Ongoing Jewish Influence in the Transformation of Ireland

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The ‘softening up’ of Ireland for the ongoing scheme of mass population replacement is set to gather pace following the appointment of Nigerian Ebun Joseph in the Orwellian role of “Special Rapporteur for the National Plan Against Racism.” The stated aim of this plan is to “make Ireland a place in which the impacts of racism are fully acknowledged and actively addressed.” In other words, the goal of the plan is to brainwash the Irish population into a sense of White guilt, or as a recent article in The Spectator put it, “the Nigerian-born Special Rapporteur will deliver regular reports to the Irish government about how hideously white and racist Irish people are.” The national Plan Against Racism will begin a process where special rights and privileges are handed to foreigners while the Irish become second class citizens in their own land. The reason for the implementation of the plan, according to Shane O’Curry, Director of the Irish Network Against Racism (INAR), is that “migrants in Ireland are reporting not feeling safe across the board in all areas of life.” Mr O’Curry does not appear to be concerned about the declining sense of safety among Irish women and children thanks to these same migrants, but I suspect that Mr O’Curry is on too high a salary, much of it provided by globalist NGOs, to concern himself with such matters. Nonetheless, as will be explained below, Ebun Joseph is merely the figurehead for something that has a distinctly Jewish complexion, because Ireland’s National Action Plan Against Racism has Jewish origins.

Alice Feldman and the Need for an “Anti-Racist Ireland”

Ebun Joseph is a direct protege of Jewish-American academic Alice Feldman, a sociologist at University College Dublin. It was Feldman who supervised Joseph’s PhD, and it was Feldman who groomed Joseph for her current role as the face of Irish ‘anti-racism’. Athough a whole host of Irish and ethnic minority names have been listed as authors of the “National Plan Against Racism,” even the briefest of research reveals that it was first conceived as far back as 2003 and that the author of a plan bearing this precise name was none other than Feldman herself — a draft document carrying that name is listed among her publications for 2003. According to Feldman’s own profile on the University College Dublin website, “Over the past two decades, I have worked in research, advisory and volunteer capacities with many civic, community and other organisations in Ireland involved in anti-racism, migration and interculturalism work.” In other words, like other Jews to be discussed in this essay, she has invested more than twenty years in opposing the interests of the native Irish. Feldman has also perfected the art of linguistic academic nonsense, once describing her work as drawing “on a trans disciplinary variety of traditions to cultivate and mobilise decolonial praxes that intervene in the global colonial legacies underpinning the current necropolitical moment.”

Ebun Joseph

Looking into the relationship between Feldman and Joseph, it is clear that Feldman is quite the activist, though content to let the Nigerian be the public figure advancing her agenda. A description of one of their partnerships reads:

UCD (University College Dublin) academics Dr. Ebun Joseph and Dr. Alice Feldman led a talk on Thursday 2nd July entitled “So What Next: Becoming Anti-Racist via Zoom.” … Joseph is a race relations consultant, Career Development Specialist and module coordinator for UCD’s Black Studies module. Feldman works in the UCD School of Sociology and is a convenor of the UCD MA Race, Migration and Decolonial Studies and Decolonial Dialogues Platform. The academics commented during the webinar that they already have a long working relationship. Joseph and Feldman focused on two topics: white fragility and anti-racism allyship. Feldman said she believed white fragility needed to be understood by white people so they can do the work of anti-racism allyship. … They discussed how when white people defensively deflect during conversations about race out of discomfort, or the fear that they are being attacked, they put the exhausting responsibility on people of colour to ensure that they feel comfortable and as a result, the conversation is closed. They both believe that if we cannot have open conversations about race and racism, we cannot change it. Joseph stressed that there are only racists and anti-racists; if someone defensively says they are not a racist, that merely means that they are a racist in denial. Joseph added that silent racists are in the majority whereas the loud, violent racists are in the minority. Feldman said that an anti-racist needs to accept that they live in a racist society and they should examine the way racism can be eradicated from the organisations they are a part of. … The academics would like there to be a compulsory anti-racism module in UCD because they feel we cannot expect to have an anti-racist society if we do not teach anti-racism.

Alice Feldman

A 2020 article for Gript rightly pointed out that

the ideology of Doctors Joseph and Feldman, which is corrupting the Irish academy as it has corrupted the universities of other western democracies, is Critical Race Theory. This theory, whatever about those who espouse it, can be used as perniciously as the spurious race theories that have gone before it. It is racialism directed against white people: no more nor no less. Its methods are the boots and petrol bombs of Antifa and Black Lives Matter allied to a craven intellectual capitulation on the part of the deracinated bourgeois liberals and lefties who control much of the institutions where the poison is disseminated.

Laura Weinstein and the Dangers of “Irish Inbreeding”

Feldman is not the first American Jew to arrive on Irish shores and start telling the Irish they have no ethnic interests. Back in 2019, Laura Weinstein, a New York PhD living in Ireland and claiming to be an expert in Irish history and culture waded into Ireland’s growing immigration debate. Of all the aspects of Irish history and culture Weinstein could have chosen to focus on, she decided she was most interested, like Feldman and others, in the “myth” of a homogeneous Irish identity and “right wing Irish nationalism.”

Laura Weinstein

Weinstein employed her Twitter account to the trolling of Irish political figures opposed to mass immigration. In one example she responded to a post by the National Party by implying that Irish opposition to immigration would leave the Irish like “neurotic” “inbred” “dogs.” She wrote: “Gene flow as a result of immigration prevents the negative impact of inbreeding. But, go ahead and constrain migration and gene flow if you want to create a race of humans that reflects the neuroticism of “pure bred” dogs. Just be sure to hold a referendum on inbreeding first.” Not only was Weinstein’s fixation exceedingly strange and unsettling, it was also fanciful. Genetic studies have shown the Irish already possess a diverse gene pool in the form of genetic clusters of Scandinavian, Norman-French, British, and Iberian origin. This is a considerably wider gene pool than that of Dr Weinstein’s Ashkenazi Jews, who are descended from a single group of 350 people. It will come as no surprise to readers of this website that Weinstein is acutely concerned about the preservation of her own people, and is listed by Algemeiner as “an antisemitism analyst at the ADL.” “Inbreeding” for me, but apparently not for thee.

Ronit Lentin’s Deconstruction of the Irish

As well as being a direct protege of Alice Feldman, Ebun Joseph is the ideological child of Ronit Lentin, the Israeli Jew who in 1997 established Ireland’s first “Ethnic and Racial Studies” programme, and thereby ushered in the arrival of Critical Race Theory in Ireland. Lentin was also a colleague and collaborator with Alice Feldman in an early 2008 side project of the National Action Plan Against Racism. From 1997 until 2012 Lentin was Head of Sociology, and acted as director of the MPhil program in “Race, Ethnicity, Conflict.” She was also the founder of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, from which she advocated an open-door immigration policy for Ireland and opposed all deportations, as well as engaging in activism to liberalise Irish abortion laws.[1] As an academic and “anti-racist” activist, Lentin formulated what would become some of the cardinal facets of Irish self-recrimination on matters of race, beginning with her definition of Ireland as “a biopolitical racist state.”[2]  By her own account, before she began her work on stoking Irish race guilt in the early 1990s, “most people were not conscious that Irish racism existed.”[3]

Ronit Lentin

In some senses Lentin introduced the concept of an Irish racism. Her first step in assuring the Irish that they were indeed racist was to deny their existence as a people. She asserted that the Irish were merely “theorised as homogeneous — white, Christian and settled.”[4] Quite who had developed this theory of the Irish, and when, was never specified by Lentin, nor did she attempt to show that the White, Christian, and settled status of the vast majority of the Irish population was anything other than a matter of fact and reality. It appears to have sufficed for Lentin simply to assert that Irishness was nothing but a theory, and to leave it at that. She was particularly aggrieved by the fact the Irish, apparently unaware they were a figment of their own imagination, voted (80 percent%) to link citizenship and blood (ending “birth-right citizenship) by constitutionally differentiating between citizen and non-citizen in a June 2004 Citizenship Referendum. This move was taken primarily in order to stop African “birth tourism” and “anchor babies” by African women, which had become increasingly common by the early 2000s. To Lentin, however, the move was symbolic of the fact “the Irish Republic had consciously and democratically become a racist state.”[5] She concluded that any idea of the Irish as historical victims should be dispensed with, and that “Ireland’s new position as heading the Globalisation Index, its status symbol as the locus of “cool” culture, and its privileged position within an ever-expanding European Community calls for re-theorising Irishness as white supremacy.”[6]

So, in Lentin’s worldview, Irishness is not only a fiction, but a racist, “white supremacist” fiction. Lentin’s advice to the Irish, should they wish to rid themselves of the delusion of peoplehood, was to engage in mass celebrations of “diversity and integration and multiracialism and multiculturalism and interculturalism,”[7] Lentin adds: “I propose an interrogation of how the Irish nation can become other than white.” Keeping up the family tradition, Ronit Lentin’s daughter Alana moved to Australia several years ago, where she quickly established herself as an equally rabid promoter of White guilt and engaged in successive critiques of Australian “racism.” She is now President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, and has penned articles for The Guardian asserting that Australian identity is as fictional as that of the Irish, and demanding Australia adopt an open borders policy so that it too can become other than White.

Katrina Goldstone and the Flooding of Ireland

Working alongside Feldman and Lentin on the 2008 collaboration relating to the early National Plan Against Racism was the Irish Jewish writer Katrina Goldstone. Goldstone remains a board member of New Communities Ireland, “Ireland’s largest independent migrant-led national network of more than 150 immigrant-led groups comprising 65 nationalities,” an organisation similar to Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, the Deputy Director of which is the Sephardic Jew Bill Abom. Goldstone has described herself as being “involved in asylum rights and minority issues” for more than two decades.

 Katrina Goldstone 

Louise Derman-Sparks and The Perils of Racist Irish Children

“Teaching anti-racism” is a top priority for Jewish ethnic activists across the West, and involves inculcating a sense of White guilt and shame about expressing White ethnic interests. The groundwork for the brainwashing of Irish children was laid by Katherine Zappone, an American lesbian who served as Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth from 2016 to 2020. In 2016 Zappone unveiled the “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Charter, and Guidelines for Early Childhood Care and Education.” The document opens by explaining these guidelines for transforming Irish education in an anti-White direction “are informed by national and international equality and antidiscriminatory educational approaches and practice. They draw heavily on the anti-bias approach developed by Louise Derman-Sparks in the USA.”

Derman-Sparks is an American Jew who “pioneered” anti-bias and anti-racism courses for children in the 1980s through such works as Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism: A Developmental Approach, and What If All the Kids Are White? Derman-Sparks travelled to Ireland on at least one occasion, in October 1998, to preach her doctrine, giving a keynote speech at a conference on early-years education with a paper titled “Education without Prejudice for the Early Years.”

A good example of Derman-Sparks’ work, which is being incorporated into the teaching of Irish children, can be found in an article for the American Federation of Teachers in which Derman-Sparks states:

Biologically, there is no such thing as race. All people are members of one race, Homo sapiens, the human race—even though everyone does not look the same. … Diversity does not cause prejudice, nor does children noticing and talking about differences, as some adults fear. … Very early, white children come to value their whiteness, presume it is the definition of normal, and believe that therefore all other skin colors are strange and less than. While early childhood teachers want all children to like who they are, the challenge for an anti-bias educator is to enable white children to like who they are without developing a sense of white superiority.

In What If All The Kids Are White? (2011), Derman-Sparks writes that “White children’s learning to be “White” is part of the maintenance of systemic racism, and “Whiteness” plays a significant role in the behaviour of all White adults.”[8] By incorporating the work of Derman-Sparks into the national education system, Ireland has sealed the fate of its youth, consenting to the ongoing brainwashing of generations.

***

The Nigerian Ebun Joseph is often ridiculed by the right-wing media, both for the extremes of her positions and for her ineptitude at articulating her ideas. She is a figurehead being used by others behind the scenes, and she absorbs much of the jokes and hostility. Joseph is certainly an ideological activist who sees ‘racism’ even in Irishness itself. A good example occurred in 2019 when she was mistakenly served blackcurrant juice instead of house wine at the Galway Bay Hotel. Whereas others might have simply mentioned the mistake to staff, Joseph declared herself the victim of racism. As this affair gathered pace, she took to social media to demand: “Please, more Blacks go there. They can’t discourage us from going where we want!” Ireland now has this person, so militant over a glass of juice, ordering the government to make the nation less ‘racist.’

It would be a mistake, however, to take Ebun Joseph lightly. She has been groomed for her role and she will attempt to perform it with aggression and dedication, to the detriment of the Irish and to the great satisfaction of her mentors. Across the West there has been a pattern of elite-led brainwashing, where ideas cooked up by hostile Jewish academics are fed to students who go on to become the nation’s professional class and from there disperse into the general population. Joseph wants the “anti-racism” material cooked up by her mentors made compulsory in the education system. These ideas infect police forces, the media, and Human Resources departments. They penetrate every aspect of life until they are inescapable. Critical Race Theory isn’t satisfied until everything about European culture and peoplehood is destroyed. There is no set target when it can be agreed that Ireland is sufficiently “diverse,” and there is no point at which the Irish will have the smear of racism lifted from their heads. Under the gaze of Critical Race Theory, the existence of a single Irish family is racist. The Irish will cease to be racist, only when they cease to be; when they are utterly replaced and when nothing of Ireland remains. These are the dictates of new rulers, of a conquering class who have not arrived with swords and guns, but with sob stories, lies and a perverted academic blackmail.

[1] See Lentin, R. (2013). A Woman Died: Abortion and the Politics of Birth in Ireland. Feminist Review, 105(1), 130

—136.

[2] R. Lentin, After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (Dublin: Metro Eireann Publications, 2006), 3.

[3] Ibid., 1.

[4] Ibid., 2.

[5] Ibid., 55.

[6] Ibid., 107.

[7] Ibid., 165.

[8] Derman-Sparks, Louise., Ramsey, Patricia G.. What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. (United States: Teachers College Press, 2011), 31.

The Move to Seek Fellowship and Common Values on the Right

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As someone who has moved twice to seek fellowship and a sense of safety in a country hostile to people on the right, I can totally relate to the people described in the article below, except that the people discussed here are serious Christians—true believers. They’re not just “cultural Christians” like me —i.e., someone who admires some aspects and influence of the Church in European history, such as the strong Christian identities of those who fought in the Spanish Reconquista, but who deplores the recent descent of  so much of mainstream Christianity into wokeness and subservience to the dominant, essentially anti-Christian culture. Many of these people doubtless imagine a Western European Reconquista that would return Christianity (and perhaps implicitly at least, Whiteness) to the center of Western culture.

But, despite these differences, we have pretty much everything else in common, including place of residence and a desire to fit into a community with shared values. The main places mentioned here are Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a small-town near Nashville, and suburban Dallas-Fort Worth. These locales are all in red states, at least for now, until the immigration deluge has its intended consequence of turning the country into a White minority nation saturated with people who identify as LGBTUQIA+ and the accompanying propaganda that is attempting to maximize the number of people with these identities. This propaganda is being blared throughout the educational system and all the major media. It’s striking that in the article, a wife exchanges teacups with her husband so that she has the more feminine one. These people uphold traditional notions of sex roles. They seem to understand that biologically based sex differences are real and that its adaptive (or perhaps part of God plan) to adhere to them. And notice the photo of the girl doing embroidery.

But it’s one thing to be in a conducive area, it’s still important to develop social relationships with people you can trust. In my case I am part of a small, all-male group sharing the same values and trying to develop projects that would bring more people like ourselves to our area and to similar areas throughout the country. I realize that people often can’t simply up and move, but many people can. And for long-term happiness, I highly recommend living among like-minded, culturally and ethnically homogeneous people is essential. Robert Putnam, whose research on increasing loneliness in American society and the detrimental effects of multi-culturalism on community (e.g., lack of willingness to contribute to public goods) is well known, realizes the importance of bonding with similar others although, like the mainstream liberal Jewish community he identifies with, he is entirely in favor of the multicultural experiment.

The people described here are successful economically, and they are well educated, including some refugees from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, More importantly, they are highly fertile, with intact families with 4–8 children (likely with more being planned). They are thus part of the hypothesized demographic revolution described by Edward Dutton and J.O. Rayner-Hilles in which cultural conservatives will become dominant because of their fertility, although our hostile elites will do their best to import the multiethnic, non-White mélange that they favor to ultimately dispossess them.

These people are organizing into small groups. They are not the types to take to the streets with their guns. And I suppose they tune in to mainstream conservative media like FoxNews which will never educate them on the importance of ethnicity in human affairs, much less inform them of the reality of how a very influential Jewish elite is well on their way to shaping the country into something they loathe. An example from the article:

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

But of course, this being the New York Times, it’s mandatory to haul in an academic who is hostile to all this:

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

The Smug, Self-Righteous Damon Linker

Yes, nothing worse than being among people like yourself. People who share your culture and your values, and yes (God forbid!), even your ethnic background (unmentioned here of course) — a sure sign of racism to your garden-variety journalist-academic like Linker.

***

The article is well worth reading: New York Times: “Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America.”

The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.

Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.

His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.

“A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling,” said Skyler Kressin, 38, who is friendly with the Claremont leaders and shares many of their concerns. He left Southern California to move to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 2020. “We need to be engaged, we need to be building.”

A bearded man looking to the left, partly in sunlight, partly in shadow, in front of a modernistic fountain.
“There’s an interesting shift going on to Texas. I think there’s a renewed sense of seeking community and shared values and culture amongst right-wing folks.” said Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute. Credit…Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

As Mr. Trump barrels through his third presidential campaign, his supporters buoyed by last week’s debate, many of the young activists and thinkers who have risen under his influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits.

Their vision includes stronger local leadership and a withered national “administrative state,” prompting them to celebrate last week when the Supreme Court effectively ended the “Chevron deference,” which could lead to the weakening of thousands of federal rules on the environment, worker protection and beyond.

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

Some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a “great sort,” a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas. (And some, including Mr. Kressin, are simultaneously chasing the cheaper costs of living and safer neighborhoods that fuel many ordinary moves.

Former President Donald Trump puts a medal around the neck of Ryan Williams of the Claremont Institute.
Ryan Williams is presented the National Humanities Medal by President Donald Trump on behalf of The Claremont Institute during a ceremony at the White House in November 2019.Credit…Samuel Corum for The New York Times

The year Mr. Kressin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions in what some hope will be a rejuvenated American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group has about 10 lodges in various states of development so far, with membership ranging between seven and several dozen people.

The group’s goals, according to leaders, include identifying “local elites” across the country and cultivating “potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime” — by which they mean a second Trump presidency, but also a future they describe in sweeping and sometimes apocalyptic terms. Some warn of a coming societal breakdown that will require armed, right-minded citizens to restore order.

The group’s ties to Claremont gives it access to influence in a future Trump administration: Mr. Anton served on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, and a Claremont board member, John Eastman, advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 election campaign. He faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia over schemes to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost that race.

Their rhetoric can sound expansive to the point of opacity. “As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children,” the group’s website proclaims. “The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.”

Their output, so far, looks more modest. Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.” The men socialize outside of meetings and pass each other business.

Two adults and six children out for a walk, They are dressed neatly in attire appropriate for school or work.
Skyler Kressin and his family moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from Southern California in 2020.Credit…Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

The circle’s critics say they present a cleaned-up version of some of the darkest elements of the right, including a cultural homogeneity to the point of racism and an openness to using violence to achieve political ends.

“It’s this idea of organizing discontent at the local level and building a network that over the next decade or three decades or even half-century would just keep moving the Republican Party further and further rightward, and mobilizing voters in discontented parts of the country, a lot of them men,” said Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, who has written critically of the crowd. “It’s a highbrow version of the militia movement.”

In its first two years, leaders said, SACR received significant funding from Charles Haywood, a former business owner in Indiana. Mr. Haywood seems to delight in being an online provocateur. He has called the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, an “electoral justice protest” and praised the racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints.”

Posting on the platform X last month, he wrote that foreign-born citizens should be deported for offenses including “working for Left causes.” Other leaders attribute the apocalyptic tone of the group’s founding documents to Mr. Haywood, who declined to comment.

A young girl, photographed from the neck down, in conservative attire, sewing next to a table full of books.
An interior scene in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Many of the young conservatives who have risen under Mr. Trump’s influence see themselves as part of a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Credit…Margaret Albaugh for The New York Times

Members of the society are young, mostly white-collar (and mostly white), and often wealthy. Some have left elite institutions to start their own firms and invest in conservative-leaning ventures.

Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, a Dallas-based journal that serves as an informal in-house publication for the movement, is moving to a small town outside Nashville this week with his wife and four children. Through his new professional network, he is raising funds to develop a corridor of conservative havens between Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky, where he has also purchased hundreds of acres of property. He expects about 50 families to move to the Tennessee town — which he declined to identify — in the next year, including people who work from home for tech companies and other corporations.

Mr. Abbotoy is betting big on the revitalization of the rural South more broadly, as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. He sees the Tennessee project as a “playbook” for future developments in which neighbors share conservative social values and enjoy, he suggested, a kind of ambient Christian culture.

“I personally would happily pay high H.O.A. fees to be in a neighborhood where I have to drive by an architecturally significant church every day, and I can hear church bells,” he said.

The Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally, was a watershed moment for Mr. Abbotoy and other conservatives’ understanding of how quickly the ground could shift under their feet. It is a decision that signaled to them the onset of an era that the conservative Christian writer Aaron Renn — who has spoken at the fraternal society’s events — calls “negative world,” an influential concept that describes a culture in which “being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society.”

Image

A man in a gray sweater looks out the window from a sparsely furnished office.
Josh Abbotoy, director of the American Reformer, is counting on the revitalization of the rural South as white-collar flexibility meets conservative disillusionment with liberal institutions and cities. Credit…Shelby Tauber for The New York Times

Mr. Abbotoy was raised in an evangelical culture that encouraged conservative Christians to go out into “the world” and influence secular institutions, including corporations and universities. But that approach, which defined the last several generations of mainstream evangelicalism, feels increasingly untenable to people in his circle.

Mr. Abbotoy, who graduated from Harvard Law School, left a job with a major infrastructure company in 2021 and came to work for Nate Fischer, a Dallas venture capitalist and prolific networker whose firm invests in conservative projects and opposes “DEI/ESG and the bureaucratization of American business culture.” Mr. Fischer is the president of SACR’s Dallas chapter.

Andrew Beck, a brand consultant for conservative politicians and entities including SACR and Claremont, moved with his wife and their now six children, along with his parents and five of his siblings and their families, from Staten Island to suburbs north of Dallas in 2020. Almost 30 members of the family now live in the same area, just as they did in New York.

“Something is shifting that’s tectonic,” said Mr. Beck, who wrote a widely shared essay on “re-Christianizing America” for Claremont’s online magazine the American Mind. “It’s not so much about staking out some stronghold where you can live in a cocoon, it’s to be a part of a place you can truly consider to be home.”

Members must be male, belong to a “Trinitarian Christian” church, a broad category that includes Catholics and Protestants, but not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members must also describe themselves as “unhyphenated Americans,” a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urging the full assimilation of immigrants.

A stack of copies of the publication, the Claremont Review of Books.
An issue of the Claremont Review of Books from winter 2016-2017.Credit…Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The group’s interdenominational membership reflects the fact that in the Trump era, conservative Christianity is increasingly becoming a cultural and political identity, with theological differences falling to the wayside and Christianity serving as a kind of generic expression of rebellion against modernity. A significant minority of members are Catholic, including Mr. Kressin. The group also includes Presbyterians, Baptists and charismatics.

In Mr. Kressin’s new hometown in Idaho, the streets are clean and people leave their doors unlocked. His family lives in a house they can afford to own, with a white picket fence and room for a trampoline in the yard. In the cozy living room, an upright piano stands in the corner, and hymnals and classic novels line shelves on the wall.

“Many in our generation are very, very much longing for rootedness,” he said. “And they were raised in an era where that was really not valued very much.”

On a weekday morning this spring, he took a brisk morning stroll out his front door and up Tubbs Hill, with wildflowers sprinkled along the path and soaring views of the crystalline lake below. At his house afterward, Lauren Kressin, who was pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, served peach tea in tastefully mismatched china, quietly switching cups with him so he would have the “less feminine” one, she said with a smile.

Starting over in Idaho, Mr. Kressin said later, was part of a project so long term that he does not expect to see its conclusion. “The old landed aristocracy in England would plant oak trees that would only really mature in 400 years,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds, but if you don’t even start building a family culture, you’re doomed to fail.”

Labour Loathe White Workers: How Slippery Starmer Has Slithered to Supremacy to Serve Semites

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Words don’t rule reality, but they do manipulate minds. Take British politics. If honesty prevailed there, the Labour Party would be renamed the Lawyer Party. Millions of its deluded supporters would finally see the truth and stop voting for a party that hates them. Labour was founded to advance the White working class, but it now abominates the White working class. This betrayal was openly admitted by the Jewish politician Lord Glasman in 2011:

Labour let in 2.2million migrants during its 13 years in power — more than twice the population of Birmingham. Lord Glasman, 49, had already told BBC Radio 4 … “What you have with immigration is the idea that people should travel all over the world in search of higher-paying jobs, often to undercut existing workforces, and somehow in the Labour Party we got into a position that that was a good thing. Now obviously it undermines solidarity, it undermines relationships, and in the scale that it’s been going on in England, it can undermine the possibility of politics entirely.”

The academic, who directs the faith and citizenship programme at London Metropolitan University, criticised Labour for being “hostile to the English working class”. He said: “In many ways [Labour] viewed working-class voters as an obstacle to progress. Their commitment to various civil rights, anti-racism, meant that often working-class voters… were seen as racist, resistant to change, homophobic and generally reactionary. So in many ways you had a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working class.” (Miliband ally attacks Labour migration ‘lies’ over 2.2m they let in Britain, The Daily Mail, 16th April 2011)

By “English working class,” Glasman meant the “White working class.” Labour loathes White workers, not non-White workers. The party ignores the far worse homophobia of lower-class Muslims and Blacks, because they’re at the top of the leftist racial hierarchy, not at the bottom like Whites. Its attitude towards White workers can be summed up in a single simple phrase: “Vote for us, you scum.” In 2014 a rich Labour lawyer called Emily Thornberry went to support her party’s candidate in a by-election at Rochester. She spotted a white workman’s van parked outside a house flying the English national flag, the cross of St George. “Yuck!” she thought. So she took a photo and sent a silently sneering tweet.

Serve Jews or else!

Her leader, the reptilian Jew Ed Miliband, was very angry. He fully shared Thornberry’s contempt for White workers, of course, but he hadn’t wanted that contempt to be made public. In other words, he hadn’t wanted the Labour Party to be exposed as the Lawyer Party. Alas for Miliband, Thornberry’s arrogance revealed the truth and helped UKIP win the by-election. It then helped the Conservative party win three general elections, first against Miliband, then against his replacement Jeremy Corbyn. When Corbyn was leader, he maintained Labour’s hostility to White workers. No-one in mainstream politics or media had any problem with that. But many politicians and journalists had very serious problems with Corbyn’s refusal to make Jewish interests his first and overwhelming priority.

Hideously White: Labour’s lying propaganda video

That’s why Corbyn was vilified as an anti-Semite and eventually thrown out of the party altogether. In 2024 Corbyn has just won his old constituency of Islington North standing as an independent. But the general election itself was won by Labour in a landslide under the fatuous and vacuous slogan of “Change.” Normal service has been resumed, because the party is once again headed by a lawyer, the slippery Sir Keir Starmer, and is once again dedicated to serving Jewish interests. Like Emily Thornberry, the new Labour leader is a human rights lawyer; unlike Thornberry, he has successfully concealed his hatred and contempt for White workers. During the election, the party released a remarkable propaganda video. Why was it remarkable? Simple. It was what the former BBC apparatchik Greg Dyke would call “hideously white.” Starmer was shown at a junior school surrounded by children and teachers who were uniformly stale and pale — there was not a black or brown face in sight, not a hijab or afro to be seen. Normally, of course, all mainstream politicians love to be seen surrounded by non-Whites and non-White symbols. But not here. At one point in the video, Starmer is seen giving the thumbs-up to an all-White class with a Union Jack on the wall behind him. At other points, the flags of the Home Nations — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — are visible over his shoulders.

Slippery Starmer slithers to supremacy

In other words, that video was deeply and deliberately dishonest. And every adult participating in it knew that it was a lie. The video was exploiting White children to advance the cause of a party that is dedicated to destroying the future of White children. Labour propagandists must have searched long and hard to find a school like that. In fact, I wonder whether the video was faked using AI. Nowadays, junior schools up and down the country are not uniformly White but swarming with Somalis and Syrians. And the flags on the walls of classrooms are typically the crowded chromatics of the noble LGBTQIA+ community, not those of the Home Nations. Starmer and his propagandists were being seriously sly and slippery. He was trying to pretend to White workers that he and his party aren’t implacably hostile to them and their love of country.

Now you see it, now you don’t: Starmer and his disappearing poppy (image from Twitter)

He was lying, of course, but enough White workers were fooled to keep Labour on track for its landslide. That’s one example of Starmer’s slipperiness. Another example was apparent when he was photographed proudly sporting the red poppy that symbolizes respect and honour for the British armed forces. But the poppy had vanished when Starmer appeared in an anti-Islamophobia video aimed at Muslims, who aren’t fans of the British armed forces. After all, Jewish control of British politics means that Britain has been dropping bombs on Muslims for decades in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. It also means that Britain is backing Israel as it drops bombs on Muslims in Gaza. When Jeremy Corbyn was leader, he backed the Palestinians and opposed Israel’s murderous war-machine. Starmer does the opposite, but that brings me to a third example of his slipperiness. He served without protest in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and in 2019 was asked on BBC television to repeat the sentence “Jeremy Corbyn would make a great prime minister.” He happily did so. A few months later, he told the BBC that “he was ‘100%’ behind Mr Corbyn and working with him to win a general election.”

No purpose but power

But guess what? It turns out that all the time Starmer was 100% against Corbyn and serving in the shadow cabinet only because he thought Corbyn had no chance of winning that general election. When Starmer became leader, he expelled Corbyn from the party and utterly repudiated Corbyn’s pernicious reign. In other words, Starmer has no principles and no purpose but the pursuit of personal power. To win that power, he has to serve Jewish interests. He also has to pretend that Labour doesn’t loathe White workers. That’s why, in the words of the BBC, he has “embraced British patriotism, using the union jack as a backdrop for speeches and getting his conference to sing ‘God Save the King’.” In reality, Starmer isn’t a patriot and doesn’t believe in the monarchy. Everything about him is fake. His “landslide” victory was won on a low turn-out and ludicrously low share of votes — barely higher than that gained by Corbyn in 2019, when Labour badly lost the election.

And it isn’t just the name of Starmer’s party that’s a lie: it’s also his own given name. He was named by his Labour-supporting parents after the Scottish firebrand Keir Hardie (1856-1915), the founder, leader and first member of parliament for Labour. Hardie was a genuine champion of the working class. So were the Trade Unions of Hardie’s day. When a mining company in Scotland tried to import foreign workers at the beginning of the twentieth century, this is what happened:

Trade Unions were openly hostile, claiming that the newcomers’ lack of English made them a danger at work; the Glasgow Trades Council declared the Lithuanians in Glengarnock as “an evil” and wrote to the TUC [Trades Union Congress] demanding immigration controls to keep them out.

Even a figure such as Keir Hardie, founding father of the Labour Party, led a fierce, xenophobic campaign against the Lithuanians. Hardie, as a leader of Ayrshire miners, wrote an article for the journal, The Miner, in which he stated that: “For the second time in their history Messrs. Merry and Cunninghame have introduced a number of Russian Poles [as the Lithuanians were described] to Glengarnock Ironworks. What object they have in doing so is beyond human ken unless it is, as stated by a speaker at Irvine, to teach men how to live on garlic and oil, or introduce the Black Death, so as to get rid of the surplus labourers.” (“Lithuanians in Lanarkshire,” BBC History, February 2004)

In 2024 Sir Keir Starmer would heartily agree that his namesake Keir Hardie was “xenophobic.” Hardie wasn’t, of course. Instead, he was doing exactly what a Lithuanian socialist would have done if the situation had been reversed: standing up for the local workers he was elected to serve. But that was at the beginning of the twentieth century. By century’s end, Labour’s betrayal of White workers was complete. When Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994, all the old-fashioned socialist nonsense had been discarded. Now the Labour party champions the downtrodden bosses against the oppressive workers. Blair was a slippery lawyer just like Starmer. And just like Starmer, Blair knew that he had to serve Jewish interests to win power. That’s why Blair won the ultimate accolade from Jews in Britain: he was a mensch. Starmer has just won that accolade too. He has been hailed in the Jewish Chronicle under the headline “Starmer is a mensch and deserving of our trust”:

After the last general election, every political commentator speculated on whether the Labour Party could ever hold office again. The spectre of the EHRC [Equality and Human Rights Commission] report [into alleged anti-Semitism in Labour] was an ever-present reminder of the nightmare of Corbyn’s tenure as leader of HM Opposition and nearly everyone believed that Boris Johnson had built an electoral coalition that had permanently redrawn our political map.

Yet last week, the country decided that the Labour Party had changed, that we could be trusted to run the government and that change was needed. … As a result, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has a working majority of 181 seats and the Conservative Party has had its worst result since 1832.

Even I struggle to comprehend the full scale of what this means for our country, for my city of Stoke-on-Trent and for our community. It’s beyond my wildest expectations and I can’t stop grinning every time I think about it. The images of Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, John Healey, Shabana Mahmood, Angela Smith, Peter Kyle, Ian Murray and the rest of the new cabinet walking down Downing Street on Friday made me sob with much happier tears than those that followed the 2019 election.

Five years ago, our community would have been scared by the thought of a Labour landslide. The pages of the JC would have been filled with stories of families worried about the future and plans to make aliyah. Thank God that is not where we are today.

After tearing out the poisonous plant of antisemitism from my party by its roots, Keir (or the PM as I must get used to calling him) has managed to rebuild enough trust with you that Hendon, Finchley and Golders Green, Chipping Barnet, Bury North, Bury South and East Renfrewshire have all returned Labour MPs. And I genuinely don’t believe that anyone, regardless of their personal politics, considers a Labour government as an existential threat to our community — because it isn’t.

That in itself is truly a miracle. I will be forever grateful to Keir for fixing what I thought had been irrevocably broken.

He is a mensch. And he deserves this opportunity to lead our country in the years ahead. He has earned our trust and we in turn owe him a fair hearing as he turns from campaigning to governing. Elections are only the first step. Now we have the privilege of service, trying to fix what has been broken in our society after 14 years of Conservative governments. (“Starmer is a mensch and deserving of our trust,” The Jewish Chronicle, 10th July, 2024)

That article was written by a highly ethnocentric Jew called Ruth Anderson, who served as a Labour MP under the Dickensian name of Ruth Smeeth (appropriately enough, Dickens would have used the name to signify smarminess, selfishness, and hypocrisy). While she was an MP, Smeeth wept in public when she was accused of working with the Conservative-supporting Daily Telegraph to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. She accused the truth-teller in question of “anti-Semitism” and had him expelled from the Labour party. Then she left the party and hilariously became “chief executive” of Index on Censorship. In reality, she no more believes in free speech than Keir Starmer believes in championing the White working class. Instead, Starmer believes in personal power and in Pabloism, an obscure variant of the Marxist-Leninism created by the Jewish megalomaniac Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). Starmer became a Pabloist at university, but no-one in the mainstream media is interested in that. How does it matter that the Labour leader was an enthusiastic supporter of the twentieth century’s most murderous and authoritarian ideology?

Fatuous and vacuous: by “Change,” Starmer means “More of the Same”

But it matters hugely when any Labour leader isn’t an enthusiastic servant of Jewish interests. The purpose of mainstream politics in Britain and all other Western nations is to wage war on Whites and sycophantically serve Semites. The fake Conservatives did that and the fake Labour party will now do the same. The only difference is that Labour will wage war on Whites with extra enthusiasm, extra authoritarianism, and extra hatred for the White workers it was founded to serve.

James Edwards Interviews Warren Balogh

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[Notice Trump lost the Reform Party nomination in 2000 to Pat Buchanan and that at the party convention Trump called Buchanan a “Hitler lover”  who “doesn’t like the blacks, doesn’t like the gays.”]

What follows is an interview conducted by James Edwards with Warren Balogh. It was originally published by the American Free Press.

James Edwards: Please give us a little information about your background and current activism.

Warren Balogh: At age 18, I was a volunteer for the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign, and I was a Buchanan delegate at the Reform Party convention in summer of 2000. I spent many years active in electoral politics until the Alt-Right came along, when I attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Eventually, I co-founded the National Justice Party in 2020 and was one of its main speakers and activists. Today I do a weekly show on Odysee called “Modern Politics,” and I also co-host a streaming show called “WarStrike” twice weekly on Odysee and Rumble.

Edwards: Let’s go back to the year 2000 and talk about that Reform Party convention in Long Beach, California. You and I both served as delegates for Pat Buchanan, who won the nomination for president. People might be shocked to learn who he defeated that year. Who was it?

Balogh: It was none other than Donald J. Trump. Many people are unaware of the fact that 2016 was not Donald Trump’s first foray into politics. In October 1999, he announced he was seeking the Reform Party nomination. Buchanan was already running at that time, and Trump decried him as a “Hitler lover” who “doesn’t like the blacks, doesn’t like the gays” and said Buchanan would only ever get the “wacko” vote. Trump thought he could waltz in and walk away with the nomination, but he never stood a chance against the better-organized, more highly motivated Buchanan Brigades.

Edwards: The fact that the Buchanan Brigades stopped the future president from becoming the party’s nominee in 2000 is a mostly unknown chapter in the evolution of Donald Trump as a politician. Trump was running on issues then that would be somewhat unrecognizable to his voters today. What was the platform of candidate Trump nearly twenty-five years ago?

Balogh: In some ways his platform was familiar, in that he spoke about trade and immigration, but on cultural issues, he ran as a moderate centrist or even a liberal. He described himself as very pro-choice and even said repeatedly he wanted Oprah Winfrey as his running mate. He said he would be willing to do a first strike on North Korea and also floated Colin Powell as Secretary of State John McCain as a potential Secretary of Defense. He was just a typical New York liberal in many ways, and there was none of the racial “dog whistling” for which he later became so infamous.

Edwards: Fast-forward to 2015, when Trump first announced his intention to seek the GOP nomination, and you have a very different candidate. That is not to say that his transformation was entirely insincere, but you commented in a recent speech that Trump has always been good at recognizing an undervalued property and picking it up at a steal. How did this ability play into his political fortunes?

Balogh: Right, well this is something he talks about in “The Art of the Deal” and for which he built his reputation. He has always been skilled at realizing when a property is undervalued, picking it up at a steal, and then turning around and making a fortune on it. I strongly believe that his experience getting soundly beaten by Buchanan in the year 2000 taught him that there is a huge, untapped source of political strength — fanatical loyalty, activism and enthusiasm — in the paleocon, populist, proto-white nationalist sentiments of the masses of white Americans who have been ignored for so many years by the two-party system. This is the same base George Wallace tapped into decades ago. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was powered by what they call “whitelash” — the white working-class backlash against years of liberal globalist, anti-white policies from both parties. Not only that, a lot of Trump’s top activists, online and otherwise, were some of the same people who backed Buchanan years ago.

Edwards: Though I don’t believe the media has covered it nearly enough, an increasing number of journalists and historians are now pointing to his Buchanan/Reform Party experience as the precursor to Donald Trump’s successful 2016 run for the White House, which has essentially defined the politics of the Trumpian era. Please list the headlines of just a few of these articles and provide a brief summation of their findings.

Balogh: Yes, for example, in VOX April 2016: “Donald Trump learned overt nativism from losing his first campaign to Pat Buchanan.” In this article, Matt Grossman wrote:

One aspect of [Trump’s] first campaign was decidedly different [from his 2016]: He declined to pursue a nativist appeal. In fact, he repeatedly accused Buchanan of racism…. What did Trump learn from his first presidential campaign? His new campaign retained his anti-trade and anti-elitist message but added Buchanan’s warnings of losing the country to ethnic and religious minorities. In retrospect, the changed approach does not seem like an accident…. Many political candidates learn from their first loss, sometimes overcompensating in an effort to remedy their biggest difficulty from the prior campaign. In losing to Buchanan, Trump learned that many disaffected anti-establishment voters shared Buchanan’s ethnocentric views. In his first campaign, he avoided nativism and never led. This time, he began with Buchanan’s message and led from the beginning. Perhaps losing to Buchanan taught Trump some new tricks.

Some more headlines on the same theme: Politico, October 2016: “Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing.” Esquire, April 2017: “When Pat Buchanan Tried To Make America Great Again.” A Politico Magazine, May/June 2017 profile of Pat Buchanan: “The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t.”

Edwards: This is interesting to me. By all means, please share with us a couple more.

Balogh: Balogh: Sure. In an NBC News piece from October 2018, titled “When Trump ran against Trump-ism: The 1990s and the birth of political tribalism in America” Steve Kornacki wrote:

He wanted a wall along the entire southern border and a pause on all immigration. He vowed to rip up trade deals and revive manufacturing. He hated political correctness and warned of the decline Western culture. He railed against a “rigged” system and fomented a populist uprising that terrified the Republican Party’s leaders. He was endorsed by David Duke. And he was denounced and labeled a racist — by Donald Trump.

His name was Pat Buchanan, and when he set out in 1999 on his third presidential campaign of the decade, it was under a new banner: The Reform Party, which had just been built from the remnants of Ross Perot’s two independent White House bids. But Buchanan encountered unexpected competition from Trump, a bombastic New Yorker who turned the race for the Reform nomination into an insult-heavy pop culture spectacle. In style and tactic, this Trump was indistinguishable from the man the world knows today. But on substance, he was jarringly different man, running against a worldview he would a few years later embrace.

As recently as April of this year, Ari Berman, writing for the Atlantic, observed: “Pat Buchanan made white Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. Now Donald Trump is reaping the benefits…. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition…”

Edwards: Though there are some differences between Buchanan and Trump, their positions on Israel being chief among them, how would you compare a speech given by Pat Buchanan in the 1990s to many speeches given by Trump today?

Balogh: Trump is hitting all the same hot buttons Buchanan did. America First was a slogan Buchanan used. Trump’s appeal to “Law and Order” echoes the sentiments in Buchanan’s famous 1992 Culture War speech, where he referenced the LA riots and talked about the need for “force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” The same Donald Trump who in year 2000 wanted John McCain and Colin Powell in his presidential cabinet, later got elected partly by running against the foreign policy of the neo-cons, and just like Pat Buchanan, he was called an isolationist for it.

Edwards: What were the similarities between the activists and voters who powered Buchanan’s three presidential campaigns and the Americans who put Trump in the White House in 2016?

Balogh: As I said, it’s the great mass of white middle- and working-class voters, economically populist and culturally conservative or nationalist, who are hated and despised by the elite political ruling class in America. Trump is tapping into a source of strength that not only powered Buchanan, but also George Wallace, Huey Long, and figures like William Jennings Bryan and even Andrew Jackson before him. But he learned the untapped power of appealing to this base from his loss to Pat Buchanan in 2000.

Edwards: As you mentioned, Buchanan himself was quoted as saying, “The ideas made it, but I didn’t.” Do you believe, even in defeat, that honor can be found in fighting for cutting-edge movements that lay the groundwork for future victories?

Balogh: Yes and no. I honestly believe Trump is an opportunist, which is something Pat Choate also observed. Choate is an anti-globalist economist who was Perot’s running mate in 1996 and, unlike Perot, endorsed Buchanan in 2000. I think Trump cynically appealed to the populism and nationalism of his base to put himself in the White House, but if you look at his first four years in office, he governed largely as an establishment Republican. Right now, he’s busy enlisting the support of powerful Jewish donors in NYC, and he’s already signaling to his donors that he’s going to staff his new administration with Wall Street types and neocons.

I do believe honor can be found in fighting a losing battle that plants the seed of a future triumph. But I don’t believe Trump is the man to make those victories happen. I think he is fundamentally very much the same man who ran against Buchanan in 2000: cynical, opportunistic, self-absorbed. He uses the anxiety and desperation of white Americans who have nowhere else to go for his own purposes.

The most interesting thing to me about the Trump era is not Trump himself, or that he represented any kind of actual break from the system, but just the fact that there are so many white Americans ready for a nationalist, populist message. That there is this huge untapped source of political strength in America, that white America isn’t finished yet, that people really are fed up with the broken two-party system and want sweeping change. Trump may have tapped into it for his own reasons, but he’s awakened a kind of sleeping giant that hopefully will lead to some greater movement down the line.

Edwards: Though we are still presently swimming against the tide, do you believe that our enemies are closer to defeat today than they were at the turn of the century?

Balogh: Yes. Absolutely. If you think of the year 2000, Buchanan got less than half a percent of the vote. Bush and Gore dominated, and they were basically indistinguishable on all the major issues of our time: globalization, immigration, and foreign wars. If you just take the issue of support for Israel, and how much that has changed on both the Left and Right since October 7th, you can see the system is growing weaker. Trump may be self-serving, but the fact that a guy like that was even able to come along and topple the Clinton and Bush dynasties, on the strength of the issues Buchanan appealed to years ago, shows how much things are changing. I think the elites would like to go back to the politics of the 90s: neoliberals vs neoconservatives, but the people don’t want that and will never go back to it. Trump opened Pandora’s box and there’s no going back.

This article was originally published by American Free Press.

Trump Assassination Attempt

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Too early to say much, but it will be interesting to see who did it and what his motives were, social media, ideology, etc. Did he watch MSNBC? Read the New York Times?  Is there going to be some self-examination on the left with all their talk that Trump is Hitler and will certainly end democracy on day 1. Lots of questions about the Secret Service. Incompetence, or worse. Much worse. Maybe some Trump haters will realize they are in a cult after all.

Whiffing with the Bases Loaded: The Supreme Court Wrongly Decides Murthy v. Missouri

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But sometimes the Court gets it wrong.  In its recent (June 28, 2024) decision in Murthy, et al.  v. Missouri, et al., the Court lapsed badly from its long traditions of protecting dissident speech.

As I noted in an earlier article on the Free Expression Foundation website (February 5, 2023) about the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, the case is extraordinary not only for the importance of the issues it presents but because it involved opposing parties roughly equal in legal resources, i.e., the plaintiffs included the Attorney Generals of two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and the defendants were officials of the federal government. This contrasts strongly with the usual cases involving dissident speech, in which the proponent of the dissident speech is often indigent while the opponents are governments or well-funded private organizations conducting lawfare campaigns.

As to the gravity of the issues the case presented — Justice Alito in his dissent (joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch) aptly wrote that “this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”  A little context puts these momentous issues into stark relief.

A fundamental principal applicable to First Amendment jurisprudence is that the First Amendment restrains only state actors – i.e., governmental entities – and not private actors, such as social media companies, e.g., Facebook (which was at the center of the issues in the Missouri case).  Thus Facebook and other social media companies, despite their enormous power over the boundaries and content of public debate, have always successfully argued that they are free to censor and limit as they see fit.  But what if a governmental entity – the Biden administration in the Missouri case – bullied and threatened the private entity – Facebook in the Missouri case – with the aim and successful result of coercing the private entity to comply with the Biden administration’s censorship demands?  This was the central question presented in the Missouri case.

Justice Alito in his dissent described numerous concrete instances of the Biden administration’s tactics, which he convincingly argued crossed the line from mere permissible Bully Pulpit advocacy by the President and his staff into unconstitutional threats and coercion. First, however, Justice Alito explained why the administration had the power to, as he expressed it, coerce Facebook into the role of “a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.”  Justice Alito wrote:

[I]internet platforms, although rich and powerful, are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business.  But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . . . which shields them from civil liability for content they spread.  They are vulnerable to antitrust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential” threat to his company. And because their substantial overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests. For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability.

Justice Alito then spelled out, among many other instances in the administration’s “far-reaching . . .  censorship campaign,” the following conduct by high-ranking government officials, gleaned from the extensive discovery taken in the case:

  • In March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the White House Director of Digital Strategy, emailed Facebook about a report in the Washington Post that Facebook’s rules permitted some content questioning COVID-19’s severity and the efficacy of vaccines to circulate. Flaherty noted that the White House was “gravely concerned that [Facebook] is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” and demanded to know how Facebook was trying to solve the problem. In his words, “we want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on.” Facebook responded apologetically to this and other missives. It acknowledged that “[w]e obviously have work to do to gain your trust.”
  • In April 2021, Flaherty again demanded information on the “actions and changes” Facebook was taking “to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” To emphasize his urgency, Flaherty likened COVID–19 misinformation to misinformation that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Facebook, he charged, had helped to “increase skepticism” of the 2020 election, and he claimed that “an insurrection . . . was plotted, in large part, on your platform.”  He added: “I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” Facebook was surprised by these remarks because it “thought we were doing a better job” communicating with the White House, but it promised to “more clearly respon[d]” in the future.

Rob Flaherty

  • A few weeks later, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked at a press conference about Facebook’s decision to keep former President Donald Trump off the platform. Psaki deflected that question but took the opportunity to call on platforms like Facebook to “‘stop amplifying untrustworthy content . . . , especially related to COVID–19, vaccinations, and elections.’”   In the same breath, Psaki reminded the platforms that President Biden “‘supports . . . a robust anti-trust program.’”
  • About this time, Flaherty also forwarded to Facebook a “COVID–19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief ” that had been drafted by outside researchers and was “informing thinking” in the White House on what Facebook’s policies should be. This document recommended that Facebook strengthen its efforts against misinformation by adoption of “progressively severe penalties” for accounts that repeatedly posted misinformation, and it proposed that Facebook make it harder for users to find “anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant propaganda” from other users. Facebook declined to adopt some of these suggestions immediately, but it did “se[t] up more dedicated monitoring for [COVID] vaccine content” and adopted a policy of “stronger demotions [for] a broader set of content.”
  • The White House responded with more questions. Acknowledging that he sounded “like a broken record,” Flaherty interrogated Facebook about “how much content is being demoted, and how effective [Facebook was] at mitigating reach, and how quickly.” Later, Flaherty chastised Facebook for failing to prevent some vaccine-hesitant content from showing up through the platform’s search function. “‘[R]emoving bad information from search’ is one of the easy, low-bar things you guys do to make people like me think you’re taking action,” he said. “If you’re not getting that right, it raises even more questions about the higher bar stuff.” A few weeks after this latest round of haranguing, Facebook expanded penalties for individual Facebook accounts that repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers deemed misinformation; henceforth, all of those individuals’ posts would show up less frequently in their friends’ news feeds.
  • Facebook subsequently told the press it had partnered with the White House to counter misinformation and had “removed accounts that repeatedly break the rules” and “more than 18 million pieces of COVID misinformation.” But at another press briefing the next day, Psaki said these efforts were “[c]learly not” sufficient and expressed confidence that Facebook would “make decisions about additional steps they can take.”  That same day, President Biden told reporters that social media platforms were “‘killing people’” by allowing COVID related misinformation to circulate.  A day later, Psaki said the White House was “reviewing” whether Section 230 should be amended to remove the Social Media platforms’ immunity to civil suits.

Justice Alito and his fellow dissenters thus made a compelling case that the Biden administration has been strong-arming Facebook into censoring disfavored views on vaccination and other issues in accordance with the White House’s dictates, a set of facts that clearly implicates First Amendment issues. The other six justices, however, in an opinion written by Justice Barrett, sidestepped these uncomfortable facts by invoking the doctrine of standing.  Standing is a rather esoteric doctrine that courts invoke when they conclude for various reasons that the plaintiffs who have brought the suit are not the proper plaintiffs to litigate it.  One of the required elements of standing is “traceability,” i.e.,  the plaintiffs must show that they incurred concrete and redressable harm that was traceable to the defendants’ conduct.  In the Missouri case, the majority, through Justice Barrett, held there was a break in the chain of traceability because Facebook, so they asserted, independently made its decisions about censoring and consequently the White House could not be held responsible for them. For the reasons previously discussed, however, this assertion seems deeply flawed, given that Facebook needed to worry about losing its Section 230 immunity and dealing with antitrust suits if it became too uncooperative with the White House. But on this basis the Court’s majority ruled in favor of the Biden administration.

So where do we stand now? A few points:

  1. Despite its victory in this litigation, I suspect the Biden administration is a little chastened by having its clandestine coercions brought into public view.  Perhaps it will back off a little.  But probably not much and not for long.
  2.  We should keep in mind that although the Missouri case focused on disfavored views about COVID vaccines, precisely the same concerns apply as to other disfavored topics, such as “hate speech,” Israel’s and America’s conduct with regard to Gaza, the prosecution of the January 6 Defendants, and a host of others. We should have no doubt that on these topics as well the White House has pressured and continues to pressure social media to suppress disfavored opinions.
  3.  What would be the effect of the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024? Certainly Trump, with his repeated “fake news” accusations, should not expect much cooperation from the likes of Facebook and other social media.  On the other hand, Trump is no stranger to making threats and demanding conformity to his views.
  4.  One hopes that Elon Musk and X are not as obsequious to government demands as Facebook has proved to be.

In summary, the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to vindicate, dramatically and with far-reaching consequences, the Court’s long tradition of protecting disfavored speech from an overreaching government.  Had Justice Alito’s incisive dissent become the majority opinion, it would have been a watershed victory for civil liberties. It was not to be.

Let me nonetheless end on a positive note. The vast document discovery in the Missouri case stripped away the camouflage surrounding the social media / government connections to reveal what many of us had long assumed – that high-ranking government officials have been aggressively pressuring social media to censor dissident viewpoints.  The plaintiffs’ theory of their case in the Missouri litigation was based on the First Amendment; regrettably, this theory failed.  But the government’s threatening communications with social media may have done more than violate the First Amendment;  if false, they may have been defamatory or tortious.  A plaintiff injured by government-engineered censorship on social media, accordingly, may have greater success based on common law tort actions than on the First Amendment.

Reposted from the Free Expression Foundation with permission.

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Britain is Now a Sectarian Society

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England is now a sectarian society. As of the General Election, on 4th July, some people are sent to parliament by specific religious and ethnic communities simply because they are members of those communities, not because of the policies they espouse. A system which has long existed in sectarian Northern Ireland has now come to the English mainland. The reason? Mass immigration into England over the last 25 or so years of South Asian Muslims, who are highly concentrated in certain areas.

The UK’s General Election has led to the utter humiliation of the ruling Conservative Party, which had been in power for 14 years and done nothing to reverse the process of mass immigration set off by Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the early 2000s. In fact, they’d accelerated it, with more than 745,000 legal immigrants arriving in 2022 alone, putting appalling pressure on housing and public services, putting aside what this does to national unity [Net migration to UK hit record 745,000 in 2022, revised figures show, By Patrick Butler and Peter Walker, The Guardian, November 23, 2023]. Led by Rishi Sunak, a second generation Indian immigrant, the party, which has existed since the seventeenth century, was plunged into its worst defeat ever, gaining just 121 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons which, as in the US, is elected by First Past the Post. Labour, under its rather dull leader, Sir Keir Starmer, attained the second largest majority in its history.

But far more interesting, and worrying, is the fact that a number of Labour MPs in previously strongly Labour areas lost their seats. Specifically, they lost them to independent Islamist candidates standing on Pro-Gaza platforms. In Leicester South, in the East Midlands, a senior Labour MP lost his seat to a South Asian Muslim, who was once a Labour supporter, who declared, upon victory, “This is for Gaza!” and held up a keffiyah; the head scarf which is strongly associated with the Palestinian cause. In Blackburn, in the northwest, the sitting Labour MP was defeated by an independent called Adnan Hussain, a lawyer who declared: “This is for Gaza. I cannot deny that I stand here as the result of a protest vote on the back of a genocide.” Iqbal Mohammed, an IT consultant and once a Labour supporter, took Dewsbury and Batley, also in the northwest, from Labour on a manifesto of fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ayoub Khan, a barrister and former Liberal Democrat councillor, took Birmingham Perry Bar from Labour as a Pro-Gaza independent [Who are the pro-Gaza independents who unseated Labour MPs? By Haroon Sidique, The Guardian, July 7, 2024]. In addition, a number of senior Labour MPs came close to losing their seats to Pro-Gaza candidates [Labour cannot afford to be complacent over pro-Gaza vote losses, By Josh Halliday, The Guardian, July 5, 2024].

Labour has long taken the Muslim vote for granted, but its failure to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza has led to a political uprising which the First Past the Post System is uniquely set up to deliver. In democratic terms, the 2024 general election is an absurdity. The Labour Party took 411 seats (64% of the seats), and a majority over all other parties of 178, on just 33.7% of the national vote. With 12.2% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats took 72 seats, while the populist conservative Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage who very much spearheaded Brexit, got just 5 seats on 14% of the vote. These were all seats that very strongly supported Brexit [Wikipedia].  (The Conservative Party: 23.7 percent vote share and 121 seats.)

The Reform vote share differed so wildly from the number of seats won because it was roughly even nationwide; they came second or third in numerous seats. Muslims, however, are concentrated into very specific areas; usually ex-industrial towns. In many of these towns, they have set up parallel societies: everybody is a South Asian Muslim (due to White Flight and people’s evolutionary desire to be with people like themselves), the community is centred around a number of (often fundamentalist) Mosques, people are highly religious, and there is a strong feeling of fighting against the dominant society [see Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, By Ed Husain, 2022]. It is conditions like this that allow Muslim independents to be elected, once they reject the Labour Party which they have done due to its stance on Gaza. In that regard, it is surely no coincidence that the seats that sent Reform Party members to parliament were overwhelmingly native British and substantially working class.

Of course, once this happens you have sectarianism and this is the end of democracy, or the beginning of the end, because people are not voting on policy, they are simply voting for a person who represents their ethnic group. Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen spelt this out in his book Ethnic Conflicts. Although it is possible for multi-ethnic societies to be democracies – India is an example – in general there is a negative association between ethnic diversity and the ability to sustain democracy. This is mediated by ethnic conflict. In fact, Vanhanen found that ethnic diversity explains 66% of the variance in ethnic conflict when you compare different countries. In other words, ethnic diversity is very likely to lead to ethnic conflict and this is, in turn, likely to lead to sectarianism, which will render democracy hollow.

India, though it is multi-ethnic, generally shares a religion – about 80% of Indians are Hindu – and the ethnic groups of which it is composed are all relatively similar. This is not the case in the UK, where the independents MPs are of a different race and a different religion than the native population. It follows that the UK cannot be compared to India and that it really is seeing – in the most stark fashion with the election of these MPs – what has a long been happening anyway; the break-up of the country into a parallel societies; into Muslim and non-Muslim areas.

This shouldn’t be surprising. As I have explored in detail in my book The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, the ethnic diversity, mass immigration and the splintering of large polities always occurs in the winter of civilization and it is likely happening in the US as well. How deliciously ironic that Labour candidates, who have dogmatically espouse mass immigration and condemned critics as “racist,” are now losing their seats in parliament due to the sectarianism that has developed due to mass immigration.