Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Trump is moving out ahead in the polls and many of the #NeverTrumpers are realizing this game of musical chairs will quickly be coming to an end and they will be left standing holding their ….

I get no joy out of NeoCons supporting Trump. I’ve actually been hoping Trump would at least ponder the possibility of allowing some of the architects of the Iraq War to be extradited to The Hague for war crimes trials. No military of course, only civilian leadership. It would be great fun to start making lists of the #NeverTrumpsters who would be eligible for a one-way ticket to the an International Tribunal for the Iraq War.

Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, David Frum, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, this could be a real all-star cast of NeoCons in the dock.

George W. Bush would have to be there. Colin Powell as well although his recent emails about Bill Clinton’s activities with bimbos may get him off the hook.

Dick Cheney is supporting Trump so perhaps he can get exculpated due to his ill health.

* I always did think that Norm Podhoretz and his comrade Irving Kristol were a bit brighter than the younger generation of neocons — if Norm and Irv were often wrong, at least they sometimes had something interesting to say.

The younger neocons, not so much.

Regression to the mean, I suppose.

* Israel? OK. But at age 86 Norman Podhoretz has a longer and firmer perspective than the younger, flighty neos you mention. For decades he has seen politicos come and go. He knows how horrible the grifter Clintons are and that Hillary is simply not an option for a rational human being. Norman Podhoretz knows how horrible Obama is and that Hillary with be Obama’s third term. Hillary stated this many times by proclaiming she will sign an instant immigration amnesty within 100 days of her inauguration. Passed through Congress in coordination with her favorite cuck-Republican, House Speaker Paul Ryan.

* I think it’s more than Israel, since Hillary would be as pro-Israel as Trump. I suspect that Norman Podhortez despises Hillary’s LGBT and feminist agenda (in the 80s and 90s, Commentary had a lot of pieces attacking the gays and feminists). In the past, Podhortez Sr. has also been outspoken about black crime (calling it our “dirty little secret”), so he could also be concerned about the “Black Lives Matter” racket.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/podhoretz-junior-vs-steve-sailer

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/how-the-gay-rights-movement-won/

https://www.thenation.com/article/some-jews-gays/

* It’s natural that in a conversation with an Israeli newspaper, Podhoretz would focus on our Presidential race’s implications for Israel.

And in any event, his rationale is about more than just Israel:

“Hillary has a worse character than Donald Trump,” he said. “She’s a thief and a liar and a brazen unprincipled opportunist. She has never done anything good in her entire political career. Even as a woman, she has gotten to where she is on the shoulders of her husband, not on her own merits. No, I have no respect for her whatsoever on any front.”

Podhoretz was able to dump the Commies and become a Reaganite. Rejecting the establishment Republicans’ view on Trump is just the newest evidence that the man can think for himself.

* According to prominent alt-right insiders, Trump has confided in them privately and promised to them to “finish off” the Jews once in office.

* But what if this promise to prominent alt-right insiders conflicts with Trump’s other promise to them to clone Harambe?

* He’s going to pay off his Alt Right supporters by replacing the Bald Eagle with the Green Frog of Justice:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/replace-warlike-bald-eagle-symbol-green-frog-peace

The United States, like many countries, uses predatory symbols to convey an image of strength and a warlike nature. In 2016 we feel it is no longer appropriate for our nation to use oppressive symbolism like the bald eagle. We request that the current administration change the national symbol from a bald eagle to a green frog. The frog is a peaceful, jovial animal whose mythological context is transformation into a prince. It’s multicultural, honoring fortuitous foreign figures from Ch’ing-Wa Sheng to Kek. We kindly ask that you shift the symbol of the United States from one of oppression and violence to a green frog of peace and love.

* They haven’t really had to choose so far in the US. They could get their multikulti cake (for the US) and eat it (and have ethno-nationalism instead; for Israel) all the time. Both candidates are still pro-Israel, so they still don’t really have to choose.

* Trump better not welch on that promise. We of the alt-right expect an officer corps of cloned Harambes to lead us to victory!

* The pressure on the refusenik republicans is becoming immense.
Hillary, who began bad, is becoming awful. Donald, who began erratically, has grown into a consummate campaigner. And much harder to fake, he seems like a decent guy.
People are watching his speeches and thinking… what was it I didn’t like about him? Oh, who cares?
That is changing the frame.
And those arch neo cons are still standing in the corner in the worst possible company.
They will jump before too long. They have a lot to lose if Trump wins and they find themselves on the wrong side of history.

* Trump is the least likely of any politician in D.C., save for Rand Paul and John Duncan, to get us into a stupid and needless military conflict.

* NORMAN PODHORETZ / NOV. 1, 1996

A few years ago I listened in amazement as a friend of mine, a prominent social critic, told a group of his fellow conservatives who had gathered to talk about the gay-rights movement that “we’re turning this thing around.” Normally my friend was so astute an observer of the twists and turns in public opinion on the major issues of the day that I found it hard to understand how he could have gone so far wrong in judging the way this one was moving. Or was it perhaps I who had gone completely off the rails in believing that the great campaign to legitimize homosexuality and to establish it as a fully acceptable “alternative lifestyle” was succeeding beyond even its own wildest expectations? Was he crazy, or was I?

In the ensuing discussion, I based my argument on what seemed to me the almost complete triumph of the gay-rights agenda and its sustaining attitudes in all the institutions of the culture, from the universities and the arts to the media of information and entertainment and even to an incredible extent (considering that the Bible unequivocally prohibits homosexuality as an “abomination”) in the churches. He then countered this sketch of the culture with evidence drawn from the polity. He pointed to the retreat that public opinion had forced upon President Clinton when he proposed to end all restrictions on gays in the military, and he also cited a number of recent local referenda in which homosexuals had been denied the protected status they sought through inclusion in antidiscrimination laws.

Those referenda would later be struck down by the courts—but that would neither have surprised my friend nor cut any ice with him. Thanks to their umbilical connection to the universities through the law schools, as well as their relative insulation from the pressures of majority sentiment, the courts in his scheme of things (and in mine, for that matter) were less a part of the polity than a part of the culture; and the culture, he readily stipulated, was for the time being a lost cause from the conservative point of view.

Neither of us, then, was crazy; we just had our eyes on different realities; and the debate was temporarily resolved by a reciprocal concession on my part that he was probably as right about the polity as he acknowledged I was about the culture. This, however, still left open the question of which realm would ultimately prove decisive, and on that question we continued to disagree. His bet was that in an increasingly conservative political climate, the culture would sooner or later either wind up following the election returns where homosexuality was concerned, just as it was already doing on other issues like the family, welfare, and crime; or, short of that, it would prove powerless to resist the pressures of majority sentiment. My guess was that in this area, if not necessarily in all others, the election returns would in the end largely be determined by the culture.

* Gore Vidal wrote in 1981:

Meanwhile, the redneck divines have been joined by a group of New York Jewish publicists who belong to what they proudly call “the new class” (né arrivistes), and these lively hucksters have now managed to raise fag-baiting to a level undreamed of in Falls Church—or even in Moscow.

In a letter to a friend, George Orwell, wrote, “It is impossible to mention Jews in print, either favorably or unfavorably, without getting into trouble. ” But there are times when trouble had better be got into before mere trouble turns into catastrophe. Jews, blacks and homosexualists are despised by the Christian and Communist majorities of Eait and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situation and that of the same-sexers. At one level, the Jews are perfectIy correct. A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact. Although sexual preference is an even more powerful fact, it is not one that creates any parcular social or cultural or religious bond between, those so-minded. Although Jews would doubtless be Jews if there was no anti-Semitism, same-sexers would think little or nothing at all about their preference if society ignored it. So there is a difference between the two estates. But there is no difference in the degree of hatred felt by the Christian majority for Christ-killers and Sodomites. In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink lambdas. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. “After all,” said Isherwood, “Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals.” The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. “What are you?” asked Isherwood. “In real estate?”

Like it or not, Jews and homosexualists are in the same fragile boat, and one would have to be pretty obtuse not to see the common danger. But obtuseness is the name of the game among New York’s new class. Elsewhere, I have described the shrill fag-baiting of Joseph Epstein, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Kazin and the Hilton Kramer Hotel. Harper’s magazine and Commentary usually publish these pieces, though other periodicals are not above I printing the odd exposé of the latest homosexual conspiracy to turn the United States over to the Soviet Union or to structuralism or to Christian Dior. Although the new class’s thoughts are never much in themselves, and they themselves are no more than spear carriers in the political and cultural life of the West, their prejudices and superst tions do register in a subliminal way, making mephitic the air of Manhattan if not of the Republic.

A case in point is that of Mrs. Norman Podhoretz, also known as Midge Decter (like Martha Ivers, whisper her name). In September of last year, Decter published a piece called “The Boys on the Beach” in her husband’s magazine, Commentary. It is well worth examining in some detail because she has managed not only to come up with every known prejudice and superstition about same-sexers but also to make up some brand new ones. For sheer vim and vigor, “The Boys on the Beach” outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zlon.

Decter notes that when the “homosexual-rights movement first burst upon the scene,” she was “more than a little astonished.” Like so many new-class persons, she writes a stilted sort of genteel-gentile prose not unlike—but not very like, either—The New Yorker house style of the 1940s and ’50s. She also writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known indeed to those few who know her.

Decter tells us that twenty years ago, she got to know a lot of pansies at a resort called Fire Island Pines, where she and a number of other new-class persons used to make it during the summers. She estimates that 40 percent of. the summer people were heterosexual; the rest were not. Yet the “denizens, homosexual and heterosexual alike, were predominantly professionals and people in soft, marginal businesses—lawyers, advertising executives, psychotherapists, actors, editors, writers, publishers, gallery owners, designers, decorators, etc.” Keep this in mind. Our authoress does not.

Decter goes on to tell us that she is now amazed at the recent changes in the boys on the beach. Why have they become so politically militant—and so ill groomed? “What indeed has happened to the homosexual community I used to know—they who only a few short years ago [as opposed to those manly 370-day years] were characterized by nothing so much as a sweet, vain, pouting, girlish attention to the youth and beauty of their bodies?” Decter wrestles with this problem. She tells us how, in the old days, she did her very best to come to terms with her own normal dislike for these half-men-and half-women, too: “There were also homosexual women at the Pines, but they were, or seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the company of large and ferocious dogs, were they instantly recognizable as the men were.” Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto.

Decter was disturbed by “the slender, seamless, elegant and utterly chic” clothes of the fairies. She also found it “a constant source of wonder” that, when the fairies took off their clothes, “the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs were smooth and silky…. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual preference [previously known to right-thinking Jews as an abomination against nature] and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones?” Here Decter betrays her essential modesty and lack of experience. In the no doubt privileged environment of her Midwestern youth, she could not have seen very many gentile males without their clothes on. If she had, she would have discovered that gentile men tend to be less hairy than Jews except, of course, when they are not. Because the Jews killed our Lord, they are forever marked with hair on their shoulders—something that no gentile man has on his shoulders except for John Travolta and a handful of other Italian-Americans from the Englewood, New Jersey, area.

It is startling that Decter has not yet learned that there is no hormonal difference between men who like sex with other men and those who like sex with women. She notes, “There is also such a thing as characteristic homosexual speech.… it is something of an accent redolent of small towns in’the Midwest whence so many homosexuals seemed to have migrated to the big city.” Here one detects the disdain of the self-made New Yorker for the rural or small-town American. “Midwest” is often a code word for the flyovers, for the millions who do not really matter. But she is right in the sense that when a group chooses to live and work together, they do tend to sound and look alike. No matter how crowded and noisy a room, one can always detect the new-class person’s nasal whine.

Every now and then, Decter does wonder if, perhaps, she is generalizing and whether this will “no doubt in itself seem to many of the uninitiated a bigoted formulation. ” Well, Midge, it does. But the spirit is upon her, and she cannot stop because “one cannot even begin to get at the truth about homosexuals without this kind of generalization. They are a group so readily distinguishable.” Except, of course, when they are not. It is one thing for a group of queens, in “soft, marginal” jobs, to “cavort,” as she puts it, in a summer place and be “easily distinguishable” to her cold eye just as Jewish members of the new class are equally noticeable to the cold gentile eye. But it is quite another thing for those men and women who prefer same-sex sex to other-sex sex yet do not choose to be identified—and so are not. To begin to get at the truth about homosexualists, one must realize that the majority of those millions of Americans who prefer same-sex sex to other-sex sex are obliged, sometimes willingly and happily but often not, to marry and have children and to conform to the guidelines set down by the heterosexual dictatorship.

Decter would know nothing of this because in her “soft, marginal” world, she is not meant to know. She does remark upon those fairies at the Pines who did have wives and children: “They were for the most part charming and amusing fathers, rather like favorite uncles. And their wives… drank.” This dramatic ellipsis is most Decterian.

She ticks off Susan Sontag for omitting to mention in the course of an essay on camp “that camp is of the essence of homosexual style, invented by homosexuals, and serving the purpose of domination by ridicule.” The word “domination” is a characteristic new-class touch. The powerless are always obsessed by power. Decter seems unaware that all despised minorities are quick to make rather good jokes about themselves before the hostile majority does. Certainly Jewish humor, from the Book of Job (a laff-riot) to pre-auteur Woody Allen, is based on this.

Decter next does the ritual attack on Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams for presenting “what could only have been homosexual relationships as the deeper truth about love in our time.” This is about as true as the late Maria Callas’s conviction that you could always tell a Jew because he had a hump at the back of his neck—-something Callas herself had in dromedarian spades.

Decter makes much of what she assumes to be the fags’ mockery of the heterosexual men at the Pines: “Homosexuality paints them [heterosexuals] with the color of sheer entrapment,” while the fags’ “smooth and elegant exteriors, unmussed by traffic with the detritus of modern family existence, constituted a kind of sniggering reproach to their striving and harried straight brothers.” Although I have never visited the Pines, I am pretty sure that I know the “soft, marginal” types, both hetero and homo, that hung out there in the 1960s. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the self-ghettoized same-sexer is his perfect indifference to the world of the other-sexers. Although Decter’s blood was always at the boil when contemplating these unnatural and immature half-men, they were, I would suspect, serenely unaware of her and of her new-class cronies, solemnly worshiping at the shrine of The Family.

To hear Decter tell it, fags had nothing to complain of then, and they have nothing to complain of now: “Just to name the professions and industries in which they had, and still have, a significant presence is to define the boundaries of a certain kind of privilege: theatre, music, letters, dance, design, architecture, the visual arts, fashion at every level—from head, as it were, to foot, and from inception to retail—advertising, journalism, interior decoration, antique dealing, publishing… the list could go on.” Yes. But these are all pretty “soft, marginal” occupations. And none is “dominated” by fags. Most male same-sexers are laborers, farmers, mechanics, small businessmen, school teachers, firemen, policemen, soldiers, sailors. Most female same-sexers are wives and mothers. In other words, they are like the rest of the population. But then it is hard for the new-class person to realize that Manhattan is not the world. Or as a somewhat alarmed Philip Rahv said to me after he had taken a drive across the United States, “My God! There are so many of them!” In theory, Rahv had always known that there were a couple of hundred million gentiles out there, but to see them, in the flesh, unnerved him. I told him that I was unnerved, too, particularly when they start showering in the Blood of the Lamb.

Decter does concede that homosexualists have probably not “established much of a presence in basic industry or government service or in such classic [new-classy?] professions as doctoring and lawyering but then for anyone acquainted with them as a group the thought suggests itself that few of them have ever made much effort in these directions.” Plainly, the silly billies are too busy dressing up and dancing the hully-gully to argue a case in court. Decter will be relieved to know that the percentage of same-sexers in the “classic” activities is almost as high, proportionately, as that of Jews. But a homosexualist in a key position at, let us say, the Department of Labor will be married, and living under a good deal of strain because he could be fired if it is known that he likes to have sex with other men.

Decter knows that there have always been homosexual teachers, and she thinks that they should keep quiet about it. But if they keep quiet, they can be blackmailed or fired. Also, a point that would really distress her, a teacher known to be a same-sexer would be a splendid role model for those same-sexers that he—or she—is teaching. Decter would think this an unmitigated evil because men and women were created to breed; but, of course, it would be a perfect good because we have more babies than we know what to do with while we lack, notoriously, useful citizens at ease with themselves. That is what the row over the schools is all about.

Like most members of the new class, Decter accepts without question Freud’s line (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) that “we actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.” For Freud, perversion was any sexual activity involving “the abandonment of the reproductive function.” Freud also deplored masturbation as a dangerous “primal affliction.” So did Moses. But then it was Freud’s curious task to try to create a rational, quasi-scientific basis for Mosaic law. The result has been not unlike the accomplishments of Freud’s great contemporary, the ineffable and inexorable Mary Baker Eddy, whose First Church of Christ Scientist he was able to match with his First Temple of Moses Scientist.

Decter says that once faggots have “ensconced” themselves in certain professions or arts, “they themselves have engaged in a good deal of discriminatory practices against others. There are businesses and professions [which ones? She is congenitally short of data] In which it is less than easy for a straight, unless he makes the requisite gesture of propitiation to the homosexual in power, to get ahead.” This, of course, was Hitler’s original line about the Jews: They had taken over German medicine, teaching, law, journalism. Ruthlessly, they kept out gentiles; lecherously, they demanded sexual favors. “I simply want to reduce their number in these fields,” Hitler told Prince Philip of Hesse. “I want them proportionate to their overall number in the population.” This was the early solution; the final solution followed with equal logic.

in new-class circles it was an article of faith that television had been taken over by the fags. Now I happen to have known most of the leading producers of that time and, of a dozen, the two who were interested in same-sex activities were both married to women who… did not drink. Neither man dared mix sex with business. Every now and then an actor would say that he had not got work because he had refused to put out for a faggot producer, but I doubt very much if there was ever any truth to what was to become a bright jack-o’-lantern in the McCarthy Walpurgisnacht.

When I was several thousand words into Decter’s tirade, I suddenly realized that she does not know what homosexuality is. At some level she may have stumbled, by accident, on a truth that she would never have been able to comprehend in a rational way. Although to have sexual relations with a member of one’s own sex is a common and natural activity (currently disapproved of by certain elements in this culture), there is no such thing as a homosexualist any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexualist. That is one of the reasons there has been so much difficulty with nomenclature. Despite John Boswell’s attempts to give legitimacy to the word “gay,” it is still a ridiculous word to use as a common identification for Frederick the Great, Franklin Pangborn and Eleanor Roosevelt. What makes some people prefer same-sex sex derives from whatever impulse or conditioning makes some people prefer other-sex sex. This is so plain that it seems impossible that our Mosaic-Pauline-Freudian society has not yet figured it out. But to ignore the absence of evidence is the basis of true faith.

Decter seems to think that yester-year’s chic and silly boys on the beach and today’s socially militant fags are simply, to use her verb, “adopting” what she calls, in her tastefully appointed English, a life style. On the otherhand, “whatever disciplines it might entail, heterosexuality is not something adopted but something accepted. Its woes—and they have of course nowhere been more exaggerated than in those areas of the culture consciously or unconsciously by the propoganda of homosexuals—are experienced as the woes of life.

* Steve Sailer wrote in 2005:

I recently pointed out that even though actress Jodie Foster reportedly had carefully searched out a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 to father her two children, the expected boost in her kids` IQ over what she would have gotten from a typical 100 IQ donor would fall in a range centering around merely 12 points. This is due to a pervasive phenomenon that its discoverer, Sir Francis Galton, called “regression toward mediocrity” and we now call “regression toward the mean.”

Interacting with John Podhoretz, the son of long-time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, inevitably calls to mind Galton`s great discovery.

Last week, I noted on my iSteve.com blog some of the younger Podhoretz`s bumptious comments on National Review Online`s “Corner” free-for-all. In reaction to John Derbyshire`s concerns about the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, Podhoretz blustered:

“Sorry, pal. You`re born here, you`re a citizen here. Period. That`s how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the advances made in the 20th century by immigrant children to the United States would not have come to pass…”

I suggested this “birthright pundit” might extend his logic like this:

“Sorry, pal. If you`re born a Podhoretz, you get to make a living offering your opinions, no matter how big of a jerk and fool you are. Period. That`s how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the money made in the 21st century by Podhoretz relatives would not have come to pass.”

Later, out of the blue, I received an email from Podhoretz reading:

“Please keep attacking me. It`s how I know I`m not a bigoted, racist scum.”

Peter Brimelow has observed how often a “racist” turns out to be someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. But with a neocon of Podhoretz the Lesser`s quality, well, you don`t even have to be arguing with him to be “a bigoted, racist scum.” I`m not exactly sure what “a … scum” is, but, clearly, Pod No Like. I replied:

“Such wit, such eloquence, such insight!”

He fired back:

“If you think I lack them, I imagine you think I have too much melanin in my skin.”

Hoo-boy! You got me there!

Thoroughly enjoying shooting fish in a barrel, I answered:

“How do you come up with such devastating comebacks? Do you keep a half-dozen Nobel Laureates on staff, or do you, somehow, just make these up all by yourself?”

While Podhoretz Minor might be an extreme example, he reflects the intellectual decline of neoconservatism from the first generation to the second. While the formidable father has often provoked fury, the son has mostly elicited laughter. Hanna Rosin reported in 1998:

… around the Washington Times offices, the [Podhoretz] column was often read out loud in Podhoretz`s absence, for comic value, in a ritual famously called Podenfreude ….