What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong About Jews

I have reproduced below what I see as a very good reply to  antisemitic thought.  In looking at why Jews tend so strongly Left, however, the authors manage only the most conventional explanation -- that the Jewish history of persecution is the key.  It has made modern-day Jews paranoid about ideas associated with past persecutors. And they associate conservative ideas as the ones that are most reminiscent of the ideas held by past persecutors.

But that is utter nonsense.  It was Protestant and ultra conservative Prussia (in North-Eastern Germany) that legislated to "emancipate" the Jews on March 11, 1812, and the tolerance of Jews in Prussia is why there were so many Jews prospering in pre-Hitler Germany, and why indeed many Ashkenazi surnames are to this day German ones. 

And the all-time pinnacle of antisemitic policy, Nazism, was a socialist creed, as almost any reading of Nazi documents will reveal.

So the record of tolerance for the Jews was ultra-conservative Prussia and the record of intolerance for the Jews was the socialist Hitler!  What in that would make Jews attracted to socialism?

It is true that Soviet disinformation has portrayed Nazism as Rightist but I think Jews should be generally well informed enough to see through that.  Jews have strong reasons to want to understand Nazism and even a cursory study of it will inform them where Nazism really lay on the political spectrum.

And discrimination against Jews in the Western world today is a fleeting thing so is a poor explanation for a huge and continuing political bias.

So I think the Jewish attraction to Leftism requires a better explanation than a memory of persecution. 

I have no doubt that a memory of an adverse past can be retained for a long time.  In Ulster they still sing about the Battle of the Boyne of 1690 and the Scots still haven't got over Edward Longshanks in the 13th century -- so political memories can last a long time.  What I ask is WHY some memories persist, what need does retaining such memories serve? And I see no reason why fear of conservatives and Christians persists among Jews. 

In Ulster each side sees the other as a dangerous rival and in the case of Scottish attitudes towards the English the matter is all too clear if rarely expressed: The English find the Scots amusing. And there is nothing more enraging than that. But what problem to Jews are American Christians and conservatives today? American Christians and conservatives are in fact the bedrock upon which American support for Israel is based. Rationally, Jews should vote for conservatives.  Instead they voted two thirds for Obama, who was no friend of Israel.  It took a strong conservative to give official recognition to Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

But, despite all that, Jewish American support for the Donks remains strong.  Why?

I think there is better explanation for Jewish Leftism, one founded firmly in the present and recent past. It flows directly from the known high average IQ of Jews.  Because of the huge potency of IQ in meeting life's challenges, Jews have risen to the top of most niches in society.  They are an elite people. 

And what do we know about the elites? Superior attitudes.  Because they have done well they tend to think that they know it all and are in a far better position to guide society than are the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory -- as Bill Buckley put it.  And the Democrat allegiance of America's present elites has been thrown into sharp focus by the ascendancy of Donald Trump. 

So I think Jews are Leftist because elites generally are Leftists. They have the attitudes of their class. Marx would understand. That seems to me to be a simple and straightforward explanation and as such has the benefit of Occam's razor. I have written at some length previously on why elites tend Left, which see.


written by Jonathan Anomaly and Nathan Cofnas

For many on the alt-right, every grievance is, at root, about Jews. Andrew Anglin, host of the most popular alt-right/neo-Nazi website, explains: “the only thing in our movement that really matters [is] anti-Semitism.” If only the Jews were gone, he argues, the white race, freed from bondage, would immediately overcome all of its problems. Where does this attitude come from?

Jews are a conspicuous people, small in number but large in footprint. As Mark Twain wrote in 1899:

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race….Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk….What is the secret of his immortality?

For many people throughout history, the answer to Twain’s question was simple: Jews conspire among themselves to dominate and disadvantage gentiles. This answer fell out of fashion, at least in polite society, after World War II. Since the 1990s, however, the conspiratorial account of Jewish prominence has taken on a new, more meretricious form in the work of (now retired) California State University, Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald, known affectionately among alt-righters as “KMac.” According to Richard Spencer, the inventor of the term “alt-right” and unofficial leader of the movement: “There is no man on the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald.” And: “KMac…may be the most essential man in our movement in terms of thought leader[ship].” To understand the alt-right’s anti-Semitism, we must understand MacDonald’s ideas, particularly as outlined in his most influential book, The Culture of Critique.

According to MacDonald, Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.” Jews possess both genetic and cultural adaptations (including, on the genetic side, high IQ and ethnocentrism) that allow them to develop successful intellectual movements that undermine gentile society and promote their own group continuity. “Jewish intellectual movements,” MacDonald argues, are led by charismatic figures analogous to rabbis. They attack white nationalism while promoting Jewish nationalism, and use pseudoscience to “pathologize” anti-Semitism, which in reality is a justified response to “Jewish aggression.” According to MacDonald, Jewish intellectual movements include Freudianism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and multiculturalism. These movements, MacDonald claims, taught white gentiles to reject ethnocentrism and accept high levels of nonwhite immigration to their countries while tolerating Jewish ethnocentrism and racially restrictive immigration policies in Israel.

MacDonald’s theory and the anti-Semitism of many on the alt-right are largely reactions to the perceived liberalism of Jews. One of us (Cofnas) has just published an academic paper that examines MacDonald’s most influential book, The Culture of Critique, and finds that it is chock full of misrepresented sources, cherry-picked facts, and egregious distortions of history. MacDonald and the alt-righters are, nevertheless, correct that many liberal leaders over the last hundred years have been Jewish. We’d like to offer an explanation for this phenomenon, as well as determine whether Jewish liberalism is the cause or the result of anti-Semitism.

People who learned everything they know about history from MacDonald’s books may be under the impression that traditional gentile society was marked by “hierarchic harmony” (his term) before Jews began their intellectual assault after the Enlightenment. This is a gross distortion of history. Gentile radicals have been around for centuries, doing exactly what MacDonald thinks is characteristic of Jews. Consider Edmund Burke’s comments on European (gentile) radicals at the time of the French Revolution:

Nor is it in these clubs alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters. They undergo a previous distortion in academies, intended as so many seminaries for these clubs, which are set up in all the places of public resort. In these meetings of all sorts every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public.

The French Revolution itself was an entirely successful movement to overturn whatever “hierarchic harmony” had existed in France, and it was led by gentiles and inspired by gentile philosophers. (Many of the gentile philosophers who laid the groundwork for the Revolution, such as Voltaire, were committed anti-Semites.) Radical French thinkers like Rousseau are completely ignored by MacDonald.

MacDonald analyzes the Frankfurt School in great detail and argues that the ideology of the school was constructed to advance Jewish interests by promoting nonwhite immigration and in general undermining white culture. (MacDonald does not mention that, incidentally, many of the Frankfurt School’s fiercest critics were Jews, like Karl Popper, who mocked their work as pseudoscience.) But French existentialism was a movement that was analogous to the Frankfurt School in every important respect…except that the leaders—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus—were white gentiles.

Sartre was a leading critic of France and America, and strongly supported nonwhite immigrants in France. The French existentialists produced radical critiques of traditional gentile society and, like the Frankfurt School, advanced pseudoscientific ideas (making demonstrably false claims about human nature and refusing to subject these claims to any test).

It is easy to find gentiles independently developing ideas virtually identical to those promoted by “Jewish intellectual movements.” MacDonald quotes Foucault’s statement: “If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have been saved a great deal of work. I would not have said a certain amount of nonsense and would not have taken so many false trails trying not to get lost, when the Frankfurt School had already cleared the way.” For MacDonald, this shows how influential the Jewish-dominated Frankfurt School was. But it also reflects the fact that, while the gentile Foucault was influenced by the Frankfurt School, he was independently thinking along the same tracks.

Still, in the past hundred years or so Jews have clearly been overrepresented among the leaders of liberal movements. They were overrepresented among communist leaders and revolutionaries, among prominent immigration advocates, and so on. Even if liberalism is not the Jewish invention that MacDonald claims it is, we still should explain why Jews appear to be disproportionately attracted to it. And is anti-Semitism a response to Jewish liberalism?—or could it be the other way around?

IQ, Persecution, and Political Identity

Mark Twain’s explanation for Jewish intellectual prominence was that “Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world.” Though they make up far less than one percent of the world’s population, Jews have comprised more than half of all world chess champions, about a quarter of Fields medalists in mathematics, and more than a fifth of all Nobel Prize winners. Social scientists have found that Ashkenazi Jews score, on average, around 110-112 on IQ tests (compared to a mean of 100).

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending argue that high Ashkenazi IQ evolved during the Middle Ages in Europe due to gene-culture co-evolution. Prohibited from entering many blue-collar occupations like farming, Jews turned to finance, particularly money lending, to survive. Records from around the year 1270, for example, report that almost 80 percent of adult male Jews in Roussillon (what is today southern France) made their living as money lenders. Finance requires a relatively high level of verbal and mathematical intelligence, and the hypothesis is that Jews who could not cut it in business tended to drop out of the community or starve.

On Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending’s thesis, these restrictive conditions selected for verbal and mathematical intelligence, not for the ability to engage in the sort of conspiracy against gentiles described by MacDonald. If Cochran et al. are right, we would expect Jews to be overrepresented in science and in the leadership of political movements, as these are both cognitively demanding activities. There is no particular reason to expect Jews to be overrepresented only in liberal movements.

Indeed, MacDonald and other anti-Semites largely ignore the fact that Jews have been conspicuously overrepresented among the leadership of all sorts of right-wing movements: anti-communists like Herman Kahn, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller; libertarians like Milton and David Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Israel Kirzner; traditional conservatives like Allan Bloom, David Horowitz, and Richard Posner; and Donald Trump’s senior policy advisor and perhaps the most influential anti-immigration activist in the United States, Stephen Miller.

But MacDonald seems to be right that Jews were disproportionately involved in radical leftist political movements in the twentieth century, and in the US Jews tend to vote Democrat. We think this can be explained by the high average IQ of Jews in combination with their being a persecuted minority, which has tended to push them toward political views that emphasize social toleration and the free movement of people. In other words, MacDonald reverses the correct order of causation: rather than Jews inviting persecution by advocating cosmopolitan policies that thwart the interests of Europeans, Jews advocated cosmopolitanism as a predictable response to persecution.

Persecution of Jews began for religious reasons in the Middle Ages and morphed into political persecution as Jews began to climb the social ladder, and political leaders saw them as a useful out-group to use as a scapegoat for people’s economic and social woes. For example, when Italian traders inadvertently brought the Black Plague from Asia to Europe, thousands of Jews were murdered in retaliation when Christian peasants decided that the Jews had deliberately infected them.

George Orwell understood the psychological benefits of directing disdain toward an out-group in order to foster social cohesion among an in-group. In his great novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he gives the character who would receive “two minutes of hate” every day among the proletarians a Jewish name: Goldstein. It is obvious why. Orwell’s implication was that the Soviet Union and other regimes were capitalizing on a human need to have some group to hate in order to foster loyalty and obedience to the leader of the in-group.

There is some evidence in political psychology for a correlation between high IQ and liberal political beliefs. So we might suspect that Ashkenazi Jews, with the highest average IQ in the world, would lean liberal. Interestingly, though, IQ correlates positively with classical liberalism, which emphasizes both social and economic liberty. This seems to be because those with higher intelligence tend to exhibit personality traits like openness to experience and tolerance for different ways of living. But those with higher IQ are more likely to support free-market economic policies (“liberalism” in the old sense of the word). Intelligence is required to understand how trade can be a positive sum game, and how order can emerge from individuals freely interacting with one another.

There are also obvious historical reasons why Jews would tend to gravitate toward liberal and cosmopolitan political philosophies that emphasize the protection of minority rights. In the early twentieth century, socialists rejected natural human hierarchies and urged persecuted minorities to overthrow their oppressors. To many Jews, socialism meant doing away with the legal and social barriers they had faced for more than a millennium. While socialist societies didn’t live up to their promises in practice, the values they espoused were easy for Jews to identify with. The Holocaust reinforced the feeling among Jews that nationalistic movements were dangerous, and that salvation lay in liberal cosmopolitanism.

Can MacDonald Save His Theory?

Popper’s famous criterion to distinguish science from non-science was “falsifiability.” Any legitimate scientific theory, he said, should specify some state of the world which, if it is observed, would make us logically compelled to reject the theory. One of the problems with Popper’s criterion is that there is no such thing as falsification in the strong sense that he envisaged. Any theory can be salvaged in the face of any evidence, though this may require some fanciful theorizing. In practice, we just have to use our judgement to decide which of the competing theories we are considering explains our observations in the most sensible way. As far as MacDonald goes, no single one of the numerous factual errors documented in Cofnas’s paper can be said to “falsify” his theory. Nor can any single example of right-wing Jews or radical gentiles. We just have to use our judgment to decide whether his conspiracy theory is a better explanation of Jewish liberalism than the simpler high-IQ-plus-persecution theory that we advocate.

No amount of evidence can disprove a theory. But as the influential Jewish philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos argued, eventually the number of ad hoc assumptions we have to make in order to sustain a theory in the face of counterexamples becomes so large that the theory shows itself to have no predictive or explanatory value. Maybe MacDonald has an ad hoc explanation for why the most liberal countries in Europe, which in the past few years accepted the largest number of immigrants relative to their population—Sweden and Germany—have a very small number of Jews. Maybe he has another ad hoc explanation for why Jews like Noam Chomsky are the world’s leading critics of Israel. And for why gentiles who were not under the influence of Jews, like Rousseau and Sartre and countless others over the past couple thousand years, have been political radicals. As to whether these ad hoc explanations are convincing, we will have to use our judgment.

We don’t think MacDonald will be able to rescue his hypothesis, built as it is on misrepresented sources and distortions. But for some dishonest alt-right leaders, the literal truth of his ideas is probably not that important. They need an enemy to unify their movement. There is no more convenient a people to play this role than Jews.

SOURCE





Navy medics embed in a Chicago hospital to get battlefield experience because the city's gun violence 'is not unlike a warzone'

Since 2014, the Navy has been operating a pilot program where they train medics for the battlefield at Chicago's Stroger Hospital
Located in one of the most violent cities in America, Stroger's trauma unit sees a lot of gunshot wounds - the type of injury Navy medics need to prepare for

This year, the Navy will be expanding the program to make it mandatory for all medics before going into action

For years, the first time many Navy medics saw their first gunshot wound was on the battlefield. Not anymore. The Navy is now expanding a program to train medics at Chicago's Stroger Hospital.

Because Chicago has been plagued recently by a spike in violent crimes, the hospital's trauma unit sees more than its fair share of gunshot wounds, creating an environment not unlike the battlefields of the middle east. 

'The experience here can't be replicated elsewhere, unless you have a major land invasion,' Dr. Faran Bokhari, who chairs the trauma & burn surgery unit at the hospital, told the Wall Street Journal in a story published Wednesday. 

SOURCE





Hollywood Heaps Praise on Movie Promoting Pedophilia

"Call Me By Your Name" is celebrated by Hollywood hypocrites during their #MeToo activism.   

With one single statement while hosting the Oscars, comedian Jimmy Kimmel openly admitted what any American with a pulse and an IQ above room temperature has known for years; namely, that Hollywood has declared open war against the values and sensibilities of everyday Americans.

Anyone who has watched the Oscars in recent years (and that number has seriously dwindled) has seen films nominated for Best Picture that most Americans have never even heard of, much less seen. Kimmel explained why, declaring, "We don't make films like `Call Me By Your Name' to make money. We make them to upset Mike Pence." Vice President Mike Pence, a quietly devout Christian, has become a favorite target for the anti-Christian vitriol vomited by the pro-LGBT Left.

Why such critical acclaim for a movie that earned less than $16 million nationally? Because Hollywood loathes traditional values and rejects morality, and has worked for decades to normalize sexual deviancy. Just months after (rightfully, if true) vilifying Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore for dating teenage girls while in his twenties and thirties, Hollywood heaps adulation on a movie that glamorizes almost the same thing.

"Call Me By Your Name" is the story of Elio, a 17-year-old American boy living in Italy with his parents in the summer of 1983. His father is a professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, and Oliver is a 24-year-old American scholar pursuing a doctorate, who has come to Italy to serve as an intern under Elio's father. Elio becomes smitten with Oliver and pursues him romantically, and the two eventually engage in a sexual relationship under the nose of Elio's father. In the end, Elio's heart is broken when Oliver reveals he is engaged to a woman, and the relationship ends.

What is so grotesque and mind-boggling about the leftist Hollywood acclamation for this movie is that it occurs at the same time Hollywood elites are congratulating themselves for their bravery for the #MeToo movement, which has exposed a culture of rape and sexual exploitation of women and young boys by powerful men in Tinseltown.

"Call Me" normalizes and glorifies pedophilia, attempting to justify it by arguing the younger man is the pursuer, as if the adult was helpless to do anything but capitulate to the lustful advances of the boy. The movie portrays this as a beautiful coming of age story, a story of first love.

Those defending the movie (and the underlying question of morality) point out that Elio is 17, and therefore above the legal age of consent. Yet if we change the sex of the youth from male to female, is this not the exact exploitation of power and influence that the #MeToo movement rages against? Young women essentially selling themselves to powerful male producers and directors for personal gain? So why pursue this narrative in the movie?

Again, it's about normalizing deviancy. As writer Chad Felix Greene, who is homosexual, laments, "This film has now entrenched in gay male culture and validated the idea that a teenage minor is not only entitled to his sexual impulses but should be celebrated for pursuing them at all costs. It positions the reluctant older man as demonstrating kindness and compassion to the intense desires of the younger man by giving into and indulging his impulses and manufactures a fantasy of true and powerful love resulting. It tells a generation of men in their 20's and older that pursing sexual relationships with teenagers is not only beautiful and empowering to the younger partner, but perfectly acceptable as long as it is legal."

For the Left, maturity and autonomy are shifting sands. The Left argues that elementary-age school children should be taught the intricacies of various types of sexual behavior, and girls as young as 13 should be able to have abortions without parental notification or consent. They argue that our youth are mature enough to vote and have a voice in advancing gun control laws. Yet they also argue that our youth should be banned from owning a firearm, that they should be able to stay on their parents' health insurance until age 26, and that they should not be subject to the death penalty as punishment for heinous murders because their brains are not full developed.

Emotional immaturity and impressionability is exactly why the pro-LGBT, pro-pedophilia Left is pushing this theme, especially with the youth. This is not some conjured conspiracy theory of the Religious Right; this is the open declaration of the Left. They are seeking to indoctrinate our children into the LGBT agenda, and "the younger the better." These are not just angry campus activists screaming to silence conservatives, these are millionaires and billionaires pushing the LGBT agenda in order to "punish the wicked" Christians.

It should come as no surprise that the three men who started the transgender movement - which includes Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist celebrated by the Left - were all pedophilia activists.

Hollywood is infested with sexual predators who are tirelessly working to normalize and legalize their predatory, sexually deviant behavior. When they are exposed, they use faux victimization as a shield to deflect criticism and anger, as Kevin Spacey did by "coming out" as homosexual when it was revealed that he had sexually assaulted multiple boys.

Keep this in mind as you watch Hollywood praise those who glorify pedophilia, and seek to destroy the morals and values that strengthen individuals, the family, and by extension, the nation.

SOURCE






Australia: Must not mention child abuse in Aboriginal families

The usual unbalanced response to the issue is coming from the Leftist Aboriginal industry.  The official policy is to leave abused black children with their families and if that does not work the kid is left with other black families, usually relatives. Where all that has been tried the kid may in rare cases be fostered by a white family. 

Adoption is usually considered only as a last resort.  Of the four Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children adopted between 2016 and 2017, three went to white families, according to government figures.

The protesters act as if the latest call is to place ALL abused black kids with whites, which is not being proposed at all. The proposal is for the most endangered kids to be placed with white families.  There have been deaths among children whom the authorities have simply shuffled around among black families.

A protester below says: "Aboriginal children are being taken away at exponential rates and these rates have grown every year"  --  as if that exonerates the existing procedures.  Surely it in fact shows that the problem is getting worse and in need of fresh thinking

The real driver behind the protests is of course the strange leftist belief that "All men are equal". Mentioning that child abuse if rife among blacks defies that foolish gospel


[TV program] Sunrise has sparked intense backlash after a commentator suggested Indigenous children should be taken from their families

The comments were made on Tuesday morning as part of the breakast show's 'Hot Topics' segment. Samantha Armytage kicked off the discussion by bringing viewers up to speed on assistant minister for children David Gillespie calling for non-Indigenous families to adopt at-risk Aboriginal children.

"It's a no-brainer", Sunrise commentator Prue MacSween supports federal minister David Gillespie's proposal for white families to adopt at-risk Aboriginal children.

"Post-Stolen Generations there's been a huge move to leave Aboriginal children where they are, even if they're being neglected in their own families," she said.

The Sunrise co-host then asked controversial commentator Prue MacSween and Brisbane radio host Ben Davis what they thought. MacSween made headlines last year after she said she was "tempted to run over" former ABC host Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

McSween claimed there was a "fabricated PC outlook" among some people who believed it was better to leave Aboriginal children in abusive homes than have them adopted by white families.

"It's just crazy to just even contemplate that people are arguing against this," she said. "Don't worry about the people that would cry and handwring and say this would be another Stolen Generation. Just like the first Stolen Generation where a lot of people were taken because it was for their wellbeing... we need to do it again, perhaps."

The comments have been slammed as false and misleading by prominent members of the Indigenous community.

South Sea Islander and Darumbal journalist Amy McQuire said the two minute segment was "packed [with] so many mistruths". "The idea that Aboriginal children are not being placed in white families is a lie," she wrote. "The greater lie is that Aboriginal children are not being taken away and are being kept in dangerous situations for fear of a 'stolen generation'.

"That does not gel with the statistics: Aboriginal children are being taken away at exponential rates and these rates have grown every year since Kevin Rudd gave his apology to the Stolen Generations and promised it would never happen again."

Black Comedy's Nakkiah Lui, meanwhile, has accused Sunrise of "bottom-feeding off people's pain". "If you're talking about the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, communities and culture, maybe speak to Aboriginal children, families and adults that have been affected," she wrote. "Not white people who have zero knowledge."

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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