I bought this book because I was under the impression that the author had been undercover with WNs for six years, but apparently he was always out as a “reporter.” He doesn’t stint on the virtue-signalling, which does not mean he has nothing valuable to say. I’ll read and I’ll let you know if there’s anything important. So far, I’ve found nothing.
On the other hand, I find that our enemies just as often have valuable insights as our friends.
As I write this, nineteen people are being treated at University of Virginia Medical Center for injuries sustained when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One woman is dead. The victims were struck as they protested one of the largest gatherings of right-wing radicals in America in recent history. Last night I watched hundreds of predominantly young, white men march in a torchlight parade, paying tribute to a history that produced slavery, Jim Crow, and a society that still discriminates against its minorities in a million ways, large and small. They were not only paying tribute to white hegemony but also protesting the cracks in that hegemony, airing grievances that seemed both petty and fabricated. As they marched en masse to chants of “Jews will not replace us!” I had to wonder exactly how Jews were replacing them and how these young, white men—by any statistical measure perched at the top of the societal food chain—had come to feel so deeply aggrieved as to see the world’s progress as an attack on them…
It should be stated that I’m not a neutral observer. In many ways I represent what my subjects believe to be the enemy. As long as I’ve been able to vote I’ve voted socialist (in my native Norway that is still, thankfully, a viable option), and I’ve made no secret about that in my reporting…
Matthew [Heimbach] had no doubt that the elites were bought and paid for by the Jews, and if there was one thing no one could accuse Matthew Heimbach of, it was being part of the elite…
He switched on the wipers and watched as the threadbare rubber strip redistributed the rain across the windshield. He needed to get new ones. In fact, he needed to get a new car, but he had no money since losing his job at Child Protective Services in Indiana when they found out about his other life as one of the most notorious nationalists in the country. It wasn’t the first time he’d been fired for his politics: he had been excommunicated from his church, cut off by his family, and suffered daily death threats since he was a teenager. Losing a job was nothing new, but it did make it harder to do political work when he had to hustle to find new employment. Also, Brooke was pregnant with their second kid—Matthew wanted a large brood—so there was that to pay for. Recently he’d found a new job as a picker in one of Amazon’s giant warehouses, but it was lonely, miserable work. The warehouse was vast, and to save money on electricity Amazon had installed motion detectors that made sure the light was only on where the picker was, meaning Matthew spent close to twelve hours per day walking around in a small cone of light, barely ten feet in diameter, surrounded by endless darkness.
BY NOVEMBER 2016 I had known Matthew for a few years, having met him in the early days of what would be a six-year field trip into the underbelly of the American white nationalist scene. It had been a journey littered with skinheads, Klansmen, fights, bad barbeque, rallies, threats, and endless highway miles. Matthew was an unexpected encounter, a seemingly earnest and in some ways sensible outlier in a sea of virulent racists—which isn’t to say that Matthew wasn’t racist, merely that he wasn’t so unambiguous about it. Also, you didn’t need to wince your way through a conversation littered with racial slurs when talking to him, which set him apart from many of his fellow white nationalists. One could argue that this made him all the more dangerous—an ostensible voice of reason covering up an insidious form of white supremacy—but it also made him easier to talk to. What had initially motivated my excursion into the world of white supremacy was curiosity about a brand of politics that seemed almost too outdated to be real—and one that I was surprised to find thriving throughout the country. At the time my impetus was little more than a fascination with the strange and offensive.
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I’ve never wanted to get glib talkers on my show. I’m not interested in slick speakers because they are never careful about facts, they’re not scholars, not intellectuals.
* Mark Collett came across best, but he’s glib and not always fact based. When I listen to someone as glib as mark, i am immediately suspect because such people are usually economical in their commitment to the truth… KMAC and GJ and RS are not glib.
He claims:
* Interracial marriage is illegal in Israel. While you can’t perform interfaith marriages in israel, plenty of people in israel are intermarried.
* He claims Jews have been banned from 359 countries and states. 109 countries all christian and islamic. Plenty of stateless people have been kicked around. So what?
* He uses the fake voltaire quote: “If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you cannot criticize.”
* Jews control by subversion… the Israel Lobby is not remotely subversive, it is how the US politics game is played.
* Jews control the porn industry. You could have accurately said the italian-american mafia controlled the porn industry for decades.
* Mark: 85% of the bolshevik government was jews. Absurd.
* Mark: “The Jewish number of 6 million” for the holocaust.
* Karl Marx was Jewish. He was also a christian. Karl’s ancestors were Jewish… If you want to blame jews for marx, you also have to blame christians.
* I like it that people think i am more devious than i am. Porners thought i was undercover LE.
* Patrick Slattery always impresses…I’ve not heard him to say false things.
* Tom Luongo says the Holocaust is unique, that it was done to kill Jews, while stalin simply killed people who threatened him. And that you can’t question certain things about the holocaust because that is “counter-factual”.
* Luongo says George Soros worked w his dad to hunt down Jews. Mark corrects.
* Luongo says Soros was just coincidentally jewish.
* Israel bans interfaith marriage. False. “I invite everyone in the audience to Google everything I’ve said because it is just the tip of the iceberg.”
* Mark does not care about facts. He never once said anything new or surprising.
* Mark says Jews are doing the opposite to Europe as opposed to what they want for themselves…Multiculturalism for thee, cohesion for me.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on Halsey English Vs Mark Collett On The JQ
Rarely have two men been so savagely opposed, and so different in their formative experiences, though each had war experiences . Hitler (1889-1945) rose from nothing to absolute dominion over Europe, and fell like a stick; Churchill (1874-1965) started high, aimed higher, and after years in the wilderness achieved greatness…
So, the battle of wits between an ascendant 51-year-old Hitler and a last-choice, embattled 66-year-old Churchill is a story always worth telling, perhaps worth telling for ever. Churchill turned the course of history. The very first German biography of Hitler, by Joachim Fest, made the telling point that, for all his oratory, Hitler left little of note in the German language. Art Historian Burckhardt again: “The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity”. Churchill, on the other hand, lifted English to the sunlit uplands. He was a most quotable man. Does any of this matter, in the cold calculation of war? Yes. Rhetoric is worth many battalions. Language can move hearts because it is the supreme tool of thinking…
Joachim Fest again: although Marxist historians have sometimes argued that historical events are inevitable because of major economic forces, and that historical biography is no more than courtly flattery, Hitler proves them wrong. His capture of the German soul and his face-saving explanation for their lost first world war proved all too powerful, with dreadful results. He was the spark in the methane swamp…
And on that point, historian Robert Tombs has put forward a good argument that Britain should have ducked out of the war, kept the Empire, and let the Nazi regime fail under its own dreadful contradictions. Conquering with lightening war is one thing, governing for the long term another. Empires are costly. Even subjugated peoples rebel from time to time. Policing them takes time, and saps profits. Ask the English. The audience was not convinced by this championing of prudent self-interest in the face of a barbaric regime, but it was a reasonable position in 1940, as the film, perhaps too vividly, depicts…
Perhaps Churchill versus Hitler is the best story ever told, and will be told again and again, long after Alexander, Hercules, Hector and Lysander are all forgotten. It will enter world history as the greatest confrontation ever: two men fighting for Europe in a battle that spread across the whole world, dragging in others till the death toll reached 50 million.
Comments:
* After seeing a 2050 showing of this film, the following comment was heard. “We had to fight the Nazis or we’d be speaking German today,” said the British man in Arabic.
* Hitler was a product of his times. Even if he had been throttled in his crib, someone else would have arisen to take his place.
If you want to see the roots of WWII, you need only study the politics of WWI. (And, no, I don’t mean just the Versailles Treaty.) All the things you see in the history of WWII – deportations, ethnic cleansing, massacres of civilians, annexations, political arrests, expansionist politics, race theory and so on – one can discover easily in the actions of *all* the participants in WWI, and on a large scale. Indeed, it can be argued that all Hitler and the Third Reich were following the plans laid out before and during WWI by, variously, the Second Reich, Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Russia and, to a lesser degree, Britain. It’s fair to assert that all Hitler was doing was following somebody else’s blueprint, and with the full support of German Speakers everywhere who didn’t want to repeat the privations, deaths, rapes and destruction of recent memory.
As has been pointed out elsewhere and above, Churchill was to a large degree an indebted fraud with a good PR machine. One very much doubts if all that “Stirring Oratory” was actually written by him at all. (Ditto the books. And that “We Will Fight Them…” speech was made by an actor on the radio.) Pretty much drunk most of the time – a high functioning alcoholic – a deep analysis of Churchill reveals a manipulative and superficially charming Psychopath who managed to drag both his country (and the United States) into a bankrupting war that pretty much destroyed the Empire he purported to be saving. It’s worth noting that in a different time and place he would be considered a War Criminal.
In contrast, Hitler’s writings – pretty much dictated – are pedantic and plodding to be sure. Where he shined brightly was in oratory. Working only with basic notes – bullet points – He would begin a speech, stop and pause, begin again, stumble then start, all the while reading the audience. Moving ahead extemporaneously, he soon had them mesmerized. If you ever watch one of his speeches from beginning to end – and not the Allied Propaganda middle excerpts where too often in he’s shown screaming and gesticulating wildly – you quickly realize that this guy made one hell of a speech. And that, along with making concrete the fears (born of experience) and desires of his audiences, was what made him so successful.
(It’s also worth noting that rarely do they tell you what he’s saying. Instead, you usually get a solemn announcer talking about “These Words of Hate.”)
This is all revisionist of course. And the takeaway is that in history the more a personage is presented as a cardboard cutout – saintly or demonic as (((circumstances and pressures))) dictate – the further you are from the truth of that person (and the forces and politics around him) you actually are. That’s where reading deeply into history becomes important.
* Hitler vs. Stalin was the real cage match, with all talons out, sharpened.
Looking abroad, Chiang Kai-Check vs. the Tojo vs. Mao was an even bigger deal.
* Who was the better painter?
Churchill?
Or Hitler?
* The least discussed of the famous Churchill stories is his one embarrassingly public failure of morale in the 24-hours before D-day. D-Day invasion was heavily planned around correcting Churchill’s mistakes and Gallipoli – especially his failure to realise the importance of contemporaneous Intel, and the consequent ability of the defending Turks to prevent or delay critical pushes by bluffing with only a handful of men until reinforcements arrived with which to pin the invaders on the beaches (hence D-day’s emphasis on high casualty paratrooper and air reconnaissance tactics – to avoid Churchill’s error, they needed to know what was happening beyond the beachfront).
After several years of everything a public image of unflappable confidence, Churchill spent the day slowly disintegrating , emotionally and intellectually, until in the last few hours he began insisting that the invasion had to be delayed, with increasingly spurious excuses. He even to get on the phone to FDR and any American general in his Rolodex, until his minders and American liaisons essentially blocked him for fear that in his hysterical state, Churchill would completely violate communications secrecy and give away the invasion date.
In retrospect, we now know that Churchill was subject to mood swings throughout his life. But it certainly looks a lot like the old man was human enough, and suffered enough guilt for his role in the First World War, that he had a near breakdown over the thought of being responsible for a 2nd Gallipoli.
* Churchill was very good with words but an abject failure in military strategy. He failed at Gallipoli, he failed in Norway, he failed at Anzio, he was wrong about the Normandy Invasion (an American plan) etc…
The Brits performed poorly in WWII, they rode the coattails of America and Russia to victory. It is ridiculous to see them thumping their chests and pretending as if Churchill was the hero of WWII.
* He was probably more worried that his reputation would suffer than about sending thousands of men to die climbing up the cliffs under the pounding of the German guns.
If so, the Jewish Question is of moderate importance at most. If the JQ is primary to you, then you’re saying non-Jews lack agency. Pick a path, white man. Blame or step up?
Larry says: So let’s stop “blaming” all other non white minorities too shall we? I mean, Why give just the Jews a pass?
Why should we “blame” Black crime or Muslim terrorism for anything for example? I’m sure the Jews don’t. Do they?
I find it hilarious to see people who make a career of pointing to uncomfortable patterns in certain groups suddenly getting nervous and and testy when it comes to (((certain uncomfortable patterns))).
If white societies should be predicated on the interests of whites then Jews are just as desirable as gypsies and blacks because the JQ is just a subset of the broader Biological Realism Thought Complex. We should start making this point because it cuts down to the core of ethnonalism itself.
And this tweet is pure passive aggressive kosher bitching.
“You insecure, goy? You goin’ to grow up and man up or blame the jooo, goy?”
This is so old and tired.
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Ben emails: I was reading through your recent long blog post “Quantfying Antisemitism” and have been watching your YouTube channel quite a bit lately.
The Jewish question is absolutely fascinating to me.
I consider myself an Antisemite, and I’ll tell you why in a second, but I also really want to be accurate in my assessment. The JQ is extremely complicated, if anything at all, and it seems like most people get it wrong. I used to be much more crude in my understanding of the Jews, even getting into Holocaust denial and other historical revisionism (which I’ve been forced to give up almost entirely on further research), but continue to modify my view over time.
Reading academic books on Jewish history, and listening to some of you and others’ counter-arguments, etc., lead me to believe a lot of antisemitic beliefs about the extent of Jewish power and Jewish beliefs and actions are myths, or at least extremely exaggerated.
Still, I can’t bring myself to not be opposed to the Jews, because enough of it is true. For example: the history of Jews using Hollywood to mold the world in their image and push degeneracy and porn, their constant pushing of anti-white, anti-racist propaganda in media and academia (long predating WWII), their role in opening our borders to replacement level third world immigration and then being on the frontline viciously preventing any of us from objecting to it, their ruthless suppression of anything even resembling criticism of them (I don’t want a foreign people ruling over me and telling what I can and can’t say, and who I can and can’t criticize – sorry), and their widespread hypocrisy and double standards and “dear fellow white people” tricks – just to name a few – are all unexcusable and unforgivable.
Also, I think you misrepresent MacDonald’s thesis. Well, I guess he has a few, but his main overarching thesis (put forth most explicitly in SAID), is that the history of Jewish/Gentile relationships is explained by constant and unavoidable ethnic conflict and resource competition.
You claim that Jews and gentiles have lived next to each other harmoniously at many times, and this might be true at some point somewhere – I guess – but I don’t really see it. I see a zero sum game. It seems that either whites are oppressing Jews, or they lift the restrictions and then Jews quickly rise due to their high IQ and begin taking over certain industries and professions at the expense of the native whites. And I get this from reading books on Jewish history written by Jewish academics, not just from reading MacDonald.
Therefore, my worldview is the same as Theodor Herzl, basically, who I think was a great man. He said that racial separation is the only way to end the eternal conflict and I truly believe that. I am unable to find any evidence to the contrary.
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Mark Collett is the best debater yet, as far as the Alt-Right goes. Seriously, Mark had a brilliant approach addressing these topics. Patrick Slattery was also impressive, he seems to hold a wealth of information (a real intellectual… not sure why he doesn’t have a larger audience). Anyway, sucks Striker wasn’t able to participate, I love that man.
Also, I hadn’t heard much of Patrick Slattery, and I thought he was exceedingly well-versed. I guess he’s buddies with Duke, which probably makes him a marginal figure… but honestly I’m so disgusted at this point with what passes for elite/upper-class insights into American politics, that a voice like Slattery’s sounds very solid to me.
For an example of what I’m talking about, check out Sam Harris’s latest podcast with Preet Bharata… so vapid.
Yet Harris has all kinds of “social status.” But I mean, it is probably not necessary for you to watch the whole thing… I should probably stop watching too.
I do think that it’s important to *try* to bring this conversation into the mainstream, because if it stays suppressed, it’s likely to explode into a disaster, one way or another — either whites seriously marginalized in their own countries, or Jews targeted in a reactionary/violent phase.
Posted inAlt Lite, Alt Right, America, Jews|Comments Off on Post Game: The Warski Strike Stream. Halsey English v. Mark Collett. David Duke can’t make it.
A journalist who spent seven years embedded with the American far-right talks about how to get under their skin.
Vegas Tenold is a tall, bald Norwegian who blends in just fine with neo-Nazis. He found his calling as a journalist in 2010, when he emailed every address on the National Socialist Movement’s (NSM) website looking for an interview. A paranoid dude who called himself Lieutenant Duke Schneider of the SS invited him for pastries near Ground Zero in New York City, and, eventually, to a rally in Trenton, New Jersey.
The march—now known as the Battle of Trenton in far-right circles—descended into chaos when Antifa-style activists showed up, a preview of the violent clashes that would come to define the resurgence of the white nationalist movement in America. It also had a pretty big influence on Tenold’s life—he spent the next seven years embedded with fringe groups like the NSM, the Hammerskins, and the Ku Klux Klan. He also watched Matthew Heimbach, who became infamous for starting a White Student Union at Towson University, try to make his toxic ideology palatable to average, disaffected Americans in Appalachia and beyond in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election.
Tenold’s book about the experience, Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America, came out this month. I called Tenold up to ask what changed in between the Battle of Trenton and the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last August, why young men in America are attracted to right-wing extremism, and the best way to get under a neo-Nazi’s skin.
Here’s that conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
VICE: What did you learn about what attracts foot soldiers to this movement?
Vegas Tenold: I think a lot of it is that old chestnut: that people want to belong to something. People want to feel that they’re part of something bigger. The world is a confusing place these days. There are a lot of reasons for unemployment, for the lack of social mobility. There are a lot of big, big issues we are dealing with that are many-faceted. And so if someone comes in and says, “Well, no, it’s because of the Jews and the Mexicans,” that’s a very alluring, tempting solution to buy into. It’s also a higher purpose. If you believe that your race and you are persecuted, then all of the sudden you’re not just some hapless guy without a job, you’re a warrior.
Do you think white nationalism would lose its appeal if politicians addressed some of the problems of working-class people who’ve become increasingly desperate in the past decade?
It will exist regardless, because selfishness is such a profound force in driving people. I’m from Norway, which is arguably the richest country in the world, and we still have our fair share of nationalists and other assorted assholes. But I do think that the devastation of the middle class [in America], the lack of social mobility that’s possible now, the lack of the social safety net, it makes it easier to say people: “You don’t have much now, but here come the Mexicans to take what little you have.” That makes it easier for nationalism, for hatred, for bigotry to spread. I think in an ideal world where education and healthcare were taken care of, it would be easier to [contain].
So you argued a couple of times in the book that Antifa was more of a unifier for the right than Matthew Heimbach himself. Should we be having a serious conversation about whether or not they should stop kind of martyring these guys by attacking them?
I think so. First of all, I don’t think Anitfa is a homogenous group. But I think that a major moment in the last couple of years for the far right in America wasn’t the election of Donald Trump, or the inauguration. It was Richard Spencer getting punched. And you know, sure, I get the temptation to punch Richard Spencer. Who doesn’t want to punch a Nazi? But it really made them all feel that they all got punched. It allowed Richard Spencer to rebrand himself as a kind-of warrior priest of the far right. It really did rally the troops.
“Wisconsin goes to Trump! Everything you love will burn! LOL”
This is the text journalist Vegas Tenold received at three o’clock in the morning on November 9, 2016. Just a few hours earlier, what had seemed impossible had happened: Donald Trump was elected to be the next president of the United States. The author of the text was Matthew Heimbach, a likable and intelligent white nationalist who Tenold followed and wrote about for six years.
So how did we get here? Where the victory on election night is not the satisfaction in having won over your fellow countrymen to your vision for the future, but rather a gleeful joy that your opponents might suffer?
For over half a decade, Tenold immersed himself in the world of the white nationalists, and the ways they looked to grab political power (or not). His primary subject was Matthew Heimbach himself, a former socialist turned white nationalist whose goal is to unite the factions of the movement into one cohesive group, reformed to be palatable to the average American. It isn’t easy, and Heimbach spends half his time trying to get Klan members to leave their robes at home and skinheads to put away the swastikas.
The white nationalists are not one cohesive group. In fact, the different sects dislike each other. To the skinheads, the KKK is a depressingly sober, stodgy remnant of days gone by, while Klan members find the skinheads to be a little too, well, Nazi. Meanwhile, the Hammerskins just want to turn up the music and get into a fight… usually with their own members. Then there’s Art Jones, the octogenarian leader (and sole member) of the America First Committee, whose rambling speeches no one likes. Not every group is political or has any intention of becoming so.
But there are a couple things these groups had in common. They all believe they are members of an army in an eternal battle against the “reds”– defined as being anyone they don’t like, and whom they imagine were lurking around every corner. They are allergic to logic and facts, finding that the absence of proof is often in fact all the proof they really need.
This book was certainly informative, but in my opinion, it spins its wheels for the middle third, and it took me a while to read it. The author bounces from one white nationalist faction to another, meeting a colorful cast of (racist and also sometimes kind of crazy) characters along the way. But I wasn’t sure what it was leading up to. Is this just a look into white nationalists, or is there a point to it all? I’m still not sure. What this book is not, is about Trump. Not really. Tenold devotes little space to the Republican’s courting of key white nationalist players, including Matthew Heimbach. About one white nationalist’s support of the then candidate, he writes:
“He supported Trump with the aloof enthusiasm of someone who wanted to set fire to something just to see what happened but also didn’t really care one way or the other whether it burned. He didn’t really mind Hillary and didn’t really like Trump that much but seemed to have gone with the candidate who would piss the most people off.”
Of course, this didn’t stop this same person from declaring after Trump’s inauguration: “We’re president now.”
In the end, the author concludes that the alt-right movement is unlikely to succeed because they don’t have a policy platform so much as a series of gripes and offensive jokes.
“Freed from the burden of political correctness, white frat boys could now explain to the world how white frat boys were the true victims of feminism, affirmative action, and other forms of anti-white persecution and could, with a straight face, stand up in public and rejoice in someone finally fighting for their rights as white, affluent college guys.”
I think after 2016, it might be dangerous to write off the altright as trolling, although there certainly are strong elements of that on social media and through internet memes. But I’m confused as to why Tenold’s ultimate conclusion is about the so-called altright “basement dwellers” when the focus of his entire book is about organized white nationalist groups. Those frat boys are not in the KKK, which Tenold well knows, since he went to their BBQs, where they’d be lucky to have a dozen attendants.
This book was between 3 and 4 stars for me. I went with the higher rating because of the importance of the information in the book. But, really, what I think Tenold had here was a long article. I know that’s not what an author wants to hear after six years of research, but this is a stretch in book form. After reading this, I feel like I know white nationalists better than before, but I can’t say it was a step toward understanding them.
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There are times when some Jews find “Judeo-Christian” a useful term because it welds the much smaller Jewish population into a unity with the majority Christian culture but when incentives change so that it becomes more important to be aggrieved and separate, then Jews hate the term “Judeo-Christian.”
My view is that the term is sometimes useful to describe a common culture where Jews and Christians generally get along and look at the world similarly. It is not ever a correct theological term but few Jews care about theology.
I find that when I want something from someone, I look for things we have in common. When I hate someone, I look for ways we are different. There are days when I want to get close to the very same person that on other days, I want to distance myself from.
The debate after #Parkland reminds us We The People don’t really like each other very much.We smear those who refuse to agree with us.We claim a Judea-Christian heritage but celebrate arrogance & boasting. & worst of all we have infected the next generation with the same disease
But Reform Rabbi Ruttenberg, author of the recent Washington Postop-ed about how the DACAites morally require that we be getting Purim on Trump’s ass, is not having any of Marco’s philosophizing:
MY JEWISH HERITAGE TEACHES THAT WE DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO SAVE LIVES.
Get my tradition out of your mouth while you’re taking that blood money. https://t.co/TwolPFavYl
Reading the bio of Rabbi Ruttenberg, a Religious Studies major at Brown, is exhausting. I had this naive assumption that being a rabbi was the last of the pleasant sinecures for non-self-starters, like being a curate in an old English novel. But intense Tiger Daughters like Ruttenberg are taking over the rabbi racket too, just like all the other SJW jobs.
Anyway, Marco’s rather affecting lament merely reminds Rabbi Ruttenberg that gentiles using the phrase “Judeo-Christian” just drives her crazy with anti-Christian animus:
This might be a good time to note that “Judeo-Christian” is not a thing and we Jews would like you to stop conflating our tradition with your American Christianity.
I looked up the use of the term “Judeo-Christian” on nGram (along with its rival “Angl0-American”):
“Judeo-Christian” is occasionally used in the 19th Century, such as by Nietzsche as a term of abuse, but it really takes off in the nice, tolerant American late 1940s as a term of inclusion.
The Coen Brothers’ most recent movie, Hail, Caesar! about a movie studio making a Biblical epic around 1950 has a scene in which the studio’s Irish Catholic fixer (Josh Brolin), whose main job is networking with Catholic cops to let movie stars off on drunk driving charges, hosts a meeting with representatives of Los Angeles’s four major religions to get their approval of a Bible movie. What’s striking is how much less than maximally satirical the Coens are in this scene: you get the impression that Coens basically are impressed with the 1950 clerics’ characteristic commitment to “Judeo-Christian” ecumenical goodwill and the filmmakers’ outreach to organized religion.
The naked expression of anti-gentile animus that motivates Rabbi Ruttenberg would have been considered in bad taste in 1950. But that era of goodwill and self-restraint appears to be slowly ending.
COMMENTS:
* Rabbi Danya, that Frappuccino you had while tweeting in perfect emotionalese cost you more than a donation to save a third world child’s life would have.
The subject of ethics is complicated. If it isn’t complicated then it isn’t an ethical problem. That’s why a tendency to hysteria and moral leadership should never be mixed.
Wouldn’t you be better off in an actually caring role? One where your need for emotional and compassionate validation, which in your heart or hearts you know is your real motive for this outburst, isn’t confused with a real world set of policy prescriptions or call to action?
Your father would take you no less nor more seriously.
* The rabinette is a not particularly attractive female. I think it would be interesting to find a correlation between physical ugliness (esp. female) & the level of frustration and unpleasantness …
* This might be a good time to note that “Judeo-Christian” is not a thing and we Jews would like you to stop conflating our tradition with your American Christianity.
* And don’t you ever mention Christmas without mentioning Hannukah.
And never mention that it used to be a pretty minor festival until we got tired of eating Chinese food on Christmas Day, and decided it deserved equal billing.
Also, we reserve the right to conflate our tradition with Christianity whenever we choose, so that everyone is made to understand that the Ashkenazim have been a big part of the Western tradition and the Enlightenment. Maybe even the central part, since the Enlightenment. Except when we don’t want to be under the ̶k̶l̶i̶e̶g̶ ̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ spotlight. Because that sometimes feels like anti-Semitism. Because it is.
Anyway, don’t include us in your stinkin’ tradition. We’ll do that ourselves.
* This is really an astonishing, not to mention unexpected, development. It was only a few years ago that some Southern Republican politician was admonished for omitting the obligatory “Judeo” from an off-the-cuff public remark about the foundations of the American regime.
The tribunes of the right went into a panic over it, lest the bald assertion of a merely “Christian” heritage offend. To his credit the pol stuck to his guns, unapologetically affirming that he had said precisely what he had meant. (I can’t recall who this was, but I don’t expect he has advanced much in the party since then.)
Now we see an aggressive rebuke of Christians—and Steve is right to call it a hateful one—from the Judeo-Left, demanding the de-coupling of that tired but polite coinage. It says to me that something really has changed—and not primarily in religious terms. The insistence on “Judeo-Christian” started out as a gesture of benign inclusion on the part of the powerful towards the weaker. It persisted (as shown in the story above) because the once-powerful feared the unraveling of a necessary alliance with, and reprisal from, a rising and influential counter-power.
But now it looks like the power relation has been completely inverted—at least in the thoughts of Rabbi Ruttenberg (herself an anointed rising star of the prevailing power, as her CV shows). She feels so secure in the invincibility of her power that she sees no further use for the alliance, expresses no residual gratitude for past and present generosity, and feels free to dump, and dump on, the Christian part of Judeo-Christian altogether.
Worst of all, she chooses to flaunt her power against the weakest of potential opponents, when the latter is expressing his personal fragility. What a nasty bully. If the word still had any meaning she’d be a genuine bigot. Anyway, folks, the knives are really out.
* As long as Christians recognize the revelations of the Old Testament and (on a human level) the Jewish origins of Christ and the Church, it seems to me that Judeo-Christian is “a thing” and the opposition of some Jews, even rabbis, to the term shouldn’t deter my use of it. It’s possible to over-emphasize the Old Testament elements, but I think that’s more of a problem with some Protestant denominations than with the Catholic Church.
* You are exactly right about how women are taking over all of the social justice warrior rackets. But this has been going on for a long time in Christianity.
The father of one of my best friends is a minister in the United Church of Christ. This guy is definitely a Democrat, but almost all of his time is centered on serving the people in his congregation. He is an exemplary human being in many respects.
His wife, on the other hand, is an intense social justice warrior. She marched with Martin Luther King in the 1960s, the whole 9 yards. At some point in the 1980s, she decided that she would have more authority if she also became a minister. She did so, and to my knowledge never did one whit of pastoral care of a congregation. Everything she did was politically related.
Fifteen years ago, I went to their daughter’s ordination ceremony. Over the course of this two hour long event, three or four senior members of her Divinity school took the podium, and acerbically reminded her that being an ordained minister means talking about Jesus and being a pastor to a congregation, not doing solely political work. Everyone laughed, because everyone knew that the only reason she became a minister was so she could engage in social justice warrior activities. As far as I know, she has no interest whatsoever in caring for the needs of a congregation or even talking about religious matters.
In the last church that my wife and I attended, the pastor was a very interesting and deeply involved guy who spent a lot of his time attending to the needs of his flock. However, he moved to another congregation, and the woman who took over as the pastor for this church is, guess what, an intense social justice warrior. Even my wife cannot stand this woman, and we left.
* For those who are rooting for an end to Judaism, this is how it happens. It’s men and women together who uphold religious traditions, and when women drop their obligations it’s over.
I know a number of Jewish men whose wives divorced them, taking the children and most of the money, and you cannot imagine their consternation and dismay. Do you think their sons are going to sit still and be good Jewish husbands?
5778 years is a long run, but the end is in sight for Judaism, and it is the women who will bring it down. Feminism and leftism are more potent forces than any of us imagine.
* She’s not at her best here. Purim tends to bring out the very worst in a Jew.
The three high holy revenge-holidays of Judaism, Hanukah, Passover, and Purim, are all repulsive in their own ways, but there’s something especially disgusting about the the fiction of Purim, which Bibi now uses to sell war against Iran. No doubt this repellent creature is fully on board with that agenda and quite happy to have “American Christians” do the fighting and dying for Eretz Israel.
As an aside, I was always under the impression that the popularization of “Judeo-Christian” was, like “Jesus the Jew” a largely Jewish meme with the intention of showing how much Christianity “owes” to Judaism and Jews.
I suppose that, like the Hanukah bush, that bit of faux-assimilationist propaganda has served its purpose and now there is no longer any reason for the Jew to cloak his fundamental hatred of Christianity and Christians.
So who did promote the term starting in the 1950s–suicidal, genteel WASP academics on their way to oblivion or conniving Jews looking to subvert institutional Christianity?
* [Lilith] It seems odd to name an ostensibly religious Jewish magazine after a demon.
* Most jews I know happily go along with the “Judeo-Christian” thing–it made US support for Israel that much more solid–but this next generation see no benefit as Christianity loses its heft in the 21st century. As things stand, “Judeo-Christian” is neither good nor bad for the jews, but I’d be selling it short in the decades ahead. Why be affiliated with something so obviously in decline?
And it really is an idiot expression–the two religious are ridiculously different in their doctrinal foundations.
More important, what about the intellectual and cultural foundations of Western civilization is jewish? I prefer “Hellenic-Christian.” That much better captures the individualistic striving and curiosity of the West.
* Ironic how the rabbi’s opinion appears to align with the opinion of Joe Sobran, who wrote the following:
“Clearly, it is futile for the Church to try to mollify a hatred so ancient and so deep as the Jewish animus against Christianity. Despite all the sentimental rhetoric to the contrary — such as pious nonsense about “the Judaeo-Christian tradition” — Judaism and Christianity are radically opposed over the most important thing of all: Jesus Christ, who commands us to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, and to love our enemies, which does not mean mistaking them for friends.”
* She looks sort of like a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg and soon she will look like an old Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
* When the Jewish brand was down (think the Rosenbergs), it appears they were fine w/ the conflation, but now that “Christian” is considered declasse, white and downscale, it’s time for the Rabbi and her peeps to begin the disassociation procedure, as it has served her people for what it was supposed to do.
* Self-restraint for Jews would be anti-semitic, self-hate. They can say whatever they want, cross any boundary at least as long as it serves them. No Lenny Bruce to call out Jewish establishment. “Spotlight” with Jew investigating misdeeds in Catholic community is good. Catholic investigating misdeeds in Jewish community would be anti-semitic.
* Her attitude is enlightening. “Judeo-Christian” is a polite fiction. The kind of pleasant, getting-along cultural thing that comes from Euro-gentile high trust societies. Jews had essentially nothing to do with America’s creation or why America became a huge successful, highly prosperous nation. But they showed up, and so politicians found a polite phrase to include them in a nod to our Christian values.
And Rabbi Ruttenberg hates it.
Not “weird” i guess, because people believe what suits these interests and self-conception, but i still find odd this tikkun-olamy self-conception about “Jewish” values as opposed to Christian ones.
Obvious as the sky is blue, is that Christianity is the a universalized God-loves-us-and-be-nice offshoot of Judaism. This Christian universaility and “be nice” message had at least something to do with why Europeans were able to develop these very nice, “everyone’s on board”, high trust nation states.
In contrast Judaism, is a much more primitive God-is-on-our-side-gave-us-this-patch-and-helps-us-smite-our-enemies tribal religion, of which there must have been hundreds back in the day. It’s no doubt accreted all sorts of stuff over the ages. But it really stands out only in that it has been so successfully tribal in resisting universalized religions–like Christianity–that Jews still exist down to this day, while pretty much all the other tribes that worshiped their particular tribal god were swept away. Of course, if you’re a Jew you can plausibly argue that just shows Jews are indeed the chosen people with God on their side. Fine.
But i find this Jewish preening about the superiority of the humanizing, universal, world-healing values of their obviously tribal religion compared to actually inclusive/universal Christianity–which helped build high-trust, super-pleasant European civilization–rather ridiculous.
* Her looks range from goblin to raptor. Mostly goblin. Although in some youthful shots, when she smiles brightly, I’ll concede “fresh-faced goblin.”
Now some gentle souls here on Unz may rush in and say, “Hey now, why are you judging her appearance? Uncouth!” Here’s why: Understanding comparative human aesthetics is an important part of sussing out why someone, or some people, have certain views—from the personal to the global. A lot of resentment/envy on an elementary biological level manifests in endless cries of “Privilege! Supremacy!”
* Since most Jews prefer Muslims over Evangelicals, Judeo-Islamic is closer to the mark.
But the real alliance is Judeo-Homo-Afro.
Judeo-Christian was useful to Jews long ago when christian power and identity were crucial factors in America. Christianity is now dead.
It’s Judeo-Diversity alliance.
Sure, there is a link between Judaism and Christianity, but there is also a break. It’s like Anglo and American. America developed as continuation of Anglos but there was also separation.
Christianity, as developed in the West, is Christo-Pagan or at least Euro-Christian, which is different from Arab-Christian and Afro-Christian.
Some say culture is product of race, but it’s closer to the truth to say culture is molded by race.
Consider how whites and blacks practice the same religion of Christianity differently.
Consider how blacks took white music and made it into black music and how whites took black music and made it in to white music.
So, regardless of the culture’s origins, it is reshaped by racial tendencies of those who adopt them. This is why Japanese Buddhism is different from the original in India. Different races digest even the same culture differently.
* I’ve noticed that women, being removed from men’s games, have only a dim understanding of the pecking order or the rules that determine status. And likewise women’s pecking order is somewhat of a mystery to men.
Anyway, this woman senses the power shift and has decided to run with it, but she has outrun her blockers, so to speak, if she really wants to pit Jewish men against Gentiles. In literature anyway, women are notorious for starting fights between men. She is either cluelessly or maliciously making prickly remarks to stir things up. However, if push came to shove, her side would lose so she should probably put a sock in it.
This is what Hegel was saying; remarks like hers are not merely statements of fact, they are actively oppositional and they will engender opposition. An Engineer would say that her statements x is this, y is that are not merely expressions or equations of scalar quantities but are vectors. They have magnitude and direction. The are barbed arrows.
* The term Judeo-Christian seems primarily confined to the United States.
It has never been popular in Europe. In any case, in Religious Studies
“Judeo-Christian” is being slowly replaced by “Abrahamic,” as in “Abrahamic
Religions,” referring to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Theologically speaking, I’ve always found the term Judeo-Christian to be
absurd, an oxymoron of sorts, as in many ways, although not all, Christianity
is practically the opposite of Judaism. For example,
1. In Judaism, unlike in Christianity, there is basically no concept of Original
Sin, and therefore there is no need for a Redeemer. Judaism shares this view
with Islam;
2. Ben-Gurion famously said, “We Jews don’t believe in hell – to us hell is
mediocrity.” Hence, culturally speaking, the pursuit of wealth, power, fame,
influence, and sexual pleasure is emphasized much more, especially among
secular Jews, than among Christians. There is a saying, “Judaism makes it
much easier to live, and Christianity to die.” In other words, Judaism
in practice emphasizes the expansion of the ego, Christianity – transcendence
of the ego.
3. Judaism says “Eye for an eye” whereas Christianity tells us to “turn the
other cheek.” As Gandhi said, “Eye for an eye means that soon we’ll all be blind.”
While those statements are obviously metaphors, there is no question that the
concept of forgiveness is much more developed in Christianity than in Judaism.
In contrast to “Love your enemies,” I was surprised that in Judaism one is
sometimes morally required to abide by the rule, “Hate your enemies.”
This was explained by a learned rabbi years ago in an article in “First Things,”
a highbrow Catholic monthly;
4. Judaism can be summarized as “It’s the deed, not the creed,” whereas
Christianity, esp. in the Protestant version, as “It’s the creed, not the deed.”
Catholicism, with its rejection of Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide, is in this sense
ca bit closer to Judaism;
5. In Christianity God is very close. We are encouraged to call Him Father, even
Daddy, as Jesus did. Theosis or deification is a venerable tradition in Christian
theology. In Judaism God (or G-d) is very distant, in fact totally other. Judaism
in this sense is similar to Islam.
In fact, Judaism, esp. Orthodox Judaism, is in practice much closer to Islam than to
Christianity. Both religions require circumcision (circumcision is virtually unknown
in Europe, and declining in the U.S.), have similar dietary laws, both are sex-positive,
unlike Christianity which values chastity, both are ritualistic, etc. It would make
more sense to speak of the Judeo-Islamic value system than the Judeo-Christian one.
In Judaism, esp. Reform Judaism, a rabbi (literally, a teacher), is the
equivalent of a college professor. Hence rabbis make a lot more money
than Protestant ministers or Catholic priests (although Catholic priests
typically get free lodging and free food, and at least in the U.S., typically
the use of a car). In consequence, the membership fees at a Jewish temple
are often very high. As a result, in contrast to Christianity, relatively few
Jews belong to a temple compared to the membership numbers at Protestant
congregations or Catholic parishes, where membership is technically free
although donations are collected and tithing is sometimes encouraged.
* We men in the West are so enlightened that we’ve created a wide variety of make work jobs for professional bitching.
* My take is Jews of the 40s, 50s and early 60s deeply desired to become Americans. You can see this with their obsession with Folk and Blues music. Bob Dylan is the archetype of this phenomena. Then there was the Phillip Roth’s and Joseph Heller’s that were practicing Hawthorne like ‘self awareness’ literature with a big smear of Freudian explanation. Somewhere in the late 80 Jews decided they preferred to be masters of the universe instead of Americans. This Jewish supremacy now pervades a vast swath of Jewish thinking. They no longer wish to be American, they wish to be masters.
* “We are not hyphenated Jews; we are Jews with no qualifications or reservations. We are simply aliens; we are a foreign people in your midst, and we emphasize, we wish to stay that way. There is a wide gap between you and us, so wide that no bridge can be laid across it. Your spirit is alien to us; your myths, legends, habits, customs, traditions and national heritage, your religious and national shrines, your Sundays and holidays…They are all alien to us.”
– Dr. Jacob Klatzkin, Krisis und Entscheidung im Judentum: der Probleme des modernen Judentums (Berlin: Judischer Verlag, 1921).
* Female pastors are heretical, and churches and synagogues have signed their death warrants by employing them. Who wants to go to church and be hectored by an angry woman?
* Judeo-Christian was an attempt at being nice and inclusive. Jews were not outside of the American tradition like Buddhists or Mohammedans or Hindus but were part of it.
Of course devout religious believers on both sides always rejected this because Orthodox Judaism is not very much like devout Catholicism. Even though they share some scriptures, the traditional Christian view of what they call the Old Testament is that it was all foreshadowing of the coming of Jesus. “Judeo-Christian” was rejected from the right, especially the Catholic right which traditionally viewed Jews as “the enemy” who killed Jesus and whose stubborn refusal to accept the new religion was an affront. Christianity is like the rebellious teenager who rejects his parents’ values and so to be conflated with them is galling – he is NOTHING like them (the narcissism of small differences). Whenever “Judeo-Christian” got mentioned around here there were always a few from the Christian right to pounce on it and say that it doesn’t exist – Judaism and Christianity are apples and oranges.
But for mainstream (Leftist) clerics it was pretty palatable. Since leftist Episcopal clerics and leftist Jewish clerics all believe in “social justice” more than they actually believe in that old time religion stuff, it was a comfortable fit. Until maybe last week, mainstream (Leftist) Reform Rabbi types were totally down with “Judeo-Christian”. When our local Reform synagogue was being renovated, the services were moved to a nearby Presbyterian church (ideal setup because the holy days don’t overlap – I’m surprised that there are not more permanent setups like this – you could cut your fixed costs in half) and our rabbi and the Presbyterian minister got along swimmingly because they both believe in mostly the same stuff.
But now we have the flight from Judeo-Christian on the (Jewish) left – same idea as the flight from white.
* Jesus committed suicide by cop.
* Another point in favor of the Catholic Church. Women may testify to their faith, as Sts. Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Therese the Little Flower did; they may instruct the ignorant, as countless teaching Sisters have done, but per St. Paul, they do not preach.
* Jewish-power critic Gilad Atzmon even uses the terms ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Athens’ as cultural polar opposites: in his schema, Jerusalem stands for rigid dogmatism and accepting things based on hierarchical authority, while Athens stands for free, open enquiry and individual interpretation.
Posted inChristianity, Jews|Comments Off on America’s Surging Anti-Gentilism
White nationalists are shocked that a Jewish video channel is banning them.
About five percent of Americans are Alt Right but the Alt Right has not learned to act cohesively and build their own infrastructure. They’ve yet to create goytube.com. They’ve yet to become tribal. They’re a bunch of individuals fighting each other. They leave it to the Jews to build out social media and then try to hop on board to spread their message.
Goytube.com would be a lot harder for Jewish activists to take down then a Baked Alaska and Warski Live.
WNs need to create their own banks and payment systems. Menachem Begin and David Ben Gurion understood that the Jewish state was not going to be given to the Jews. It had to be seized and defended. They could count on organized Jewish support. I wonder when WNs will develop this formidable power?
Many WNs have to loudly hate out-groups and deny the Holocaust to psyche themselves up to a strong in-group identity. For ethnocentric people, however, strong in-group identity comes easily.
I feel the walls of censorship tightening around us until we strangle.
Everyone has gotten strikes or banned off youtube in the past 3 days. This is why and apparently it's getting worse. I am working on my backup… do not worry. https://t.co/gSrk4zDOHl
Just days after YouTube put strikes against several conservative channels, on Wednesday evening the platform suspended Warski Live—the home of Internet bloodsports, or political debate streams—from hosting its daily show.
Free speech will not be tolerated.
The host of the show, Andy Warski, delivered the bad news to his audience on Twitter today, announcing that his channel was given a strike for an old video criticizing progressive mouthpiece Franchesca Ramsey.
He revealed that his channel, which featured debates from speakers across the political spectrum, including classical liberals like Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) and members of the alt-right like Jared Taylor—was struck with a 90-day ban prohibiting him from hosting further “internet bloodsports” livestreams—the bread and butter of his channel.
Warski says that his channel was hit by YouTube’s new “trusted flaggers,” individuals with the capability to flag a channel for automatic suspension without proper review. He believes that the strike on his channel has a good chance of being appealed within a week, as he believes the strike to be invalid.
“It’s a bullshit strike,” says Warski. “In the meanwhile, I’ve privated all of my videos up until where I started doing regular streams so any videos criticizing Riley (Dennis), Franchesca—any SJW essentially—because apparently when I was talking to some people a ton of YouTubers who have criticized SJWs are getting strikes. So if you’ve made fun of or criticized Franchesca, you’re at risk if these trusted flaggers find you. It is bullshit, and [we] will appeal it, so I can’t stream it.”
Warski says that he will continue to stream on the channel of his co-host, biologist J.F. Gariepy. Should that channel also be taken down, he intends to stream on other backup channels that he has set up to circumvent the politically-motivated attempts to kill his platform.
Regardless of Warski’s efforts to continue streaming, the strike will undoubtedly hurt his ability to reach his audience of over 280,000 subscribers.
Various other lesser-known Trump-supporting accounts hosting daily political debate streams were hit with a similar strike several days ago, effectively putting an end to those accounts ability to reach any sort of audience—a problem compounded by some of those creators also being banned from Twitter.
Posted inYoutube|Comments Off on Warski Live Has Been Banned From Youtube Live Streaming For Three Months
And I believe in the Black Question and Muslim Question and a Latino Question and the Asian Question and that question is — is the majority better off hosting the strangers in their midst?
For example, why would Jews want Arabs in the Jewish state of Israel? Why would Muslims want non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia?
Every group, every individual, should ask themselves if they are a blessing to those around them. If you live a life of love and service to others, then you know you are a blessing. If you don’t know, then you’re not likely a gift to others.
Jews asking themselves the Jewish Question — are the non-Jews better off having us around — is a good thing. It wonderfully focuses the mind.
Accurate criticism is good for groups. It helps them to behave better.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on I Believe In The Jewish Question
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
