Kevin MacDonald

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Comments on Ethnic Interests

Given Ian Jobling’s work (which is decidedly odd for someone who claims to be a race realist and defender of the White race) and the recent interest on this list in ethnic genetic interests and genetic similarity theory (GST), I thought I would briefly lay out my views.

My ideas on GST are spelled out here. The data compiled by Phil Rushton and others are very clear that people assort on the basis of genetic similarity — they like genetically similar people more, are more likely to marry them, etc. Any critic of this theory must show where this rather large amount of data is wrong and provide another explanation for why genetic similarity influences behavior. That has not happened. A recent study that is entirely compatible with GST concludes “assortative mating related to genetic ancestry [not social class] persists in Latino populations to the current day, and has impacted on the genomic structure in these populations.”

Contrary to Jobling, my argument is that GST is not about altruism: “Relationships of marriage, friendship, and ethnic group affiliation fundamentally involve reciprocity, and self-interest is an obvious component of all of these relationships: Assortative mating increases relatedness to children, so that one receives a greater genetic payoff for the same parenting effort. Successful alliances and successful friendships have a greater payoff to self if genetically similar others succeed when you succeed.” There is also a higher threshold for defection.

The same argument can obviously be extended to larger kinship groups. Again, it’s not about altruism but about self-interest. Indeed, as I note, genetic similarity must compete with other interests. For example, in marriage, genetic similarity must compete with the resource value (health, age, beauty, wealth) of a prospective mate. As I also note, GST is not adequate as an underpinning of an evolutionary psychology of groups — of the deep attachment that people often have to their ingroups. Nevertheless, GST mechanisms are doubtless responsible for what I term “implicit Whiteness” — the primal attraction that Whites have for each other in an increasingly multi-racial societies they live in now. Clearly, this has nothing to do with altruism.

Jobling mentions my comment on Jews preferring martyrdom over conversion to Christianity as an example of bad thinking. My argument is not based on GST, but on social identity (SI) and individualism/collectivism mechanisms. In the article referred to above, I provide a number of arguments for why SI mechanisms are an evolutionary adaptation to between-group conflict. These must be answered by any competent critique. I also provide an argument for individual and group differences in social identity processes based on research on individualism/collectivism. Again, it’s not about altruism. The argument is that at the collectivist extreme, people lack an algorithm to calculate the relative benefits of defection versus continued group membership. Any reasonable critique must address my specific argument and provide an alternative explanation of martyrdom. I also argue that in many parts of the world people have lived in group-structured populations for evolutionarily significant periods. This in turn leads into one of the major areas of my thinking briefly discussed in the article— that European peoples are significantly more individualistic than collectivist peoples, prototypically the Jews. European tendencies toward individualism figure in much of my recent writing. (See here and here.)

Finally, I argue that rational choice mechanisms are critical for developing adaptive strategies for humans. For humans, the evolutionary game is played out in conflicts over the construction of culture — hence my book, The Culture of Critique. This argument first appeared in my books on Judaism, since I repeatedly noted that Jews were flexible strategizers, not preprogrammed robots. (Whatever else one might say, an effective lobbying group like AIPAC is using rational mechanisms, not evolved modules in figuring out how to influence US foreign policy.) In the academic journal literature, I presented it here, and I expanded on it here recently.)

It is true that these mechanisms do not have an affective component — they don’t produce an emotional allegiance to one’s race or ethnic group, and they are therefore insufficient to build a mass movement. But rational choice mechanisms do show why it is entirely rational to have allegiance to one’s ethnic group. Implicit Whiteness based on genetic similarity is insufficient as a basis for a successful White movement. I think that ultimately a White mass movement will rely on social identity mechanisms because they do have an emotional component. As Whites become a minority and as the political fault lines are more and more centered on race, these mechanisms will naturally be triggered. This is a recent comment along these lines.

Acting on and strategizing about genetic differences is the very essence of evolution, and there is no doubt that genetic differences between human groups are meaningful and have important effects on behavior. Quite simply, societies composed entirely of sub-Saharan African groups are going to be very different from societies composed entirely of Jews, Chinese, or Europeans.

Humans, like all living things, have genetic interests because we are not clones. People who deny there are genetic differences and behave as if there are no meaningful genetic differences will simply lose the evolutionary game — much like a pacifist male elephant seal who refuses to fight other males in order to be able to mate. Salter’s work is absolutely bedrock sound. Jobling repeats several arguments that have long been refuted (see this paper for a more detailed discussion). As Salter notes no matter what the level of genetic commonality among humans, if this commonality negates the adaptiveness of favoring one’s ethnic group or race, then it must also negate the adaptiveness of parental love. This is absurd, both intuitively and theoretically. But you cannot have it both ways: if preserving genes in your children is adaptive, doing so with any concentration of your genes must be adaptive.

There is no doubt that we have evolved modules that reliably promoted adaptive behavior in past environments, but as humans we are able to make plans and strategies that don’t depend on these modules but are responsive to current contingencies. For example, one idea that has been proposed is to establish a White homeland in the US. Such a proposal should be evaluated by rational choice mechanisms: What are the costs and benefits — genetically, psychologically, financially, economically, and in terms of defensibility, etc.? How exactly would White be defined? These questions can only be answered by rational choice mechanisms — what psychologists term explicit processing.

If we don’t act on our knowledge and understanding of genetic differences we will be like the pacifist elephant seal — a genetic dead end. Our tombstone could read: “Here lies the White race. It went out and conquered the world. It then committed suicide because it decided the game wasn’t worth playing.” This is definitely not an ideology that seems to appeal to others around the world, as in Israel where immigration and marriage are tightly linked to genetic ancestry.

The peoples who appear to be on course to inherit the earth will doubtless enjoy attending museums dedicated to exhibits of this peculiar people. It is perhaps fitting that after the hatred that so many now bear toward Whites for their previous dominance has subsided, our demise would be seen as a mere evolutionary curiosity — the first group to voluntarily exit history.

Kevin MacDonald: Martin Webster on Peter Oborne's Exposé of Britain's Israel Lobby

Kevin MacDonald: Martin Webster’s article on Peter Oborne’s exposé of Britain’s Israel Lobby was just posted on TOO. Here’s the link to the article, and we are also posting the link to Oborne’s 50-minute program in  the video section of the TOO front page. This is very long article by TOO standards, and Webster adds a lot that is not in the program, so I thought I would briefly mention a couple of things. 

He does an excellent job of exposing the twin strategies of bribery and intimidation that have been so successfully pursued by the Isaral Lobby in America and elsewhere. The article shows how the Israel Lobby has been able to avoid laws intended to prevent corruption of public officials. It also discusses a number of complicit non-Jews who profit from their connections with the Israel Lobby and, in some cases, are married to Jewish women.

Finally, the article illustrates once again the importance of media control. Oborne’s TV show has been given the silent treatment in the media and will doubtless be yet another example of how the truth is marginalized and basically irrelevant in contemporary Western societies.

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Nora Ephron makes an obvious choice

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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The looming racial chasm

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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Jews are the financial engine of the left

In his book Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz states that Jews fund the left in America. He states it as a rather obvious truth — so obvious that it doesn’t really require a great deal of research.

And he is not writing simply about explicitly Jewish activist organizations like the ADL, but also to organizations like the ACLU and the $PLC. In fact, in his 1996 book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, J. J. Goldberg pointed out that “within the world of liberal organizations like the ACLU and People for the American Way, Jewish influence is so profound that non-Jews sometimes blur the distinction between them and the formal Jewish community.”

For example, SUSPS, an environmentalist activist group attempting to influence  the Sierra Club  to oppose immigration, recounts the notorious donations north of $100 million by David Gelbaum to the Sierra Club on condition that they not oppose immigration. As Gelbaum famously said to the president of the Sierra Club, “”I did tell [Sierra Club President] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

It turns out that Gelbaum is also a major donor to the ACLU — more than $20 million annually. The New York Times reports that Gelbaum will not be making his donation this year. But the gap will be at least partially filled: “Donors like the Leon Levy Foundation, the Open Society Institute [funded by George Soros], Peter B. Lewis and John Sperling had stepped up with pledges totaling $23 million spread over the next three years.”

The only thing these sources have in common is Jewishness. Sperling, Soros, and Lewis are on an authoritative list of the 139 Jews on the 2009 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest  Americans;  Leon Levy was also Jewish, not making the list only because he died in his 70s with a net worth of around a billion dollars (which would qualify him for the list today). The Times report also notes that donations had been hurt because some foundations had been harmed by the Bernie Madoff fiasco — also presumably Jewish money.

Several implications:

Lists of wealthiest Americans underestimate Jewish wealth because people like Levy don’t appear on lists of wealthy people even though their money is still being used to advance Jewish causes.

Secondly, Jews are very good at using their financial power to advance their ethnic interests. One of the biggest problems for European-Americans is that wealthy non-Jews seem far more interested in funding the opera or getting their name on a building at the local university than in helping their people. A good example is the Chandler family who formerly owned the L. A. Times. They had no interest in the media, and the company is now controlled by Sam Zell, who is Jewish. The family remains wealthy but in general seems to be involved in finding fun and interesting ways to spend their time (one of them flies around the world to attend the opera; another is into building outsize model trains) rather than influencing the world.

Finally, in researching this, I couldn’t help but notice that Lewis, Soros, and Sperling have gotten together previously. The Wikipedia entry for Sperling notes, “Together with George Soros, and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, Sperling raised considerable amounts of money for drug [legalization] and other related causes, especially during the 2004 presidential campaign.” Sperling also exhibits the Jewish tendency for disdain of the traditional culture of America. The Wikipedia entry includes a comment on his book The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America: “One America, to judge from the book’s illustrations, … lives in ‘vibrant’ cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.”

Not much doubt what side of the culture wars Sperling (and Lewis and Soros) are on.

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Kevin MacDonald: Making the US government Israeli-occupied territory

Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt has a nice column on the Haaretz article showing that right wing Jewish groups make a huge amount of noise over US-government appointees. Even when they fail to get someone removed, it doubtless has the effect of making any administration be very wary of whom they appoint.

The Haaretz article shows the emerging divide within the Jewish community between the J Street liberals and the more hardline organizations. The recent nominees who have come under attack have in common an association with J Street. But the reality is that J Street is not really much of an improvement on the neocons and AIPAC. Philip Giraldi calls it “AIPAC lite” –little more than window dressing to appeal to liberal democrats. (See also Stephen Sniegoski’s piece.)

So we are likely to be treated to highly publicized wars between the old-time Israel Lobby and newer, “liberal” version–full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, or at least very little.

Of course, it’s the same in American politics where everyone’s attention is riveted on the miniscule differences between Republicans and Democrats — and for much the same reasons. Liberal democracies need the appearance of open, unfettered debate in order to live up to their ideals. As with the ADL’s assault on mainstream media figures who deviate from the ADL’s approved messages, the goal is to have an acceptably narrow range of public debate while still pretending we live in an open society.

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More on the culture of deceit: Solomon Dwek is just the tip of the iceberg

Back in August, Edmund Connelly wrote about a culture of corruption that pervades the Orthodox Jewish community in New York and New Jersey.  Solomon Dwek’s rabbi father renounced him after he informed on money laundering within the community as part of a plea bargain in his case of bank fraud. Now New Jersey.com reports that the feds are investigating Dwek’s charitable contributions. The basic scheme is to contribute to a Hassidic charity in order to get a tax write-off, but then receive kickbacks of up to 95% of the money from the charity. But it’s far wider than just Dwek: “In Los Angeles, more than 100 contributors to a Hasidic Jewish sect in Brooklyn are being investigated by the U.S Attorney for the Central District of California in connection with the same kind of kickbacks spelled out in the New Jersey cases.”

Those involved are often religious leaders and the wealthy:

A similar scheme led to federal charges in 2007 against the Grand Rabbi of Spinka, the spiritual leader of an Orthodox sect based in Brooklyn. Millions of dollars were contributed to Spinka organizations from donors who secretly got back up to 95 percent of their money — despite declaring all of it as charitable giving on their federal income taxes.

Grand Rabbi Naftali Tzi Weisz, 61, of Brooklyn pleaded guilty earlier this year in Los Angeles, where the case was prosecuted, and is awaiting sentencing.

One of the contributors to the Spinka charities, David Hager, 55, of Los Angeles, was sentenced earlier this year to six months in federal prison after pleading to two counts of tax evasion. He was accused of claiming deductions for contributions that had been reimbursed at a rate of 90 cents for every dollar he donated.

Hager was worth over $400 million, according to court records.

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