Searching the comments on this story at NYTimes.com I notice zero mentions of “Jew.” I guess such comments are deleted immediately.
Talking about politics in America without mentioning Jews is like talking about football without mentioning the quarterback. Jews are to American politics as the quarterback is to the New England Patriots.
Steve Sailer writes: The NYT’s article is full of demographic breakdowns regarding these 158 donors, but the word “Jewish” doesn’t appear in the article.
Comments:
* Isn’t this the sort of thing Maoist China did?
“Look at the these rich folk, they are the enemy!”
* I think the power of the media is more important than the power of people that write checks every four years.
* Wikipedia…. Israel lobby
“In 2006, 60% of the Democratic Party’s fundraising and 25% of that for the Republican Party’s fundraising came from Jewish-funded Political Action Committees. Democratic presidential candidates depend on Jewish sources for 60% of money from private sources.[49]”
Also Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, p.163
“Despite their small numbers in the population (less than 3 per cent), American Jews make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties”
footnote 55 “In 1976, over 60% of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish; over 60% of the monies raised by Nixon in 1972 were Jewish…..”
* The media is run by the same class of billionaires. As George Carlin said “it’s a big club and you and me aren’t in it”.
Their job is to convince us – the masses, that the kabuki theater we call politics is really decided by us and not a bunch of nasty rich people who own the political and intelligentsia class lock, stock and barrel. They also keep a lot of stories out of the news that can impact the narrative they feed us on a daily basis as well.
* I recall Charles Murray’s narration in his great sociological study, “Coming Apart”. In Part II (on the White Working Class), Murray seemed baffled about why all the social indicators showed pretty serious social decline among lower status Whites, men especially. Lower status White men had been steadily socially/civically/economically disengaging between the 1970s and 2010s.
It is easily explainable. Young White U.S. men see and hear this sort of this thing daily or semi-daily (as in NY Times article — White Man, undesirable, White Man, evil, White Man, the world’s foremost problem, etc.). They hear no one pushing back. A part of them realizes, “I’m not wanted,” so they stop trying as hard. They disengage.
Maybe Murray knows this and was being coy. His narration came off at times almost as if he viewed the phenomenon as unexplainable.
It is explainable. All people respond to incentives.
* “In a nation that is being remade by the young, by women and by black and brown voters.”
I’m not sure that “remade” is the word I would choose. It implies an element of construction & creation that I don’t see.
“Re-purposed,” perhaps.
* Only counting the obvious Jewish names, plus a few others I’m pretty sure are Jewish, I counted 35 of the 154*, or 23%, which is much higher than the 2-3% of the population that is Jewish, but much lower than the ~35% or so of the Forbes 400 who are Jewish.
Jews might be even more heavily represented than that if the Democratic primary were more competitive. Indeed, one could argue that the fact that the Democratic primary is so uncompetitive is the fact the the Jewish lobby’s preferred candidate pretty much has the nomination already sewn up, despite her huge and obvious weaknesses.
Bill Clinton was probably closer to the Jewish lobby than any president in history. Both of his Supreme Court nominees were Jewish, 25% of his cabinet (in terms of man years) was Jewish, and four of his six nominees to the Federal Reserve Board were Jewish, while only one was (possibly) a white gentile and the other was black. And, of course, his only child married into a Jewish family.
* You’ll notice they say ‘mostly finance and energy’, when finance way outpaces energy and the other fields; energy’s a distant 2nd and close to #3. Trying to create a false equivalence–if there’s a story here it’s the dominant role of finance.
* These 158 families are lucky to live on islands of wealth that isolate them from a country whose shifting demographics they cannot possibly understand.
July 9, 2012 By Laura Goldman
Even when I have been disenfranchised from God and synagogue, I have always been culturally proud to be a Jew. A source of that pride is the Jewish tradition of helping the oppressed, and our involvement in social movements such as labor and civil rights.
Until I saw the documentary “The Revolutionary” at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, I mistakenly thought that China during the revolutionary period was one country that had not felt the Jewish embrace. In fact, 85 to 90% of the foreigners helping the Chinese at the time of the Communist takeover were Jewish. This included the daughter of the founder of the brokerage firm Goldman Sachs, who left the comfort of her Park Avenue home to assist the Chinese.
* You would be shocked at how many people don’t know that jewish donors dominate both parties. The media certainly aren’t going to tell them…
* I imagine it’s very hard to keep your campaign going if you say things that those 158 families (or the subset that might support you given your party and ideology) don’t like to hear. My guess is that this explains a fair bit of the deference to Israel of pretty-much all serious candidates, and probably the lack of desire to restrict immigration.
* 64 of the top 158 donors made their money in finance. That’s almost as many as the number of donors (66) from the next five categories combined – energy & resources, real estate, media, health, and technology. That’s pretty damn impressive when you consider the massive share of the average family’s income that gets sucked up by housing, fuel, and healthcare.
* The primary purposes of SSM’s backers was the removal of any legal stigma against homosexuality. It was also an incredibly convenient weapon to attack traditional religious belief and morality–the best stigma to beat the dogma. Finally, it’s a perfect 1%er issue, both because it allows easy virtue whoring and its practical benefits are for the convenience or pleasure of an infinitesimally small minority at the expense of the middle and under classes for whom robust traditional marriage and family are perhaps their only lifeline from drowning in destitution.
* It’s funny that “white privilege” is a phrase that can be uttered anywhere but “Jewish privilege” – which is much more ostensibly true – must be uttered pseudonymously. Oy vey!
* Steve, are you actually implying that some Jews are wealthy? Don’t you know that is noting more than a vicious, anti-Semitic canard? All right-thinking people know that the Jews are the poorest, weakest people in the entire universe.
* Money controls the political process.
Smart people tend to make more money than the dumber ones.
As a group, Jews grade out smarter than the average bears.
More smarts, more money, more political influence.
Wow! The stuff you can learn at Unz is just mind-blowing.
* Jewish, I counted 35 of the 154*, or 23%
This is sort of an iron law of American life (or was until recently – the next generation won’t do as well due to intermarriage and other factors) just like the 1 SD spread in IQ between blacks and whites. Ashkenazim have earned 27% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans, 25% of ACM Turing Awards, and 26% of the Fields Medals. Ashkenazic Jews, 2 percent of the US population, make up 30% of elite-college faculty, 30% of Supreme Court law clerks, and 27% of Ivy Leaguers, etc.
These (including being a billionaire) are all “g loaded” activities. All of them are just a statistical artifact of the difference in IQ ( BTW, how many of the 154 were black?), not some nefarious plot by the Elders of Zion. If you shift a population mean almost 1 SD to the right, when you get out to the right tail their tail will not be as skinny by about 1 order of magnitude – instead of 1 in 500 having an IQ of 145+, you will have 1 in 50. So Jews show up in these g loaded occupations at about 10x their frequency in the general population. This is about as surprising at this point as learning that the sun rises in the east or that the gold medal for the 100M sprint has been won by a black guy. I could have given you that % right off the bat without all that laborious effort at counting ‘bergs and ‘steins. In fact I bet you missed a few and the real # was around 27% and not 23%.
* “This is about as surprising at this point as learning that the sun rises in the east or that the gold medal for the 100M sprint has been won by a black guy.”
True, but the discussion centers more on the Times’ obsession with how white the list is while it pretends not to notice how Jewish it is. Your argument could be applied to both – of course it’s whiter than America on average, because whites are smarter and richer than average; of course it’s full of older people, because older people tend to have higher incomes and greater wealth.
If they’re going to obsess about the importance of demographic disparity in political contributions then they have no right to ignore the elephant in the room. Personally, I think Jews are a lot more conscientious about contributing to political campaigns, and the gap isn’t entirely explained by income disparity. Even if you controlled for wealth and income, I’d wager that Jews are still more likely to donate to political campaigns. But that’s shame on us, not on them (though it’s a lot easier to justify campaign contributions when you know the guy you’re donating to is unlikely to betray you on your pet causes).
* I’d reiterate that tallying the Jewish share of large donors kinda misses the point when you consider that about 70-80% of Jews are Democrats. Until only very recently, it’s been taken for granted that Hillary would be the Democratic Party’s nominee – in large part because she has so many of the party’s Jewish donors in her corner. That means a lot less money going to the Democratic field (for now) since this money is all for the primary. If it heats up we’ll get a better overall picture. If it does, the Jewish share of large donors will go way beyond 25%. And if you want an even better picture of who the large donors are, you really need to wait for the general election. One out of four? That’s not the ceiling, that’s the floor.
