Luke Ford

Charles Johnson writes: Cathy Young is pretty naive about how politics actually works. And no where is that clearer than in her confused Federalist hit piece against the Alt Right.

VDare.com has already pointed out that the factual errors with Young’s piece.

She criticized and mocked me for exposing Jackie Coakley. She slimed me and has slimed me privately elsewhere in the cuckservative movement from which she gains some but not all of her income.

I was courageous; she was cowardly and signaling. I took the risk; she fired the pot shots. But you knew that already.

Cathy Young admits that she initially believed Rolling Stone’s fake rape story here.

Like Ashe Schow or Cristina Hoff Sommers, Cathy is basically a signaling libertarian who won’t actually do the brave thing when it comes to anything that matters.

I furthered her career by outing another Columbia University fake rape chick who had updogged her. BuzzFeed came after me, not Cathy.

Now that those of us who were courageous have won on the fake rape issue, Cathy has turned her attention to maligning the Alt Right movement.

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Was I wrong about the #AltRight? Yes, they're even creepier than I thought. My response to critics at @allthinkcom https://t.co/9MOOA7hSf3

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) April 18, 2016

So here’s a disconstruction of that “Alt-Right” world view.

The Alt-Right: They’re creepy and they’re kooky, and not in the cute Addams Family way

My Federalist article taking on the Allum Bokhari/Milo Yiannopoulos defense of the “alternative right” at Breitbart.com (developed from my earlier post here at Allthink) has drawn some responses along predictable lines: Cathy Young is a Jew (true), a “Marxist” ex-Soviet immigrant (here’s a tip: people who emigrated from the Soviet Union generally did so because they didn’t like Marxism)

Well, that was after 1989. Your American Tale doesn’t set the rule. From Wikipedia, a lot of these people before that were rather fascinated with Marxism:

Although German Jews generally leaned Republican in the second half of the 19th century, the East European elements voted Democratic or for left parties since at least 1916, when they voted 55% for Woodrow Wilson.^[97] American Jews voted90% against the Republicans and supported Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in the elections of 1940, 1944 and 1948,^[97] despite both party platforms supporting the creation of a Jewish state in the latter two elections.^[98] During the 1952 and 1956 elections, they voted 60% or more for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, while General Eisenhower garnered 40% for his reelection; the best showing to date for the Republicans sinceHarding’s 43% in 1920.^[97] In 1960, 83% voted for Democrat John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, against Richard Nixon, and in 1964, 90% of American Jews voted for Lyndon Johnson; his Republican opponent, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater, was Protestant but his paternal grandparents were Jewish.^[99]Hubert Humphrey garnered 81% of the Jewish vote in the 1968 elections, in his losing bid for president againstRichard Nixon; such a high level of Jewish support has not been seen since.^[97][100]

During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, Jewish voters were apprehensive about George McGovern and only favored the Democrat by 65%, while Nixon more than doubled Republican Jewish support to 35%. In the election of 1976, Jewish voters supported Democrat Jimmy Carter by 71% over incumbent president Gerald Ford‘s 27%, but in 1980 they abandoned Carter, leaving him with only 45% support, while Republican winner, Ronald Reagan, garnered 39%, and 14% went to independent John Anderson.^[97]

During the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984, the Jews returned home to the Democratic Party, giving Reagan only 31% compared to 67% for Democrat Walter Mondale. The same 2–1 pattern reappeared in 1988 as Democrat Michael Dukakis had 64%, while victorious George Bush polled 35%. Bush’s Jewish support collapsed during his re-election in 1992, to just 11%, with 80% voting for Bill Clinton and 9% going to independent Ross Perot. Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996 maintained high Jewish support at 78%, with 16% supporting Bob Dole and 3% supporting Perot.^[97]

On to more substantive things. “Pale Primate” defends the RadixJournal column which argues against a pro-life position on the ground that legal abortion reduces breeding by stupid and irresponsible women who are mostly black, Hispanic and poor by claiming that it’s not really any worse than a controversial 2001 article by legal scholar John Donohue and economist Steven Levitt (of “Freakonomics” fame) which argued that legalized abortion was partly responsible for the drop in violent crime. By the same logic, the rantings of certain radical feminists who think the number of males should be reduced to 10 percent of the human population because men wreak too much havoc on the world are not really any worse than a discussion of statistics showing that men commit the vast majority of violent crimes.

Insofar as these feminists actually admit that men might be inherently/biologically more aggressive, they might have something on you, Cathy. Many don’t, though, blaming video games or “culturation,” or media “indoctrination” or other nonsense, claiming the same, for all practical purposes, blank-slate ideology that you do.

In 2006, noted cuckservative Jonah Goldberg, weighing in on Derbyshire’s thoughtcrimes, even conceded, countering John Podhoretz, that a discussion of demography was essential to immigration politics.

I should say that I think JPod is getting too hung up on the phrase “ethnic balance” as a codeword for all sorts of unlovely things. It seems to me that if you’re going to sit down and have any immigration policy at all, it’s unavoidable that you’re going to address the issue of ethnic balance in one way or another, no matter what you call it. Ultimately, you have to choose where people come from if you have an immigration policy, even if you emphasize other factors like skills or family unification. So you can either look at it directly or you can skirt around it. But you can’t avoid it.

Donohue and Levitt stress that their conclusions are descriptive, not prescriptive. They also don’t proudly declare their rejection of the principles of human rights and equality, or sling derogatory epithets at people who adopt African children.

First, you claim equality as a moral “principle.”

I’m not going to get into a detailed discussion of race, intelligence and genetics. I freely admit that I’m not an expert on the subject; I’ve followed, for instance, some of the debate on Nicholas Wade’s The [sic – A] Troublesome Inheritance, which deals with innate differences between human population groups, and I see persuasive arguments on both sides.

You can’t claim a moral principle of equality if you express a lack of interest and/or expertise in the peer-reviewed scientific findings that document “equality” as mere wishful thinking.

The basic point I’d make is this: If we, as citizens of a multiracial and multiethnic society, want to have a more open discussion of issues of racial differences, it is imperative, as Steven Pinker wrote in 2006, to do so in a framework of “commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups.” (Group differences, as Pinker notes, “pertain to averages, not to individual men and women.”) The Alt-Right wants the opposite.

In what contexts do you judge individuals on their faceless characteristics alone? In dark alleyways? When receiving resumes? In both aforementioned circumstances on the same terms? If you do, you are a fool; you are no smarter than Jesse Jackson, whom many might consider a leftist radical, when he said…

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved…. After all we have been through. Just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating. (Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in “Crime: New Frontier – Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue” by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times (ellipsis in original). Partially quoted in “In America; A Sea Change On Crime” by Bob Herbert, 12 December 1993, New York Times.)

You may choose, Cathy, to consider an individual as you would any other, in any context, but in doing so you would put yourself, in some circumstances, at risk of harm. The battlefield, in a declared, poorly uniformed war between ethnically disparate nations, is the most extreme example of when your attitude is positively suicidal. But there are many others. Whether or not you embrace tribalism has absolutely nothing to do with whether others do. Others who may include somewhat profitable gangs who currently control entire neighborhoods in America, neighborhoods into which you certainly never venture alone.

<“Pale Primate” takes issue with my statement that VDARE chronicles crimes by blacks, Hispanics and Muslims in a “gleeful” tone. I’ll leave it to others to interpret the tone of headlines that refer to “murderous blacks hopped up on crack.”

If you find that headline gleeful, you’re projecting.

He also defends a VDARE item that criticized an Associated Press article for downplaying the Nigerian background of a Texas couple arrested for enslaving and abusing a Nigerian nanny, asking why the headline referred to the nanny as “Nigerian” but the couple’s background was buried inside the story. But there’s a good reason for that. The nanny, who was here illegally, was a Nigerian national. The accused perpetrators, legal immigrants from Nigeria, were U.S. citizens.

But this is a motte and bailey. The alt-right admittedly doesn’t recognize meaningful citizenship as legal recognition under the current regime; instead, a nation is comprised of a highly extended set of familial relationships.

I’ve said before, in this and other articles, that progressive and liberal writing on race and crime tends to descend into denialism of higher crime rates among blacks and “white supremacy” clichés. I’ve written repeatedly about this. In fact, my last Newsday column was a defense of Bill Clinton’s remarks defending the 1994 crime bill. Miraculously, I managed to make my point without once referring to “murderous blacks hopped up on crack.”

You could have. Disproportionately, more murderous blacks than whites were in fact hopped up on crack. Granted, that would not have gotten into Newsday,

No, it wouldn’t have. Nor would your previous admissions that Russian/Soviet/Eastern Bloc Jews were inordinately communist.

but I’m reasonably sure I would not have used that language even if writing for my own blog. I don’t think our only options are denialism or VDARE-style “racialism” that constantly stresses the ethnic, racial or religious identity of perpetrators and always presuming it relevant to the crime. Incidentally, if a “social justice” website decided to highlight violent crimes by white people in order to counteract racial stereotypes, and started covering such crimes in the same way that VDARE covers crime by blacks, Latinos and Muslims, I would consider that racist and repulsive.

What you’re identifying is the order of the day for national outlets, and it’s not all intentionally anti-white. Think of “Man bites dog,” versus “Dog bites man,” as Sailer puts it. These outlets have an incentive, for ad revenue, to highlight that which is rarer. People, when consuming local news, are naturally, as is based in reality, less likely to see “white man kills black man,” versus the converse. Local news’ relative commitment to reality contributed to Vester Lee Flanagan’s on-air homicidal rampage in Roanoke, Virginia. One which of course hasn’t resulted in white solidarity marches. This is a trend the alt-right resents.

“Pale Primate” accuses me of “tone policing” – a phrase that comes, by the way, straight from the lexicon of “social justice warriors,” who insist that “people of color” and women who want to talk about racism or sexism should never be criticized for expressing their frustration in such phrases as “white people suck” or “kill all men.”

Yes, I think tone matters. I believe that when we discuss differences between population groups, we should be careful not to do it in a way that dehumanizes people

Now you warn against “dehumanizing people,” and not “individuals.” Which is it? Why should individuals in an audience feel slighted by generalizations about their group? More importantly, why should the generalizer care if the individual be that insipid? The generalizer shouldn’t.

or demeans them on the basis of identity, imputes collective guilt, or justifies relegating a group to inferior status (especially a group with a very real history of oppression and dehumanization). If that’s “tone policing,” guilty as charged. I call it basic human decency. (And yes, I’m well aware that progressives sometimes pretend that the “SJW” version of political correctness is nothing more than basic and civility toward women and minorities.

The only full-time employed enforcers of political correctness concern themselves exclusively with the terms in which women and non-Asian minorities (NAMs) are discussed or referred to.

As we all know, that’s nonsense. But just because the SocJus crowd uses decency as a shield doesn’t make decency a bad thing.)

Fighting a capable, malicious enemy with kindness is a fool’s errand.

By the way, when I said that the tone at VDARE “reeks of hostility and contempt toward the presumed losers in the ‘biodiversity’ lottery,” I didn’t mean criminals, as “Pale Primate” suggests. I meant mainly blacks and Hispanics.

And then we get to the Jews.

You see they’re not the presumed or actual losers. Good for you.

Typical. Just kidding.

“Pale Primate” tries to exonerate retired psychology professor Kevin MacDonald of the charge of anti-Semitism, claiming that MacDonald is merely interested in “document[ing] Jewish intellectual and political movements.” Since the alt-rightists apparently appreciate bluntness, I’ll be blunt: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. I invite anyone to read MacDonald’s articles for themselves and to peruse his website, The Occidental Observer (dedicated to “white identity, interests, and culture”), where some 40 of the 136 topic tags refer to Jews – from “Israel Lobby”

Why are there quotes around “Israel Lobby?” Does Israel not have a lobby? Does Israel not have national interests lobbyists are working for? The lobbyists would certainly argue it does.

and “Holocaust Industry”

Again, the scare quotes. Billions of dollars have been put into making profitable films about the Holocaust.

to “Jewish aggressiveness,” “Jewish influence,” “Jewish wealth,”

Jews make up a wildly disproportionate number of the world’s billionaires. Is that conjecture?

“Jews as a hostile elite,” and “Historical anti-Jewish writings.”

“Pale Primate” also defends MacDonald’s view that “Jews played a major role in destroying Russia via Bolshevism,” since “Jews were a massively disproportionate share of upper level positions in every commissariat” in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s, including the secret police. Well, let’s see. This 1920 photo of the presidium of the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) has 13 people identified by name. Two (Mikhail Lashevich and Lev Kamenev) are Jews. Obviously, 15% is disproportionate given that Jews made up only 2% of Russia’s population at the time. But that hardly equals “Jewish-dominated.” As for the secret police, according to Yuri Slezkine, the author cited by “Pale Primate,” 4.3 percent of Cheka (secret police) commissars and 8 to 9 percent of senior officials in 1918-1920 were Jewish. The real overrepresented minority in the Cheka were Latvians, who made up less than 0.1% of Russia’s population at the time but over 50% of Cheka commissars and senior officials. In 1922, the “collegium” of the Cheka’s successor, the GPU, was made up of eight people, two of whom were Jews, one Latvian, one Ukrainian, and four (including its head, Felix Dzerzhinsky) were ethnic Poles.

Let’s hear about how the Poles and the Latvians destroyed Russia, shall we?

Insanely obvious difference: Latvians, during the Cold War, were not granted entrance into the United States simply for being a part of any ethnic and/or national group (take your pick).

But never mind MacDonald on the subject of the Jews. Here’s Steve Sailer (at VDARE and on his own blog), reviewing the Amy Chua/Jeb Rubenfeld book on successful minorities in America. After quoting their assertion that members of these groups tend to be afflicted with insecurity and “to instill it in their children,” Sailer adds: “Or in the case of the wealthiest, most powerful group, they use their influence over the media to instill it in their children and to depress, demoralize, and divide other groups` children.”

That link? It leads to an article about a book commemorating the Holocaust.

I really don’t think any further comment is needed.

You can’t even. But try to even openly to your Newsday or Federalist editors.

(I do appreciate “Pale Primate’s” tweets, which led me to do a bit more digging and find this gem.)

Luke Ford’s blogpost, which speculates on whether or not I’m a “neocon,” contains a tidbit that led me to another interesting discovery. As an aside, Ford takes a jab at me for having written two Reason.com columns on the University of Virginia/Rolling Stone rape hoax “without mentioning Steve [Sailer] or Richard Bradley”: “Hard to say if she is just lazy or ignores the work of writers she doesn’t like.” Actually, both of those columns were reprints from RealClearPolitics.com; earlier, I had written two other RCP columns on the subject which did mention Bradley, a blogger and former magazine editor, and credit him for being first to raise questions about the credibility of the alleged fraternity gang rape victim, Jackie.

You are linked to Steve Sailer I’m sure mostly because you won’t say Jackie’s last name, which is Coakley.

I’m not really sure why I should have credited Steve Sailer, who posted about the case on his Unz Review blog and then wrote about it for Taki Magazine but added nothing original.

Again, Sailer added Coakley’s last name, which you will not so much as utter. Sailer has complained for a year that outlets such as your own won’t utter the name.

the Sailer acolytes in Bradley’s blog comments who tried to argue that Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about rape culture at UVA, centered around Jackie’s story, had something to do with Erdely being Jewish. Apparently, she had some kind of Jewish agenda to destroy UVA because it’s too white, Christian, pretty and conservative, or something. (When another commenter pointed out that many of the journalists who helped debunk the hoax were also Jewish, the conspiracy nuts were undeterred: Of course the Jews will do that when their mischief is caught out!)

Again, the alt-right is trying to relay instincts of proportion, and its own ability to engage in pattern-recognize as to journalists angry at mostly white gentile institutions, which can include fraternities. Your critique falls flat because journalism as a whole, which I’ve pointed out, is wildly disproportionately Jewish. Erdely herself in the Rolling Stone piece described U.Va. students as “overwhelmingly white.” What was being “overwhelmed in this instance?” The text would suggest Erdley herself.

Okay, so these are just random commenters. But a December 3, 2014 post at VDARE by one of their prolific bloggers, Eugene Gant, highlighting Sailer’s Taki Magazine article, referred to Erdely as “militantly Jewish” (linking to an article about a Jewish day camp that briefly referenced Erdely as one of the parents) and “a hit thing for the Christophobic left” (because she had previously written a story, also of dubious veracity, about a boy’s sexual abuse by priests).

One need look no further than this year’s Academy Award winner for best picture to see where the media industry shines a spotlight in this case, notably a film called “Spotlight,” about Catholic priests’ systemic abuse of children. There’s a real pattern of selective attention here, especially when public school teachers have a much broader and better substantiated pattern of minor abuse. A 2015 documentary, “An Open Secret,” that didn’t come close to winning its Academy Award was about Hollywood’s surely more pervasive sexual abuse of the vulnerable.

The Occidental Observer ran a longer piece depicting the rape-hoax story as “ethnic warfare” born from Erdely’s “anti-White animus” (in the Alt-Right taxonomy, Jews are, of course, not “white”) and noting that some of her staunchest defenders were “Jewish female journalists.” Oh, and Luke Ford did a blogpost that referred to Erdely as an “proud Jew and anti-white fabulist” (with a headline calling her a “left-wing Jew with a history of Christian-bashing).

Nothing Catholic priests’ history of sexual abuse over that of secular school teachers’ might leave, yes, citizens of a majority Christian nation with that impression.

As for Sailer? Well, he didn’t exactly peddle this slimy nuttery himself, but he sure did pander to it.

Check out this April 7, 2015 Sailer blogpost at VDARE titled “Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Kristallnacht on Campus.” Its actual subject is the theme of broken glass in Erdely’s story (such as the glass table shattering during Jackie’s alleged rape) and actual broken glass at the fraternity named in the rape allegations, which was attacked by vandals throwing bottles and bricks through the windows in December 2014, shortly after the story’s publication.

White heterosexual gentile males are the new Jew to the SJW. Sailer was drawing an apt analogy.

If it weren’t for the obsession with Erdely’s Jewishness in certain quarters, I would have assumed that “Kristallnacht” was just a fancy metaphor. But was it actually a not-so-subtle reversal of an infamous attack on Jews in which a “militant Jew” becomes the perpetrator inflicting a Kristallnacht on gentiles? You decide.

Sailer, who is half-Jewish, by the way, in case it matters—and even I’ll say it shouldn’t—may not be the target you’re looking for here. Is Sailer one of the right-wing-loving Jews you’re fond of telling us about?

I suppose “Pale Primate” will tell me that I’m not actually disputing any of this, just “tone policing.” Right-o. I’m also not in the habit of disputing the arguments of people who think rape is a male conspiracy to keep women in their place.

We noticed you wouldn’t dispute that when you wouldn’t name Jackie “Coakley,” yes.

Incidentally, I do think that large-scale immigration of people who find Western cultural norms alien and don’t want to assimilate poses real problems. I absolutely agree that we need to confront those issues. But the Alt-Right is not helping such a discussion; on the contrary, it’s making it easier to dismiss all such concerns as racist.

A wide variety of outsiders who might enjoy the lavish social service benefits of say, Germany—benefits that dwarf those offered even by the United States—would predictably attempt to acquire them. The barriers to those outsiders are not only those that should be in those their way, but those that are: their lack of intellectual aptitude, and therefore ability to contribute economically to an economic pool built up by the deceased, who sacrificed their labor, if not their lives. The former should be good enough, even for an Aryan.