Mainstream Conservatives

James Edwards: Glenn Beck 8/28 rally — the death rattle of mainstream conservatism

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Glenn Beck’s big rally at the Lincoln Memorial a couple days ago is the talk of the news media and the internet. Liberals are denouncing it, conservatives are walking on air, while tens of millions of people are completely mystified. And with good reason – if Seinfeld was a show about nothing, this massive gathering was a rally about nothing. And while it may have looked impressive, in reality it shows just how impotent and adrift the mainstream conservative movement has become.

Nobody is really sure what it was even about. Beck, who is only famous because he has spent hours a day for the last decade ranting about politics, says it had nothing to do with politics, even though Sarah Palin was the keynote speaker.

It was about “restoring honor” or something, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Or it was a way of supporting the troops, depending on which day you talked to Beck.

Then it turned into a rally to reclaim the Civil Rights movement, and give it back to the people who Beck swears pioneered the Civil Rights movement, right wing conservatives. Yes, that’s what Beck actually claims to believe. Leave it to Glenn Beck to make white-hating black columnist Leonard Pitts look sane and reasonable.

It also has something to do with honoring all those unsung heroes of the American Revolution, the numerous black Founding Fathers, whose existence (until Beck came along to set the record straight) has been covered up by “liberals” who are trying to divide us by race. Yes, Beck actually says this, too.

And Palin? She was asked what Martin Luther King would’ve thought of the rally. This was a great opportunity to tell it like it is for all of America to hear. She could’ve said something like: “Martin Luther King? I’m white – why would I give a damn what Martin Luther King would’ve thought about this rally? At any rate, he no doubt would have disapproved, as he was a radical left wing socialist whose movement was all about increasing the size and power of the federal government, and using it to take rights and resources from white people and give them to non-whites. Hell no he wouldn’t have approved, and I couldn’t be more proud of that fact.”

But did she say anything like that? Of course not. Instead, she talked about how she could “feel his spirit” in this place that MLK’s presence had turned into “sacred ground” and that he would’ve heartily approved because the rally was all about “equality”, which is what he stood for. And “conservative” National Review was so proud of her words they posted the video.

(Of course, none of this idiotic pandering did anything to convince liberals and non-whites that Beck, Palin, and the hundreds of thousands of white people who showed up at the rally are anything but despicable racists and Nazis.)

As it turned out, the rally was actually a huge revival meeting, in which Beck implored America to turn back to the god(s) of our Jewish-Christian-Muslim-Hindu-Mormon-Sikh-Zoroastrian heritage that made America great. He had over 200 members of the clergy on the podium, and he stressed that they were from “all faiths” and it didn’t matter which god we pray to, as long as we pray to something or someone, singular or plural. Just pick a higher power and go with it. In other words, it was the largest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in history. Listen as Beck tells the crowd to “go back to your church, your synagogue, your mosque” and get to work on “refounding America.”

Now, normally, evangelicals would be horrified at this pantheism of “America needs to turn back to god, but it doesn’t matter which god” on full display Saturday, at a huge revival meeting led by America’s most famous Mormon. But not anymore. Judging by the posts and comments on the website of America’s biggest Christian news magazine, they ate it up. One columnist pretty much compared Glenn Beck to Jesus:

We arrived an hour late. The entire reflecting pool area of the National Mall was packed. The adjacent fields were packed, and the tide stretched toward the Washington Monument. The Associated Press has reported that “tens of thousands” were there. That kind of cynical numbers-downplaying reminded me of Heidi’s Romans 8:28 observation and made me glad that every lie will come out in the wash eventually. They lied about Jesus the whole of his ministry. And after he was raised, which was the ultimate vindication, they paid off soldiers to spread the rumor that his body had been stolen. But as the Bible says, “No weapon forged against you shall prosper” (Isaiah 54:17).

———-
Neither Beck nor his other speakers (among whom, Sarah Palin) mentioned a word about Mr. Obama. This concerted decision to steer clear of politics and hatefulness robbed the Huffington Post of the ability to dub the affair “political,” forcing them to settle for the accusation that it was “religious.” This is like when the Pharisees called Jesus a glutton and drunkard when he ate and drank, and a madman when the crowds thronged Him so that he couldn’t eat—the damned if you do and if you don’t approach that makes me glad for the sovereignty of God and Romans 8:28.

Toward the end, Glenn Beck told the attentive crowd that if we don’t go home and let our revival meeting change our lives, by drawing near to God and by telling the truth in our daily living, then all we will have had was a good time on a Saturday afternoon.

Notice how she accepts the liberal premise that criticism of Obama is “hatefulness.” Then she calls the rally a “revival meeting”, after complaining that the media was calling it “religious” in nature! If Beck comes across to normal people as a complete nutcase, it’s because he knows his audience.

Another columnist for World also wrote about the rally. His 72 year old mother attended, in spite of recently having a hip replacement. Which was no doubt paid for by Medicare, which probably doesn’t even phase her when she agrees with Beck and the Tea Parties that “government should get out of health care.” Anyway, his 72 year old mother must be a member of the lying liberal media, because she said the rally was all about god:

I called my mother to see if the stories were accurate. “Mom, what was the rally like? What was the tone?” I asked. “Beck’s speech was primarily all about God,” she said verifying the news reports of the giant Tea Party. There wasn’t any focus on politics. It was about recognizing God.

Clearly, Beck’s rally was a vague, confused jumble of meaninglessness. Or, if you prefer, a hot ghetto mess. Yet many conservatives are excited and thrilled, and think that 8/28/10 will forever be remembered as some kind of turning point, as the day when the huge task of “taking America back” formally got underway. In reality, it was the exact opposite. I’m convinced that one of these days, we’ll look back on this as the nadir of the mainstream conservative movement, as its death rattle, as the day the conservative movement gave up the ghost. Hundreds of thousands of white conservatives spent millions of dollars to travel to DC, to stand around and do nothing, after being ordered not to bring any signs to express themselves, while Beck and Palin lectured them on the glories of The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and the importance of getting back to the fundamentals of the Christian-Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Mormon faiths.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the world they’re desperately trying to preserve, but can’t, because they’re desperately afraid to even name it, just keeps disappearing. In fact, the very next day the New York Times published an article about the death of conservatism in Orange County, California, which used to be the epicenter of political conservatism in America.

Orange County has been a national symbol of conservatism for more than 50 years: birthplace of President Richard M. Nixon and home to John Wayne, a bastion for the John Birch Society, a land of orange groves and affluence, the region of California where Republican presidential candidates could always count on a friendly audience.

But this iconic county of 3.1 million people passed something of a milestone in June. The percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent, the lowest level in 70 years.

It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful — its detractors might suggest zany — reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state.

At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county’s residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land.

The demographic changes that have swept the county reflect what is happening across the state and much of the nation. It has happened slowly but surely over the course of a generation, becoming increasingly apparent not only in a drive through the 34 cities that fill this sprawling 789-square-mile county south of Los Angeles, but also, most recently, in the results of a presidential election. In 2008, Barack Obama drew 48 percent of the vote here against Senator John McCain of Arizona. (By comparison, in 1980, Jimmy Carter received just 23 percent against Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero whose election as California governor in 1966 and 1970 was boosted in no small part by the affection for him here.)

The demographic changes that have transformed Orange County are also transforming the rest of America. The process may be further along in Orange County, but it’s happening everywhere. Thanks to immigration, sixty percent of the babies being born in Texas are non-white, and it’s only a matter of a few more elections before Texas’s electoral votes go to the Democrats, and when that happens, the GOP can forget about putting one of their own in the White House ever again. And there are many other cities and states that are right behind Texas, and lots more where the process will take a few more decades to have the same effect, but all of America is on its way to turning into Orange County, California.

That’s why the Beck Heads and Tea Partiers are losing their country. Not because they don’t attend their local mosque often enough. But they can’t admit that, because that would be “racist”, and losing your country is a lot better than being called “racist.”

But a conservative movement as willingly impotent as the crowd that came to DC on Saturday can’t go on much longer. At some point it’s going to dawn on them that no matter how much they grovel to MLK and praise his holy name, or how many “conservative” imams they pack their podium with, they still get called racists and Nazis, and their country just keeps slipping further down the tubes.

When that finally sinks in with conservatives, and it may be sooner than we think, things will start to get interesting.

Reposted from The Political Cesspool.

Kevin MacDonald: Glenn Beck: More Clueless Conservatism

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Sometimes it’s pretty obvious what’s wrong with conservatives. Glenn Beck’s Washington gathering turns out to have been a plea for a religious revival (NYTimes: “At Lincoln Memorial: A Call for Religious Rebirth“):

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. “America today begins to turn back to God. … There’s nothing we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace unless we solve it through God.”

It was a plea made to an overwhemlingly White audience by a rainbow coalition of speakers:

The speaker list was diverse, including African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans; Jews and Christians; clergymen, military veterans and sports stars, including Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals. The crowd, however, was overwhelmingly white. (LATimes: “Beck, others exhort conservatives to action at Washington rally“)

All that implicit Whiteness and no place to go. When Whites put on a rally for an overwhelmingly White constituency, they feel a need to pledge allegiance to America as not really having an ethnic identity. Hence the need for non-White speakers. The same thing happened at a Tea Party rally I attended in Southern California: the obligatory Black speaker needed to deflect charges of racism that automatically surface when the crowd is overwhelmingly White. That’s why NASCAR is assiduously courting Black drivers to perform in front of their  overwhelmingly White audiences.

The LA Times article notes that “Speaker after speaker praised the nation’s military, its Founding Fathers and Lincoln.” Red meat to the  Tea Partiers—guaranteed to bring tears to the  eye. Unfortunately, the military has been co-opted by the Israel Lobby. And the pleas to religion,  the Founding Fathers and Lincoln are just another version of the proposition nation creed: All will be well if we accept a certain set of universal ideas with no ethnic content.

But it won’t. The people attending are overwhelmingly White because Whites are angry and deeply anxious about their future in America as other groups expand their power and as Whites are increasingly victimized as Whites, in everything from affirmative action to violent crime. But they can’t explicitly state that this is a war against them. So they end up pledging allegiance to the very things that are dispossessing them–and calling it conservative. The worst part is that it gives his gullible audience hope that there are easy, painless solutions. We can do it if we just BELIEVE.

They can’t break with the ruling ideology. Until they do, they will just keep on losing and getting more and more desperate. And that, in a nutshell, is the argument for the A3P.

Edmund Connelly on Faux Conservatives

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Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article explores the topic of faux conservatives. Particularly interesting is Michael Savage’s question “Who assaulted the White race? Who set out to destroy the White people?” This is a huge improvement on other MSM conservatives. I have never heard anything like that from the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, or your average neocon. Even if his analysis of why this happened is puerile (although it does finger some prominent Jewish names in the 1960s counterculture), just having his audience think in those terms is a breakthrough. Listeners inevitably get the message that the White race is under attack and likely to go extinct in the foreseeable future. He inserts a gloomy report on White birthrates in Europe that concludes that it would take decades for Whites to get back on track demographically.

Certainly White listeners are going to feel threatened and under attack — quite a different message from the harmonious future envisioned by the current media and intellectual elites and on the verge of being enforced by the impending multicultural police state. It necessarily implies that  White people identify as White and start looking for ways to reverse their decline — the nightmare of the current regime. And it doesn’t take much imagination to plug into a really powerful analysis of what went wrong in the 1960s and how the events of that decade continue to reverberate in our culture.

The other thing that struck me is the complex character of Andrew Breitbart, whose picture lounging in a bathtub graces the TOO front page. One can only imagine the mixed messages he must have had growing up as an ethnically Irish boy being raised with his Hispanic sister by a Jewish man and his formerly Protestant wife. Then he goes to Tulane for college — a bastion of White southern culture. The $64 question is, what did Breitbart mean when he said, “You’ve gone to Hebrew school, you’ve gone to Auschwitz, you go, Never again, Never again. Then you go to Tulane and you go, Maybe never again”? Suggestions appreciated.

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Kevin MacDonald: The Genteel Mr. Bradlaugh

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I agree with everything in Christopher Donovan’s blog on Bradlaugh’s take on the AmRen cancellation. But a couple of things Bradlaugh wrote stick in my craw. It used to be that Jews complained about genteel anti-Semites. Now we have people like Bradlaugh who spout genteel philo-Semitism: He complains about “the antisemitism of the AR followers, which rubs me the wrong way. I fall in line with the long tradition of British philosemitism (Cromwell, Victoria, Lloyd George, Maggie Thatcher), and just have no patience with the other thing.” He could have included Winston Churchill who was philo-Semitic to the point of corruption.

It seems to me that anyone writing on politics has a responsibility to write honestly about the various forces that influence public policy. For Bradlaugh, it’s simply not genteel to discuss embarrassing things like Jewish power. I suppose Mearshimer and Walt rub him the wrong way as well. I had this to say about John Derbyshire, Bradlaugh’s alter ego:

Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. … Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses.

I think that Bradlaugh’s problem is that he sees himself as genteel and that being genteel is a very good thing. (Definition: 1. Refined in manner; well-bred and polite. 2. Free from vulgarity or rudeness. 3. Elegantly stylish: genteel manners and appearance. 4. a. Striving to convey a manner or appearance of refinement and respectability. See Synonyms at polite. b. Marked by affected and somewhat prudish refinement.)

He seems very impressed with good manners, a well-rounded education, and being polite. Genteel people simply don’t discuss Jewish power and influence for fear of offending the Jews. In the same way, genteel people would not want to offend others by calling attention to their garish clothes. To do so would make one impolite and vulgar and therefore consign one to a lower order of society.

His gentility is probably also why he doesn’t resonate with AmRen’s “ethos of the South, which I don’t really … get. I wonder if a foreigner ever can get it. It’s as odd and particular, in its own way, as Tibetan Buddhism.”

The reality is that White Southerners are by far the largest identifiable group of White Americans who have held onto their culture and identity in the face of the onslaughts of the last 50 years. The White vote for Obama was nearly in the single digits in three southern states, and lopsidedly Republican in the others. White Southerners understand, at least implicitly, that it’s about racial and ethnic conflict. As the racialization of American politics continues, all Whites will tend even more in this direction. (The recent election in Massachusetts certainly supports this). Conservatives who think they can take back the country without Southern Whites are seriously deluded.

Bradlaugh’s gentility also leads him to entirely avoid framing the issue in ethnic or racial terms at all:

My own strong preference, as I argued in that debate with Jared, would be for everybody to shut up with the race business. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of this happening, though, so it’s not hard to see the AR-ers point of view. In any case, I say again, whatever you think of that point of view, it’s a point of view. It shouldn’t be shut out of the public square; and if it is so shut out, by goons phoning in death threats to hotel employees, there ought to be a fuss made. Well, here I am on Secular Right, making a fuss as best I can. Freedom of speech! Freedom of assembly! Liberty! Liberty!

This is “proposition conservatism” at its finest. If only people would stop talking about racial and ethnic conflict, then we could frame everything in terms of principles like free speech without soiling ourselves like the AR crowd. For people like Bradlaugh, massive immigration would presumably be fine if the immigrants were all principled people like himself.

The reality, of course, is that whether or not we talk about it, racial and ethnic conflict will continue. There is no other possible outcome given that 100 million more non-Whites are to be added to the population of the US in the next few decades.

The bottom line is that no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. And in the process of losing the ethnic battle, the society will be less and less committed to Bradlaugh’s cherished principles because, in the end, the principles of free speech, individual liberty, and the rest of the corpus of Western individualism are ethnic creations.

But people like Bradlaugh are more willing to lose the ethnic battle than to become anything less than genteel by mentioning the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the political divisions in the US. It just wouldn’t seem proper.

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Christopher Donovan: Secular Right on the AmRen Shutdown

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Christopher Donovan:  Over at Secular Right, the blog for religion-averse conservatives, “Bradlaugh” has weighed in on the outrage that was the threat-driven shutdown of the American Renaissance conference.  “Bradlaugh” sings the praises of Jared Taylor but decries the “anti-semitism” of some conference attendees.  I guess even under a pen name, you’ve got to watch out for Big Jew.

It’s still a good post.  I haven’t scanned the 78 (when I checked last) comments, but if any TOO readers feel inclined to throw in, go right ahead.  Are we winning?

Though I drag my sorry sinner’s rear into random churches on the odd Sunday with my daughter in tow, I have the same sympathy for the Secular Right ethos as I did libertarianism back in college.  It’s got a nicely rational line-up of ideas and tends to attract whip-smart figures like Heather MacDonald, John Derbyshire and Walter Olson.  The secular right crowd shows a strength of mind that reminds me of, well, race realists and white advocates.

But like Christian conservatives, secular conservatives will never get anywhere near the society they envision because they ignore the fundamental issues of racial difference and ethnic competition.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

Second Fundraising Appeal: Why support The Occidental Observer?

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Kevin MacDonald: The United States is headed for a political crisis. Patrick Buchanan wonders “Is this how democracy ends?”  Debt is skyrocketing and it is politically impossible for the Democrats or Republicans to deal with it — at least partly because of the rage of the tea partiers. These are the middle and lower middle class Whites who feel that the country is being taken away from them.

On the other hand, while rage builds among the middle and lower middle class Whites, the message has not reached educated Whites. George Will points out that the Republican Party “recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites.”

The Republican Party can’t win without their populist base, and yet it’s virtually certain that the Republicans will do nothing to give them what they really need. The Beltway Conservatives don’t even mention immigration as an issue, even though, as the Center for Immigration Studies tells us, wherever immigrants settle the percentage of the vote going to Republicans has declined. The Republican Party has become a White party. Whatever short term successes they have — and they figure to do well this year by milking the rage and the money of the tea partiers, they are doomed to electoral defeat in the long run.

American politics has become racialized. The United States and the rest of the Western world are undergoing an existential crisis. Our culture is coming under intense pressure with the rise of multiculturalism and continuing high levels of non-White immigration. We can see the changes all around us, and yet discussion of public policy related to these issues in the mainstream media is contained within a hopelessly narrow space.

We at The Occidental Observer are determined to change this. In this, our second fundraising appeal, we are asking readers to contribute financially to TOO’s success and increased visibility. It is important to get our message out in the most professional manner possible.

Western societies have become cauldrons of competing ethnic groups where only one group — White people of European descent — may not explicitly assert their interests.  The tea partiers want something like the America they grew up in, but they may not say this because they will be tagged as racists by the media. These people are being pushed out economically and politically. They are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.

But without direction and leadership, this movement will not be effective. The fact is that the domination of the mass media and the academic world by elites that are hostile to White identity and interests makes it very difficult for educated Whites to sign on to a White ethnonationalist movement. Such people are often vulnerable to economic pressures where they work, and, as college-educated people, they have a respect for mainstream academic and media institutions. Having been treated fairly in general, they trust the integrity of the basic institutions of the society. They identify with its basic ideology — America as emerging from its long dark night of evil into the glorious goodness and virtue of the multicultural future.

The Occidental Observer occupies a unique space on the Internet because it attempts to appeal to educated Whites. There is simply no other outlet that discusses the full range of issues related to White survival and interests with the same level of intelligence and intellectual honesty that can be found here. All of the theory and the data are on our side. There is no reason at all why educated Whites cannot be persuaded to see the world as we do and to explicitly advocate for a White identity and for White interests.

It is no secret that many of our articles deal with Jewish power and influence. Jews have become a financial, media, and academic elite, and the organized Jewish community is a pillar of the multicultural left that has transformed Western societies. The multicultural left has abandoned the White middle and working classes in favor of promoting policies that will completely eclipse the people and culture of traditional America. An important theme of many of our articles  has been that Jewish influence in the media has resulted in the denigration of all of our cultural traditions, especially the strong Christian religious traditions of our people. It has resulted in invidious portrayals of White people and their accomplishments that have become internalized among a very large number of our people.

Educated Whites must realize that whatever their current prosperity, their long term prospects for themselves and their children are going to be severely compromised in multicultural America. It makes no sense whatever for these people to ally themselves with the looming non-White majority and against the great majority of their own people.

This is a very difficult topic to discuss fairly and honestly. A large part of the problem is that even well-argued, factually-based discussions of Jewish power and influence are typically labeled “anti-Semitic” and are banned from mainstream discussion. The occasional lapses from this public decorum are aggressively policed by an imposing array of well-financed activist organizations. These organizations have no scruples about ruining careers or doing whatever else they see as necessary to maintain the status quo. They typically operate by creating moral panics aimed at shutting down any discussion of Jewish power and any discussion of the Jewish role in the decline of Whites in America and other Western societies.

Prior to the Internet, it was possible to relegate all discussions of Jewish power and influence to the fringes of the culture. But that is no longer the case. The Occidental Observer has a place on the web that is just as accessible as the New York Times or the Washington Post.

It doesn’t take billions or even millions of dollars to develop a presence in this new medium. But it does require a sound financial foundation. We have set up TOO on a shoe-string budget. The great majority of the writing and all of the technical work have been done as a labor of love by people who are self-motivated to contribute to this effort.

We have posted some exceptional material within these constraints. But volunteer labor can only go so far. Good writers are a rarity. For the reasons discussed above, It is difficult to find writers with the requisite expertise and commitment to the historical American nation and the West. It is only natural that writers would appreciate some compensation — even if it is far less than they would need to earn a living. Quite simply, they need the money.

Huge numbers of readers are not critical for our success. The anti-White revolution that has so far triumphed in America has been a top-down phenomenon. The next revolution will also likely be a top-down phenomenon in which ideas that are completely outside the mainstream are disseminated and gradually take hold among people who can make a difference, whether because they have money, writing ability, or skills in the political arena. 

The point is not how many people are reading TOO, although we are certainly growing in readership. (This pdf file of readership from February, 2009 through January 2010 shows that around 2500 unique users per day in the most recent month — over twice the readership of a year ago.)

The point is that some of the people reading it may be able to make a difference in the future.

I ask for your support on behalf of The Occidental Observer’s dedicated writers.

A significant number of small donations make a huge difference. Realize that at this time we are not a 501C3 tax-deductible organization.

At present, we have several ways to make donations. Click on this link.

Thank you.

Kevin MacDonald, Editor

Kevin MacDonald (Email him) is Editor of The Occidental Observer and is Professor of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

What’s gotten into Rush Limbaugh?

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The ADL reports that Rush Limbaugh “raised the possibility that liberal Jews were having ‘buyer’s remorse’ with President Obama in light of the outcome of the Senate election in Massachusetts.” Limbaugh:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

Abe Foxman responded as follows:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote. 

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.           

This is classic ADL-talk. Anything said about Jews as Jews is anathema. No need to actually look at the evidence that indeed Jews are vastly overrepresented in the Wall Street elite and that they gave vastly disproportionate amounts to Obama.

What’s surprising is that Limbaugh would go there, given the long track record of the ADL in condemning any mention of Jews as influencing anything at all. Unless he’s living under a rock (and he isn’t), Limbaugh must have known of the consequences and did it anyway. Perhaps things really are changing for the better.

This is from a previous article reacting to ADL angst about anti-Jewish comments that were appearing in a great many of the comment sections of news articles on the internet in the wake of financial meltdown in 2008:

The problem is that we all know that there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Wall Street, just as there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Hollywood. In fact, as we previously pointed out, Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent social scientist, noted during the 1990s that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish.

Nevertheless, the immediate reaction of the ADL is to attempt to stifle any such comments and simply label them as “anti-Semitism.” …

Such heavy-handed attempts to squelch discussion of Jewish influence can be seen on a wide range of issues, most notably the role of the Israel Lobby in influencing US foreign policy in the Middle East. When John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt published their work on the Israel Lobby, organizations like the ADL were quick to condemn them as anti-Semites and compared their writing to classic anti-Jewish themes in writings like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But the bottom line is that there is no attempt to soberly and rationally determine the real extent of Jewish involvement in this disaster. The  entire topic of Jewish involvement in the financial system is taboo. It is not surprising that the police-state tactics favored by the ADL fuel the flames of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories when all attempts to raise the issue of Jewish influence in the financial system or other areas of American life are met with powerful efforts to enforce silence.

The situation is similar to a previous financial scandal — the one involving Michael Milken, the notorious 1980s junk bond king. As a 1989 National Review article noted, Milken “is Jewish, as were many of his partners and peers. (Indeed, about the only sympathy he has gotten is from those who see his prosecution as an instance of anti-Semitism.)”

Much of the discussion of the Jewish role in this financial scandal centered around the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz called Den of Thieves an “anti-Semitic screed” and attacked a review by Michael M. Thomas  in the New York Times Book Review because of his “gratuitous descriptions by religious stereotypes.”  Thomas’s review contained the following passage:

“James B. Stewart . . . charts the way through a virtual solar system of peculation, past planets large and small, from a metaphorical Mercury representing the penny-ante takings of Dennis B. Levine’s small fry, past the middling ($10 million in inside-trading profits) Mars of Mr. Levine himself, along the multiple rings of Saturn — Ivan F. Boesky, his confederate Martin A. Siegel of Kidder, Peabody, and Mr. Siegel’s confederate Robert Freeman of Goldman, Sachs — and finally back to great Jupiter: Michael R. Milken, the greedy billion-dollar junk-bond kingdom in which some of the nation’s greatest names in industry and finance would find themselves entrapped and corrupted.”

Sounds like a Jewish cabal to me. Thomas later noted that “If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in street crimes are black, that’s an interesting sociological observation. If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in securities indictments are Jewish, that is an anti-Semitic slur. I cannot sort out the difference. . . .”  …

The difference between the current  crisis and the Den of Thieves debacle is that the consequences to the financial system of the current Wall Street disaster are far greater and they are far more likely to have a negative effect on pretty much everyone. When a new version of Den of Thieves describes in detail the Jewish involvement in the current catastrophe, perhaps not even Alan Dershowitz or the ADL will be able to keep the lid on the bottle.

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