New Yorker: ‘Birth of a White Supremacist – Mike Enoch’s transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist shock jock’

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

I have many Jewish friends who find gentile nationalisms, particularly white nationalism, terrifying.

Nationalism means that you are devoted to your people. Jews are devoted to their people. Why shouldn’t goyim be devoted to their people?

To me, it’s not scary that there are white supremacists. There’s no inherent connection between that ideology and violence, any more than there is an inherent connection between Christian supremacism, Jewish supremacism, Islamic supremacism, black supremacism, etc, and violence.

It’s not scary when people hate your group. At one time or another, I’ve felt fleeting hatred for almost every group I’ve known and I expect most people have experienced similar emotions.

Genocide happens when there is a dramatic clash of interests. Just because someone hates Jews or blacks or Christians is not a reliable predictor that the person is going to become violent.

Negative feelings about Jews are called anti-Semitism yet the Jewish Bible is filled with negative sentiments about Jews and Jews still regard the book as holy.

Just as I don’t hate any particular group of people, I don’t hate the MSM. They’re probably my primary source of information about the world. I take into account their biases and read them anyway.

The New Yorker, for example, publishes this interesting and valuable profile of Mike Enoch:

This summer, after a loose coalition of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Confederate apologists announced that they would hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, promotional flyers began to circulate on the Internet. The flyers included a list of names: the self-proclaimed thought leaders who planned to speak at the rally, arranged, Coachella-like, in order of prominence. At the top of the list was Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” almost a decade ago, and who has been so successful at making himself the poster boy of the movement that he was once sucker punched while standing on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. Farther down the list were Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville resident who organized the rally; Matthew Heimbach, who has been called “the affable, youthful face of hate in America”; and Christopher Cantwell, who would later star in a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, unpacking a small arsenal of guns and saying, among other things, “We’re not nonviolent—we’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”
The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the overall tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on the Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.
The Charlottesville rally, on August 12th, immediately erupted in violence, and the police shut it down before any of the speakers could take the stage. A few of them reconvened in a park two miles away. Enoch, surrounded by small concentric circles of reporters, protesters, and counterprotesters, stood on a wooden riser in the shade of a dogwood tree. A tall, stout man with a husky voice and a grim, downturned mouth, he wore aviator sunglasses, a slight beard, and the unofficial uniform of the day: khakis and a white polo shirt. “We’re here to talk about white genocide, the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race,” he said. “Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege? This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.” He finished his remarks and introduced the next speaker, David Duke. An hour later, James Alex Fields, Jr., wearing khakis and a white polo, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer, a local counterprotester.
Enoch’s father, who is also named Mike, spent that Saturday at home. He lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country. “I made breakfast, and at some point I mowed the lawn,” he said recently. “Then, as I do every day, I sat down to read the New York Times.” He saw a photograph of a torch-wielding mob taken in Charlottesville the previous night. “I looked at the picture for a while, and I couldn’t find Mike anywhere,” he said. He scrutinized other photos online, and still didn’t see his son. “I said, ‘Thank God,’ and I went about my day.”
On Sunday, after he got home from church, he saw that a relative had e-mailed him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It turned my stomach,” he said. “Until that moment, I had imagined that, whatever had caused him to go down this path, it could somehow be reversed, and he could come home again.”
Most of the bloggers and commenters on the Right Stuff use pseudonyms—Sneering Imperialist, Toilet Law, Ebolamericana, Death. “Mike Enoch” is a pseudonym, too. Over the years, on “The Daily Shoah,” he occasionally dropped hints about his identity, though he was careful not to reveal too much. He said that he lived with his wife in New York City—“which narrows it down to me and eight million other people”—and that he worked at a “normie” day job, which he would surely lose if his employers ever learned about his alter ego. As a child, he had attended church camps and public schools, where he’d been “programmed” to believe in universalism and equality. Most members of his immediate family were still “shitlibs”—committed liberals who had not yet seen the error of their ways.
In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish.
At first, Enoch tried to insist that he wasn’t Peinovich, but he soon put up a post on the Right Stuff confirming his identity: “I won’t even bother denying it.” On white-nationalist message boards, including the Right Stuff itself, a few commenters accused Enoch of being “controlled opposition,” or demanded that he divorce his wife. (“I can’t believe all you fags still support this Jew fucker!”) Some held out for more information (“How Jewish? Because if 1/4 or less, I don’t give a shit”); others changed the subject (“I’m more disappointed by how fat he is than anything”).
A few days later, on “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch and his co-hosts read dozens of notes from listeners who were remaining loyal to the podcast, some of whom had donated money to Enoch in his time of need. “My heart goes out to his wife,” one fan, a long-distance trucker, wrote. “If she is married to Mike, she must be a good individual.”
“That is a really nice thing to say,” Enoch said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.” He didn’t mention that his wife had gone to stay with her mother in the Midwest.
Also included in the dox were two e-mail addresses, both purportedly belonging to Enoch. In general, I am opposed to doxing—I worry about vigilante mobs, false positives, slippery slopes—but not opposed enough, apparently, to overcome my curiosity. I e-mailed both addresses.
Enoch responded right away. He said that he didn’t want to talk—“I have a platform to tell my story that is bigger than yours”—and yet, every time I sent another e-mail, he sent one back. I made no secret of the fact that I found his views repugnant, but I added, truthfully, that I wanted to know how he’d ended up in this predicament and what he planned to do next. At one point, I wrote him a long note trying to persuade him to talk to me. His entire response was “You seem kinda mad.” We went back and forth for a while, but I had no real success in drawing him out, and eventually we both lost interest.
He later read our full exchange on “The Daily Shoah.” To his credit, he didn’t edit his responses to make them sound smarter, but he didn’t have to. According to the rules of online debate in the Right Stuff’s “Essential T.R.S. Troll Guide,” which I hadn’t read at the time, Enoch had won our exchange by default, because he had written fewer words and maintained his ironic detachment, whereas I had committed the greatest possible faux pas: letting myself be “triggered” into displaying emotion. After the podcast aired, a few of Enoch’s fans sent me nasty messages on Twitter. I figured that was the end of it.
Then I heard back from the other e-mail address. “I am not the Mike Peinovich to whom you addressed this email, but I am his father,” it read. “Until two days ago, I was totally unaware of his ‘alt-right’ activities. . . . I am struggling to understand how Mike E. (which is what we call him to distinguish him from me and my father who was also Mike Peinovich) could have said, posted or tweeted the things that are attributed to him.”
I called Mike, Sr., and we talked for a long time. It was the week of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and he spoke in the tone that a lot of liberals were using then—weary and a bit dazed, as if struggling to shake a bad dream. “We tried to give our kids good values,” he said. “Mike E. went to good schools, and he loved being part of his church youth group. We knew that he was an outspoken Trump supporter, and he was very much the only one in the family, so we agreed, at a certain point, not to talk about politics.” He had listened to the podcast for long enough to recognize his son’s voice and profane sense of humor, but lasted only a few minutes before turning it off.
Four days after the rally in Charlottesville, I went to meet Mike, Sr., and his wife, Billie, in New Jersey. They live in an Arts and Crafts house on a tree-lined block near the center of town. Mike, Sr., answered the door. He was taller and thinner than his son, with silver hair and rimless glasses, but I saw the resemblance right away: the square jaw, the downturned mouth.
Billie and Mike are retired, and they spend several months a year travelling. They gave me a tour of the house, pointing out items they’d collected: Persian rugs, Mexican pottery, a floor-mounted globe. Mike was once a professor of Old English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his study contains several dictionaries and translations of “Beowulf,” along with contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” We sat in armchairs in the living room, and he talked at length about his ancestors. “My grandfather helped drive the K.K.K. out of North Dakota,” he said. “My other grandfather came from Yugoslavia, fleeing religious persecution.”

I find less than 5% of the articled above unfair. Overall, it is an important read. It is a compelling read. It is a great read. My hats off to the author and to the people who participated in the profile. I sense that the author was generally fair and honest.

I feel drawn to write about outlaws. In some ways, members of the Alt Right remind me of pornographers. Outwardly, most pornographers proclaim they have no interest in talking to the MSM and yet most yearn to talk for hours to reporters. They want to be listened to by people in prestigious positions and they want to be acknowledged in mainstream outlets. Most Alt Righters are the same way. Most proclaim they never talk to the press, but as the Mike Enoch example shows, once you get them going, they’ll talk to you for hours.

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The Joys Of Diversity

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

Most Orthodox Jews I know prefer to spend most of their spare time with other Orthodox Jews. On the other hand, many of the Orthodox Jews I know prefer to have non-Jews as neighbors because they’re not as nosy.

From what I’ve seen, the more Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews mix, the more they hate each other.

From what I’ve seen, most non-Orthodox Jews have more positive views of non-Jews than they do of Orthodox Jews. Most of them would prefer to have gentile neighbors rather than Orthodox neighbors.

From what I’ve seen, Orthodox Jews make no assumptions about a fellow Jew’s ethics based on his level of observance of Jewish law. From what I’ve seen, increased observance of Jewish law does not make people more honest in business.

From what I’ve seen, non-Jews find it easier to deal with secular Jews than with Orthodox Jews. They prefer secular Jews as neighbors to Orthodox Jews.

Most people, most of the time, prefer their own kind. I notice that even in Orthodox synagogues, Ashkenazi Jews prefer the company of other Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardim generally stick with Sephardim, and Persians stick with Persians.

I notice that the more diversity people have to deal with, the more they keep their head in and their guard up. On the other hand, when people are with people like themselves, they tend to be comfortable.

When Jews move into a neighborhood or business, they sometimes raise tensions (e.g., Postville) by challenging mores. The more observant the Jews, the more challenges they raise.

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The Age You Peak At Everything

Posted on October 9, 2017 by Luke Ford

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Judaism, Homosexuality & The Alt Right

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

We discuss Andrew Joyce’s three essays on the Alt Right & homosexuality. Listen here.

My cohosts are Dennis Dale and Casey the Classicist.

* The Messiah Will Purify Jewish Bloodlines.

* We discuss Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882).

* From page 46 of the book Anti-Semitism Before the Holocaust by Albert S Lindemann: The writings of the widely recognized ‘father of modern racism,’ Count Arthur de Gobineau, further suggest some of the overlooked intricacies of racist thinking in regard to the Jews in the nineteenth century…

Gobineau pushed what could be called the essentialist core of racist thinking to its logical conclusion: environment did not explain the rise of civilizations but rather inherent racial genius did; the decline of civilizations was due to the dilution of that genius through race mixing. The phrase in Disraeli’s novel, ‘all is race; there is no other truth,’ was thus consistent with Gobineau’s theories. Revealingly, Gobineau considered the Jews to be one of the superior ‘white’ races and approved of their efforts throughout history to remain racially pure…

Gobineau’s racism was widely criticized, especially in his own country, but in one revealing regard it was widely accepted both in Europe and among people of European descent in the Americas: African Blacks were, he asserted, a distinctly inferior race. For Gobineau, Africans and the European lower orders had common traits — low intelligence, lack of self-control, and proclivity to violence. For all its claims to scientific validity, this view had deep roots in the European and Judeo-Christian past, going back to texts of the Bible as well as commentary on it. Indeed, the terminology of modern racial theory derived from biblical mythology in the account of Noah and his sons (Gen. 9:21-27): Shem, from whom the Semites descended; Ham, from whom the African Hamites descended; and Japheth, from whom the Europeans descended…

Some rabbinical commentary also contained proto-racist elements, enhancing for example the derogation of Blacks more than the bare biblical text in making the sons of Ham ‘ugly and dark-skinned’. The influential Jewish medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that ‘the Blacks’ nature…is below that of man and above that of a monkey.’ So Disraeli might be said to have drawn from both modern scientific and age-old sources when he concluded that if the white population of the United States were to continue to ‘mingle with [its] negro and coloured population’, an inevitable degeneration of the civilization of the young republic would be the result…

Blacks were often described as lacking in intelligence, Jews as cunning, dangerously intelligent. Blacks allegedly lacked self-control, whereas Jews were seen as disciplined and devious. Insofar as Jews were described as inferior, it usually had to do with moral issues, although their small stature, weak bodies, and odd ‘Oriental’ appearance were also mentioned. In short, negative visions of Blacks tended to describe them as animal-like, at a lower stage of evolution; they could be used in the way beasts of burden were used and were dangerous int eh way that such animals could be dangerous. But there was no concern in nineteenth-century Europe or America that Blacks were taking over the world through clandestine power and financial manipulation.

* The Zakein Mamre is a sage who does not accept the legal rulings of the Sanhedrin. He is executed so that controversies do not disrupt the nation of Israel.

Sanhedrin 88A: “And Rabbi Elazar says: Even if the rebellious elder says his ruling on the basis of the tradition, and the members of the court say: This is the correct understanding in our eyes, he is executed, so that discord will not proliferate among Israel and to ensure that there will be a standard halakhic ruling. And if you say: For what reason was Akavya ben Mahalalel not executed? It is due to the fact that he did not issue his ruling as practical halakha; he merely claimed that his understanding was correct in theory, which is always permitted.”

From Chapter three of the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah:

A person who does not acknowledge validity of the Oral Law is not the rebellious elder mentioned in the Torah. Instead, he is one of the heretics and he should be put to death by any person.

א
מי שאינו מודה בתורה שבעל פה אינו זקן ממרא האמור בתורה אלא הרי זה בכלל האפיקורוסין [ומיתתו בכל אדם]:

2
Since it has become known that such a person denies the Oral Law, he may be pushed into a pit and may not be helped out. He is like all the rest of the heretics who say that the Torah is not Divine in origin, those who inform on their fellow Jews, and the apostates. All of these are not considered as members of the Jewish people. There is no need for witnesses, a warning, or judges for them to be executed. Instead, whoever kills them performs a great mitzvah and removes an obstacle from people at large.

ב
מאחר שנתפרסם שהוא כופר בתורה שבעל פה [מורידין אותו] ולא מעלין והרי הוא כשאר כל האפיקורוסין והאומרין אין תורה מן השמים והמוסרין והמומרין שכל אלו אינם בכלל ישראל ואין צריך לא לעדים ולא התראה ולא דיינים [אלא כל ההורג אחד מהן עשה מצוה גדולה והסיר המכשול]:

3
To whom does the above apply? To a person who denied the Oral Law consciously, according to his perception of things. He follows after his frivolous thoughts and his capricious heart and denies the Oral Law first, as did Tzadok and Beitus and those who erred in following them.

* The Rise & Fall of Civilization by Brian Fitzpatrick

Sex is the sacrament of choice for secular and pagan people — in which they seek their personal, ontological stability. It cannot be found there, but makes a good pretence at it by making one feel good (for five minutes). – E. Fox

Perhaps the definitive work on the rise and fall of civilizations, was published in 1934 by Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin.

In Sex and Culture, Unwin studied 86 human civilizations ranging from tiny South Sea island principalities to mighty Rome. He found that a society’s destiny is linked inseparably to the limits it imposes on sexual expression and that those sexual constraints correlate directly to its theological sophistication and religious commitment.

Unwin noted that the most primitive societies had only rudimentary spiritual beliefs and virtually no restrictions on sexual expression, whereas societies with more sophisticated theologies placed greater restrictions on sexual expression and achieved greater social development.

In particular, cultures that adopt what Unwin dubbed “absolute monogamy” proved to be the most vigorous, economically productive, artistically creative, scientifically innovative, and geographically expansive societies on earth. Absolute monogamy is a very strict moral code. Under absolute monogamy, sex can occur only within one-man/ one-woman marriage. Premarital and extramarital sex are not tolerated and divorce is prohibited.

Understandably, the only societies that practice absolute monogamy are the ones that take their religion very seriously.

Whether monotheistic or polytheistic, they believe devoutly in God or gods, and they order their society according to divine moral laws.

Unwin’s contemporary, British historian Arnold Toynbee, was much more explicit about the centrality of religion in history. Toynbee’s masterpiece, his 12-volume Study of History, charted the rise and fall of 26 civilizations. In Toynbee’s view, “The course of human history consists of a series of encounters…in which each man or woman or child…is challenged by God to make the free choice between doing God’s will and refusing to do it.”

Why exactly does absolute monogamy, the Pauline moral code, bring vitality to a society? Absolute monogamy fosters cultural growth by solving what anthropologist Margret Mead called the “central problem of every society”— that is, to “define appropriate roles for the men.” Monogamous civilizations require men to choose either lifelong celibacy or the responsibilities of a husband: fidelity, breadwinning, and fatherhood. Most men choose to marry, to their good fortune, because married men tend to be healthier, happier, and more productive than bachelors.

Those committed husbands create stable marriages, which offer the greatest opportunity for raising healthy, productive children who can keep a society strong and growing. Likewise, the great economist Joseph Schumpeter attributes the success of capitalism not to the entrepreneur’s lust for money or status, but to his love of family. To Schumpeter, the central pillar of any healthy civilization is the self-sacrificing married man who doesn’t spend his income on his pleasures, but prefers “to work and save primarily for his wife and children.”

And in Family and Civilization, Harvard historian Carle Zimmerman concludes that “the creative periods in civilization have been based upon” the strongest form of family, which he terms the “domestic” type: “The domestic family affords a comparatively stable social structure and yet frees the individual sufficiently from family influence to perform the creative work necessary for a great civilization.” If devotion to God, a Pauline moral code, and strong marriages and families are the key to cultural success, then what causes civilizations to decline?

Zimmerman warns of “periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of basic belief in the forces which make it work.” Unwin’s explanation would be that if people lose their faith in God, they tend to lose their motivation to live by the strict moral code. In This Present Age, sociologist Robert Nisbet writes, “What sociologists are prone to call social disintegration is really nothing more than the spectacle of a rising number of individuals playing fast and loose with other individuals in relationships of trust and responsibility.” Moral standards begin to erode when a society’s members chafe at the discipline imposed by absolute monogamy and begin to gratify their personal impulses without regard for the consequences inflicted on others.

In other words, in an amoral, hedonistic society, you can’t trust the people you need to trust, not even your spouse. Moreover, if people can make and break relationships at will, with no legal repercussions or social stigma, they are much more likely to abandon their marriages—at their children’s expense—when the going gets tough. Husbands with roving eyes are much more likely to trade in their wives for new models.

Thus, the founder of Harvard’s sociology department, Pitirim Sorokin, warned that if individualistic selfishness and self-seeking are not checked, a society will lapse into a state of “sexual anarchy.” In The American Sex Revolution, Sorokin writes that “both man and society are degraded” as a culture becomes “sexually obsessed:”

The members of such a society are habituated to look at the opposite sex as a mere instrument for pleasure…To these individuals, talk of human dignity, religious, and moral commandments, and rules of decency is just bosh…The society degrades the values of womanhood and manhood, of motherhood and fatherhood and venerable age, of marriage and family, and even of love itself.

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Forward: ‘Shadowy Blacklist Of Student Activists Wins Endorsement Of Mainstream Pro-Israel Group’

Posted on October 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Forward:

For more than two years, a shadowy website called Canary Mission has posted political dossiers on students active in pro-Palestinian groups, saying it hopes to keep them from finding work after college.

Now, a mainstream Jewish pro-Israel organized has endorsed Canary Mission — despite criticism that site uses “McCarthyite” tactics.

In an annual report, the Israel on Campus Coalition cited Canary Mission as an effective model for deterring support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, hailing the website for causing students to drop their support for pro-Palestinian groups out of fear of “repercussions.”

“Through online platforms such as Canary Mission, a database devoted to exposing hatred of Jews and Israel, the pro-Israel community has established a strong deterrent against anti-Semitism and BDS activism,” ICC’s report reads…

Canary Mission’s published dossier on Pritsker runs to 3,000 words, much of it boilerplate text on Students for Justice in Palestine, of which he is a member. It also notes his support for a failed student government resolution to divest from ten companies that SJP says profit off Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

But the dossier also includes information on Pritsker unrelated to his pro-Palestinian activism. It notes that he was arrested earlier this year at a protest against the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, and that he ran for student government in 2015.

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