The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 2

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Legal Work for the Movement

When she returned to Berkeley, Fay “felt energized.”[i] So did other returnees. Mario Savio, fresh from Mississippi, launched the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley that fall, kicking off the wider radical crusade of the 1960s. When the police began to clear Sproul Hall of protesting students in the early morning of December 3, Bob Treuhaft was the first one arrested; he had been called by Savio and arrived just in time for the bust.[ii] The Free Speech Movement—surprise—was every bit as Jewish as Freedom Summer. The occupiers of Sproul Hall held a Hanukkah service during the sit-in, and the biggest base of support for the radicals came from the Jews in the student body.[iii] Fay “relished seeing the Berkeley campus develop into a hotbed of Movement fervor.”[iv] The fact that it was a Jewish movement was presumably a source of pride for her, given her strong Jewish identity.

The arrestees called for legal help and Fay jumped into action. Her energy at times like this could be awe-inspiring, and the FSM members “secretly fell in love with her.”[v] Over the years, many people would describe Fay as attractive, intelligent, and generous, especially when she could immerse herself in a cause. She helped arrange for bail and performed other legal work in a blur of activity.

Shortly afterward, Fay held a Seder (a ceremonial Passover dinner) for SNCC personnel at her home. She “incorporated into it references to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement.”[vi] This was fitting because the Jews had invested heavily in the movement; indeed, they had generally succeeded in guiding the direction of the civil rights campaign from the time they initiated the NAACP in 1909.[vii]

Fay had another reason to feel good in the spring of 1965. She and Marvin reunited and leased a house in the Berkeley flats. They made their home a haven for movement friends, who were excited by yet another looming cause: the Vietnam War. (No rest for the wicked.) They plunged into an effort to help young men resisting the draft and others demonstrating against the war.[viii] Fay, Marvin, and their lawyer friends Peter Franck and Aryay Lenske set up the Council for Justice (CFJ) to provide legal services for the entire range of leftist causes. The Executive Committee of the CFJ included Beverly Axelrod, who would soon make Eldridge Cleaver famous.[ix]

The CJF didn’t last long, but not to worry; there is always another cause, another front in the war against White society. Sure enough, one soon appeared, one that carried a menacing—murderous, even—revolutionary swagger, so calculated to set Jewish hearts aflutter. Better yet, this group was Black, and so would be entirely dependent upon Jewish brains and money.

Eldridge Cleaver and the Revolutionary Glorification of Black Criminality

In the wake of Freedom Summer and the racial rancor it generated within the civil rights movement, more pugnacious Blacks rose to ascendancy in SNCC and other civil rights organizations. Stokely Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in May 1966, and quickly repudiated civil disobedience. He embraced “Black Power” and Black separatism, and by the end of the year he expelled Whites from the SNCC. A position paper worked up to explain the move stated, “All White people are racists.”[x] Jewish revolutionaries were outraged; one cited Jewish support of civil rights organizations and their “strategic role in organizing and funding the struggle,” and concluded “it was clear to everyone that [Jews] were the primary target” of Carmichael’s new racial militancy.[xi] Jews can get awfully sensitive when their revolutionary proxies get it into their heads to steer their own way.

It was in this context that the Black Panthers appeared in the Bay Area in October 1966. The Black Panthers reviled the “White power structure” but were open to alliances with White radicals. Jewish leftists immediately connected with their movement. Advocacy for the Panthers would become the dramatic climax of Fay’s career. She would throw herself into the maelstrom of pro-Panther activism with total incomprehension of their true nature, just like many other Jewish revolutionaries.

We begin with Eldridge Cleaver, because his career was so largely a Jewish creation, and provides necessary background for Fay’s new endeavor. In1966 Cleaver was doing time for attempted rape and attempted murder. His infamous predilection for violating White women would soon be broadcast by Jewish publicists. He read politics and history in prison, but his ideas crystallized upon reading George Breitman’s book, Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. Breitman, a Jew, depicted Malcolm at the end of his life as less a religious leader than a socialist revolutionary. “The Malcolm X of the Breitman book went far beyond seeing racism as a flaw in the hearts of the American people. It was endemic to the nation’s economic system, a necessary feature of capitalism. The whole structure had to go.”[xii] The book impacted Black inmates “like a lightning strike.” They now spurned mere reform or talk of civil rights; “[t]here was nothing to be gained by trying to fit in. The very structure of the society would have to be razed.” Cleaver was the inmate “who followed this line of thought most closely.”[xiii] A Jew thus lit yet another spark for Black revolution.

From prison, Cleaver managed to contact Beverly Axelrod, a Jewish lawyer and veteran radical. He hoped that he could pay her legal fees with his writing, and she could win his parole. Axelrod smuggled forbidden literature into prison for Cleaver, and he gave her his numerous tracts, which she sent to Norman Mailer, whose 1957 essay “The White Negro” reminded more than one critic of Cleaver’s scribblings. With Mailer’s enthusiastic approval, she was able to get Ramparts magazine, soon to become the most prominent publication of the New Left, to publish selections.[xiv] Robert Scheer, editor at Ramparts (son of a Russian Jewess and a German Gentile), also helped place Cleaver’s work in the magazine; his role would become big enough to earn the description of “perhaps the key person to launch the career of Eldridge Cleaver.”[xv] Eldridge Cleaver was a Jewish creation, and the Jews were on their way to replacing the SNCC as their controlled vehicle of social demolition.[xvi]

In August 1966, Ramparts published Eldridge’s “Letters from Prison,” which included this famous passage: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the White man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”[xvii] Whatever Beverly Axelrod thought of this passage, it didn’t stop her from falling in love with him. By the time she got him out on parole at the end of 1966, they were lovers and planned to marry. Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice came out in the spring of 1967. The book “whipped tough cultural observations in with a froth of sexual lore, and the result was a violence-steeped Maileresque Black sexual-political myth …”[xviii] It featured letters to and from Beverly and was dedicated to her, “with whom I share the ultimate of love.”[xix] Jewish media sources received it rapturously; the lefty Jewish critic Maxwell Geismar in his introduction to the book wrote that Cleaver was “simply one of the best cultural critics writing today.”[xx]

Cleaver could portray his crimes as politically motivated all he wanted, but without Jewish publicists, it would have amounted to nothing. Because he was able to gain the ear of radical Jews, the myth of the criminal-as-revolutionary was born: “crime . . . became a revolutionary challenge to the state.”[xxi] This idea—putting the final touch on a dangerous concoction—created “room for criminal male violence in the ideology of the New Left.”[xxii] A direct path was laid down to domestic revolutionary violence and terrorism. It led in a straight line from the Black Panthers, to the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and now, Antifa.

Huey Newton and Fay Stender

At a party celebrating the publication of Soul on Ice, Fay Stender met Cleaver and toasted his engagement to Axelrod.[xxiii] (The engagement would not last long; Cleaver soon abandoned her for a much younger woman. Cleaver later admitted that he used Axelrod, eleven years his senior, to get out of prison.) It was through Axelrod that Fay would become involved in the case that made her famous.

However, Fay was depressed again. She was no closer to a full partnership in the firm of Garry & Dreyfus; she mostly did research for the “name” partners. She was envious of Beverly Axelrod, the toast of the radical community, and Marvin had embarked upon yet another affair. She needed a new cause. As it happened, it wasn’t long in coming: in the early morning hours of October 28, 1967, the thuggish founder of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, murdered John Frey.

Oakland police officer John Frey had pulled over a vehicle with Newton and a friend inside. Ten minutes later Frey was dying of five bullet wounds, two in the back from close range.[xxiv] An hour later Newton showed up at Kaiser Hospital with a gunshot wound in his abdomen. There the cops caught up to him; so did Charles Garry and Fay Stender. Eldridge Cleaver, who had joined the Panthers after his release from prison and now stepped up as leader, had called Axelrod for help and she called Garry.[xxv] Fay “would never forget the impact of seeing Huey Newton lying half-naked under armed guard. . . . At first sight, she felt a strong sexual attraction.”[xxvi] Her depression vanished; she “instantly realized this might be the career break she was looking for.” She would be at the center of the “hottest Movement case around”: a capital murder trial for a Black man “struggling” against the “racist” American system.[xxvii]

Huey Newton in Beverly Axelrod’s apartment, 1967. Props by Cleaver.

Fay wasn’t the only turned-on radical. Newton (who reportedly had a Jewish grandfather[xxviii]) and the Panthers had already gotten major press coverage; less than three months before Frey’s murder, Israeli-born Sol Stern had done a write-up on the Panthers for New York Times Magazine (August 6). This was the first exposure the Panthers had received in the mainstream press. “Stern had asked Newton if he was truly prepared to kill a police officer; Newton replied that he was.” Stern couldn’t help concluding that, for the Panthers, “the execution of a police officer would be as natural . . . as the execution of a German soldier by a member of the French Resistance.”[xxix] In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Frey, the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb (owned and run by the Jew Max Scherr[xxx]), which had been covering the Panthers steadily since early 1967, “hastily concluded” that the Newton case was a “clear case of police provocation” and declared him a political prisoner.[xxxi] The Barb would continue to cover Newton’s case full-blast.

Many radicals believed that Newton had killed Frey, and hoped it presaged a real revolution.

Fay would assist Garry in the case, along with Barney Dreyfus and another partner, Alex Hoffmann, a diminutive Viennese Jew. Garry planned a “super-aggressive defense . . . raising every possible factual and legal issue,” with a maximum of publicity to arouse sympathy for Newton.[xxxii] Fay, who had virtually no experience in criminal trials, would do research and write motions and briefs that challenged everything that might lead to plausible grounds for a subsequent appeal. Garry would conduct the trial in the courtroom. Nevertheless, the case looked very bad for the defense; everything pointed to Newton having an electrifying end to his career.

Garry planned to put the “racist” American system on trial and the prosecutor on the defensive. Lise Pearlman describes it as the first “Movement trial”; the Chicago Seven Trial was yet to come.[xxxiii] The Panthers and their White backers would mount large demonstrations around the courthouse at each pre-trial hearing and all through the trial, and the leftwing press and its Jewish scribes would provide fawning coverage.

The Panthers at the time of Frey’s death numbered only about a dozen people. With a cause célèbre like Newton imprisoned in a racially explosive murder case, Blacks flocked to the Party. Within eighteen months, there were over forty chapters around the country with 5,000 members. Their paper, The Black Panther, launched in Beverly Axelrod’s apartment, grew to a circulation of over 100,000.[xxxiv] Newton, many remarked, was more valuable in prison, a likely martyr, than free.

The prosecutor quickly obtained an indictment from a grand jury. Fay and Barney Dreyfus immediately prepared a constitutional challenge to the composition of the jury, because it was too White. It didn’t reflect a “cross-section of the community.”[xxxv] They invested immense effort and time on this angle. (Their argument would fail; they would appeal; again denied.[xxxvi]) This, together with their later agitation against the composition of the trial jury, would have the terrible effect of making juries and the judicial process subject to identity politics, and lead to rampant Black juror sabotage of criminal cases against Blacks.

In January 1968, Fay began visiting Newton regularly in the Alameda County Jail. She was “delighted at his warm reception,”[xxxvii] and began dressing more attractively, with makeup, on her visits. She was “but one of a growing number of his new female devotees.”[xxxviii] Newton was able to bamboozle her completely. He told her he learned to read after high school by repeatedly attempting Plato’s Republic. She in turn shared personal details with him, and was soon panting, “he is truly a great man. Huey is a loving, gentle, kind person . . . He has a righteous force, a fierce combination of moral outrage and anger.”[xxxix] What is this but pure female emotion, utterly duped by radical ideology and a dangerous but charming poseur?

In late February 1968, the government released the Kerner Report. It infamously blamed White racism for Black failure and the Black inner-city riots of the preceding few years, providing top-level government backing for the claim that Huey Newton’s actions were simply the result of frustration with oppression.

Five weeks later, after a night of whoring in Memphis, the Reverend Martin Luther King met God, unexpectedly.[xl] In protest, Blacks across the nation attacked and burned down their own communities.[xli] President Johnson had to call in 13,000 troops to quell the violence and arson in Washington, D.C. Amidst the excitement, Eldridge Cleaver gathered four carloads of heavily armed Panthers and set out to “off” some “pigs” and “stoke the image of [the Panthers] as the future revolutionary vanguard.”[xlii] A shootout ensued. Police killed one Panther and hauled Cleaver off to prison. Cleaver insisted he and the Panthers were innocently “preparing a picnic” for the morrow.[xliii] “To the Bastille!” brayed the Berkeley Barb at this “police outrage.” Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, among others, demanded Cleaver’s release.[xliv]

Meanwhile, Fay worked round the clock on the case. She attended Panther meetings, read books that Huey assigned her, and prepared motions. When the state rejected her challenge of the grand jury, she assembled a panel of sociologists to help her strategize for the trial. This was “a novel concept. Today professional jury consultants are often used in high profile . . . cases . . . but back then the use of sociologists . . . was pioneering.”[xlv] They specifically sought ways to shape a jury to their liking, i.e., one with as many minorities as possible. Fay reached out to David Wellman, a friend and movement journalist who was working on a Ph.D. in “race relations” at Berkeley. He brought his colleagues Bob Blauner, a “confirmed Marxist,” Professor Jan Dizard, and Dr. Bernard Diamond to meet with Fay.[xlvi] Fay and her “experts” prepared hundreds of questions that Charles Garry could ask prospective jurors to root out racial “bias.” This is another example showing that outsiders or Jews will not play by the “gentleman’s rules” that bind together a homogeneous high-trust society. They literally act as a social corrosive.

Garry and Fay knew full well that their chances of winning an acquittal, or a hung jury, rested on whether they could seat Blacks on the jury. Did they really think that Blacks would judge the evidence with greater acumen and dispassion than middle-class Whites? Not bloody likely. They were well aware that minorities on juries were prone to siding with their racial brothers at the expense of facts.[xlvii] Garry wanted “to create the impression that every member of a minority group would understand his client’s perspective better than Whites, but he knew better” [emphasis added].[xlviii] He knew many Blacks in Oakland did not view the Panthers positively. He was banking on naked racial solidarity to spring a murderer and increase his own fame. Did Fay think of the implications of their strategy? Or did she simply accept the idea that Newton was justified in his actions because of White racism?

The Newton Trial     

The trial began with jury selection on July 15, 1968. Judge Monroe Friedman presided. The prosecutor was the tall, courtly, almost ridiculously decent Lowell Jensen. Even Pearlman points out the contrast in style and behavior between the prosecution and the defense; it was exactly what one might expect between a WASP and a group consisting mostly of Jews.[xlix]

Security for the trial was unprecedented. Outside, Panthers and thousands of supporters marched, chanted, and screamed. Some held signs reading, “The Nation Shall be Reduced to Ashes, the Sky’s the Limit if Anything Happens to Huey.”[l] It was blatant intimidation of the judge and jury, orchestrated by the radicals, and should never have been permitted.

For three days, Fay trotted out her experts to explain to Judge Friedman how biased Whites were: Jan Dizard, Bob Blauner, Alex Hoffmann, Dr. Sanford (one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality), Dr. Diamond, and even Hans Zeisel from Chicago.[li] It is hard to see how the affair could have been more Jewish; only Dizard and Sanford were Gentiles. The judge denied most of the defense’s requests, but did permit a longer questioning period for possible jurors. Questioning of the jury pool then took nearly three excruciating weeks. One defense strategy ironically backfired; most Blacks stated under oath that they couldn’t impose the death penalty under any conditions, and Jensen logically proceeded to exclude them, greatly reducing the number of Blacks who could sit on the jury. Both Fay and Garry had actually hoped that minorities would lie about their feelings on the death penalty so they could be seated and vote against death, if it came to that.[lii] The fact that the defense assumed they would lie, and that they were eager to profit from it, says everything we need to know about their ethics. Such are the imperatives of tikkun olam.

The jury seated five minorities, including one Black man. Jensen, fair to a fault, didn’t strive to exclude minorities just because they were minorities.

The defense put Newton, a good speaker, on the stand. He denied shooting Frey. Then, with Garry prompting him, he “talked at length . . . about hundreds of years of oppression,” over the objections of Jensen, because Judge Friedman “was fascinated” by the history lesson.[liii] Newton, of course, had no direct knowledge of “hundreds of years” of oppression; his “testimony” was totally extraneous to the case. Newton swore that the Panthers were committed to nonviolence, at virtually the same moment protestors outside were chanting, “Revolution has come – Time to pick up your gun,” and “Off the pigs.”[liv]

The Black juror, David Harper, “found himself profoundly affected” when Newton testified about racism in American society.[lv]

When cross-examined by Jensen, Newton claimed that Officer Frey had been rough with him, called him “nigger,” and pushed him; he fell, Frey pulled his gun, and Newton felt a hot flash on his stomach. He claimed he remembered nothing more.[lvi] Garry brought Dr. Diamond to the stand to testify that soldiers shot in the stomach commonly experience amnesia and unconsciousness.[lvii]

Jensen’s final remarks included a “chilling” account of the killing. Only Newton could have fired the fatal shots, he concluded. Garry then closed. He compared Newton to Christ and invoked both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. With tears in his eyes, he embraced Newton and implored the jury to find him innocent.[lviii]

During jury deliberations, the lone Black man and a Cuban held out for acquittal. Finally they compromised by opting for a verdict of manslaughter. It was a “stunning” victory for the defense, but it left Fay and Alex Hoffmann devastated (Pearlman speculates that Hoffmann, a homosexual, may have been in love with Newton).[lix] Newton was sentenced to two to fifteen years, under the “indeterminate” sentencing law. It was an outrageous violation of justice, worked by Jews and non-Whites at the expense of a White policeman and White society. The demoralization of White society consequent upon such a violation of justice would be hard to calculate, but surely it would have serious and long-lasting effects.

Fay began working on the appeal the next morning. Garry was busy with other cases, and handed it over to her. She would read the 4,000-page trial transcript, and eventually write a near 200-page brief arguing for a reversal of the verdict, even though historically there was very little chance for success. She threw herself into fund-raising, recruiting celebrities to lend their names to the “Free Huey” campaign, and speaking at colleges, all with her customary full-bore intensity.[lx] She also reached out to rabbis involved in civil rights work: “Fay relished making connections between her religious heritage and her current mission. In her view, Newton’s freedom should be the rabbis’ cause as well.”[lxi]

She visited Newton in prison, along with Alex Hoffmann. As his attorney, they could meet in a small room with some privacy. She felt it her duty to keep Newton’s spirits up. “She seemed . . . to be almost in love with Newton. They looked deeply at each other during her visits, sometimes touching when the guards’ attention wandered.”[lxii] They did more than touch; once “a startled guard reported seeing Stender bent down apparently engaged in oral sex with Newton.”[lxiii] It was a combination Fay couldn’t resist: her own powerful sexual appetite, a poor victim of brutish White racism, an intimate moment with a real revolutionary. Did she think of her husband? Her children? Venereal disease?

In the summer of 1969, Fay and Marvin took time for a trip to Europe and Israel. They “marveled at the transformation in Israel wreaked by the collective blood, sweat and tears of so many Jews.” A relative with an Uzi on his back showed them around what Lise Pearlman calls the “newly liberated” West Bank.[lxiv] Fay would later become “distanced” from other leftists over the issue of Palestine (they often denounced Israeli imperialism); she acknowledged the Arabs had a right to the land, but so did “the survivors of the Holocaust.”[lxv]

When they returned, Fay left Garry & Dreyfus and joined with Peter Franck (her old friend from the Council for Justice) in a new radical law “collective” in Berkeley: Franck, Stender, Hendon, Hill, & Ziegler. All but Hill were Jewish. Collectives were the new thing; they would have no distinctions in status or pay. Naturally, they would devote themselves to “Movement” work.

She finished her brief for Newton’s appeal in January 1970. In what amounted to a grand fishing expedition, she claimed, among other things, that the grand jury and the trial jury did not reflect Newton’s “peer group,” despite the fact that the prosecutor had not excluded minorities per se. Fay and Garry presented oral arguments on February 11. The appellate decision would come down in late May.

Go to Part 3.

[i] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 98.

[ii] When protestor Joe Blum reached Santa Rita prison after dawn, he heard a voice call out, “Hey Joe! How many of you motherfuckers are coming out here?” It was his friend from Merritt College, Huey Newton, in prison for assault. From Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther (Addison Wesley, 1994), 73.

[iii] Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 68.

[iv] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 98.

[v] Ibid., 100.

[vi] Ibid., 100-01.

[vii] See Kevin MacDonald, “Jews, Blacks, and Race” here, and E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Chapter 16.

[viii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 101-02.

[ix] Ibid., 102. Franck is Jewish; so was Axelrod.

[x] Heineman, 42.

[xi] David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 227.

[xii] Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 97.

[xiii] All quotes from Cummins, 97.

[xiv] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 113.

[xv] Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 104.

[xvi] “Cleaver . . . would do more than anyone else to facilitate Huey Newton’s Black Panther Party replacing SNCC as the national symbol of Black disenchantment.” Pearson, 104.

[xvii] Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: The New Press, 2009), 69-70.

[xviii] Cummins, California’s Radical Prison Movement, 100.

[xix] Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue, 121.

[xx] Ibid., 122-23. Cleaver’s warden from San Quentin had a different view of his writing. He thought it was “racist as hell, talking about the White honkies and death to the White man and that sort of thing . . . I consider[ed] it garbage, the words of a diseased mind.” (from Cummins, 98.)

[xxi] Cummins, 103.

[xxii] Cummins, 103.

[xxiii] Lise Pearlman, American Justice, 110-11.

[xxiv] Horowitz and Collier, 29.

[xxv] Pearlman, American Justice, 133.

[xxvi] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 118.

[xxvii] Pearlman, American Justice, 110.

[xxviii] Pearson, 292.

[xxix] Richardson, 92-3. Stern probably knew the “French Resistance” was largely Jewish; see “Was the French Resistance Jewish?” in the Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/201308/was-the-french-resistance-jewish

[xxx] See here for Scherr.

[xxxi] Cummins, 113-14.

[xxxii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 119.

[xxxiii] Pearlman, American Justice, 112, 136.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 38.

[xxxv] Ibid., 117-18.

[xxxvi] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 121.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 122.

[xxxviii] Pearlman, American Justice, 151.

[xxxix] Ibid., 151.

[xl] In his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Ralph Abernathy, close associate of Martin Luther King, testifies that King spent time with two women that night, neither one his wife, and beat up a third. See http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-12/books/bk-1880_1_ralph-david-abernathy/2

[xli] After the Watts riots in August 1965, in which the Blacks of Los Angeles had destroyed much of their community, they nevertheless felt that they had “had chastised the White power structure.” Heineman, 41.

[xlii] Pearson, 154.

[xliii] Pearson, 155.

[xliv] Cummins, 121.

[xlv] Pearlman, American Justice, 161-62.

[xlvi] Ibid., 177.

[xlvii] Ibid., 217.

[xlviii] Ibid., 223.

[xlix] Ibid., 215.

[l] Pearson, 167.

[li] Pearlman, American Justice, 210-13.

[lii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 126.

[liii] Pearlman, American Justice, 284-85.

[liv] Ibid., 286.

[lv] Ibid., 327.

[lvi] Ibid., 287-88.

[lvii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 130-31.

[lviii] Pearlman, American Justice, 298-302.

[lix] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, xiv.

[lx] Pearlman, American Justice, 357-58.

[lxi] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 143-44.

[lxii] Horowitz and Collier, 31.

[lxiii] Pearlman, American Justice, 358.

[lxiv] Both quotes from Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 150.

[lxv] Ibid., 336.

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).