Charles Murray is a big philo-semite so maybe he doesn’t realize he’s criticizing Jews as America’s new elite?
The video begins with Jeffrey Rosen yakking on about how he’s the president of the National Constitution Center.
I’m just going to share my feelings in real time as I listen. Do I really need to submit my feelings to the strictures of bourgeois morality and back them up with citations?
CM: “The Americans were particularly proud of their honesty.”
I feel like Charles Murray is making a brutal assault on Jews here, no less an assault than that mounted by the Einzatsgruppen.
Richard Lynn wrote in his 2011 book, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement:
“There are only two values in which Jews are significantly different from others. These are honesty, which Jews desire in their children less than do others, and judgment, which Jews desire in their children more than do others.” (RE: General Social Surveys)
There are eight values in which Jews are significantly different from others. Jews attach less importance to cleanliness, honesty, manners and obedience, but they attach more importance to considerateness, interest in how and why things happen, judgment and responsibility. (Fuller details of this study are given in Lynn and Kanazawa (2008).)
The results of all these studies suggest that Jews have stronger motivation for achievement than Gentiles.
Alex Linder made even more unkind remarks in his review of the movie Shattered Glass.
CM summarizing Alexis DeTocqueville: “Of course Europeans would bring their European vices with them.”
CM: “The Founders took for granted that marriage is the bedrock institution of society.”
CM: “The word ‘morality’ for the Founders referred to fidelity within marriage and the permanence of marriage.”
Wait, didn’t Freud show that this was a hang-up? If we couldn’t focus on adultery, we would have less TV and movies for the goyim.
CM: “Marriage in America was a much more solemn affair.”
Not when our satirists have at it!
CM: “The Founders were not particularly religious…but they were united in this — religion is essential for the health of the nation.”
All strong in-groups have hostility for out-groups. Just as Christians have some ambivalence and hostility for Jews, so too do Jews have some ambivalence and hostility for Christians. Jewish elites may have done more than any group to remove religion from America’s public square. When you hear there’s a lawsuit to remove a creche or a public posting of the Ten Commandments or the saying of an invocation at a football game, you often find there are secular ADL-ACLU-type Jews behind it.
CM: “Religiosity among white work class has plummeted.”
Hmm, I wonder who’s led the way in calling Christianity stupid and evil?
CM: “The pointy-headed intellectuals did become secular.”
That means Jews, right?
CM: “There has been such a deterioration in the things the Founders thought were essential to the functioning of a free society.”
Hmm, who led the way in destroying these things?
CM: “The American project is not about how well the most prosperous group is doing.”
Hmm, which group is the most prosperous in America today? Probably the group with the highest average IQ.
As the Jewish People Policy Institute noted in 2010: “World Jewry today is at a historical zenith of absolute wealth creation.”
CM: “The new upper class… have developed a culture that is far more separated from mainstream American culture than was previously true.”
Is that a shot at Jews?
CM: “There is a collapse in confidence of codes of unwritten behavior.”
“The elite’s code determines the code of society.”
It sounds like he’s talking about Jews.
CM: “The second way the new upper class is failing in its obligation is unseemliness… Some examples. Unseemliness is building a house of 56,500 square feet and 123 rooms, which is what Aaron Spelling did in Beverly Hills.”
Jew!
As someone who grew up a WASP, I notice that many Jews live more opulently than what I knew. They often celebrate more extravagantly. I don’t remember WASP equivalents of the Persian-Jewish wedding and the Beverly Hills bar mitzvah.
CM: “Being an American trumped membership in a social class.”
It does not trump membership in a tribe, be it Jewish, Chinese or black. Members of tribes are often tribesmen first and members of their host nations second. They may not care that much about America’s civic culture.
CM: “I grew up in a home home to the Maytag company. Maytag executives made good money. They could have afforded to buy Cadillacs. None of them did. Why not? Because they would be getting too big for their britches. The idea of constructing a 20,000 foot house wouldn’t cross their mind. In New York City and Los Angeles, you had people who bought Cadillacs and built big houses [in the 1950s], but if you looked around the rest of the country…”
New York and Los Angeles are Jewish centers. We live big when we can. It is a mitzvah to enjoy life and to drive a luxury car. Who’s building all these out-sized mansions around LA? We have big families and we like to live large.
CM: “This sense of wanting to be an American first and not a member of an upper class was palpable.”
It was palpable among WASPs, who used to run the world.
CM: “We also have going on among the new upper class a fairly openly expressed contempt, not billionaires, but the elites in academia, law, journalism, foundations and cultural institutions, a kind of contempt for mainstream Americans.”
Charles Murray is talking about Ashkenazi Jews here. We have high IQs and we are disproportionately the new elite. All strongly identifying in-groups, including many Ashkenazi Jews, have varying degrees of contempt as well as admiration for outsiders.
CM: “That would have been considered unseemly 50 years ago, it would have been seen as snobbery and snobbery used to be un-American.”
Am I out to lunch here or are the cultural changes Charles Murray laments largely the result of this upper class changing from overwhelmingly WASP to partly Jewish?
CM: “The unseemliness that now seems acceptable among America’s new upper class is a symptom of the collapse of codes of behavior that depend not on laws and regulations, but upon shared understandings of the fitness of things and an allegiance to behave in accord with those standards. Unseemliness is another symptom of hollowness of the core.”
Am I stark raving mad or is Charles Murray echoing the Nazi critiques of the Jews of Germany?
CM: “How much do you value what has made America exceptional and what are you willing to do to preserve it?”
I hear the marching of jackboots.
CM: “America’s new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”
CM: “Suppose that all the people who wrote sitcom plots and television series all felt it was really important that children be born to a mature adult male and female committed to their care in a committed relationship. If they all believed that, it would get conveyed. That’s what I mean by the collapse of a sturdy code. There’s no code out there that gets into the air.”
Well, who writes these TV shows? It is often Jews. Is Charles Murray saying that the Jews, the new upper class, are the problem?
In conclusion, I know most of my thoughts above are paranoid. In reality, there’s probably little meaningful difference in these things between Jewish and non-Jewish elites.
