Jews as a Hostile Elite

Ron Unz on the illusory American meritocracy

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French Translation, by Armor

An enduring aspect of the self-concept of Jews is that their ascent to elite status in America and elsewhere is the natural result of a meritocracy. For example, after Elena Kagan was nominated for the Supreme Court, Robert Frank penned an article in the Wall Street Journal (“That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP”) hailing the rise of a meritocracy where Jews could finally assume their rightful place as an elite, and cheering the demise of those lazy, corrupt WASPs who did everything they could to thwart the rise of the Jews, including placing limits on Jewish enrollment in the elite universities.  The fact that Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards (judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience) never seems to have entered his mind. In Frank’s view, her ascent from Princeton undergraduate to Harvard Law, to high-level government positions and dean of Harvard Law is the American meritocracy in action—a view that conveniently ignores the role of her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here) in greasing her ascent, most egregiously her appointment as dean of Harvard Law by Larry Summers.

Ron Unz has published a very important article showing that Kagan’s remarkable rise is a symptom of a far wider issue—that Jewish admission to elite universities is far from meritocratic (“The myth of American meritocracy: How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?”). (On the basis of Unz’s article, it would be interesting to look at Kagan’s SAT and LSAT scores!) Because of their role in replenishing elites, university admissions is a huge lever of power. The implication of Unz’s article (although he would probably shy away from this wording) is that a Jewish elite now controls this lever of power and has used it to its advantage, resulting in a massive overrepresentation of Jews in elite universities compared to their academic qualifications or intelligence, while discriminating against non-Jewish Whites and against Asians. Read more

Jonah Goldberg and Harold Meyerson on the election: It’s all good

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Two op-eds in the LATimes illustrate two Jewish reactions to the election. Although they supposedly are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, they have much in common.

On one hand is Jonah Goldberg, editor of National ReviewOnline. Goldberg is a neocon—a faux conservative who recently was noted as supporting the firing of John Derbyshire for telling the truth about race. Goldberg has also attacked Peter Brimelow for what he described as “the narrow and nasty emphasis on what … Brimelow calls America’s ‘specific ethnic core'” (“Peter Brimelow (“a once-respected conservative voice”) on Goldberg of National Review (a once-conservative, now respected, magazine“). Brimelow’s main point is that Goldberg has been an enthusiastic supporter of displacement-level non-White immigration and is horrified at the thought of an identity politics for White people (for other groups, it’s just fine).

So it’s not surprising that Goldberg is not particularly upset by the election (“The right isn’t waving a white flag“). Goldberg claims that conservatism will come back, as it has before. Not one mention of the demographics of the vote or what that portends for the GOP or what the GOP ought to do about it. Read more

Lee Siegel: Exuding Jewish Triumphalism

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A bit of Jewish triumpalism by Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal (“Rise of the Tiger Nation“). The basic plot line is that Jews overcame WASP dominance to attain the high ground in American culture. Now there is a rising Asian minority which, according to a Pew  Research Center Study is “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”

My basic premise is that it is entirely reasonable for elites to resist displacement. For Siegel, the Jewish displacement of the WASP elite is a morality tale, with Jews as the good guys. The WASPs resisted by establishing quotas at Ivy League universities. They resented Jewish incursions into “WASP bastions such as rarefied country clubs, exclusive professional clubs, white-shoe law firms, prestigious foundations and the like…[;] these were the very institutions that resisted them the most intensely.” Writing from his position as a dominant elite, Siegel is not shy at hinting that some complaints about Jews were quite reasonable:

One reason that anti-Semitism persisted even as Jews ascended in American life was that Jews were frequently in the vanguard of American social and political dissent, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Yippie Abbie Hoffman and beyond. Not only that, but many of the architects of America’s archenemy, Soviet Communism, had been Jews. As the WASP establishment lost ground to Jewish newcomers, the words “communist” and “Jew” often became synonymous. The association of Hollywood with lax morality, and of Jews with Hollywood, heightened a kind of low-grade hum of anti-Jewish feeling, even as it proved the general acceptance of the Jewish sentiments and sensibility that permeated American entertainment.

Read more

Liberal Bias in Academia: The role of Jewish academics in the creation and maintenance of academic liberalism

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A study to be published in September in Current Directions in Psychological Science, prominent peer-reviewed academic journal, goes beyond the well-known fact that the vast majority of social psychologists are on the left (“Survey shocker: Liberal profs admit they’d discriminate against conservatives in hiring, advancement“).

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” …

More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” …

Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy. …

A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative. …

[While much larger percentages of faculty are economic conservatives,] the widest divide occurs on social issues, the contested terrain in the culture wars shaking the academy. On these contentious issues, 90 percent identified as liberal and only 4 percent as conservative.

Of course, social psychologists by definition perform research on social issues—precisely the areas where they are overwhelmingly liberal. Don’t expect any race realist research on criminality or ethnic differences in aggressiveness to come out of mainstream social psychology. Read more

Manny Friedman: Jews “own a whole freaking country”; and yes, that includes the media

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Well, it turns out after all that Jews do control the media—and a whole lot besides. So says Manny Friedman, writing in the Times of Israel (“Yes, Jews DO control the media“).  Of course, we at TOO have known this for quite a while, but it’s nice to hear it from a Jew, even though it’s in a Jewish publication and intended to be part of a Jews-only dialog. The thing is, it’s okay for someone like Friedman to say it (or Joel Stein, writing in the LATimes and linked by Friedman). But it’s definitely not okay for someone like me. In fact, Friedman is typical of Jewish writers who inhabit a completely Jewish universe when they talk about anything relating to Jews. Friedman is well aware that non-Jews who talk about such issues should prepare for a wall-to-wall, no-holds barred, 24/7 campaign against them:

The funny part is when any anti-Semite or anti-Israel person starts to spout stuff like, “The Jews control the media!” and “The Jews control Washington!” Suddenly we’re up in arms. We create huge campaigns to take these people down. We do what we can to put them out of work. We publish articles. We’ve created entire organizations that exist just to tell everyone that the Jews don’t control nothin’. No, we don’t control the media, we don’t have any more sway in DC than anyone else. No, no, no, we swear: We’re just like everybody else! Does anyone else (who’s not a bigot) see the irony of this?

I don’t see any “funny parts” to this, and I rather doubt that “irony’ is the right word here. How about “ethnic strategizing,” as in “Does anyone else (who’s not a bigot) see the ethnic strategizing of this?” Read more

Review of Beyond Human Nature, by Jesse J. Prinz

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Jesse J. Prinz is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York and an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. His academic specialism is the philosophy of psychology, and he has produced books and articles on emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics and consciousness. His latest book, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives, was published earlier this year. Like much of his previous work, this new book is an attack on “psychological nativism.” Prinz (who is Jewish) claims that his latest book “concerns the cultural impact on human variation” and is part “of a critique of approaches that oversell the role of biology.”[i] The Jewish ethno-political agenda behind this critique soon becomes clear when the author acknowledges his “intellectual heroes who hover silently in the background. I mention here Franz Boas, whose pioneering work in anthropology has been an inspiration to many who try to establish universal human dignity through the study of diversity.”[ii]

In arguing for the primacy of nurture over nature, Prinz devotes a significant part of his book to attempting to explain why measured racial differences in IQ can be ascribed to environmental rather than genetic factors. He believes that “The IQ controversy is an extreme example of a more general tendency to explain human abilities by appeal to biology,” and regards it as “a particularly egregious case because it legitimates biases against many subjugated groups and mistakes social injustice for biological necessity.”[iii] For Prinz “one of the great tragedies of IQ testing is that researchers have used their results to argue fallaciously that certain groups of people differ in intelligence.”[iv] Introducing his case for an environmental explanation for racial differences in IQ, he notes that

everyone agrees that intelligence can be affected by the genes. The fact that humans are smarter than dogs is clearly a consequence of our biology. Everyone also agrees that differences in human intelligence can be genetic. Some people can be congenitally retarded, and extreme forms of genius are likely to be genetically based as well. But what about the vast majority of us who lie somewhere between Einstein and Tweedledumb [note the standard invocation of the Jewish Einstein as the quintessence of human genius]. Genius and retardation are rare conditions, which may result from genetic mutations. Are the differences between people who fall in the normal range distinguished by the genes? Is the run-of-the-mill dullard biologically different from a garden variety whiz-kid? And if so, are those biological differences fixed, or might they be altered by experience? These questions become even more heated when we turn from individual differences to differences between groups.

Do biological differences in brain power come pre-packaged with biological differences in pigmentation? These are touchy topics, and naturists have felt considerable heat for defending positions that are politically incorrect. I don’t think we should let politics arbitrate in this case, however. I think naturists simply get the science wrong. While some differences in intelligence may be linked to biology, most people have pretty comparable biological endowments. If we want to find an explanation for group-wide social inequity, then we would be better off studying the negative effects of poverty, and the positive effects of cultural practices that encourage learning.[v] Read more

Stephen Jay Gould’s Jewish motivation: Natural selection by any other name

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Stephen Jay Gould is definitely high on the list of ethnically motivated pseudoscientists that populate The Culture of Critique. In reading over the section on Gould from Chapter 2 (see pp. 30-37), I was struck by how many evolutionary biologists viewed Gould as a charlatan and were willing to say so in public. John Maynard Smith’s comment gets it exactly right: Gould “has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with. . . . All this would not matter were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.”

Gould’s importance comes from his position at Harvard as well as his access to the media. (Gould’s Chair for Politically Correct Popularization of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard is now held by Steven Pinker.) My treatment in Culture of Critique emphasized his obvious political motivation and his defamations of various 19th- and early 20th-century scientists, such as Samuel George Morton.

The point is that Gould’s political motivation, his lack of academic credibility, and his fraudulent use of sources were well-known before the 2011 study showing that in all likelihood Gould committed scientific fraud in his analysis of Morton’s data on race differences in skull size (“Stephen Jay Gould: Next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the Devil’s Mouth at the Center of Hell“).

But Gould is a Jewish intellectual hero, so it’s not surprising to see attempts to rehabilitate him. An article by Benjamin Ivry in the Forward attempts to do just that—badly, beginning with the implication that Gould’s only intellectual sin was his defamation of Morton. But in the process he provides some good material showing Gould’s strong Jewish identity. Indeed, the title, “Evolutionary Biology after Auschwitz,” only makes sense if there is indeed a deep connection between Gould’s work as an evolutionary biologist and his Jewish identity. Read more