The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 1

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Introduction

Fay Stender earned fame as a radical attorney in the 1960s and 1970s, defending two of the most prominent Black Panthers in highly publicized court cases. During the course of her career in left-wing activism, she embraced numerous “causes” with a passion as flamboyant as it was unbalanced. She worked strictly within the stream of Jewish anti-White activism, but inside that framework her aims were essentially random, a consequence of her peculiar personality. She displayed during the course of her work a toxic combination of Jewish radicalism, selfishness, ambition, egotism, and unrestrained female emotion. The blend eventually destabilized social institutions and got people killed.

Fay was the personification of psychological intensity, a classic marker of Jewish activism. Her personality traits were etched in bold lettering. People “who knew her intimately . . . regarded her as one of the most forceful persons they had ever met.”[i] Her sympathetic biographer mentions her “extraordinary” ego, and even her husband was appalled by her “analytic, calculating ambition.”[ii] She was “deeply typical” of the radical movement, says a fellow 1960s leftist, “the paradigmatic radical—relentlessly pushing at human limits; driven to a fine rage by perceived injustices; searching for personal authenticity in her revolutionary commitments.”[iii] Like many subversives of the 1960s, she was also a strongly identified Jew, and consciously linked the supposed values of her Jewish heritage with her social activism.

Her life story is a revealing case study in Jewish activism.

Early Life and Education

Fay Stender was born in San Francisco in 1932, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her grandparents hailed from the old country: Brest-Litovsk, Hungary, and Germany. Her father, Sam Abraham, was a chemical engineer; her mother, Ruby, was a teacher. They were a conventional family, not “political” or activist. Sam was Orthodox, but Fay and her only sibling, Lisie, were raised Reform, and they observed the Sabbath and other Jewish rites.[iv]

Fay began piano lessons at four years of age, and quickly showed real talent. By the time she entered her teen years she was on track to become a concert pianist. She earned the privilege of performing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony when she was just fourteen years old.

Not long afterward, she rebelled against her rigorous schedule. She wasn’t happy with her stunted social life (she was attending private school to maximize practice time); she demanded to be allowed to attend Berkeley High School with her friend Hilde Stern. She also wanted to reduce her practice time. Her parents submitted only after much argument. She did not fit in very well in high school, however, because Hilde’s circle of friends considered her arrogant. She was “a loner, restless and impatient with frivolity.”[v] She read much in her spare time and made the National Honor Society.

Fay and her family evinced a good deal of neurosis. Her mother was “controlling” and “tended toward hypochondria,” frequently dragging Fay around to doctors and imposing unnecessary therapies on her. Fay herself suffered periods of serious depression throughout her life, and may have suffered from bipolar disorder.[vi] She also enjoyed provoking authority. At public institutions, she would open doors marked “private” and, boldly entering, implicitly challenging the White social order.

At seventeen, Fay followed Hilde Stern to Portland, Oregon, to study English at Reed College. Reed had a reputation as left wing and iconoclastic. Fay reveled in her freedom from parental control, and began dating for the first time. She was, like many young people, almost painfully idealistic. A letter of advice to her younger sister featured this earnest impression: “The real meaning of life is in three things, love, beauty and pain. And these three are all really one which is God or Truth. And you will only come to know and understand this by giving, and giving too much.”[vii]

A young Fay Stender at Reed College

Jewish idealism does not frown upon unorthodox modes of sexual expression. Sex is also, of course, a well-known tool of revolutionaries. In her sophomore year she fell for a youthful professor, Stanley Moore, a womanizing Communist with a taste for bondage (Fay’s biographer Lise Pearlman describes the relationship as “sado-masochistic.”[viii]) Moore turned her strongly to the left and “convinced her to reject her cloistered upbringing and bourgeois Jewish values.”[ix] It began to dawn on Fay that “there was something wrong with this country, something I wanted to change.”[x] She quickly embraced radical ideas, a rare example of a Gentile converting a Jew to revolution.

In her junior year she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. There she befriended a fellow student, Chinese immigrant Betty Lee, and, talking “a million miles a minute,” “passionately expounded on Communism, racism and imperialism.”[xi] Her knowledge of these issues must have been superficial, but her passion wasn’t. She was vocal enough with her new beliefs that the FBI opened a file on her and Betty as suspected Communists.[xii] The FBI would track Fay through much of her life. Read more

Sociology as Religion, Part 2

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The author returns to the Project’s origins in Chapter Four, and here is where I diverge from Smith’s analysis. As mentioned in discussing Chapter One, the author sees the Project as perhaps the ultimate stretch of Western liberalism and individualism. I see the Project more as a discontinuity, not only from Western tradition generally, but specifically from the men who established sociology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

First, consider that liberalism, and the Enlightenment were products of the minds of Western White men; while the Project is explicitly anti-Western, anti-White, and anti-male. Second, though the Enlightenment celebrated the individual, it did so in a restrained way. Here it is useful to look at the political and social applications of Enlightenment thought, rather than the Enlightenment as a purely philosophical movement. In Western Europe and North America the Enlightenment can be represented by the republicanism of the Founding Fathers and their antecedents. These men often wrote and spoke of the need for virtue and self-control, and the requirements of the common weal, the common good. In Central and Eastern Europe the Enlightenment was embodied by the Enlightened Despot, the absolute monarch who would reform his society from the top down. Both variants were far removed, if not the antithesis of the snowflake, “do your own thing” individualism of the Project.  A third factor – the Enlightenment developed in tandem with the Scientific Revolution. One of Smith’s motifs is the loss of scientific objectivity in sociology. The Project is faith based, a secular religion. It is not scientifically based. It indulges in a sophisticated manipulation of the social and life sciences to serve its agenda.  The Dissident Right is more firmly based on science then the contemporary Left.

The author briefly discusses Lester Ward, Edward Ross, and other “early American sociologist pioneers and textbook authors” (122). What Smith chooses to ignore is the profound influence that evolutionary theory, racialism, and eugenics had on the nascent social sciences of the period.[5] Take Lester Ward, the first name on Smith’s list. Ward established the sociology department at Brown University, and served as the first president of the ASA. Born in Illinois from New England stock, he saw heavy combat with the Union army during the Civil War. Yet Ward had a well-developed racial conscious. He “drew a distinction between ‘historic’ or ‘favored’ races which originated in Europe, and other great groups of black, red, and yellow races. . . . He spoke frankly of ‘superior,’ ‘inferior,’ and ‘decadent’ races.”[6] And despite his background Ward appeared to have a sincere concern for the safety of Southern White women.

The lower races, Ward maintained, experienced an unusual amount of sexual desire for members of the higher races because they dimly and instinctively realize that improvement of their own race is involved. A Negro who rapes a white woman, Ward declared, is impelled by something more than mere lust. ‘This is the same unheard but imperious voice of nature commanding him at the risk of lynch law,’ said Ward, ‘to raise his race to a little higher level.’ On the other hand, the fury of the white community in which such an act takes place is equally natural.[7]

Sentiments of the first president of the American Sociological Association.

In the past when the establishment was confronted with the racialism of foundational figures such as Ward they often tried to minimize or dismiss such beliefs as simply outdates prejudges of an earlier age that society has discarded along with erroneous views on medicine or astronomy. In today’s more polarized environment such beliefs are seen as proof of pervasive individual and institutional racism, past and present, that must be extricated root and branch. White racial consciousness and preference was, of course, taken for granted in the past.  His experiences fighting for the Union did not lessen Ward’s concerned for the welfare of White women in the South. Blood is thicker than regional differences. It is obvious that he thought deeply about the issue and analyzed it from an evolutionary perspective.

Another name on Smith’s list, Edward A. Ross, was even more explicated in his racial views. A strapping six foot six advocate of the strenuous life and a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, Ross coined the term “race suicide” later used by Roosevelt and Madison Grant. Ross received a PhD from Johns Hopkins and went on to help establish the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin where he taught for 31 years. He also served as the third president of the ASA. Ross was skeptical about giving Blacks the franchise: “One man one vote does not make Sambo equal to Socrates.”[8] He also vigorously pushed for limiting immigration. He believed “Hebrew money . . . was financing the anti-restriction campaign, which pretended to benefit all immigrants, but was, in fact, ‘waged by and for one race.’ According to Ross, the Jews had repaid the gift of American asylum by undermining America’s capacity to control its own racial destiny.”[9] Ross also authored one of the early introduction to sociology textbooks, Foundations of Sociology (1905). Sections of this book could have been written by Madison Grant. It needs to be repeated that men such as Ward, Ross, and even Grant were progressives who fought corporate interests and went to bat for the working man. They were true progressives whose study of social science led them to race realism. I cannot understand why today’s writers on the Right refer to their opponents as progressives.

It would appear from the evidence presented above that there has been a sharp discontinuity in sociology during the twentieth century. The Project is indeed revolutionary. There has been a 180 degree turn on social issues, especially involving race and sex. While Smith concedes the influence of Marxism and feminism on contemporary sociology I do not believe he fully appreciates, or at least does not acknowledge, the profound changes that have occurred. The Project has adopted elements of Trotsky’s permanent revolution of social transformation along with the continuous Cultural Revolution of Mao, with no end in sight.

Smith ends Chapter four by stating that sociology’s embrace of the Project was not inevitable. Again, the evidence above would definitively support that conclusion. The social sciences as a whole could have continued with their naturalist approach, one informed by the life sciences, especially evolutionary biology, throughout the twentieth century. There is a natural tendency to read history backwards, to see events or developments that occurred decades or centuries earlier as inescapably leading to present conditions. A more balanced view of the past sees numerous turning points when alternative paths could have been taken.

Chapter five is entitled, “Consequences,” but in keeping with Smith’s religious motif I think a better title would have been, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Sociology.” The sins are: Dishonesty – “the discipline is being dishonest with itself, its students, their parents, college and university administrators and donors, and American taxpayers” (134).  Sociology is too often propaganda disguised as social science. Hypocrisy – “For a discipline that is obsessed with social inequality as a moral wrong American sociology turns out to be just as structured and driven by status hierarchy, rankings, elitism, excluding social processes, and protection of privilege as just about any other institution in society” (136).

The next four sins are closely related: “Standardized Thinking” – excludes dissenting ideas; “Myopic Socio-logic” – the inability to think outside the box; “Corruption of the Peer-review Process” – the Weitzman scandal is an example; “Alienated Sociologists” – the alienating and purging of dissident students and scholars from the discipline. The seventh deadly sin is “Self as Blind Spot.” The Project’s “very obvious righteousness in the eyes of those committed to it tends to make it invisible to its disciplines. For them it is just self-evident reality” (176).

Chapter seven’s title asks: “What Is Sociology Good For?” Smith has trouble answering this question. At times the author thinks “that sociology as an enterprise should simply be shut down,” or perhaps just “downsized” (184).  Sociology can be very good at describing social characteristics, problems can come with the interjection of ideology and politics, “under the guise of theory and interpretation,” that distort sociological research. The obvious solution is to replace the perverse and destructive ideology of the Project with a healthier, more objective orientation that serve the needs of society.

Chapter eight “Conclusions,” is largely a summarized restatement of Smith’s main points. There is then an appendix where the author briefly describes his personal beliefs. Earlier in the book Smith states that while he opposes the sacred project, which I clearly identify with the Left, he is no conservative, and he is definitively not man of the authentic Right. His own ideology – Critical Realist Personalism – emphasizes “the person over the individual and community solidarity over atomization” (200). It is unclear from this short description how the author defines community.  Critical Realist Personalism is described in more detail in Smith’s To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, and Evil (2015).

So what can we take away from this book? First, if you are teaching or studying sociology, or plan to, you should read this book. Obviously a short review cannot fully develop Smith’s thesis, nor discuss all of his evidence. Plus, my interpretation of this work any not be the same as yours.

For the layman the main points are: (1) The contemporary Left is a secular religion. This is clearly the book’s main message, and it is really nothing new. Commentators a hundred years ago were comparing the Bolshevik party to a religious order. Religions, secular or sectarian, are largely based on faith, so reason or empirical evidence will not dissuade true believers. They do not want dialog or debate. The social justice warriors of today are as fanatical as any religious zealots of the past.

(2) The book points out that those opposed to the Project’s takeover of sociology have largely acquiesced, offering passive resistance at best. This has also been true in the larger political/social arena. Science and reason are not enough. Something spiritual is required. The Right needs the “intense emotional commitment” to a common cause, and the “subordination to a higher collective purpose” that Smith notes on the Left. Conservatives do not have this spirit and never will.  It is obvious that unless the Left can be confronted by a greater counter force it will prevail.

(3) Academic departments are closed systems that medieval guilds could not match. Especially in the liberal arts and social sciences grad students are often recruited and faculty are hired and promoted on ideological grounds.  These departments are subject to little or no oversight or accountability.

One last note, the increasing number of books such as this one, critical of the academy, may indicate that more people are finally taking notice of the Left’s corrosive effect on Western scholarship. However, of all the institutions in society, higher education may prove to be, for some of the reasons cited above, the most difficult to restructure.

[5] See: Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Reviewed in: The Occidental Quarterly 16 no.2 (Fall 2016) 105-113.

[6] Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963). 164.

[7] Ibid, 166.

[8] Ross quoted in Leonard, Illiberal Reformers, 50.

[9] Ibid. 158.

Harold Bloom (1930–2019): Unconventional Jewish Guru

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“The defense of the Western canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. If multiculturalism meant Cervantes, who could quarrel with it?”
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

It’s been remarked that in the last two decades of his life, the infamous Yale literary critic Harold Bloom was sufficiently preoccupied with his eventual demise that, when a student ran into him in a bathroom and asked “How are you, Professor?,” Bloom, at the urinal, replied, “I am born unto death.” The anecdote dates from when Bloom was 69, and does a marvelous job of conveying just how the incomparably melodramatic Bloom had come to personify bathos itself. Bloom would live for another two decades, dying in mid-October and leaving the literary and journalistic worlds scrambling to debate his politics, Jewishness, and critical legacy. Quite aside from these debates, to my mind the most fascinating aspect of Bloom’s career was his almost entirely unique position as a Jewish intellectual guru who resented WASP America but possessed an exuberant love of Western literary culture that led him, ironically, into direct conflict with many of the forces assailing the same group. Although his reasons and motivations are complex, in the case of Harold Bloom, the enemies of his enemies were not his friends. In the following essay I want to explore Bloom’s position as Jewish activist and guru, his attitudes to the old Yale WASP elite, and the nature of his defense of the Western literary canon. Read more

Why I Owe Jim Bakker an Apology and Thank You                         

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Recently, I wrote an article, posted here, on the 1969 Academy-Award-winning film “Midnight Cowboy.”  I’m old enough to have seen it in a theater back when it was first released—of course, no DVDs or streaming in those years.  I hadn’t seen it again until this year, a gap of a half-century no less.  What particularly struck me this time around is how the film was replete with social/cultural messages that I wasn’t consciously aware of back then.

One of the messages or themes, of “Midnight Cowboy” was a negative take on Christianity, which, I realize now, was to be expected coming from the Jewish, gay, and leftist creators of the film.  I took note of their identities this time around; I wouldn’t have known to do it back then.  Examples:

  • The protagonist Joe Buck, Texas-born and raised, now in his twenties, on a bus to New York City, has his transistor radio to his ear listening to a gospel program called “The Sunshine Hour.” “Oh yes, sweet Jesus! I tell you, faith healin’.  I got a letter here from a sister enclosing ten dollars.”

Christianity as a money hustle.

  • A flashback: Ten-year-old Joe, looking frightened, being baptized, dunked in a river by a tall, lean, rural-looking man, a preacher, in a shirt and tie standing hip deep in the water. People on the shore, their arms raised high in the air, swaying back and forth, lost in Pentecostal rapture. An unsettling image; a bit scary.

Christianity as alien.

  • Joe in a shabby apartment in New York City with a stranger named O’Daniel—fifties, short, bald, fleshy, wearing only a loosely tied bathrobe, an odd manner. Leering at Joe, O’Daniel has him turn around so he can get a good look at him, pats Joe’s body.

Out of the blue, O’Daniel says, “Why don’t you and me get right down on our knees right now?”  He opens the bathroom door to reveal, attached to the inside of the door, the toilet in view, electric lights flashing, an altar with a statue of Jesus.

Joe bolts for the door to the outside.

“No!  Don’t run from Jesus!” implores O’Daniel.

As Joe nears the door, a pole with a sign attached that says “God is love” falls in his way.  He frantically thrusts it aside and charges out of the room.

Cut to Joe running down the street as fast as he can go.

Christianity as something to get away from.

  • Joe in a hotel room, invited by one Townsend P. Lock, late middle age, in New York, he says, for a paper manufacturer’s convention. Locke had picked Joe up at a carnival shooting gallery.

“What you want?” Joe demands.  “What you got me up here for?”

“Oh, Joe, it’s so difficult. . . . Oh, God, I loathe life.  I loathe it.  Please go.  Please.”

“You want me to leave?”

“No, I mean, yes, yes.  Please go.  Come back tomorrow.  Promise?  I want to give you a present . . . for your trip.  [Joe had told him he was going to Florida.]  Please take it.”  Locke takes a chain with a Saint Christopher medal off his neck and hands it to Joe.  “I want you to have it.  You don’t have to be Catholic.  Saint Christopher’s the patron saint of all travelers.  I want you to have it for helping me be good [refrain from engaging in homosexual sex].”

Joe doesn’t want a useless Saint Christopher medal, especially from someone like this, and gives it back to him.

Christianity as a pointless religion of lesser beings.

“Midnight Cowboy” is associated with the song “Everybody’s Talking” sung by Harry Nilsson—it’s prominent background music in the first scenes and then again in the last ones.  It starts out:

Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Those lyrics certainly didn’t apply to me in my formative years.  I heard every word the people talking at me were saying—the Hollywood movies, the network television shows, the popular music, the mass circulation magazines, all of them.  I had no critical understanding of what they were saying and its implications for my life, but I heard it and I took it to heart and I lived by it.

Which gets me around to Jim Bakker.   This was back in the mid-1970s to the late-‘80s, which is getting to be 35 years ago, so I suppose a lot of people these days know little or nothing about him.  He was a very big deal back then.  He and his wife Tammy Faye hosted a daily Christian talk show called “The PTL Club,” which was seen widely on a satellite network Jim had created.  It was never clear what PTL stood for—Praise The Lord or People That Love, one of the two or both—later on, after Jim and Tammy got in trouble, more on that later, people said it stood for Pass The Loot.

The two of them were diminutive—Jim 5’4’’ and Tammy 4’10’’.  Jim decked himself out like his idol Johnny Carson and Tammy piled on the makeup and did some business with her eyebrows and eyelashes and teased her hair to the max.

To give a sense of the success of PTL, within four years, more people watched it than tuned in to Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” It was America’s most viewed daily television program. I watched the Jim and Tammy show regularly; or sort of watched it, in the same way I sort of watched “Midnight Cowboy.”   It wasn’t that I was religious and watched Jim and Tammy to hear God’s Holy Word.  I had been baptized an Episcopalian, my immigrant English mother’s nominal denomination, but I’d had no contact with organized religion growing up or as an adult.   For me, watching Jim and Tammy, or going to see “Midnight Cowboy,” was like what George Mallory said back in 1923 about climbing Mount Everest, I did it because it was there.

Jim was originally from Michigan and Tammy grew up in northern Minnesota.  Both had modest upbringings.  They met in a bible college in Minneapolis and married and quit school to try to make their mark as traveling evangelists.  Their first television show was a kids’ puppet show.

“The PTL Club” began in a Charlotte, North Carolina furniture store.  It ran from 1974 to 1989.  In addition to putting together the satellite television network, Jim set up a headquarters for his and Tammy’s ministry in North Carolina he called Heritage Village, and he started up a Christian theme park just over the border in South Carolina he called Heritage USA.  A good amount of the time on PTL was given over to soliciting viewer contributions to expand Heritage USA.  It’s estimated that Jim’s donation pitches resulted in up to two million dollars a week coming in.  In time, Heritage USA became the third largest theme park by attendance in the U.S., behind only Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California.  What have you done lately?

Being in the know as I was back then because I had heard the people talking at me—how else would I have known, I hadn’t experienced anything first hand—I knew for a fact that Christians, particularly fundamentalists, were on the wrong side of the heroes/villains divide in life’s drama, and that all televangelists were phonies, hypocrites, and con artists.  It came as no surprise to me when Jim got caught in a sexual dalliance in a Florida hotel room a 21-year-old church secretary (not Jim’s) named Jessica Hahn.  Jim’s people doled out thousands of dollars in hush money to Jessica, but that didn’t do the trick, if you’ll pardon the expression—Jim’s transgression became front page news.  Tammy, who was dealing with a bad prescription pill problem at the time, was devastated by Jim’s betrayal and the humiliating notoriety.

Just as I knew would happen, the Bakkers got caught with their fingers in the till.  Jim (Tammy got off clean) was charged with the misuse of ministry funds to finance his and Tammy’s lavish personal lifestyle.  The media went after him with a vengeance.  After a highly publicized trial—again, front page—Jim was sentenced in 1989 to 45 years in federal prison.  This picture after the verdict—which became the iconic photo of him–was used to mock him and get it across that the SOB got what was coming to him.  I was fully on board: what a despicable loser.  I can’t think of an American in my lifetime who was as universally reviled as Jim Bakker.

As it turned out, he got out after five years, in December of 1994.

Jump forward to 2009.   I’m writing an article called “Message in the Inbox”—it’s on my website, www.robertsgriffin.com—which includes this:

History moves fast, so for those who don’t know about the infamous Jim Bakker—his wife, Tammy Faye, who recently died, got off clean—he was a television evangelist who got jail time for having his hand in the till.  Jim and Tammy Faye would emote that their Heritage USA religious theme park would have to be abandoned if the viewers didn’t send them heaps of cash right away.  In would come the money and Jim would throw a few bucks at the park and pocket the rest.

The truth of the matter was that I didn’t know what I was talking about in that paragraph, even though I was sure that I did (there’s no delusion like self-delusion).  I had glanced through a few newspaper articles and watched some television segments, that was it.  What I knew about the Bakkers, as my mother used to phrase it, you could put in your eye.  I got my basic angle from my sources, “Midnight Cowboy” and all the rest of the mediators of reality—that’s why they’re called the media—who had been talking at me.

Nobody has ever questioned what I wrote about the Bakkers, because the same people that had been talking at me had been talking at them and so it rang true.   If I had been so bold, however, as to defend the Bakkers in that 2009 piece—which, as you can surmise, I’m tooling up to do here—I would have been questioned big time and given a bad rating.  As writers of articles, along with stand-up comics and university professors, know well, the best way to go over with people is to confirm what they already believe.

It’s not just Jews, gays, and leftists that have it in for Christianity.   I’ve written a couple of articles this past year for this publication that run up against this idea.

“William Pierce and Cosmotheism” was posted in February of 2018.  Pierce, who died in 2002, was a prominent white racial advocate.  I wrote a book about him—The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds (FirstBooks Library, 2001).   In the 2018 Cosmotheism article, I outlined Pierce’s criticisms of Christianity in light of his racial commitments.  He argued that Christianity’s egalitarianism, universalism, other-worldliness (which distracts whites from attending to their compelling racial business here on earth in this life), and “superstition and craziness” were detrimental to white racial advancement.

The second article, posted in October of 2018, was on William Gayley Simpson (1892–1991), a white nationalist, and entitled “William Gayley Simpson on Christianity and the West.”  It included this quote from my book on Dr. Pierce which was taken from Simpson’s book, Which Way Western Man?

In Which Way Western Man? Simpson informs the reader that in his twenties he had read about the life of Francis of Assisi and found it an inspiration and personal challenge.  In Simpson’s eyes, St. Francis exemplified what Jesus meant for his most dedicated followers to do in the world.  At 28 years of age, during a month alone on an island in the St. Lawrence River, Simpson made the decision to incorporate this ideal into his own life.

Simpson lived a Franciscan life for nine years.  Centering his efforts in large cities, he made his way across the American continent trying to better the circumstance of people who were having a tough go of it in life.  He toiled as a common laborer, giving his work as a gift and living on whatever others chose to give him in return.  It proved to be an experience that was not only a test of what Simpson was made of as a person but also a test of the very foundations that had heretofore directed his life: liberalism, idealism, and Christianity.

Simpson ended this phase of his life when he reached the conclusion that the way he had been conducting himself for nearly a decade was neither the best way for him to serve others nor consistent with his own personal makeup.  As laudable as it seemed on the face of it, he decided, what he had been doing hadn’t gotten at the heart of what was wrong with mankind, because it isn’t so much the conditions of human beings that need improvement but rather their caliber, and the way he had gone about things hadn’t gotten at that.

Simpson had tried to become equal to the lowest and the least of individuals, and that just wasn’t him, that wasn’t his path in life, it wasn’t his way forward.  It became clear to him that he wanted to affirm the life of the mind and connect with the aristocratic instinct and taste that he felt strongly was natural to him.

Simpson gave over the rest of his life to pointing the way to a finer human existence with particular reference to those he increasingly came to see as his people, whites of northern European background.  For them especially, he described a life of health, robustness, beauty, nobility, and meaning far beyond what they were currently seeking and achieving and far more in keeping with what he considered their true nature and possibilities. 

It’s now October of 2019 as I write this.  Well into retirement as I am and sitting here on this leather couch pretty much from dawn to bedtime, with the last big event in my life coming right up, I’m finding myself drawn to giving energy (such that I still possess) to making sense of what I did with my life and why.  I’m learning that a review of my biopic movie, as it were, complete with how many stars I think it merits, is a central feature of old age.  There’s much on the line in this endeavor, because we only get to make one movie; no opportunity for re-shoots or sequels.  The “Midnight Cowboy” investigations and reflections came out of this “movie review” impulse, as was the decision I made a few weeks ago to look into what went on with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

With the Bakkers, I started with a book by John Wigger, who is a history professor at the University of Missouri, entitled PTL; The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017).  I went from there to a memoir Jim wrote just after he got out of prison called I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL’s Power to Prison and Beyond (Thomas Nelson, 1997).  Then it was Jim’s book written with the help of Ken Abraham, The Refuge: A Look into the Future and the Power of Living in a Christian Community (Thomas Nelson, 2000).  I read James A. Albert’s book on the 1989 trial, Jim Bakker: Miscarriage of Justice? (Open Court, 1999).  Albert is a law professor at Drake University.   And I read articles.  All of them totally trashed Jim (Tammy does better); not one positive word about him, zero.

Somewhere in all of that, I watched a 2000 documentary called “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” which was sympathetic to her.  The blurb for it:

Twelve years after the scandalous collapse of the multimillion-dollar Christian empire built by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” tells the fascinating inside story of the rise, fall and resurrection of “the Queen of the Eyelashes.” One of the most adored and reviled women of her time, the film follows her amazing tale from her love at first sight encounter with Jim, through the glory days of PTL, to the scandal that brought both their empire and their family tumbling down.

In the documentary, Tammy reads from Psalm 91.

He shall cover thee with His feathers,
and under His wings shall thou trust.
Because He has set His love upon me,
Therefore I will deliver Him.
I will set Him on high,
because He hath known my name.
He shall call upon me,
and I will answer Him.
I will be with Him in trouble.
I will deliver and honor Him.
And with long life I will satisfy Him,
and show Him my salvation.

Jim and Tammy divorced in 1992 while Jim was in prison.  Tammy re-married and died of cancer in 2007.  Jim, now bearing in on eighty—white hair, such as there is left of it, close-clipped beard, looking fit—with his second wife Lori does a television show out of Missouri that gets minimal attention.   I know nothing about the new show or what Jim is up to generally these days; my focus is on what happened during the PTL and prison years.

Jim Bakker with his second wife Lori

I’ll be darned, I didn’t expect it, after reading a fair amount on Jim and Tammy, I’ve come to the conclusion that both of them were for real, that they did very good work, and that arguably Jim was innocent of the charges that sent him to prison.  I feel awful about the dumb, heartless, and cruel depiction of them I mindlessly tossed off in that article I wrote.

I’ve watched some old YouTubes of PTL as part of my little research project, and this time I picked up on the way Jim ended all of his shows.  He looked into the camera and said, “God loves you . . . He really does.”  Maybe I’m losing it in my advanced state of geriatricness, but all I can do is report that I don’t think it was a con.  I think he really believed it, really meant it.  Plus, I’ve decided that in getting across to millions of people that they are loved, as he did so effectively, Jim made an enormous positive contribution to people’s lives.  To many, many people, hearing from Jim Bakker that they were loved was the only time in their lives they heard that, and it meant the world to them.

Jim Bakker was able to communicate to millions of people who felt alone, discarded by the world, and that they were nobodies and nothing, that God values them and that they belong, to the Christian community.  I’m reminded of the advice the novelist Kurt Vonnegut gave to people who feel cut off and isolated: go to your local church next Sunday morning.  Jim getting across to people that they count and are connected to something immensely significant and worthy was a great gift to a whole lot of people.

Jim was ridiculed for calling his Heritage USA donors “partners”—so it went, that was his ploy to shake money loose from them.  Here I go again, I think he was sincere; it wasn’t a ploy.  For a $1,000 donation, people felt they had a stake in something where otherwise, for many of them, they didn’t have a stake in anything.  They and their family were entitled to free lodging for four days at a Heritage USA hotel every year for the rest of their lives.   Despite what the media implied at the time, thousands upon thousands of people took advantage of that option; and even if they didn’t, just knowing that they could have done it gave them the feeling of being involved in an endeavor they believed in.  Plus, they had the uplifting knowledge that there was a place for them and their children to go where there would be other Christian people like them.  Jim set that up and it lasted for fifteen years; quite an accomplishment for someone who started from nothing.

In Jim’s book I Was Wrong, he gets into his personal failings.  The Jessica Hahn business got a lot of space.  He makes it clear that he now realizes that the prosperity gospel he bought into in a big way got out of hand.  He describes getting financially over-extended with the theme park, but he denies siphoning off money designated for it as I had him doing in the 2009 article.  He acknowledges that he and Tammy got ostentatious in their personal lives.  A board set Jim’s and Tammy’s salaries, which rose to around $1M Jim/$300K Tammy yearly.  He describes studying the Bible intensely in prison and coming to realize that the prosperity gospel was inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus.  His book The Refuge reflects the changes in his religious orientation from the PTL days.

It came through to me in Jim’s memoir, and from the Wigger book as well, that he was a decent, honest, well-intended person, sincere in his religious beliefs and projects, and a remarkably hard and productive worker.  A literacy program for inmates he and another inmate put together when he was in prison particularly impressed me.  As I read through his memoir, to my surprise, I grew to like him and, yes, admire him.  From everything I have been able to pick up about Jim Bakker, he was no fraud, and yet that is precisely the consensus wisdom about him.

Jim ends I Was Wrong with a description of preaching for the first time after being released from prison.

“I’m scared to death and I’m going to tell you that.  This is my first time in the pulpit in many, many, many years.”

“We love you, Jim!” someone shouted.

When I looked around the room and saw so many friends who were still serving God after surviving all that had happened at PTL, I was reminded afresh of God’s promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” 

The faith of many in this room had been severely tried, and they had come through the refining fire as pure gold.  They had not gotten bitter; they had become more loving, more kind, more Christ-like.  PTL was not a group of buildings; it was the people of God, in whom God was working.   They truly were the People That Love, the people who, no matter what, have continued to Praise The Lord, 

Slowly and with deep emotion, I began to read the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord in my shepherd; I shall not want. . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. . . . Thou prepares a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.”

I once thought God had abandoned me.   I thought my days of ministering for the Lord were done.  I thought that I would never preach again.

I was wrong.

And so too was I wrong—about you, Jim.  My apologies.

Looking into the lives of Jim and Tammy Bakker surfaced and underscored some rules to live by, call them that.

  • Listen carefully to what people have to say, but don’t just take it in. Question it, work with it, compare it to what others are saying, come to your own conclusions about whatever it is.  Don’t uncritically buy into somebody’s narrative and run with it, plugging everything and everybody into that particular story.   Look straight at reality: discern what each particular circumstance, event, and human action really is about rather than simply going by what your assumptions and generalizations and authoritative sources say it is.  Create your own narratives.  That’s what I tried to do with “Midnight Cowboy,” and that’s what I’m trying to it here with the Bakkers.
  • Keep in mind that intellectual autonomy and integrity takes courage. Sometimes your truth won’t play well with your audience, but put it out there anyway. You’ll take hits, but you’ll feel good about yourself, and at the end of your life, you won’t be living with the painful conclusion that you sold out in your one shot at life on this earth.  Develop your integrity and courage the same way you develop anything else, by practicing.  The next chance you get, do the honest and courageous thing.
  • Because something is true doesn’t mean it’s everything; there can be other important truths that need to be taken into account too. William Pierce contributed insightful observations about how Christianity can be problematic to whites’ wellbeing and advancement. But there’s also what he didn’t talk about: how Christianity can give peace, joy, meaning, direction, strength, and impetus to one’s life.  I offer the list in this last sentence not as insider who has experienced those things but rather as an outsider who hasn’t experienced them and wishes that he had.  In any case, we need to ask ourselves with respect to anything, what else is there that matters besides this?  What’s all of it?
  • Because something is right for one person doesn’t mean it’s right for some other person. To his credit, William Gayley Simpson was speaking only for himself when he said he wanted to affirm a life of the mind and connect with the aristocratic instinct and taste he felt natural to him. I’m sure he would have agreed that this approach might not work for, say, those who dropped out of school after trying and trying and failing and failing, and who take any job they can get and struggle to pay the minimal amount due on the credit card and then get laid off, and who are drinking or taking drugs more than they should and aren’t there for the people that need them as much as they ought to be.  Christianity may be a way for these people to feel their lives have meaning and worth, and it could give them the strength to get it together and be better for themselves and for the people in their lives.
  • Last, assume your adversaries know what they are doing. People who have it in for white people also tend to be the most bent on pulling the props from under the Christian religion. As brilliant a man as William Pierce was, and I know from personal experience he was brilliant, I’m coming to the conclusion that his opponents know better than he did the positive role Christianity plays in the wellbeing and fate of the white race.

I have a 15-year-old daughter, a sophomore in high school, who lives with her mother in another state from where I live.   This week, I sent her a gift of a CD by a Christian singer named Lauren Daigle, “Look Up Child.”  I feel good about doing it, and I wouldn’t have thought to do it if I hadn’t looked into the life of Jim Bakker and come to the conclusions I did.  Thank you, Jim.

I included a note to Dee, as I’ll call her here, with the CD.  Here’s what I said:

Dear Dee— 

This is a CD by Lauren Daigle, who sings Christian music.   The song “You Say” on this album has been a surprise hit—you can check out the video for it online.  Also, check out the video for “Rescue.”  You will pick up that Lauren is very different from rap artists or Billie Eilish [Dee recently went to a concert of hers]. 

75%—three of every four people—in the United States identify themselves as Christians, but how often in school are you encouraged to study them and their way of life, their culture?  You should learn about Christian people, and from a position of respect; often, schools and the media put them down as “uncool” and somehow bad.

Christians believe that God exists and loves them and looks out for them. 

 In these lyrics from “You Say,” the “You” being referred to is God.  

You say I am loved when I can’t feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
And you say I am held when I am falling short
And when I don’t belong, oh You say I am Yours
And I believe
Oh I believe
What You say of me
I believe 

In these “Rescue” lyrics, the “I” who will find you and rescue you is God. 

I will send out an army to find you
In the middle of the darkest night
It’s true, I will rescue you
I will never stop marching to reach you
In the middle of the hardest fight
It’s true, I will rescue you 

See if you can do a report on Christians in one of your classes—what they believe and how they live.  Let me know what you learn. 

Love always,

Daddy

The Nobel Prize in Literature and the Politics of Selective Outrage

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In an era in which every work of art is scrutinized by establishment critics according to prevailing political sensitivity, it is not surprising that the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature is now mired in controversy. Perhaps calling it a controversy might be a bit of a stretch considering how little impact literature –or most art, for that matter– has in public conversation these days, but it is still telling that the award’s winner, Austrian writer Peter Handke, is facing the wrath of cancel culture.

What was Handke’s transgression? His stance toward Serbia during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) and the Kosovo War (1998-1999). It is likely that his Slovenian heritage –he is the son of a German soldier father and a Slovenian mother– prompted him to defend his ethnic homeland, especially when Serbia waged war against the separatist ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo, a pro-independence –and clearly anti-European– effort backed by the Clinton administration and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is just as likely that Handke was outraged because of the double standard so typical of these international crusades led by Western globalist governments, where a foreign leader is designated as this season’s Hitler (Milosevic, Assad, Hussein, etc.), a group of “freedom fighters” is identified and properly armed and supported (the ethnic Albanians, the anti-Assad forces in Syria, the “rebels” who destroyed Gaddafi’s Libya, etc.), and war crimes and atrocities are selectively played up or down by the subservient Western media.

Handke’s collection of essays “A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia” is a slim tome that was published in Germany in 1996 and then translated to English the following year. It has never been reprinted since and copies go for $1,000 on Amazon. Based mostly on his experience travelling through the country, Handke expounds on how the media “relentlessly portray the Serbs as evil.” These fair observations are nonetheless undermined by his one-sided view of the conflict between Serbs and Croats. Handke pans Croats almost as unilaterally as the mainstream media maligns the Serbs.

In a subsequent interview with the left-wing French newspaper Liberation in 1996, he went even further. “True, there were intolerable camps between 1992 and 1995 on the territories of the Yugoslav republics, especially in Bosnia,” he said. “But let us stop automatically connecting these camps to the Serbs in Bosnia. There were also Croat camps and Muslim camps, and the crimes committed here and there are and will be judged at The Hague.”

Handke is an accomplished novelist and playwright, but interestingly enough, his career as a screenwriter of films like German director Wim Wenders’s acclaimed “Wings of Desire” came to a halt shortly after he made his views on Serbia known.

A few years later, liberal establishment writer Salman Rushdie zeroed in on Handke and nominated him for an “International moron of the year” award for his “series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of [Serbian President] Slobodan Milosevic.” By then, Handke was already getting the full non-person treatment by fellow mainstream writers, ever so diligent when it comes to shunning those who deviate from liberal orthodoxy. As it is, Rushdie ended up granting his inane award to actor Charlton Heston for his work as president of the National Rifle Association.

Milosevic died in prison while awaiting a trial for genocide and war crimes at The Hague, where Handke visited him. Handke’s final politically incorrect gaffe was attending Milosevic’s funeral in Požarevac, Serbia in 2006, where he delivered a eulogy.

The unexpected awarding of the Nobel Prize to Handke has unleashed a virulent wave of criticism. In the interim between the end of the Kosovo War and 2019, freedom of speech in the West has suffered increased attacks. European countries in particular have strengthened their so-called hate speech laws and debate of certain topics as well as adopting some political stances is simply impossible unless you are willing to face censorship, hefty fines, and imprisonment.

The award was even more surprising considering how the Swedish Academy was just coming out of an embarrassing #MeToo-type scandal last year in which the husband of one of its members was accused of rape. The academy had to cancel 2018’s prize announcement and, as part of its public atonement campaign, its members committed to be less “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric.”

One of the first organizations to object to Handke’s Nobel was Pen America, which describes itself as standing “at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.”

PEN America President Jennifer Egan issued a statement on behalf of the organization. “We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth,” the statement said. “At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this. We deeply regret the Nobel Committee on Literature’s choice.”

The condemnation is double-fold because not only it rejects Handke’s apparent questioning of “historical truth” but the fact that the prize is being awarded at a time of “rising nationalism.” In Pen America’s view, it goes without saying that nationalism is something to be denounced.

The attack is in line with the stated rationale for American and European intervention in the Kosovo War twenty years ago, which led to NATO’s aerial bombing of former Yugoslavia for 78 straight days. Needless to say, since the Western establishment has designated the Serbs as the main culprits in this conflict, the crimes committed against them are not even acknowledged when condemning supposed Serbian “apologist” Handke. Nationalism is a mortal sin and the Serbian people’s fight to preserve the unity of their state is to be forever repudiated.

As United States Gen. Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000, said shortly after the war in Kosovo started: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th-century idea and we are trying to transition it into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”

One has to wonder what Clark thinks of the more ethnically homogeneous state of Israel considering he comes from a long line of rabbis. According to a story from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during the time when Clark was trying to use his “war hero” status to run for President in the Democratic Party primary of 2003, he “revels in his Jewish roots.”

Clark’s troubling statement about multi-ethnic states, which did not get much play by mainstream media, did catch the attention of more perspicacious commentators like the late paleocon writer Sam Francis, who saw through the incipient attempts to suppress identity and homogenize cultures on a global scale. “In that order, particular identities – race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, cultural tradition, class, gender and any other category that distinguishes one “person” from another – will be forbidden. There are enough statements on record from the architects and prophets of this new order to know that national sovereignty itself will have vanished. And the order will not just be somewhere else, it will be everywhere, including in what used to be the United States,” Francis wrote in 1999.

It is no mystery that awards in the arts are politicized and hence not surprising that numerous writers or even the average reader responding to bombastic media accounts have joined Pen America’s repudiation of Handke. As of this writing, more than 40,000 people have joined in on the hysteria and signed a petition asking the Academy to revoke the prize.

It is more unusual, however, to see academics from other disciplines join the fray. Take, for example, American historian Deborah Lipstadt, a Jewish ethnic activist whose main claim to fame is her storied libel trial against her British colleague David Irving. With her characteristic lack of nuance, Lipstadt tweeted on October 13, 2019: “A Novel (sic) Prize to a Genocide denier. How did this happen?” and a few minutes later tweeted again: “Where’s the outrage?”

In a letter to The New York Times published five days later, Lipstadt criticized a column in defense of Handke, claiming that its writer ignored “the immense platform or megaphone the Nobel committee has awarded Mr. Handke. There will be those who will be convinced that his false claims must have some legitimacy, simply because he is a Nobel winner.”

The Swedish Academy has a long history of snubbing deserving recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It has been said that the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, an author whose short stories and essays displayed a breadth of erudition and inventiveness that earned him international recognition, was nevertheless denied the Nobel due to his politics. As the Argentinean once said, “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition.” Critics have since speculated that Borges was shunned by the Swedish Academy for his conservative political views and his admiration for strongmen like Spain’s Francisco Franco, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and Argentina’s Jorge Rafel Videla.

Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno, one of the most influential men of letters in the Spanish-speaking world, is also said to have been skipped over by the Swedish Academy due to an apparently unforgivable political sin. One of Unamuno’s admirers was the young leader of the nationalist Falange movement, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. In spite of being a strong defender of Western culture, Unamuno was not aligned with any particular political movement and yet he accepted Primo de Rivera’s request to meet in early 1935. Unamuno was impressed by his young admirer’s intelligence and publicly praised him, describing the Falangist leader as “very talented” and capable of accomplishing anything he wanted. According to Unamuno’s biographer Francisco Blanco Prieto, meeting with Primo de Rivera and attending one of his rallies likely cost him the Nobel.

Similarly, the Swedes shunned American poet Ezra Pound because of his allegiance to Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline for his anti-Jewish writings during World War II.

It is pointless to speculate why Handke obtained the world’s most prestigious literary award amid an inquisitorial political climate. What we can expect, however, is that the Nobel will ultimately succumb to the same cooptation of other literary prizes as more writers follow the diktats of the political institutions that grant them subsidies, history as a discipline conforms to an official narrative, and the arbiters of artistic excellence are compelled to operate like commissars and censors.

The Tory Parliamentary Struggle to Preserve English National Identity, 1753–1858: Parts IV and V

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Part IV: The Collapse of the Anti-Jewish Party, 1847–1858

The agitation for Jewish “emancipation” would not begin again in earnest until the Whig ministry of Lord Russell. There was no law against Jews taking up seats in Parliament; rather, they were effectively barred from taking office because of a technicality. In 1847, Lionel de Rothschild, Nathan’s son, was elected to the Commons. Unable to swear the Oath of Abjuration because of the words “upon the true faith of a Christian,” he could not take his seat. A Jewish Disabilities Removal Bill was again sent through the Commons in 1848. This provoked significant opposition among High Tories because it placed Jews on an equal footing with Roman Catholics. It was passed in the Commons, but rejected in the Lords. Following the Whig failure to get the bill passed through the Lords, Rothschild vacated his seat. He was re-elected in 1850. In consequence, the Whigs introduced into the House of Commons an Oath of Abjuration Bill, which would allow Rothschild to swear a modified oath and take his seat. Although it was passed in the Commons, it was ultimately rejected by the Lords in 1851.

Lord Russell, now Foreign Secretary in Lord Aberdeen’s Conservative cabinet, passed another Jewish Disabilities Bill in 1853. This was steered through the Commons without issue, but Lord Shaftesbury had urged its rejection in the Lords, where it was voted down after a second reading. Russell tried to pass a bill modifying the Oath of Abjuration, but it also abolished the Catholic version of the oath. This provoked considerable opposition among members of the Commons and it was voted against by a majority of MPs. In 1856, during Lord Palmerston’s Whig ministry, the MP for Manchester introduced a bill proposing the abolition of the Oath of Abjuration, but this measure was rejected after a second reading in the Lords. In 1857, Palmerston and Rothschild were returned to Parliament, with a large Whig majority. Palmerston passed an oaths bill in the Commons with the aim of substituting the Oath of Abjuration for another. This time, the Catholic version of the oath was left intact. This passed the Commons, but was rejected by the High Tories. Again Baron Rothschild again vacated his seat but was subsequently re-elected to the Commons. Lord Russell introduced another oaths bill, but before the second reading could be completed, Lord Palmerston’s ministry had fallen and was replaced by Lord Derby’s Conservative ministry in 1858. The Lords read the bill, then removed the clause affecting Jews, an amendment that was promptly rejected by the Commons.

Eager to break the stalemate between Houses, a committee was established by the Commons, with Baron Rothschild, much to the disgust of the Lords, appointed as a member. The committee’s purpose was to provide reasoned objections to the Lords’ stance on Jewish civil and legal disabilities. This would be submitted to the Lords for consideration. The Lords would then appoint a committee to come up with reasons in favor of maintaining the status quo, then submit these to the Commons for examination. During the committee stage, the High Tories, after decades of intra-Parliamentary squabbling, finally cracked. Much to their abhorrence, the Tories found themselves drawing up a compromise bill out of political expediency, even though the majority were still against Jews in parliamentary office. This was then sent to the Commons.

On the third reading of the Jewish Disabilities Bill (1858), Tory MP Samuel Warren protested, describing the measure as a “wholly unprecedented course …  calculated to lower the Legislature in the estimation of the country.” Forcing the Tories to embrace a bill they opposed on Christian principles would hurt the Conservative party. If Jews were allowed in Parliament, it would lead to the national repudiation of Christianity.

“The Jew must, therefore, in the whole tone of his thoughts, and in the whole series of his principles,” said Warren, “be so at variance with the principles and tone of thought of a Christian community, that he cannot safely be trusted with the discretionary power of making laws for that Christian community.”

He objected to the elitist nature of the campaign for Jewish relief:

The admission of Jews into the Legislature is opposed to public opinion and the wishes of the people, which ought to be distinctly ascertained by means of a general election before taking a step so seriously affecting the constitution of the Legislature. … The Bill before the House is, in the above and other respects, without precedent in our legislation; opposed to the genius and spirit of the Constitution; offensive to the Jew; derogatory to the dignity of this House; provocative of disunion and collision between the two Houses; and violates equally the principles of both parties to this unhappy contest.[1]

With the passage of the Jewish Relief Act of 1858, the Tories were forced to shed an integral part of their English ethnic identity. This is doubtless why the contest between both houses was a protracted one. The bill gave each House the ability to decide which oath they would use. It did not expressly give Jews the right to sit in Parliament, but they would be able to sit in the Commons upon alteration of the oath. The Tories would see to it, in determining what oath they would use, that the seats in the Lords would be reserved for Christians, a state of affairs that continued until 1885.

One of the Benefits of the Jewish Emancipation (1849-1858). An old Jew shows his wife a sucking pig and says_ Dare mine dear, see vot I’ve pought you! tanks to de Paron Roast-child & de Pill.

Part V: The Destruction of English National Identity

In the History of the Jews in England, Jewish historian Cecil Roth wrote, with an air of triumph:

“On Monday, 26 July 1858, Baron de Rothschild at last took his seat in the House. Two hundred years after Cromwell’s death the work that he had begun reached its culmination, and an English Jew was for the first time recognized as an equal citizen of his native land.”[2]

The High Tories were the racial consciousness of the English nation, the last bulwark of the nation’s racial defenses against alien intruders. They were willing to fight tooth and nail for the preservation of England’s distinctive ethnic character. With the numbers and influence of the High Tories seriously diminished by late nineteenth century, who would stand for England?

The triumph of the Judeo-Liberal vision was possible for two reasons:

(a) The millenarian beliefs of evangelical Christians. Millenarian beliefs among English Puritans introduced a world-denying and ascetic spirit into the English culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These destructive tendencies exacerbated the Englishman’s weaknesses, especially his relative lack of ethnocentrism, his individualism, and his tendency to promiscuous altruism.

Christianity is not an intrinsically destructive force; from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, it functioned as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic identifier. On the other hand, its universalist tendencies could be exploited by hostile elites—Jews, Whigs, liberals etc.—to dissolve and replace English national identity with a raceless cosmopolitanism. For example, historians speculate that Cromwell had both economic and millenarian reasons for re-admitting the Jews in 1656, believing this would lead to mass conversion of Jewry, ushering in the Millennium. The Jew Bill of 1753 was interpreted within a similar eschatological framework of mass Jewish conversion and universal redemption. In the nineteenth century, many Christians believed it was their duty to fight for Jewish relief because it would usher in the Second Coming. The Anglican evangelical Robert Grant, who tirelessly agitated for the removal of Jewish disabilities in the Commons during the 1830s, was an advocate of pro-Jewish millenarianism.

Perhaps our solution to this paradox is found in Oswald Spengler, who wrote: “It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction.”

If the birth of Western civilization occurred in the late Middle Ages, as Spengler contended, then Faustian man inherited the Christianity of late antiquity and “made it a new religion,” one that reflected Faustian man’s affirmation of life and striving towards the infinite. Faustian man transformed an ascetic and syncretistic Middle Eastern cult into a militant faith that would alter the course of world history. The music, architecture and literature of the late medieval period, like the Scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all sought to expand Faustian man’s consciousness.  Christianity, by accommodating itself to the Germanic warrior ethos, served as an ethnic marker that preserved English identity when faced with ethnic conquest and subversion by hostile invaders. In this Faustian regime, Europeans did not hesitate to drive out Jews and Saracens who threatened their survival as a race or the territorial integrity of their homeland. This warrior ethos permeated the medieval doctrines of the Christian church, i.e., the military orders, the code of chivalry, the rejection of infidels as sworn enemies of Christ, the glorification of the book of Revelation’s warrior Christ, the importance of jus ad bellum etc.

Faustian Christianity concealed a double-edged sword. The world-denying and universalistic dogmas of the old Magian religion, never completely submerged by ethnocultural Germanization, could be recovered and used to de-emphasize the religion’s significance as a Germanic ethnic marker. These dogmas, i.e. pacifism, universal love, the brotherhood of man, would be employed by hostile elites—Whigs, Jews, and liberals—to exploit European vulnerabilities. As a result, Europeans would no longer be willing to fight for what their ancestors had handed down to them. Courage, bravery, honor, glory, wealth—these were the values of Faustian Christianity, of Columbus, the conquistadors, the English settlers in America. The Magian-like Christianity that now dominates the Western World is a complete reversal of these values, the last gasp of a dying civilization.

(b) Whiggism, which evolved into modern liberalism. This political philosophy, in its earliest form, stressed the economic benefits of Jewish immigration. It assumed a Benthamite utilitarian cast as time wore on. Liberals who fought alongside the Jews to sabotage English identity argued that maximizing Jewish happiness would increase the happiness of the greatest number. Although Bentham himself was not an egalitarian, many of the Jews’ liberal champions were just as much concerned with liberty as they were with equality.

The diseases of liberalism and cosmopolitanism were already in existence by the mid-seventeenth century, albeit in an inchoate, nascent form. In the Whig-liberal narrative, the Jewish attack on English national identity was portrayed as the underdog’s struggle for legal and civil equality in an oppressive society. The liberalism of the nineteenth century allowed Jews to establish a permanent foothold within the host society, with the aid of those Englishmen who had a diminished sense of racial consciousness. The Jews and their liberal regressive allies had succeeded against their “oppressors,” but only at great cost to the survival of Western civilization, which had been infiltrated and weakened from within. The roots of modern Western degeneracy are found in the emergence of the more inclusive liberal world-views of the nineteenth century.

The Whiggish view of history—the belief in endless social progress—does not promote mutual co-operation in an ethnically heterogeneous living space, but inter-ethnic warfare. When two distinct ethnic groups with diametrically opposed interests are confined to a single geographical area, the racially healthy group will always take advantage of the racially unhealthy; if lack of good racial health is defined as widespread promiscuous altruism, i.e., Lockean individual rights, religious tolerance, universal suffrage, feminism etc., the group with the strongest ethnic identity will use these as weapons against the group being infiltrated and subverted. By exploiting its weaknesses, such as the European’s promiscuously altruistic attitude toward outgroups, the invading Jewish ethny maximizes its own survival at the expense of the host.

The attempt to do away with English ethnicity in the early modern period was led by a Judeo-Whig-Liberal elite, in collusion with Anglican evangelicals. By the late twentieth century, it would become so powerful that race-conscious whites would find their civilization being taken away from them and given to racial aliens. The attempt to encourage ethno-racial amalgamation between Jews and Englishmen was an attempt to redefine English national identity to accommodate Jewish ethnic interests. The result was inter-ethnic warfare, followed by subversion of English national identity from within. Once the Jewish influence had spread throughout the English body politic, English national identity would be further expanded to accommodate the peoples of the Third World, a development that will ultimately lead to the ethnic extinction of the English. The year 1948, the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush on English shores (see Andrew Joyce’s “The SS Empire Windrush: The Jewish Origins of Multicultural Britain”), was really the culmination of a series of events set in motion by Oliver Cromwell.

The parallel between Judeo-Whig-Liberal elite betrayal of the English public from 1753–1858 and Judeo-Liberal elite betrayal of the European public from 1948 to the present is striking. Cromwell invited Jewish foreigners to settle on English soil for economic reasons, just like the globalist elites, who invite Third-World immigrants to colonize Western countries so they can be economically exploited as a source of cheap labor. Jews were also re-admitted for millenarian reasons, with the Puritans believing that Jewish colonization of England was part of the divine plan, one that would usher in humanity’s universal redemption; in the same vein, Third World immigrants are imported by neoliberal globalists to recreate heaven on earth, similar to the New Jerusalem of the English Puritans.

There are other similarities. The Jew Bill was the result of Jewish meddling in English affairs at the highest levels of government, with the collusion of the Whig elite. Similar events occurred in the United States during the 1960s, where Jewish involvement in the demographic transformation of the country, in collusion with liberal elites, has been among the most decisive factors.[3] That Jews have always been a weapon of Western elites eager to advance their narrow economic and ideological goals is an inescapable conclusion. The difference, of course, is that national populist resistance to Judeo-Whig-Liberal elite power in 1753 was able to exploit the patriotic sentiments of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry to devastating effect, temporarily thwarting Jewish infiltration of English society.

Self-identified Jews pushing for dissolution of English national identity while maintaining their ethnic identity as Jews, would be a recurring leitmotiv in the history of Jews in Europe and the New World. This aspect of Jewish behavior would figure prominently in the twentieth century and would be a major factor in the undoing of Western civilization in the Anglosphere.

Whether the integrity of one’s racial identity can be preserved or not typically depends on the resolve of the elites, since a nation’s world-view or “ruling ideology” is ultimately a reflection of elite power. If the elites value the survival of the people they rule, they will preserve their distinct ethno-racial character; if they do not, they will undermine it by importing racial aliens. This was the case in early Victorian England; public opinion was molded by the millenarian evangelicalism and utilitarian liberalism of the Judeo-Liberal elite, placing the Lords at a strategic disadvantage because of the increased public pressure to resolve the intra-Parliamentary disputes in favor of the Jews and their allies. At some point in the late 1850s, resistance to Jewish interests became futile and High Toryism ceased to exist as a major force in English politics.

The victory of the Judeo-Liberal elite in 1858 spelled the death of English national identity. If the Jew could be an Englishman, anyone could be an Englishman. The effects of this decline have worsened considerably since Jewish “emancipation” and are now unstoppable, unless drastic measures are taken.

Bibliography:

Alderman, Geoffrey. “Not Quite British: The Political Attitudes of Anglo-Jewry.” In The Politics of Race by Ivor Crewe (2015).

Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain: 1656 to 2000. Univ. of California Press, 2002.

Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society. University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Hibbert, Christopher. Wellington: A Personal History. HarperCollins Publishers, (2010).

Latimer, B. “Samuel Richardson and the ‘Jew Bill’ of 1753: A New Political Context for Sir Charles Grandison.” The Review of English Studies, 66 (275), 2015b, 520–539. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgu112

‌Panayi, Panikos. Germans in Britain since 1500. Hambledon Press, 1996.

Perry, Thomas Whipple. Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Politics in Eighteenth Century England. Harvard University Press, 1962.

Rabin, Dana Y. “The Jew Bill of 1753: Masculinity, Virility, and the Nation.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, pp. 157–171., doi:10.1353/ecs.2005.0067.

Roth, Cecil. A History of the Jews in England. Clarendon Press, 1964.

Shapiro, J.S. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

‌Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn and Arnold, Thomas. The life and correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. Two Volumes. London: T. Fellowes, 1858.

[1]     https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1858/jul/21/aejourned-debate

[2]     1964, pg. 266

[3] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2002; orig.: (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).

The Tory Parliamentary Struggle to Preserve English National Identity, 1753–1858, Part III

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Part III: The Jewish Campaign Against Parliamentary Anti-Judaism, 1829–1836

The movement for Jewish “emancipation” in nineteenth-century England was spearheaded by Jews and their Whig or Liberal allies, while the opposition was led by the High Tories:

The High Tory majority in the House of Lords had acted as a barrier to the advancement of Jewish ‘emancipation’ … and some of the arguments put forward against the Jews, both in and out of Parliament, reflected the traditional Tory view that Church and State were part of an inseparable entity, in the promotion of which Jews ought to play no part. (Alderman, 2015)

In practice, Anglo-Jewry had more freedoms than their compatriots in central Europe, but in late-Georgian England, the laws on the books indicated that they were less free. Cecil Roth writes:

The entire body of medieval legislation which reduced the Jew to the position of a yellow-badged pariah, without rights and without security other than by the goodwill of the sovereign, remained on the statute book, though remembered only by antiquarians. As late as 1818 it was possible to maintain in the courts Lord Coke’s doctrine that the Jews were in law perpetual enemies, ‘for between them, as with the devils, whose subjects they are, and the Christian there can be no peace.’[1]

Despite his freedoms vis-à-vis Ashkenazim of Central Europe, in the English society of the nineteenth century, politically and professionally, the Jew was still excluded from the mainstream:

Public life was, in law, entirely barred. Jews were excluded from any office under the Crown, any part in civic government, or any employment however modest in connexion with the administration of justice or even education, by the Test and Corporation Acts. … These made it obligatory on all persons seeking such appointment to take the Sacrament in accordance with the rites of the Church of England. … Naturally these disqualifications included the right to membership of Parliament, for which the statutory oaths in the statutory form were a necessary preliminary. For the same reason the universities were closed, and, as a consequence of this, various professions.[2]

The Jew says: “Come I sha—Open the door vill ye—I vants to come in—and heres a shentlemans a friend of mines—vants to come in too—dont be afeard—I dont vant a sheat for nothing—I can pay for it So help me Got.”

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