individual Jews who publicly air the Jews’ dirty laundry. However, the Nation of Islam presented them with a more difficult task because it represented a not-insignificant Black voice that the Jews supposedly support. In any event, the damage from The Secret Relationship was potentially too detrimental for them to ignore—they struck hard against Farrakhan and have largely succeeded in characterizing the work as “pseudo-scholarship,” which it is anything but. What is sad, and this too can be googled, is how many African Americans have jumped to the defense of their Jewish friends in Hollywood against Farrakhan. Add Louis Farrakhan to the long list of non-Jews that have been tarred by the Jews for daring to critique the Jews—had he limited his vociferousness to merely condemning European Christians, I have little doubt that he would have received a generous subsidy from the Jews, and they would have passionately defended his attack on European Christians.

One of the most telling critiques of The Secret Relationship is not that it is not scholarly but that it relies upon “old” scholarship. Consider the following analysis by Professor Winthrop D. Jordan published in The Atlantic in 1995:

Footnotes matter because verifiability depends on them. In the Karp-Korn instance we are nearly home, though we do not yet know when the article was published—and, of course, the date matters greatly. We can determine it only by consulting actual copies of the article, which turns out to be “Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789–1865,” which originated as an address by the president of the American Jewish Historical Society and was first published in 1961. The date [1961], it turns out, falls within a period when Jewish scholarship about the history of Jews in the United States was moving away from predominantly filiopietistic studies of ancestry and achievement and toward a more sophisticated assessment of the role of Jews in American culture. Korn’s article contains a great deal of specific information to which The Secret Relationship has been thoroughly faithful. … Dating such historical writing is critical, given the shifting state of historical scholarship over time. Many of the works cited in The Secret Relationship are so old that it would be generous to call them outdated. Of the first sixty-odd, nearly a third date from before 1950 and eight from the 1890s. In contrast, a recent pamphlet on the Atlantic slave trade that was published by the American Historical Association as an aid to scholars and teachers cites four sources that date from 1949 through the late 1960s and twenty-eight published since 1970.

In other words, The Secret Relationship may be scholarly, but it relies upon “old” scholarship that was produced during a less contemporary era in which Jewish scholars took no pains to hide the involvement in—and domination of—the Atlantic African slave trade. When convenient, the Jews cannot hide their pride in dominating anything, and this included a time when the Jews could not hide their pride in dominating the Atlantic African slave trade. So, we get an apologist for modern Jewish scholarship’s revision of the Jewish involvement in the slave trade by claiming, in nearly incomprehensible language, that we should minimize scholarship that was created during a brief but less “filiopietistic” era. What the author failed to understand is that every era that Jews write about is written in “filiopietistic” terms. The only thing that changes is what is considered historically acceptable. The Jewish scholars from the 1890s through the early 1960s were being “filiopietistic” in trumpeting the domination of the slave trade by the Jews—only later, when the slave trade became a toxic liability did later “filiopietistic” Jewish academics decide that airbrushing the Jewish role was the better course.

More to the point, the fact that later scholarship minimized the Jewish role is proof positive of a collective Jewish agenda to protect Jewish identity and Jewish victimology. Now Jews care about what Blacks think—and indeed the Jews are doing the best to instrumentalize Blacks against Whites (parenthetically, it is no accident that “Blacks Lives Matter” is largely underwritten by Jewish money)—so celebrating a past commercial achievement of Jewish cleverness in the Atlantic slave trade and defending earlier Jewish conduct within it takes a distinct backseat to contemporary Jewish needs. At least, the author acknowledges the danger:

YET surely the compilers of The Secret Relationship will feel that such disparities merely confirm their case—that by avoiding these older historical writings, the history establishment has been hiding the facts about the important role played by Jews in the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. The [American Historical Association’s] pamphlet does not, in fact, even mention Jews. The compilers will no doubt take this omission as further confirmation that the participation of Jews has been kept a secret.

To this observation, no rebuttal is offered. Professor Jordan’s critique of The Secret Relationship simply—and almost autonomically—moves on to yet more criticism of the book. Yes, someone has been hiding this seeming big historical fact—the Jews played a leadership role in the Atlantic slave trade—and this is a story unto itself. Credit Professor Jordan for recognizing this point but his failure to rebut this charge of “hiding” is quite telling. Ultimately, after conceding that the Jews did, in fact, play an outsized role in the slave trade—albeit mostly in the early years of European settlement, Professor Jordan offers a strange defense of the Jewish role in the African slave trade:

The reasons for the important role of Jews in the early years of the slave trade are not hard to find. To put the matter in summary [apologetic] terms, Jews in medieval Europe had effectively been pushed by the Western branch of the Christian Church away from land ownership and into commerce and financial dealings. During those early years of western overseas expansion many Jews continued to find opportunities for drawing wealth from commerce and finance. Under heavy threat in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Portuguese and Spanish Jews found refuge in the Netherlands, a quasi-nation that by that time had a widely reputed tolerance for religious diversity. Jewish citizens of the Netherlands were able to participate in domestic and foreign trade, including the slave trade on the coast of West Africa and in the Americas. These Jews, along with many Christian Dutch traders, supplied slaves not only to the Dutch colonial enterprises in Brazil and Surinam but also to Curaçao and other islands in the Antilles for transhipment to the New World colonies of other European nations. Ironically, Jews were therefore able to make major investments in landed enterprises—which in tropical America meant slave plantations—in Brazil and then Surinam. This brutal trade in human beings was carried on by various African peoples and sociopolitical entities in West and West Central Africa. The participation of these groups also waxed and waned over the 500-year period. Internal developments in Africa played an important part in determining how the trade varied from place to place and from time to time … . One aspect of the present issue, however, is utterly clear: by focusing on the importance of the activities of one internationally distributed religious group of Europeans, the Jews, this book ignores diversities in Africa.

In other words, it is … the Catholic Church’s fault. And the Africans? And the Jewish role in the slave trade in Roman times and for centuries in the Muslim world? The extensive discussions of slavery and lack of disapproval of slavery in Jewish religious writing dating from the ancient world? Hmmm. Meanwhile, nary a word of disapproval of the Jews. It is hard to believe that Professor Jordan had any self-respect left intact after he published this drivel

*          *          *          *

The Secret Relationship is a difficult and disturbing read. Notwithstanding that the focus is upon the Jews and their disproportionate role in the African slave trade, the general dehumanization of Africans is appalling. The business of chattel slavery is a black mark indeed for every participant—Christian and Jew alike. Turning human beings into objects—taking away their natural liberty, subjecting their women to outrages and forced concubinage, and separating families—is horrible. Something is galling about the Jewish liberals who cast aspersions profusely at the European Christians who engaged in chattel slavery. They, like us, bear an ignominy regarding it. Yet they are cagey to the point of dishonesty concerning their substantial part.

The Nation of Islam has ironically done the world a great favor in publishing this remarkable work. Even though it has been “discredited,” its very existence has forced the Jews to account for their role in the slave trade. As a coda to this work, one of the critics mentioned above, Professor Jordan, made a broad criticism of The Secret Relationship that is noteworthy for the irony lost on the critic:

Far from asking any question at all, [The Secret Relationship] begins with an answer—that Jews were especially important in exploiting Africans. It is able to demonstrate, at least ostensibly, that they were. This is the central difficulty: the book sets out to prove a thesis and pays little attention to evidence that might modify or contradict it. If one were to inquire more neutrally into what role Jews played in the Atlantic slave trade, one would find that it was a considerable one during the formative years of the trade, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a very small one when the trade reached much greater volume, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Here, Professor Jordan admits that the Jews played a “considerable” role during the formative years of the slave trade but criticizes the work for beginning the work with an “answer” and then, according to the critic, “ostensibly” supporting that same answer. What? What is the criticism—that the compilers should have consulted other sources to nuance the answer? As a professional historian, one might assume that an appreciation might be given to the Nation of Islam for pointing out how the Jews’ “considerable” role in the slave trade had been obliterated by contemporary historians to the point that no one knows of that role at all.

Where is the apology demanded of the Jews for that “considerable” role?  Instead, all we get is prevaricating and dissembling. The entire episode—both the work and the furious Jewish response—is a microcosm of Jewish malfeasance and Jewish gaslighting.

Saint Peter Claver, Pray for Us.

 

Retraction of My Article on Jewish Influence

On January 1 of this year my paper “The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence” was published in the peer-reviewed Israel-based academic journal Philosophia. As I noted at the time:

This is the first time I have attempted to publish an article on Jewish influence in the mainstream academic literature since The Culture of Critique was published in 1998 by Praeger, so it is something of a milestone. I have updated quite a bit of the material, particularly the scholarly writing on Jewish involvement in influencing U.S. immigration policy—Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique. I have always felt that Chapter 7 was the most important chapter in the book. …

Besides updating some critical aspects of The Culture of Critique, the paper emphasizes the point that the enactment of the 1965 immigration law did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be understood apart from the wider context of the rise of a new Jewish elite with influence in a wide range of areas. As I note in the article, the rise of this new elite “implies that vital issues of public policy, including immigration, the civil rights of African-Americans, women’s rights, religion in the public square (Hollinger’s “secularization of American society”), the legitimacy of white racial identity and interests, cosmopolitanism [identifying a “citizen of the world”], foreign policy in the Middle East, and many others will be affected by the attitudes and interests of this new elite.” The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America.

Publication resulted almost immediately in hostile comments from Jewish academic activists, calls for retraction, and condemnation of the journal’s editor for allowing such horrifying breach of academic sensibilities to happen. On January 4th, the publisher, Springer Nature, posted the following statement with the article.

04 January 2022 Editor’s Note: The Editor-in-Chief and publisher are aware of concerns raised with the content of this article and are investigating. Editorial action will be taken as appropriate once investigation of the concerns is complete and all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.

The editor or whoever was in charge then sent the paper out for three more reviews. The reviews arrived toward the end of February and I sent in my reply in early March. My reply ran to around 9000 words and responded to each of the issues raised (one of the reviewers was simply blowing off steam, so there really wasn’t anything to respond to). I prefaced my reply with the following summary statement:

General Comments

Far too often the reviewers fail to make an argument or specific criticisms of my work but seem to think that simply providing an invidious summary of my views is sufficient to rebut them. Most surprising to me is that none of the reviewers mention even one objection to the long section on immigration—by far the most critical and longest section in the article (amounting to 13 pages and 6500 words); nor is there any discussion of the rise of the intimately related topic of the rise of a new, substantially Jewish elite in the post-World War II era in the U.S., particularly since the 1960s. This is important because my paper addresses the three “core issues” raised by Cofnas, but the Jewish role in immigration policy is, as I note, “The only claim that, if true, would seriously endanger an important aspect of what Cofnas labels ‘the anti-Jewish narrative.’” The other issues discussed are interesting and important in a general discussion of Jewish issues, but they pale in comparison to the material on immigration policy. And, as noted in the paper, some of the most discussed issues, such as intermarriage and the issue of Jewish hypocrisy—two of Cofnas’s three core issues (not to mention Karl Marx’s Jewish identity), are completely irrelevant to central work Cofnas describes as being part of “the anti-Jewish narrative,” most notably The Culture of Critique (hereafter, CofC), which is what Cofnas is supposedly criticizing. Moreover, none of the reviews critique my analysis for why higher average Jewish IQ by itself fails to explain Jewish influence (i.e., Cofnas’s “default hypothesis”).

But all was for naught. I was informed in mid-May that the paper would be retracted and (amazingly) asking me if I agreed with this decision but notifying me that any objection that I had to the retraction would not be included along with the retraction statement. I of course objected and wrote yet another reply, this time to their retraction statement. This is their retraction statement, including specific statements of my scholarly malfeasance:

The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article. After publication concerns were raised regarding the content in this article and the validity of its arguments. Post-publication peer review concluded that the article does not establish a consistent methodology or document its claims with well-established sources. The article also makes several comparative claims without providing appropriate comparison data. Kevin MacDonald does not agree to this retraction. The online version of this article contains the full text of the retracted article as supplementary information.

Springer Nature formally retracted the paper sometime in early July—the title and the retraction notice are all that remain on the article’s main page, but the article can still be accessed on their site as “Supplementary Information,” with  “RETRACTED ARTICLE” emblazoned diagonally on every page.  However, anticipating this, I had enough sense to save a local copy, so it still lives on on my website as it originally appeared in Philosophia.

Retraction Response

I disagree with the retraction of my article “The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence.” The editors of Philosophia should be ashamed of themselves for retracting this article for such obviously spurious reasons. I am quite aware of the reality that academia has become intensely politicized and that Jews in particular are very sensitive about any discussions of Jewish influence. But I really didn’t think that my article would be retracted without any detailed response to my ~9000-word rebuttal to the post-publication reviews—a response that meticulously responded to every claim made by the reviewers. One expects a reasoned give-and-take in an academic venue, but this retraction is simply an assertion of authoritarian control. And to make matters worse, this response to the retraction statement will not be posted by the publisher.

The astonishing thing is that the retraction statement includes the following as the only reasons for the retraction:

Post-publication peer review concluded that the article does not establish a consistent methodology or document its claims with well-established sources. The article also makes several comparative claims without providing appropriate comparison data.

But none of the three post-publication reviews ever mentioned that I had failed to provide a consistent methodology, so obviously I felt no need to discuss this point in my response. And only one reviewer complained about sources, noting that I had cited evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton. The complaint about citing Dutton is simply ad hominem rather than an honest attempt to dispute what Dutton wrote on Jewish intermarriage—a topic that is, in any case, of only marginal relevance to the main points of my paper. As I noted in my reply, “my practice is that citations should be to information that I consider reasonable and reliable, not what the political affiliations of the authors are.” I cite many authors who have political beliefs that I do not subscribe to, and in fact, the vast majority of my sources come from Jewish authors.

Regarding the issue that the paper contains “several comparative claims without providing appropriate comparison data,” I responded to each proposed instance in my reply to the reviews. But the retraction statement fails to make an argument for why my rebuttal fails.

All of my responses to this issue made the point that I was not arguing—and it was not necessary for me to argue—that Jews are more ethnocentric than any particular group, only that Jews are indeed ethnocentric. For example, in my reply to one of the post-publication reviews, I noted:

The reviewer quotes me: “… Jews under discussion were ethnocentric as indicated by ethnic networking” and comments “Does that mean that blacks are ethnocentric because of their ethnic networking?  Or Catholics?  Or fundamentalist Christians?  This is gibberish because he is making statements about Jews as a group and arguing that they are different from gentiles but he presents no comparison data regarding relative ethnocentrism.”

[My response:] Notice that I do not make a point that Jews are more ethnocentric than any particular group either in the paper under review or in The Culture of Critique—apart from the 2002 Preface to the First Paperback Edition of The Culture of Critique (pp. xviii–xxxi) contrasting Western European and Jewish cultural forms on a variety of traits. The material in the 2002 preface is a preliminary version of the ideas in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (2019) and is in no way essential to the argument in Culture of Critique as published in 1998, where the only relevant claim I make is that Jews are ethnocentric—a claim that I document exhaustively. However, for completeness, my view is that Jews are in general more ethnocentric than Western European groups (I make no other comparisons), particularly northwestern European groups—the thesis of my Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition (2019). My emphasis on the uniqueness of Western individualism is entirely congruent with Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World (2020) … . When Henrich uses the superlative ‘WEIRDest’ (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) in the title, he is emphasizing the uniqueness of the Western peoples; individualism is the polar opposite of collectivism and its associated ethnocentrism endemic to Jewish groups.

Thus there is no rebuttal to my argument that between-group comparisons are irrelevant to the argument presented in The Culture of Critique where the only point was that in fact Jews are in fact ethnocentric as indicated by Jewish ethnic networking, not that they are more ethnocentric than any other group. And in my later writing I did provide comparative data based on Western individualism—data that are irrelevant to the argument in The Culture of Critique; these data show that the individualism of the West is unique among world cultures but such data are not relevant for the argument in The Culture of Critique. None of this is considered in the retraction statement.

This retraction is a disgrace to the academic profession. At the very least, this statement should be included along with the retraction statement so that readers can judge for themselves the legitimacy of retracting it.

To his credit, Nathan Cofnas, my adversary in all this, publicly objected to the retraction, posting this on Twitter:

Two important points. The retraction is unprecedented: It’s “the 1st time a paper has been retracted from a philosophy journal for political reasons.” And more importantly, his email notifying Jonathan Haidt, one of the founders of Heterodox Academy, that the paper was retracted got no response. Heterodox Academy represents itself as follows:

Heterodox Academy is a nonpartisan collaborative of 5,000+ professors, educators, administrators, staff, and students who are committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning.

And they note:

All our members have embraced the following statement:

“I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.”

But apparently some viewpoints are not allowed, and there can be no disagreement on certain issues. Their commitment to open inquiry is a farce.

Jonathan Haidt is well known to me because of his work criticizing the groupthink that is so prevalent in the academic world; I cite him several times in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition in Chapter 8 where I discuss the academic world as one of the pillars of elite power in the West (“the academic world can accurately be characterized as a moral community of the left in the sense of Jonathan Haidt”[1]). He is Jewish, and one is tempted to conclude that Heterodox Academy is simply another example of controlled opposition in the service of safeguarding Jewish interests in restricting the boundaries of academic debate on Jewish issues.


Jonathan Haidt, “Post-partisan Social Psychology.” Presentation at the meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX., January 27, 2011.

On Russophobia and “Anti-Semitism”

I first learned of the term “Russophobia” many years ago in Robert Wistrich’s 1991 book Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. My initial impression was essentially that Russians on the “radical right” were attempting to turn the tables on Jews by accusing them of what is effectively the inverse of anti-Semitism (i.e., Russophobia). Of course, this was little more than a mere stratagem designed to obscure their true anti-Semitic intentions. Although not at all thuggish or violent, the proponents of Russophobia, according to Wistrich, were especially dangerous since they included many prominent writers and scholars and had viable connections within the Soviet power structure of the day. Wistrich saw through it all, and so should any right-thinking gentile.

Of the people decrying Russophobia, Wistrich writes:

They are in favor of patriotism, law and order, and traditional values blended with ecological concerns to preserve the Russian cultural heritage. What they claim to hate are the destructive influences of ‘liberals’ in Soviet life, the fads and so-called ‘Russophobes’ – those émigrés, dissidents and above all Jews who are quite falsely said to denigrate Russian history and mock the backwardness of Russian culture. [Igor] Shafarevich’s tract, entitled Russophobia (1989), can be taken as the Bible of this anti-Western, anti-Socialist and antisemitic gospel, driven by intellectual paranoia and an apocalyptic vision of the spiritual crisis confronting Soviet society.

This was essentially my baseline for Russophobia for many years prior to my conversion on the Jewish Question upon reading Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique. I again encountered Shafarevich’s name when researching Solzhenitsyn and the Right. Solzhenitsyn mentions Shafarevich quite often in his memoirs—always in a positive light—and included three of Shafarevich’s essays in his 1974 From Under the Rubble collection. One of these essays was the incipient version of Shafarevich’s famous work The Socialist Phenomenon.

Shararevich (who was one of the twentieth-century’s leading mathematicians and who died in 2017 at the age of 95.) distributed his long essay “Russophobia” as samizdat in the early 1980s, and published it in the Soviet periodical Nash Sovremennik in 1989. In 2002, he published an expanded version of this essay as Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma, a full-length treatise on Russo-Jewish relations, similar to Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Togetherbut with greater emphasis on religion. Unfortunately, no English translation of this work exists as of yet.

What’s interesting about “Russophobia,” however, is not only its thoughtful and well-argued counter-Semitism, but the shallow and dishonest responses it engendered from Jewish writers, which tarnished much of Shafarevich’s reputation in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union. From the essay’s onset, Shafarevich expresses concern for the “spiritual life” of Russia. He notes that starting in the 1970s, a flood of anti-Russian literature was being produced which he saw as “the expression of the view of an established, cohesive school.” According to these writers, Russia is inherently despotic and oppressive due to the backward nature of the Russians themselves, which manifests itself mostly through violence, servility, and “messianism.”

Shafarevich counters such slander over several pages of historical discussion, for example, on Richard Pipes’ claim that Tsar Nicholas I served as the model for not only Soviet totalitarianism but for Hitler’s Third Reich as well. Shafarevich demonstrates clearly that totalitarianism was fully developed in the West prior to Nicholas I, and so Tsarist Russia should be let off the hook for initiating “all of the 20th century’s antiliberal tendencies.” As for “Messianism,” Shafarevich deftly reminds his readers that the outlook which appoints a certain group as being “destined to determine the fate of humanity and become its savior” began not with the Russians but with the Jews thousands of years ago. And as for the claim that “the revolution in Russia was predetermined by the whole course of Russian history,” Shafarevich points out that socialism was already fully-developed in the West before gaining any kind of foothold in Russia in the nineteenth century. For evidence, he cites the lack of Russian proto-socialist authors of the stature of Thomas More or Tommaso Campanella, and how early Russian socialists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen started their socialist endeavors only after they emigrated to the West. He concludes [emphasis in the original]:

Thus, many phenomena that the authors of the tendency we are examining proclaim to be typically Russian prove to be not only not typical of Russia but altogether non-Russian in origin, imported from the West: that was the payment, as it was, for Russia’s entry into the sphere of the new Western culture.

Now, by this point in the essay, the savvy reader will know where it’s going. Although Shafarevich had hardly used the J-word, the people he was skewering had names that echo into eternity—or if they don’t, they should. Grigory Pomerants, Richard Pipes, Boris Shragin, Alexander Yanov, Boris Khazanov, and others. Essentially, Shafarevich is accusing Jewish writers for being the nucleus of this Russophobia and imbuing it with Jewish nationalism. He’s not responding to these people as individuals. He’s responding to them, however politely, as Jews. And that is unacceptable to the same Jews who gleefully condemn Russians as Russians. See how that double standard works?

“Are these authors interested in the truth at all?” he asks. He later probes for ulterior motives:

And hatred for one nation is usually associated with a heightened sense of one’s belonging to another. Doesn’t this make it likely that our authors are under the influence of some sort of powerful force rooted in their national feelings?

In this passage, one can sense a precursor to the evolutionary struggles between populations as found in MacDonald’s Separations and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique.

Shafarevich borrows terms from historian Augustin Cochin, who divided the antagonists of the French Revolution into “Lesser people” and “Greater people.” The former group, an elite minority, lived in a spiritual and intellectual world at odds with the established order, as represented by the latter group. The Lesser People were bent on revolution and enforcing newfangled notions such as equality and freedom, while the Greater People insisted upon Catholicism, concepts such as honor and nobility, loyalty to the King, and taking pride in French history. These were the very things that the Lesser People considered dead weight and wished to remove, with maximum violence if necessary.

Shafarevich applies this duality to 1980s Soviet life by demonstrating how this Jewish school of Russophobia had the same motives and possessed the same hatred that Cochin’s Lesser People had for the Greater People. Their platforms were eeriely similar. In both cases, the Lesser People stressed individualism over nationalism, a disconnect from history, and an utter contempt for the people.

He states that Yanov pushed the idea that

humanity is quantized ONLY INTO SEPARATE INVIDUALS, and not into nations. It is not a new viewpoint. Humanity dispersed (or “quantized”) into individual units that are totally unconnected to one another—such, evidently, is Yanov’s ideal. [emphasis in the original]

As for Russian history, it is complete “savagery, coarseness and failure;” nothing but “tyranny, slavery, and senseless, bloody convulsions.” Religion, according to Pomerants “has ceased to be a trait of the people.” Pomerants also declared that love for one’s people is more dangerous then love for animals and that Russians possess “a lackeyish mixture of malice, envy and worship of authority.” Watch how he advocates for genocide:

The peasant cannot be reborn except as a character in an opera. Peasant nations are hungry nations, and nations in which the peasantry has disappeared [sic!] are nations in which hunger has disappeared.

Andrei Amalrik, a non-Jewish ally, insults the Russian thusly:

And if language is the fullest expression of the spirit of the people, then who is more Russian—the “little Negro” Pushkin and the “little Jew” Mandelshtam, or the muzhik in the beer hall who, wiping his spittle across his unshaven cheeks, bellows: “I’m a Russian!”

Khazanov declares not only that he finds Russia repulsive but that “to be a member of the Russian intelligentsia at the present time inevitably means being a Jew.” Shragin proclaims that the Russians being treated worse than all other groups in prisons was “just and logical.” Furthermore, none—not a single one—of these authors apply similar criticisms to Jews—only to Russians. The authors simply presume Jewish innocence before going out to destroy the reputation of the Russian people. Such attitudes breed revolution and terrorism, as was demonstrated in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and culminated in the inhuman atrocities of the Bolsheviks (which, Shafarevich demonstrates, also contained a nucleus of Jews). Shafarevich recognizes that for the Greater People, this is essentially a recipe for death.

Shafarevich:

[a] people that assesses its own history IN THAT WAY cannot exist. We are dealing here with a phenomenon that vitally affects us inhabitants of this country. [emphasis in the original]

This sentence represents the essence of the current struggle of the White Dissident Right, and the core of “Russophobia.” We, as the Greater People elite, oppose the Lesser People elite—most of whom are Jews—not because we possess an a priori hatred of Jews but because we wish to survive as a people. Shafarevich demonstrates how adhering to the Lesser People’s platform will guarantee that we won’t survive as a people. Really, it’s either-or.

As expected, Jews everywhere accused Shafarevich of anti-Semitism. Walter Laqueur responded with a New Republic essay entitled “From Russia with Hate,” in which he straight-facedly asks if Shafarevich was an admirer of Hitler (despite how Shafarevich condemns the Nazis as totalitarians in “Russophobia”). Semyon Resnik nitpicked on minor factual inaccuracies regarding Shafarevich’s treatment of the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. He also accused Shafarevich of perpetuating a blood libel by describing the murder as a “ritual act”—as if this undermines the main points of Shafarevich’s essay.

In his stunningly spiteful 1990 essay entitled “Russian History and Anti-Semitism of Igor Shafarevich,” Eliezer Rabinovich sets up a straw man by accusing Shafarevich of blaming solely the Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution (something Shafarevich explicitly does not do in section eight of his essay). He dodges the question of whether Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks by declaring such Jews as Trotsky and Zinoviev as “anti-Jewish Jews.” He then disputes much of Shafarevich’s historical exegesis and harps on Russian flaws and Russian culpability for past atrocities. Fair enough. No people is without sin, and Shafarevich claims nothing of the sort with Russia. Further, Rabinovich’s arguments do not necessarily refute Shafarevich’s. It is possible for Russophobia and anti-Semitism as the authors describe them to exist simultaneously. Yet Rabinovich states flatly that “Jewish Russophobia simply does not exist,” while Russian anti-Semitism does. Talk about presumption of innocence! How can anyone take such a self-serving zealot seriously?

Josephine Woll in her Soviet Jewish Affairs essay entitled “Russians and ‘Russophobes’” smears Shafarevich as a radical slavophile. She then, quite superficially, attempts to employ logic against him.

Shafarevich argues inductively, from results to ’causes.’ There are demonstrations and strikes. Their causes cannot be objective circumstances (in any event, Shafarevich does not consider that possibility). Therefore they must be provoked. Who could benefit from provoking them? Those who hate Russia and wish to see her weak. Who feels such hatred for Russia? Jews. QED.

Note how Woll completely ignores the evidence Shafaravich presents to support his idea that Jewish nationalism is the driving force behind Russophobia. Do the quotes he presents not evince contempt for Russia? Are most of their authors not Jewish? Aren’t these authors attacking Russia and Russians while not simultaneously attacking Israel and Jews? How can one not detect enemy action in all of this?

And this brings us back to Wistrich and his ludicrous claim that certain Jews “are quite falsely said to denigrate Russian history and mock the backwardness of Russian culture.” Falsely, is it? Did he not read “Russophobia?” In his book, Wistrich didn’t even include “Russophobia” among his source material, only Woll’s article and others like it. Did Robert Wistrich lie out ignorance or knowing? And none of these writers make credible attempts to counter Shafaravich’s evidence or disprove his conclusions. For them, it’s enough to label such conclusions as anti-Semitic. Whether such conclusions adhere to the truth, like the existence of Russophobia itself, is a less pressing matter.

“The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence”

Nathan Cofnas published a paper in the Israel-based academic journal Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel in February of last year titled “The Anti-Jewish Narrative.” Andrew Joyce wrote a masterful reply, “The Cofnas Problem,” while I decided to try to  publish a response in Philosophia. My paper went through two rounds of peer review and was finally accepted. It was the lead article in the January issue of Philosophia,  and is available as an open-access paper on Springer Nature [The two links in the previous sentence go to the original paper but now with the retraction notice.] I provide a local version due to [well-founded] concerns the article will be pulled by Springer Nature.

This is the first time I have attempted to publish an article on Jewish influence in the mainstream academic literature since The Culture of Critique was published in 1998 by Praeger, so it is something of a milestone. I have updated quite a bit of the material, particularly the scholarly writing on Jewish involvement in influencing U.S. immigration policy—Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique. I have always felt that Chapter 7 was the most important chapter in the book. Intellectual movements can decline drastically in influence. This was the fate of psychoanalysis—but not Boasian anthropology, and the intellectual descendants of the Frankfurt School remain influential throughout postmodern academia. Moreover, at least in Western democracies, even political movements, as embodied in the Jewish subculture of radical leftism, can be reversed at the ballot box—unless the people against whom the 1965 immigration law was directed are replaced by a new electorate with no attachment to the people and culture of the West. As argued in the paper, this is exactly what the 1965 immigration law was intended to accomplish in the minds of the Jewish activist community that was by far the most influential force in enacting the law.

Besides updating some critical aspects of The Culture of Critique, the paper emphasizes the point that the enactment of the 1965 immigration law did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be understood apart from the wider context of the rise of a new Jewish elite with influence in a wide range of areas. As I note in the article, the rise of this new elite “implies that vital issues of public policy, including immigration, the civil rights of African-Americans, women’s rights, religion in the public square (Hollinger’s “secularization of American society”), the legitimacy of white racial identity and interests, cosmopolitanism [identifying a “citizen of the world”], foreign policy in the Middle East, and many others will be affected by the attitudes and interests of this new elite.” The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America. This new elite exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture” The 1950s saw the decline of the old WASP elite, recounted in Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. By the 1960s this new elite was flexing its muscle, resulting in a cultural and demographic revolution which is ongoing and indeed accelerating. This new, substantially Jewish elite was (and remains) centered in academia and the media, and, because of Jewish wealth, this new elite has been able to have decisive influence in the  political process via donations to political causes.

The abstract:

The role of Jewish activism in the transformative changes that have occurred in the West in recent decades continues to be controversial. Here I respond to several issues putatively related to Jewish influence, particularly the “default hypothesis” that Jewish IQ and urban residency explain Jewish influence and the role of the Jewish community in enacting the 1965 immigration law in the United States; other issues include Jewish ethnocentrism and intermarriage and whether diaspora Jews are hypocritical in their attitudes on immigration to Israel versus the United States. The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America that exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture. Jewish activism in the pro-immigration movement involved: intellectual movements denying the importance of race in human affairs; establishing, staffing, and funding anti-restrictionist organizations; recruiting prominent non-Jews to anti-restrictionist organizations; rejecting the ethnic status quo as a goal because of fear of a relatively homogeneous white majority; leadership in Congress and the executive branch.

“Modify the standards of the in-group”: On Jews and Mass Communications

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in September, 2018, in two parts. It is a classic, and an important addition to the research on Jewish involvement in creating the culture of critique—the anti-White culture that we live in today. A revision to The Culture of Critique would of necessity include a summary and discussion of this material. The above photo is a testament to the way we live now—viewing the world through lenses shaped by activist Jews.


“To be successful, mass propaganda on the behalf of out-groups would have to modify the standards of the in-group.
Samuel H. Flowerman, Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry, 1947.
[1]

“The whole story is transparently barmy.” This is what Guardian journalist Jason Wilson had to say in a 2015 article discussing “conspiracy theories” about Cultural Marxism. Barmy, for the uninitiated, is a British informal adjective with the meanings “mad; crazy; extremely foolish.” Wilson continues by attempting to explain “the whole story”:

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios. There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think … The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism.

Re-reading this article recently, I wondered what Mr Wilson would say if I told him I possessed a document wherein an influential Jew linked to Marcuse and Adorno unambiguously sets out a scheme for the capture of the media, the mass brainwashing of White populations with multicultural propaganda, the manipulation of in-group culture to make it hostile to its own sense of ethnocentrism, the spreading of a culture of political correctness, and, ultimately, the co-option of the West by small ethnic clique pursuing its own interests under the guise of “promoting tolerance.” I wonder what he’d say if I told him the same Jew operated a network of hundreds, if not thousands, of other Jewish intellectuals engaged in the same single task — unlocking a psychological “backdoor” to White culture in order to completely reorient it. I think I’m correct in assuming that Mr Wilson would call me “barmy,” and accuse me of regurgitating the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I suspect he would believe I’m a fantasist and an anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist. I know he’d dismiss even the possibility that such a document might actually exist. And yet it does exist.

The Intellectual Context

It’s quite possible that none of you have heard the name Samuel H. Flowerman, but I can say with certainty that you all, in a sense, know him nonetheless. If you’re even remotely familiar with the Frankfurt School, then you’re familiar with one aspect of his work. And, as we will soon discuss, if you find yourself living in a culture brainwashed into self-hatred then you’re familiar with another, though related, aspect of his work. Flowerman, it must be conceded, has been largely forgotten by history. He lurks in larger shadows left by “the exiles.” But Flowerman was in some respects as crucial a member of the Frankfurt School circle as any other. Of course, he wasn’t German-born. Nor was he a member of the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Instead, he was born in Manhattan in 1912, the grandson of a jeweler who arrived by ship from Warsaw’s Jewish district in 1885. And yet he would later achieve enough influence within his own group, as both activist and psychologist, to act as Research Director for the American Jewish Committee, and, most famously of all, to direct and co-edit the Studies in Prejudice series with Max Horkheimer.

For most who have in fact heard of him, this is perhaps the greatest extent of their knowledge of Flowerman. But for an accident, it would certainly represent the limits of mine. Very recently, however, I was conducting some research on Jewish activism in the cultural background preceding Brown v. Board of Education, and found myself, as I have so many times before, tumbling down the proverbial rabbit hole. After initially focusing on the figures of Jonathan Kozol and Horace Kallen (whose influence extends well beyond the popularisation of what he coined “cultural pluralism”), I came across a 2004 article in the Journal of American History by Howard University’s Daryl Scott titled “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education.”[2] Scott mentioned Flowerman because of the latter’s desire (pre-Brown) to inject theories derived from Studies in Prejudice into the education system, believing that moulding children was one of the best methods to achieve long-term and sustained socio-cultural change [see here for evidence the policy is continued to this day by the ADL].

Flowerman, a fan of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, possessed a background in both the study of education and of mass communication, and this heavily informed his thinking and activism.[3] In particular, he was doubtful that mass propaganda could, by itself, directly affect significant change among the White masses and make them abandon their “prejudice and latent authoritarianism” [i.e. acknowledging their own ethnic interests]. He was fascinated instead by the way peer group pressure exerted influence on the individual school children he had studied, along with the potential influence of teachers as shapers of minds as well as mere educators. For example, in a 1950 article for New York Times Magazine titled “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” Flowerman argued that, in order to produce “personalities less susceptible to authoritarian ideas, we must learn how to select better teachers and to train them better; we must see them as engineers of human relations instead of instructors of arithmetic and spelling.”[4]

The combined result of his research and thinking in these areas was his argument that it should be desirable for people like him to obtain control over the means of mass communication. Not only, argued Flowerman, should this control be used for blanket “pro-tolerance” propaganda, but it should also actively reshape in-group standards — thus reforming peer group pressures to become antagonistic to in-group ethnocentrism. His (then) highly ambitious goal was a culture that policed itself: a politically correct culture in which Whites, via peer pressure, conformed to new values — values much more user-friendly to Jews. His views and goals were later summarized by Herbert Greenberg, a colleague and co-ethnic in the same field, in 1957:

Flowerman de-emphasized the value and effectiveness of propaganda as a technique for reducing prejudice. He also agrees with the conception that techniques based on group structure and inter-personal relationships are the most effective.[5]

Flowerman and Greenberg were just two members of what was effectively a series of interlinked battalions of Jewish psychologists and sociologists operating with a kind of religious fervour in the fields of “prejudice studies,” opinion-shaping, and mass communications between the 1930s and 1950s, all with the goal of “unlocking” the White mind and opening it to “tolerance.” In a remarkable invasion (and creation) of disciplines similar to the Jewish flood into the medical and race sciences in the 1920s and 1930s, Jews also flooded, and then dominated, the fields of opinion research and mass communications — areas of research that overlapped so often under Jewish scholars like Flowerman that they were practically indistinguishable.

Even a quick review of lists of Past Presidents reveals that Jews were vastly over-represented in, if not dominated, the membership and presidencies of both the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). And of the four academics considered the “founding fathers” of mass communication research in America, two (Vienna-born Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin) were Jews. Of the two European American founding fathers, most of Harold Lasswell’s graduate students were Jewish[6] (e.g., Daniel Lerner, Abraham Kaplan, Gabriel Almond, Morris Janowitz, and Nathan Leites) and he also sponsored the Institute for Social Research’s project on anti-Semitism.[7] The fourth, Carl Hoveland, had an equally Jewish coterie around him at Yale, where he operated a team of researchers along with Milton Rosenberg and Robert Abelson. Historian Hynek Jeřábek notes that Lazarsfeld’s influence in particular can’t be understated — by 1983, seven years after his death, “the directors of social research at the three largest media networks in the United States, CBS, ABC, and NBC were all his former students.”[8] Another Jew, Jay Blumler, has been called “a founding father of British media studies.”[9]

In fact, the Jewish dominance of the study of public opinion (and the potential for its manipulation) simply can’t be overstated. In addition to those already named, Joseph Klapper, Bernard Berelson, Fritz Heider, Leo Bogart, Elihu Katz, Marie Jahoda, Joseph Gittler, Morris Rosenberg, Ernest Dichter, Walter Weiss, Nathan Glazer, Bernard J. Fine, Bruno Bettelheim, Wallace Mandell, Hertha Hertzog, Dororthy Blumenstock, Stanley Schachter, David Caplovitz, Walter Lippmann, Sol Ginsburg, Harry Alpert, Leon Festinger, Michael Gurevitch, Edward Shils, Eugene Gaier, Joseph Goldsen, Julius Schreiber, Daniel Levinson, Herbert Blumer, I. M. A. Myers, Irving Janis, Miriam Reimann, Edward Sapir, Solomon Asch, and Gerald Wieder were just some of the hundreds of highly influential academics working in these fields that were born into Jewish families, associated heavily with other Jews, contributed work to Jewish organizations, married Jews, and yet concerned themselves with a degree of fanaticism with White opinion and ethnocentrism in America. This is to say nothing of their graduate students, who numbered in the thousands.

Despite some superficial differences in the titles of “opinion research,” “prejudice studies,” and “mass communications,” these academics all worked with each other to some degree, if not directly (in organisations or in co-written studies or papers) then via mutual associations. For example, it is a matter of historical fact that, in addition to three of the four founding fathers of mass communications research being Jews, all three were also very intimately involved with the Frankfurt School and the broader Jewish agenda to ‘adapt’ public opinion. Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin, the two gurus of mass communication, together attended a 1944 conference on anti-Semitism organized by the research department of the American Jewish Committee (headed by Samuel H. Flowerman) and the Berkeley faction of the Frankfurt School in exile (headed by Theodor Adorno).[10] David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer also point out that Lazarsfeld was in regular communication with Max Horkheimer, was “strongly supportive of the Horkheimer Circle and its work,” and even furnished the latter with “notes and recommendations for the Horkheimer Circle’s unpublished ‘Anti-Semitism Among American Labor.’”[11] He was also a colleague at Columbia with and close confidante of, Leo Lowenthal.[12] By the late 1940s, Lazarsfeld’s ex-wife and mother of his child, Marie Jahoda, had even come to act as an American Jewish Committee liaison between Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, and co-wrote a number of articles on “prejudice” with Flowerman in Commentary.

One should by now begin to see clear connections forming between the American Jewish Committee, the Frankfurt School, “prejudice studies,” Jewish dominance of the academic field of “mass communications,” and, finally, the flow of influence from this field into the mass media (most clearly in the positions at CBS, ABC, and NBC quickly obtained by Lazarsfeld’s students). These connections will be important later.

A reasonable working hypothesis for such a sudden concentration of mutually networking Jews (often from different countries) in these areas of research would be that Jewish identity and Jewish interests played a significant part in their career choices, and that the trend was then accelerated by ethnic nepotism and promotion from within the group. Jeřábek appears to concur when he states that “Paul Lazarsfeld’s Jewish background, or the fact that many people around him in Vienna were Jewish, can help to explain his future affinities, friendships, or decisions.”[13] Setting aside the deep historical context of conflict between Jews and Europeans, a contingent and contemporary explanation might be that Jews were moved into fields involving mass opinion and perceptions of prejudice because they were deeply disturbed by the rise of National Socialism.

A more general, but, perhaps more convincing explanation considering their activities over time, is that these Jews were in fact disturbed by any form of ethnically defined and assertive White host culture. For example, some of the foreign-born academics listed above, such as Marie Jahoda and Ernest Dichter, had even been arrested and detained in pre-Anschluss, pre-National Socialist Vienna as cultural and political subversives in the early 1930s. They then made their way to the United States or the United Kingdom where they more or less continued the same behavior. It is highly likely that these individuals sought both to understand and change the mechanics of opinion and mass communications in their host populations in order to make it more amenable to Jewish interests. When they were effectively exiled from one host population they merely transplanted their ambitions to a new one. The only alternative hypothesis, long used in Jewish apologetics for any similar instance of Jewish over-representation, is that huge numbers of mutually networking Jews convened in these disciplines purely by accident. Nathan Cofnas and Jordan Peterson, for example, might argue that Jews accidentally entered these areas of study en masse simply because they possessed high IQs and liked living in cities.

The problem with such reasoning is that the work produced by these academics and activists was so highly focused against White American opinion, rather than appearing random or accidental, that it strongly indicates these scholars entered the field of mass communications with a clear and common agenda. For example, Jewish mass communications scholar Bernard Berelson was not just a researcher in public opinion, but also conducted a series of propaganda tests on how to make White Americans find their own ethnocentrism abhorrent. In 1945 he conducted a study in which a cartoon was shown to the public that made connections between Fascism and American culture. The cartoon, titled “The Ghosts Go West…,” showed ghosts leaving the graves of Hitler, Mussolini, and Goebbels, and flying to America carrying a banner that read: “Down with Labour Unions, Foreign Born, Jews, Catholics, Negroes.” The message was clearly that “intolerance” in America was basically the demonic ghost of fascism. Interestingly, however, the study found that Jews exposed to the cartoon were so fixated on the banner that they missed the underlying message altogether and believed the cartoon was a far right creation. The potentially confusing nature of the piece meant it was never deployed as a “pro-tolerance” propaganda weapon.[14]

Berelson was also later a colleague and friend of Frederick S. Jaffe, the Jewish then-Vice President of Planned Parenthood. Both Jaffe and Berelson later became somewhat notorious because of a memo (known in history as the Jaffe Memo) sent in 1969 from the former to the latter, in which anti-White sociopath Jaffe put forth his own series of protocols that included a table that summarized many proposals from various sources regarding population control. This table contained proposals such as compulsory abortions for out-of-wedlock births, sterilizations for women with more than two children, encouraging homosexuality, and encouraging women to work. Both would also later work together on the infamous 1972 Rockefeller Commission Report which incorporated many of Jaffe’s proposals. We thus see more links between Jewishness, “prejudice studies,” the discipline of mass communications studies, and anti-White Jewish activism more generally.

In reality, the work of all these scholars orbited the same themes, if not openly, then more secretively (as in the case of Lazarsfeld’s work with the Institute for Social Research). Marie Jahoda, the ex-Austrian subversive, produced a series of studies that were mere variations on the theme of White ethnocentrism, something she pathologized most famously in Antisemitism and Emotional Disorder (1950).[15] In the same year, Morris Janowitz and Bruno Bettelheim worked together to produce Dynamics of Prejudice.[16] Meanwhile Joseph Gittler produced such works as “Measuring the Awareness of the Problem of Group Hostility,”[17] and “Man and His Prejudices.”[18] Herbert Blumer produced “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position.”[19] Fritz Heider worked with Kurt Lewin and Solomon Asch on unlocking the ways in which conformity could alter group behavior and individual opinions.[20] Ernest Dichter believed his studies of the mass communications in marketing could lead to the development of persuasive techniques that could “stop the new wave of anti-Semitism.”[21] The work of Walter Weiss concerned “mass communication, public opinion, and social change as they bear on changing racial attitudes.”[22] And aside from his secretive work with the Institute for Social Research, Paul Lazarsfeld, while working at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, introduced the notion of “social bookkeeping,” a systematic service that would note and evaluate “prejudice” in any material appearing in mass media of communications. I could go on.

Marie Jahoda

What we see here is the origins of an extensive Jewish joint enterprise in which the unlocking and alteration of White American public opinion is the goal. This is not conspiracy theory, but an established and provable fact. In a sense, the Frankfurt School, or Institute for Social Research, was the tip of an iceberg. The work of Horkheimer, Adorno et al, both drew from, and enthused, a large and growing army of Jewish academics working in the fields of public opinion and mass communications. This was a body of academics and activists keen to translate theories on “prejudice and the authoritarian personality” into action — to change the opinions and thinking of the host population. They would go on to develop forms of testing and analysis to further these goals, and their students would go on to take dominant positions in the fields of the mass media and mass communications. In many cases these academics speak openly of the need for control of the media and the mass dissemination of sophisticated propaganda (all of which could be tried and perfected at the expense of their universities in the name of ‘prejudice research’). Of all these activists, however, none produced a work more bluntly subversive than Samuel Flowerman’s 1947 essay “Mass Propaganda in the War on Bigotry.” It is to the protocols of Samuel H. Flowerman that we now turn our attention.


“Millions of leaflets, pamphlets, cartoons, comic books, articles
and more recently radio and movie scripts — have been produced and disseminated in the propaganda war.”  Samuel H. Flowerman, Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry, 1947.[1]

The Protocols of Samuel H. Flowerman

Samuel H. Flowerman, as Research Director at the American Jewish Committee, as colleague of the Institute for Social Research, and as a kind of hub for the expansive Jewish clique of mass communications scholars, was at the center of the drive to put Jewish “opinion research” initiatives into practical action. The clearest articulation of what this practical action would look like was articulated in his 1947 essay, “Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry.” Flowerman’s foremost concern was that, although millions of dollars were being spent by organisations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League on propaganda, propaganda may not by itself be sufficient for the mass transformation of values in the host population — in particular, for the weakening of its ethnocentrism.

Flowerman begins by explaining the format and extent of existing efforts: “Millions of leaflets, pamphlets, cartoons, comic books, articles — and more recently radio and movie scripts — have been produced and disseminated in the propaganda war (429).” Flowerman’s use of the language of warfare is of course interesting in itself and will be discussed further below. For now, we should focus on what Flowerman lists as the five aims of the “propaganda war”:

1. “The restructuring of the attitudes of prejudiced individuals, or at least their neutralization.”
2. “The restructuring of group values toward intolerance.”
3. “The reinforcement of attitudes of those already committed to a democratic ideology perhaps by creating an illusion of universality or victory.”
4. “The continued neutralisation of those whose attitudes are yet unstructured and who are deemed “safer” if they remain immune to symbols of bias.”
5. “Off-setting the counter-symbols of intolerance.” (429)

Flowerman concedes that the level of work and control required to achieve these aims would be extensive, and that the project was highly ambitious, seeking nothing less than “successful mass persuasion in the field of intergroup relations (429).” But he is equally clear in the conditions required for such success.

Flowerman’s first condition is “control by pro-tolerance groups or individuals of the channels of mass communication.” (430) Since Flowerman’s entire context of “pro-tolerance” activism was essentially Jewish, we may assume he is strongly implying that the channels of mass communication should fall into Jewish hands. Since “control” in Flowerman’s phrasing is not qualified, and since many newspapers, radio stations, and movie production companies were already in the hands of “pro-tolerance” Jews, the implication is also present that this control should be absolute. In addition, notes Flowerman, total control of these channels may still not be sufficient in itself. The host population will still need to be exposed to the productions of mass communications, and this was to be assured via “force, commercial monopoly, and/or crisis (designed or accidental).” (430) Only then would ‘pro-tolerance’ forces see “the persuasive devices and techniques of the elite playing upon the susceptibilities of the manipulated.” (430) Flowerman closes here with reference to Erich Fromm’s theory that people have “a desire
to be controlled.”

The second of Flowerman’s conditions for “successful mass persuasion in the field of intergroup relations” is saturation. This condition, like that of control and monopoly of the channels of mass communication, is intended as absolute. In other words, the message of “pro-tolerance” was to be ubiquitous and all-pervasive — beyond what was possible in 1947 and probably beyond what could even be conceptualized in 1947. In Flowerman’s words: “In addition to the large sums of money currently being expended on tolerance propaganda, significantly greater sums would probably be needed to achieve the degree of saturation — as yet hypothetical — required.” (430) The general idea here is to increase the “flow of pro-tolerance symbols” as a proportion of “the total stream of communications.”

In November 1946, a three-day convention, partly organized by Flowerman, was held in New York, bringing together “experts in the general field of public relations, including advertising, direct mail, film, radio, and press; professional workers on the staff of national and local agencies specifically concerned with fighting group discrimination; and social scientists from the universities and national defense agencies.”[2] Jews, of course, dominated all of these areas, and the list of attendees included the previously mentioned figures Bruno Bettelheim, Sol Ginsburg, Hertha Herzog (radio research director of McCann-Erickson, Inc.), Julius Schreiber, Paul Lazarsfeld, Joseph Goldsen, and Morris Janowitz. One of the findings of the mass communications scholars present at the convention was that even control and saturation may not be sufficient to ensure a transformation of opinions and values in the demographic majority. This was the case when the propaganda encountered particularly strong-minded individuals, or when the propaganda got lost in the overall stream of communications that one encounters in the course of everyday life. Flowerman thus writes with frustration that “we are developing a nation of individuals who work, worry, love, and play while news commentators, comedians, opera companies, symphony orchestras, and swing bands are broadcasting. This continuous onslaught for ‘something for everyone’ results in a kind of ‘radio deafness.’” (431) In order to overcome this obstacle, Flowerman returns to a key aspect of his first condition — the use of crisis (he writes that this can be “designed or accidental”) to focus attention on delivered propaganda. Flowerman writes:

As for overcoming the ‘radio deafness’ to commercial announcements and the general atmosphere of make-believe of radio entertainment, only symbols associated with acute crisis would seem to have a chance. For the great bulk of American people racial and religious intolerance is not regarded as a critical situation. … The absence of critical stress serves to diminish levels of attention to pro-tolerance symbols. (431)

Practical contemporary examples of what this tactic might look light would be the ubiquity of pro-diversity propaganda in the aftermath of Islamic attacks, Charlottesville, school shootings, moral panics about racism, ADL hype about the ever-present threat of anti-Semitism, murders by immigrants, and migrant drownings in the Mediterranean. The point here is that regardless of context, “crisis” is to be manufactured into almost every situation in order to focus attention on the real goal — the successful delivery of “pro-tolerance” messages, even (or especially) in circumstances in which tolerance has proven deadly, to the host population. Jews or, in the more ambiguous phrasing, “the agents of pro-tolerance,” would thus need to achieve (in Flowerman’s own words) the ambitious trifecta of “control, saturation, crisis.” (432) Crisis is therefore Flowerman’s third condition.

The fourth condition is the achievement of an alteration of predispositions in the individual via modification of their surroundings and peer pressure. Here Flowerman argues that “pro-tolerance” propaganda should not rely on intellectual means but instead on “social perception, which is affected by the predispositions of the audience. In turn, these dispositions are affect-laden attitudes which may have been produced by parents, teachers, playmates, etc.” (432)

The point here is that Flowerman and the mass communications clique believed that their propaganda would be better received by the masses if the psychological context of reception was itself changed. In other words, people raised in the demographic majority who are imbued with a sense of communal pride, social responsibility, cultural achievement, and national purpose are unlikely to be predisposed to be receptive to messages on behalf of outsiders. Some intervention in peer interactions and peer culture was thus necessary in order to break up such an obstacle to the reception of “pro-tolerance” propaganda. As just one example, we return here to Flowerman’s 1950 article for New York Times Magazine in which he argues for the training of teachers “as engineers of human relations instead of instructors of arithmetic and spelling.”[3] Children can thus “engineered” to be more receptive to “pro-tolerance” propaganda in adulthood.

This condition bleeds into the fifth — the manipulation of the basic instinct of humans to conform to group standards. Flowerman writes:

Consciously or unconsciously, individuals use group frames of reference in social situations even when they are physically separated from the group. … The strength of group sanctions is a potent force to reckon with even for an individual with a strong ego. … It would appear, then, that to be successful mass propaganda on behalf of out-groups would have to modify the standards of the in-group. … Mass pro-tolerance propaganda, to be successful, would have to change such values, which would be difficult to imagine without control, saturation, crisis, etc. (432)

What Flowerman is proposing here is essentially a revolution in values, after which a politically correct culture emerges where the demographic majority becomes self-policing and antagonistic to its own ethnic interests. In this environment — achieved via “control, saturation, crisis”— the strength of group sanctions among the White American in-group is directed towards manifestations of in-group ethnocentrism instead of outsiders. It’s nothing less than a proposal for the cultivation of White guilt and pathological altruism, and the diminishment of White ethnocentrism and cultural pride.

The sixth condition is the cultivation of influential figures on behalf of the “pro-tolerance” agenda. This required great subtlety. Flowerman writes that the research of his mass communications colleagues and co-ethics shows the targets of their propaganda:

are willing to assign to some individuals a stamp of approval which they deny to others … We know that many leaflets written and endorsed by popular heroes and accepted even by prejudiced individuals are often dismissed on the ground that they are being distributed by minority groups in their own self-interest. Many prejudiced individuals cannot conceive of such distribution by dominant groups. (433)

What Flowerman is here complaining of is the fact that some members of the demographic majority are perceptive enough to accurately point out the real origin of “pro-tolerance” propaganda, and to dismiss it on those grounds. By “minority groups,” the coy Mr Flowerman of course means Jews. He then cites a specific case:

In an experiment being conducted at the University of Chicago by Bettelheim, Shils, and Janowitz, veterans were exposed to pro-tolerance propaganda including a cartoon by Bill Mauldin. A prejudiced respondent, sharing the general esteem in which this popular soldier-cartoonist is held by ex-GI’s, said that he had regarded Mauldin as a “regular guy” but he supposed that if you paid a man enough you could get him to do anything; this respondent believed that the material he saw was being distributed by “a bunch of New York communists.” (433)

Thus we see the pathologisation of a veteran because he perceived with stunning accuracy the hand of subversion behind the use of a popular icon to promote an agenda entirely alien to his interests. Despite exceptions such as this veteran, the overall susceptibility of the masses was deemed sufficiently high for the strategy of “sponsorship” to be progressed. As a result, reports Flowerman,

propagandists, recognising the need for impeccable sources of authority, are producing material endorsed by popular heroes in sports, entertainment, and in the armed forces. Recently a plan has been developed to promote the insertion of full-page newspaper advertisements paid for and sponsored by “respectable” local business organizations. The effect of this campaign will have to be determined. (433)

Developed alongside his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research and the mass communications clique, these, then, are Flowerman’s six conditions for a radical transformation of values in the White American demographic majority:

1) Control of the channels of mass communications;
2) Saturation with Pro-tolerance messages;
3) Crisis, designed or accidental;
4) Diminishment of Cultural Pride and Self-esteem;
5) Cultivation of Self-Punishment and Group Self-Sanctioning;
6) Sponsorship of willing dupes or traitors.

Although these six conditions form most of the body of “Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry,” Flowerman also spends some time discussing the ideal content of “pro-tolerance” propaganda. In this regard, he comments:

The most striking feature, the spearhead, of propaganda, is the slogan. … Current pro-tolerance or anti-intolerance slogans urge unity and amity, warn against being divided by differences of race and religion, describe our common origin as immigrants to these shores, remove myths about racial differences, and denounce bigots and bigotry. Some popular slogans are: Don’t be a Sucker!, Americans All – Immigrants All, All Races and All Creeds Working Together etc.

Don’t Be A Sucker! was the name of a wartime film produced by the Army Signals Corps at a time when it was working heavily alongside Jewish Hollywood executives and script writers; its film production center was headed by Col. Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Cohen.[4] According to Wikipedia, the film:

has anti-racist and anti-fascist themes, and was made to educate viewers about prejudice and discrimination. The film was also made to make the case for the desegregation of the United States armed forces. An American who has been listening to a racist and bigoted rabble-rouser, who is preaching hate speech against ethnic and religious minorities and immigrants, is warned off by a naturalized Hungarian immigrant, possibly a Holocaust survivor or escapee, who explains to him how such rhetoric and demagogy allowed the Nazis to rise to power in Weimar Germany, and warns Americans not to fall for similar demagogy propagated by American racists and bigots. In August 2017 the short film went viral on the internet in the aftermath of the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and various copies have been uploaded to video sharing sites in the past year.

Flowerman was dissatisfied with the slogans of his time, however, believing them to be too “general in nature, vague as to goals, and unspecific as to methods.” (434) He believed that merely defining fascism as the enemy was insufficient because, at that time, the host population believed “fascism was strictly a foreign phenomenon characteristic particularly of Nazi Germany.” Propaganda depicting fascism as the enemy was therefore going to be ineffective in making the host population see its own values as oppositional and requiring destruction. Referring to works like The Authoritarian Personality, Flowerman writes: “Studies abound in which subjects subscribed to tenets of fascism although they rejected the fascist label itself. The pervasiveness of prejudice in so many individuals makes it difficult to set up a real enemy.” (434) He acknowledges that “in much anti-intolerance propaganda” the enemy is defined as “white, native-born Protestants,” but makes it clear that he wishes this to be expanded “for logical and psychological reasons.” One gets the impression that “Diversity is our Strength” and “Fight Hate” would have been much to his satisfaction.

*****

We now find ourselves returning to our point of departure. “The whole story is transparently barmy,” said the Guardian’s Jason Wilson when discussing “conspiracy theories” about Cultural Marxism. Consider again what he says this “conspiracy theory” amounts to:

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios. There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think … The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism.

In light of the facts addressed in this essay, such a theory would seem thoroughly borne out, with the only required alterations being that the process started before the 1960s and involved many more figures than the staff of the Institute for Social Research. The problem with people like Wilson is that they are proof of the very ‘conspiracy theory’ they refute. Raised in a controlled media, saturated with pro-tolerance propaganda, psychologically blasted with crisis after crisis, stripped of cultural pride, consumed by White guilt, and influenced by purchased “sponsors,” he is the perfectly gullible product of the protocols of Samuel H. Flowerman and the mass communications clique.

Not barmy, but more or less ridiculous, Wilson becomes an intellectual pygmy biting at the heels of his betters — those who, like the veteran in the study of Bettelheim, Shils, and Janowitz, see the true origin of the propaganda and are pathologized for their perceptivity.


[1] Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(4), (1947) 429-439.

[2] S.H. Flowerman and M. Jahoda, “The study of man – can prejudice be fought scientifically?” Commentary, Dec., 1946.

[3] S. H. Flowerman, “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” New York Times Magazine, April 23 1950, 31.

[4] See for example, Richard Koszarski, “Subway Commandos: Hollywood Filmmakers at the Signal Corps Photographic Center,” Film History Vol. 14, No. 3/4, (2002), 296-315.


[1] Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(4), (1947) 429-439.

[2] D. M. Scott, “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education,” Journal of American History, Vol 91, No 1 (2004), 69–82.

[3] For an example of Flowerman’s thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis see S. H. Flowerman, “Psychoanalytic Theory and Science,” American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 8, No. 3, 415-441.

[4] S. H. Flowerman, “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” New York Times Magazine, April 23 1950, 31.

[5] Herbert Greenberg, “The Effects of Single-Session Education Techniques on Prejudice Attitudes,” The Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1957), 82-86, 82.

[6] Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, (2003), 13.

[7] Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 384.

[8] Hynek Jeřábek, Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 18.

[9] James Curran, “Jay Blumler: A Founding Father of British Media Studies,” in Stephen Coleman (ed) Can the media save democracy? Essays in honour of Jay G. Blumler (London: Palgrave, 2015).

[10] John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 176.

[11] David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, Exile, Science and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals (New York: Palgrave, 2005),  184.

[12] James Schmidt, “The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,” New German Critique 100 (2007), 47-76, 47.

[13]Jeřábek, Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research, 23.

[14] Bureau of Applied Social Research, “The Ghosts Go West”: A Study of Comprehension, (Unpublished), 1945, Directed by Bernard B. Berelson. Cited in Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” 438.

[15] See for example, “The dynamic basis of anti-Semitic attitudes,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2, (1948); “The evasion of propaganda: How prejudiced people respond to anti-prejudice propaganda” The Journal of Psychology, 23 (1947), 15-25; Studies in the scope and method of “The authoritarian personality. (New York, NY, US: Free Press, 1954); “Race relations in Public Housing,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 7, No. 1-2 (1951).

[16] Morris Janowitz and Bruno Bettelheim, Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).

[17] Joseph Gittler, “Measuring the Awareness of the Problem of Group Hostility,” Social Forces, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Dec., 1955), 163-167.

[18] Joseph Gittler, ”Man and His Prejudices,” The Scientific Monthly, 69 (1949 ), 43-47.

[19] Herbert Blumer, ““Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review, 1 (Spring 1958), 3-7.

[20] Irvin Rock and Stephen Palmer, “The Legacy of Gestalt Psychology,” Scientific American, Dec 1990, 84-90, 89.

[21] Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2017), 15.

[22] Bert T. King and Elliott McGinnies, Attitudes, Conflict, and Social Change (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 124.