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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Limits of Decoding a Nation’s DNA

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Review of DNA USA: A Genetic Portrait of America, by Daniel Sykes

In the foreword to Madison Grant’s The Conquest of a Continent, Henry Fairfield Osborn writes, “The character of a country depends upon the racial character of the men and women who dominate it.” The Olympic games offer a natural display of Osborn’s truism.

Anyone who has watched the 2012 Summer Olympics, particularly the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremony in London — the procession of top athletes from the 204 participating countries — would have noticed the full spectrum of racial distinctiveness across these national delegations.  Aliens from another galaxy would have no problem distinguishing the Dutch from Jamaican Olympians.

Westerners are constantly told that “diversity” is a national strength. However, the Chinese Olympians underscore one of Grant’s fundamental points: “the most essential element in nationality is unity.”

Sports “commentators,” such as the ever-annoying Bob Costas, routinely point out that the American Olympic delegation reflects a greater degree of racial and ethnic “diversity” than many other countries. The point isn’t that multiracial national delegations don’t do well in Olympic events. It just isn’t a prerequisite for national achievement. The Chinese have demonstrated this time and again.

Every four years Olympian delegations from around the world showcase individual talent as well as racial and ethnic sexual differences in their competitive performances. In fact, racial patterns dominate various athletic events: Whites and Asians in swimming and cycling events, Blacks in sprinting and basketball. Individual competitors cannot expunge the factors of race, ethnicity, and sex when analyzing group dynamics on a comparative basis. Read more

The pre-election window for war with Iran

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Jacob Heilbrunn thinks there may be an “October Surprise”—a U.S. bombing operation against Iran. The point would be to outflank Romney who has done all he could possibly do to show his absolute fealty to the Jewish state.

Romney observed in December, he would never, ever criticize Israel. Instead, he would get on the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu and ask, “What would you like me to do?” So it’s fair to say that Romney would outsource his foreign policy to Netanyahu when it comes to Israel and its enemies.

Obama, on the other hand, has had at best a strained relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, and, as Heilbrunn notes, his administration “has been doing everything in its power to dissuade Israel from speedy action. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Israel was another sign that the administration is trying to reassure Israel of its commitment to its security.”

The downside of an attack on Iran would be $200 oil in an economy that is currently the main issue in the election. I rather doubt that Obama would want to take the chance that Americans would be really enthusiastic about yet another war against a far away nation that only the most fevered neocon would portray as an imminent threat to the U.S. Read more

Grammy winner Ray Stevens interviewed by James Edwards

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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to go into the studio and tape an interview with Ray Stevens, who now joins a long list of entertainers, such as Ted Nugent, that have appeared on our award-winning show. They have appeared despite the fact that our show has had many well-known guests who explicitly advocate for the legitimate interests of White Americans. It is very encouraging that celebrities like Ray Stevens are willing to brave the likely attacks by the SPLC and others groups that routinely attempt to police the media to prevent public discussion of our core ideas.

The pastor of my Southern Baptist church has been a fan of Ray’s music all of his life. As such, I invited my pastor to participate as a guest host in the interview, which was truly a delight. We will be playing our conversation with the legendary singer/songwriter during the second hour of tonight’s live broadcast.

Ray Stevens has become increasingly politically outspoken on behalf of conservative causes in recent years and his new song, “Obama Nation,” takes direct aim at the White House. Read more

Immigration: Then and Now

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Alma and Reinhild Rauhaus among the ruins of their ancient German city, 1952
Coats made from fallen soldiers’ uniforms

Joined by fourteen potential jury members, I sat in a jury box this spring and answered questions to determine my competence in deciding the amount of damages in a traffic accident case. It was easy enough to get past the “tell us about yourself” introduction, for I had long ago learned to be cautious and evasive when describing myself. Fortunately, place of birth was not asked. Toward the end of the questioning period, one of the attorneys inquired of everyone whether he or anyone in his family had ever served on a police force or in the armed forces. I was the last to be asked and uneasy about this unexpected question.  Finally, after reassuring myself that WW II was ancient history and Americans more sophisticated than they used to be, I related my family’s military history in a few short sentences. Both of my parents had served in WW II. My father, Wolfgang, had been captured in France and sent to a POW camp in Texas, where he spent two years picking cotton. My mother, Ute, was a member of a Third Reich girls’ organization, the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, where, as an eighteen year old, she commanded a group of search light operators during the last year of the war. My maternal grandfather, a police official, served in both world wars. In the silence that followed the few words of my relatives’ military service long ago, I felt the dread of ethnic condemnation, which I had so often experienced when I was obliged to reveal that I was an immigrant German.

THEN

In 1952, my mother, my younger sister, Reinhild, and I set sail from Bremerhaven, Germany for Halifax, Nova Scotia.  From there the three of us boarded a train which took us half way across the country to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Wolfgang had left months earlier to find employment and housing in Winnipeg. Though a degreed engineer, Wolfgang could only find work butchering fowl at a turkey slaughtering plant.  For the first year of their residence, until Wolfgang could locate more suitable employment, the family lived in a tenement. Both of my parents had learned French and Latin in school. Ute spoke no English, whereas Wolgang had acquired rudimentary English in POW camp. Read more

The role of Jewish converts to Catholicism in changing traditional Catholic teachings on Jews

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In a previous article, “Benzion Netanyahu: Jewish Activist and Intellectual Apologist,” I discussed the activities of New Christian intellectuals in 15th-century Spain in developing an interpretation of Christianity and Judaism in which Judaism was presented very positively:

These intellectuals presented Jews as a genetically separate religious group composed of morally superior individuals and distinguished by a superior genetic heritage. On this basis, the New Christians argued that they were therefore worthy of being the progenitors of Christ who was born a Jew. (This appeals to Christians who naturally want to believe that Jesus came from a superior genetic stock.)  The basic strategy was to realize that Christianity could serve as a perfectly viable ideology in which Christian Jews could retain their ethnic solidarity, but with a Christian religious veneer.

What I didn’t point out was that some of the the main New Christian apologists, such as Alonso de Cartagena (whose writings are discussed in Chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents, p. 210ff), were not only converts from Judaism but also held high positions within the Catholic Church—obviously an ideal position from which alter Christian theology about Judaism. They were quite successful, at least temporarily:

As has undoubtedly often been the case in other eras (see, e.g., the discussion of the Dreyfus case in Chapter 6), the [New Christian] apologists were intellectually far more sophisticated than their opponents, and collectively they dominated the literature of the period. … Their arguments, while necessarily departing from orthodox Christian arguments in their defense of the Jews, are presented in a highly literate, scholarly style that undoubtedly commanded respect from an educated audience. They were highly skilled in developing the very intricate, tortured arguments necessary to overcome the existing anti-Jewish bias of Christian theology. The result of all this intellectual activity was a stunning, if temporary, victory over the Toledo rebels of 1449 … . The rebels were soon regarded by the public as moral, religious, and political renegades; they were excommunicated by the pope, and their leaders were imprisoned and executed. (p. 212) Read more

The Art of Guilt by Association

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“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story” – Mark Twain 

On the 22nd of July 2011, shortly before Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway, I became one of the ‘fortunate’ four Dutch persons to have unsolicitedly received Breivik’s manifesto. It was his ‘Declaration of Independence’, which he had forwarded to thousands of people; the Dutch media claim there were only 1001 addressees, but there were several thousand).

The following 9 months I was unable to explain why I received this increasingly extremist, aggressively neoconservative manifesto. It is true that, since 1991 I had been writing anti-immigration and pro-Afrikaner articles and essays. But my articles were rather paleoconservative and mainly written in Dutch and Afrikaans. Did Breivik read Dutch? Afrikaans? I had never heard of this person, who also went by the pseudonym Andrew Berwick. Until the moment when Norwegian newspapers started sending me e-mails, I did not realise that the enigmatic Norwegian mass murderer had sent me the e-mail.

Only recently, when I finally felt emotionally capable of paying more attention to his lengthy compendium, did I read in the Preface that I must be a Facebook friend of his, or a friend of a Facebook friend of his, if I received it from himself. The latter must have been the case. Thank you.

At the same time, when on the 27th of July 2011 Breivik’s list of 1003 addressees was going viral, Dutch and Norwegian journalists started writing articles about four Dutch recipients, including me. Most journalists never contacted me. The handful of journalists that had actually gone to the trouble of calling or e-mailing me before they started writing newspaper articles about me, wanted explanations from me: “Why did you receive it?” “Surely you must agree with what he writes.” Although I had told them that I had only been able to read two pages of the manifesto (a section about the Frankfurt School caught my attention), one journalist from a local paper called me on the phone and repeatedly asked me what I thought of the manifesto, and if I agreed with Breivik’s analyses. He sounded irritated when I told him that I had yet not found any particular paragraph that I endorsed. Read more