Why Are So Many Jewish Intellectuals On The Left?

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#118 11-27-18 Populism: Threat Or Menace?

Christopher Caldwell writes:

Americans, living in the home of modern judicial review, will understand that judges are often guilty of trying to correct electoral results that don’t correspond to insider thinking. The civil rights laws of the 1960s, for example, have been interpreted to require transgender bathrooms, regardless of how democratic majorities might feel about them. Certain western European democracies work under analogous constraints. In Italy, both investigative magistrates (the equivalent of federal prosecutors) and adjudicative magistrates (the equivalent of federal judges) are members of the judiciary branch, and the bench, for the most part, operates as a self-perpetuating guild. Judges, not legislators or executives, appoint and approve judicial hires. Like Americans, Italians had plausible 20th-century reasons for enhancing the prerogatives of judges. Americans wanted to smash segregation. Italians wanted to ensure—in the wake of Mussolini, fascism, and defeat—that no prosecutor working on behalf of a strongman would use his office to throw political opponents in jail.

As it turned out, allowing the judiciary to be “independent” in this way was an even bigger risk. For, in Italy as in the United States, the judiciary is both a powerful regulatory body and a subset of what we now call the One Percent. Italian lawyers and judges, like our own, have a cultural affinity with intellectuals and progressive politicians. The result is that, when conservative governments come to power, the judiciary joins the opposition. Silvio Berlusconi, the madcap media billionaire who after 1994 became the longest-serving postwar Italian prime minister, was in and out of courtrooms for long-ago business irregularities for the whole two decades he was in or near power. He was convicted of tax fraud in 2013 and banned from politics for six years, until 2019.

Since the new League-Five Star coalition took power in mid-2018, Italy’s situation has paralleled that of the United States even more closely, with judges seeking ingenious ways to thwart a government they oppose on ideological grounds. A Genovese judge threatened to seize the League’s entire €49-million treasury, for an embezzlement case that antedates Salvini’s takeover of the party. After Salvini delayed the disembarkation of 177 Eritreans who had arrived aboard the Italian Coast Guard boat Diciotti, a prosecutor in Agrigento indicted him for kidnapping.

Where the United States is unloved among European populists, it is sometimes as the source of such judicial chicanery. American forces wrote or inspired a number of postwar constitutions, including the German Grundgesetz, which contains guarantees that many blame for the country’s impending “dissolution” by migration. “It is high time,” writes Frank Böckelmann, “for a constitution that is of the German people and for the German people.” For another thing, the United States tax code provides the model for various activist foundations that have left governments feeling surveilled and threatened in their sovereignty. That has been particularly so in Hungary, which in recent months has moved to close the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros’s charities and to shutter a university he founded.

Orbán’s philosophy has been described in Western headlines as an attack on democracy. It is more accurately described as a passionate defense of his own vision of democracy. Orbán’s vision is different from the one that prevails in the West today. It is closer to the understanding of democracy that prevailed in the United States 60 years ago. For Orbán, democracy is when a sovereign people votes and chooses its destiny. Period. A democratic republic need not be liberal, or neutral as to values. It can favor Christianity or patriotism, if it so chooses, and it can even proudly call such choices “illiberal,” as Orbán did in a 2014 speech.

* Illegal Immigration Under Trump On Track to Hit Highest Level in a Decade

* Is Twitter worth it?

* Indie erotic cinema director Erika Lust owns the site XConfessions, where women submit fantasies and she adapts them into beautiful pornographic films.

* Roger Stone says Trump won’t run in 2020

* Re Stone: “Since the CIA views WikiLeaks as a Russian front and Assange as a Kremlin agent of influence, the alleged crime could potentially be very serious.” Since when has the CIA been in the prosecution business?

* Watch: Six Years Ago Obama Promised to Buy a Chevy Volt. Now It Is Dead

* HOSTILE TRIBESMEN FORCE INDIAN POLICE TO ABANDON ATTEMPT TO RECOVER AMERICAN MISSIONARY’S BODY

* Kate Beckinsale Boasts About Facials from Foreskin of South Korean Infants

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Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hillary Spurling

Here are some excerpts:

* But although the couple’s disparity in age proved immaterial [Anthony’s mom was 38 when she married his 21 yo dad), in practice its psychological consequences were devastating. Their union broke another ingrained taboo against a practice universally condemned in that self-righteous age as abhorrent and unnatural. Maud was acutely aware that in other people’s eyes, probably to some extent in her own, she stood convicted of cradle-snatching. She saw or suspected public hostility, mockery, sniggers and pointing fingers on all sides. Her public confidence evaporated. Contact with the outside world became painful and, as she got older, excruciating. She no longer went to parties. She stopped seeing her own friends, and made no attempt to get to know her husband’s. From now on she was tortured by shyness. Its shadow darkened and distorted her life, and in due course her son’s…

His [dad] desires were momentous and so urgent he had not the smallest ability to defer gratification.

* parties. The problem was that Tony was basically ineligible. He had no prospects, no connections, nothing to inherit and he wasn’t related to anyone people had ever heard of in the world of debutante dances and court presentation. A job in the City or the Foreign Office, even at a pinch the BBC, might have been acceptable but girls like Dig Biddulph did not marry boys with dead-end day jobs in small unstable concerns like Duckworths.

* The friend he made that autumn at the Poly was Evelyn Waugh, who was studying carpentry…. Evelyn was drinking again, still hard up and living at home on a modest allowance from his father, supplemented by a part-time job that he was “too ashamed to mention” teaching at a school in Golders Green. His plan was to be a craftsman or a carpenter.

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The Dog Show

A friend says: I’m watching the Westminster dog show and it is so woke. All about how each breed has its strengths… each approaching its own ideal!

I was thinking of a didactic “Animal Farm”-like narrative featuring different breeds of dogs stuck in a pound together — including some mutts & cross-breeds, of course. Different dogs have different strengths and weaknesses, and so the dogs struggle to distribute scarce resources and to cooperate early on, but eventually they get red-pilled, go tribal, become identitarian, etc. The golden retriever is smarter than all the rest, so no matter what they’re doing, he outperforms and tends to rise to the top (he’s the Jew, obviously).

All the dogs want dog treats, but somehow the golden retriever always gets the most of them… then what should happen? Should the poodles accept the supremacy of the goldens and just fall in line, and accept their station?

This is the whole middle part of the Tucker & Ben Shapiro interview… basically why is intellectual labor so much better rewarded than the labor of a fit, energetic, 24-year old man with an IQ of 95? Tucker makes the point that women have the leg up now because of this arrangement.

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America’s First Elites

00:00 America’s First Elites (WASPs)
10:00 Pilleater joins
30:00 Kevin Michael Grace joins
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/americas-first-elites/
46:20 Ed “Borzoi” Chang joins, he was recently doxxed by Media Matters
1:16:00 New Yorker: “Man Made,” a Film About Transgender Bodybuilders, Upends the Traditional Documentary Gaze
1:21:00 NYT: My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy
1:27:00 Twitter Permanently Bans Feminist For Writing That ‘Men Aren’t Women’
1:30:00 WHO IS MASIN ELIJÉ? MAN TWEETS ALLEGATIONS AGAINST DWIGHT HOWARD OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
1:37:00 Class differences in sexual vice
1:38:00 Rutgers Women’s Studies is the 1927 Yankees of feminism
1:49:00 Jonathan Yaniv, Canadian Jewish guy, now identifies as a woman and is on a warpath
2:00:00 Ukraine prepares to defend itself from ‘an immediate INVASION’ after three of its navy vessels were captured by Russian forces
2:05:00 White Liberals Present Themselves as Less Competent in Interactions with African-Americans
2:07:00 Caravan rushes US border, repelled by tear gas
2:09:00 America’s First Elites
2:14:00 How Porn’s Female Directors Are Putting Hollywood to Shame
2:16:00 Will 2019 be the year of women in porn?
2:23:00 ‘If Brexit is finished, then so is democracy’
2:28:00 WHO IS MASIN ELIJÉ? MAN TWEETS ALLEGATIONS AGAINST DWIGHT HOWARD OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
2:34:00 Who Will Fix Facebook?
2:35:00 David French: The White-Supremacy Surge
2:36:00 WP: In the United States, right-wing violence is on the rise
2:43:00 The latest on Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump
2:47:00 There’s No Point To Regulating Big Tech Because It’s Failing
2:53:00 Richard Spencer denounces the Sailer Strategy
2:56:00 Stefan Molyneux
2:59:00 Brundlefly joins
3:15:00 Are Jews God’s Chosen People?
3:26:00 David French and the Closing of the American Mind
3:33:00 Somali Muslim Arrested for Attempting to Mow Down Jews With Car in Front of L.A. Synagogue
Robert W. Merry writes:

The Saturday Evening Post’s connection to the old stock was through the predominantly Anglo-Saxon localities of the heartland, whose leaders ran their communities much as the national elite ran the country. They dominated the banks, civic organizations, school boards, county courthouses, and businesses. And they constituted the core readership of the Post, for decades the nation’s most influential and widely circulated magazine. Its old-fashioned editorials and Norman Rockwell covers depicting middle-class scenes were regarded by many as symbolic not just of the magazine and of their own families but of the nation itself.

This cultural symbiosis between the elites of the Northeast and the heartland masses made for a relatively high degree of civic amity within the polity and relatively little class animosity. The acceptance of the elite by the masses generated self-confidence at the top, and this in turn generated an accommodative and soft-edged leadership. Stewart Alsop, in writing about the elite’s decline, referred to it as having been made up of “self-confident and more or less disinterested people.”

…But it would be a mistake to view the old elite as soft or easygoing on matters related to the national identity or the country’s political and foreign policy aims. This was brilliantly captured by writer and thinker Benjamin Schwarz in a provocative 1995 essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Diversity Myth.” Schwarz punctures what the magazine called the “hortatory version of our history, in which America has long been a land of ethnic tolerance and multicultural harmony.”

No, says Schwarz: until probably the 1960s, the “unity” of the United States derived not from its “warm welcoming of and accommodation to nationalist, ethnic, and linguistic differences but from the ability and willingness of an Anglo elite to stamp its image on other peoples coming to this country.” This was the legacy of “a cultural and ethnic predominance that would not tolerate conflict or confusion regarding the national identity.”

Consider the stark expression of Stewart Alsop’s great-uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, who offered words of both welcome and warning as waves of immigrants entered the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe. “We have no room,” declared Roosevelt, “for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans.” Newcomers who had become “completely Americanized,” he added, “stand on exactly the same plane as the descendants of any Puritan, Cavalier, or Knickerbocker…. But where immigrants, or the sons of immigrants, do not heartily and in good faith throw in their lot with us, but cling to the speech, the customs, the ways of life, and the habits of thought of the Old World which they have left, they thereby harm both themselves and us.” America would not tolerate, said Roosevelt, newcomers inclined to “confuse the issues with which we are struggling by introducing among us Old-World quarrels and prejudices.”

This was a distillation of the concept of the melting pot—which, as Schwarz correctly notes, “amounted to the repression, not the celebration, of ethnic diversity.” He adds that, given the immigrants’ value as working-class stalwarts at the dawn of industrial America, no effort to curtail the immigrant wave could succeed politically (until the 1920s). But these groups weren’t allowed to vitiate Anglo-American dominance. “Americanization, then,” writes Schwarz, “although it did not cleanse America of its ethnic minorities, cleansed its minorities of their ethnicity.”

…The British ventured to the New World largely as families to create communities, commerce, and wealth born of toil. Bent on perpetuating the folkways and mores of the Old Country, the menfolk brought their own women and generally refused to mix with the Native Americans. The Spanish of Mexico, by contrast, came as conquerors and plunderers. They mixed freely with indigenous women—beginning with Hernan Cortes, who, upon arriving, promptly took as his mistress the lovely and intellectually vibrant Princess Malintzin. The result was that, within a few generations, ethnicity became a particularly vexing issue in the lands of New Spain. Eventually, a new class system based on blood lines emerged, with the increasingly numerous mixed-blood mestizos harboring political and social resentment born of mistreatment and prejudice from both Indians and Spaniards. One result was that the kind of civic solidarity seen in Anglo-Saxon America couldn’t take root in Mexico.

A friend says:

Gary Cooper has been replaced by Dustin Hoffman! Haha. Wow.

“It should be noted that this article represents no call for any kind of restoration. History moves forward with a crushing force and doesn’t pause for nostalgia.”

Well, of couuuurse.

First thought: maybe hyper-literate urbanism can never be the aspirational model for an entire people. I think this used to be commonly understood. We urbanites needed Iowans to grow our food. It would be crazy to imagine that everywhere in America should be like San Fran and NYC… those places aren’t even self-sustaining. But that mutual respect—urban respecting rural and vv) has fallen apart.

The phrase “old-fashioned” as used in this article to describe Saturday Evening Post maddens me.

Old elite were “disinterested people.” Yeah. And remember Washington’s early warning about partisanship. This is the ethos I operate within OR ELSE I risk ostracism… I have to teach my classes (do my job) as if I have no race, no interests. I’m a ghost. Or else I’m a Nazi. That disinterest, which was the mark of a good person, almost of a philosopher, was weaponized and used against us.

The quote from Roosevelt about people acting “simply as Americans” is akin to the Christian command to be born again. No more Greek or Jew.

To put all this another way: a shadow identity was invented that looked outwardly WASP, but inwardly was anything but WASP… the WASP ethos was assumed and self-policing because, as the article says, one needed to assimilate or they wouldn’t be able to make a living. But some realized this situation and consciously performed assimilation (language, dress, even manners) while inwardly never assimilating. And then these shadow WASPs gradually changed the ideal form so that “American” and “WASP” no longer looked exactly the same.

Note: as to why the real WASPs let this happen… and how responsible they are. Eh. I dunno. Maybe they didn’t think of making movies as a particularly important contribution to society. Guess they were wrong.

I think capitalism and even “usury” is an unremarked part of this story. Capital seems to take on a need to expand, and so bringing in Italians and Irish and even Chinese was profitable through 1920… in Federalist 10 Madison talked about the “rage for paper money” being a wicked project. Andrew Jackson tried to resist the bank in like 1828, but the bank won… I don’t know that I’ve ever convinced you about this at all—you seem to be almost an Austrian when it comes to capitalism. But it seems to me like we ought to be looking for other economic models that do not require constant growth and expansion. Otherwise, in the end, the Bank eats up everybody but the bankers, so to speak.

Key sentence: “Thus did the old elite soon come under attack from those who saw it as an impediment to American social and cultural progress.” — progress. Ugh! This is crucial. It begs the question — progress toward what? What IS “merit?” One thing is clear: Matthew Stewart never actually wants to live in anything other than a white neighborhood… however he virtue signals about it.

Interesting sidenote re: Huntington thesis… Roman Catholicism was long associated with Race & ethnicity, and almost all popes were Italian or French… but the last three have been Poland, Germany, and Argentina, and soon (of course) that circle will widen and Roman Catholicism will be merely a creed. And that isn’t sufficient.

Final thought: the kulaks who died in Ukraine were basically country bumpkins. Ukraine the bread basket of the USSR. Will our elites seek to totally destroy them the way the Yezhov Terror did under Stalin? Could there be a midwestern holodomor?

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