Kevin MacDonald

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Thomas DiLorenzo on Puritan Moral Fervor

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Thomas DiLorenzo’s recent columns at LewRockwell.com are well worth reading (“Glenn Beck’s Lincoln Contradictions”; “ see also, How the Lincoln Myth Was Hatched”). They emphasize Puritan religious fanaticism aimed at using the government to create the morally perfect society.

As explained by Murray Rothbard in “America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861” (in John Denson, ed., The Costs of War, Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 128):

The North, in particular the North’s driving force, the “Yankees” – that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois – had been swept by a new form of Protestantism. This was a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent “postmillennialism” which held that, as a precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.

To the Yankees, their “kingdom” was to be a “perfect society” cleansed of sin, the principal causes of which were slavery, alcohol, and Catholicism. Furthermore, “government is God’s major instrument of salvation,” Rothbard wrote. This is why the Yankees never seriously considered ending Southern slavery how THEY had ended it in their own states – peacefully through some kind of compensated emancipation. They were not so concerned about the welfare of the poor slaves. Indeed, even Tocqueville noticed that “the problem of race,” as he phrased it, was worse in the North than it was in the South. Instead, as Rothbard continues:

The Northern war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the birth of a perfect world. The Yankee fanatics were veritable Pattersonian humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, of their era.

This analysis of the Puritans also reflects David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989) and Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (1999), and I used it in trying the fathom the depths of WASP pathology (e.g., here; academic version). The fact is that all of the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique were fundamentally aimed at some kind of moral perfection — exactly the weak spot of WASP America. DiLorenzo points out that the neocons have used this weapon in order to rationalize wars (KM: on behalf of Israel) but framed as great moral crusades: “The neocon establishment, which is influential in both major political parties, believes in just the opposite: ‘entangling alliances’ and endless military interventionism with as many nations as possible, all in the name of some undefinable Great Moral Cause, in the tradition of Dishonest Abe.”

Charles Krauthammer is a perfect example of an American Jewish intellectual who cynically exploits the tendency among Whites for moral idealism and universalism in order to advance his narrow ethnic intererts. Here he is pushing war against the entire Muslim world:

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries…. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in an…existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. … At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy.  (Democratic Realism)

Here is U.S. District Court of Appeals Judge Simon Rifkind testifying in 1951 on behalf of pretty much the entire organized Jewish community on how America should approach immigration:

We conceive of Americanism as the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of different races, all religions, all nationalities.  [!] Americanism is a tolerant way of life that was devised by men who differed from one another vastly in religion, race background, education, and lineage, and who agreed to forget all these things and ask of a new neighbor not where he comes from but only what he can do and what is his spirit toward his fellow men.

Rifkind, whose remarks were quite famous at the time, defines Americanism in moral terms as implying tolerance and positive feelings toward others. Like Krauthammer, the national interest of the United States is not the critical issue. We should pursue Rifkind’s multi-racial utopia without concern for economic benefits to the US:

Looking at [selective immigration] from the point of view of the United States, never from the point of view of the immigrant, I say that we should, to some extent, allow for our temporary needs, but not to make our immigration problem an employment instrumentality. I do not think that we are buying economic commodities when we allow immigrants to come in. We are admitting human beings who will found families and raise children, whose children may reach the heights—at least so we hope and pray. For a small segment of the immigrant stream I think we are entitled to say, if we happen to be short of a particular talent, “Let us go out and look for them,” if necessary, but let us not make that the all-pervading thought. (p. 570) [see Culture of Critique, Chap. 7, pp. 278-279.]

DiLorenzo points out that Puritan publicists created the mythic Abe Lincoln out of thin air, and those who defied the duty to deify Lincoln did so at their peril–quite reminiscent of what happens to people who contravene the current standards of political correctness.

Jews are remarkably immune to moral crusades when it comes to Israel. Then it’s ethnic politics with a vengeance, and lofty ideals about multi-racial immigration are non-starters. The New England WASPs seem particularly disposed to such behavior, although other Whites seem predisposed as well. “Ideas worth fighting for,” as Justice John Paul Stevens had it. No non-White group seems inclined in this direction.

In my view, this proclivity stems ultimately from Western individualism as an ethnic trait: In individualist societies where relatedness beyond the immediate family is not important, ideas with great emotional appeal have a group-binding function, resulting in cohesive, emotionally motivated ingroups willing to mete out punishment to outgroups defined not on the basis of kinship but on the basis of their beliefs. On the other hand, in collectivist societies like Judaism cohesion is ultimately a matter of kinship relatedness, and ingroups and outgroups are defined ethnically.

It is worth noting that the 19th-century Puritan intellectuals loved the German idealist philosophers. One of Willhem Marr’s most interesting observations is his proposal that

Germans formed idealistic images of Jews during the Enlightenment when others had more realistic and negative views. Jews are realists, accepting the world as it is and advancing their interests based on their understanding of this reality. Judaism is characterized by particularlst morality (Is it good for the Jews?). Germans, on the other hand, tend to have idealized images of themselves and others — to believe that the human mind can construct reality based on ideals that can then shape behavior. They are predisposed to moral universalism — moral rules apply to everyone and are not dependent on whether it benefits the ingroup.

In large part the problem confronting Whites stems from our psychology of moralistic self-punishment exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants, but also apparent in a great many other Whites. As Fischer noted, “New England …  had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem), but the highest rates of public violence—’the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches’” (p. 189). These people will eagerly use government against the politically incorrect, morally reprobate ne’er-do-wells in their midst.

The best strategy for a collectivist group like the Jews for destroying Europeans therefore is to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. A major theme of [The Culture of Critique] is that this is exactly what Jewish intellectual movements have done. They have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. The general dismantling of the culture of the West and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity will occur as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment. Thus the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West. (see here)

The main difference between the Puritan New Jerusalem and the present multicultural one is that the latter will lead to the demise of the very White people who are the mainstays of the current multicultural Zeitgeist. Unlike the Puritan New Jerusalem, the multicultural New Jerusalem will not be controlled by people like themselves because the non-White ethnic actors will act on the basis of narrow ethnic interest, not high principle. The ultimate irony is that without altruistic Whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans won’t be around to witness it.

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Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?

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The current TOO article by John Graham and me, “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?,” reviews 8 books on the Bernie Madoff scandal. From the beginning, there was a pronounced Jewish angle to the media coverage of the scandal—mainly emphasizing that Madoff was a Jew who stole from other Jews. However, this review (for which the lion’s share of the credit goes to Mr. Graham), explores the far greater depth of Jewishness apparent in the incident. Here I review several important themes.

Contrary to the image in the media, the scandal in fact was a large scale transfer of wealth from non-Jews to Jews. The big money that entered the fund beginning in the 1990s was predominantly from non-Jews, and especially from Europe. In the end, according to whistle blower Henry Markopolos,the European losses were “substantially more than losses in the United States.” We suggest that the attraction of wealthy, aristocratic Europeans may have been an example of the “court Jew” phenomenon: “For centuries it was customary for aristocratic landowners, particularly in Eastern Europe, to delegate the task of managing the businesses operations on their estates to Jews, sometimes using the same families for generations.”

Madoff succeeded for so long because he had become a classic Jewish rabbi/guru who was idolized as God-like by the Jewish community. The Jewish community “regarded Bernie like a messiah. He was spoken of as if godlike.” This is a common feature of Jewish social structure generally—and much emphasized in The Culture of Critique. Just as people who questioned the Oedipal Complex were expelled from psychoanalytic societies and labeled as having various character flaws, an Israeli woman who questioned Madoff’s genius was called an “anti-Semite.”

Interestingly, quite a few of Madoff’s Jewish clients seem to have believed that it was a fraud or at least based on illegal activity such as “front-running” (trading ahead of client orders). “Many Madoff accounts thought they were safely benefitting from illegal activity — and did not care.” They seem to have thought of themselves as benefiting from Jewish ethnic networking where there has been a long tradition of failing to report illegal activities of other Jews— an offence known as Mesirah (informing).

Perhaps most explosively, we suggest that Madoff was protected because of the power of the Jewish community:

The Bernard Madoff matter was one about which a significant segment of Jewish America cared very much — some for financial reasons, others, perhaps, because of community pride and loyalty. Challenging this group was well known to be extremely dangerous. As in other matters, they awarded themselves a veto, and they used it — as it happened in this case, to their cost. All in all, the Madoff affair and the cover-up is another indication of Jewish power in America.

 

For example, Henry Markopolos, in his aptly titled No One Would Listen, comments

 

In my mind, at least, I was convinced that someone high up at the [Wall Street] Journal had decided it was too dangerous to go after Bernie Madoff. … I was finally beginning to consider the possibility that Bernie Madoff was untouchable — that he was simply too powerful to be brought down.

 

Madoff was investigated eight times by the SEC, but each investigation was inexplicably stopped. Sen. Charles Schumer seems to have been part of the power structure protecting Madoff. Madoff and his sons maxed out their contributions to Schumer. Schumer phoned the SEC on Madoff’s  behalf,  and he treated Markopolos with incredible rudeness during Senate hearings — not exactly the expected treatment toward someone who was right all along.

What has been portrayed as SEC incompetence now looks quite a bit like corruption. “We submit that the SEC failed to stop Madoff not because it was incompetent, but because it was afraid — of the Jewish Establishment.” It seems likely that even greater corruption was involved in the financial collapse that has been such an ongoing disaster for the country. The fact that Goldman Sachs managed to settle its involvement in one particular deal with a slap on the wrist.

Consistent  with the corruption thesis, it appears that Madoff’s accomplices will get off easy. Amazingly, an article that appeared too late to include in the print version questioned whether anyone will be criminally charged with being an accomplice to the fraud. Bernie is taking the fall all by himself, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if there’s lots of money stashed for his family members.

Perhaps in the back of Madoff’s mind was the idea — possibly the instinct — that after a few years, perhaps in a different country, maybe speaking a different language, his family would live on, possibly with a new name (surname changes are under way among the Madoff kin) and perhaps with some portion of the loot.

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Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together: “From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”

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The English translation of Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together (“From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”) is now available. (See here; donations are needed to complete the project.)

The main theme is the post-WWII purging of Jews from many of the powerful positions they held as an elite in Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn’s account is similar to other mainstream accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. When Jewish intellectual activists write about the role of the Jews in the USSR, they generally focus on this period—Jews as the victims of anti-Jewish actions—rather than the status and role of Jews in previous decades. The following quote from a historian sums up the situation:

“‘Pushing’ Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and ideological activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in 1948-1953. … Positions of any importance in KGB, party apparatus, and military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific establishments.”

Solzhenitsyn pointedly notes that Jews who had benefited from their nationality because they were officially classified as an oppressed minority under the Czar were now targeted on the basis of nationality:

Through its “fifth item” [i.e., the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very same method used in the Proletarian Questionnaire, other items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy, intellectuals and all the rest of the “former people” since the 1920’s.

Nevertheless, Jews were by no means eliminated from prestigious occupations. A historian comments that “Although the highest echelon of Jewish political elite suffered from administrative perturbations; but surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. … The main blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite — officials… and also journalists, professors and other members of creative intelligentsia.”

Anti-Jewish attitudes remained strong, fueled in large part because of the role of Jews as agents of oppression during the pre-war decades. For example, Solzhenitsyn notes that there were negative attitudes toward Jews returning to areas that the Germans had evacuated, particularly Ukraine.  Anti-Jewish attitudes combined both traditional ideas (Jews as wealthy: demanding restoration of prime residential property they owned before the war) as well as the role of Jews as government officials during the pre-war Soviet oppression.  A Jewish observer who claimed that Nikita Khrushchev had said, “In the past, the Jews committed many sins against the Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don’t need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn’t return here.”

Jews complained about these attitudes as well as the fact that other groups were indifferent to Jewish suffering, but Solzhenitsyn notes the irony, quoting another Jewish observer who stated “that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea and the Caucasus.” The example is a testimony to Jewish ethnocentrism–focused on their own suffering but never seeing, much less acknowledging, their indifference to the suffering of others or their role in causing it during the height  of their power.

There was a similar scene throughout Eastern Europe as Jews returned from exile after the war.

A great overrepresentation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts: “the Jews had played a huge role in economic life of all these countries,” and though they lost their possessions under Hitler, after the war, when “the restitution laws were introduced…  (they) affected very large numbers of new owners.” Upon their return Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by Communists and this created a new wave of hostility towards them (22).)

Toward the end of Stalin’s life, he intensified the campaign against Jews, possibly resulting in his death in 1953. The main source of his hostility toward Jews was the age-old concern about loyalty: Jewish ties with Jews in other countries — in this case, Israel and the United States. During the Cold War there was a fear that Jewish sympathies would lie with Israel and the US as Israel’s main source of support. One result was that Stalin crushed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK), a Jewish organization that had been created to court support for the USSR among American Jews during WWII. During the Cold War, the ties between Soviet Jews and American Jews became a liability in the eyes of Soviet regime.

An indication of Jewish power is that the campaign against the EAK in 1952 was carried out “slowly and with great caution” because Stalin was “very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by using force.” It’s striking that the mass murders and deportations of the 1920s and 1930s were carried out without any international outcry, but the campaign against a rather small Jewish group was done very cautiously.  Thirteen Jews were executed.

This is similar to what happened when Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter in 1942. These murders of two Jewish leftist activists created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world — the same people who had previously ignored or rationalized mass murder during the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt made appeals to Stalin, and American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews.

Another manifestation of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign was the trial of Rudolf Slansky, the Jewish First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The trial was “openly anti-Jewish with naming ‘world leading’ Jews such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and putting them into the same harness with American leaders Truman and Acheson.”

Stalin also arrested a large number of Jewish doctors —the  “Doctors’ plot” — and “prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter to Pravda with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and their approval of Stalin’s government.” (The letter was preceded by an article in Pravda published on January 13, 1953 claiming “”The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ” Joint” [i.e., the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”)

In February, the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv was bombed. Solzhenitsyn accepts the idea that the “international anger” resulting from the Doctors’ plot  “could possibly” have motivated “internal forces” to murder Stalin:

And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the first time, right? He did not understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria (for example, according to [Abdurakhman] Avtorhanov’s version (66).)

The trimming of Jewish power in the USSR is important not just as a facet of Jewish history in the USSR but also because it had a major role in influencing some components of the American Jewish community to become less enamored with the left—notably Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives. Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic Western societies were best for Judaism. National Socialism was obviously bad for Jews, and Communism had become so. Despite their elite status, the events of 1948-1953 showed that Jews were vulnerable when the attitudes of an autocrat like Stalin turned against them.  Liberal societies were best, but they had to be controlled against populist tendencies. After all, the working class had eventually opted to join the  National Socialists.

Stephen Holmes describes Strauss’s solution to the Jewish dilemma as follows:  “The good society … consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young” — a comment that sounds to me like an alarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern that an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival in the Diaspora and with the tendency for Jews to become an elite, it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that Jews would be a prominent part of the aristocracy and that the arrangement would serve Jewish interests–as indeed the current regime does.

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Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities explained

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Steve Sailer has an important blog at VDARE.com quoting  from Russel K. Nieli’s essay on No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. It’s no surprise that there is affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos: “To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”

Unfortunately, the authors lump Jews and non-Jews into the White category, but combining their results with what we know about Jewish admissions to elite universities yields some interesting results.

In a 1998 op-ed (“Some minorities are more minor than others”), Ron Unz pointed out “Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews also represent just 2% to 3% of the overall population. Thus, it appears that Jews and Asians constitute approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America” (See also Edmund Connelly’s take.)  A 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian (“Choosing the Chosen People”) cited data from Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, that with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24% of Ivy League undergrads. (Princeton had only 13% Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over 6 times the Jewish percentage in the population to around 10 times.)

Jews therefore constitute a vastly disproportionate share of the population classified as White at elite universities. Data from an earlier study by Espenshade show that around half of the students at elite universities are classified as White, suggesting that Jews and non-Jews classified as White are approximately equal in numbers. (Given that students from the Middle East are also classified as White, there is the suggestion that Jews outnumber non-Jewish students of Christian European descent.)

One might simply suppose that this is due to higher Jewish IQ. However, on the basis of Richard Lynn’s estimates of Ashkenazi Jewish IQ and correcting for the greater numbers of European Whites, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around 7 to 1 (IQ >130) or  4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145). Instead, the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews is around 1 to 1 or less. (See here.)

So there must be some other reason besides IQ that Jews are such a large percentage of the population classified as White at elite universities.

Espenshade and Radford show that there is discrimination against poor Whites and against non-urban Whites—exactly the population groups that are least likely to be Jewish. There is a “a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites.”

When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.

One possible explanation is that the desire for better off students reflects the universities’ desire to have students who are better able to pay their way, so that more money can be diverted to less well-off non-Whites. Nieli points out that this “cannot explain why well-qualified lower-class whites are not at least offered admission without financial aid. The mere offer of admission is costless, and at least a few among the poor whites accepted would probably be able to come up with outside scholarship aid.” Right.

Nieli suggests that the real reason that rejecting less well-off Whites benefits the university is because it raises the yield score (the ratio of those accepted to those who enroll) and lowers the  acceptance rate (the ratio of applicants received to those accepted) on the theory that less well-off Whites would not be able to afford to attend without scholarship money that the university wants to reserve for non-Whites. This makes them look good to the rating agencies.

This explanation seems rather  ad hoc. Quite a few less well-off Whites would doubtless be willing to take out loans in order to satisfy their dream of an education at an elite university. To be convincing, Nieli should at least have some data supporting his theory. Even an anecdote or a colorful story gleaned from an academic cocktail party would be nice.

The other finding is

what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values. This is most clearly shown in a little remarked statistic in the study’s treatment of the admissions advantage of participation in various high school extra-curricular activities. In the competitive private schools surveyed participation in many types of extra-curricular activities — including community service activities, performing arts activities, and “cultural diversity” activities — conferred a substantial improvement in an applicant’s chances of admission. The admissions advantage was usually greatest for those who held leadership positions or who received awards or honors associated with their activities. No surprise here — every student applying to competitive colleges knows about the importance of extracurriculars.

But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. … Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

It’s interesting that the bias against Red State interests holds even when controlling for other variables such as family income. These students are being rejected not because of their family income but because of their attitudes and interests–a finding that casts doubt on the yield rate/acceptance rate explanation for the bias against less well-off Whites as well.

These data strongly suggest that Jewish overrepresentation at elite universities has nothing to do with IQ but with discrimination against non-Jewish White Americans, especially those from the working class or with rural origins. It would be interesting to see the dynamics of the admissions process. How many admissions officers are Jewish? And, whether or not they are Jewish,what pressures are they under to admit Jewish students? The brouhaha that engulfed the Princeton campus because Jews were “only” overrepresented by around 6.5 times their percentage of the population suggests that there is considerable pressure for high levels of Jewish admission. The Daily Princetonian ran four front-page articles on the topic, and the New York Times ran an article titled “The Princeton Puzzle.” (See here; the original NYTimes article is here.) Clearly anything less than 20% Jewish enrollment would be met with raised eyebrows and perhaps intimations of anti-Semitism.

The big picture is that this is a prime example of the corruption of our new elite. As noted previously, the poster child for this corruption is the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. The fact that she is a Princeton graduate now makes even more sense given that when she went to Princeton the percentage of Jews was around 18% — more in line with the de facto affirmative action policies favoring Jews that we see now in most Ivy League universities.

Whatever else one can say about the new elite, it certainly does not believe in merit. The only common denominator is that Whites of European extraction are being systematically excluded and displaced to the point that they are now underrepresented in all the important areas of the elite compared to their percentage of the population.

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The A3P replies to the New York Daily News and Huffington Post

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Kevin MacDonald: The New York Daily News has reached a new low in journalistic propaganda with its article “New Hampshire State House Candidate Running On White Supremacist Platform” (July 13, 2010). The article purports to be a description of the candidacy of Ryan J. Murdough for the state senate in New Hampshire. The accompanying photo pictures a man with a swastika tattooed on his head giving a Nazi salute despite the fact that there is no connection at all between the photo and anyone in the American Third Position.

Daily News caption: A New Hampshire man (not pictured) is hoping to use racism and the support of a hate group to get elected as a Republican to the State House.

Daily News caption: A New Hampshire man (not pictured) is hoping to use racism and the support of a hate group to get elected as a Republican to the State House.

Similarly, a Huffington Post article on Murdough’s candidacy features a photo of a flag with a Swastika along with Nazi-style salutes–again, completely unrelated to anyone connected with the A3P (“New Hampshire State House Candidate Running On White Supremacist Platform”; July 13, 2010).

Uncaptioned photo from the Huffington Post article

The Daily News article refers to the A3P as a “hate group,” and Mr. Murdough is characterized as “racist.” Like many other Americans, Mr. Murdough is concerned about the very rapid demographic changes engulfing the country. His comments reflect absolutely normal and legitimate concerns about the future of his people and his culture.

We reject labels such as “white supremacist” or “racist” that are routinely bestowed on assertions of White identity and interests as a means of muzzling their expression. In the vast majority of countries around the world, it is perfectly normal and legitimate for people to resist the invasion of other peoples. No one would suppose that, say, South Korea has a moral obligation to admit millions of non-Koreans so that native Koreans become a minority. Nor is there any moral imperative that they give up the primacy of Korean culture. No one would suppose that Koreans are being evil or “racist” for opposing the entry of millions of people unlike themselves–people who will be allowed to vote and compete for political power and other resources.

Our main concern is that this upheaval unleashed by massive non-White immigration opposes the legitimate interests of the European-descended peoples of the U.S. It’s not about hatred. It’s about seeing real conflicts of interest among different ethnic groups. Quite simply, massive non-White immigration is not in the interests of the vast majority of White Americans.

Murdough’s letter to the Concord Monitor expresses concern about the costs of diversity. Throughout the world, ethnically diverse societies are marked by ethnic conflict. No one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. Our vision of the future of America is that it is well on the road to becoming a cauldron of competing ethnic groups, with chronic divisions over issues like affirmative action, redistribution of wealth and the establishment of public goods like health care — any issue that may be seen as benefiting one ethnic group more than another.

Finally, the Daily News article grossly distorts the views of the directors of the A3P. We do not endorse “Nazi ideals” or simplistic, biologically reductionist theories of Judaism and Jewish influence. Questions related to the influence of various ethnic groups and conflicts of interest between different ethnic groups can be scientifically investigated. It is perfectly legitimate for any ethnic group, including White Americans, to identify the forces that oppose their interests and to act on that basis.

A major aspect of ethnic activism for all other ethnic groups is to call attention to their perceived opponents. For example, the Los Angeles Times reports today that Latinos of all political parties oppose the Arizona immigration law and see White racism as the source of the opposition to legalizing millions of Latinos. Similarly, it makes sense for A3P to articulate the forces we see arrayed against us.

There can be little doubt that one of the main forces arrayed against White people identifying as Whites and acting on their interests is the non-White coalition of ethnic groups  centered in the Democratic Party, and this includes the organized Jewish community as well as other non-White minority groups, such as Latinos. We understand that Latinos have an interest in getting as many of their people into the U.S. as possible. However, Latino interests in immigration conflict with the interests of White Americans. We have a legitimate interest in preserving our culture and our political power.

The fact that the great majority of White Americans feel they cannot identify as Whites or discuss their conflicts of interest with other ethnic groups is a completely unnatural state of affairs — the result of a prolonged assault on the legitimacy of these concepts by politically and ethnically motivated elites that have dominated public discourse on issues of race and ethnicity since before World War II and especially since the 1960s. Our purpose is to change that, and Mr. Murdough’s candidacy is a big step in that direction.

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James Edwards on Mel Gibson

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James Edwards’ current TOO article (“On the crucifixion of Mel Gibson“) emphasizes themes that have been a staple here: Jews adopting very different strategies and attitudes in Israel than in the Diaspora and Jews making alliances with other minorities against the White majority. It reminds us once again that, unlike the old WASP elite, the new elite in America will not be principled.

Ari Emanuel is horrified that Gibson would use the N-word but he comes from a long line of racial Zionists–followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky who believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish. For example Jabotinsky stated, “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.” On the other hand, as soon as they move to the US, the family adopts the leftist, pro-multicultural, anti-White attitudes typical of American Jews. His mother was a civil rights worker in the US, and of course his brother Rahm Emanuel is a major power in the Obama administration and its left-leaning multicultural, anti-White agenda. Edwards shows that Emanuel’s talent agency also represents several White-hating rappers. Of course, Jews have their own grudges against the people and culture of the West, epitomized by the hostility toward Gibson’s The Passion of Christ.

It’s only common sense for Whites to fear an America in which they are a minority with a hostile Jewish elite that has made an alliance with Blacks and other minorities with their own historical grudges.

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John Paul Stevens as a prototypical WASP

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There’s been a lot of talk about the fact that soon there will be no WASPs on the Supreme Court. What does it mean? And does it really matter?

What’s fascinating is that John Paul Stevens was nominated to the Supreme Court as a moderate Republican who gradually moved further to the left as he got older.  What strikes me is his strong sense of principle–even to the extent of making decisions that could not possibly be seen as helping his ethnic group. After all, that’s what being principled means: Doing something because you value an ideal, not because there is anything in it for you. If I don’t steal something because I am afraid of getting caught, it’s not a matter of principle. But if I refrain from stealing some money it even if there is no possibility of being caught and even if getting the money would mean a lot to me, then I am acting on principle.

Stevens’ liberalism meant that despite being nominated by a Republican, he timed his retirement to occur during a Democratic administration. Even without knowing who would be the Democratic president, he surely knew that a Democratic president would nominate someone quite unlike himself to fill his position. The chances of any Democratic administration appointing a WASP to the Supreme Court are less than zero. And of course, Obama appointed someone who seems to all appearances to be a strongly identified Jew — not to mention that she has no visible qualifications and has benefited immensely from Jewish ethnic networking.

Much the same could be said about David Souter–another WASP appointed by a Republican who chose to retire during a Democratic administration and was replaced by a Latina.

The result is that the Obama administration has has had two appointments very early on, predictably appointing people who represent two important Democratic constituencies–Latino and Jewish. (Jews contribute at least 60% of the money for the Democratic Party, and Latinos are an increasingly important component of the non-White ethnic coalition that the Democratic Party has now become.)

Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor. This is reflected in his writing:

“The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach,” he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. “If those ideas are worth fighting for—and our history demonstrates that they are—it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.

Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that what’s important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.

Writing in the LATimes, Gregory Rodriquez framed the the issue by titling his article “The triumph of WASP culture“: the lack of WASPs means the WASPs have won. The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and Souter as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave. WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.

This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (See my review of Eric M. Kaufmann’s The Rise and  Fall of Anglo America.) (The exception was during the 1920s when the WASPs sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)

In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for–even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle –“Let us die to make men free” as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of ingroups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their proneness to moral universalism — ethnic traits in my view and in  the view of many WASPs in the 19th century — made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s.  Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.

And now that the forces of liberal cosmopolitanism have won out, the WASPs — even the liberal ones — are being rapidly jettisoned by our new, substantially Jewish elite. The replacement of Stevens by Kagan is deliciously paradigmatic.

Kaufmann points out that one of the defining features of the  WASPs is the tendency to believe that as a result of assimilation everyone would be just like them. Immigrant Catholics would shed their religion and become proper Protestants. In fact, becoming a WASP wasn’t all that hard if you had enough money, dressed right, joined the right clubs, and became an Episcopalian or Congregationalist. As I wrote about growing up in Wisconsin:

I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. … But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

I suspect therefore that Stevens and Souter think, perhaps unconsciously, that the people who replace them will be just like them in the sense that they will uphold the same ideals. The republic will live on but with different faces–a utopian idea, to say the least.

In fact, it is far more likely that now that the WASPs are gone, the Supreme Court and every other important institution will be divvied up as an ethnic spoils system, especially for the Democrats as they try to appease the various parts of their ethnic coalition. And the Republicans will doubtless appoint at least some non-Whites to show that the principles of WASP idealism are not dead.

The reality is that the  various non-White ethnic groups jockeying for power in America are not like the WASPs at all. Their powerful sense of ethnic identification means by definition that they are unprincipled–that they can be reliably predicted to see things in terms of what is good for their ethnic group. Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment comes to mind, and Kagan’s strong ethnic identity implies that she, like the rest of the Jewish community, will be mainly motivated the old dictum of “what’s good for the Jews”: the Supreme Court as a lifetime legislative appointment to be used to advance the interests of their ethnic group. Kagan’s unprincipled views on issues such as free speech are entirely within the mainstream of the Jewish community. Indeed, in one of her law review articles she anticipated the recent hate crimes legislation that was pushed so strongly by the ADL and supported by the rest of the organized Jewish community. The most glaring aspect of Jewish political behavior now is their remarkably unprincipled support for the multicultural left, including massive non-White immigration in the United States while at the same time providing unquestioning support for an apartheid, racialist Israel with laws that make Arizona’s immigration laws pale by comparison.

Stevens and Souter are naive. Their devotion to ideas and principle along with similar attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the  future.  All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals. Ethnicity matters.

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