Nora Ephron makes an obvious choice

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I finally got around to watching Julie & Julia, directed by Nora Ephron who also wrote the screenplay. She is Jewish and a typical Hollywood liberal. She donated to Al Franken and Obama. Here’s an example of her prose (titled “White Men” from the liberal (and very mainstream) website Huffington Post, written just before the Pennsylvania primary in 2008:

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)

White men are nothing more than haters. Not even Bill Kristol is liberal enough for her.

Julie & Julia is basically about two women becoming famous cooks 50 years apart. But Ephron can’t resist an opportunity for a little propagandizing. The movie has a brief cameo appearance of Julia’s father, John McWilliams. The following is from a biography of Child:

Pasadena, where she was born in 1912, was a handsome city, known for its wealth and civic accomplishments; John McWilliams was a living symbol of the city’s prosperity. A Princeton graduate and devout Republican, he managed the Western landholdings and investments amassed by his own father and later became vice president of J. G. Boswell, one of California’s major landowners and developers. His personal and professional mission was to keep California booming, and he put a great deal of time into Pasadena community life. Julia was raised to admire his discipline and public spirit, which she did, but he also nurtured a set of rabidly right-wing convictions that she would come to abhor. The two of them split sharply during the 1950s, when John McWilliams became a strong supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy whom Julia found despicable. Her father was also outspoken about his contempt for Jews, artists, intellectuals, and foreigners; and for most of her adult life Julia viewed him with enormous dismay, though she managed to keep loving him.

In fact, McWilliams’ anti-Jewish views were well enough known that he was mentioned, along with well-known figures such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Methodist preacher Wesley Swift, as anti-Jewish supporters of McCarthy in Aviva Weingarten’s Jewish Organizations’ Response to Communism and Senator McCarthy (see my review here).

In Julie & Julia, McWilliams is presented as a cranky supporter of McCarthy who dislikes Julia’s husband Paul, a political liberal who had lived in Paris as a poet and artist — everything that McWilliams detested. In the movie, Paul is working as a librarian in the Foreign Service when he is called to Washington where he is grilled about possible communist associations and on his sexual orientation. Julia states that she knows many people who have been persecuted by McCarthy even though they have done nothing wrong. Paul returns to France dispirited by his experience.

The movie seems to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of McWilliams — a portrayal tailor made to hammer home one of Hollywood’s favority moral lessons about the evil 1950s.

However, Ephron could have taken another tack altogether. Although Julia renounced her father’s views on McCarthy, her views on homosexuality would certainly exclude her from the culture of the mainstream media today.

Homophobia was a socially acceptable form of bigotry in midcentury America, and Julia and Paul participated without shame for many years. She often used the term pedal or pedalo — French slang for a homosexual — draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden’s, using the same pedalo I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not pedals!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homovipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of pedals—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I’m tired of them, talented though they are.”

So Ephron had a choice if she wanted to bring up politically volatile issues. She could have played up the angle of Julia’s father as a cranky right-wing supporter of Sen. McCarthy, or she could have played up the angle of the Childs as homophobes.

But this was a feel-good movie, so it was a no-brainer. For Ephron, part of the feel-good message is to portray Julia’s character as an enlightened liberal, just like herself — and at the same time get in yet another dig at the retrogrades who supported McCarthy while avoiding any mention of McWilliams’ civic contributions or Julia’s homophobia.

Despite the fact that McCarthy was basically right about the people he hauled before his committee (see M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies), the cause of anti-McCarthyism remains a rallying cry for the Nora Ephrons of the world — at least partly because, as Weingarten shows, so many of them were Jews.

My only surprise is that we weren’t treated to a caricature of McWilliams’s anti-Jewish attitudes.

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Christopher Donovan: Why 'J'Accuse' Stays in the Present Tense

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Christopher Donovan: Joseph Sobran once reportedly joked that the New York Times should change its name to “The Holocaust Update”.  Not for nothing — barely a day passes when Hitler or the Holocaust isn’t mentioned in its pages.  The phenomenon includes even pre-World War II events, as described in this Sunday Book Review article on the Dreyfus affair.  (It’s a biggie to Jews because the intellectual founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was supposedly convinced of the need for a homeland for Jews while covering the Drefyus affair as a journalist.)

I know nothing about the veracity of the allegations against Dreyfus, but like any other accusation leveled at a Jew — Leo Frank, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and so on — Jews seize upon the accusation itself, presume the Jew was wrongly accused in a climate of fevered anti-Semitism, and regurgitate the episode endlessly as another example of the moral purity and snowy innocence of Jews in a dangerous world of bloodthirsty gentiles.

The truth is a bit more complicated, but the New York Times won’t be getting into that.

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Christopher Donovan: O'Reilly v. Law & Order

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Christopher Donovan: The Jewish producer of Law & Order, Dick Wolf, presides over a television show that presents a grossly distorted view of New York City’s criminal class. Namely, that it’s rich whites, skinheads and radical right-wingers committing all the crime, while heroic black, Hispanic and Jewish detectives chase them down.

Often, the writers of the show will put liberal or anti-white speeches directly into the mouths of the characters. TV talker Bill O’Reilly, a recent target of one such speech, fired back.

Of course, the real fight here isn’t loudmouthed conservative radio personalities versus liberal television writers. It’s implicit whiteness, in the forms of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, versus Jewish sensibilities. How many O’Reilly viewers get that?

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Ted Sallis: Ethnic Nepotism: A Prescription for Fitness

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Ted Sallis: In the comments section on my previous blog on Jewish genetics, Hunter Wallace pointed out this screed by Ian Jobling — a leading proponent of the Philo-Semitic Branch (PSB) of pro-White activism.  While I hope that the academics whose work was unfairly attacked in that essay will directly respond on their own sites, I would like to reproduce a heavily edited version of something I had previously written. 

Jobling confuses descriptive and prescriptive arguments about ethnic nepotism. As we shall see, he is not the only one who makes such an elementary error.  There has in fact been a lot of “squid ink” squirted around this issue by individuals who really should know better, if they were not so blinded by ideological concerns.

For example, a favorite quote from Richard Dawkins (for Asian supremacists and their followers) is as follows, this from The Selfish Gene: 

Kin selection is emphatically not a special case of group selection. … If an altruistic animal has a cake to give to relatives; there is no reason at all for it to give every relative a slice, the size of the slices being determined by the closeness of relatedness. Indeed this would lead to absurdity since all members of the species, not to mention other species, are at least distant relatives who could therefore each claim a carefully measured crumb! To the contrary, if there is a close relative in the vicinity, there is no reason to give a distant relative any cake at all. Subject to other complications like laws of diminishing returns, the whole cake should be given to the closest relative available. (p. 290) 

There are problems with this cake analogy. The pursuit of ethnic genetic interests (EGI) is not about parceling out “goodies” (“cake”) to co-ethnics in an indiscriminate fashion. It’s about making relevant and contextual choices to maximize your proportion of distinctive genetic information in the next generation. 

It’s also not about the “evolution” of anything. As discussed more fully with respect to Brigandt’s article below, there is no reason why a specific behavior that would enhance EGI needed to have “evolved.” We are talking about rational thought mechanisms able to make an adaptive decision about what is prescriptively adaptive — not instinct. 

A problem with the cake analogy is that the “cake” in question may be a collective good or some form of action or sociopolitical ideology which is suited for application on a large, population scale, and is not relevant to “close kin.” All things being equal, it would be more adaptive to “spread the cake” of immigration to America to your close kin overseas rather to non-related co-ethnics. When it comes to immigration policy, we are not talking about making a choice between your uncle Joe immigrating or some random co-ethnic. We are instead asking whether (large) numbers of genetically distant peoples should be allowed to migrate to your territory; we are making a choice of whether the future demography of your nation will consist of co-ethnics or aliens. If the “cake” in question is access to the carrying capacity of an entire nation, then obviously, the “cake” cannot be reserved for “close kin.” No person that I know of has an immediate family that numbers in the millions or tens or hundreds of millions. Only ethnies fill the bill for certain rather large “pieces of cake.”

Therefore, certain types of “cake” are not scalable down to individuals and extended families. 

Of course, the thing about this is that the “cake” goes in both directions: By giving co-ethnics the “large cake” by successfully influencing immigration policy, you are getting the “small cake” of your own genetic interests being maximized. Note also that Dawkins says that when a closer relative is in the “vicinity,” then that is who should get “the cake.” 

In other words, he is suggesting a relative, contextual metric, despite earlier stating that we should not give out “cake” based on relative genetic distance. If the close relative is at hand, give the cake to him; this implies that if the closer relative is not at hand, give it to the more distant relative. Indeed, then, looking at “cake” which is scaled to populations, one favors the “close relative” of co-ethnics over others when given the choice. Even at the individual level, in circumstances in which favoring family is not possible, the “close relative” of co-ethnics, “when in the vicinity,” takes the “cake” over the “distant relative” of non-ethnics. 

Of interest to this issue is Brigandt’s confused article (“The homeopathy of kin selection: an evaluation of van den Berghe’s sociobiological approach to ethnicity,” Politics and the Life Sciences 20: 203–215, 2001). There he attempts to explain why ethnic nepotism is not “adaptive.” The problem is that the argument  boils down to Brigandt’s definition of a behavior being adaptive only if it has evolved. He asserts that ethnic nepotism could not have evolved because various population groups were isolated from each other during their evolution; hence, there was no selective pressure for ethnic nepotism. As a result, ethnic nepotism could not have evolved and therefore it makes no sense to say it is adaptive. 

Putting aside the argument of whether ethnic nepotism could have evolved (see Notes 1,2), the problem here is the semantic one of defining ‘adaptive.’ If we wish to define ‘adaptive’ in the sense that Brigandt does, then he may be correct, given that caveat of the notes below. However, let’s look at this crucial quote by Brigandt from the same paper (emphasis added): 

True enough, it is an evolutionarily better strategy to spend beneficial behavior towards fellow ethnics than towards outsiders, because you are more closely related to them. 

Well, yes. That, in one sentence, is a reasonable summary of Salter’s entire prescriptive argument — which is different from Brigandt’s descriptive argument about the likelihood that ethnic nepotism could have evolved. Indeed, herein lies the problem, in that Salter (and I) would define adaptive as “an evolutionarily better strategy.” In this sense of adaptive, whether a strategy is adaptive is independent of whether or not is has evolved. 

Most people would define adaptive in the sense that Salter and I use it, and not as Brigandt uses it. (See also Kevin MacDonald’s comments here and here on how rational choice mechanisms are capable of adaptively attaining evolutionary goals in novel environments — including the multi-racial environments of the contemporary world.) In other words, for most people, adaptive means “an evolutionarily better strategy” — a strategy that succeeds better than alternatives in maximizing fitness in future generations. 

How about a more specific example?  Let us assume that an Irishman has no evolved tendency to favor Irish over Nigerians. Is it, or is it not, adaptive for him to invest in preventing Ireland from being over-run with Nigerians, and the Irish being displaced?   This is the important question here.  Does an Irishman have any genetic interests beyond that of his immediate family?  Or, once beyond that family, do all human magically become genetically identical from the interests of our specific Irishman?  

If groups are not genetically identical — as alleged “race realists” should know — then interests differ depending upon, as Brigandt admits, how closely related you are to people.  The extent of these interests depends on numbers and more important on relative genetic distance.  From an Irish perspective, a Nigerian immigrant does more genetic damage that a Chinese, who in turn does more damage than a Pakistani, who does more than a Syrian, who does more than a Greek, who does more than an Italian, who does more than an Austrian, who does more than an Englishman, who does more than a random Irish unrelated co-ethnic.  

Context is crucially important.  In many cases, there is no advantage to the Irishman to engage in ethnic nepotism.  If the Irish were demographically secure, if no non-Irish were in Ireland, if there was no ethnic competition, then the Irishman should concentrate on helping immediate kin against the non-familial Irish competition.  However, in cases in which Irish interests are faced with non-Irish interests, particularly on issues on a scale beyond normal familial interests, then ethnic nepotism can be adaptive. 

On the other hand, in some cases, “humanism” is adaptive — joining humanity to fight an alien invader, or to avert some global ecological catastrophe.  Alternatively, in some cases, a narrow struggle as between the Irish and English is adaptive.  

Given the world-wide racial crisis for European peoples, sometimes an intermediate racial nepotism may be adaptive.  Context always matters.  Relative interests always matter.  There is no set-in-stone rulebook which says one must always engage in indiscriminate ethnic or racial nepotism — that’s a straw man that no one is advocating, and that’s not part of Salter’s prescription.  Instead he advocates a nuanced, nested view of genetic interests in which a person normally invests mostly in self and family, but, at times, may also need to invest in the ethny, dependent upon circumstances.  

Context may change.  Regardless of the past, the English vs. the Irish are hardly the major threat each group faces today, given Third World immigration and racial displacement in each nation.  In the past, persons of Irish and Italian ancestry engaged in conflict in East Coast American cities, due to competition over urban ecological niches.  Today, after decades of extensive intermarriage between those groups, assimilation, as well as the emerging colored threat in the cities, that ethnic hostility as in large part completely disappeared.  

Where to invest in genetic interests, and when to do so, will always be legitimate questions that depend upon context.  EGI is fluid, not completely fixed.  However, what is beyond question is that EGI exists, since genetic differences between groups exist and to quote Brigandt: “it is an evolutionarily better strategy to spend beneficial behavior towards fellow ethnics than towards outsiders, because you are more closely related to them.”   

It is curious — quite curious — that an anti-racist academic can admit this, but an alleged “pro-White race realist” like Jobling attempts to deny it.  Cui bono?   It would be one thing if what he’s saying in these essays was correct — after all, there is the long Western tradition of valuing truth-telling over political convenience. 

But it is not correct – and he’s making himself look foolish defending the narrow interests of a group that has heretofore opposed all manifestations of race realism — moderate or otherwise. 

What about arguments such as “don’t people have genetic similarities to mice?  We should avoid killing mice!”  

The whole point of EGI is differences in distinctive genes (or as I would put it, distinctive genetic information).  Harpending makes this point in the article reproduced in the appendix to On Genetic Interests (OGI), when he refers to the fact that people share many genes with an onion. But what is important is genetic similarity beyond that of random gene sharing.  After all, evolution ultimately works on the differences in genetic information within and between populations.  

It is quite clear that if all organisms were perfect genetic clones of each other, then there would be no basis for the natural selection of those types best “fit” for a particular environment.  Selection works on differences; kinship is based upon relative differences.  An Irishman and his brother share many genes with a random, unrelated Irishman.  What’s important for distinguishing the familial interests of the brothers from that of an unrelated co-ethnic is the genetic information shared by the brothers that the unrelated stranger lacks.   

From the perspective of a human, the relationship between humans and mice, from a purely reductionist genetic standpoint, are the genes and gene sequences shared by humans that are distinct from mice.  Random gene sharing does not require humans to place murine interests above their own.  Random gene sharing does not require one human population to favor another if the two are in conflict. 

This mouse-human example also ignores the issue of relative interests and context as described above for our Irish case.  Killing a mouse does not reasonably harm the genetic interests of any individual human in comparison to another person not killing the mouse.  Indeed, if the mouse carries harmful germs, eliminating that rodent can be adaptive; there are no counter-balancing relative interests imposing genetic costs.  That is contrasted to ethnic activism in favor of your ethny, and against an alien ethny which, for example, promotes mass immigration, racial integration and miscegenation, and “civil rights” for other alien ethnics. 

The mouse “argument” also importantly ignores genetic structure. We may share X% of gene sequences with a mouse, but a mouse is structurally different genetically than a human, so that an infinite number of mice do not, and can not, ever constitute an interest to a human greater than one other human. (Note: one cannot completely blame Jobling for this point, since I am not satisfied with how this was handled in OGI).  

Likewise, from the standpoint of an Englishman, any number of English-Bantu hybrids will never exhibit the genetic information characterizing a genetic structure (e.g., coinheritance of genome-wide units of distinctive genetic information) typical of a single given Englishman.  Genetic interests are ultimately about genetic information, not merely the numbers of copies of individual genes or gene sequences.  This flaw in the original EGI concept is one that I hope will be corrected in future editions of OGI.  

Nevertheless, the point is obvious.  How could “kin selection” for our vaunted “family kin members” have evolved anyway?  After all, don’t numbers of non-familial ethnics, non-ethnics, and even mice contain more copies of particular genes than our immediate kin?   The same ridiculous “argument” about “gene sharing” used against ethnic nepotism can be used against familial nepotism.  Jobling no doubt shares more total gene copies with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team than with a single member of his own immediate family.  Should he invest all his resources in buying new sneakers for the globetrotters?  Or, perhaps, in feeding a nest of house mice? 

Further, genetic identity (e.g., population genetics, forensics, paternity) is not based on the numbers of gene sequences, but the patterns of gene sequences within individuals and within groups.  Ultimately, evolution is working on differences in gene (sequence) frequencies in organisms and populations, not those scattered randomly throughout the biosphere.  Genetic structure is important, and recent published work has begun the process of quantifying it. 

In conclusion, I have to tell Hunter Wallace: you are right and my “fence-sitting” about the PSB was wrong.  Even after all the destructive memes that have been emanating from the PSB: a multiracial White separatist (sic) state, racial preservation for its own sake is “insane”; Whites needs to surrender to the racial status quo, and all the rest. 

I naively held out hope that an accommodation could be found between the PSB and traditional “pro-White” factions.  I hoped that the only real differences between the PSB and traditional racial nationalists was merely that the former wanted inclusion of Jews, and that something — perhaps Svigor’s assimilation idea – could be a long-range solution for bridging that gap. 

But, this was mistaken.  There are fundamental differences that set the PSB apart — their ultimate interests are different from ours.  I am concerned — as I believe Hunter Wallace is — that the PSB may attempt to subvert racialism in the same manner that the neoconservatives subverted traditional American conservatism.  If this occurs, racial nationalism (for European-derived peoples) will be replaced by some sort of anti-EGI, aracial culturalism that defends White values rather than White people.  We’ll be told to accept “Asians and others” and to distinguish between the bad “NAMs” (a concept meant to condition us to accept “high-IQ, law-abiding” non-Whites) and the good “AMs.”  As genetic studies continue to emphasize the differences between Jews and Europeans, the PSB can be expected to further critique and attempt to delegitimize EGI and ethnic nepotism.  

Whatever the PSB strives for with their activism, their vision and goals are not ours. 

Notes:   

1. Given that selective pressures on humans have continued up to the present, and may be accelerating, it is quite possible that selection for ethnocentric behavior could have taken place during periods in which different ethnies were in close proximity (e.g., in historical times). It may even be taking place today, as non-ethnocentric ethnies are being demographically displaced by those who place a higher value on such behaviors. And, of course, brain scans show that Whites have a stronger (negative) response to Black faces than to those of Whites, which suggests an evolved heightened “danger” response to the phenotypically alien. 

Although this does not in any way alter the irrelevancy of Brigandt’s argument, it is worth noting that the argument itself may just be plain wrong. We also need to follow through on the implications of Brigandt’s argument. Let us say he is right in that the bulk of behavioral evolution took place within homogeneous groups/societies and, thus, selection for ethnic nepotistic altruism could not have evolved. 

The problem is that the Whites of today, most of them, live within multiracial, multicultural societies quite different from that in which their “instincts” evolved. And the overall “small world” globalist environment means that peoples in general are being exposed to things for which their mental/behavioral modules have not been “evolved” to handle (again, this is assuming Brigandt is correct). Therefore, “evolved behavior” cannot be deemed as “appropriate” — i.e., it cannot be truly adaptive in the modern world, can it? 

You cannot have it both ways. If ethnic nepotism cannot have evolved because human behavioral evolution took place in “racial isolation,” then one cannot assert that behaviors that evolved in such isolation can “protect” the adaptive interests of individuals in radically different environments today.  We have now introduced a factor that simply did not exist in the “environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” — group competition between the co-ethnics and non-ethnics. Broader genetic interest didn’t exist before, as the only group in the environment was co-ethnics, and the only genetic distinctiveness was at the individual and familial level. 

Sorry — that doesn’t apply anymore in multiculturalism or in the “global economy” as a whole. There is now the whole issue of group genetic interests. If Brigandt is correct, “evolved behavior” took place in isolation; hence, such behavior cannot handle the modern realities. Rational thought processes are needed for adaptive behavior today, just as Salter has argued. 

2. See here for a view that competition between groups can create conditions suitable for intra-group cooperation. Given that human evolution has been accelerating, perhaps the argument that ethnic nepotism could not have evolved is wrong.  Again, if certain human traits have been selected for since the Neolithic, and, indeed, during historical times, then human behavioral evolution has been occurring during the period in which different ethnies have been in contact and in conflict.  In those circumstances, ethnic nepotism may have evolved, and in the context given, they may well have been adaptive.  As explained above, there are circumstances in which the “cake” can only be distributed between large population groups, and is not scalable to familial kin.  In those cases, ethnic conflict can select for ethnic nepotism without any conflict to narrower spheres of genetic interest.  However, in the last analysis, whether ethnic nepotism “evolved” is not required for it to be the “evolutionarily better strategy.”

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Tom Sunic: Reply to Stern

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Editorial note: Frequent TOO contributor Tom Sunic replies to Joel Stern’s letter to several writers associated with TOO and TOQ. (For Stern’s letter, see Alex Kurtagic’s “Narcissism” blog which also comments on Stern.)

Dear Mr. Stern:

Thank you for your comments. I appreciate  your concern for the future of  the Jewish people, and I’d also like to extend  my condolences  regarding the loss of your family . 

Of course, I speak in my own name, not on behalf of my TOO colleagues, all of them being outstanding intellectuals and tolerant people. I hope you have read Prof. MacDonald’s work — in which you won’t find any Jew baiting, but rather serious analyses of this most important issue of our times. 

Any lumping together of Christian identitarians and National Alliance hotheads with TOO is groundless.  

I respect your concerns for the real or hypothetical attacks on your victimhood. But I also expect from you some respect for my own, including respect for the historical memory of my people and my race —  wherever they may reside. It would be commendable on your part to extend sympathies to many of my relatives who perished anonymously in communist terror after 1945. While many Jews in America take for granted that non-Jews will constantly reminisce about Jewish victimology and hypothetical threats to the Jewry, few Jews seem to be concerned with the plight of non-Jews under communism in East Europe. 

The fact that Jewish intellectuals played a formidable role on the eve and during the Bolshevik seizure of power — however good or bad their intentions may have been — remains a topic that needs to be addressed in detail. This might help us avoid future mass killings and pogroms and secure, more or less, some semblance of cohabitation.

Yet, something tells me that neither myself nor yourself seriously believe in this static scenario.

One of the reasons anti-Semitism occurs is due to the lack of open debate about mutual perceptions and self-perceptions of Jews vs. non-Jews.  Hatred of Jews is prevalent among  those who mimic Semitism, people who subconsciously try to be more Jewish than Jews themselves. This is part and parcel of ‘genealogical proximity’, between Christians and Jews, and which has historically resulted in mutual hatred. This is a neurotic dilemma of a person wishing to replace his Sameness by someone else’s, i.e. Jewish/Christian Otherness. The classic example of this neurotic mindset are Christian Zionists. 

Your concerns reflect standard self-induced fears and self-fulfilling prophecies about anti-Semitic demons — who, as a rule, must sooner or later materialize.  The demon architects are not those you suspect of anti-Semitism, but those who claim to be your friends now. 

Sincerely,

 

Dr. Tom Sunic

www.tomsunic.info

Croatia

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The looming racial chasm

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Ronald Brownstein’s recent column points once again to the emerging racial chasm in the US. Obama won 80% of the non-White vote in 2008, and his approval rating among minorities continues to be around 75%. Among Whites, it’s a different story. 44% of college-educated Whites approve of Obama, and only 38% of non-college-educated Whites. If, as Brownstein suggests, these approval ratings reflect future voting patterns, it would mean a landslide against the Democrats by Whites — quite possibly more than the official 58% White turnout for Bush in 2004.

But he also points to the possibility that support for Obama will slip even further among college-educated Whites:

Since 2007, median incomes have plunged more for white families headed by men with a college degree than those headed by men with only high school educations, the Economic Policy Institute reports.

That widening distress changes the political equation. A possible Republican surge next year in blue-collar “beer track” districts remains the biggest threat to the Democrats’ House majority. The Democrats’ vulnerability will deepen, however, if they cannot hold the line in “wine track” districts whose education levels exceed the national average. That’s one way a difficult 2010 election for Democrats could turn catastrophic.

If less than 40% of Whites voted Democrat while twice that percentage are voting Republican, it would indeed indicate a widening racial chasm. Of course, the downside is that there is no evidence that this is anything more than implicit Whiteness. And the Republicans are certainly not going to nominate candidates that would do anything to change this.

Still, it’s only a matter of time — and a fairly short time at that — before everyone realizes that the political landscape is fast becoming a racial landscape. And at that point, explicit assertions of White identity are inevitable.

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Ted Sallis: More Jewish Genetics: The "Weak Khazar Hypothesis"

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Ted Sallis:  An important new paper (free online; see here) has come out on Jewish population genetics.  

The populations used in this study are described as: 

The Middle Eastern populations included in the study were Bedouin (46), Druze (42), Mozabite (29), and Palestinian (46). The European populations were Adygei (17), Basque (24), French (28), Italian (13), Orcadian (15), Russian (25), Sardinian (28), and Tuscan (8). Middle Eastern and European non-Jewish individuals were taken from the H952 subset of the HGDP-CEPH panel [24]. The Jewish samples included Ashkenazi Jews (20), Moroccan Jews (20), Tunisian Jews (20), and Turkish Jews (20). 

The major findings are described below, emphasis added: 

Abstract: Background: Genetic studies have often produced conflicting results on the question of whether distant Jewish populations in different geographic locations share greater genetic similarity to each other or instead, to nearby non-Jewish populations. We perform a genome-wide population-genetic study of Jewish populations, analyzing 678 autosomal microsatellite loci in 78 individuals from four Jewish groups together with similar data on 321 individuals from 12 non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations.

Results: We find that the Jewish populations show a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure. Further, [statistical analyses] place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations. Conclusion: These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent. 

Neighbor-joining population trees obtained for the three distance matrices were generally quite similar (Figure 3). All three trees are divided into a European side and a Middle Eastern side, with the four Jewish populations located in the interior. 

This result … assigns the Jewish populations and the Palestinians to the same cluster (Figure 2), and by the relatively close placement of the Palestinians and the Jewish populations in MDS plots of individual distances (Figure 5). 

What about the Khazars? 

One frequently discussed conversion that likely occurred in the 8th century at the far eastern edge of Europe, north of the Caucasus and Black Sea regions, is that of the Khazarian kingdom [60, 62, 64]. The demographic effect of this conversion is debated, so that only a small minority of the Khazars may have adopted Judaism. While the ultimate fate of the Khazar population remains unknown, the theory has been advanced that a large fraction of the ancestry of eastern European Jews derives from the Khazars [60, 62-64]. This theory would predict ancestry for the eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish population to be distinct from that of the other Jewish populations in the study. Although we did not observe such a distinct ancestry, it is noteworthy that in some analyses (Figures 2 and 3), as was observed in the recent study of Need et al. [10], we did detect similarity of the Adygei, a north Caucasian group from the area once occupied by the Khazars, to the Jewish populations. 

This is consistent with what I’ve said in the past. The data are consistent with a “weak Khazar hypothesis” — that Ashkenazi Jews may have some fraction of Khazar ancestry but are more closely linked to other Middle Eastern groups. On the other hand, the “strong Khazar hypothesis” — that the Ashkenazim are merely “converted Khazars without any connection whatsoever to the Middle Eastern populations of the classical world (i.e., Hebrews)” — is highly unlikely.  Not only are the Ashkenazim genetically close to the Sephardim (who have traditionally been considered as likely Hebrew descendants), but this study yet again confirms previous findings of a significant fraction of historical Middle Eastern ancestry in the Ashkenazim. 

Therefore, the idea that the Ashkenazim are simply Khazars with no Middle Eastern ancestry is untenable.

However, equally untenable is the idea that the Ashkenazim are “just like Europeans” and are not distinct from the European genepool.  It is quite clear that Europeans are different from Middle Easterners, with various Jewish groups positioned intermediate to those two major Caucasian continental population groups.  Indeed, it may be reasonable to see Jews as a “mini-race” as they are distinct from both Europeans and Middle Easterners and are indeed more similar to each other than to these other groups.  This conclusion is supported by the work of Need et al. (Note 1), which demonstrated that 1/4 Jewish ancestry can be detected in individuals.  This ability to detect 1/4 Jewish ancestry, in a reasonably reliable manner, within the broader Caucasian family suggests a degree of racial differentiation of Jews sufficient for consideration as a separate (sub-) racial group.

In general, these findings support Jewish history and tradition, given the commonalities of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, as well as the Middle Eastern connection.  One would think that persons of Jewish ancestry would be well pleased with these findings, which have a strong empirical basis.  Indeed, persons who falsely claim that the Ashkenazim are “Europeans” are as anti-Semitic as those who continue, in the face of all contradictory evidence, to peddle the “strong Khazar hypothesis.”

Note that discussions of the Ashkenazim as a group do not necessarily cover all individuals of this group.  Likely (and supported to some extent by this paper) individual Ashkenazim may be essentially genetically European, and others genetically Middle Eastern, even when most of their fellows are intermediate to those populations. Global similarity analyses, such as the quantitative measurement offered by 23andme (using over 500,000 autosomal SNP markers), may be useful to determine the genetic affinities of individual Ashkenazim (and Sephardim); particular individuals may be quite different from their ethnic genetic centroid.

That being said, this paper’s data are fairly clear that the Ashkenazi (and Sephardic) genepool, as a whole, is not European, and it is not Middle Eastern either.  It is a unique and distinct blending of these ancestries.  This analysis is in no way a commentary on the debates found elsewhere on the Internet about “are the Jews white?”  Different people draw the line of “whiteness” at different places within the Caucasian family of peoples.  The issue here is, instead, empirical determination of the place of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in the genetic spectrum of human populations.  This paper is an important contribution to our understanding of this complex and fascinating topic. 

This paper also refutes some self-serving stupidity that a part-Jewish and highly confused commentator has been making, in that he incorrectly asserts that the major biological/genetic split of Caucasians is within Europe, with northern Europeans (who he bizarrely believes underwent racial differentiation in India [!] of all places) separate from the other Europeans, who he thinks are in the Middle Eastern population branch. Of course, autosomal analyses consistently show this is incorrect, and I’ve previously cited those papers in other forums.  From the present paper (emphasis added): 

Neighbor-joining population trees obtained for the three distance matrices were generally quite similar (Figure 3). All three trees are divided into a European side and a Middle Eastern side, with the four Jewish populations located in the interior. This division is supported by relatively strong bootstrap values… …the basic pattern visible in all three trees, in which the Middle Eastern and European populations cluster separately with the Jewish populations in the center. 

European populations included are examples of Basque, French, Italian, Orcadian, Russian, Sardinian, and Tuscan.  Basque, Italian, Sardinian, and Tuscan are southern European. Orcadian is northern European, the French can reasonably be seen as “central,” and Russians are eastern European.  Given that European genetics is clinal as well as clustered, the arrangement of the populations in the “trees” is what one would expect. 

Note:

1. The Need et al.  paper also clearly shows a variety of European populations (similar to those analyzed in the paper discussed here) clustering separately from Middle Easterners, with Jews in an intermediate position.  Thus, different research groups, using different marker sets, are coming to the same conclusion – a conclusion supported by other peer-reviewed papers as well.

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