The Atlantic: ‘The Making of an American Nazi: How did Andrew Anglin go from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist—and how might he be stopped?’

My major complaint about this article is that it portrays people such as Andrew Anglin as lashing out at phantoms rather than real people with real conflicts of interest. Life is war. Different groups have different interests. Diversity plus proximity equals conflict.

Chaim Amalek writes me: “Do you ever think ‘there but for the grace of God go I’? I mean what if you had discovered Yggdrasil and William Pierce before happening upon Dennis Prager?”

Luke O’Brien writes the best piece yet on Andrew Anglin:

At the time, Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin barely knew each other. Spencer, who fancies himself white nationalism’s leading intellectual, cloaks his racism in highbrow arguments. Anglin prefers the gutter, reveling in the vile language common on the worst internet message boards. But Spencer and Anglin had appeared together on a podcast the day before Sherry’s Medium post was published and expressed their mutual admiration. Anglin declared it a “historic” occasion, a step toward greater unity on the extreme right…

Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.

But where Rockwell and Pierce relied on pamphlets, the radio, newsletters, and in-person organizing to advance their aims, Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.

…But he maintained a footprint in Columbus through his father, who has said he was “not really involved with Andy’s site.” In fact, Greg was involved. He’d registered The Daily Stormer’s trade name and filed paperwork for his son’s limited-liability corporation, Moonbase Holdings—a likely reference to a conspiracy theory that Hitler survived World War II by escaping to a secret lunar base…

No payment processor would touch The Daily Stormer, but Anglin had little trouble raising money. Since 2014, he has taken in about $250,000 worth of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, from unknown sources, according to John Bambenek, a cybersecurity expert who has been tracking neo-Nazis’ bitcoin wallets. Anglin urged his readers to send checks as well. Those donations went to Greg’s office, which was why the protesters had gathered outside, many of them from the Columbus chapter of Anti-Racist Action, a national antifascist network.

Anglin had first come to my attention in the summer of 2015, after he endorsed Trump on The Daily Stormer. When I interviewed him over email for HuffPost last year, he lied to me repeatedly—about his site’s traffic numbers, his financing, his location. Before that article came out, he falsely accused me on The Daily Stormer of fabricating information from the FBI regarding his whereabouts. More than once, I offered to walk him through my reporting, but he refused to hear me out. He also refused numerous requests to talk to me for this article…

The Daily Stormer had become arguably the leading hate site on the internet, far surpassing Stormfront, whose message boards had brought white nationalism into the digital age back in the 1990s. Anglin was a punchy, prolific writer who used snark and hyperbole to draw in Millennial readers. “Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism” was how he described his approach. Irony gave him cover to claim that he was just kidding around. He cited Infowars, Vice, and BuzzFeed as inspiration, but the closest analogue in terms of format and tone, he said, was Gawker. Like the now-shuttered gossip site, The Daily Stormer aggregated the news with attitude. Unlike Gawker, Anglin doctored everything to reflect his racist worldview….

Anglin wrote about his longing for a race war and urged his readers to prepare for combat against nebulous forces unleashed by Jews, blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, women, liberals, journalists—anyone who might impede the alt-right’s assault on the nation. Like many young men on the extreme right, Anglin hadn’t just given up on the idea of the United States as a liberal democracy. He wanted to burn it to the ground. “There is rapidly approaching a time when in every White Western city, corpses will be stacked in the streets as high as men can stack them,” he wrote. “And you are either going to be stacking or getting stacked.”

Anglin’s influence extended offline with Daily Stormer “book clubs,” which he created to engage his followers in “real world actions.” The clubs were small chapters of readers who gathered in cities in the U.S., Canada, and other countries. A Columbus group met at a gun range. Other clubs had been kicked out of bars after openly expressing anti-Semitic views or flaunting Nazi paraphernalia. Anglin pressed his readers to study martial arts, learn to use firearms, and engage in “simulated warfare” through paramilitary training with pellet guns.

Among the protesters in the rain outside Greg’s office, I met Anglin’s preschool teacher, Gail Burkholder, who described being shocked when she’d learned that her former student had grown up to be a notorious white nationalist. “Why would I think one of my students would become a Nazi who wants to kill me?” said Burkholder, who is Jewish. She’d spotted Anglin’s name in the news after Dylann Roof murdered nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof reportedly left comments on The Daily Stormer, and he has become a hero to Anglin’s readers, who honor him with “bowl cut” memes.

Roof wasn’t the only killer who read The Daily Stormer. In 2016, Thomas Mair shot and stabbed a British member of Parliament. This year, James Harris Jackson was charged with killing a black man with a sword in New York City and cited The Daily Stormer as an ideological influence. Devon Arthurs, an 18-year-old former neo-Nazi who converted to Islam, shot and killed two of his three roommates in Tampa, who were still neo-Nazis. Police arrested the surviving roommate for hoarding explosive materials.

…He also got deeply into drugs, according to half a dozen people who knew him at the time. He did LSD at school or while wandering through the scenic Highbanks Metro Park, north of the city. He took ketamine, ate psychedelic mushrooms, and snorted cocaine on weekends. He chugged Robitussin, and “robo tripped” so much that he damaged his stomach and would vomit into trash cans at school.

But people who knew Anglin in high school told me that, for reasons that were unclear, his behavior became erratic and frightening sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year at Linworth. Visitors to his house saw holes in his bedroom walls, and they knew that when he was upset, he would smash his head into things. Several recall an episode at a party: Anglin burst out crying after Alison drunkenly kissed someone else, then ran outside and bashed his head on the sidewalk over and over.

He harmed himself in other ways, too. He tried to tattoo the name of his favorite band, Modest Mouse, on his upper arm but gave up after two and a half letters, leaving him with moi etched on his skin. He stretched his earlobes by jamming thick marker caps into piercing holes until they dripped blood. He claimed to feel no pain and used lighters to melt the flesh on the inside of his forearms. He provoked people into assaulting him but never fought back, instead laughing as the blows fell. Two kids beat him into a gutter once. Anglin just lay there until they stopped, out of pity and confusion.

Former friends recall that Anglin’s parents seemed blind to their son’s alarming behavior. And while he could be tender toward his younger siblings, Chelsey and Mitch, and loyal to his friends, he also had a sadistic side. Alison (who asked that her last name be withheld from this article) told me that during Anglin’s sophomore year, she called him, distraught: She said she’d passed out at a party and been raped by a friend’s older brother. She needed compassion and support, but Anglin just laughed and broke up with her.

“You’re a slut,” she remembers him saying.

Several girls Anglin had gotten to know at another high school began calling her house at all hours of the night, according to Alison and other sources. “You deserved it,” they’d say. “You slut.” Alison says the abuse went on for weeks, as Anglin showed friends a video he’d made of them having sex.

After the breakup, Dan Newman, another friend at the time, remembers Anglin once bashing his head into the walls of his bedroom in such a frenzy that his mother had to call the police. Several classmates told me that Anglin didn’t date again in high school and sometimes tried to kiss other boys, including one black student he especially liked. Whether this behavior was authentic experimentation or just for shock value, it’s notable in light of the extreme homophobia Anglin has since expressed on The Daily Stormer and elsewhere. He has advocated, for instance, throwing gays off buildings, isis-style.

By Anglin’s junior year, Greg and Katie’s marriage had come undone. People who knew Katie back then described her to me as a browbeaten woman who lived in fear of her husband. A person who was close to one of Greg’s former clients, along with two Columbus pastors familiar with Greg’s work as a counselor, told me that Greg got involved emotionally, and sometimes sexually, with his female clients. Court documents related to his divorce support this claim: A former client is identified as his girlfriend. Greg would later make her a partner in his counseling practice.

… In Davao, however, Anglin hit on every pretty young Filipina he saw and had success with many of them, sometimes taking advantage of their hope that an American husband could be an exit from poverty. Most of these girls were 18 or 19 years old, but Edward says some were younger. He remembers Anglin once picking up a 14-year-old in a bar and bringing her back to the Sampaguita to spend the night…

This fixation on strength is common among members of the alt-right, but Anglin took his devotion to power to a wild extreme. “He thinks in terms of a fascist Disney film,” a prominent white nationalist who has collaborated with Anglin told me, adding that Anglin believed that if he tried hard enough, disciples would flock to his cultish vision and help him summon another Hitler into existence. “He imagines he has some magical power.” Over his heart, he’d tattooed the spidery black sun of the Sonnenrad, an occult symbol in a mystical strain of neo-Nazism whose followers embrace such notions as Hitler being an avatar of Vishnu.

In March 2013, Anglin, or perhaps his father, used Greg’s email address to register the domain name for The Daily Stormer. Then Anglin left the country again. First he went to Greece, where he stayed in a hostel in Athens for three months. He found work giving tours of the Parthenon and other sites and attended meetings of Golden Dawn, Greece’s ultranationalist far-right political party.

On July 4, 2013, The Daily Stormer launched in beta mode, replacing Total Fascism. Anglin named his new site after Der Stürmer, a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi-era weekly that Hitler had read devoutly. (As Anglin would later write, the official policy of his site was: “Jews should be exterminated.”) The Daily Stormer was unlike anything else in white nationalism: The design was clean, the posts were infused with Anglin’s wry humor. It was Nazi Gawker, and it caught on.

…In 2014, Anglin was living in Europe when he found a partner in Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. “weev,” a neo-Nazi hacker and troll. Auernheimer grew up in the Ozarks and went to federal prison in 2013 on identity-theft and hacking charges. After his conviction was vacated on appeal a year later, he moved abroad. He now lives in Transnistria, a small, Russia-backed breakaway region on Moldova’s eastern border.

Posted in Alt Right, Andrew Anglin | Comments Off on The Atlantic: ‘The Making of an American Nazi: How did Andrew Anglin go from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist—and how might he be stopped?’

Exhausting

I notice that some people, some friends even, exhaust me. We can exchange but a few words on a text or via Messenger, and I feel depleted and annoyed. So why is that?

One reason is that they ask too many questions about the wrong things and at the wrong time. They seek clarification on stuff most people intuitively understand. I might say I start my day with a cold shower, supplements, prayer and meditation, and they’ll ask if I ever use hot water (yes, I do, but I like to finish off with cold for 60 seconds). Do I do yoga? How long is my commute? How long is davening? Do I ever miss Talmud class?

So why do I find these simple questions draining? I guess I just didn’t expect to have to provide so much detail and explication in the context. I don’t think many people like explaining themselves. I know I hate it. And yet when I look back on my life, I see that I have often driven people crazy demanding that they explain themselves. I didn’t get the cues. I was lazy and I ignored them.

I had one girlfriend who I never had to explain things to. She intuitively grasped when I was sarcastic. Other girlfriends hated my sarcasm and couldn’t understand it. One type of relationship was smooth and the other was annoying.

I find it easier to have relationships with people who speak English as a first language, love to read books, and read social cues as well or better than I do.

Another thing I find depleting is when in a casual conversation, people will pick on contradictions and ask me to explain. I might say I love to get working before the sun rises and they’ll ask me about my prayer life and Talmud study and where’s the time for meditation in such a situation.

Explaining is tiring.

Relentlessly negative people are also exhausting.

I’m not sure there’s much that annoying people can do directly to become less annoying. I figure that their life doesn’t work and so when they hear about things that work, their mind instinctively tries to deconstruct that option to show why it wouldn’t work for them and why it doesn’t work for me either, I’m just fooling myself.

We all want others to become more like ourselves. People who are happy instinctively want to give to others and to increase their happiness. People who are depressed instinctively need to drain happiness from others.

Without exception in my experience, depressed people are a bottomless pit of need. You can never give to them enough to raise them out of their depression. And I say this as someone who has been low-grade depressed throughout my life (until 2013, when I began using this Fisher Wallace device nightly). A therapist more than a decade ago said I reminded her of a baby who tries to suck every teat dry because he has no faith that there will be enough. A girlfriend once remarked that when she left me on Sunday nights after speaking the weekend together, she always felt drained. She’d never met someone so needy. She gave me a book called “The Givers and the Takers.”

One of the things that I took away from my ten years of psycho-therapy is that there usually always more choices than what I am seeing. I’d typically go into therapy complaining that I was between a rock and a hard place but my therapist would typically point out that I had more options. I was at such a primitive place that these options were often not real for me. I had to grow up to expand my options. I was still stuck in fear, self-seeking, dishonesty, selfishness and related character defects.

I tend to do better with structure imposed upon me. That was one thing that attracted me to Orthodox Judaism. I’ve had to work the 12-Steps multiple times in multiple programs to get more power in my life. Even with God’s power, I still encounter people and situations that drain me and so I do my best to minimize these interactions.

After more than six years in 12-step programs, I haven’t put much effort into constructing, let alone living, my vision. I want more recovery before I do that. Until now, my character defects have so warped my visions that many of them have not been worth living.

A great thing about 12-Step programs is that your life tends to immediately get better because you stop doing things your way and start taking direction from God, the program and from those you respect in the program. It’s amazing how when you stop doing things your way, your life improves.

Posted in Addiction, Personal | Comments Off on Exhausting

Prince Charles Expressed Concern About The ‘Jewish Lobby’ In 1986 Letter To A Friend

The Independent: “Prince Charles blames ‘foreign Jews’ for Middle East turmoil in 1986 letter”

Comments on the Frame Game thread:

* There are days when I can hardly imagine life as a red-blooded Gentile because of how maddening it must be to watch such obvious truths be so sloppily & cavalierly discounted to zero by institutionally powerful Jewish groups.

How could it NOT engender anti-Semitism!?!

* We’re not even allowed to say “Jewish lobby” now. What, is AIPAC ecumenical now? It’s so ridiculous. God damn.

* Why would the neutral term “Jewish lobby” be considered anti-Semitic, unless it’s “pro-Semitic” to lurk in the shadows?

* It’s maddening they think we are not bright enough to look behind the veil. Thank you for showing us not all jews loath us. Besides we’re too cute and funny to go to a gulag.

* I mean, does AIPAC and the ADL do anything other than shout “anti-Semite” when someone connects the dots?

* Can you help us understand the split between many Israeli nationalists and the open borders zealots of the diaspora elites?

Joe* says:

Its interesting that he wrote to Laurens van der Post. Van der Post is one of those men who led a fascinating life although his biographer thinks at least some of it was made up. What we do know about him is that he was born in South Africa, traveled to Japan along with William Plomer in the late 1920’s, was one of the original members of the South Africans who created the magazine Voorslag, worked on South African Newspapers, emigrated to England, fought in WWII and was captured early in the conflict in what is now either Indonesia or Malaysia and spent the remainder of the war in a Japanese POW camp. The men who served under him in the camp (he was an officer) speak highly of him maintaining morale, along with other prisoners instituting educational classes, and his knowledge of Japanese proved invaluable.

After the war he dumped his first (South African wife) for Ingaret Giffard a lay Jungian therapist, did much exploratory work in British colonies in southern Africa in what is now Malawi and Botswana, and became a defender of the Bushmen, a stone age group of persons, different from the other native Africans. He produced a film about them which was aired on the BBC. He also someone or other ingratiated himself with Margaret Thatcher and with Prince Charles. One of the stories is that Charles brought a collection of van der Post’s writings with him on his honeymoon for Princess Diana to read. Some of Van der Post’s books are accessible, others are not so easily understood.

Van der Post himself had some familiarity with Palestine. In his book, the Seed and the Sower, an important scene of the book takes place in Palestine. Before he went to the Dutch or British East Indies, he had been sent by the British Army to help be a camel wrangler to support the anti Italian forces in Ethiopia.

Van der Post was a keen observer of international affairs, although he developed his own stereotypes about nations (as an example that the Japanese are very influenced by the moon) and many of his predictions about post apartheid South Africa have come to pass (although he was an ardent opponent of Apartheid, he was a strong supporter of Buthelezi and the Zulus and a staunch opponent of the ANC and considered Mandela a terrorist since he had been convicted of that and did not consider him a political prisoner/freedom fighter/ moral conscience, although Mandela himself was much more gracious to Van der Post in the messages he wrote upon van der Post’s death.

He did consider the founding of the state of Israel and the British promise (if that is how the Balfour Declaration is construed) to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine a mistake and a wrong done to the Palestinians who lived there. He believed that although the Jews had suffered in WWII that it was morally wrong to impose a new state for the Jews on an existing area that had been predominantly Arab. It seems that Charles’ letter to Van der Post makes a crucial distinction that most Jews are unwilling to look at. Although in many of the Arab (and Islamic) countries from Morocco to Iran to Yemen, the Jews were not treated well, in many of those countries, they were well integrated into the communities where they lived and thrived and prospered there. The creation of Israel had the unintended effect of leading to anti Jewish sentiments in many of these countries where they either had been close to non existent, or at a very low level. I think this the reason that Charles is singling out the European Jews as causing the friction with the Palestinian Arabs. Because he looked at it historically when the Ottoman Empire gave refuge to the Jews expelled from Catholic Countries in 1492 and after.

Jews do not like to think that the introduction of Jews to Palestine in the post Herzl Zionist era, and then in the aftermath of WW II was in any way colonialist. That is why it is so important for Jews to promote the idea that Israel is the homeland of the Jews, as if the 25,000 Ashkenazi Jews in the 13th Century which grew into something like 10 to 12 million at the outset of WWII (including European Jews who had emigrated to America) had any sort of actual historic claim to Israel.

Van der Post who was quite familiar with the Dutch and English colonization of South Africa in particular, recognized this for what it was and I am sure this the reason Charles was willing to confide in him in this letter which I am sure he never thought would be made public.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on Prince Charles Expressed Concern About The ‘Jewish Lobby’ In 1986 Letter To A Friend

Bobby Riggs, The Mafia and The Battle of the Sexes

I just watched the silly 2017 movie The Battle of the Sexes about the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King.

The movie never mentions that Bobby threw the match to satisfy his gambling debts. Instead, it presents Billy’s victory as some great triumph for women and gay rights. As Wikipedia notes: “According to an extensive article by the ESPN program Outside the Lines,[26] Riggs took advantage of the overwhelming odds against King and threw the match to get his debts to the mob erased. This would confirm the suspicions held by many of Riggs’ peers, including Don Budge.”

Slate:

This lack of preparation—and Riggs’ uninspired, error-riddled play during the match—fueled speculation that the old hustler had intentionally thrown the match, perhaps because he had bet against himself, perhaps at the behest of the mob. (The strongest such claim came in a 2013 ESPN story by Don Van Natta Jr.)

Riggs made no effort to hide the extent of his gambling habit (a July 1973 Sports Illustrated profile described Riggs and his best friend Lornie Kuhle betting “on everything from tennis games to memory contests, from the turn of a coin to the flight of a robin”), and according to A Necessary Spectacle, he annoyed both King and his own support team by spending the break after the first set trying to negotiate a change in the odds with his bookie up in the stands.

The fact is that most any man among the top 100 players on the senior circuit would beat the top female tennis players of any age.

ESPN reports:

It seemed a certain payday for him. Four months earlier, Riggs had crushed Margaret Court, the world’s No. 1 women’s tennis player, 6-2, 6-1, in an exhibition labeled by the media as the “Mother’s Day Massacre.” Court’s defeat had persuaded King to play Riggs. Nearly everyone in tennis expected a similarly lopsided result. On the ABC broadcast, Pancho Gonzales, John Newcombe and even 18-year-old Chrissie Evert predicted Riggs would defeat King, then the No. 2-ranked woman. In Las Vegas, the smart money was on Bobby Riggs. Jimmy the Greek declared, “King money is scarce. It’s hard to find a bet on the girl.”

But by aggressively attacking the net and smashing precision shots, King ran a winded, out-of-shape Riggs all over the court. Riggs made a slew of unforced errors, hitting soft returns directly at King or into the net and double-faulting at key moments, including on set point in the first set. “I don’t understand,” Cosell said after a King winner off a Riggs backhand. “He’s been feeding her that backhand all night.” Midway through the third set, Riggs looked drained and complained of hand cramps. After King took match point, winning in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, Riggs mustered the energy to hop the net. “I underestimated you,” he whispered in King’s ear.

Posted in Sex | Comments Off on Bobby Riggs, The Mafia and The Battle of the Sexes

Parasha Toledot (Gen. 25:19–28:9)

This week’s Torah portion tells us the story of Esau and Jacob.

Listen here.

I am joined by Vivian Veritas, Dennis Dale and the Professor.

* I think the allegations against Roy Moore are true. I don’t think they reflect well on him. I don’t think they’re an abomination either. I’d rather someone did this than something gay. I think Roy’s behavior is common. If I were in Alabama, I would still vote for Roy Moore.

* How old was Rebecca when she married Isaac? According to Rashi and other medieval rabbis, she was three (because she required a wet nurse when she traveled to meet Isaac), but Isaac waited until she was an adult before he had relations with her. Others say Rebecca was ten, possibly 13.

According to Wikipedia:

Early-teen marriage was possible in Judaism. In Judaism girls reach adulthood at 12 and boys at 13. According to the Talmud, a father is commanded not to let his his daughter marry anyone until she grows up and says, “I want this one”.[73] A marriage that takes place without the consent of the girl is not an effective legal marriage.[74]

Despite the young threshold for marriage, a large age gap between the spouses was opposed,[75] and, in particular, marrying one’s young daughter to an old man was declared as reprehensible as forcing her into prostitution.[76]

A ketannah (literally meaning “little [one]”) was any girl between the age of 3 years and that of 12 years plus one day;[77] he could arrange a marriage for her in her best interests.[77] However, after reaching the age of maturity, she would have to agree to the marriage to be considered as married. If the father was dead or missing, the brothers of the ketannah, collectively, had the ability , as had her mother.[77] In these situations, a ketannah would always have the right to annul her marriage, even if it was the first.

* According to Torah and to the Talmud, an uncle can marry his niece in Judaism, but this ceased to be the practice when Jews moved to Europe. Why? Because the rabbis decreed that Jews could not do anything that made them look morally inferior to the gentiles around them. So while polygamy continued among Sephardic Jews until the 20th Century, it was forbidden to Ashkenazi Jews by Rabbi Gershon around 1000 CE.

* Abraham is the only Biblical character described as dying “content.”

* Gen. 25:23: God said to Rebecca: “Two nations are in your womb.”

Artscroll: “The Sages teach that the two of them will never be mighty simultaneously; when one falls; the other will rise. History has demonstrated this prophecy in practice.”

The realist approach to foreign policy says that power determines how far a nation will rise. As one nation grows stronger, other nations around it become comparatively weaker. As one group within a nation grow stronger, other groups become comparatively weaker. Life is a competition over scarce resources between various forms of life.

* Gen. 26:4: God tells Isaac: “All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your offspring.” Is that true? Is that real? Is that your experience?

* Gen. 26:6:

So Isaac stayed in Gerar.

7 When the men of that place asked him about his wife, he said, “She is my sister,” because he was afraid to say, “She is my wife.” He thought, “The men of this place might kill me on account of Rebekah, because she is beautiful.”

8 When Isaac had been there a long time, Abimelek king of the Philistines looked down from a window and saw Isaac caressing his wife Rebekah. 9 So Abimelek summoned Isaac and said, “She is really your wife! Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’?”

Isaac answered him, “Because I thought I might lose my life on account of her.”

10 Then Abimelek said, “What is this you have done to us? One of the men might well have slept with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.”

11 So Abimelek gave orders to all the people: “Anyone who harms this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.”

* Gen. 26:14:

…the Philistines envied him. 15 So all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth.

16 Then Abimelek said to Isaac, “Move away from us; you have become too powerful for us.”

So why do goyim hate Jews? Because we’re excellent.

* The survival of the Jewish people depended upon Jacob getting the birthright, so whatever he does to nab this is then ok? Why did Jacob fear Esau? Because he knew that he stole the birthright from him. Why do we fear people? Because we know we’ve harmed them and thus created an incentive for them to get revenge on us. If we go around harming people, we will develop a worldview that everyone is out to get us. For example, Harvey Weinstein hired ex-Mossad agents to go after his accusers.

* Optics. Are you gents dressed in a way that makes the white cause look good?

* NYT: Louis C.K. Is Accused by 5 Women of Sexual Misconduct

In 2002, a Chicago comedy duo, Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, landed their big break: a chance to perform at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. When Louis C.K. invited them to hang out in his hotel room for a nightcap after their late-night show, they did not think twice. The bars were closed and they wanted to celebrate. He was a comedian they admired. The women would be together. His intentions seemed collegial.

As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.

They thought it was a joke and laughed it off. “And then he really did it,” Ms. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times. “He proceeded to take all of his clothes off, and get completely naked, and started masturbating.”

* Does society have an interest in slut shaming? Friend: “Basically this: some men use their power and fame and wealth to gain access to sex with beautiful women, and that’s bad. But also, some beautiful women use their sexuality to gain access to power and fame and wealth. And that’s also bad. Put another way: is prostitution a sin? Or is it only a sin to solicit a prostitute, but not to be one?”

* Friend: “I got banned in /r/history this week for replying to a poster’s question about why there is a third world with a recommendation to check out Rushton’s 1995 book. Banned. I submitted a request to the moderator about why… I wanna talk about this kind of soft/moral censorship of ideas.”

* Some of my friends have problem with positivity. It’s a reaction to wishful thinking. Many of my friends reject the 12-Steps, finding it too hard and the sayings too trite. Many Jews reject belief in an Afterlife because it is too positive. They want to be rational. They don’t want to be like Christians.

* The 2017 movie Detroit shone a light on police murder in 1967 at the Algiers Hotel. Do I prioritize my white interests over Godly principles? It depends on the context. Ethics are both situational and absolute. The situation determines the absolute. Sometimes empathy for out-groups can be a disadvantage to your own people’s survival.

Steve Sailer wrote:

The key moment in the self-destruction of the once great American city of Detroit over the past half century can be dated precisely to July 23, 1967, when blacks began the Detroit Riot. Before 4,700 paratroopers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions finally halted the orgy of criminality, African Americans had looted 2,500 stores and burned down 400 buildings in their own neighborhoods.

The next year, 80,000 whites moved out of Detroit. (In 2017, the total population of Detroit is almost a million lower than fifty years ago.)

Of course, today we are instructed to think of these white refugees from black violence not as victims but as perps. Almost nobody is interested in the stories of the millions of Americans whose lives were literally dislocated by the huge surge in black urban crime during the peak years of American liberalism, 1964–75.

For example, the opening text for the new movie Detroit, which opens nationally on Friday, pins the blame for the black riot of 1967 on the economic devastation caused by the 22,000 whites who had presciently left Detroit the year before, apparently taking all the magic dirt with them, leaving only the tragic dirt.

In reality, the Detroit Riot had little to do with economic decline. Instead, it was a classic example of how rising expectations fuel resentment. Detroit in 1967 represented the apogee of working-class prosperity, which Detroit blacks shared in due to United Auto Workers’ leader Walter Reuther’s profound opposition to racial discrimination. Perhaps no black community in the history of the world had yet been as broadly prosperous as Detroit’s in 1967. To blacks across America, Berry Gordy’s Motown record label, named after the glamorous Motor City, represented black affluence. Economist Thomas Sowell observed:

“Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit’s black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4 percent. It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot which marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair.”

Moreover, intensely pro-black white liberals, such as President Lyndon Johnson, Governor George Romney (Mitt’s dad), and Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, were pouring taxpayer money into Detroit’s black neighborhoods.

* Steve Sailer writes:

Following up my Taki’s column on Larry David, “Curb Your Self-Awareness,” here’s a self-aware excerpt from a 2001 interview by Emma Forrest with Rachel Weisz, the lovely Oscar-winning Jewish-British actress:


EMMA: Well, it’s that Jackie Mason joke about how no Jewish woman wants to look Jewish: “‘You think I look maybe a little Italian, I look a little Russian, perhaps I can be Spanish?’ … ‘You look Jewish!’”

RACHEL: Hollywood’s run by Jews. I was advised by an American agent when I was about 19 to change my surname. And I said “Why? Jews run Hollywood.” He said “Exactly.” He had a theory that all the executives think acting’s a job for shiksas.

EMMA: Of all the self-loathing Jews in the world, the most self-loathing are the Hollywood Jews. They don’t want to see images of themselves on screen. That’s why Lauren Bacall had to hide her identity, and Winona Ryder changed her name from Horowitz.

RACHEL: In some way acting is prostitution, and Hollywood Jews don’t want their own women to participate. Also, there’s an element of Portnoy’s Complaint — they all fancy Aryan blondes.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Although there is a tendency for Jews in the US to market themselves as a ‘race’, when you look at British Jews versus US Jews, the British Jews such as Sascha Baron-Cohen (Borat, Ali G) Sid James, Leslie Howard, Lawrence Harvey, Warren Mitchell (the original model for Archie Bunker), Daniel Day Lewis, Anthony Newley seem to have much more in common with their fellow Brits than with US Jews. As did Harold Abrahams, chairman of the Amateur Athletic Association, and the sprinter whose early life story became Chariots of Fire, a movie whose title is drawn from a phrase in Britain’s second national anthem, William Blake’s Jerusalem.

Growing up in the UK I was aware that certain politicians like Clement Freud, Sir Keith Joseph, or Nigel Lawson, father of the even more famous Nigella, or moguls like Robert Maxwell were Jews, but certainly never thought of them being a different race. We would have thought of Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch) more as a Czech import than as someone who had sympathies with Israel, although after his death there were some claims that he was an agent of Mossad.

So maybe British Jews are more integrated than US Jews, or is it all an illusion?

* Perhaps its because they aren’t nearly as powerful as US Jews so they behave a bit better.

* The intellectual antecedents to Nazism.

Posted in Torah | Comments Off on Parasha Toledot (Gen. 25:19–28:9)