Why the Magna Carta anniversary celebrations will be missing two crucial paragraphs

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If there is one thing our elites enjoy it is giving each other a big pat on the back and the extravagant celebrations planned for the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta will give them lots of  opportunities to do just that.

There may still be eighteen months to go before the actual anniversary itself but the commemoration events are well underway to mark the day in 1215 that King John was finally brought to heel by the barons and where limited government and Western constitutional freedom was born.

In Britain the BBC will broadcast TV documentaries, dramas and radio programmes, and the event is to even have its own opera and specially commissioned symphony. The occasion will be marked by commemorative stamps and the Royal Mint will issue a special £2 coin. In America high-powered lawyers and constitutional experts will be chewing over the meaning of it all at banquets, dinners, lectures and exhibitions in Boston, Washington and Philadelphia and 800 U.S. lawyers are expected to make the pilgrimage to Runnymede beside the Thames where the document was sealed.

Across the English-speaking judicial world no single document is probably more venerated than the Great Charter. The Founding Fathers embedded it into the 1791 Bill of Rights in the shape of the Fifth Amendment that says no-one “can be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law”. And today it is regularly cited in newspaper editorials, political debates and Supreme Court judgments.

But amidst all the self-congratulation about habeas corpus, the right to trial by jury and how it’s wisdom shines down the through the ages and still has much to teach us, one awkward question should be asked, however churlish it might seem.. Read more

Steve Sailer: Jews are on top now

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In the course of a Q and A on Jason Richwine in Takimag, Steve Sailer notes:

Q. How can America survive without these sacred myths [such as the myth that “America is a nation of immigrants]?
A. America survived fine for a couple of hundred years without the current schmaltz. When I was a boy in the 1960s, we had different schmaltz. The national myths then were all about cowboys and settlers, not immigrants.

The contents of the national myths serve to demonstrate current ethnic power. The descendants of Ellis Island-era immigrants are on top now, so they’ve rewritten history to make their ancestors sound central. This post-hoc score-settling is no doubt fun, but it’s obviously a stupid way to decide immigration policy. (“Frequently Asked Questions about the Jason Richwine Brouhaha“)

What? Italians run America?

Actually, no. If one clicks on the “top now” link, it takes you to another Sailer column on Jewish billionaires. Based on blogger n/a’s estimates, 35% of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans are Jewish.  (The Jewish Times of Baltimore estimated that 139 of the 2009 Forbes 400 were Jewish—also 35%; cited here; the original article seems to have disappeared.)

Of course being “on top” is a lot more than being well represented among the wealthy. It’s media influence (ownership and production of media; see here, p. 48ff), political influence (e.g., the Israel Lobby, financial clout within within the Democratic and Republican parties), academic influence (overrepresentation in the administration and enrollment at elite universities), etc. It’s this powerful  influence in all the elite high ground of America that makes Jewish concerns on issues like immigration and multiculturalism so critical (Lawrence Auster agreed). It’s no surprise that Jewish organizations are foursquare behind the Schumer-Rubio bill, and Jewish billionaire Paul Singer (#392 on n/a’s list, with $1.1 billion) has financially backed the bill within the Republican Party (see also here).

I would agree that Jews are on top now so that they effectively run the country. As a result, Jewish attitudes on immigration are very important. I am not so sanguine about Jewish motives for supporting displacement-level non-White immigration. Sailer thinks they want “to make their ancestors sound central” to national mythology. My view is that it’s really about fear and loathing of White America. And that makes the entire project sinister indeed.

Jason Richwine on IQ and Immigration

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The Jason Richwine saga is a critical barometer of the political climate of our times. As everyone knows by now, he resigned from his position at the Heritage Foundation after his involvement in a report on the economic costs of immigration (since strongly endorsed by Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, writing in National Review Online). As Richwine said in his interview with the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, his Ph.D. research on how IQ affects the social and economic costs of immigration had nothing to do with the Heritage Foundation report.

This is nothing more than a guilt by association smear campaign aimed at putting yet another nail in the coffin of White America. It is an index of the power of the left that they need not dispute the economic effects of the Schumer-Rubio bill; nor do they need to rebut the data and conclusions of Richwine’s Ph.D. thesis. They simply need to make the linkage between Richwine and taboo findings—that IQ predicts economic success, underclass behavior, and use of government services so that importing low-IQ immigrants is a very bad idea. Having made these associations, they can indulge in smug sociopathic satisfaction because a young man with a wife and two young children is suddenly out of work and with much diminished prospects in life.

Richwine’s Ph.D. thesis was approved by a Harvard committee, but it’s clear that the real force behind it was Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve. In the Acknowledgements section of his thesis, Richwine describes Murray as a “childhood hero”; Murray seems to have been his de facto thesis advisor at  Harvard:

The substance of my work was positively influenced by many people, but no one was more influential than Charles Murray, whose detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism have made the final draft vastly superior to the first. I could not have asked for a better primary advisor.

So it’s not surprising that Richwine’s thesis takes seriously the work of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen—the main figures in academic research on race and IQ. Although he also considers criticisms that have been leveled against them, it’s clear that Richwine sees this body of  work as basically correct.
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Facing the Future as a Minority

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This speech was delivered at the 2013 American Renaissance conference, which took place on April 5–7 near Nashville, Tennessee.  It was posted originally at the website of the National Policy Institute

casperFriedrich

For as long as anyone can remember, immigration has been the chief political concern at gatherings such as this. At last night’s cocktail party, “amnesty,” “illegals,” and various heroes and villains in Washington were discussed with great interest.

For people like us—who are asylumed away to the margins—one could say that immigration is our connection to the outside world.  It makes us feel like we have a horse in the race—maybe even that, through our silent partners in the Beltway, we can affect national policy.  We even, we should admit, get captivated by the political theater of “immigration reform.” Ann Coulter’s speech at the last Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, was catnip for racialists. Ann staked out the far rightward territory of respectable debate; and though she used the language of Republican electioneering, she seemed to be winking and nodding at us the entire time. . .

Whenever any issue or idea receives universal accord—when it become an assumption, when it’s taken for granted—it’s time to put it under serious scrutiny.  We should ask what an issue like immigration can tell us about ourselves—about what our goals are, and should be, and how we could best engage in political action. I hope we can do that today.
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Justice Denied: Thoughts on Truth, ‘Canards’and the Marc Rich Case: Part Two of Two

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In the aftermath of their indictment, one of the earliest strategies that Rich, Green, and their lawyers attempted to employ was that of claiming anti-Semitism was behind the legal measures brought against them: both claimed that they had been singled out because they were Jews. And so we find ourselves finding truth behind another ‘canard’ — that Jews have used accusations of  ‘anti-Semitism’ to avoid scrutiny of their behavior. In our bid to extricate ourselves from this one, let’s rely on the authority of the government investigators: the authors of House Report No. 454 write (p. 157) that this argument was “false,” “preposterous” and a (p. 159) “clumsy attempt to play the race card” that was so poorly executed that it was “rejected by associates like Abraham Foxman.”

This is a very interesting choice of words by our helpful authors — for they imply that if this false charge had a little more credibility, the jovial Mr. Foxman would have been on it in no time. Who am I to argue? The report goes on to state that investigators discovered (p. 157) that Rich’s lawyers were in possession of a 1988 memo which clearly listed almost fifty other criminal cases brought against non-Jewish crude oil resellers in the previous year. Rich, Green, and his associates knew that their Jewishness had nothing to do with the indictment — the charge of anti-Semitism was indeed used cynically in an attempt to escape scrutiny and punishment.

Both Green and Rich remained on the F.B.I’s Ten Most Wanted list for over a decade, until the pace of Rich’s appeal effort increased in intensity around 1999. During his period of self-enforced exile, Rich made repeated efforts to extract strategic advantage from the fact his daughter was dying of leukaemia, and later in his petition to the White House he claimed that he had been prevented from returning to her bedside and from attending her funeral because of Federal prosecutors. The authors of House Report No. 454 write (p. 155) that “nothing could be further from the truth. Rich knew that if he returned  he would receive bail, and that he would not be incarcerated unless convicted of crimes he had been accused of committing. He was prevented from returning to visit his dying daughter only if he refused to face the U.S justice system. Rich’s desire to have his cake and eat it too, makes it difficult to generate sympathy for him in this matter. In fact, the only possible conclusion is that Marc Rich placed his own needs over those of his daughter.”

The frankly unbelievable level of cynicism seen in Rich’s behaviour towards his daughter, and the deeply immoral core of this particular aspect of the petition was by no means the only significant problem with it. Government investigators state (p. 154) that “the centrepiece of Marc Rich’s effort to obtain a Presidential pardon was the pardon petition, which was put together by the Marc Rich legal team. … The resulting document, which had a number of misrepresentations and factual inaccuracies, was a surprisingly poor effort, considering the amount of time and money that went into it.”

Funny, I was thinking precisely the same thing the other day about the thousands of shoddy works of history, philosophy and junk science that take up valuable space on the shelves of our libraries. The petition consisted of over thirty double-spaced pages, the first twenty of which “attempted to cast Rich and Green in a favorable, even likeable light.” The authors of House Report No. 454 comment that “these statements seem almost laughable given what the world knows about Marc Rich and Pincus Green.” Read more

Justice Denied: Thoughts on Truth, ‘Canards’ and the Marc Rich Case: Part One of Two

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‘When someone does you wrong, do not judge things as he interprets them or would like you to interpret them. Just see them as they are, in plain truth.’
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Four: Verse Eleven.

In my humble opinion, one of the most intriguing features of the posturing of the Anti-Defamation League, and other Jewish ethnic activist organizations, is their frequent discussion of what they call ‘canards.’ There are, I am informed, many ‘canards’ ranging from allegations that ‘the Jews’ killed God and mutilated communion wafers, to allegations that Jews control the media and have inordinate influence in the areas of culture and politics.

For many years I had been vaguely aware of this list of ‘canards’, and one or two things had consistently bothered me about it. For a start, the many attempts by Jewish writers to lay emphasis on the importance and impact of superstition appeared to me to be little more than crude efforts to shift the blame for ethnic conflict onto Christianity and an allegedly ‘irrational’ populace, and away from some of the harsher realities of resource competition in the Middle Ages. While I have no doubt that the so-called ‘Blood Libel’ contributed to violent actions taken against Jews, I have never been convinced that this charge, and others like it, was in any way sufficient in itself to spark violence. Even adopting the mentality of the age, thickly populated with tales of spectres and demons, it is difficult to imagine that the animosity which arose was rooted solely in such charges.

In fact, I am completely convinced by the theory of respected historian and folklorist Gillian Bennett, who argues that “where accusations of ritual murder were made in this period…it is more probable that they were cause celebres around which anti-Jewish feeling could crystallize, rather than the cause of anti-Semitism in the first place.”[1] The posturing of Jewish ethnic activists about the ‘potency’ of this particular set of ‘canards’, both in the past and the present, can be attributed to their desire to deceive others and themselves. Read more

Heather MacDonald on the corruption of the new hostile elite that runs the University of California

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At TOO we often emphasize that the new elite is not only hostile but corrupt. Usually, our main culprit is Jewish ethnic networking, but it extends far beyond that. Heather MacDonald has a great article on the corruption of the University of California by the new multicultural elite (“Multiculti U.: The budget-strapped University of California squanders millions on mindless diversity programs“).

For an alternative view, which blames Gov. Ronald Reagan’s actions in 1969 for UC’s current problems (!!!), see “Reagan and the fall of UC” by Seth Rosenfeld (LATimes, 5/10/2013.) Rosenfeld ignores the budget crisis since 2008 and the massive diversity bureaucracy and lowered standards for faculty and students targeted by MacDonald. Obviously intended to promote his book (which condemns the FBI’s  role in resisting 1960s student radicalism), Rosenfeld paints a fantasy world where one might be led to believe that UC is being destroyed by a shadowy conspiracy put into motion by Reagan and somehow continuing to the present despite the fact that California is Exhibit A for the dominance of the multicultural left throughout state government. As MacDonald shows, this dominance of the multicultural left is obvious at UC (and, one might add, pretty much every other American university).

There is so much to like in MacDonald’s article, beginning with her comments on Peter Schrag, an op-ed writer for the Sacramento Bee, who claimed that the university needs more money so that it can pass on the tradition of a whole lot of dead White folks. MacDonald responds:

Stingy state taxpayers aren’t endangering the transmission of great literature, philosophy, and art; the university itself is. No UC administrator would dare to invoke Schrag’s list of mostly white, mostly male thinkers [including Madison and Jefferson,  Melville, Dickinson and Hawthorne; Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer; Dante and Cervantes; Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen; Goethe and Molière; Mozart, Rembrandt and Michelangelo; Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Sophocles and Euripides,  Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky] as an essential element of a UC education; no UC campus has sought to ensure that its undergraduates get any exposure to even one of Schrag’s seminal thinkers (with the possible exception of Toni Morrison), much less to America’s founding ideas or history.

Rather than requiring a focus on Western civilization, the only undergrad requirement at Berkeley is  a course involving “theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society” administered by “Berkeley’s ever-expanding Division of Equity and Inclusion.” Read more