Source: 1. הימין האלטרנטיבי הוא ימני במובן האמריקני והארופאי של המושג. סוציאליסטים אינם ימין אלטרנטיבי. פרוגרסיביים אינם ימין אלטרנטיבי. ליבראליים אינם ימין אלטרנטיבי. קומוניסטים, מרקסיסטים, מרקסיאנים, מרקסיסטים תרבותיים, ונאו-שמרנים אינם ימין אלטרנטיבי.
2. הימין האלטרניבי מהווה אלטרנטיבה לתנועה השמרנית המיינסטרימית שבארה”ב, שלהלכה מתומצתת בעשרת עקרונות השמרנות של ראסל קירק, אך למעשה סטתה עם הזמן לכיוון הפרוגרסיביזם. הוא גם מהווה אלטרנטיבה לליברטריאניזם.
3. הימין האלטרנטיבי אינו גישה הגנתית בעלמא, אלא הוא דוחה על הסף את הרעיון של תבוסה אצילה ועקרונית. אדרבא, מדובר בפילוסופיה התקפית במלוא המובן, הדוגלת במחשבה קדימה. הימין האלטרנטיבי מאמין בנצחון באמצעות התמדה, תוך מיזוג דעים עם המדע, המציאות, המסורת התרבותית, ולקחי ההסטוריה.
4. הימין האלטרנטיבי מאמין כי התרבות המערבית היא הישג פסגה לאנושות, ותומך איפא בשלושת יסודותיה: הנצרות, הלאומים האירופאיים, והמורשת היוונית-רומאית.
5. הימין האלטרנטיבי הוא לאומני באופן פומבי ומוצהר. הוא תומך בכל סוגי הלאומנות וכן בזכותם של כל עם ועם להתקיים באשר הוא באופן אחיד ובלתי מחולל מפלישה והגירה של זרים.
6. הימין האלטרנטיבי הוא אנטי-גלובליזציה. הוא מתנגד לכל קבוצה הפועלת למען אידאלים ומטרות גלובליסטיים.
7. הימין האלטרנטיבי הוא אנטי-שוויונות. הוא דוחה על הסף את רעיון השוויונות מאותה סיבה שהוא כופר באמונה בחדי קרן ושדונים, והיא שהשוויון הבין-אנושי לא היה ולא נברא מעולם בשום צורה ואופן, לא מדעית, לא חוקית, לא גשמית, לא שכלית, לא מינית, ולא רוחנית.
8. הימין האלטרנטיבי הוא סיאנטודי. הוא מניח לעת עתה את נכונותן של מסקנות השוטף של השיטה המדעית (סיאנטודיה), תוך הבנה כי א) מסקנות אלו עשויים להשתנות בעתיד, ב) תופעת המדעיזם חשוף לשחיתות, וכי ג) מה שנקרא הקונצנזוס המדעי כביכול, מבוסס לא על סיאנטודיה, אלא על דמוקרטיה, ולפיכך היא לא מדעית הלכה למעשה.
9. הימין האלטרנטיבי מאמין כי זהות > תרבות > פוליטיקה.
10. הימין האלטרנטיבי מתנגד לכל שלטון ומשלה של קבוצה אתנית כלשהי בידי קבוצה אחרת, במיוחד בתוך ארצות המולדת של העמים הנשלטים. הימין האלטרנטיבי מתנגד לכך שקבוצה אתנית זרה בארץ תתפוס עמדה של השפעה יתרה בחברה הילידית באמצעות נפוטיזם, שבטיות, או כל אמצעי אחר.
11. הימין האלטרנטיבי מבין כי גיוון (תרבותי) + קרבה (פיזית) = מלחמה.
12. לימין האלטרנטיבי לא אכפת מה אתם חושבים עליו.
13. הימין האלטרנטיבי דוחה את הסחר החופשי הבינלאומי ואת התנועה החופשית של בני אדם הנצרכת לשם הסחר החופשי. היתרונות של הסחר החופשי הלאומי אינן ראיה ליתרונות הסחר החופשי הבינלאומי.
14. הימין האלטרנטיבי מאמין כי יש להבטיח את קיומו של הגזע הלבן ולקיים עתיד לילדים לבנים.
15. הימין האלטרנטיבי אינו מאמין בעליונות הכללית של גזע, עם, אומה, או תת-גזע כלשהו. לכל גזע, עם, אומה, ותת-גזע אנושי נקודות חוזקה וחולשה משלו, ולו הזכות הריבונית לשכון לבטח בקרב תרבותו הילידית, אותה הוא מכיר ומבכר.
16. הימין האלטרנטיבי הוא פילוסופיה שמוקירה שלום בין עמי העולם השונים, והוא מתנגד למלחמות שמטרתן להשליט את הערכים של עם אחד על עם אחר, וכמוהן נסיונות לאבד עמים מסוימים באמצעות מלחמה, השמדת עם, הגירה, או התבוללות גנטית.
He also predicted President Trump early on: “He will win the primaries,” I repeated, “and he will also win the presidential elections. And, because of Netanyahu’s irresolution, that will create a very dangerous situation for Israel.”
“The new model is the return to identity. This is the new direction that history is taking. England wishes to return to its identity and voted for Brexit; America is returning to its identity and voted for Trump (“Make America Great Again); and, with G-d’s help, Israel will also return to itself and vote for Zehut.”
“Zehut” is Hebrew for “Identity,” the name of his party (card-carrying founding lifetime member). I used to think of him as the Israeli Ron Paul. But he is actually much more like Trump (just as resolute, but much lower key). He is a bit more intellectual and sounds a bit like Vox in speaking, especially with the constant refrain of identity. Unlike the leaders of religious parties, who have always had a narrow constituency, he is focusing on the Israeli heartland, the generally left-leaning greater Tel Aviv metro area (population 3.7M, nearly half the state). His message resonates very well. The man wants to legalize drugs (he speaks of starting with unrestricted medical marijuana, but is open about his long term intent). He also openly talks of expelling our Arab enemies within (with compensation even; we are kind). I met him several times. Discussed returning to the silver shekel, which he said were in his thoughts when I mentioned it to him.
* I have mentioned Feiglin quite a few times over the years. He had a lot in common with Ron Paul back in the day. I am hoping that his presence in Israel and Trump + Alt Right in the West is an indication of the rising of a generally cleansing and enlightening zeitgeist.
* The people of Israel are mostly right-wing and nationalist.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Israeli Supreme Court, (which consistently flouts and overturns the decisions of PM Netanyahu and the Knesset and has no accountability) Israeli media, Israeli universities, or most people in Israel’s only large urban city, Tel Aviv.
And sadly, Israel suffers from quite a bit of “vibrancy” of its own. Jews are only about 75% of the population.
Muslims are 17% and benefit from a certain degree of affirmative action. Although like blacks in the US, they cry about “discrimination” and “racism”. For reference, France, which has the largest population of Muslims of any country in Europe is only at 9%.
Do some of these problems sound familiar at all?
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on הימין האלטרנטיבי, מהו
Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an Americanjournalist and movie critic for The American Conservative, a blogger, a Taki’s Magazine and VDARE.com columnist, and a former correspondent for UPI. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports. As of 2014, Sailer stopped publishing his personal blog on his own website and shifted it to the Unz Review, an online publication by Ron Unz that described itself as an “alternative media selection”.[1]
Sailer has generally held that nature versus nurture debates have worked out scientifically that the two sides are “about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty” such that the “glass is roughly half-full and half-empty.”[2] He’s thus often written on issues of race and intelligence as well as gender and intelligence issues, arguing that social groups face inborn advantages and disadvantages but that conservative socio-economic policies can improve things for all.
Sailer grew up in Studio City, Los Angeles.[3] As a child, Sailer appeared alongside four other grade school students on the “Kids Say the Darndest Things” segment of Art Linkletter’s House Party. He majored in economics, history, and management at Rice University (BA, 1980).[4] He earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: Finance and Marketing.[5] In 1982 he moved from Los Angeles to Chicago,[6] and from then until 1985 he managed BehaviorScan test markets for Information Resources, Inc.[7] In 1996, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and in February 1997, he was treated with Rituxan. He has been in remission since those treatments.[8] He became a full-time journalist in 2000[9] and left Chicago for California.[10]
Writing career
From 1994 to 1998, Sailer worked as a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review, in which he has since been sporadically published.[11]
Sailer’s January 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum”, published in The American Conservative, argued that nationbuilding in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article has been republished in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, and in One World, Many Cultures.
After the 2004 US election, Sailer discovered a very strong correlation between voting patterns and fertility rates. He described the fertility link in an article in The American Conservative: “Among the 50 states plus Washington, D.C., white total fertility correlates at a remarkably strong 0.86 level with Bush’s percentage of the 2004 vote. (In 2000, the correlation was 0.85.)”[21] Writing in the New York Times, pundit David Brooks referred to this article as showing the “surprising political correlations” of what he dubbed “natalism”.[22] Sailer later discovered a slightly stronger correlation between marriage rates and voting, and dubbed his theory of modern American voting as “Affordable Family Formation”: “a state’s voting proclivities are now dominated by the relative presence or absence of affordable family formation.”[23] The correlation between home prices, marriage rates, and voting was verified by George Hawley at the University of Houston, using county-level data for the 2000 election.[24]
In 2008, Sailer published his only book, America’s Half-Blood Prince, an analysis of Barack Obama based on his memoir Dreams from My Father.
Sailer is the founder of an online discussion forum called Human Biodiversity Discussion Group, whose members he has described as “top scientists and public intellectuals”.[25][26][27]
Views and criticism
Sailer cites studies that say, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites,[28][29] and that Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asians have higher IQs than whites.[30][31] He says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap.[citation needed] He suggests that a problem with mass immigration of non-white Mestizo Mexicans into America is that native-born whites in the US will become a master caste to a non-white servant caste.[32] He also considers that “for at least some purposes—race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification,”[33] such as providing a very rough rule-of-thumb for the fact that various population groups may inherit differences in body chemistry that affect how the body uses certain pharmaceutical products,[34] for “finessing” Affirmative Action when that’s economically convenient,[35] and for political gerrymandering. Sailer has also argued that Hispanic immigration is “recreating the racial hierarchy of Mexico” in California:[36]
While upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans marry blonde Anglos, downwardly mobile white men wed Mexicans. Now, there is no doubt plenty to be said for getting hitched to a Mexican lady. They probably tend to make better mothers, homemakers, and cooks than the leggy blonde careerists who, however, are so much more in demand in Southern California. But sadly, there is a big social cost to Anglo-Hispanic marriages—which raises severe doubts about America’s ability to assimilate Latino immigrants. As pro-immigration/pro-assimilation researcher Gregory Rodriguez admits, “Surprisingly, in most homes headed by an Anglo/Latino couple, Spanish becomes the household language.”
Thus, those L.A. blue-collar whites who don’t flee to Utah will tend to assimilate genetically and culturally into Latino culture.”
Rodolfo Acuña, a Chicano studies professor, regards Sailer’s statements on this subject as providing “a pretext and a negative justification for discriminating against US Latinos in the context of US history.” Acuña claimed that listing Latinos as non-white gives Sailer and others “the opportunity to divide Latinos into races, thus weakening the group by setting up a scenario where lighter-skinned Mexicans are accepted as Latinos or Hispanics and darker-skinned Latinos are relegated to an underclass.”[37] Sailer considers Hispanic a non-racial characterization,[38] identifying non-Hispanic White Americans as second-class citizens because of affirmative action, which he claims has caused and will cause more and more “anti-white pogroms“.[38]
During the United States presidential election, 2004, Sailer estimated that based on the intelligence tests from military records of candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, Bush probably had a higher IQ by about 4 IQ points.[17][39] In a report on the findings for The New York Times, journalist John Tierney called Sailer “a veteran student of presidential IQ’s”, and cited the judgement of Professor Linda Gottfredson, an IQ expert at the University of Delaware, that Sailer’s study was a “creditable analysis”.[17] Although citing Bush as having a higher IQ, Sailer has condemned Bush as “irresponsible” and “uninterested in proficiency and honesty”.[40]
If you analyze a host of real world outcomes using adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty.[2]
What you won’t hear, except from me, is that “Let the good times roll” is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.[40]
Sailer describes his personal ideology as “Citizenism”, which he explains as:
I believe Americans should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens over that of the six billion foreigners… [since] Americans grasp that we are lucky to be American citizens and they want to pass on their good fortune to their posterity undiluted.[44]
He views this as an antithesis of racism, and he argues that African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, European-Americans, and other groups can rally behind this. He has also stated that “White Nationalism is worse than a crime, it’s a mistake” and argued that the ideology, if widely adopted, would actually hurt American whites rather than help them.[44]
A survey of psychometricians by Rindermann, Coyle and Becker found that Sailer’s blog was the most accurate when it came to “news sources relating [to] intelligence testing.”[45]
Memes
Sailer is responsible for coining terms for several concepts that have been popularly adopted and are often seen in the media.
Invade the world, invite the world
Sailer first appears to have coined this term in 2010 as “invite the world, invade the world” when he said “Because we must invite the world (it’s unthinkable not to), we therefore must invade the world to be safe…”[46]
It subsequently changed to the more pithy “invade the world, invite the world.”[47]
Citizenism
Sailer’s concept of Citizenism is that Americans are “willing to make sacrifices for the overall good of their fellow American citizens rather than for the advantage of either six billion foreigners or of the special interests within our own country.”[48]
The primary concern of female journalists
Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism states that “The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.”[49]
Tragic dirt
In November 2015, perhaps riffing on Vox Day’s magic dirt meme, Sailer coined the Tragic Dirt meme when referring to an article on terrorist attacks in the following countris: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria.[50]
The baby gap
The “Baby Gap” is a reference to Sailer’s 2004 observation that white voters are picking their parties “based on differing approaches to the most fundamentally important human activity: having babies.” [51]
Zeroth Amendment
The “Zeroth Amendment”[52] is an observation that unrestricted immigration policies in the USA are justified by a hypothetical amendment to the United States Constitution. The Statue of Liberty pedestal plaque poem The New Colossus has been mockingly cited as the text of the hypothetical Zeroth Amendment.
The Sailer Strategy
In November 2000 Steve Sailer first articulated an approach the Republicans could use to win the US presidency.[53]
The approach has since become widely known as The Sailer Strategy and consists of pointing out to the Republicans that they could win by “increasing their share of the white electorate.”[53] In the recent 2016 presidential election it is suggested that Donald Trump won by adopting the Sailer Strategy[54] and news reports before and after the election suggest that the Mainstream Media agrees while not using the same term.
Posted inSteve Sailer|Comments Off on Steve Sailer Profile
* Kristol flinched when the questioner mentioned your name Steve. It was a flinch of shame. He knows he’s a fraud.
* Immigration won Trump the primaries, there can be no doubt.
The Sailer Strategy was his key to victory in the general, but I do not think immigration is what pushed him over the top in the general. My take is that it was the war on political correctness that did it.
Trump didn’t use ethnic or racial fears to drive resentment among working class whites – instead he used political correctness. PC is the cugel used by the (upper class) elites to silence (lower class) whites. Trump stood against the PC overreach of BLM, Trans bathrooms, and all the other slights that have been building since the triumphant celebration of gay marriage. In some ways it was an intra-white class struggle, with lower class voters using Trump to strike back against their betters.
It alienated more cuckservative whites, but activated the passion and enthusiasm of the more numerous lower class whites, enabling Trump to successfully implement the Sailer strategy.
Whether that happened by luck, instinct, or design is an interesting question to be answered in the weeks to come.
* Kristol is unable to understand the complimentary alienation of the economic effects of globalism (outsourcing production to the Third World) and immigration (in-sourcing low skilled labor) which yield an acute loss of dignity and humiliation greater than the sum of the parts. Likely he could understand it if he tries but doesn’t care to understand it.
The sense that you can’t achieve reasonable lifetime milestones while simultaneously enduring the psychic shock of having often hostile, ethnically chauvinist foreigners replace you and overcome you with a healthy assist from your own government, while your relative lower status is applauded as “progress” and just desserts.
* He literally sputters when faced with a question about Japanese standards of living. That’s after getting beet red when asked about immigration. I’m surprised he didn’t cover his ears and start yelling “la la la I can’t hear you”.
You would think when people are consistently this wrong they would eventually lose their jobs instead of doubling down. Post-Trump it seems they may become even more prominent. Peter Principle at play?
* I still do not understand why anyone listens to him ? He has supported one failure after another (Iraq War, Jeb Bush, Hispanics becoming the new Republicans, election predictions, tax cut for billionaires to win votes, ignore white voters, etc), why is anyone listening to him ? I just wish somebody could ask him straight to his face why he thinks he is an expert when he is always wrong.
* Scott Alexander talks about how the left is destroying the future usefulness of terms like “openly racist” by attaching them to Trump, who clearly is not. What words can be used in the future to describe a candidate who is ACTUALLY openly racist, since if you call him “openly racist” people will assume that you mean it in the devalued Trumpian sense of someone who really isn’t? Now six of the last 4 Republican candidates have been garden variety racists, but only Trump up until now has qualified as openly racist so they will have to think of some new superlative.
Anyway, Kristol is destroying the meaning of the word “wrong” in the same way. If Sailer and Coulter are “wrong” (even though they were right) then what do you call an idiot like Kristol who was ACTUALLY wrong, now that the word wrong has lost its original meaning?
Now when the Hillary folks tout the fact that she won the popular vote, that’s understandably trying to salvage some dignity from defeat, but what excuse does Kristol have?
* That was quite a defensive answer. His body language said more than his words.
* Roger Stone said it best.
He learned from Nixon that the candidate has to reach his peak at just the right moment, and Trump did.
It’s like a surfer. He has to wait for just the moment when ride it all the way.
Trump managed to catch the right wave.
At any rate, I do believe Trump would have won much bigger if the media had been at least half-fair. Also, if nevertrumpers(riff on ‘never again’?) hadn’t been so hostile and voted for that fool Gary Johnson.
Winds were against him, but Trump managed to catch the right wave at just the right time.
And there were few winds on his side: Wikileaks and Wiener.
The media try to bury them… but there was the internet.
If Kennedy was the first TV president, Trump is the first internet president.
Some will say Obama was internet savvy due to high-tech community support, but he didn’t need the internet to win cuz all the media and big money were behind him.
But Trump really couldn’t have done this without alternative news and info sources.
* Having been involved in politics since the 2000 election, every Republican presidential candidate is literally Hitler. Each candidate more like Hitler than the last. Calling opponents racist and sexist have been watered down for a long time. The key difference is that the GOP of 2000-2015 would flinch whenever they were inevitably called a racist or sexist where Trump just plowed right through it. I’m sure to guys like Romney or McCain, they liked to have considered themselves non-racists and non-sexists to a fault so they would eagerly try to dispel the labels the best they can, even if it meant throwing their base under a bus. Trump has been the only guy so far to just keep on plowing through and looks like it worked for him. The Democrats are going to panic when they find that calling someone a racist no longer works.
* BTW, @Steve_Sailer, I’m seeing you name-checked more and more. Are you no longer an unperson after last Tuesday? Can people now admit that you exist without fear of disappearing themselves?
* Kristol predicted failure for Trump before Super Tuesday,
over the summer (remember Carly Fiorina accepting the invite to be Ted Cuz’s vive president), after Khazir-Kahn-gate, during the formation of the Renegade Party, and after all three debates before the general election. One of Nate Silvers writers at five-thirty-eight were talking up Evan Mcmullin’s chances not only in Utah, but a path to actual victory nationwide even two weeks before the national election. Silver had one article after the second debate entitled, “Hillary Clinton probably finished off Donald Trump last night”. Kristol assured everyone the entire GOP ticket would be pulled down by Trump.
What has Bill Kristol been right about again? Nothing in the past year. If he didnt have a name magazine and a perch at Fox, he would be a ranting fool on a sparsely read blog.
* The Weekly Standard cult really does seem to have a problem with those 2 (Coulter; Steve). I don’t doubt in the latter case the consternation is less pronounced and less uniform With Ann it’s obvious they hate her on every front and the style vs. substance reasons could never be unpackaged– recall her pro-McCarthyism book. Yet I think there’s about a half dozen or so regular contributors of theirs now following the unspeakable Unzian blog if only furtively; Caldwell, Carlson, and Last have openly quoted from these dark outlands. Alt-Rights may come and go but the ‘Sphere never stops turnin’.
* Kristol has supported one failure after another for twenty years and it gave us Barack Obama and almost gave us Hillary Clinton.
Now Trump has triumphed and have given the GOP it’s biggest victory in nearly three decades and is poised to pull the party in a new direction.
Kristol having failed to make any impact on the primary recruited a nobody solely to give Utah to Hillary and thus cost Trump the electoral college and he couldn’t even succeed in that.
I suppose I’d be angry too.
* Trump basically addressed the issue in a way that was theretofore verboten and won the Presidency.
So one is left with the undeniable conclusion that the two party consensus on immigration which totally excluded the Trumpian policy was a falsified preference – a fabrication they nearly made law.
What they can’t allow is a legal immigration pause in the same manner as the 25-65 pause because the people might like it.
* I love it when the questioner asks, “What have you ever been right about in decades?” and Kristol answers, “Most things.” Maybe he’s been right about where he left his car keys, but he’s been wrong about every issue of national significance. If I had been in the audience I would have shouted, “Hear, hear!” after the questioner asked him that one.
* According to OpenSecrets, Bill Kristol lives in 22101 (McLean, Virginia). There are 232 pages of properties in 22101 currently listed for sale on Zillow. The cheapest single family home is going for $697k. It’s 1655 sq ft and was built in 1956. On 176 of the 232 properties the asking price is $1 million or more, and the median asking price is $1.5 million. Zip code 22102, right next to 22101, is the wealthiest zip code in the D.C. Area, which is one of the richest metro areas in the country.
So yeah, it’s safe to say Bill Kristol gives zero shits about your average working class American. The funny thing is that he talks up his opposition to the Gang of Eight Amnesty Bill while providing us with no reason why he actually opposed it. He certainly didn’t denigrate Gang of Eight supporters in the same way he derided opponents of the 2006 amnesty bill, which he called “yahoos.” Probably he just realized that if he openly supported another attempt at amnesty that no one would ever get caught dead reading his magazine again.
* When really pressed – when the questioner pointed out the success of homogenous nations such as Japan and pre-Merkel Germany- Kristol, Galston and sympathizers in the audience respond with laughter and ridicule. This is a time worn tactic of the left, particularly the (((left)). I have seen it in action at debates for decades.
One cannot have a good faith debate with these people.
* What’s not mentioned is that he’s a so-called neocon Jew who cheerled America into the ill-/un-conceived and ultimately disastrous ‘War on Terror’ (aka ‘Invade the World, Invite the World’) — Kristol has always seemed to be dogmatically stupid and obtuse — also dogmatically malevolent re what is best for America and its people — yet he still appears to be a member of the punditocracy and retains influence — and people wonder why Trump won.
* Well, Kristol lost it pretty quickly. His first tack was to insist that “Sailer and Coulter were wrong” (that the vote was about immigration), because Trump didn’t get over 50% of the vote, and the other three candidates were all pro-immigration. Ergo, the American people are pro-immigration.
When he got pressed on this issue, he started getting accusatory (“what kind of euphemism is ‘third world’), dismissed the Somalis by referencing refugees, and then started getting sarcastic.
* So, according to you, “every other democracy” has the “same” open immigration policy? That’s news to me.
Look, American Jews tend to get a great many things wrong. Their curious attitude toward Israeli immigration policy (if they indeed have one, and if it is the same restrictionist policy you assume they hold) might be one of the few things they get right. What’s the point, therefore, of wanting to punish US for THEIR perceived ideological misdeeds, via this alleged “same” open immigration policy? No need to answer; your motives are clear.
* …the point about bringing up Israel with these people is that either they’re hypocrites or they practice cognitive dissonance. It’s a rhetorical dagger to point out the double standard, because there’s really no excuse for it except to say “Israel is special.”
The Israeli prime minister has stoked a volatile debate about refugees and migrant workers from Africa, warning that “illegal infiltrators flooding the country” were threatening the security and identity of the Jewish state.
“If we don’t stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state,” Binyamin Netanyahu said at Sunday’s cabinet meeting. “This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity.”
Yohanan Danino, the Israeli police chief, said migrants should be permitted to work to discourage petty crime. Nearly all are unable to work legally, and live in overcrowded and impoverished conditions. “The community needs to be supported in order to prevent economic and social problems,” said Rosenfeld.
But the interior minister, Eli Yishai, rejected such a move, saying: “Why should we provide them with jobs? I’m sick of the bleeding hearts, including politicians. Jobs would settle them here, they’ll make babies, and that offer will only result in hundreds of thousands more coming over here.”
Yishai repeated an earlier call for all migrants to be jailed pending deportation. “I want everyone to be able to walk the streets without fear or trepidation … The migrants are giving birth to hundreds of thousands, and the Zionist dream is dying,” he told Army Radio.
Netanyahu said the state would embark on “the physical withdrawal” of migrants, despite fears among human rights organisations about the dangers they could face in their home countries. Yishai said: “I’m not responsible for what happens in Eritrea and Sudan, the UN is.”
Build something awe-inspiring. Something Americans can be proud of. Something that will repay the investment many times over for generations to come.
Uhhh didn’t Trump mention something about building a huge wall?
* Concern/paranoia about Japan in the 1980′s centered on two observations: (1) American cars were terrible, while Japanese cars exhibited high quality design and manufacture, and (2) the Japanese government’s industrial policy (through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI) seemed to point to a strategic command of a national economy that we would need to emulate.
The first issue was dealt with by much needed reform in Detroit and the Japanese companies building effective factories in the US. (You would not believe the crappiness of American cars. Every car had a clock, but no clock continued working for more than six months. I was astounded to see a working clock in my friend’s Honda Civic in 1974. The clocks in American cars shook apart from road vibration. When a colleague consulting for GM recommended a more expensive clock on Cadillacs, GM told him “Nobody buys a Cadillac for the clock.” They were right. People bought a Lexus.)
The second issue was a constant concern of people like James Fallows. MITI was already losing leverage over Japanese companies, however, and the emergence of companies like Apple and Microsoft convinced most people that central policy in the form of Industrial Policy was more likely to prop up staid companies like IBM than to generate something new and important.
* Japan’s MITI notoriously tried to get its 10 or so car companies to merge into just two under Toyota and Nissan. Honda refused.
* I didn’t have the heart to listen to the whole thing, but I flipped through it. My God, it was dreary and platitudinous and utterly conventional. In contrast there’s a Milo/Ann Coulter podcast out that was recorded just before the election. (“In this tiny corner of the world, Ann gets to be the voice of reason.”) The conversation was sparkling, funny, and had at least a couple real insights.
I get that the great and good can’t and shouldn’t let it rip to quite the same extent a couple epater le bourgeois specialists like Ann and Milo do. But the Kristol/Galston/gal talk reminded me of a Brezhnev-era colloquium in which the whole point is to drone on while avoiding saying anything either interesting or true. That could result in you getting into trouble with the authorities.
* Steve keeps mentioning a high-low tag team to screw over the middle. I noticed some historical parallels, with Jews trying to screw over other Jews through the involvement of outsiders. One could probably make a whole article out of something like this if you find more examples, at the risk of sounding like a conspiratorial nutcase (perfect for Unz.com!)
From a Wikipedia article on Pompey’s military career (He was Caesar’s opponent in the Civil War):
“A conflict between the brothers Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II over the succession to the Hasmonean throne begun in Judea in 69 BC. Aristobulus deposed Hyrcanus. Then Antipater the Idumaean became the adviser of weak-willed Hyrcanus and persuaded him to contend for the throne…The people supported Hyrcanus and only the priests supported Aristobulus…The ambassadors of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus asked for [Pompey’s] help.”
From a Wikipedia article on the last two Jews of Afghanistan:
“Simintov had lived with the second last remaining Jewish man in Afghanistan, Ishaq Levin… Levin had initially welcomed Simintov but the two fell out permanently when Simintov offered the caretaker help to emigrate to Israel to join the rest of the former Kabul Jewish community…the older man took umbrage, claiming Simintov was trying to take over the synagogue. A feud ensued, with the Taliban becoming involved after both men reported each other to the authorities for alleged wrongdoings ranging from running a brothel to misappropriating religious objects.”
* Criticizing Jewish double-standards on immigration policy is a valid debate tactic, as long as Jews simultaneously support lax border laws here and strict border laws in Israel to a noticeable degree. Even Netanyahu said that Europe had a responsibility to accept Syrian refugees, at the beginning of the crisis last year.
You imply that the motive of this line of questioning is antisemitism. That is a shaming tactic meant to discourage legitimate criticisms. I assume that you are hijacking this conversation with shaming tactics because you are paranoid, neurotic, and because you are anti-Gentile. I’m willing to say that openly.
* Free trade and immigration are the one-two punch of globalism. Free trade moves the portable jobs, e.g. manufacturing, overseas for lower wages and environmental costs. Immigration lowers the price point of labour for the less portable jobs, e.g. construction. They both need to be in place for globalism to be running efficiently on all cylinders.
* Can we demonize and punish American Jews for their hypocrisy in holding the “Israel is special” attitude with regard to immigration?
* Respectfully, could people stop using abbreviations without having previously indicated what they are talking about? I see these on iSteve frequently. If the comment is uninteresting, I don’t bother doing a Google search on what they mean by “BYMOAT” or whatever. If the comment is interesting, I try to figure it out in context. Example: “And that was the danger of SS.” My mind raced through possibilities–Social Security, Secret Service, uh, oh yeah, Steve Sailer, but that doesn’t work in context, wait a minute, “Sailer Strategy.” So I got it. It only cost me a minute. Am I just slower than everyone else? Possibly. But why not give slow guys like me a break and write “Sailer Strategy (SS)” the first time, since Sailer Strategy had not previously appeared in this post or comments?
* The presence of Bill Kristol at this Harvard symposium highlights the desperate need for a new generation of intellectuals who can articulate and expand upon the vision of nationalism that Trump, and corresponding populist movements in Europe, embody.
There is no place for a Bill Kristol after 2016 — if there ever was. He and his are artifacts of an elite bubble, and have no basis in the larger polity. This was always so, but became indisputable in 2016.
Posted inAmerica, Ann Coulter, Steve Sailer|Comments Off on William Kristol: “Steve Sailer and Ann Coulter Were Wrong.” [2:47:30]
I’m beginning this commentary on the recent assaults on Steve Bannon by quoting my response to questions that a CNN-Digital reporter asked me concerning President-elect Trump’s friend and adviser:
“There’s no indication that Steve Bannon, the Breitbart executive and Donald Trump adviser, who has been characterized as a white nationalist, is a racist or anti-Semite. Bannon is not a white identitarian or race realist. He comes from the world of Washington politics and journalism, not white identity politics. Although I don’t know the man, I doubt Bannon hangs out with people who burn crosses on other people’s lawns.”
I expressed this view, more or less, not only to CNN-Digital. I also expressed it in a phone-call marathon to representatives of a Danish daily and the Jewish Forward and, in an hour and a half German conversation, with an editor of the German conservative weekly Junge Freiheit. In all these exchanges I had to answer the question of whether Steve Bannon was in fact an anti-Semite and racist, a judgment that was coming from, among others, such exemplary American “conservatives” as Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, and writers for the Wall Street Journal. I was also asked whether as the co-inventor of the term “Alternative Right,” which has now been shortened to “Altright,” I could tell if Bannon, who likes the term in question, enjoys the company of “white nationalists.”
I tried to explain that the exceedingly elastic term “Altright” has been claimed by a number of groups that belong to the non-establishment Right. All those on the Right who are at war with the GOP establishment and neoconservative politics and who are combatting PC with particular ferocity have embraced the designation “Altright.” This is especially true of Millennials who scorn establishmentarian positions. But it’s not at all clear to me that those who write for Bannon’s website publication, some of whom are Orthodox Jews, have much to do with white identitarians who also use the term “Altright.” I would doubt that these writers go out to drink with the Philonazi blogger Matt Heimbach, who also claims the Altright moniker.
Like David Horowitz, David Goldman, Rudolf Giuliani, and dozens of other commentators, I find the charges leveled against Bannon to be outrageous slander. I am also horrified by the double standard in play when Bannon, who may or may not have complained to a now divorced wife about Jewish students in a private school, is depicted as the reincarnation of Hitler. At the same time, attacks on Jews or other ethnic groups coming from the Left are given short shrift by the media.
Disparaging descriptions of blacks, Latinos, and Catholics that have emanated from Hillary’s staff (and which have been revealed by Wikileak) occasioned a yawn from the mass media here and in Europe. And so has Hillary’s hateful obscenity about her husband’s Jewish campaign manager, which has never received the same critical scrutiny as Steve Bannon’s totally fictitious anti-Semitism and racism. What would happen to Bannon’s or any Republican’s career if, like Hillary, he referred to someone as a “f-cking Jew bastard”? Presumably that person would not be the darling of the media establishment and the presidential candidate of George H.W. Bush, Robert Kagan, Max Boot and Alan Dershowitz.
I intend to raise these questions the next time someone calls on me as an expert on the Altright who can document Steve Bannon’s possible connection to neo-Nazi websites. Perhaps the interviewers would be interested in knowing what Hillary and John Podesta said about certain groups. Even more relevant, they might want me to explain how it came to pass that the Democratic National Committee is about to nominate as its new director Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim convert and close friend of Louis Farrakhan. Ellison is entirely explicit in his anti-white and anti-Jewish views and unlike Bannon, does not require reinvention to be turned into what he’s not. The fact that Ellison is heartily endorsed by such presumed idealists as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not likely to hurt the reputations of either social justice warrior.
Posted inAlt Right, Paul Gottfried, Steve Bannon|Comments Off on Frontpagemag: ‘Inventor of term “Alt Right” explains why Bannon critics are full of hot air’
* I’ve met a few career Foreign Service officers over the years. The one common trait seems to be a sort of problem-fixing mentality towards the world. I got the impression of a vast diplomatic force that doesn’t seek to secure our interest, smooth any ruffles, and get the hell away from the rest of the world, but rather, looks for nails to hammer down, things to rearrange better, and in general, schemes to embark on.
* Trump’s relationship with the #NeverTrump wing of the GOP should be cordial but distant. Mitt Romney, John Kasich, John McCain, and the Bushes should be on the sidelines and grateful for the opportunity to be there because he could and should just exile them from the party instead. Trump doesn’t need them and as it turns out, neither does the GOP. They’re from a bygone era of the GOP that the public entrusts Trump to move on from, which I believe he will, even if there are a few neocons in his cabinet.
It’s up to us to begin building up Trump Republicans/paleocons who have the experience and connections necessary to fill these prominent roles when they are needed to.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Who Should Be Secretary Of State?
Joel Bellman writes: “As shocking as it still seems to me now, we are facing the imminence of President Donald Trump, the candidate who vowed to crack down on our free press, encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies, emboldened racists and bigots and personally recirculated some of their propaganda, defended the use of torture, promised if elected to deport millions of residents and bar entry on religious grounds to thousands more, and vowed to prosecute and jail his political opponent.
“It no longer seems such a stretch to believe that it is happening here.”
If Joel Bellman really believes that, then why is he still residing in the United States? Of course he doesn’t mean it. He just slings nasty slurs out of habit.
Posted inAmerica, Jews|Comments Off on More Hysteria: ‘It is happening here’
Los Angeles Times: The morning after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Paul Bogaards awoke with “a feeling of despair and dread or worse.” The director of public relations at Knopf Doubleday emailed that to his staff; he also told them that if they needed to they could take the day off, but that he was going to work that day…
Bogaards’ message about the power of books was meant to fend off a sense of foreboding widely shared in New York literary and publishing circles. By and large, people in publishing had expected Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. Mainstream publishing “exists in a bubble, in the same way that the media exists in a bubble,” Bogaards told The Times.
“We are, for the most part, a bastion of the liberal elite,” he added ruefully. That Donald Trump will be president of the United States has shaken that community to the core…
“Pretty grim,” is how Dayna Tortorici, co-editor of the small leftist intellectual magazine n+1, described the mood in its offices in Brooklyn. “We’re still reeling.” n+1 had been in the middle of closing an issue when the results came in late on Nov. 8 — and stopped. Several articles in the issue were predicated on the expectation of a Clinton presidency.
Posted inAmerica, Books|Comments Off on LAT: Publishers are reeling from Trump’s win, but the news is not all bad
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Jews and their clergy at various synagogues around America were gathering to sit shiva — the Hebrew and Jewish term for the seven-day period of grieving that Jews engage in after the loss of an immediate relative — because Donald Trump was elected president.
Consider for a moment how childish and narcissistic this is, using the sacred ritual reserved for the death of one’s child or parent as a way to express disappointment over a presidential election.
And of course, there were the irresponsible, over-the-top outbursts by Jewish columnists and academics. Take Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who devoted his column after the election to writing an open letter to his 12-year-old daughter.
“As I watched the returns at Donald Trump’s celebration here Tuesday night,” Milbank began, “the hardest part was trying to reassure my seventh-grade daughter at home, via phone and text, that she would be okay.
“She had expected to be celebrating the election of the first female president, but instead, this man she had been reading and hearing horrible things about had won.”
The man’s 12-year-old daughter “feared her own world could come apart” because of the election result. He reassured her, however, that her world would be fine, especially since she would be receiving so much love at her upcoming bat mitzvah.
Milbank’s daughter’s trauma was more than matched by the reaction of a Jewish adult, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine. On Nov. 8, he tweeted, “This is the worst thing that has happened in my life.”
Chait was 31 years old on 9/11.
A response to his tweet by a woman named Bethany S. Mandel pretty well summarized the maturity level of Chait’s comment. She said: “I took my mom off life support at 16 & dad hanged himself 3 yrs later. I’m sorry this election was so hard for you.”
I am sure Ms. Mandel would join me in paying Mr. Chait a shiva call.
Speaking of 9/11, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said on Bill Maher’s show that Trump’s victory is “a moral 9/11.” He suggested that Trump becoming president might be worse than 9/11, for 9/11 happened to us, but “we did this to ourselves.”
Paul Krugman, Friedman’s colleague at The New York Times, wrote that he now realizes that he “truly didn’t understand the country we live in.” Never have truer words been written. It’s tough to understand those for whom you only have contempt.
Add similar comments made during the election by other Jewish leftists in the media and academia, and you get the picture.
How are we to understand this?
Here’s one explanation: When Jews abandoned Judaism, many of them did not abandon Judaism’s messianic impulse. From Karl Marx — the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis — and onwards, they simply secularized it and created secular substitutes, such as Marxism, humanism, socialism, feminism and environmentalism.
If left-wing Jews want to sit shiva, they should do so for their religion, which, like much of Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism, has been so deeply and negatively influenced by leftism.
Posted inDennis Prager, Jews|Comments Off on Left-Wing Jews Are Embarrassing Judaism
When a Bank is called Banc, it is usually a division of the original Bank, and often the persons in control want it for their own sketchy investments, but it is a weird business and it is always amazing how someone as known as Jason Galanis could get what he did.
I find it interesting that Barry Minkow is one guy exposing this. I am not so sure about his rehabilitation either. The Times writer (Lobel?) who originally teamed with him to expose scams quit after it became clear to him that Minkow was using his position to make money by shorting stocks and then publishing negative information about them.
Banc of California, a fast-growing Irvine lender that’s been rocked by allegations that it is connected to a convicted con artist, has started an investigation into those claims for the second time.
This time the bank has hired an outside firm, a move likely aimed at appeasing a major shareholder who argued a previous investigation into allegations of connections between Banc of California insiders and fraudster Jason Galanis was handled by a law firm that was too cozy with the bank and its executives….
Banc of California has been dogged over the last two months by allegations of connections to Galanis, including what Lashley described as “a significant amount of interconnectedness” between Galanis — who this summer pleaded guilty to securities fraud charges — and bank insiders or their family members, including Jason Sugarman, an advisor to the bank and the brother of its chief executive, Steven Sugarman.
Some of those connections were raised in a Sept. 7 Bloomberg story following the bank’s announcement that it would pay a reported $100 million for the naming rights to the soccer stadium being built by new Major League Soccer team L.A. Football Club — a team owned, in part, by Jason Sugarman.
Banc of California’s stock started sliding after that story, then cratered when an anonymous short-seller — an investor who has bet against the bank — wrote a post on a financial blog alleging connections and outlining them in detail, concluding that Galanis had gained control of the bank. Lashley said he does not agree with that conclusion, and the bank has denied the short-seller’s claim.
Aurelius recently exposed purported ties between Banc of California and Jason Galanis, a convicted fraudster who, along with his family members and acquaintances, has been tied to numerous stock frauds over the past few years (find the Gerova conviction here, the Penthouse settlement here, and the current Tribal Bond allegation here). The connections between BANC management and Galanis caused a massive collapse (almost 30%) in BANC’s stock price, which speaks to how much fear the market has when it comes to paper-trail connections between Galanis (a serial fraudster) and public companies. I too have been researching Jason Galanis as his name recently came up in a loan that I was researching regarding BofI Holding (NASDAQ:BOFI).
In this report, I will show a series of connections between BOFI and Jason Galanis that I believe date all the way back to the original Gerova fraud (2010), and carry on as recently as 2015 as a result of BOFI’s involvement in a $7 million loan to Jason Galanis (now delinquent and the subject of messy foreclosure proceedings that involve the Department of Justice). Investors ought to ask/wonder how this loan is being reflected on BOFI’s balance sheet and/or if management will speak to said Galanis ties during the next earnings call.
A man once dubbed ‘Porn’s New King’ was arrested in Los Angeles on Wednesday on charges he scammed a Native American tribe and others of more than $60 million.
Charges against Jason Galanis, 45, and six others were announced by US Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan. Defense lawyers did not immediately comment.
Prosecutors said Galanis, his father John ‘Yanni’ Galanis, Gary Hirst, Hugh Dunkerley, Bevan Cooney, Devon Archer and Michelle Morton lied to the Oglala Sioux tribe from March 2014 through April about how proceeds from its bonds would be invested.
They said the dealings occurred with the Wakpamni Lake Community Corp., an economic development corporation arm of the Oglala Sioux tribe of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
The government alleges that Galanis and the others spent most of the proceeds on homes, cars, travel, designer clothing like Gucci, Prada, Valentino and jewelry.
It said they duped investors into buying the bonds as well. Galanis was charged with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit investment adviser fraud and investment adviser fraud.
‘Instead of investing the proceeds in a way that would provide capital for development and help cover the interest payments, the defendants allegedly pocketed most of it to pay for their own personal expenses,’ Bharara said in a statement.
‘The defendants’ alleged fraud has left devastation in its wake: a tribe with tens of millions in bond obligations it cannot pay, and investors out tens of millions, left holding bonds they did not want.’
Diego Rodriguez, head of New York’s FBI office, said: ‘The alleged fraudsters named in this case didn’t just see an opportunity to steal money when they thought no one was looking, they allegedly hatched a plan to scam a municipal entity from the start.
‘The most egregious fallout from this scheme is that the bondholders now hold worthless securities, and the tribe can’t make the interest payments due.’
Galanis was labeled ‘Porn’s New King’ by Forbes magazine when it reported in 2004 that he had bought the nation’s largest payment processor for Internet porn.
According to the New York Post, this is the third time in nine years that Galanis has been accused of masterminding a financial fraud scheme.
Galanis and his 73-year-old father were arrested in September and ‘charged with operating a pump-and-dump that netted them nearly $20million,’ the Post reported.
In addition, he was accused of using nearly $500,000 of the proceeds to pay for legal bills related to his pump-and-dump case.
‘The defendants also allegedly duped unwitting investors into buying the bonds by hiding material facts about them, including their lack of liquidity,’ Bharara said in a statement.
Court papers allege that the father-son-duo worked the Sioux scam prior to their arrests in September and still continued on with it after they were released on bail.
A trial for that case is scheduled for the fall of this year.
It was a headline writer’s dream: “Man once dubbed ‘Porn’s New King’ is charged in tribal fraud.” The Associated Press’s May 11 story by Larry Neumeister said six men and one woman were charged in a Southern District of Manhattan Court for defrauding an “arm of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota for over $60 million.”
Leading the alleged fraudsters, said U.S. Attorney, Preet Bharara, was Jason Galanis. Galanis earned his title as “Porn’s New King” via a March 2004 Forbes Magazine article that said he led a group of buyers for a company named Internet Billing, or iBill. Forbes reported “IBill is the largest processor of credit-card payments for the purchase of dirty digital pictures. It is literally the engine of paid Internet porn.” Forbes also reported that Jason Galanis is the “son of John Peter Galanis, the notorious white-collar crook who bilked investors of $400 million before he was thrown in prison…”
Banc of California may have some very troubling ties to a family known for fraud.
Jason Galanis is the son of John Galanis, whole stole millions of dollars from banks and investors in the 1970s and 1980s, and even fraudulently took control of the Columbia Federal Savings Bank.
Fraud appears to be a family business, as both men have lengthy histories of involvement in white-collar crime. The father and son duo recently plead guilty to charges stemming from their role in taking control of Gerova Financial, a reinsurance company, and later defrauding shareholders.
As recently as May, Jason and John Galanis were charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice for their involvement in a Ponzi scheme. The blog post points to evidence that the Ponzi scheme was run out of the same office building as Banc of California’s headquarters.
The post draws a number of links between Jason Galanis and Banc of California’s CEO, Steven Sugarman. Perhaps the most troubling involves an entity known as COR Capital. In 2010, COR Capital led a major investment in the bank that would become Banc of California, and Sugarman was installed as CEO. The author details evidence suggesting that Galanis controlled COR Capital, drawing a direct link between Banc of California’s CEO and a serial fraudster known for financial industry crimes.
With so many Galanis-related entities proving to be vehicles for fraud, any relationship between Banc of California and the Galanis family is cause for deep concern. The market seems to think so, too.
In 2010, COR Capital (“COR”), an obscure investment firm most visibly known for its associations with Pink-Sheet stocks, led the recapitalization of a Los Angeles based regional bank named First Pactrust (“FPB”). In 2012, Steven Sugarman, COR’s Managing Member, became the CEO of the bank and began a “transformational” growth strategy fueled by a combination of (oftentimes related party) acquisitions and loan growth.
Growing its balance sheet by a factor of 10x and now having crossed the critical $10 Billion asset threshold, the renamed Banc of California (NYSE:BANC) has touted itself as a “community reinvestment” lender. The bank has cultivated relationships with politicians and celebrities to project an air of success and credibility as California’s Bank. Investors have increasingly adopted these promotional narratives and BANC’s shares had doubled over the past year.
The PR effort hit new highs in August when BANC agreed to pay $100 million, roughly 10% of its market cap, for soccer stadium naming rights to the LA Football Club (which just happens to be part-owned by Steven’s brother Jason Sugarman and Jason’s father-in-law Peter Guber).
With our interest piqued by yet another related party transaction, we conducted exhaustive due diligence into BANC’s leadership team, collecting tens of thousands of pages of publicly-available state, federal, and international documents. Taken together, these form to assemble one of the most ominous fact patterns we have ever seen.
Our research establishes that BANC’s senior-most officers and board members have a broad mosaic of extensive and indisputable ties to Jason Galanis. We believe this introduces a significant un-discounted risk that notorious criminals gained control over the $10 Billion taxpayer guaranteed Banc of California.
Jason Galanis and his infamous father, John Galanis, have a long history of secretly gaining control of banks and public companies via front men, looting assets, and leaving unsuspecting investors and taxpayers with hundreds of millions in losses. The mere presence of a bank leadership team associated with Galanis should send diligent investors running for the hills.
We see striking similarities between BANC and Gerova Financial, a $1 Billion NYSE listed financial institution that collapsed on the revelation of Galanis’ secret control. Like BANC, Gerova’s executives had significant ties to Galanis and touted their community reinvestment efforts with politicians to establish credibility. In the end, the promotion was a diversion from a giant fraud that left investors with devastating losses.
Posted inCalifornia, Los Angeles|Comments Off on LAT: Banc of California to review alleged ties to fraudster after investor’s demand
I do not think that the smear campaign is only a function of Marc’s gifts. That is one factor. Reality is always multi-factorial. We have – with an incredible group of thinkers, scholars and teachers – engaged in a year-long process of information gathering and research at the Center. One of the things we looked at is why there is always a “group of victims.”
Sometimes it is because there is genuine predation and horrific abuse happening. After all, where there is smoke there is fire.
At other times however that is not the case. To cite one paper written at the Center, “Where there is smoke there may be fire or there may be a smoke bomb or where there is smoke there might be an ember that is fanned into a fire by a combination of malice, hidden agendas and woundology,” or a series of other dynamics.
We are well aware at the Center of who the people are, of their multi-year and at times multi-decade connection to each other that has never been exposed. We are well aware of how the layers have been added on to this anti-Gafni meme over a period of thirty years.
Memes like this are created when facts are ignored, complexity is ignored, hidden agendas abound. This is characteristic of the post-truth and post-fact era which allowed Trump to win the US election. It is also true that when perpetrators disguise themselves as victims and rescuers (as in Karpman’s triangle in psychology) what is actually driving the story is harder to see … until it is finally pointed out.
Obviously there is a group of people that are in close touch with each other, that support and mutually reinforce each other in creating what elementary cognitive psychology has long called “false pattern recognition.”
We are well aware that people from different stages of Marc’s life are connected to each other and have engaged, along with some new figures in a highly orchestrated and organized smear campaign.
That there is no seeking of restorative justice, that the language is always about intense demonization, that facts are regularly distorted, misstated or lied about, says a lot about the possible motivations at play. There are obviously not one but seven or eight major factors playing out in this smear campaign.
At the appropriate time and place I will add my voice to many who will – if it turns out to be necessary – analyze what happened and why in the public space.
For now, I will simply post a link to the facts section on Marc’s website which has a lot of really important information: http://www.marcgafni.com/resp/
Marc has for many years owned any mistake he made, and always been willing to meet and create resolution for anyone who felt hurt. Taking a mistake, then turning it into a story filled with outright lies and distortion and then making that your victim identity for decades, supported and egged on by many of the people who have attacked Marc for years, many of them key actors in the false complaints, the smear campaign and more, is to say the least not okay.
At what point does the alleged victim – telling a false story about what happened – become the abuser? Again this is precisely the dynamic described in Karpman’s victim triangle.
Marc has spent part of the last year preparing a full response with what is – if I may be blunt – devastating insight and substantive information in response to every one of the either false or highly distorted stories including some of them referenced in this thread. If he is further attacked he will respond fully. He is committed to – if necessary – breaking the silence and at the urging of many of us at the Center, sharing all of the context and all of the objective information – some of it new – that has come to us at the Center from many parties over this past year. The level of fraud that has been committed by some of the key parties, in so many different ways is astounding.
Yes, I work for the Center and that also means for and with Marc. Does that mean that what I say is somehow less trustable? I don’t think so. I honestly would say: to the contrary.
With all the material online about Marc, it is impossible for anyone to get close to him without having to do their own research and come to their own conclusions. That definitely happened to me, when I started to get involved with the Center in 2011.
I have been working with Marc Gafni on an almost daily basis for years now. And I must say that nothing I have experienced even vaguely resembles the picture of Marc that has been painted in this smear campaign or the earlier campaigns that are recycled here.
And the picture that all of us working with Marc are somehow mindless sheep that are brainwashed by him is just ridiculous. Nowhere else in the world so far have I encountered a more mindful, intelligent and loving tribe than at the Center for Integral Wisdom. Even in the midst of this attack, our only concern has been how we can respond to this with integrity, truth, and love.
There are dozens of people, all of high integrity and high discernment, working actively with Marc and the Center. I interact with them constantly. The atmosphere is clean, open and premises on radical autonomy and Unique Self integrity.
The quality of discourse in this thread however is so ridiculous that it is embarrassing and disgusting. If I ever have felt victimized by anything in relation to Marc, then it is by threads like this that are hurting my innermost sense of integrity, truth, and justice. This is why I am leaving this thread now that doesn’t even deserve to be called a conversation. Goodbye.
Over the last year, I have been attacked in the press and on Internet blogs, falsely accused of everything from sexual harassment to plagiarism. My character and work have been demeaned. These attacks have unfolded as a series of articles reaching back to the end of 2015. I believe that these articles are the result of a highly orchestrated smear campaign.
I want to directly address a particular false story by Sara Kabakov that is being used in an attempt not only to destroy my reputation, but now has become the basis for a wider organized campaign to destroy the reputations of peers and colleagues.
The series of articles and blogs I’m referring to, particularly ones published in Jewish press, cite the alleged “molestation of Sara Kabakov, starting at age 13, by her former Rabbi and spiritual guru, Marc Gafni.” They present this claim as if it were an established and self-evident truth. It is not.
Speaking the truth about this story is not just crucial for me personally, it is also important for the evolution of public culture in the Internet age. Fact checking and fair process are at the core of democratic society. How we manage conflict tells us much about who we actually are as human beings and as a society.
Our culture must protect against all abuses of human rights and dignity. That includes racial and class-based abuse, sexual harassment and all forms of physical and emotional abuse. At the same time, we must be alert to all forms of defamation and cyberbullying in any form. Cyberbullying and false complaints create trauma, sometimes leading to suicide and always deface human dignity.
This response, which contains detailed refutations of the false and distorted claims being circulated about my actions and character, is the first in a series of articles I will be providing various media outlets who have published erroneous stories about me.
These issues have been extensively and directly addressed on the Facts page of my personal website. However, it now feels necessary to go one step farther.
What follows is my direct response to the assertions made by Sara Kabakov in her opinion piece published by the Forward on January 13, 2016. I am writing about this relationship for two important reasons. First, her story significantly distorts key details about our relationship. And secondly, as I mentioned above, her claims are being actively and intentionally used in some of the most malicious elements of the smear campaign against me.
Sara’s Forward article describes a highly distorted and often outright false narrative about our relationship from 36 years ago. In this article, Sara introduces herself as “the woman Gafni molested when she was 13 years old,”
At the time I met Sara, I was a 19-year-old boy. I was not a rabbinical student, as Sara stated in her essay. I was a college freshman, and not a rabbi, or the man who writes this response today. I have also never been a spiritual guru as Sara has labeled me. I was a teenager in a relationship with a younger teenager. Moreover, I was not then, nor am I now, a “child rapist,” “statutory rapist,” or a “pedophile,” as many have claimed through various media sources. These claims result from the ongoing recycling of falsehoods about this relationship 36 years ago.
I met Sara toward the beginning of her freshman year of high school. I was one year out of high school. Our relationship began some time later, in the early winter of 1980. Sara now says that she was 13 during the time of our relationship, but, according to what she told me then, she was 14 during the time of our relationship. Her 14th birthday was November 30. Our relationship began in December.
The first sentence of her article significantly disguises the fact that ours was a relationship between two teenagers. The portrait of me as a sexual predator is made much more credible when in her Forward article she is twice described as a 13-year old before mentioning my actual age at the time of our relationship.
Relatedly, Sara claims that when we met, “he offered to tutor me in Talmud,” a subtle distortion that sets up a formal authority relationship, which also strengthens the abuse narrative. Such a relationship never existed. It is true that we discussed the Talmud — I was an Orthodox yeshiva student, and discussing Talmud was what we did. But I was never her tutor in any sense.
Of critical importance is the fact that, 36 years ago, I hadn’t any awareness that her being a minor was an issue. We were 14 and 19 — teenagers, who had no knowledge of such things in New York, when, culturally, such topics were far less discussed than they are today. Indeed, either these words or this topic ever came up between us — not even once during the few months of our relationship. It was just not in our cultural awareness.
As a committed Orthodox boy, I was conflicted about my feelings versus following what I thought at the time was God’s law. I had strong feelings for Sara. And, at that time, she claimed to have the same feelings for me. What once was a mutual expression of teenage love has somehow, over the course of many decades, become, for Sara, a story of abuse. This is the heart of the matter.
In describing the start of our friendship, Sara states: “He proceeded to tell me how ‘special’ I was, and that he really liked me.” This is true. I was falling for her and we shared our feelings with each other directly. She then says that I suggested we “keep our friendship a secret,” and that I was “grooming [her] into being silent and fearful.” Nothing could be further from the truth of my recollection. Our friendship was not a secret, and I never suggested it be kept as such.
It’s true that, as Sara states, I stayed at her house on Shabbat, with her parents’ permission and their full knowledge. I also stayed over many times during the week, which she does not mention. Their house was like a second home for me, and I had a good relationship with her parents. Again, there was nothing secret about the fact that we were close friends or that we spent a lot of time together. We never shared that we were dating — but not because I asked Sara to keep a secret. We naturally did not share it with parents, as is the case in many teenage relationships.
So, as others have asked, was this relationship one of teenage love or abuse? I recognize that even for open-minded readers — that is, anyone who hasn’t already assumed that the story told by Sara, or the organizers of the larger smear campaign is true — this question is impossible to answer definitely. There are two opposing narratives, and there is no easy way to directly establish the veracity of either. This is why, a decade ago, the last time Sara’s claims were used to mischaracterize me, I did the only thing I could do to demonstrate that the story I am telling here is not a lie.
I took a polygraph — the results of which are available online — to affirm my claims. It was completed by Gordon H. Barland, PhD, the former director of polygraph research for the Department of Defense. I answered five questions about aspects of my relationship with Sara and the nature of our physical contact, which was nothing greater than teenage necking. The polygraph contained two questions about our mutually positive experience at the time, and three questions regarding the nature of our physical contact. No deception was indicated for my answers to all five questions. In fact, Dr. Barland assessed the probability of deception at less than .01. He concluded that I had answered each question truthfully.
Orthodox law and practice prohibits all physical contact before marriage, including even holding hands. In her article, Sara correctly says that each time we had physical contact, I would express deep remorse through an act of Teshuvah (repentance), because I knew that such contact was in violation of Jewish Orthodox law. This is true. I spoke to the man who had been my rabbi in high school the year before, and he affirmed the “absolute biblical prohibition, according to Maimonides, of any physical contact between unmarried people.” At 19, I did not know how to resolve the contradiction between our very limited contact and what I was being taught was immutable divine law.
Despite distorted details as to why Sara and I broke up according to Sara’s account, I broke up with Sara because I was committed to Orthodox law and practice which prohibited any physical contact, even holding hands, before marriage. I was internally tortured to be out of integrity with Orthodox law. As a 19-year-old Orthodox Jew, I understood this law as a direct divine obligation, one which I had transgressed. Decades later I realize that my shame at not having been able to fulfill the law must have been devastating to Sara as well. I deeply regret this.
We broke up and Sara later wrote me a beautiful love letter, which arrived about six months after the breakup. It looked tattered and was covered in postmarks and other stamps, like it took several attempts before it was finally delivered. Sara’s letter said that we were each other’s one true love, spoke of the depth of our love, that we were intended for each other, and that it would be tragic for us not to spend our lives together. I cried for what felt like two hours after reading it. I was devastated, and I can still remember my sadness.
I called her immediately. The call was answered but she would not come to the phone. In that moment, I wondered if she thought I had ignored her letter, which very well may have arrived months after she wrote it.
In other publications, Sara has denied sending this letter. In the polygraph mentioned earlier, two questions directly concerned the letter and its contents. “After your relationship with Sara was over, did she write you that you were her one true love?” and “After your relationship with Sara was over, did she write that you were meant to be together forever?” I answered both questions as “yes,” and no deception was indicated. Again, Dr. Barland concluded that I had answered truthfully.
We are left with two very different stories about our relationship, and I am left with a very difficult question: When and how did her story shift from teenage romance to one of abuse? It pains me greatly to even write this essay, but the current smear campaign has so heavily relied on her allegations that I am left with little choice but to reflect on this at a deeper level.
In retrospect, I deeply regret my involvement with Sara. I take full responsibility for my role in this youthful mistake. I apologize with all my heart for any pain I may have caused her in our youthful relationship.
As always, I stand against any form of sexual harassment or abuse. Sexual abuse, like all abuses of power, is a pervasive problem. I stand against all practices and behaviors that seek to shame victims who chose to speak out. In speaking out, I have no intention to shame Sara. My intent here has been to respond to allegations made against me — as is my right as a human being. Twenty years of this tale has had profoundly damaging and traumatic effects on my life, on my children’s lives, and on the lives of my partners and friends. Sara cannot hide from this truth nor her own profound responsibility in perpetrating gross and horrifically damaging falsehoods, by claiming that she is being subjected to victim shaming.
Wrongful accusations, leveled by an individual or by a group, in a trial-by-Internet atmosphere are regressive. I propose another vision. I will conclude with my dream, which I hope is not an impossible dream: What if the result of this campaign was the seeking of a higher clarification? What if, over time, all the parties, with all their narratives, could sit together, compare facts, talk, and seek genuine truth and reconciliation?
Posted inMarc Gafni|Comments Off on Defending Marc Gafni
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
