Kevin MacDonald

Tag Archive for: Kevin MacDonald

Rachel Maddow on Jim Russell

/78 Comments/in , , , /by

Jim Russell, who is the Republican candidate for New York’s 18th Congressional District, is busy combating accusations about his association with The Occidental Quarterly. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s take is a classic example of the power of the media to create an alternate reality where facts don’t matter and where simply stating Russell’s opinions is enough to create mild amusement in her audience benumbed by decades of leftist propaganda. No need to note that Russell is a scholar who has a Ph. D. and has written a book published by Oxford University Press on how Christianity was influenced by German culture during the early Middle Ages. No need for any informed scholarly opinions on his statements in the article in question. If that well-informed anthropologist and psychologist Rachel Maddow thinks something is outlandish, then it must be outlandish. End of story.

Maddow starts by labeling TOQ a “White supremicist journal” —shorthand for not having to deal with the ideas presented there and not being sensitive to the obvious difference between White supremacy and White advocacy. Does she think that it is always illegitimate for any ethnic group to seek to advance its interests? If so, then she should come out publicly against the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza.

She then puts up on the screen this quote from the article:

While liberals and universalists constantly yammer about “bringing us together” and “diversity is our strength,” it may be suggested that the biological function of human language and culture is just the opposite, that is, to keep discrete groups apart.

What an absolutely outrageous idea! Maddow, being Jewish by descent,* could not possibly be expected to grasp the concept of a culture that erects barriers between itself and the surrounding society—as Diaspora Judaism has done for its entire history and as Israel has now taken to the point of building walls between themselves and the Palestinians, providing separate roads and neighborhoods—in short, apartheid.

Contemporary mainstream evolutionary theories of culture highlight the  importance of badges of group membership, such as language and modes of dress that function to define ingroups and outgroups, and psychologists are well aware that there is a powerful evolutionary psychology of social identity that responds to these cues by making people in ingroups have exaggerated negative attitudes toward outgroups and exaggerated positive attitudes toward their ingroup.

She then highlights Russell’s quoting “old racist arguments” from T. S. Eliot:

The population should be homogeneous…. What is even more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and culture combine to make a large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

As noted here repeatedly, multiculturalism has huge costs, especially for the majority ethnic group in terms of social cohesion, social isolation, and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods like government-sponsored health care— with no discernible benefits apart from ethnic restaurants. Yet if there has been one overriding goal of Jewish intellectual and political activism in the US and other Western societies over the last century, it has been to legitimize multiculturalism and pathologize any sense that the  traditional people of these societies have any interests in maintaining their demographic predominance and their culture.

Maddow then goes after Russell’s expressed concern about the effects of the media on imprinting children with images of other races because they may affect later mating preferences. Notice that Russell expresses himself quite tentatively: “One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact.” But in fact, there is quite a bit of research that has come out since Russell wrote his article indicating just that. For example, this is a quote from an academic article of mine:

Research on human
infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months
of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However,
racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup
faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006;
Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005).

Research on human infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However, racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005). (p. 1022)

The reality is that social psychology provides strong support for the idea that exposure of babies to other races would make them favor their own race less. And Russell is certainly correct that the media is doing its best to aid this process. However, the good news is that the media does not really have access to infants, or at least much less access than it does to older children and adults. The research seems to indicate that babies learn who their people are by seeing family members–resulting in hysteria over “racist babies.” One can anticipate government programs that force White babies to be exposed to non-Whites (but exempt non-Whites from this process).

Maddow then goes off on Russell’s accusation that the media promotes miscegenation in films directed at adolescents and pre-adolescents and his claim that parents have “a natural obligation as essential as providing food and shelter to instill in their  children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.” Again, research supports the idea that media images could indeed overcome our natural liking for people like ourselves (programmed in infancy; see above) and lead people to be more open to miscegenation—especially in impressionable and conformist-minded children who are led to think that such behavior is “cool” and the sort of thing popular, attractive teenagers do. Several prominent social psychologists have argued that constant repetition by media images–especially if they are seen as coming from elite, mainstream sources–can overcome predispositions to be attracted to our own people.

One would think that Maddow would be well aware that her people have had very strong socialization pressures for marrying within the group which has led to very strong genetic commonality among long-separated Jewish groups. Urgings by Jewish religious and secular authorities (e.g., Alan Dershowitz, Elliott Abrams) to marry other Jews are commonplace. But when Russell makes similar suggestions, he is labeled a racist and a kook.

Her piece is a good example of how the media is focused on changing the behavior  of one group and one group only: White Christians.

*According to WikiAnswers, Maddow was raised Catholic, with an Irish mother and Russian father. She asserted she is “distantly Jewish.” See also here.

Jewish-Muslim Tensions

/41 Comments/in , /by

The current Marty Peretz uproar is one  of those many times when a White advocate can see nothing good on either side of a debate. It makes for depressing reading when all the sides heard in the mainstream media are corrupted.

Peretz is the famously fanatic pro-Israel nutcase who happens to own the New Republic. He is also rich, having married into enough money to buy his bully pulpit and make it into an excellent example of Jewish double standards: Liberal on pretty much all domestic issues, but gung-ho in favor of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Israel. The recent controversy came about because he wrote, “frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

In his apology, he disavowed the First Amendment comment. Let’s get real. Does anyone seriously think that Muslims believe in free speech as a principle (think Danish cartoons, Salman Rushdie, and Theo Van Gogh)? Or that Jews do?   Whites will learn soon enough that the people replacing them have no regard for things like constitutional government or the First Amendment. Harvard, with the left’s typical lack of concern with facts, condemns Peretz—claiming that his statement is “the diametric opposite of what we in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies stand for.”

Nevertheless, Peretz will be allowed to speak at the event and will return to Harvard to give a longer talk at some later date. No indication that Harvard will return the money in a fund for undergraduate research named after Peretz — probably because the money will be used to support the sort of left-oriented research that is de rigueur at universities these days and doubtless approved by Peretz: “the study of intercultural understanding, inequality, and social justice.”

I suspect that this sort of problem will become more and more common for American Jews and especially the organized Jewish community. On one hand they provide Israel with unconditional support — even though Israel and the Israel Lobby are attempting to re-organize the entire Muslim world to be subservient to Israel and ignore what’s going on with the Palestinians. On the other hand, they see their main problem in the US to be any peep of opposition by the traditional majority of the country to the vast transformations engulfing the country. Peretz’s New Republic is completely on board with mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the moral obligation of White people to become a minority in the country they built.

Another interesting example is the ADL. Their opposition to the Ground-Zero Muslim triumphalism was much denounced by liberals. Like Peretz, the ADL backs Israel unconditionally. The ADL also has no doubts at all about the proper role of Muslims in American society: to be part of the multicultural coalition aimed squarely at lessening the power of the White majority. So it’s not surprising that the ADL recently announced an “Interfaith Coalition on Mosques”—an ADL-led initiative which will “monitor incidents of mosque discrimination around the country, gather facts and analyze the information, and speak out when appropriate to help Muslim communities who are encountering prejudice.” As noted in the article, a prominent Muslim activist is publicly supporting it.

So at least some Muslims are quite happy to see the ADL leading the charge against the discomfort of the White majority at having yet another aggressive Middle Eastern religious group have a major impact on our culture. In the ideal Jewish world, American Muslims would become part of the anti-White alliance while ignoring the role of the Israel Lobby in getting America to agree to the dispossession of the Palestinians and to wage wars against Islam in the Middle East. I don’t think this will work in the long run. It’s certainly not working in Europe.

Barbara Lerner Spectre: Jews play a "leading role" in promoting multiculturalism in Europe

/167 Comments/in /by

In the video below, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who runs a government-funded Jewish study group in Sweden, makes the following remarkable statement—remarkable because she does not attribute anti-Jewish attitudes to irrational prejudices or even Muslims who hate Israel. Instead she says that it’s because of the “leading role” played by Jews in the  movement  toward multiculturalism:

I think there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism because at this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role and without that transformation, Europe will not survive.


Her comment is an example of the  age-old Jewish self-concept of a “Light Unto the Nations”: Jews saving Europe by leading it to multiculturalism. One wonders why she thinks Europe could not survive as a set of monocultural societies. Israel and many other societies function quite well with a recognized dominant culture and people and, as repeatedly emphasized here, multicultural societies have a hosts of costs and no visible benefits. The better question, of course,  is how Europe can survive multiculturalism. By definition, it can’t.

The interview is part of a longer set of interviews available here.

Self-Deception and Guruism among Jews

/71 Comments/in , /by

Life is really easy if you are in the business of refuting “anti-Semites” in the Mainstream Media. There is a ridiculously low standard for arguments and an easy confidence that contrary voices will not be heard.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has a predictably vacuous column on the comments of Karel De Gucht–a topic previously discussed here. Mr. De Gucht stated, “Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill.” Stephens says that the comment dispenses with “the usual fine-grained, face-saving distinction about the difference between a ‘Jewish’ and an ‘Israel’ lobby.”

What makes it so easy for Stephens is that he doesn’t have to actually provide any data showing the relationship between Jews and the Israel Lobby. It’s enough to simply say that De Gucht failed to make the distinction to brand him an anti-Semite. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if he referred to the Israel Lobby when talking about “the grip [the Lobby] has on American politics—no matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats.”  That too would doubtless cast him as an anti-Semite. Titling their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy certainly didn’t prevent John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from being labeled anti-Semites.

Stephens uses the same tactic in dismissing De Gucht’s statement that “There is indeed a belief—it’s difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.”

Stephens comments:

Here, then, was a case not of “criticism of Israel” or “anti-Zionism,” the usual sheets under which this sort of mentality hides. Mr. De Gucht’s target was Jews, the objects of his opprobrium their malign political influence and crippled mental reflexes. If this isn’t anti-Semitism, the term has no meaning.

Again, Stephens feels no need to actually discuss whether Jews tend to behave this way. The subject is out of bounds—automatically; nothing more than “anti-Semitism.”

Since Mr. De Gucht will not attempt to defend his comments (he has already profusely apologized for his indiscretion—rejected, of course, by Stephens), I’ll give it a try. Part of the issue is self-deception, as per my previous comments on De Gucht. We are all prone to self-serving biases. But in particular, people who are highly ethnocentric are prone to not seeing how their own ethnocentrism blinds them to rational discussion of anything related to their ethnic interests. One of the more laughable mainstays of neoconservative rhetoric is the assertion that, despite their easily-documented strong Jewish identification and their close ties to Israel, they really believe that their policy recommendations are in the interests of the United States—including the disastrous war in Iraq and the impending war with Iran. Anyone who has taken a course in Social Psychology 101 would be aware of how naive that is. But of course, that doesn’t prevent it from being asserted with absolute self-confidence by writers like Jacob Heilbrunn (see here, p. 16).

The title of Heilbrunn’s book is relevant to De Gucht’s comments: They Knew They Were Right. The other part of this syndrome is absolute confidence in their ideas–what one  might term ‘guruism’. Heilbrunn calls attention to the neocons’ penchant for “sweeping assertions and grandiose ideas” (p. 26). There is a towering self-confidence that is doubtless exaggerated by being within an echo chamber of like-minded others. I remember talking to an academic psychiatrist long before psychoanalysis became a chapter in Culture of Critique. As a biologically oriented psychiatrist, he was not a believer in psychoanalysis, but he said what struck him about psychoanalysts in their heyday was their absolute self-confidence and sense of superiority. They were completely immune to empirically-minded naysayers–of which there were plenty, even at the height of their power. Keep in mind that psychoanalysis is perhaps the greatest intellectual fraud of the 20th century–a set of beliefs that explained everything but had only the most tenuous connection to reality and an ideology that empirical research was for bean counters.

The same thought crossed my mind while reading Thirteen Bankers, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. Near the heart of the financial meltdown was the towering self-confidence of Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan in opposing any regulation on the derivatives market. Summers seems to be pivotal. When Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, proposed that some thought should be given to regulation,  Summers reportedly said “I have thirteen bankers in my office, and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.” As Johnson and Kwak note (p. 9), we don’t actually know if there were any bankers in Summers’ office; “more likely he came to his own conclusion.” The point is that Summers had an unshakable faith that what he was saying was correct—a faith that was ominously unrelated to empirical reality. Nevertheless, Ms. Born was successfully pushed aside and ultimately a law was enacted  preventing any regulation of the derivatives market. It’s quite analogous to Freud’s total confidence in the Oedipal Complex as a core doctrine of psychoanalysis and expelling anyone who disagrees.

Self-deception is not the entire story here. More likely, it relates to the centrality of charismatic leadership among Jews—a theme of Culture of Critique and very apparent in the Bernie Madoff scandal: The rabbi guru surrounded by worshipful disciples. Madoff was “like a God” People around him “regarded Bernie like a messiah. He was spoken of as if godlike.” “He was received like visiting royalty, mysterious and unapproachable” (see John Graham and Kevin MacDonald, “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?”) He was brilliant; a genius. Because of his financial wisdom, everything turned to gold. Naysayers were ignored, and Jewish naysayers were labeled anti-Semites for not believing in the wisdom of Bernie.

Of course, Madoff exploited this tendency toward hero worship  among Jews to his own advantage and defrauded others in the process. In the case of the imperial wars so confidently trumpeted by the neocons and in the case of the financial meltdown, the victims are the entire country. And the scary thing is that Summers is still running the economy.

Kevin MacDonald: Solzhenitsyn's "During the Civil War" — Chapter 16 of 200 Years Together

/4 Comments/in , , /by

Chapter 16 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together is available here. Again, donations are of critical importance for finishing this important project. This immensely interesting and important chapter is the topic of the current TOO article. I solicit comments here.

Kevin MacDonald: Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 23 of 200 Years Together

/33 Comments/in , /by

The current TOO article discusses Chapter 23 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together. I solicit comments here. The main theme is Jewish self-deception–the inability to see things without ethnic blinders, in particular, the history of the Jews in the USSR. After writing it, another example surfaced—they’re not hard to come by—although, as usual, it’s hard to know if it’s more a matter of aggressive intimidation than self-deception. Yet another government official has gotten in trouble for saying the obvious. This time it’s Karel de Gucht, the EU Trade Commissioner (“EU Trade Commissioner  Apologizes for Jewish Comments”).

The European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group, had demanded a retraction of De Gucht’s remarks in which he maintained that Israel frustrates U.S.-led peace efforts and warned not to “underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill.”

“That is the best organized lobby that exists there,” the former Belgian foreign minister said in the interview with the Dutch-speaking VRT radio network.

“Don’t underestimate the opinion … of the average Jew outside of Israel,” he said. “There is, indeed, a belief, I can hardly describe it differently, among most Jews that they are right. So it is not easy to have a rational discussion with a moderate Jew about what is happening in the Middle East. It is a very emotional issue.”

De Gucht was saying (he’s since apologized profusely) that Jews honestly believe what they are saying is true, so it’s pretty much impossible to have a rational discussion–self-deception by any other name. It’s the same with the history of the Jews in the USSR—and a great many other things.

The official Jewish reaction has been to see De Gucht’s comments as an example of “a growing wave of anti-Semitism in Europe,” explicitly said to be on a par with Thilo Sarrazin’s comments on Jewish genetics. Again, there is a blind spot where facts are irrelevant. In a comment that is worthy of Abe Foxman, Moshe Kantor of the European Jewish Congress stated, “It has somehow become acceptable to attack Jews through Israel, even at the highest levels,” said Kantor. “The old anti-Semitic libels of the all-powerful Jewish cabals, the recalcitrant Jew and the irrational Jews only caring for their own, are remade to fit 21st- century hostility to the Jewish State.”

Of course, besides self-deception there is the very real possibility in this case that Kantor knows full well that this is just bluster and intimidation attempting to prevent public discussion of Jewish power and relying for its effectiveness on cowed European elites whose defining characteristic since WWII has been terror at being labeled an anti-Semite. Tough call.

Policing the Elites

/81 Comments/in /by

Just recently Thilo Sarrazin, a director of Germany’s central bank, made headlines because he wrote a book critical of immigration, basically saying that Germany is commiting suicide. He says (reasonable and popular) things like “I don’t want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in a mostly Muslim country where Turkish and Arabic are widely spoken, women wear headscarves and the day is measured out by the muezzin’s call to prayer.”  He also thinks that Turks aren’t as smart as Germans (they’re not; Richard Lynn on IQ: Germany=102; Turkey = 90); and he thinks that Jews have significant genetic commonality (also true). (A Jewish spokesman said, “Whoever tries to define Jews by their genetic makeup, even when it is superficially positive in tone, is in the grip of a race mania that Jews do not share.” No need to discuss the fact that Jewish genetic commonality discovered by (Jewish) population geneticists can only be explained ultimately by the fact that the Jews have always had a race mania.)

Sarrazin attracted a deluge of criticism for expressing his views. “The German elite is united in its criticism [of Sarrazin]. Sarrazin is representative of a latent Islamophobia, but one which has not been able to take shape in any political formation as we have seen in the Netherlands and Austria.”  Sarrazin has now been sacked because of his views–even though they have nothing to do with his position as a banker; his fate will doubtless be a cautionary tale for similarly inclined others.

It reminds us that the consensus among elites throughout the West is maintained not by force of argument but by brute force, although it’s not uncommon for the media to confidently assert that the facts are on their side. (Time magazine: “Experts reject his argument that innate low intelligence is the culprit.”) Another tack is to gleefully assert that Europe has no choice but to admit immigrants because its birthrate is so low—while at the  same time noting that the German government won’t do anything to encourage births because that’s what the National Socialists did:  “Crucially, however, the memory of Nazi schemes to promote motherhood continues to inhibit governments in Berlin from urging women to have more children.”

But in the end, elites are not willing to let dissident views simply compete for adherents or let people be exposed to scientists like Richard Lynn who, by any reasonable account, is also an expert. It’s all about enforcing orthodoxy.

The question is how to break through this elite monopoly on discourse on immigration and race. I confess I don’t have a clue. That’s what makes the Glenn Beck phenomenon so pathetic. Here’s a guy who has an immense following of angry White people yearning for leadership that would really help their  plight. And all he can come up with is a vague commitment to traditional values and the Constitution. I’ve got news for you Glenn: The only important issue is that Whites are becoming a minority and seeing their political power and cultural influence disappearing. The Constitution will be completely irrelevant when Whites become a minority.

But that’s the thing. Idiots like Beck get exposure on the national media. And if Beck somehow strayed off the reservation and started worrying about explicitly White issues, he’d be gone, just like Sarrazin. He probably understands that.

The elites realize that there are large percentages of Whites who would sign on to anti-immigration attitudes with just a little encouragement. Polls in Germany found that 35% disagreed with Sarrazin, while 30% agreed–a substantial minority, especially given that they receive no encouragement from “respectable” sources. Elites understand that a conflagration could be very easily ignited with a bit of encouragement from the top. Sarrazin’s sacking means that 30% of Germans have just been told that their views are completely illegitimate–so much so, that people who hold them should be fired, even if their beliefs are completely irrelevant to their job description.

Policing elite discourse is the name of the game. It doesn’t matter if an anonymous person writes a well-reasoned article on the internet. But it matters a great deal if the director of the Bundesbank writes a book that resonates with popular attitudes and, because of his position, gets a great deal of publicity in the mainstream media.  That’s why there was such outrage when James Watson got off the reservation on Black IQ. That’s why the Israel Lobby went crazy when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt–professors at elite institutions–wrote that the Israel Lobby was a very powerful force that routinely acted against the interests of the US.

Elite consensus is not threatened by people like Sarrazin. Even Mearsheimer and Walt have been effectively contained if votes in Congress are any indication.  It’s been shown over and over again that the consensus can be maintained, despite the occasional miscreant. Until we find a way to break through it, we are not going to get anywhere.