“The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence”

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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.

An Update to “Why Are Professors Liberals?”: Jewish Influence Firmly Ensconced in Academia by the 1960s

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Recently a blog titled “Ideas and Data” posted a very interesting and important article by an anonymous blogger, “The Jewish Question: An Empirical Examination.” I’ll have more to say about this blog in the future, but here I discuss a study on Jewish academic influence that I was unaware of.

This is the video version:

First, some introductory material from my paper, “Why Are Professors Liberals?.”

Gross and Fosse point out that it was during the 1960s when universities became strongly associated with the political left in the eyes of friends and foes alike — enough to result in self-selection processes in which conservatives would feel unwelcome in the university:

Higher education was a crucial micromobilization context for a number of left social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which further enhanced the institution’s liberal reputation; with concerted cultural efforts by American conservatives, especially from the 1950s on, to build a collective identity for their movement around differentiation from various categories of “liberal elites,” not least liberal professors; with restricted opportunities for Americans on the far left to enter other institutional spheres; and with self-reinforcing processes by which selfselection into the academic profession by liberals resulted in a more liberal professoriate whose reputation for liberalism was thereby maintained or enhanced. (pp. 158–159)

Further, because elite universities attempt to most represent the zeitgeist of the field, Gross and Fosse point out they will offer positions to scholars they see as exemplary; political attitudes are a major part of being exemplary. As noted above, Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that many liberal academics openly acknowledge that they would discriminate against a conservative job candidate. This rigorous policing of the attitudes of professors at elite institutions in turn leads to elite institutions being to the left of lesser institutions. In the academic hierarchy, the result is that graduate students coming from elite institutions are most representative of the leftist academic culture, either because of their socialization in the academic environment or simply because of self-interest as a member of a group (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals) whose interests are championed by the left. This becomes progressively diluted as one goes to the second- and third-tier schools and eventually down to K–12 education. The result is a liberal social environment at all levels of the educational system which in turn has measurable effects on student attitudes. Public opinion surveys carried out since the 1960s show that going to college results in attitude change in a liberal direction compared to parents. If education level remained the same, there was little change in attitudes (Kaufmann, 2004, p. 191).

Thus, academia is a top-down system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure liberal ideological conformity. Read more

Studying the Gentile: Fanciful Pseudoscience in the Service of Pathologizing the Covington Boys

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“One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too many.”
     Karen Pollock, Holocaust Educational Trust, January 2019

In Studying the Jew (2006), Alan Steinweis’s slim, Harvard-published text on the scholarly study of Jews under the Third Reich, the author laments “the perversion of scholarship by politics and ideology” and its service in the goals of “exclusion and domination.” While some of the anecdotal material presented in the book is fascinating, especially its prosopographies of what one reviewer called the “clearly brilliant” German scholars who undertook such work, the overarching message of Studying the Jew is that one should, under no circumstances whatsoever, study the Jew. That Steinweis felt such a message was in any way necessary in 2006 is a testament to the same paranoia in which the fevered Jewish inability to let go of the past becomes the frantic injunction unto the Gentile to “Never Forget.” Steinweis’s limp appeals to contemporary relevancy aside, by 2006 the kind of patient and methodical Judenforschung produced by Édouard Drumont, Henry Ford, Hillaire Belloc, and the scholars of the 1930s, had indeed become a thing very much of the distant past — Kevin MacDonald’s remarkable 1990s trilogy being the exception that proves an otherwise solid rule. By the 1960s, Jews had effectively monopolized the study of their own history and sociology in the post-war, modern incarnation of “Jewish Studies,” and quickly followed a self-congratulating, navel-gazing, agenda-driven, victim-orientated trajectory in the same fashion as their later counterparts in Women’s Studies, Chicano Studies, and Black Studies. Serious critical study of the Jews vanished from academia and mainstream culture.

Curiously, however, around the same time that serious critical study of Jews vanished from campuses and newspapers, a new trend emerged: studying the Gentile. I was strongly reminded of this recently during the debacle surrounding the Covington Catholic High School trip to Washington D.C. The facts of this incident are now so well known that they need no further regurgitation here. It should suffice to mention that large sections of the media were incensed that the school’s students had enough self-respect to hold their ground against a group of ludicrous but abusive Black Israelites, as well as a Native American who apparently thought the best way to mediate the situation and reduce tension would be to bang his war drum and chant loudly mere inches from the palefaces. The aftermath was a true exercise in the media manipulation of anti-White hatred, something that seemed to reach a zenith when America’s most prominent African-American Zionist, and AIPAC house Negro, Bakari Sellers, heroically broke from stereotypes of ignorant Black thuggery to call for one of the White children to be punched in the face. Stunning and brave.

At the Guardian meanwhile, attention momentarily turned away from the beating of White children to the more sedate subject of brainwashing them. In an article titled “How should parents teach their kids about racism?,” the author, panicked by the children of Covington High, turns for advice to two academics working in the field of ethnicity perception among White children. Of course, both of these academics just happen to be Jewish. The first is Evan Apfelbaum, Boston University’s Jewish expert in the study of the psychology of the little goyim. The article states:

Evan Apfelbaum, an associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business focused on social psychology and diversity, agreed that it’s good to start teaching children about race when they’re young. “Having these tough, uncomfortable conversation at home in advance, in a structured setting, is one way to help prepare kids for facing these types of complex things in the real world,” he said. Parents can use such viral videos that demonstrate inappropriate behavior as an opportunity to have a conversation with their children about racism, Apfelbaum added. “When things go viral, there’s an opportunity for learning,” he said.

Unfortunately for Apfelbaum, the emergence of further footage from this particular event revealed that the opportunity for learning involved the knowledge that adult Black men are quite willing to scream “faggots” at White children, presumably because those children have the mysterious ability to speak in complete sentences. A further lesson was that elderly Native Americans are not full of profound wisdom uttered in the staccato prosody of so many film depictions, but are instead profoundly anti-social and fully prepared to shamelessly lie about school children in order to solicit media attention.

The second of the Guardian’s consulted experts was Dan Siegel, a truly ominous Jewish UCLA psychiatrist with a not-sinister-at-all interest in how the “remodeling” of the teenage brain can be interfered with in order to prevent in-group attachments:

The “remodeling” of the teenage brain into an adult brain entails four core changes: emotional sparks, social engagement, novelty-seeking and creative exploration — what Siegel calls “Essence”. The four changes represent an uptick in passion, drive to be a part of a group and a desire for new experiences that is normal for teenagers. These changes can be positive or negative, depending on how they’re fostered, Siegel said. The development also heightens what psychologists call “in-group, out-group distinction”, or the tendency to lump oneself in social groups, he added. When a person feels like their “in-group” is threatened by an “out-group” — people part of a group they don’t identify with — there’s a chance they will dehumanize the out-group. “Adolescents are equally prone to having this in-group-out-group distinction” as adults are, Siegel said. “Essence” exacerbates the distinction, and that’s what can be seen in the viral videos, he added. In these videos, there’s evidence of “emotion they don’t know how to control, collaboration where they give up morality to gain membership, novelty-seeking which drives them to do things that are really dangerous … and following ideals as they push against things that have them not think logically”, Siegel said.

This is probably one of the most fanciful pieces of Jewish psychological quackery I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of it. Now that we have footage covering the entirety of the episode in D.C., it’s clear that the young men from Covington Catholic High School showed great restraint and emotional control in the face of provocation and abuse, and the “smirking” student can be seen on camera urging his (compliant) fellow students to maintain order and not engage with the Black Israelites or other provocateurs. Siegel, meanwhile, claims he sees evidence of “emotion they don’t know how to control, collaboration where they give up morality to gain membership.” This is just a Jewish intellectual activist refusing to look at the footage objectively, and thus presenting an entirely false picture in order to pathologize those he feels a pre-existing antagonism towards.

Siegel’s nonsense, like a lot of Jewish pseudo-science, would be laughable if it wasn’t so obviously malicious. Aside from his ‘Essence’ scam, Siegel operates a pro-diversity “mindfulness wheel of awareness” methodology designed to brainwash clients into abandoning any sense of ethnic identity. In an interview with Forbes, Siegel explains:

You want to expand your “circle of identity” so that within the phrase “like me” you include a lot of diversity. What I would say is the plane of possibility is accessed more when people integrate consciousness. People are too confined, so they are excessively differentiated and not accepting the value of other life forms including other humans that do not fit into that initial high plateau of identity. What has been fascinating about doing the wheel of awareness practice — and I think this is consistent with some of the research about reducing some of the implicit racial bias [editor’s note: a field rife with failure to replicate] with mindfulness practices— is when people access the hub, they’re gaining more access. They are more readily accessing the plane of possibility and in the plane, there is no racism. In the plane, there is this experience of reality that embraces the fluidity of identity. That is, “you” are made up of people who are not your racial background. You are people who don’t speak your same language. You are people who of different religions. It’s not just that they’re different and that is okay. It’s that you are both part of the same sea of potential or the plane of possibility. What has been beautiful about explaining this is that people get a feeling of relief that they can now basically be in a state of — and not to get too gooey — love and acceptance.

Dan Siegel: “You want to expand your “circle of identity” so that within the phrase “like me” you include a lot of diversity.”

Read more

A Singularly Semitic Scandal: Avital Ronell and the Corruption of Western Academia

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In Homage to Catalonia (1938), his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell describes how his wife was rudely woken by a police-raid on the hotel room she was occupying in Barcelona:

In the small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men marched in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions about the room, obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms (there was a bathroom attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded the walls, took up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every garment and held it up to the light. (Homage to Catalonia, ch. 14)

The police conducted this search “in the recognized OGPU [then the Russian communist secret-police] or Gestapo style … for nearly two hours,” Orwell says. He then notes that in “all this time they never searched the bed.” His wife was still in it, you see, and although the police “were probably Communist Party members … they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaningless.”

Orwell’s story suggests a new word to me: typhlophthalmism, meaning “the practice of turning a blind eye to essential but inconvenient facts” (from Greek typhlos, “blind,” + ophthalmos, “eye”). But it’s a long word, so let’s call it typhlism for short. Shorter is better, because the term could be used so often today. Orwell’s story is an allegory of modern Western politics and social commentary, where so many essential but inconvenient facts are “silently dropped” from analysis. For example, the Labour MP Denis MacShane and the Labour council in Rotherham were typhlistic when, for reasons of political correctness, they turned a blind eye to the horrors being committed by brown-skinned Muslims against White working-class girls.

Looking for Mr Reitman

And if you want to see another good example of typhlism at work, try one of the strangest and funniest scandals ever to set the Owl of Minerva hooting in the groves of Academe. The two central figures in the scandal are the New York University (NYU) professor Avital Ronell (born 1952) and her former graduate student Nimrod Reitman (born c. 1984). Ms Ronell, a “feminist literary theorist,” began her career studying with the enormously influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida and is now the Jacques Derrida Professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. As a sideline, she headed “the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program” at NYU. She is also a “self-defined lesbian,” while Mr Reitman is a homosexual.

Academic star Avital Ronell

Their respective sexualities, although not of course funny in themselves, are an essential part of what has made the scandal so entertaining. Mr Reitman has accused Ms Ronell of a sustained campaign of sexual harassment, including two incidents in which his 66-year-old lesbian mentor pulled him into her bed and “put my hands onto her breasts, and was pressing herself — her buttocks — onto my crotch. She was kissing me, kissing my hands, kissing my torso.” Read more

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

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Go to Part 1.


“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. Read more

Ezra Pound, Jewish Activism, and the Struggle for Cultural Memory

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“The terror of Pound for Kazin and the rest of us, if we are honest, is Pound’s racism”
Theodore Weiss, The New York Review of Books, 1986. 

I often take great pleasure from looking into the past and finding, among persons and works of great genius, ideas that we very closely share. It’s not terribly difficult. Times have changed so dramatically, and the window of ‘acceptable’ ideas has so radically narrowed, that almost every great creative thinker of substance prior to the 1950s held socio-political views regarded as quasi-Fascistic by the current dispensation. Most of us will be aware, of course, that these broader cultural shifts have had extremely negative repercussions for the socio-historical legacy of such figures. In short, within a society all too keen to abolish the ‘old White men’ from the history books, such figures will be the first to go.

Against this ominous backdrop, a colleague and literary scholar recently felt the inclination to inform me that the great genius of literature Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who possessed a genuine and open sympathy for Fascism, is being slowly and insidiously exiled from college reading lists and school curricula. It should come as no great surprise to readers of the Occidental Observer that having been caged in a ‘death cell’ for his war-time affiliations, and driven first into a mental health hospital and then out of his country, Pound’s punishment would continue posthumously with his relegation to anonymity. Where my friend erred, however, was in attributing the slow vanishing of Pound to an amorphous ‘neoliberal’ zeitgeist. As an ‘armchair’ fan of Modernist poetry for almost a decade, and an ethno-nationalist even longer, I’ve been more acutely aware of the specificities behind the degradation of the much-maligned poet. Far from being a recent phenomenon, I was also aware that the most important steps in Pound’s marginalization had been put in place decades earlier. Having shared these specificities with my colleague, I now present them here for the consideration of our readership.

The process of annihilating a genius and his worldview from the cultural memory of his people is both straightforward and relatively commonplace. During the course of several research projects over the last decade, it became apparent to me that even where ideologically suspect cultural figures are permitted to remain under study, the socio-political ideas of these ‘tainted’ individuals, no matter how central to their character or intellectual worldview, are sequestered within their social and professional biographies, and often presented as unpleasant ‘moral stains’ upon an otherwise acceptable and productive life. An excellent example in this regard is W.J. McCormack’s 2005 Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics, which endeavored to ‘expose’ and quarantine the Anglo-Irish poet’s alleged “intense relationship” with Fascism and anti-Semitism. In this way, ‘offending’ but ‘milder’ figures like Yeats are made ‘safe’ for the young and impressionable White minds passing through our college systems. In the more ‘extreme’ cases, however, like that of the explicitly Fascist-affiliated Pound, these ‘moral stains,’ and the indignation they provoke, are deemed unmanageable and unforgiveable. They are amplified, and utilized in attempts to defame and degrade the cultural figure. The process of defamation and degradation eventually forces that figure out of acceptable public discussion and recognition, and thus into obscurity. Read more