The roots of American progressivism, by Steve Sailer - The Unz Review
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The Roots of American Progressivism

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It’s widely assumed, both by Jews and by anti-Semites, that the roots of American progressivism are heavily Jewish.

Yet, Jews had relatively little impact on the crucial first century of the American republic, from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Yet progressivism that is ideologically ancestral to contemporary “In this house we believe” wokeness was already ascendant during the second quarter of the 19th Century in New England and its cultural satellites upstate New York, and northern Ohio, and triumphed nationally in the 1860s, if only briefly, from say 1862-1868.

For example, one of the first incidents in which I became aware of the Great Awokening was during the winter of 2013 when students at traditionally leftist Oberlin College in northern Ohio had one of their freakouts over the KKK running amok on campus (it turned out, evidently, to be a lady, perhaps homeless, walking around on a cold night with a white blanket draped around her).

Oberlin was founded in 1833. Oberlin wasn’t always exactly like it is today, but it always had tendencies in that direction.

The leftist ideological center of America in the first half of the 19th Century was of course Boston, which had few Jews at the time.

Although small numbers of Sephardic Jews passed through Boston in the colonial era, the city had no significant Jewish presence until the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1840s and 1850s, Jews from Poland and Germany began arriving, coming especially from the Prussian-ruled provinces of Posen and Pomerania. Fleeing economic deprivation and religious persecution, the new Jewish arrivals to the city numbered about a thousand on the eve of the Civil War.

In contrast, the rightist ideological center of America during this era was Charleston, South Carolina, base of John C. Calhoun and the fire-eaters who launched secession in 1860. Charleston was known as the Jewish capital of America during the Sephardic era up through about 1830.

The first two Jewish U.S. Senators were Southern slave-owning Confederates.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of 19th Century American Jews: it’s full of worthy individuals, but few are exactly pivotal figures in American history.

In the middle of the 19th Century began a small but talented influx of German Ashkenazis. And then in the 1880s began a huge influx of Eastern European Ashkenazis. Hence, the second century of the American republic would be vastly more influenced by Jews than the first century.

But the roots of American left of center ideology are distinctly Protestant, obviously going back to the Puritan side of the English Civil War of the 1640s. Yet, fewer and fewer seem to remember this.

I think part of the problem is that American Protestants are losing interest in their history. For example, I own the 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica, and it contains an amazing number of articles about now-forgotten American Protestant ministers, almost all of which strike me as boring, in part because almost nobody ever brings these worthies up anymore in intellectual discourse. The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, used to try to figure out occasionally how to work mention of, say, Henry Ward Beecher or Thomas Wentworth Higginson into an article denouncing Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich, but not anymore.

In contrast, Jewish intellectuals remain relatively fascinated by their predecessors for healthy ethnocentric reasons. Thus, Emma Lazarus, a relatively minor figure in her own time, is now treated as a de facto Founding Father.

And anti-Semites find it more interesting to read contemporary Jews writing about old Jews than to read old Protestants whom nobody writes about anymore. So, anti-Semites, like Jews, overestimate the Jewish role in the history of whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.

 
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  1. A lot of people today vaguely call themselves “conservative” but they are not. They are simply repelled by the radical Left.

    I have no desire to live in a “trad” village from the 1800s. Most of us want sane policies that promote human welfare and embrace a scientific worldview. And don’t focus on wiping out whatever group we belong to.

    • Agree: Santoculto, AnotherDad, mc23
    • Replies: @Ennui
    , @Jay Fink
    , @AnotherDad
  2. anonymous[105] • Disclaimer says:

    Steve has changed and its stark in this post. It is the first time I’ve seen him use anti-Semites as a derisive term against some of his readers. He hasn’t called out readers as racist for disliking black people and pointing out demerits of black people as a group. Has Steve in old age taken on a different identity? Does he identify as Jewish now?

  3. Margaret Fuller, Emerson & all that shit, plus some utopian communities (basically post-Puritan lunatics). Post-Civil War, the Boston craze.

  4. anon[259] • Disclaimer says:

    Steve, do you have any conflicts of interest on this subject? I.e., are you personally of Jewish descent – either biologically or through adoption? A lot of people assume that you’re a gentile but there’s material on the internet implying that you’d discovered that at least one of your biological parents was Jewish.

    “American Protestants are losing interest in their history”

    White Christian history has been made all about slavery and the Holocaust by Jewish media oligarchs and Jewish academics and by Jews lobbying the school districts to mandate reading Anne Frank’s diary in every elementary school. In effect, perhaps the absolute majority of “history” taught in K-12 and undergrad is WWII and the majority of that is rehashing the Holocaust over and over.

    “In contrast, Jewish intellectuals remain relatively fascinated by their predecessors for healthy ethnocentric reasons.”

    Which is exactly the sort of thing which Jewish-controlled media and academic institutions have pathologized in white Christians post-WWII as “Nazi.”

    Now even white historical figures are being turned into “people of color.”

    • Agree: JimDandy, Mike Tre
  5. Maybe someone has mentioned this already, but Uri Berliner from Steve’s recent NPR post has ‘resigned’ (been fired?) from NPR, perhaps at the behest of the new CEO and iSteve subject Titania McGrath Maher, or at least she felt compelled to yammer about it in her salvific-sounding but logically insane way in this recent iSteve theme mash-up:

    https://apnews.com/article/npr-editor-resigns-conservative-liberal-c259642e3920e99d5f05a7fe1a90012e

    • Replies: @SFG
    , @R.G. Camara
  6. Mark G. says:

    The late 19th century American Progressives were influenced by German philosophers. Germany became the center of the Counter-Enlightenment in Europe. As an example, the Progressive Herbert Croly studied at Harvard under the Hegelian Josiah Royce. The Progressives looked to Germany as the new model for America. The New England Progressive Jane Addams complained that America was moving too slowly in copying Germany.

    The Germans had taken up Rousseau’s idea of a strong leader at the top representing the “General Will”. This was a rejection of the American belief in freedom and individual rights. In Europe this led eventually to Hitler and also Stalin. Stalin was a disciple of the German philosopher Karl Marx.

    In America, these ideas moved America in an increasingly statist direction, first with Wilson and then with FDR. This has continued up to the present day. These ideas have led America down the road to decline.

  7. Oberlin was always exactly like it is today, but it always had tendencies in that direction.

    Missing “not”?

    S/b:

    Oberlin was not always exactly like it is today

    ?

    • Agree: MEH 0910
    • Replies: @Barnard
  8. healthy ethnocentric reasons

    Just wondering if anyone else’s ethnocentrism is healthy, and if so, who and why, and if not, who and why not?

    Also, it is not self-evident to me that this particular ethnocentrism has really been so healthy, Emma Lazarus and her consequences being Exhibit A.

  9. SFG says:
    @Almost Missouri

    I mean, I agree with the guy, but you can’t write a long expose of your current employer for a small upstart in the same business and expect to keep your job.

    Say he had worked for Coca-Cola and made a YouTube video complaining about the use of high fructose corn syrup in Coke for a company making artisanal soda with non-fructose-based sweeteners. Would he keep his job?

    • Agree: Almost Missouri
  10. Anonymous[119] • Disclaimer says:

    Haha, several dozen leftists at Google have been arrested and fired after staging a sit-in protesting Google’s collaboration with the supremacist ethnostate of Israel’s wanton baby murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

    These leftists falsely believed that, because their Jewish masters had allowed them to run wild for weeks protesting imagined “white supremacy” after a black career criminal died of a heart attack in police custody that their Jewish corporate overlords would also tolerate their protest of blatant examples of Jewish supremacism in Israel – of the mass murder of civilians in Palestine so as to make room for more Jewish lebensraum land-grabs.

    Haha, these stupid, silly goyim believed Jewish lies about America being a “white supremacist” country – believing Jewish lies about Jews being sincere “liberals” who care about brown people.

    Everybody who doesn’t have their heads up their @sses knows that America is really a Jewish-supremacist state where Jews control all the institutions and call all the shots and blame whitey whenever one of their ventures goes to shit (e.g., Iraq) or whenever their criminal activity is exposed (E.g., Jews’ massively outsized role in the slave trade).

    But not all Googlers have their heads up their behinds. Below is a video of an ex-Googler where he described why Kanye may well be right about the Jews. Jews, he explains, may best be thought of as a parasitic mafia group.

    Unfortunately, he then took this video down from his Youtube channel after experiencing a scare which lead him to believe that his account would be suspended as a consequence of posting it. He described, in a subsequent video (which apparently is also taken down) that he’s decided to be like Cypher in the Matrix film. You know: Cypher the character who betrayed Neo and the resistance because he decided that he’d rather just be living in blissful ignorance plugged back into the Matrix and eating his juicy steak. Thus, he’d resolved to never talk about Jewish power again.

    I wonder how many other “Cyphers” there are on Youtube and in corporate media and in the Deep State and Congress and academia, who decide to silence themselves and/or collaborate with the Jewish tyrants who rule over the West because they just want to eat their juicy steaks…

    https://rumble.com/v1q1ex6-why-kanye-west-is-right.html

    • Replies: @Anon
  11. SFG says:

    I’ve seen this argument in Tablet and in Kaufman’s Whiteshift, and there are some interesting precursors that look an AWFL lot like modern progressivism: “Boston marriages” between suffragettes, crusades against male vices of the era like alcohol and prostitution, and birth control and abortion advocacy. You also have xenophilia with things like Theosophy and concern for minorities and the poor with the original abolitionist movement (yes, the other side is right sometimes) and settlement houses and so on. Even the ‘cultural extermination’ of Native Americans by taking them to boarding schools to learn white cultural ways was based on Progressive ideas of the perfectibility of man. You think the Carolina planter aristocrats would have done that?

    There was even an anti-Klan organization, the Knights of the Flaming Circle, that took anyone who wasn’t a white…Protestant. Though I might be a bit far afield.

    I do think the Jewish influx in the Great Wave of immigration at the last turn of the century gave the left a huge ‘shot in the arm’ in terms of intellectual capital, as well as the current obsession with ethnic prejudice (a huge problem for Jews in Russia). The actual Hart-Celler act reflects this, but let’s not forget Hart was Irish-Catholics were still a minority at this time, with JFK’s election being a big deal in overcoming that prejudice. Politics is always a matter of shifting coalitions-you can find presidential election maps from about a century ago that look pretty modern red vs blue but with the colors flipped.

    So the East European Ashkenazim allied with the left end of New England WASPs and, of course, wound up running the movement…just as their grandkids are finding out they’re too white (by lefty standards) for that to continue.

    Sunrise, sunset…

  12. Mike Tre says:

    “Thus, Emma Lazarus, a relatively minor figure in her own time, is now treated as a de facto Founding Father.”

    Well, it’s a relief that a relatively minor figure like Emma could only manage to get a couple lines of her poem nailed to the feet of the Statue of Liberty.

    Just imagine what a relatively major figure might accomplish!

    We live in a binary world of only antisemites and jews apparently.

    Or of only negroes and racists.

    Or of only women and misogynists.

    Or of only homosexuals and homophobes.

    • Replies: @Mike Tre
    , @Cagey Beast
  13. Anonymous[421] • Disclaimer says:

    It’s widely assumed, both by Jews and by anti-Semites, that the roots of American progressivism are heavily Jewish.

    Shouldn’t that be anti-goyites and anti-semites?

    Btw, the idea isn’t that Jews always led or pushed progressivism but that they later usurped it with either radical twist or tribal bent.

    So, what was once good was made bad.

    • Replies: @Ian M.
  14. Ralph L says:

    Wasn’t it back then the same urban/non-urban divide that we have now? Packing the rats together makes more of them want to push other rats around. The leaders of Charleston lived in the country most of the year. If they’d somehow dispersed the later Jews out to farms and small towns instead of NYC, would they have turned out differently? Likewise, our recent aliens?

    Rejuvenating Lazarus was supposed to be a job for us Christians. How dare they!

  15. One way to measure where mainstream 19th century America fit on the political compass would be to compare it to its European peers. Georges Clemenceau* was radical by French standards but quite comfortable in respectable New England society:

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Clemenceau

  16. @SFG

    an AWFL lot

    heh

    xenophilia with things like Theosophy

    Is this some kind of “Free Tibet” thing?

    • Replies: @SFG
  17. Now, do one on all of the people fired for criticizing Calvinists.

    • LOL: Gordo
    • Replies: @FPD72
    , @Ian M.
  18. @SFG

    But that assumes NPR’s role is to sell unhealthy junk to the public and everybody knows it. Berliner at NPR is more like the whistle-blowers at Boeing.

    • Replies: @Mr. Anon
  19. Cutter says:

    A lot of it’s just less-able white ethnics refusing to accept that some whites have agency.

  20. Anon[401] • Disclaimer says:

    I find the boomer fetishization of Jews to be so interesting, Scott Adams goes ballistic when people point out that these ruinous liberals are always Jews “every single time”, but he just can’t make the connection. I’m with EMJ, they are the enemies of mankind.

    • Replies: @Pragmatic Extremist
  21. Bill P says:

    Boston was majority Unitarian by the end of the 18th century, IIRC. That’s about when the last of the old guard Puritans were forced out of Harvard and pastoralized.

    Evidently the mercantile class had had enough of the austere spirituality of the Noncomformist Puritans. This was in fact an old dispute, the Puritans having originally gained the upper hand by expelling liberals in the early 17th Century.

    So despite the contemporary fashion of blaming the Puritans for progressivism, it wasn’t really their fault, unless you want to blame their immoderate zeal for the subsequent backlash.

    Yankee progressivism emerged, in my opinion, originally out of a desire for economic liberalism. Old fashioned Christian ideals can get in the way of commerce, and Boston was all about international trade. Boston ships were laden with cotton, sugar, rum, molasses, tea, coffee, whiskey, slaves, spermacetti, ambergris, Chinese opium, etc. etc.

    The Indians on the Pacific Coast called Americans “Bostons,” because that’s where all the Americans they had met were from.

    I believe it’s Catholic scholar Patrick Deneen who has pointed out that each side of the political spectrum in the US promotes one variety of liberalism: the right promoting economic liberalism (Hamiltonian) and the left social liberalism (Jeffersonian). Opposing both is a kind of populist conservatism that was mostly expressed through Protestant Christianity.

    So one could say that the American project has been based on an anti-Christian liberalism balanced by a fervent populist religiosity. Now that this Christian religiosity has been largely vanquished, the balance is gone and we are careening down the path of nihilism, which, as Dostoevsky pointed out, is the inevitable child of liberal parents.

  22. History is rapidly forgotten indeed.

    Looking at primary sources myself, struggling through s’s spelled like f’s, I am very sympathetic to Yarvin’s view that the American Revolution was a left wing project, that the British loyalists were much farther right.

    It’s crazy to mythologize things to the point that Emma Lazarus becomes an honorary founder, but it’s clear that America is not such a conservative country when you actually read primary documents outside of the Federalist Papers.

    • Agree: Ian M.
    • Replies: @SFG
  23. Jack D says:
    @SFG

    NPR doesn’t make sugary beverages for profit. They’re a publicly funded news purveyor that is supposed to be nonpartisan (LOL). Berliner said that he tried to raise his concerns internally and was met with derision so he had no choice but to go public.

    • Replies: @deep anonymous
    , @SFG
  24. @Jack D

    I respect Berliner for having the stones to do what he did, knowing he probably would be canned. No doubt he is old enough to afford retirement, but still, a lot of people hold their tongues.

    I also suspect that the last straw for Berliner was the pro-Palestinian stuff. A relatively rare instance where a fair part of the Left (mostly the goyish part) diverges from the party line. It is something White Gentiles should emulate–to stand up for the interests of their group. But there is little to no evidence of that happening.

  25. Pixo says:

    Protestant theologian Karl Barth on the cover of Time in 1962.

  26. SFG says:
    @Jack D

    Well, give them some time, though I am sure it will be using natural sugar from farms owned by BIPOC queer femmes.

    It’s a different industry, but my point remains: if you publicly criticize your employer, especially at an organization that’s seen as a counter to your existing one, you will probably lose your job.

    I agree with the guy 100% and like to see Jews siding against the woke. But, he had to know what he was doing.

    • Replies: @Jack D
  27. American progressivism is not Jewish, but it is related to Judaism.

    I recommend all persons read Professor James Kurth’s book “https://www.amazon.com/American-Way-Empire-America-World-But/dp/1733117814/”.

    The American Way of Empire‘s chapter on the “Protestant Deformation” explains in part the origins of this issue.

    In addition, people should read works of Pietist Restorationism. Starting in the British isles and then propagated to America, Christians of the UK-USA tradition adopted Old Testament perspectives on politics and theology. This is the origin of Progressivism: the combination of protestant “free-thinking” combined with the worldliness of Old Testament perspectives.

    Moldbug covered this in his own way.

  28. WASPs likely believe that the nation and their power was lost thanks to their magnificent error in opening the flood gates for the Ellis Island immigrants in the 19th Century. Hence, WASPs have largely given up on America or reminding people of their mark on it, at least publicly.

    The loss of Boston to the Irish Catholics was particularly psychologically hard upon the Old Guard. Boston was literally founded as a Protestant “City Upon a Hill:, a shining beacon of plain, Puritan, anti-Catholic Protestantism. However, the Brahmins still controlled much of Boston power and New England power for decades despite being outnumbered due to Old Yankee money.

    Meanwhile, Jews observe they are currently in charge of America and therefore reminding people of their history is a mark of pride.

    Pro tip: a democracy/republic is controlled by the masses. If you want a small minority ruling over a large majority, choose a dictatorship, or else keep the borders very, very closed.

    • Replies: @Dutch Boy
    , @deep anonymous
  29. @Pixo

    Barth was a singular theologian that combined liberal ideas like universal salvation with traditional biblical exegesis. What’s your point?

    • Replies: @Pixo
    , @FPD72
  30. LondonBob says:

    Kevin Macdonald has tackled this.

    https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2020/05/kevin-macdonald-puritan-individualism-anglo-saxon-hegemony-jewish-infiltration

    In general I don’t think you can draw too much from beliefs from prior times in to the very different modern political scene. The Puritan heartland in England is the most conservative area in Britain, the UKIP stronghold of Boston, and is still very rural.

    Modern progressivism is predominantly Jewish, although Irish Catholics, like Maher, or the Kennedys, have certainly played a role, across the anglosphere.

  31. SFG says:
    @Almost Missouri

    More New Age before New Age. It was founded by a Russian aristocratic lady named Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to have gotten revelations from Secret Masters in, yes, Tibet. There was a whole bunch of turn-of-the-century woo stuff about Secret Masters and the truth behind all religions, and a bunch of Western esotericism that’s been kicking around since at least Agrippa and Ficino, further if you include the Gnostics and Pythagoreans. The big difference was a lot of stuff they imported from Hinduism and Buddhism, including the swastika.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy

    I’m sure a bunch of ladies got enlightened and a bunch of guys got laid.

  32. in part because almost nobody ever brings these worthies up anymore

    Steve,
    You should do a deep dive into American church Dispensational theology. People who believe this stuff are Deplorables (a la Hillary), but they still have enough electoral influence not to be ignored.

    • Replies: @Anogomous
  33. Jack D says:
    @SFG

    Oh, I think he knew. This was his parting shot. He metaphorically set himself on fire to get attention to the problem because he was trying to save public broadcasting from itself. I think he will be fine. I’m sure he’ll find another job.

    • Agree: Harry Baldwin
  34. The half-Jewish Theodore Sorensen remembered the WASP wokesters well enough to crib from an Oliver Holmes Jr. speech his “Ask not….” line in Kennedy’s inaugural speech.

  35. Protestantism started as a rebellion against the religious and moral values of previous generations. as time went on, it shifted from being a rebellion against things that were specifically Catholic (since those were in the distant past of the protestors in question) sometimes to more recent trends and sometimes to things more foundational. Unitarians were rebelling against their Calvinist progenitors, then proto-Progressives rebelled against earnest XIX century mercantilism and expansionism. the previous generation rebelled against any sense of responsibility to one’s family. the current fad rebels against human nature itself.

  36. pirelli says:

    the roots of American left of center ideology are distinctly Protestant, obviously going back to the Puritan side of the English Civil War of the 1640s

    Puritans vs Cavaliers, Whigs vs Jacobites, liberals vs Tories, abolitionists vs slave-owners, John Stuart Mill vs Thomas Carlyle (although they were actually buds!)… I’m sure there were some softball games between Unitarian and Episcopalian seminarians that got quite nasty as well.

    The current ideological divide in America has deep roots in the political history of Britain and the early American republic that have nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish influence. When reactionaries go off about how today’s radical left is all a product of da joos, they are being, in my view, bizarrely self-deprecating (assuming they’re of Protestant descent, which many doubtless are). We’re living in a world built by Protestants.

    In the US, by the early to mid-20th century, the Jews were playing the game better than anyone else, but they were still playing a game invented by Protestants.

    • Agree: Ian M.
  37. Jack D says:

    Some of the Jewish radicals (e.g. Emma Goldstein) came to the US already radicalized and influenced by Marxist or anarchist thinkers. But ultimately, radicalism in the US was a dead end. Emma Goldstein was sent packing back to the USSR. Chuck Schumer does not see Emma Goldstein as a role model.

    The predecessors of todays Democrats did not bring their politics from the shtetl and were greatly influenced by and looked up to the great American WASP thinkers and politicians. The Yiddish radio station in New York had the call sign WEVD in honor of Eugene V. Debs (and not Emma Lazarus). My late father in law was also named Eugene in his honor. The uber-WASP FDR (and even more so Eleanor) were looked upon as gods in many Jewish households.

    The Jews did not land in America as a rich elite obsessed with race and gender issues. This kind of nonsense is a luxury for rich women. Their original concerns were the bread and butter concerns of working class people – organizing for a better pay and shorter work weeks and safer conditions in the garment making sweatshops and so on.

    • Agree: Frau Katze, Ian M.
    • Troll: R.G. Camara
    • Replies: @IHTG
    , @Mr. Anon
  38. Steve, in certain circles, it is common to trace the roots of the current evil to a small rebellion that occurred in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517.

    The equation is pretty simple: Protestantism = democracy = individualism = corruption of customs = a general moral degeneracy.

    There is also the matter of what happened to The First Daughter of the Church toward the end of the 18th century:

    On June 17, 1689 the Sacred Heart of Jesus manifested to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque His command to the King of France that the King was to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart. For 100 years to the day the Kings of France delayed, and did not obey.

    So on June 17, 1789 the King of France was stripped of his legislative authority by the upstart Third Estate, and four years later the soldiers of the French Revolution executed the King of France as if he were a criminal.
    https://usgraceforce.com/the-sacred-heart-of-jesus-the-first-100-year-warning/#:~:text=For%20100%20years%20to%20the,if%20he%20were%20a%20criminal.

    • Agree: Ennui
    • Replies: @Jack D
    , @FPD72
    , @Anonymous
  39. @Mark G.

    True. In fact, German philosophical influence was so profound it created the modern American law school.

    In the 1870s, the dean of Harvard law, Christopher Langdell, re-organized the law school to be very Germanic in nature (before that it wasn’t considered prestigious or profitable). Not only did he create a standard first-year curriculum (copied by every other law school and to this day largely unchanged), but introduced the “Socratic method” in teaching, where a teacher basically puts one student on the spot each class and pushes them through questioning to absurd limits. This was copied from German ideas about such pedagogical questioning being used in sciences. It was thought that by treating law as a “science” it would rigorize and regularize the irregular American common law, discovery truths about it unknown, and thus tame the wild beast into something like chemistry, physics, or biology was becoming.

    Of course it failed on those accounts. Human-made law isn’t a science. And Langdell and his Protestant associates were deliberately ignoring the 1500+ years of Catholic and Orthodox philosophy (e.g. Aquinas) on discerning a valid law and justice — i.e. with regards to Christian truth. You can’t claim there’s a universal just law principle without recourse to God and natural law.

    But what the Socratic method and standardized courses did allow was for a small number of faculty to teach a large number of students and sell them textbooks. After that, law schools were huge money makers for American universities.

    • Thanks: mc23, Ian M.
    • Replies: @Ennui
  40. G. Poulin says:
    @Bill P

    Unitarianism is itself a kind of red-headed stepchild of the old Puritanism. It’s what Puritans become when they get rich, fat, and powerful. They lose the strict morality but keep the arrogance. Modern progressivism is less of a political theory and more of a perverted form of Christianity.

    • Replies: @Corpse Tooth
  41. @Almost Missouri

    resigned

    Absolutely stupid move by him, but his own fault for being a commie. Yes, he’s a woke commie, just not as woke as the latest round they hired, hence his alarm bells.

    By resigning, he’s allowing all the commies at NPR to claim “Hey, we didn’t fire him, he quit, so clearly he thinks he’s wrong on some level”. Had he stayed, he would have forced NPR to fire him, reprimand him, or freeze him out, which would have (1) allowed him to claim he was right all along; and (2) sue them.

    This is why you never, ever resign. Stay and make them punish you. You still (as of right now) have the law on your side, and can take the commies to the cleaners with a good lawyer. And commies want easy victories (resign) not long slogs (firing and suing) — the latter disheartens them, especially if they lose.

    Vox Day is right: make the rubble bounce. Don’t make it easy on them.

    In short, this commie was just a weak idiot.

    • Replies: @Rob Lee
  42. @Mark G.

    “These ideas have led America down the road to decline.”

    I forgot who it was who complained that of those Boomers who were fresh out of the Ivies and seeking to “run the country” had imbibed far too much “German philosophy.” This, of course, was a direct consequence of the European turmoil of the 20s and 30s which saw academics and intellectuals (many, if not most, being Jews) flood the faculties of Columbia, Harvard, Yale etc. to the point where the likes of The Frankfurt School seemed to have moved its headquarters (so to speak) to the campuses of the American Northeast–and, starting in the immediate post war period, inevitably to the institutions of government.

    As a result, and as we are seeing now, traditional religion–indeed tradition itself– has taken a back seat to the religion of The State and will probably eventually be discharged from the bus altogether.

    • Replies: @deep anonymous
  43. Because so many Jews were going to New York, which was regarded as almost synonymous with the United States, in the early days of Zionism there was a movement towards setting up a Jewish community in Galveston, TX

    However when Jews arrived in Galveston they were quickly moved on to other diverse places, many of them small towns, and there was never an opportunity for a real southern Jewish community to form.

    Had the Homeland been established in Galveston, maybe there would be no Israel today.

    • Replies: @Jack D
  44. Linus says:

    I appreciate that Steve is addressing the JQ, and certainly there is truth in the fact that American history was driven largely by Protestants. What is missing here is 1) the American project derives from the Enlightenment, one of whose central targets was the destruction of Christianity; 2) especially after the 19th century Zionist push, Jews successfully exploited this western anti-Christian tendency to their advantage.

    As E. Michael Jones has extensively documented, the Jews are excellent at exploiting the fault lines within societies to their advantage. The founding fathers (especially John Adams) recognized that America could not continue successfully without a Christian base, yet they also pushed for a liberal-unto-atheist Enlightenment system into our founding documents. This resulted in a contradiction baked into the American experiment, and that confusion is now working itself out in our rapidly dissolving nation. Many groups can exploit this internal devolution, but the Jews have always been primed to achieve maximum profit from western decline, as they operate strongly via within-group unity and out-group hatred.

    • Agree: Ennui, Goddard, Travis
    • Replies: @FPD72
  45. Doc Bob says:

    Of course. Jews value humor. Progressivism is so humorless only Puritans could have invented it.

    Rather, American progressivism has impacted the culture of US Judaism. I’ve been to a few Passover Seders. They were universally enjoyable except for the “secular humanist” seder. It left no room for fun to make space for land acknowledgements, lesbian acknowledgements, etc etc.

  46. traditionally leftist Oberlin College in northern Ohio had one of their freakouts over the KKK running amok on campus (it turned out, evidently, to be a lady, perhaps homeless, walking around on a cold night with a white blanket draped around her).

    I have no firsthand knowledge of the event in question, but Oberlin is IMHO too small and affluent to have white-blanketed homeless women. A more plausible scenario is a co-ed trying to return incognito from an ill-judged nocturnal tryst. She can thank the discretion of campus security that her name and purpose remain unknown despite her antic jetting into a national news story through the express lane of woke hysteria.

    • Replies: @prosa123
    , @mc23
  47. For example, I own the 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica, and it contains an amazing number of articles about now-forgotten American Protestant ministers, almost all of which strike me as boring, in part because almost nobody ever brings these worthies up anymore in intellectual discourse.

    Really? How can you talk about how America is today without considering the influence of Ellen G. White and Elmer Gantry?

    • Replies: @kaganovitch
    , @FPD72
  48. J.Ross says:

    OT — As you read these two completely coincidental items from Ellis Items, keep in mind that there is also “chance,” “diversity,” and “the competency crisis.”
    4. Gillian Tett:

    (A)ccording to US officials, the Chinese government in particular is intensifying cyber-attacks and — most crucially — changing their nature. Previously, these focused on espionage and/or intellectual property theft but now “prepositioning” strategies with so-called “living off the land” techniques are proliferating. In plain English: hackers secretly install themselves inside infrastructure and lie low, so they can create massive future disruption if — or when — desired.

    This “prepositioning” is hard to see. However, US officials recently revealed one such incident around a so-called “Volt Typhoon” Chinese hack. Security experts fear that this threat is now far bigger than the more visible ransomware issue. “The People’s Republic of China represents the most critical threat [among cyber risks],” General Timothy Haugh, head of US cyber command, told the Vanderbilt event. Or as David Frederick of the National Security Agency echoed: “You cannot overstate the critical mass of prepositioning and attack capabilities.” (Source: ft.com)

    5. Four states have experienced widespread outages of 911 lines, affecting emergency calls throughout South Dakota and swaths of Nebraska, Nevada and Texas overnight, officials said. Most lines were down for one to two hours, although services appeared to be gradually restored overnight. The exact nature of the outage appeared to vary across states — some 911 systems reported problems with calls from landlines, while others said customers using mobile phones were struggling to get through. Some police departments or sheriff’s offices said that 911 callers were receiving a busy signal, and they encouraged people to contact them via non-emergency numbers or by text. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

  49. prosa123 says:
    @Almost Missouri

    Oberlin is IMHO too small and affluent to have white-blanketed homeless women. A more plausible scenario is a co-ed trying to return incognito from an ill-judged nocturnal tryst.

    Known as the Walk of Shame. Though I don’t understand why anyone would be ashamed. I mean, getting a little Pork Action* is nothing to be ashamed about!

    * = as it was known during my college days

  50. Lex says:

    In the 1840s and 1850s, Jews from Poland and Germany began arriving, coming especially from the Prussian-ruled provinces of Posen and Pomerania. Fleeing economic deprivation and religious persecution

    Hmmm.

  51. Art Deco says:

    I’m not seeing the current obsessions peddled by the educational apparat, the media, and corporate HR as deriving from mid-20th century Jewry or from early 20th century New England Yankee culture. It seems more like a bad case of affluenza.

    • Replies: @J.Ross
  52. @Bill P

    Populist conservatism has not been vanquished yet, it found a new champion in louche businessman Donald Trump, of all people. Even though Trump for most of his life has been very much a Jeffersonian, he saw an opportunity to take up the flag of populist conservatism and it got him to the White House once and may do so again. Traditionally of course if American economic and social liberals have been able to agree on one thing over the centuries, it’s that populist conservatism needs to be crushed.

    • Replies: @Dutch Boy
  53. J.Ross says:

    Oh, so they’re Protestants. See the EMJ piece. Nobody cares if they attended shul (or, for that matter, meeting) regularly, we care about people who want us to die.

  54. J.Ross says:
    @Art Deco

    Affluenza definitely, and late decadence, but denying the Jewish role is laughable. Please continue doing so. A tremendous censorship is probably looming because the unprecedented widespread real time end-scene from the Running Man, where the Wurlitzer stops working but they’re still hammering on the keys.

    • Replies: @Art Deco
  55. Barnard says:
    @Almost Missouri

    I assume the not is missing also. The tone for Oberlin was set by revivalist preacher Charles Finney who became its President in 1850. Finney was a crazed zealot even among abolitionists who used coercive pressure to obtain new members to his churches. Jumping from one progressive cause to the next and even abandoning Christianity entirely is the natural progression of the path he set out at Oberlin.

  56. Dutch Boy says:
    @Peter Akuleyev

    It is amazing and instructive that the arrival of Trump drove the liberalism out of the liberals at light speed. It makes one think that the whole liberal project was always about power and not liberty at all.

  57. Christianism has no Jewish roots??

    • Replies: @Jack D
    , @puttheforkdown
  58. J.Ross says:

    Oberlin was founded in 1833. Oberlin was always exactly like it is today, but it always had tendencies in that direction.

    Wasn’t, surely?
    ——–
    College is dumb, when misused as being for everyone. Now we have a mechanic shortage (at the same time that we supposedly have full employmemt, which we don’t really have).
    https://www.newsday.com/amp/business/mechanic-shortage-auto-dealers-boces-ugkoeytz

  59. might as well complain that there isn’t much talk about Pong and Nolan Bushnell anymore. every 25 year old guy making a million dollars a year in video games should be a scholar on early Atari. blue hair lesbians should be required to post a technical analysis of Nishikado’s Space Invaders code before they’re allowed to take over and ruin the next 2 billion dollar video game franchise.

    would be like complaining that 30 million dollar a year NFL players have no idea about leather helmet football minutia. don’t they know what was happening 100 years ago in their own sport? you can’t enter the NBA draft without making a blog post about pre-shot clock basketball time of possession numbers. “How dey come up wit 24?”

    how’s it relevant? it’s not. “The AC versus DC battle back in 1890 was MUCH more important than figuring out who owns and programs every television network in 2024. All this technology runs on ELECTRICITY, the real underpinning of the entire system. Edisons, not Cohens.”

    • Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
  60. Well how about that! Who would have guessed? Because according to the bots and Gabmas basement bloggers that stink up the comment threads in any Gab post, the JOOOOOOOZZZZ are to blame for everything. Because Freud or Oppenheimer or something. They all had the Baltimore bridge collapse figured out before it hit the water – it was the JOOOOOOOZZZZZ, donchaknow. Here’s a cute kitten video, and presto, a dozen commenters are responding with something about the JOOOOOOOOOOOOOZZZZZZZZZ and the CIA.

  61. @LondonBob

    The sort of people who left counties like Lincolnshire and Essex for America were probably quite different in personality traits to their fellow countymen probably having a less conservative mindset, even in those regions today there are still a lot of people with leftist views, probably moreso than in say West Virginia or Kansas(the British right wing regions are far less conservative than American right wing regions and states) so while conservative in nature there is of course an ugly lefty element as well.

  62. Erik L says:
    @Almost Missouri

    Everyone’s ethnocentrism can be healthy. It can also be unhealthy. When you are a minority the unhealthiness that could have an unambiguously bad effect on society (i.e. stealing not ‘advocating for policies other people disagree with’) tend to be handled by traditional criminal and civil law, the kind that has existed throughout history.

    When you are the majority, it’s different. It’s more akin to being a monopoly and being able to charge rents. Just by favoring your own, your people could e.g. get most of the best government contracts, be subject to less punishment for a given crime, live in clean neighborhood while all the chemical dumps go in those of other ethnic groups.

  63. Mr. Anon says:
    @Cagey Beast

    But that assumes NPR’s role is to sell unhealthy junk to the public and everybody knows it.

    And? Is that not the case? That’s what I’ve always assumed.

    Berliner at NPR is more like the whistle-blowers at Boeing.

    For his sake, let’s hope not.

  64. Jews…

    Great. Another thread that will be hijacked by Yack D and people arguing with Yack D. Over/under is 37 Yack comments.

    • Replies: @Pixo
  65. Anonymous[338] • Disclaimer says:

    Who is the driving force behind the genocidal, anti-White intellectual and political regime that is in effect in United States and other European nations today?

    That is the issue we are concerned with.

    The causal agent is obvious to anyone who is out in the world and has eyes to see and ears to hear. It isn’t 19th century American Christians.

    • Agree: AnotherDad
  66. Erik L says:

    Thanks Steve. Also, consider the possibility that the liberalism and activism of the children of well off Jews was either imitation, or caused by the same thing, as the progressive activism of protestants. Twentieth century Jews, contra the opinions of many here, very much wanted to assimilate and become recognized as true Americans.

    The first big woke movement was the anti-slavery movement in Britain. People forget this now, because that movement was overwhelmingly successful, but slavery was not always considered an obvious evil. The movement was very much driven by women. They would exchange stories of the horrors of slavery and had some pin they would wear (it had an etching of the face of an unhappy slave).

    The movement was so big that voters compelled their representatives at the Congress of Vienna to demand anti-slavery declarations in the product of the conference.

    All the big moralizing political movements since have been imitations of this

  67. Jack D says:
    @Jonathan Mason

    There were Jewish Agricultural Colonies established in other places – Vineland, NJ, Argentina, etc. These operated in parallel with Zionism and were never intended to be complete substitutes for each other.

    The Jewish population of E. Europe experienced a population boom in the 19th century and exceeded its natural carrying capacity for its former middle man roles. The result (combined with hostility from the reactionary Russian government replacing the formerly enlightened Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – Russia has an ongoing problem with shitty rulers to this day) and later from newly revived nationalist movements among Ukrainians and Poles was widespread poverty. The Jews of E. Europe were looking for multiple routes out of poverty including job training, emigration to the cities of the Americas (and large W. European cities such as Paris), rural colonization in the New World AND emigration to Palestine. All of these parallel routes together were STILL not enough to alleviate the poverty of E. European Jews or to significantly reduce that population before it was destroyed in the Holocaust, so it’s not like one was the sole substitute for the other. Consider this like the problem of rural poverty in Latin America – again there is not just ONE route out of poverty – some go to El Norte, some to the big cities, some to work in maquiladoras, etc.

    Jewish farming in America was mostly a one generation thing because, given the educational opportunities available in America, the children of Jewish farmers preferred to do professional work rather than shoveling chicken shit like their fathers. The same was mostly true of other occupations that the immigrant Jews had available to them. Current generation Jews aren’t sewing garments or operating corner grocery stores, etc. like their grandpas either. A few grew these into modern fashion chains or supermarket chains, etc. but most got out.

    • Thanks: Johann Ricke
    • Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
  68. Mr. Anon says:
    @Jack D

    Their original concerns were the bread and butter concerns of working class people – organizing for a better pay and shorter work weeks and safer conditions in the garment making sweatshops and so on.

    Of course, some of them, like Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, were interested in worse pay and longer hours, and were not particularly concerned with safer working conditions:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

    • Replies: @Erik L
  69. Dutch Boy says:

    The old-style Boston Progressivism was noxious but survival. The new Jewish version is suicidal. The old-line liberal progressives created a society with no immune system and that always results in death.

  70. Dutch Boy says:
    @Pixo

    Henry Luce had a mission to subvert traditional Christian theology in the interests of the American Empire. Theologians like Barth were useful in that regard, as were Catholics like Theodore Hesburgh. It’s the old choice of Christ or Mammon.

  71. Jack D says:
    @Santoculto

    Yes, if you think hard enough, it ALL comes back to the Jews. You just have to hit the right triple bank shot and bingo, the ball always ends up in the Jew pocket. Or as John Hay said of his friend Henry Adams, when Adams “saw Vesuvius reddening … [he] searched for a Jew stoking the fire.”

    In the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” there is a kind of running joke where the Greek chauvinist father maintains that ALL English words are actually taken from the Greek. His daughter challenges him – “What about kimono?” But he is undaunted and quickly thinks of a (spurious) way to connect kimono to a Greek word.

    This reminds me of the people here who have Jew on the Brain disease. Yes, liberalism really has Christian roots, but “Christianism” has Jewish roots, so it all comes back to the Jews anyway. Touché.

  72. Mr. Anon says:

    It is well known that there is a strong strain of busy-body dogooderism among northeastern WASPs and that had a lot to do with the origins of progessivism in this country. But how relevant are Boston Brahmins in our society today? It seems like their influence began to peter out sometime in the 1950s or perhaps somewhat later (maybe the 1970s?).

    Well, what was America like in the 1950s? Not so radically progressive as it is today. So, what explains how it got to be what it is today? Is it all down to Congregationalist church ladies? I highly doubt it. I rather think a lot of it has to do with another group, whose societal (and especially cultural) influence has vastly increased since that time.

    • Replies: @Ennui
    , @Steve Sailer
  73. Pixo says:
    @William Badwhite

    I wanted to learn more about Jack D so I went to https://www.JackD.com

    It was not what I was expecting!

  74. @anonymous

    Steve’s descent into full Boomer over the past six or seven years has been interesting to watch.

    First, it was Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Now, he’s pointing and sputtering about white nationalists and antisemites like one of the Oberlin students that he mocks.

    Apparently, for Steve, Jews feeling pride in their people and having endless political organizations and lobbies to protect and promote the Jewish people is for “healthy ethnocentric reasons.” But if whites – ostensibly his people – do the same, it makes them “white nationalists.”

    In addition, according to Steve, if whites notice Jewish power and influence and dare to talk about it, that makes us antisemites.

    Something very strange happened to Steve over the past five years or so. Everyone – except the Jew crew – has noticed it. I have no idea what it was, but it’s getting worse. I used to read Steve for interesting takes on interesting subjects. Now, to my shame somewhat, I stop by to see how far the patient is regressing.

  75. @Prester John

    “I forgot who it was who complained that of those Boomers who were fresh out of the Ivies and seeking to ‘run the country’ had imbibed far too much ‘German philosophy.’”

    You might be thinking of The Closing of the American Mind by the late Harold Bloom.

    • Replies: @Prester John
    , @Anon
  76. @Almost Missouri

    According to Steve, when whites show healthy ethnocentrism, it makes them white nationalists. When whites notice healthy Jewish ethnocentrism via countless Jewish organizations and lobbies, it makes us antisemites.

    What happened to Sailer? This is getting weird.

    • Replies: @SFG
  77. Pixo says:
    @Chrisnonymous

    Just a graphic illustration of Steve’s point that “almost nobody ever brings these worthies up anymore in intellectual discourse.”

  78. @SFG

    Yep, the Jews took the baton from the Yankee WASPs. Both groups have this odd believe that they can and should tell the world how to live so the hand-off was pretty smooth and mostly unnoticed.

    Unfortunately, unlike the WASPs, Jews are terrible at running the show. They have zero noblesse oblige and their desire to undermine whites via immigration is destroying the country. The 20th century really was the Jewish Century but that time is fading now. Like the WASPs before them, the Jews are being challenged at a time that their young generation just isn’t as good as past generations.

    It’ll be fun to see how it all plays out.

    • Replies: @deep anonymous
  79. Anon[176] • Disclaimer says:

    In which Sailer outs himself as an enemy of the People.

  80. JimDandy says:
    @anonymous

    “It’s widely assumed, both by Jews and by anti-Semites, that the roots of American progressivism are heavily Jewish.”

    He left out some other groups, I think. Like, noticers?

    The roots of historical American progressivism and the roots of contemporary American progressivism are two different conversations. Same with “Conservatism”–when anti-Russian Jewish “Trotskyites” dressed up in Conservative drag they created a new set of roots.

  81. Muggles says:

    The late libertarian economist and historian Murray Rothbard (and other scholars) wrote some impressive articles and essays which argue that American “progressivism” circa the late 19th century (roughly 1880-1920) was largely the intellectual result of “liberal” university presidents whose religious orientation was far different from earlier Protestant theology.

    Whereas Catholicism insists on the papal hierarchy and institutional teaching via the priesthood rather than personal biblical instruction and “salvation”, the Protestant movement focuses on personal awareness of biblical teachings and salvation through education and personal good works.

    Especially via the New England “Ivies” and similar colleges (i.e. Woodrow Wilson) in the lae 29th century the “progressive” Protestant theology took a sharp turn away from the individual salvation towards the idea of “salvation” via “social reform”, i.e. government laws and programs which supposedly meant bringing “God’s good works to Man.”

    Much of modern (corrupt) liberal Protestant theology thus became a “religious” crusade for involving the federal (and in places, local) governments to “improve mankind.”

    No Jews were involved. Also this came from Yankee dominated institutions and was sold as a “duty” for good Christians to support and uphold.

    This very sinister substitution of State “salvation” works instead of individual enlightenment and personal moral behavior was an early template largely echoing the nascent beginnings of institutional Socialism and by the early 20th Century, Communism via The Party.

    At a time when educated Americans and others were highly relgious and Bible literate, this shift towards “salvation by State” remains an implicit premise of today’s largely secular “progressives.”

    Euthanasia, eugenics, the “righteous Warfare State” all gained momentum from 1900-1930.

    When the State becomes “the instrument of God” it grows unchecked.

    While there were early monopolistic practices and legal abuses from the private sector, when the State is the Strong Arm of God, no limits are applied.

    As left liberals have largely abandoned formal religion for new variants (Green Worship, anti European values “intersectional Marxism”, end of the Worldism catastrophic-ism) the State has become the substitute for God among the over educated pseudo intellectual classes.

    Not found in the Third World, where old time religion still flourishes.

    Atheists and agnostics say there is (perhaps) no God. Statists believe the State is God.

    Thanks to late 19th century American Protestant theologians…

  82. Rob Lee says:
    @R.G. Camara

    “In short, this commie was just a weak idiot.”

    But would you expect anything less than weak idiocy from a commie? He probably sat in his kitchen weeping, agonizing for hours on end about how to approach this issue… wavering in the usual soft-spined superfluous manner of all leftoid creatures.

    The fact that he worked for NPR at all signified that he was thoroughly neutered from the start.

  83. Anonymous[366] • Disclaimer says:

    On-topic?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/nyregion/illegal-weed-gale-brewer.html

    When an illegal smoke shop opened across the street, Gale Brewer, a local councilwoman, vowed to close it.

    Ms. Brewer grew up on Massachusetts’s North Shore, the pearl-wearing daughter of moneyed Boston Brahmin stock. But in adulthood she has come to so perfectly represent the Upper West Side’s particular brand of New Yorker — exceedingly liberal, notoriously opinionated — that constituents often affectionately misidentify her as a Jewish native of the city.

    … During the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, she and her husband fostered close to 30 children.

    … she was determined not to encourage a full-scale backlash on looser marijuana laws. She simply wanted to close the shops so a healthy, regulated industry could grow up in its place.

    … She remembered greeting a “nice young man behind the counter,” and telling him, “Be sure you’re legal.”

    There was little chance of that. The man who signed the store’s lease, Abrahim Kassim … pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiring to smuggle cigarettes over state lines. … after Mr. Kassim purchased a $2 million Long Island mansion, the federal government indicted someone with the same name on charges of running a food stamp fraud ring at a deli in the Bronx.

  84. Pixo says:
    @Muggles

    I don’t agree with Rothbard’s libertarianism, but it brings to mind that the peak Jewish demographic era of 1950-2000 that the very Jewish philosophy of libertarianism was popular intellectually but had no actual power.

    Instead, Ike Nixon Ford Bush Rockefeller center-liberal Protestant Republicanism dominated the commanding heights of US power.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    , @McFly
  85. Jack D says:
    @Pixo

    Ike Nixon Ford Bush Rockefeller center-liberal Protestant Republicanism dominated

    This is just not true. In addition to almost 1/2 that period being Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton in the White House, for most of that period the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and you also had a liberal Supreme Court. Basically, the Republican platform during that period was “we support the same thing as Democrats do, only a little less.”

    • Agree: Dutch Boy
    • Replies: @Pixo
    , @deep anonymous
  86. A major theme in Western literature is “simping”.

    Examples are abound, Les Misérables, Père Goriot, Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations, Divine Comedy, Tristan, and above all, Werther, guy commits suicide because he was simping so hard

    It’s sort of telling that Gwyneth Paltrow went from depicting epitomy of English gentry ladyhood to now selling “vagina-scented perfume”

    Other literature canons have been more “direct” about female nature:

    Liu Bei said, “The ancient had a saying: ‘Brothers are as hands and feet; wives and children are as clothing. You may mend your torn dress, but who can reattach a lost limb?’

    Romance of Three Kingdoms

    https://ctext.org/sanguo-yanyi/ch15

    The Master said, “Of all people, girls and servants are the most difficult to behave to. If you are familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they are discontented.”

    — Confucius, The Analects

    https://china.usc.edu/confucius-analects-17

    • Replies: @puttheforkdown
  87. SFG says:
    @Moldbug Fan

    Overthrowing the king to establish a republic was most definitely a left wing idea in 1776.

  88. @anonymous

    “It is the first time I’ve seen him use anti-Semites as derisive term … ”

    Anti-Semitism is a sloppy mess akin to skull-face Katherine Maher’s twisted thoughts on white men. It is imprecise. It is constructive to view Zionism in negative terms. It is a supremacist ideology that will cold-bloodedly kill non-Jews if it furthers the Zionist cause. All of the current WW III chatter is due to Zionist psychoticism. The most effective critics of Zionism are Jews and Jewish internecine warfare can be vicious (and entertaining). What I am truly against is not getting the job. And if I don’t get the job I will blame Thomas Wentworth Higginson for obvious reasons.

  89. No mention of McWhorter’s analysis of how Wokeism aligns with Mainline Protestantism?

    The Jews definitely share a lot of blame, but I also ascribe to a ‘we all broke the dam’ explanation. Maybe we can all just agree to blame women?

  90. Pixo says:
    @Jack D

    It was the same basic ideology. The ideological differences in the 52 56 60 68 76 92 presidentials were tiny.

    Just as the Jewish right was marginal in the GOP, the Jewish socialists were marginal on the left.

    Half Jew libertarian Goldwater was a disaster in 64 and Jewy-New-Left McGovern was worse in 72.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
  91. And anti-Semites find it more interesting to read contemporary Jews writing about old Jews than to read old Protestants whom nobody writes about anymore. So, anti-Semites, like Jews, overestimate the Jewish role in whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.

    And, at the other end of the chute, we see dueling paranoias. An “anti-Semite” in America is more than happy to sell a Jew a gun. Where else is that true?

    …the Jewish role in whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.

    E Michael Jones might be all over the story of Jews’ role in legalizing pornography, abortion, and contraception, and replacing compulsory prayer with Darwin in public schools, but their critics at this site are silent about it. Because these critics support those things, those particulars can’t possibly be part of the Great Jewish Conspiracy.

    • Thanks: Ian M.
    • Replies: @Dumbo
  92. i’d say it’s more Steve doesn’t need his comment section to turn into Stormfront. he doesn’t need half of all posts to turn into arguments about da jews. i’m certainly hip to that. especially since many articles posted by other authors on this site cover these topics extensively. that’s why i’m not really amenable to the idea that Unz himself objects to the discussion. he actively solicits these other writers who post rather unhinged rants about da jews all the time. Steve can buffer most of that traffic to the other author’s threads.

    however, this is BY FAR the most important thing happening on the planet right now, and explains most of what happens in the world today. da jews are 80% of the entire game here. they used to run the Soviet Union, now they run the United States. it’s impossible to be a noticer and try to explain how the world works without constantly running into this stuff. indeed, there are now two large regional wars happening, and it’s because of them. at the same time, the US border has ceased to exist, also largely because of them. because of them, Congress must spend a trillion dollars protecting the borders of other countries and 0 dollars protecting the borders of this country. Invade the World, Invite the World as Steve used to say. how long until those 2 million Palestinians end up here or in Yurp, because that’s the ‘obvious’ solution. yet another useless, hostile underclass to deal with forever. your local jewish congressman thanks you, and don’t forget to vote Democrat in November as always.

    meanwhile, after the Ukraine war is over, they will replace all the Ukrainians lost with third worlders, and turn Ukraine into a third world dump in eastern europe and staging ground for the proper third world invasion of even that part of the world. can’t kill the Russians, at least we’ll put 10 million africans right on their border. after defeat, Zelensky if he’s still alive will jet off to Israel or perhaps Florida.

    how you react to this global situation is up to you, but derp on this new angle that it was actually wacko religious minority groups 250 years ago who who have a lot of downstream influence on what the US government does today. the ‘liberal inertia’ argument is a dog that does not hunt. it would be like pretending the NBA is not extremely, clearly, and totally a black thing today and for the last 40 years, because 80 years ago it wasn’t.

    • Troll: Mike Tre
  93. Dutch Boy says:
    @R.G. Camara

    The real tragedy of the Boston Irish is that they eventually succumbed to the Anglo-American Progressivism of the pre-Irish Bostonians (e.g., the Kennedys). The Irish of Ireland have done the same.

  94. @Pixo

    Half Jew libertarian Goldwater was a disaster in 64 and Jewy-New-Left McGovern was worse in 72.

    Elections from 1980 into the early 2000s were essentially McGovernites vs Goldwaterites. Those “losses” turned out to be victories in the long term. Florence King posited that feminists got so powerful because they lost the ERA fight. They concentrated their efforts in other, more productive (for them) directions.

    As for McGovern, my high-school teacher, an ethnic Republican before that was a thing, told us that McGovern was the moderate, and Humphrey the radical. It’s just that their followers went the other way, largely due to foreign policy and particularly the war. (Both were natives of South Dakota, but only one carried on the prairie “isolationism”.) McGovern was also a listener, Humphrey anything but. That made him look like a softy.

  95. @Pixo

    Adolph Hitler was TIME magazine’s man of the year for 1938.

    TIME magazine has since said that he was the most important man in the world that year as candidates were considered for doing the most good or the most harm. In other words the largest deviation from the norm.

    Hitler failed to repeat his victory in 1945 when he killed himself, losing out to Harry Truman with whom the buck stopped.

    Winston Churchill took the prize in 1940 and Josef Stalin in both 1939 and 1942.

    Stalin was the only person to win the award both for being bad and for being good–though not in the same year.

  96. Certainly. Jews like Walter Lippmann and Louis Brandeis were more significant in the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but even then, they weren’t central figures. The original impulse and the voting strength of the movement came from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the progressive movements of the day had a strong Protestant tone.

    As for the earlier American reformers, they were also largely Protestant or Unitarian, but they didn’t call themselves progressives. Opening up a college to women and African-Americans wasn’t the same thing as advocating a massive new government bureaucracy. It’s true that the same parts of the country that were reformist in the Transcendentalist/Abolutionist era are progressive now, but believing all men were equal before God and shouldn’t be enslaved was a long way from today’s DEI and LGBTQ.

    New Englanders who aren’t of Puritan ancestry have an ambivalent relation to those Yankee idealists. We see their faults, but we don’t throw them into the trash, the way some other Americans, particularly Southerners do. It takes all kinds to make up a country. Those of us here who aren’t Irish have the same feeling about them too. We see their faults, but don’t hate them. Maybe it’s the same with the Jews too.

  97. the correct question is: Who is driving the bus? think about the end of Fight Club. where it’s revealed that Fight Club was only sort of about adult men having a fist fight to vent their frustrations about modern pointless existence and being trapped in a cubicle forever. Fight Club is actually about blowing up buildings and killing hundreds of people. did you enjoy the recruitment process? please join up next for the part where we rig skyscrapers with explosives. the ‘Uh, What?’ moment for most of the people previously involved. the “This isn’t what I signed up for” event. the point where it’s revealed who is really driving the bus. the point where a lot of the people get off the bus.

    jews and liberal protestants, 1860: let’s free the slaves! horay!
    jews and liberal protestants 1950: now let’s get them civil rights so they can go to school and get a job and buy a house! horay!
    jews 1970: now let’s make sure they get into college and your son can’t. let’s make sure they get the job and your son doesn’t.
    liberal protestants 1970: wait a minute…
    jews 1990: now let’s make sure they can murder and rape you guys and we’ll get them out of prison so they can go back to murdering and raping you guys. they don’t have to obey any laws, to make up for what happened back in the day.
    liberal protestants 1990: uh, this isn’t what i signed up for…
    jews 2000: now let’s normalize homosexuality and make sure open homosexuals run and control all organizations dealing with children. let’s make it illegal to stop homosexuals from doing anything they want. preying on your kids is legal. even giving other people HIV on purpose is now legal.
    (increasingly less liberal) protestants 2000: where did this stuff come from?
    jews 2010: now let’s replace all white people with random third worlders. this is the end of borders for white countries. and you’re going to pay for your replacements too.
    (the few remaining observant) protestants 2010: what is this nonsense?
    jews 2020: we hate you. you had it coming all along. it’s not happening, but it’s also good that it is. death to all whites.
    (no longer protestant christian people who left their church finally) 2020: this stuff is insane. i’m out.

    • Troll: Jack D
    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
    , @Jack D
  98. @Santoculto

    Yeah, it has roots in a complete rejection and over-turning of Judaism. You need more help with obvious stuff?

    • Thanks: Jack D
    • Replies: @Santoculto
  99. @SFG

    Overthrowing the king to establish a republic was most definitely a left wing idea in 1776.

    But not as left wing as the French (or Haitian) revolutions which were all about beheading the aristocracy. The American revolution was more of a coup d’etat by a rival aristocratic faction.

  100. Anogomous says:
    @Chrisnonymous

    #27 @Chrisnonymous: Is Dispensationalist Theology just another fake like Q Anon, i.e. a completely made up constructed non-existent thing with no humans belonging to it or adhering to its supposed ideology? Does anyone really believe it or act on it as if they believe it? It’s political dark matter, and Dark Lives Matter.

    @Mr. i:

    So, anti-Semites, like Jews, overestimate the Jewish role in whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.

    is just what a Jew might say.

    #9 @SFG:

    Say he had worked for Coca-Cola and made a YouTube video complaining about the use of high fructose corn syrup in Coke for a company making artisanal soda with non-fructose-based sweeteners. Would he keep his job?

    Someone at Coca-Cola makes sure there’s plenty of all-sucrose Kosher Coke every year about this time. AKA “Mexican Coke” and it’s delish.

    #26

    I’m sure a bunch of ladies got enlightened and a bunch of guys got laid.

    Don’t forget The Ledbeater Masturbation Scandal. No wonder Krishamurti skedoodled! As the Tibetans would say “Os.bo. ma.ret.” It is not suitable.

    • Replies: @FPD72
  101. @China Japan and Korea Bromance of Three Kingdoms

    It’s not simping in the modern sense when the women have chaste morals and are punished for being whores, ie the norm for most of Western European civilization. Simping applies only when men behave chivalrously in a society that rejects patriarchal control over female sexuality. The impossibility of controlling such behavior behind the scenes is not the point – it’s just whether or not men could imagine it to be so, because the whoredom was kept private and the public ideal was upheld. Once the genie is out of the bottle, as in modern times, only a simp would play the traditional heterosexual male role of provider, supporter, emotional tampon, etc.

  102. SafeNow says:

    I do think the Jewish influx in the Great Wave of immigration at the last turn of the century gave the left a huge ‘shot in the arm’ in terms of intellectual capital

    True, SFG, but I think the principal “shot in the arm” was Jewish verbal fluency. Hey, Protestants, from intellectuals down to my incredible plumber, are plenty smart. A century of Protestant ethos got overwhelmed by Jewish verbal fluency. A Protestant century is but a spitball-shooter compared to the nuclear weapon that is the end-product of 2000 years hunched over the Torah: finding and arguing verbal nuances, debating, burnishing dissension and contentious, wiring a thesaurus into the brain.

    • Replies: @SFG
  103. Doubtful there’s better example of the neurotic feminine running through progressiveism and radicalism than this anarchist pioneer.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/obituaries/voltairine-de-cleyre-overlooked.html

  104. @SFG

    Overthrowing the king to establish a republic was most definitely a left wing idea in 1776.

    You’re confusing 1776 with 1789. No king was overthrown in 1776.

    Our break was at least as reactionary as it was “revolutionary”. There was a discussion on the old VFR site about an earlier meaning of the term revolution– a full return to a previous state, as with moons or planets. The colonists were looking back to the 17th century, not forward to the 19th.

    • Replies: @SFG
    , @Hypnotoad666
  105. Dumbo says:

    Well, the Reform was bad and Protestantism turned Christians more pro-Jews or more Jew-like, so there’s that. (Was Luther a crypto?)

    Protestant churches are much more Jewish-centered than Catholic ones. Some modern tele-evangelical Protestant churches even display the star of David instead of the cross.

  106. Dumbo says:
    @Reg Cæsar

    E Michael Jones might be all over the story of Jews’ role in legalizing pornography, abortion, and contraception, and replacing compulsory prayer with Darwin in public schools, but their critics at this site are silent about it. Because these critics support those things, those particulars can’t possibly be part of the Great Jewish Conspiracy.

    I don’t think most HBD people support pornography, although I guess some do, but many support abortion and contraception, and of course Darwinism. But you have to be blind not to see that there are a lot of Jewish hands behind pornography and abortion, that not to mention the gay/trans stuff.

    But, as for the “woke” movement as a whole, it’s more complex. I do agree with the general idea that it’s not just a Jewish thing, it’s an American/Puritan thing. The obsession with “racism” stuff predates Jews.

    Wokism seems less pronounced in Europe and, where it’s more pronounced, it’s usually in Protestant countries (although Catholic countries are fast catching up, but the Catholic Church, since Vatican II and the Covid fiasco, basically doesn’t exist anymore…)

  107. For historical roots don’t forget Philadelphia Quakers. They sent settlers (bad whites) westward to live on the frontier with Indians and then scolded them for fighting Indians. Very progressive thinking.
    But guess what – times change. Quaker Philadelphia is now run by blacks, Puritan Boston is run by real Brahmins from India, and a place called Hollywood that didn’t exist in colonial times is run by Jews who weren’t here then. It’s not just a matter of who started the fire, but who keeps pouring more gasoline on it. And the ideology itself changes over time. The DEI agenda of minority power and open borders may have grown from an earlier ethic but it has morphed into its own beast.

  108. SFG says:
    @Reg Cæsar

    You’re right. I should have said ‘expelling’,

  109. @Jack D

    “Jew on the Brain disease”

    That same disease also afflicts Jews in massive numbers.

    • Agree: Muggles
  110. But the roots of American left of center ideology are distinctly Protestant, obviously going back to the Puritan side of the English Civil War of the 1640s. Yet, fewer and fewer seem to remember this.

    I say:

    Don’t tell the WASP Puritans that 1620 is a few years after 1607.

    Virginia Company guys sitting around drinking ale without much business to conduct and the Puritans walk in saying they’re tired of Holland and want to make more money and they need some loot for re-settlement to the New World colony of England. Virginia Company guys say that’s great and they’ll work out something about religion to make sure the Virginia Company Puritans don’t start a bad precedent back in England. Sounds like a Thomas Pynchon novel.

    The eventual New England settlers were heading for Virginia originally, and then somehow landed 600 miles or so to the North.

    Ron Paul likes to talk about a Letter of Marque system to privately deal with pirates on the oceans and seas. Drake had the same from some King or Queen and the Virginia Company had something of the same for settlement and colonization.

    LOOT and money-grubbing were always paramount with Puritans, not religion.

    If it is said that LOOT, money-grubbing and Mammonism was the religion of the Puritans, that would be true.

    The original Company was the Virginia Company — the Virginia Company gentlemen competed with the Puritans in their zeal for Gold, Glory and the God of War.

    In 1634, Hugh Mason sailed to Massachusetts with his wife Esther. Hugh Mason was one of the first settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts. He was somehow involved in a battle with Native Americans in Sudbury in 1676.

    Hugh Mason’s son Daniel ended up in dire circumstances indeed:

    Daniel born on February 19, 1648/9 [6]; graduated from Harvard College in 1666. [5] Daniel went as surgeon in a vessel from Charlestown, James Ellison master, about 1678 that was captured by a corsair and carried to Algiers. Daniel died in slavery 1698.[13]

    https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Mason-528

  111. @Pixo

    Well, nobody reads Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST magazine anymore, and people don’t design Constructivist stage sets, thinking they’re creating the future.

    In discussions like these, it’s natural to tend to focus on lines of intellectual development and ethno-demographic trends, but what tends to get forgotten is the thing which mostly created modernity and Progressivism is simply advances in technology, medicine, public health, city planning, and so forth. Sort of the way feminism was really started by the washing machine, the electric vacuum cleaner, the dryer, the pediatrician, the OB/GYN, and so forth.

    There’s a scene in an old Simpsons episode where the family for some reason moves into an ultra-modern new home, where all the appliances sort of operate themselves. Marge pushes a button, and all the housework is done in like 30 seconds. Long pause. She shrugs, sits down, and starts drinking a bottle of red wine. Wokeism is sort of that bottle of wine, drunk in the mid-afternoon by superfluous, realistically purposeless people.

    Back in the old days, the liberalized economic market allowed men to become rich; freed from drudgery by hubby’s market-acquired wealth, their wives spent their energies forming Aid Societies to fix this or that social ill which the market could not cure. The thing was, all these ladies charities were informed by the recognizable ethos of the Church, not by the local Book of Nonsense, so their borders were policed and rationalized morally and intellectually. Not so now.

    From say the 20s to the 70s, the traditional practical business acumen of Jews in a rapidly growing enormously complex economy which required a million different widgets and gidgets to function, resulted in a lot of Jewish fortunes built by the Toledo Clothespin King, the Staplegun King, the Spark Plug King, and so on. This left enormous reservoirs of money which fell into the laps of their crackpot no-goodnik progeny, who used it to fund their Project Destroy America, with ample means to do so. What does Rob Reiner’s crypto-Jewish character on All in the Family do for a living? He’s a layabout grad student professional irritant.

    • Replies: @Pixo
  112. When one reads about the history of movements & ideas, one easily gets confused with ill-defined terminology.

    Progressivism is an American thing with roots in religious revivals in the early 1800s, but actually articulated in American Transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau & the rest. This was partly mediated through German idealism, and also through Latin translations of Hindu scriptures & dissemination of monist world-view. So, here you basically have a worldview that is life affirming, a belief in a non vindictive deity & essentially panentheism, a marriage of Upanishads and Plato. No tiresome sin, Hell, punishment, determinism, contrition…. but a core belief that any man/woman is a god in disguise & every person is basically Soul, a divine spark in flesh (here they departed from Germans, because German idealism is not so explicitly gnostic). Read about New Thought & positive thinking in William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience”. 

    The other turning point is Spiritualism in 1850, a craze that vanquished England & Europe.    

    What’s this got to do with social causes?

    Prominent transcendentalists who were socially oriented, naturally advocated abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, humane treatment of the poor, free love, divorce when love in marriage is gone, the extension of civil rights,…

    The other branch, not so much influenced by transcendentalist philosophy was a product of mostly Puritan-rooted evangelism, not too educated but radical in beliefs & actions- many abolitionists who were, give or take, nuts. John Brown is an example & he was a psycho.

    After the war, you got the Boston craze with feminism, spiritualism, prohibitionism, eclectic socialism, free love, various progressive causes…..and it all snowballed until WW1 with temperance movement, suffrage & charity works. Most of them were not fully aware of materialist socialism advancing in Europe.

    With Jews coming in greater numbers after the 1890s or so, there was another ingredient added – generally progressive agitation for social causes, while other Europeans were more involved in anarchist terrorism (assassination of presidents, Wall Street bombing-mostly Italians, other central Europeans etc.). That was not progressive, but socially radical & frequently terrorist.

    So, in the past 100 or so years, there are two distinct strands which rarely overlap, except among literary people: urban radicals with a significant Jewish element (founding the NAACP & pushing radical chic Wolfe satirized; present in the 60s counterculture which was a goulash of spiritual anarchy, occultism, free everything, New Left obscurantism etc.) & more “native” lunatics stemming from spiritualism & Puritans-turned-Unitarian SJWs.

    I’d say that modern “Woke”/SJW madness has little to do with eastern European & Jewish activism, but is a secularized heir to post-Puritan transcendentalists, prohibitionists, feminists, spiritualists, utopians & other nutjobs.

  113. @Jack D

    I agree. It was during that time that some cynic (can’t recall who it was) described Republicans as the “tax collectors for the welfare state.” He may even have been referring to a specific Republican, maybe Everett Dirksen, maybe somebody else.

    • Replies: @Corn
  114. @G. Poulin

    “Unitarianism is itself a kind of red-headed stepchild of the old Puritanism.”

    After receiving my DD214 the only work I could find was handyman at a Unitarian Church because nothing within my MOS training was applicable to civilian life. Based on that experience I surmised that Unitarianism is basically the Boomer Hippie branch of Protestantism.

    • Agree: Frau Katze
  115. Anonymous[267] • Disclaimer says:

    THE crucial turning point in the history of the USA is very simple and obvious to determine, namely, year 1960, and the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency. As an aside, it is interesting to note that this is more or less one clear century ahead of the Civil War, which is usually marked as the USA’s key point of destiny.
    Prior to Kennedy, the USA was on the right track. The right track to greatness and if pursued the nation would be unfathomably greater now than the post Kennedy reality. With Kennedy came so called ‘Civil Rights’, Hart Celler and all the rest of that scurvy crew.

    And, according to the theories of Kevin McDonald and others, just *who* were the forces behind the scenes, blatant communists and others pushing for ‘civil rights’ and mass third world immigration, and what was their motivation for doing so? Why was the Reed Johnson Act repealed, when there was practically no support in the USA for doing so?

    Remember that the USA of 1960 was the whitest America ever, before or since.

    • Thanks: Charles Pewitt
    • Replies: @Charles Pewitt
  116. Mike Tre says:
    @LondonBob

    But not the Roosevelts or the Rockefellers?

  117. Mike Tre says:
    @Mike Tre

    Don’t worry Steve-o. One of your anon sycophants will defend you.

  118. Ennui says:
    @Loyalty is The First Law of Morality

    You are a liberal. I don’t mean that as an insult, simply a statement of fact. The issue is, people with attitudes like yours created the space for what we have now. You might not like “trad”, but “trad” would have squashed a lot of this stuff, ruthlessly, in the bud.

    Liberals never realize “consenting adults” leads to what we have now and what we have shortly. Liberals celebrate people maintaining their identities, not understanding that creates the space for ethnic/diaspora lobbies of which AIPAC is only the most successful.

    Liberals believe in human autonomy as the greatest good. Liberals invariably support spreading that good elsewhere.

  119. Ennui says:

    Spot on, Steve. It’s what some of us argue futilely on here. Blaming stuff on Jews, Blacks, Womyns, etc is cope.

    Mike Johnson, Heritage Southern American, looks to be getting ready to give GloboHomo a big win. People can say he’s bribed, corrupt, or stupid. But he and Biden (half-WASP) own what is coming, same as two other WASPs, Bush and Cheney, owned what came before.

  120. Ennui says:
    @R.G. Camara

    Your thoughts on Oliver Cromwell, the Whigs, and John Brown and the idealization of Brown and Lincoln in the North? All those Yankee missionaries and nice white ladies going around the world and elsewhere in America?

    Would you agree that Yankee culture has an element of moralism, a violent reaction against what it sees as corrupt, decadent societies or institutions? Do you think that some element of this affects American Liberalism and Cultural Leftism? Were William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Mann, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Beecher Stowe products of Continental Romanticism?

  121. FPD72 says:
    @Whitey Whiteman III

    I was twice not hired because I was a Calvinist.

    In 1978 my wife and I had applied to be dorm parents at a Bible college while I was in seminary. We had four years of effective campus ministry at Purdue and Southern Illinois University as our principle qualification, plus two years each of campus ministry as undergraduates at our respective universities. We had been interviewed by the Dean of Students, who told us we were his choice but that we would have to be approved by the Board of Directors. He got back to us a few days later to inform us that the board had given us a thumbs down

    The reason why? We held to a particular (limited) atonement, which made us five point Calvinists.

    As graduation approached in 1981 I candidated with a church and came highly recommended by a faculty member who had previously led that congregation. While I was at the church their leadership received a phone call from the seminary’s placement office. The gist of their message: the church shouldn’t hire me.

    The reason given? I was a five point Calvinist.

    No one was fired at the college or church, so I can’t add names to your list.

  122. @Reg Cæsar

    Our break was at least as reactionary as it was “revolutionary”.

    The American Revolution (perhaps more accurately “War of Independence”) and the English Civil War (perhaps more accurately “Revolution”) were both premised on the idea that they were fought to restore traditional rights that had supposedly been usurped.

    Whether that was true or just propaganda/rationalization is ultimately beside the point. The real point is that’s how the Anglo-Saxon mindset establishes legitimacy.

    By contrast, the French and Russian revolutions seem to have been true progressive revolutions which drew their sense of legitimacy from a complete destruction of the past and replacement by a new “scientific” reality.

    I don’t know what this proves exactly, but it certainly says something about the different peoples and cultures involved.

    • Replies: @Reg Cæsar
  123. Pretty short article. Doesn’t say or prove much, certainly not anything I haven’t thought myself. Have you written anything about spanking?

    • Replies: @SFG
  124. McFly says:
    @Pixo

    Related to Steve’s post, as opposed to today’s progressivism, 20th-century libertarianism was heavily Jewish. It was the product of young men coming of age in the postwar era reacting against the socialism and communism of their parents who came to the US in the Ellis Island era.

    As an aside, probably the most important figure in that movement was a man named Aaron Director, who taught at U Chicago and later retired at the Hoover Institution.

    Milton Friedman’s brother-in-law, Judge Richard Posner called him his biggest influence. One of those obscure people who had a massive influence on the world, he never published anything but instead focused on teaching and being a kind of counselor/guru:

    “Director’s greatest contribution to the Chicago school lay in his ability to recruit and convert scholars to the school’s neoliberal doctrine. Some of his students compared taking his antitrust or economics courses to a religious conversion with Nobel laureate Ronald Coase joking that “I regarded my role as that of Saint Paul to Aaron Director’s Christ. He got the doctrine going, and what I had to do was bring it to the gentiles.”[8] Rather than penning the great works of the Chicago school himself, he was, according to former University of Chicago Law School dean Paul Baird “a teacher of teachers.”[9]

  125. Luke Lea says:

    Patriotic Gore by America’s all -time greatest literary critic, Edmund Wilson is a great exception to your rule. Except, I suspect, nobody reads him anymore.

  126. @Jonathan Mason

    Really? How can you talk about how America is today without considering the influence of Ellen G. White and Elmer Gantry?

    And yet, in the nearly 7000 comments and close to a million words you have written at Steve’s blog, despite often discussing “how America is today”, you have never mentioned Elmer Gantry.

  127. Luke Lea says:

    America’s greatest unsung heroine, whose picture truly deserves to be on the $20 bill, Frances Perkins. Her oral history, recorded and transcribed, is available from the Columbia University oral history project. She was an earlier Protestant, committed Episcopalian, and best of all a great raconteur of her life during the first half of the 20th century.

    • Thanks: kaganovitch
  128. @Jack D

    In the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” there is a kind of running joke where the Greek chauvinist father maintains that ALL English words are actually taken from the Greek.

    In this case, he might be right. The roots of Progressivism are probably Greek — in particular, Plato. Plato the philosopher naturally thought society should be ruled by a Philosopher King. Modern Progressives feel the same way. It’s just that now their philosophy is wokeism.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    , @Ian M.
  129. SFG says:
    @SafeNow

    I never said Protestants weren’t smart, and I don’t believe it either.

    Protestant intellectuals (which were most of them in the USA before about 1900 or so) were plenty smart, but they were distributed between both sides. The vast majority of Jewish intellectuals leaned left, and as you say the concentration in verbal IQ gives extra convincing power. There had been roughly balanced forces, but it shifted the equilibrium considerably left.

    x1 + y > x2; doesn’t mean x1 or x2 is small, but if y is big enough it will shift the equilibrium.

    • Replies: @Jack D
  130. SFG says:
    @Buzz Mohawk

    There’s a lot of evangelical Christians here (and probably some Orthodox Jews). I really don’t think most of the commenters want to hear about my Monday evenings with my sub, and Steve’s always been very circumspect about that part of his life, as is his absolute right.

    But if you haven’t read Dan Baltic, you should.

    • Thanks: Buzz Mohawk
  131. FPD72 says:
    @Chrisnonymous

    Barth was a singular theologian that combined liberal ideas like universal salvation with traditional biblical exegesis.

    Barth’s hermeneutic was not traditional. He rejected a grammatical, historical, contextual interpretation. His view was not that the Bible is the word of God but rather that it contained or became the word as it was existentially encountered by the reader.

    The late Francis Schaefer has an excellent discussion of Barth and neo-orthodoxy in contrast to a traditional or Evangelical view of Scripture and its interpretation in his book The Church Before the Watching World.

  132. Jack D says:
    @The Spiritual Works of Mercy

    All religious stuff is weird (God appears to Moses in a burning bush) but I have to say that the Sacred Heart is particularly strange. First of all, why does the Heart always seem to communicate with women and not with men? 2nd, what is a heart doing talking? Since when do hearts talk? I could see maybe the Sacred Head of Jesus talking, but a talking heart?

    Also, I understand that some people consider all of Jesus to be sacred (don’t get me started about the Holy Foreskin, the only part of Jesus that did not ascend to heaven) but why his heart? Why not the Sacred Liver? This comes from the ancient Egyptian misunderstanding of the heart as the seat of emotions. The Egyptian mummy makers used to carefully preserve the heart in a separate jar but they would suck out the brain and discard it because they did not know the function of this worthless mush.

    Also this whole “obey me or else bad things will happen” is much too chain-letter-ish. “Emperor Nicholas did not pass on the chain letter and six months later he was executed by the Bolsheviks.” Most people are not inclined to take advice from a talking heart, let alone on hearsay from a woman. Listen lady, how do I know that the Sacred Heart of Jesus was talking to you and that you are not just some kind of mental case?

  133. Luke Lea says:
    @SFG

    Lookout Mountain, near where I live, is where all the big Coca-Cola bottling magnates used to live. My little landscaping company did a lot of work up there. I remember how scandalous it would be considered if a worker popped a Pepsi in their sight.

    • LOL: Buzz Mohawk
    • Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
  134. Jack D says:
    @SFG

    There have been Jewish intellectuals on the right also, especially on the economic right and libertarian right, but the American nationalist right has not exactly welcomed Jews with open arms so it is not surprising that not many Jews are found in its precincts.

    Here is Francis Amasa Walker writing about the Jews (and other Ellis Island huddled masses) in the June, 1896 issue of The Atlantic:

    But it is not alone that the presumption regarding the immigrant of today is so widely different from
    that which existed regarding the immigrant of thirty or fifty years ago. The immigrant of the former time
    came almost exclusively from western and northern Europe. We have now tapped great reservoirs of
    population then almost unknown to the passenger lists of our arriving vessels. Only a short time ago,
    the immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than
    one per cent of our immigration. Today the proportion has risen to something like forty per cent, and
    threatens soon to become fifty or sixty per cent, or even more. The entrance into our political, social,
    and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter
    which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people
    have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the
    inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the
    olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for
    existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us.
    They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of
    self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under
    the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains.

    I don’t expect that Frank there was having many Jews over at his house for Shabbos dinner.

  135. @prime noticer

    “jews and liberal protestants, 1860: let’s free the slaves! horay!”

    The two Jews in the U.S. Senate in 1860 were so adamant about freeing the slaves that they both became Confederates, one of them the third-ranking leader in the Confederate government.

    • Agree: Twinkie
    • Thanks: Johann Ricke
  136. Jack D says:
    @Hypnotoad666

    But progress is Latin. Pro- from the Latin for forward and gradi – to walk. To walk forward. Gus is wrong in that much of English is Latin rather than Greek (not to mention a lot of other languages too).

  137. FPD72 says:
    @The Spiritual Works of Mercy

    The equation is pretty simple: Protestantism = democracy = individualism = corruption of customs = a general moral degeneracy.

    How about a little thought experiment? Imagine the United States in 1910, when it was predominantly Protestant but before Modernism took over the mainline denominations. Now think of Roman Catholic Mexico and South America. Which countries had higher levels of moral degeneracy, measured by rates of illegitimacy, prostitution, etc.?

    It was the moral sewer of the city of Rome, with open prostitution, fornicating priests, Simony, and a church hierarchy living extravagant lives on the backs of poor parishioners that started his intellectual journey that resulted in the 95 Theses.

    Today both the Church of Rome and mainline Protestants have been captured by the spirits of the age: LGBQT+, Marxism in its cultural form of Critical Theory, open borders, etc. On the major issues of the day, what’s the difference? How pleased are you by staunch Roman Catholics Biden and Pelosi? How pleased are you with your co-religionist who emphasized National Transgender Visibility Day over the resurrection of Christ?

  138. mc23 says:
    @Almost Missouri

    If she just carried a mattress over head the whole problem could have been avoided

  139. Notfred says:

    What about the effect of Jewishness on Protestantism.

    The English Puritans were as noted by Webber thoroughly “Hebracized.”

    The roots of Progressivism in particular lie in the whole Tikkun business invented by Luria.

  140. @Mike Tre

    There really is no talking to you guys who “name the Jew” everywhere and always. If anyone names a reason for a negative social phenomena other than the Jews, you guys are there to tell us how laughably naive we are.

    Imagine working in a garage where one of your fellow mechanics blames water in the fuel lines for absolutely everything, including squeaky windshield wipers. After a while wouldn’t that guy get on everyone’s nerves?

    • Replies: @Mike Tre
  141. Joseph Bottum’s most recent book (An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, Image/Random House, 2014) pretty much documents this down to showing how many of today’s leading woke activists are lineal descendants of early-century Protestant worthies, particularly those associated with the Social Gospel movement which emphasized this-worldly action over theology and liturgy. It seems to have been a short step for their descendants to jettison the supernatural altogether. Worth a read.

  142. FPD72 says:
    @Linus

    The founding fathers (especially John Adams) recognized that America could not continue successfully without a Christian base, yet they also pushed for a liberal-unto-atheist Enlightenment system into our founding documents.

    How did the founders push for liberal-into-atheist system in our founding documents? The first amendment prohibited a national established church but the states were free to have established churches, which several did. Not even the 14th amendment prohibited it, otherwise there would not have been a push for a Blaine Amendment, which would have prohibited state churches. It failed to get out of Congress.

    The founders are not responsible for misapplication of the 1st and the 14th; that’s on 20th century courts. That said, I’m against state churches but can distinguish between personal preference and the Constitution.

    • Replies: @Frau Katze
  143. @Jack D

    The most successful farming business in my town is owned and operated by the Jewish son of the man who started it. I know him. He was the only one of his several siblings interesting in farming. He got a business degree and grew that fucking thing into really something. I still run into him when I stop by, even though he could be sunning himself on a beach somewhere forever. This is his life. He’s found a successor, who is not a member of his family and not even Jew. He says that young man “has farming in his blood.” It’s just something that one almost has to be born to do.

    • Replies: @Jack D
  144. Anonymous[381] • Disclaimer says:
    @anonymous

    Steve has been familiar with the Moldbug thesis for the past 15+ years since Moldbug blogged about it. But in the past, he never really fully endorsed the view and seemed to give equal hearing to opposing arguments like from this blogger: https://racehist.blogspot.com/search/label/Moldbug

    This is the first time I’ve seen him strongly endorse the thesis when in the past he was more skeptical. It might have to do with the greater amount of right wing anti-Semitism on social media these days and increasingly mainstreamed on the right that he wants to counter.

    • Thanks: res
  145. @Luke Lea

    You know, it’s funny but there is a Lookout Mountain adjacent to Golden, Colorado where Coors beer is made by the (very Republican and German American) Coors family, close to where I came of age. I doubt you would want to pop a Budweiser there.

    Buffalo Bill is buried there at the top of Lookout Mountain.

    • Replies: @G. Poulin
  146. @Pixo

    Joke heard at a Lutheran college:

    A team of archaeologists find a petrified cross with some bones and the inscription “INRI”. Realizing they might be onto something big, they consult the top theologian of the day, who happened to be Karl Barth.

    Barth gasps. “This would be revolutionary! You mean he really existed?”

  147. @anonymous

    is the first time I’ve seen him use anti-Semites as a derisive term against some of his readers.

    Any powerful special interest group should be a legitimate topic of discussion. If someone wants to counter-argue that the group doesn’t even exist (e.g. “the mafia is just a myth”), or that they do exist but their agenda is totally awesome for America, then that’s fair game, too.

    There’s nothing wrong with debating these questions regarding the Jewish/Israel lobby. The existence of such a debate is apparently what is meant by “Anti-Semitism.” One interesting aspect of such so-called “Anti-Semitism” is that it basically functions as a “canary in the coal mine” which tells you whether you are looking at free speech or controlled narrative.

    It’s pretty obvious, however, that there is currently a massive behind-the-scenes (also in front of the scenes) campaign to suppress anything and everything contrary to the interests of Israel and Jews.

    You could probably map this by charting a very recent precipitous drop in the phrase “Every. single. time.” To be clear, I’m not saying such characterizations are necessarily good or bad, they are just a leading indicator of what’s allowed, and who’s deciding what’s allowed.

    To come full circle back to Steve, I simply think he’s been making a real push over the last few years to be recognized as a respectable high status “public intellectual.” However, nothing codes for low status among intellectuals as much as Anti-Semitism.

    • Replies: @Jack D
    , @JimDandy
  148. Anon[117] • Disclaimer says:

    Sailer in response to “prime noticer”:

    The two Jews in the U.S. Senate in 1860 were so adamant about freeing the slaves that they both became Confederates, one of them the third-ranking leader in the Confederate government.

    Yes, Jews didn’t start pretending to care about blacks until they determined that blacks could be used as a bioweapon against whites. That didn’t occur until the 1920s or so. Then Jews formed the high-low “coalition of the fringes” between themselves, blacks and other minority groups.

    Actually, Jews were massively overrepresented in the slave trade and among slave owners. For example, the founder of Lehman brothers, Mayer Lehman, owned seven slaves while living in Alabama.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_Lehman

    The comedian, Larry David, also had slave-owning ancestors.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/larry-david-shocked-to-learn-his-ancestor-was-a-confederate-slave-owner

    But pretty much everything else that commenter “prime noticer” wrote was accurate.

  149. Ennui says:
    @FPD72

    Biden and Pelosi are Americanized, which is to say Protestants. They larp as Catholics.

    Look up prostitution in 19th-century London and get back with us with your findings, the percentage of women engaged in the trade might shock you.

    Luther manifested the spirit of Christ and honored God’s house by making fart and bathroom jokes from the pulpit. Luther was probably a manic depressant with autistic tendencies. He was a hypocrite to say the least. People with his conditions should be kept from influential positions.

    The Reformation opened a period of carnage unrivaled until the next big round of Satan-inspired upheavals during the late 18th century, aka the age of Revolutions.

    • Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
  150. SFG says:
    @Citizen of a Silly Country

    Pittsburgh synagogue shooting? Remember, we hadn’t had real antisemitic mass violence for a while, if ever.

    One of the things when you’ve been reading Steve as long as I have that you realize is he’s really not a vicious guy. If you think your words might, potentially, get someone innocent killed, let alone a family at prayer, you’ll choose them more carefully.

    • Replies: @SFG
  151. ic1000 says:
    @SFG

    > [Uri Berliner couldn’t have expected to] write a long expose of your current employer for a small upstart in the same business and expect to keep [his] job.

    A savvy friend suggested that Berliner’s move could have been the shrewd opening of a promotional campaign for a Substack debut.

    Or, old-fashioned Boomer journalist that he is, maybe Berliner just reached the limit of his silent dissent from the diktat of the NPR nomenklatura that Truth, isn’t.

    • Replies: @SFG
  152. Dennis Dale says: • Website

    “Progressive” now has less connection its original manifestation than “fascist.” Radicals calling themselves progressive now just like the sound of it. Right Side of History you know.

    Progressives in 2024 are simply leftists too radical to be called “liberal”. Earlier today I just happened to be reading Robert Starr’s excellent history of California, Golden Dreams, about the early twentieth century progressive movement in California, which was very much populist, bringing more direct democracy to California politics–the initiative and referendum system whereby voters can make or reject law directly, open political primaries, even a law where a member of a party can run for and win another party’s nomination–a Republican pulled this off and there was an election without a Democratic candidate for governor (the leading Democrat had to run as an independent).

    The difference between then and now is the original progressives liked democracy, as (perhaps too naive) optimists. There was another movement of the early Twentieth Century if I recall that did have its fair share of Jews and has a clearer connection to present day “progressives” and a strong distaste for democracy, as “populism”. Starts with a “B” I think…

  153. mc23 says:

    The Roman Catholic Church has always acknowledged a separation from secular rule even as they tried to influence and the church in history has been fragmented into spheres of authority, abbots, abbesses and various religious orders, many of which ran the universities. The Papacies cup of troubles was overflowing and seldom in control.

    By contrast the Puritans had almost complete secular and religious control when they arrived America and remained advocates of social engineering to remake man through politics even as the religious solidarity of dissenters fragmented. By 1805 a Unitarian was in the Chair of Divinity at Harvard.Most churches wanted to regulate mores, it seems New England and much of New York were more focused on social reforms. Abolition of slavery was heavily driven by the descendants of New England slave traders.

    Jewish contributions didn’t start to become outsized until sometime in the 20th century. Ironically, given Jewish dominance in Hollywood, around the same time Thomas Edison’s monopoly in film making was ended. (not a Jewish plot)

    • Replies: @Matra
  154. @R.G. Camara

    “Pro tip: a democracy/republic is controlled by the masses.”

    I followed you up to this point but I have to disagree with the quoted sentence. A democracy is controlled by the minority that creates, molds, and shapes public opinion. The average person is incapable of much original thought. He/she/it believes what the media masters tell him/her/it.

    • Agree: Ian M.
  155. @puttheforkdown

    What is it like to be ”anti-Semitic” and still praise a Jewish demigod?

    That was a simple question. There’s no need to be so angry…

  156. Pixo says:
    @The Germ Theory of Disease

    I agree with all that. Intellectual genealogies can be a fun topic but it is ultimately of no importance who today is the real heir of Locke or Hobbes.

    Similarly I think Marx was wrong about communism and economics generally, but he made an important contribution in viewing history as involving long impersonal economic trends not a succession of great men and great battles.

    Gibbon deemphasized great men/battles even though he recognized this was the more interesting historical topics. But he also viewed the rise and fall of empires as inevitable because prosperity leads to softness which leads to corruption and military weakness.

  157. @Jack D

    Such a big and useless comment.

  158. SFG says:
    @SFG

    To clarify: I am NOT blaming Steve for the shooting. AT ALL.

    The problem is that human beings are masses of irrational flesh, and your effects on them are rarely finely calibrated.

    If you talk about something bad Jews are doing, and people listen to you, you raise the level of bad feeling toward Jews. (True for any group by the way.) You might make 100,000 people suspicious of immigration policy (rightly so in my opinion, and that of everyone here), and rile up 10 lunatics. Prior to Pittsburgh, though, a lot of people assumed the baseline level of anti-Jewish feeling in the country was so low it wasn’t really an issue. Some idiot paints a swastika on a bathroom door, whatever.

    But once it’s obvious people can die, you start to worry a lot more about what nutjobs might be listening to you, and what they might decide to do that you never intended.

    Does the NYT think this way about random white people being killed when they blame black people punching Asians on white supremacy? Of course not. But that’s why they’re evil.

  159. SFG says:
    @ic1000

    It’s a good point. He might have figured the writing was on the wall for him anyway, and decided standing on principle would get him a bigger audience than being Old White Man #9 to be canned, or else have his reputation ruined in a trumped-up #MeToo case because he looked at someone the wrong way 15 years ago.

  160. @Citizen of a Silly Country

    I largely but not completely agree. Sometimes he still makes acute observations. But his philo-Semitism has become obvious.

  161. Thanks Steve.

    I curse all those Puritan Progressive Yankees running the “Biden Administration” pushing anti-white racialism, sexual degeneracy, and treasonous open borders immivasion.

    May they burn in the eternal fires of Hell!

  162. @Citizen of a Silly Country

    “It’ll be fun to see how it all plays out.”

    I don’t know about the fun part. Probably more like terrifying. We are already well on the way to a police state, and there is no reason to believe things will improve. After the impending financial collapse, things will get very interesting.

  163. Jack D says:
    @Buzz Mohawk

    In my area, all of the chicken farmers were Jewish except for ONE who was an Italian immigrant. His kids and now grandchildren have stayed in the business and turned it from a family farm into a major enterprise supplying supermarket chains across the Northeast.

  164. In an effort to be helpful, I am attempting to uncover the secret of Jewish power.

    I have acquired a number of these ceremonial tablets. They have strange symbols imprinted upon them.

    At first I couldn’t make heads or tails of the symbols. Fortunately, I was able to scan one of the tablets. I employed sophisticated AI technology to crack the ancient cipher:

    Now I have to figure out how to interpret the images.

    Know this, Judea: the Deplorable Goyz of Unz shall not rest until we know everything.

    • Replies: @mc23
    , @Whitey Whiteman III
  165. @Hypnotoad666

    By contrast, the French and Russian revolutions seem to have been true progressive revolutions which drew their sense of legitimacy from a complete destruction of the past and replacement by a new “scientific” reality.

    Including that annoying metric system. However, we were the pioneers of metric money, 179 years before the Brits finally succumbed to it.

    • Replies: @Ralph L
    , @Ian M.
  166. Jay Fink says:
    @Loyalty is The First Law of Morality

    I agree. I’m a conservative but have no interest in the trad movement…especially tradwives who look like Amish women. What a turn off.

  167. You’ve skipped the era of explosive growth, crushing of, and resurgence of American Progressivism.

    From about 1880 to 1940 was the huge influx of European Jews into New York City.

    They were the cadres of what became Politically Correct Progressivism (PC-Prog), as well as Trotskyite Neoconservatism.

    After the Bolshevik coup in Russia, 1917, they were the corps of proselytizers of “America Sucks.” This was the Normal-culture-destroying covert influence operation, conceived and operated by the Comintern’s Willi Muenzenberg. He introduced the 6 tenets that became the belief system of today’s PC-Progs: America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, imperialist, capitalist hellhole–and it must be changed.

    Many of Muenzenberg’s operators were Jewish. Many were not. But Jews were overwhelmingly over-represented in these operations. Once the operation took root, with the 19th Amendment giving women power, and with Muenzenberg’s payload planted deep within American culture, and the rubes got the message that it was cool to hate America, the AWFL became the main carrier of this virus.

    The final gasp of native Progressivism was Teddy Roosevelt, Raymond Robins: vigorous Protestants carrying big sticks. When they faded (1920ish), the Comintern version filled the gap. It took another 60 years for the operation to bear fruit, but flower and fruit it did.

    Full details: https://kentclizbe.substack.com/p/pc-prog-misconceptions-woke-cultural

    • Replies: @Art Deco
  168. Jack D says:
    @Hypnotoad666

    The reason that saying “every single time” is anti-Semitic is because it is not true. And there is nothing that makes you less acceptable among intellectuals than telling racist lies. Even telling racist truths is problematic but you can at least defend telling the truth. Lies are always indefensible and telling them (rightfully) leaves you open to attack.

    • Replies: @res
    , @Richard B
  169. Jack D says:
    @prime noticer

    jews 1990: now let’s make sure they can murder and rape you guys,

    said no Jew ever.

    If Jews actually said and did the stuff that you attribute to them, I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to shoot up a synagogue, but they didn’t. This stuff doesn’t exist except in your head, which needs to be examined.

    • Agree: Art Deco
    • Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
  170. Ralph L says:

    Didn’t the 19th century have the same urban/non-urban divide that we have now? Packing the rats together makes more of them want to push other rats around. The leaders of Charleston lived in the country most of the year. If they’d somehow dispersed the later Jews out to farms and small towns instead of NYC, would they have turned out differently? Likewise, would our recent aliens?

    Rejuvenating Lazarus was supposed to be a job for us Christians. How dare they!

  171. The replies under this tweet are similar to the comments here.

  172. FPD72 says:
    @Jonathan Mason

    Of course Gantry was the brainchild of Sinclair Lewis while White was an historical figure and one of the three founders of what became the Seventh Day Adventist church. She claimed to have received hundreds of direct revelations (visions) from God, each of which she wrote down and published.

    Interesting to note, in the last twenty years the Adventists have moved in an Evangelical direction and clearly embraced such doctrines as salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

  173. This is also Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin’s take. He draws a straight line from the Puritans to the Whigs to modern leftist hell. There’s certainly something to it; Kevin Macdonald’s latest book on individualism in the West takes a break from analyzing Jews to also finger the English Revolution as the place where western whites went amok.

    The problem with connecting religious/cultural types to political ideologies is that significant exceptions help counter over simplistic causation. Mormons, for example, are largely hillbilly dissenters from New England elites, and typically reliably Republican voters. And Dutch Calvinists, while including their share of liberal wind bags, are largely a cultural holdout against leftism in places where they live in large numbers.

  174. Steve’s also right that there isn’t much interest among white Protestants to follow their heritage. Some of this is lack of strong in group preference among the same people where the Reformation’s roots were strongest. But part of it is the intellectual and theological distinctions can grow so complicated that few people care to follow the implications or take the time to understand them. Liberal Protestants are too embarrassed to acknowledge what they once believed, and conservative/evangelical ones are often unaware of it.

    In contrast, while Jewish scholars can endlessly go back and forth on the fine print of Talmudic interpretation, Jews uninterested in the details can get the gist of it by falling into a rather simple team Orthodox-team Reform dichotomy, with a few Conservative or secular or restorationist dissenters adding some marginal flavor.

    • Replies: @Ennui
  175. @deep anonymous

    When I want good insight on black traffic statistics or golf course design, I definitely turn to Steve.

  176. Roger says: • Website

    Jews are leaders of progressive movements. Sure, some Protestants are progressive, but I doubt that we would all be using transgender preferred pronouns just because some Protestant preachers asked us to. Jews not only dominate the progressives, the whole Democrat Party would be dead without Jewish leadership, activism, and fundraising.

  177. @Notfred

    The English Puritans were as noted by Webber thoroughly “Hebracized.”

    The roots of Progressivism in particular lie in the whole Tikkun business invented by Luria.

    The English Puritans were influenced by reading the Old Testament. Before the printing press, translations of the entire Bible were uncommon.

  178. Ennui says:
    @Steve Sailer

    Grant expelled the Jews from the military district of West Tennessee. I guess prime didn’t notice that.

  179. @SFG

    Okay, but Jews are an incredibly powerful group in this country. We should be allowed to talk about our rulers without Steve or anyone else calling us racist (and, no, Jews don’t get their own special word).

    Steve has literally become that which he mocks.

    Steve correctly criticizes our rulers for not allowing people to talk about racial differences. Yes, it will be difficult, but racial differences are a reality so best to be open about it.

    But when the topic becomes Jewish power and influence, Steve points and sputters like a blue-haired, Oberlin freshman.

    • Replies: @Ennui
  180. Ralph L says:
    @Reg Cæsar

    In the 1870s, novelist Anthony Trollope gave his recurring character Plantagenet Palliser, Liberal minister, the pet project of decimal coinage. His wife was always ribbing him about the time he spends trying to adapt the farthing to a fifth of a penny. In the 1970s TV adaptation, his young female cousin says to call it a pistil, because that’s what they call the fifth leg of a horse. I couldn’t find that in the Palliser novels, too indelicate.

  181. FPD72 says:
    @Anogomous

    “Is Dispensationalist Theology just another fake like Q Anon, i.e. a completely made up constructed non-existent thing with no humans belonging to it or adhering to its supposed ideology? Does anyone really believe it or act on it as if they believe it? It’s political dark matter, and Dark Lives Matter. Theology just another fake like Q Anon, i.e. a completely made up constructed non-existent thing with no humans belonging to it or adhering to its supposed ideology? Does anyone really believe it or act on it as if they believe it? It’s political dark matter, and Dark Lives Matter.”

    It’s very real. One of the largest seminaries in the country, Dallas Theological Seminary, fully embraces various types of Dispensational theology. All of the faculty sign the school’s doctrinal statement. Students must at least subscribe to Premillennialism.

    Lest you think only illiterate rubes could believe such things, faculty have doctorates from schools such as Cambridge, Harvard and Yale. Richard Quebedeaux, a Harvard School of Theology grad, in his book The Young Evangelicals, wrote that it is the most academically rigorous seminary in America.

    Something that most of us learn by the time that we are 40 is that very intelligent people can have beliefs and opinions with which we strongly disagree. Some of us never learn that lesson.

  182. Steve Sailer:

    While it’s true that American gentile white liberals/progressives are mostly of Puritan ancestry, it’s important to point 0ut that liberalism/progressivism is *secular* and actually a rejection of all religion. In fact, one of the universal tenets of liberalism is separation of Church and State.

    The ideologies that are even more to the Left of liberalism, like Marxism, are flat out atheistic and reject all religion as primitive superstitions. But of course, Americans are historically very religious compared to Europeans, so Americans always try to frame these issues with religion.

    “healthy ethnocentric reasons…”

    I don’t think ethnocentrism is healthy at all, especially in the case of Jews given the unpleasant events of the mid 20th century when German ethnocentrism resulted in 6 million Jews being killed. Most of the wars the World has ever seen were due to either economic reasons or ethnocentric reasons. Like Albert Einstein once famously said:

    “Nationalism is the cancer of Mankind.”

    Ethnocentrism has caused a *lot* of heartache in the World, which is why it is appalling to me that Right-wingers such as yourself love it so much. In the case of Jews, ethnocentrism has led Jews to both be persecuted by gentiles and also to behave in sociopathic ways towards gentiles, like practicing usury against them. Jews even genitally mutilate their boys for ethnocentric reasons, but I guess that is ok with you. You only oppose genital mutilation of children if it is for transgender reasons.

  183. @FPD72

    The UK has a state church to this day. Hasn’t helped them a bit.

  184. Ennui says:
    @John Milton’s Ghost

    Low Church Protestants and Calvinists, particularly on the frontier of North America and South Africa, were largely ignorant. There are parallels between frontier Scotch-Irish, Trekboers, and Hill Yankees. Reading eyewitness accounts, one gets the impression that once they did away with trained clergy, everything went to the dogs. This stuff isn’t complicated, it’s just these people haven’t been reading or supervised by well-read clergy for 300 years.

    Not arguing Catholic laypeople are better informed. But they don’t expect to be. They learn their catechism and rosary, listen to their homilies and traditionally deferred to their priests. It wasn’t some dimwit barely understanding the biblical text in front of him.

    There is an off putting degree of arrogance masked by an ah shucks faux-humility with these low church types.

  185. HA says:
    @Citizen of a Silly Country

    “I used to read Steve for interesting takes on interesting subjects. Now, to my shame somewhat, I stop by to see how far the patient is regressing.”

    And yet, you still keep stopping by — far more than so you did when you supposedly found this blog interesting. I say that because you claim Sailer started his decline 6-7 years ago, but the midway point of your 43 pages of comments is Jan 2021.

    I.e., as is the case with the rest of your commentary, the math doesn’t add up. I guess you could claim that you didn’t feel any need to comment or voice approval back when Sailer was more to your liking than you do now that he’s circling the drain, and maybe you’d dumb enough to believe that, but I’m not.

    If anything, I’d say you’re more like some crazy ex who keeps “stopping by” 500 feet outside the apartment building — as stipulated in the restraining order — to scream “I’m over you and I’ve moved on”. And you want to talk about shame?

    Face it, despite your incessant cries for attention, it seems that Sailer just isn’t that into you.

    • Troll: Richard B
    • Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
  186. @FPD72

    Well, I just happen to know that Mexico was a very pious country back then until it was corrupted by modern television in particular.

    What started “his intellectual journey that resulted in the 95 theses” was Luther’s own profound scrupulosity. This is well understood now. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-scruples-of-luther-and-therese

    How pleased am I with the current state of things? Look into the website next to my handle.

  187. @Jack D

    This is stupid. But I’ll respond to it when you respond to my other post about miracles.

  188. @Jack D

    jews 1990: now let’s make sure they can murder and rape you guys,

    said no Jew ever.

    Well, they’re not dumb enough to say it outright (yet).

    However, Jews disproportionately waging lawfare (legislative and legal) against legal gun ownership is rather damning.

    • Replies: @JimDandy
  189. @Muggles

    When the State becomes “the instrument of God” it grows unchecked.

    Just so.

    Superb post; you get it, Muggles.

    Christian virtues and theological truths, when uprooted from genuine faith, mutate and metastasize into demonic caricatures in their human hosts.

  190. @Dumbo

    Some modern tele-evangelical Protestant churches even display the star of David instead of the cross.

    Seriously? Where did you see this?

    • Replies: @epebble
  191. JimDandy says:
    @Jenner Ickham Errican

    How about if Jews danced and cheered at hugged and took selfies while lighting lighters like they were at a concert as the towers fell? Think Jack would blame us if that ticked us off a little?

    • Replies: @Jack D
  192. @FPD72

    Barth’s hermeneutic was not traditional. He rejected a grammatical, historical, contextual interpretation.

    Very true. The irony is that mainline Protestant theology had devolved from orthodoxy to such a degree by Barth’s time that he was classified as a ‘conservative’ theologian. But when you read him, you realize how idiosyncratic and potentially dangerous (for the church) many of his ideas really were.

    I don’t know how much influence he has these days anyway, though. The liberal denominations rejected him right away, and the conservative ones have largely left him behind now as well.

  193. Anonymous[391] • Disclaimer says:
    @The Spiritual Works of Mercy

    Protestantism = democracy = individualism = corruption of customs = a general moral degeneracy.

    That assumes those customs were absolute moral perfection.

    They were not.

  194. JimDandy says:
    @Hypnotoad666

    The mafia is a good example. If someone is genuinely anti-mafia does anyone (aside from mafia members) really accuse them of being anti-Italian? We’ve gotten to the point in this country where “anti-Zionism” is officially a synonym of antisemitism. It’s absurdly pathetic.

  195. Ian M. says:
    @Anonymous

    So, what was once good was made bad.

    Except that progressivism was rotten from the start.

  196. Anon[312] • Disclaimer says:

    The American Civil War was caused by a progressive left-wing freak out. Jews had nothing to do with it. Puritan New Englanders had everything to do with it.

  197. Ian M. says:
    @Whitey Whiteman III

    I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In any constitutional state in Europe every sort of religious and political theory may be freely preached and disseminated; for there is no country in Europe so subdued by any single authority as not to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth from the consequences of his hardihood… But in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the United States, there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it.

    In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-f‚, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority that is able to open it. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

    -Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

    • Thanks: res
  198. Ian M. says:
    @Bill P

    Boston was majority Unitarian by the end of the 18th century, IIRC. That’s about when the last of the old guard Puritans were forced out of Harvard and pastoralized.

    But doesn’t the internal logic of the Calvinism of the Puritans naturally lead to Unitarianism and Universalism? To take the latter first, trying to reconcile a God Who is Goodness itself with a God who from eternity predestines some to eternal damnation while denying free will is a hard circle to square, and so the descendants of the Puritans took the first horn of the dilemma and rejected the second and became Universalists. Presumably, their proto-sola scriptural positivism led them likewise to regard the concept of one God in three Persons as a contradiction and resulted in their embrace of Unitarianism.

    • Replies: @Bill P
  199. Ian M. says:

    Interesting post, Steve.

    While I never cared much about the so-called Neoreactionaries (Mencius Moldbug a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin), they were at least more insightful in their analysis of the etiology of American liberalism by tracing it back to the Puritan influence than that monomaniacal segment of the alt-right with their crude Rube Goldbergesque, triple bank shot, 4D-chess attempts to connect all baleful developments to the influence of the Jews.

    ***

    The leftist ideological center of America in the first half of the 19th Century was of course Boston…

    From Henry James’s The Bostonians, set at a little later time in Boston (second half of the 19th century), a description of the character Miss Birdseye, who was thought to be a parody of Elizabeth Peabody:

    [S]he belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did not prevent her from being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements…

    [W]henever money was given her she gave it away to a negro or a refugee. No woman could be less invidious, but on the whole she preferred these two classes of the human race… It would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not sometimes wish the blacks back in bondage… She was in love… only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations. But they had been the happiest days, for when causes were embodied in foreigners (what else were the Africans?), they were certainly more appealing.

    ***

    In contrast, the rightist ideological center of America during this era was Charleston, South Carolina, base of John C. Calhoun and the fire-eaters who launched secession in 1860.

    I think to identify the Southern fire-eaters as the rightest ideological center of America is anachronistic, a consequence of our modern perspective and how we associate slavery with the right. But in reality, the ideological spirit that animated the Southern fire-eaters was quintessentially liberal: they conceived of themselves as the heirs of Jefferson (the most radical liberal of the major founders) and were anti-authority, pro-popular sovereignty, and supported radical individualism and what we today would regard as a very ‘leftist’ and ‘activist’ theory of jurisprudence. Their conception of property was also thoroughly modernist.

    The Civil War was a war between two liberal factions: the egalitarian ideology of which the radical northern abolitionists were the paradigmatic representatives, versus the individualistic and anti-authority ideology of which the southern fire-eaters were the paradigmatic representatives.

    Someone who represents something closer to a more authentic ‘right’ of the time was Orestes Brownson.

  200. @Ennui

    You are a liberal. I don’t mean that as an insult

    No offense taken. I wouldn’t call myself that. Most liberals are in denial about human nature (even that there is such a thing , especially if it has a biological basis). Do you believe DNA matters and has a lot to tell us about human behavior?

    And how do you feel about technological innovation?

    Liberals celebrate people maintaining their identities

    Not White people! Actually, classical liberals would love everyone to forget RACE exists.

    Liberals believe in human autonomy as the greatest good.

    It depends on what you mean by that. If you mean a radical individualism that ignores all of society, then no. Humans are a social species but we are not a totalitarian bee colony either. Now, if by “autonomy” do mean that humans are “on their own”? Yeah, there is no evidence otherwise. If angels wish to show up, they are more than welcome.

    • Replies: @Ennui
  201. @Ennui

    Not one word about the economy from you dirtheads, conservative, liberal, whatever you call yourselves, you’re shills if you ask me.

  202. @Anon

    EMJ is also a dumb boomer who thinks converting Jews to Catholicism will somehow fix them. Hint: it doesn’t

  203. Jay Fink says:

    My great grandfather immigrated to America in the late 1800s and immediately got involved in Socialist politics. I learned about this as a young teen and thought it was cool. I told everyone in my junior high school I was a Socialist and got strong disapproval. In fact one boy hit me. The irony is that as an adult I am likely further to the right than any of them.

  204. @Jack D

    I mean its obviously the Jews behind everything wrong with the West. Anyway death to Israel

  205. Anonymous[298] • Disclaimer says:
    @SFG

    If you talk about something bad Jews are doing, and people listen to you, you raise the level of bad feeling toward Jews. (True for any group by the way.) You might make 100,000 people suspicious of immigration policy (rightly so in my opinion, and that of everyone here), and rile up 10 lunatics. Prior to Pittsburgh, though, a lot of people assumed the baseline level of anti-Jewish feeling in the country was so low it wasn’t really an issue.

    What were the Pittsburgh shooter’s reasons/grievances?

    • Replies: @Jack D
  206. @Ian M.

    Thanks.

    It’s interesting how many heavyweight 19th Century novelists (James, Dickens, Thackeray) made fun of women philanthropists for black causes.

    • Replies: @SFG
    , @Corvinus
    , @S Johnson
  207. Ian M. says:
    @Citizen of a Silly Country

    First, it was Trump Derangement Syndrome. …

    ?

    When has Sailer talked much about Trump? On twitter? He doesn’t seem to do much of it on the blog.

    At any rate, as far as the stereotype I associate with Trump Derangement Syndrome, I would never have thought to put Sailer in that category.

    • Replies: @HA
  208. Anon 2 says:

    Re: American Protestants are losing interest in their history

    That may be true of mainline Protestants but there is more to American Religions
    than Protestantism (and Catholicism). There are several Christian or Christian-
    adjacent groups that revere their founders who are typically white men.

    1. Mormons – still growing exponentially although slower than 50 years ago.
    There are 7 million Mormons in the U.S. which is exactly the same number
    as the population of the U.S. Jews. In terms of noticing how is it possible
    for Mormons to go through life without constantly engaging in scandalous
    behavior as is the case with Jews? The biggest scandals in Mormonism are
    occasional polygamous groups who live in the middle of nowhere where
    one or two wives happen to be underage. Mormons fast once a month, are
    disgustingly healthy, and seem to live forever. They also believe they will
    become gods and goddesses in the afterlife;

    2. The Amish – there are 68,000 Amish in the U.S. They are still growing
    exponentially;

    3. Seventh-Day Adventists number about 1.2 million in the U.S. and
    are growing exponentially. Interestingly, they were co-founded by a woman,
    Ellen White (1827-1915). They tend toward vegetarianism, and like the
    Mormons, they also set longevity records;

    4. New Thought (to be continued in a separate post)

  209. “So, anti-Semites, like Jews, overestimate the Jewish role in the history of whatever it is they are against [or for] in America.”

    Well, perhaps that is indeed the case. The next follow up in logical progression, would be: What is the Jewish role or influence over US’s current events, current outcomes, current, current, and current, in the year 2024? Is there a direct influence by Jews over Hollywood? Over the music business? In Sports? Economics, Education/Academia? In the year…2024?)

    The past is one thing. What about the role of Jews in major US institutions that directly influence America’s present?

    Or is that kind of noticing a no-no?

  210. Bill P says:
    @Ian M.

    That may be. It’s a theological argument worth having, and I know it is an ongoing dispute in Evangelical circles.

    However, the Puritans never intended such an outcome, and that’s an important distinction between them and true anti-Christians. But today they are being blamed for all sorts of social pathologies that would horrify them if they were alive to see them.

    Given the state of Protestantism today, it looks to me as though people are just kicking them while they’re down.

    • Replies: @mc23
  211. Anonymous[311] • Disclaimer says:

    But we all know who funded Martin Luther to begin with and pushed him to destroy the Church.

  212. Anon 2 says:
    @Anon 2

    (cont.) New Thought has become the most influential American religious
    movement of the last 200 years, although since it’s ignored by the
    media, it’s hard to evaluate its number of followers and sympathizers.
    Some claim that New Thought (not New Age, although there are some
    overlaps) began with such European figures as Swedenborg, Mesmer,
    and Émile Coué. In the U.S. the movement is said to have begun with
    the mesmerist and faith healer Phineas Quimby (1802-1866). It included
    Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, Ernest Holmes, the
    founder of Religious Science, and reached its highest level with the publication
    of “A Course in Miracles” (1976) and “A Course of Love” (2000). “The Positive
    Thinkers” by Donald Meyer is a good introduction.

    New Thought tenets include:

    1. We are divine beings having a human experience. This follows directly
    from the logic of Christianity, 1. God is our Father, 2. Our Father is Divine,
    3. Therefore His children must also be Divine (New Thought shares the
    emphasis on human divinity with Mormonism);

    2. We are learners, not sinners. How could Divine beings be guilty of sin?
    Our bodies are not us. They are merely learning devices (or avatars) we use
    to navigate the unfamiliar world of space and time. All our problems, incl.
    our diseases, accidents, and wars stem from our ignorance of the spiritual
    laws that govern the illusory (or virtual) material world;

    3, Instead of praying, we should do affirmations (first emphasized
    by Coué);

    4. We cannot die because we were never born. We are actually not in our
    bodies. We may be looking through them but in fact we are immortal
    beings outside the world of space and time, similarly to the way people
    look through virtual reality headsets at illusory realities.

    Hence many New Thought adherents feel superior to Jews. Jews claim
    to be their tribal god’s chosen people whereas the New Thought followers
    believe they are themselves gods and goddesses.

    • Replies: @Anon 2
  213. They were talking about this on the Rest is History podcast in an episode on Martin Luther.

    About how all the questioning and iconoclasm in protestantism logically leads to secular humanism and atheism.

    You can check it out, they make this point on episode 437 at hour 1:05

  214. Anon 2 says:
    @Anon 2

    (cont.). One more item.

    5. We create our own reality (partly on a deep unconscious level).
    Hence, unlike in Wokism, we are not the victims of the world we
    see. Hence all victimology goes out the window. We are totally
    responsible for what happens in our lives. But since our fake selves (or
    egos) that seem to inhabit our fake bodies create fake realities, we need to
    allow ourselves to be guided by our Higher Selves that have a panoramic
    view of reality so we can become enlightened and gain a panoramic
    view of reality as well. The claim that we create our own reality
    has a long history but was first clearly expressed in the “Seth
    Material” (1970).

  215. Jack D says:
    @JimDandy

    The only ones dancing on 9/11 were Palestinians. Like the American left you have your head so far up your ass that you don’t even know who your real enemies are. Instead of horseshoe theory they should call it horse’s ass theory.

  216. @Anon 2

    “2. The Amish – there are 68,000 Amish in the U.S. They are still growing
    exponentially;”

    Not growing nearly fast enough. In other words, the entire centuries-old historic US Amish population was replaced in toto by (((Team Biden’s))) invading monkeymen over the course of a long weekend.

  217. SFG says:
    @Steve Sailer

    The interesting thing about The Bostonians is it has a fight between a bro-ish man and an intellectual lesbian over a young woman. This being the 19th century, the man wins. The New England literary establishment of the time still hated James for mocking them.

    The history of academia in the last 50 years is an attempt by the Olive Chancellors of the world to make sure they get Verena Tarrant, not Basil Ransom.

  218. JimDandy says:
    @Jack D

    HAHAHAHAHA! You’re so shameless and scattershot that you use the same bullshit approach that the Jews cheering on 9-11 did. You’re a traitor, Jack.

    “According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan “during the incident” — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, *”We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”* The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.”

    June 21 — Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won’t forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.

    Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.

    She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.

    Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. “They seemed to be taking a movie,” Maria said.

    The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men’s faces. “They were like happy, you know … They didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange,” she said.

    She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.

    The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.

    The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.

  219. Ennui says:
    @Loyalty is The First Law of Morality

    You are a Liberal in the Classical sense. You can even be a race realist and be a Liberal. Wokism is a kind of Liberal heresy. It isn’t Liberal, but exists because Liberalism allows it.

    By maintaining identity, I meant ethnic cohesion. I wasn’t clear. George Washington’s letter to the Sephardi Jews of Rhode Island as an example. Set the wrong tone for the new country. Trad societies may tolerate ethnic or religious minorities, but they certain don’t celebrate them or given them public space to act out. Ethnic lobbying does go on behind closed doors in such societies, but nothing is perfect.

    By individual autonomy, I mean political and moral autonomy. I mean the justifications for our involvement in the World Wars “safe for democracy,” and Afghanistan, schools for girls. I mean John Brown. Liberals believe autonomy is such a fundamental, self-evident, Creator-endowed good, that war in its name is good, indeed required in many cases.

    • Replies: @That Would Be Telling
  220. Mike Tre says:
    @Cagey Beast

    Straw man from you, as usual. I mean, Sailer brought up the topic, didn’t he? All I did was apply his logic to all the other protected groups.

    And you attempt at a working man’s analogy tells me you probably don’t know which end of the nail gets driven by which side of the hammer.

  221. Art Deco says:
    @J.Ross

    but denying the Jewish role is laughable.
    ==
    Only in your addled head.

    • Troll: JimDandy
  222. mc23 says:
    @Stan Adams

    So far so good comrade.

    1. You are helpless before our power
    2. All your children will be ours
    3. Enjoy the decline you sybaritic fools
    4. Your leaders are puppets in our hands

    Keep scanning before they destroy the evidence.

    • Replies: @Stan Adams
  223. Art Deco says:
    @It's the Influence, Stupid

    as well as Trotskyite Neoconservatism
    ==
    There is no such thing as ‘Trotskyite Neoconservatism’.

    • Replies: @Jack D
  224. mc23 says:
    @Bill P

    Progressive Protestants have been among the forefront of Queer theory and trans-mania. They used to hunt witches too but now they create them. They would not have had any success without the support of the media and academia which they haven’t controlled for generations.

    However, America’s Protestants didn’t develop the twisted racism called Whiteness calling for the destruction of European people or demographic replacement through open borders. The driving force there has been post 1890 immigrants, some more prominent then others.

  225. Anon 2 says:

    Re: The Art of Living

    Jews always complain how, with astonishing regularity, they
    get butchered and expelled from all the nice places. But today
    we know something we didn’t know even 50-60 years ago – namely
    the art of living well. If you’re a person of average intelligence, with
    an IQ in the 95-105 range, and don’t live in sub-Saharan Africa
    or Ukraine (since the Bolshevik Revolution the unluckiest
    country in Europe), then we know exactly how to be
    disgustingly healthy and have a long productive life.
    Simply imitate the lifestyles of the two most researched groups
    in America – Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists. Fast
    at least once a month, minimize the intake of (red) meat, be
    super-friendly toward everyone, avoid addictions to alcohol,
    or cigarettes, forgive people’s imperfections. If you’re an atheist,
    then at least follow a spiritual philosophy of life whether it’s Stoicism
    or a mild form of Buddhism. Read Tao Te Ching. and the four
    Gospels. There are many Christian atheists who still admire
    the Christian art of living, especially the forgiveness part.

    • Replies: @Anonymous
  226. @Jack D

    Funny, I recall Netanyahu saying that it was good for Israel.

    • Agree: JimDandy
    • Replies: @res
  227. @prime noticer

    It is like the Emmett Till thing he makes so much fun of. But, to stick it to the Anti-Semites, he’s going back to the Mayflower.

  228. I’d call myself philo-Semitic if I liked big words where plainer littler ones would do. Basically I like and appreciate Jews. But still I am rather astonished at times when their very strong presence in political commentary manifests itself. Case in point: Right after the Hamas attack on Israel last October, the home page of National Review had, if my memory serves me correctly, five articles about it by Jews. National Review is not Commentary; it is a non-denominational magazine widely viewed as the main voice of American conservatism. Spokesmen against anti-Semitism always say the notion that Jews control the news media is malicious nonsense. Well, “control” is rather absolute, but it certainly seems to be true that Jews enjoy a great deal of standing in the news media. My impression is that the same is true of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

    • Replies: @SFG
    , @Hibernian
  229. Yngvar says:

    Socialism is the retarded child of Christianity.

  230. Corvinus says:
    @Ian M.

    “But in reality, the ideological spirit that animated the Southern fire-eaters was quintessentially liberal”

    To the contrary, their philosophy was rooted in conservatism. Their goal was to protect the institution of slavery, i.e. maintain the status quo, and centered their argument around the preservation of states’ rights. Southerners felt the anti-slave pressure in the years after the Revolution, and they reacted to it by crafting a positive, idyllic defense of slavery. They took it for granted as a natural part of a hierarchical society and thus sought to preserve their ways of life by way of demanding local control.

    • Replies: @Prester John
    , @Ian M.
  231. @Citizen of a Silly Country

    It is an invaluable demonstration that, yes, all boomers are like that. And, all jews are like that. A reminder what the Who/Whom is, nowadays.

  232. Ennui says:
    @Mr. Anon

    Lots of comments about shifty Jews and Continental Philosophers corrupting our precious Angloid Republic.

    No mentions of the 2nd Great Awakening, Burned Over District and all its attendant weirdness. In the rush to restate Alan Bloom’s BS theory, some of the usual suspects never engaged with Steve’s point about Oberlin.

    • Replies: @Mr. Anon
  233. Jack D says:
    @Anonymous

    Ask Google. Basically he listened to the guys here who keep saying that the Jews want to “drown the goyim”. How does it feel to have gotten people killed with your cheap rhetoric?

    • Replies: @res
    , @Anonymous
    , @SFG
  234. Matra says:
    @mc23

    Jewish contributions didn’t start to become outsized until sometime in the 20th century.

    IOW around the time the country became socially leftist. That’s quite a coincidence. Strange that when the descendants of Puritans were running most of New England it was right wing & patriotic (WASP Harvard was well to the right of the country during FDR’s reign) but when they were displaced by Jews and Catholics they suddenly swung left. I guess Ellis Islanders just brought out the inner leftist within the Puritans that had been hiding all those centuries.

    • Replies: @Hibernian
  235. Jack D says:
    @Art Deco

    No but at City College in NY in the 1930s, the future neocons gathered as Trotskyists in Alcove #1 of the cafeteria and the Stalinists gathered in Alcove #2.

    So in this sense (only) neo-conservativism had Trotskyist roots.

    https://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_krystol_2.html

    • Replies: @Art Deco
  236. @Loyalty is The First Law of Morality

    I have no desire to live in a “trad” village from the 1800s. Most of us want sane policies that promote human welfare and embrace a scientific worldview. And don’t focus on wiping out whatever group we belong to.

    Agree.

    This is the most depressing thread I’ve ever read on Sailer. A demonstration of the curse “intellectualism”. Egos desperate to shower us with their erudite arcana of centuries past to push their pet theories, while ignoring the nuclear blast that went off in front of their faces.

    If the West’s predicament is really caused by “the Enlightenment”, then we’re just screwed. There will never be a consensus to chuck science and the fruits thereof and almost no one actually wants to be ruled by churchmen–of any stripe. (Yuck.)

    Yeah, Protestantism was disruptive. And yeah, there is this long strain of post-Puritan reformist utopianism in America. Northern Euros are a dynamic, practical “get out the wrench and fix it” people and that can be trouble as most stuff does not need fixing. But productive responsible men–with republican governance–can figure out what “reforms” are actually positive (e.g. abolition of slavery) and which are not (e.g. prohibition, the ERA, women’s suffrage–ok we still have some work to do there). Despite “reformism” somehow Northern Euro Protestants managed to create the most dynamic and prosperous and free societies–including America–that seemed pretty darn healthy and thriving up to about 60 years ago.

    What the “it’s those crazy utopian Protestants!” people need to explain is why America has melted down precisely as the northeast Protestants *lost* their traditional power grip on America, and became dramatically less influential, while the leading role–media, academia–was seized by the Jews.

    That’s pretty darn weird!

    Fortunately, we do not have to chuck the Enlightenment, or toss out Protestantism or bring back or monarchy or throne and altar conservativism or feudalism any other such nonsense. American republicanism can function just fine. America’s–and the West’s–problems are not “reformism”. They aren’t caused by people campaigning for “universal healthcare” or “reining in the corporations” or “a living wage” or “the environment”.

    No, our problem is straightforward. Our problem is minoritarianism–anti-whiteism, immigrationism, anti-nationalism. (Which are not Protestant ideologies so us non-Protestants can live perfectly comfortably with Protestants thick on the ground.)

    Simply destroy minoritarianism–toss its adherents out of our societies–and we can keep the Enlightenment, republicanism and sane, prosperous, free nations.

    • Replies: @Corvinus
    , @Ian M.
    , @Ian M.
  237. @Corvinus

    “their philosophy was rooted in conservatism”

    Yes–relative to the America of the 21st century. On the other hand, “conservative” is an elusive and open-ended word and depends upon how it is being used. The word can just as easily be descriptive of a psychological disposition more appropriate to aesthetics, not to a political ideology. In terms of the latter, the word emerged only in the early-middle 19th century and subsequently rebranded as “laissez-faire liberalism.” In any case, what we call conservatism these days continues to morph to the point where, in its extreme form, is almost indistinguishable from the 20th century fascism of Il Duce and The Bohemian Corporal–two men who couldn’t even be remotely described as “conservative”, at least as the word would have been understood in those days.

    Given the association of the antebellum South with the England of Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe”, I prefer to call those Southern fire-eaters “High Medievalists”, who, one suspects, would’ve been right at home in 12-14th century Western Europe.

  238. @Steve Sailer

    Prime Noticer BTFO with one snark!

    Jews probably are a fair bit statistically overrepresented in Steve’s donors, reflected in the Favoured Commenter Status, but that’s not all that is driving this train, here at isteve.

    How many pundits, intellectuals, etc. have ever changed their mind over the age of 50? They were raised exclusively in a jewtv bubble their entire lives of born on 3rd base luxury, and it was mostly too late by the time the internet came around.

    What does the Infernal Boomer have to gain by turning the world upside down, when they have only 5-10 years to live and are at the top?

    For most all of history, they would have incentive to do it for their kids, grandkids, etc. Their posterity. But, that simply does not exist in so many of them.

    What does the Infernal Boomer have to gain by admitting he sold the world. That he was wrong on everything. That it was all for nothing and only Hell and a Lake of Fire soon awaits.

    No, Steve is neo-hip on TwitterX, he’s got a book out, he’s gonna keep rockin’ forever!

    • Replies: @Anonymous
  239. Corvinus says:
    @Steve Sailer

    “Yet progressivism that is ideologically ancestral to contemporary “In this house we believe” wokeness…”

    Could be. But most likely not. The disagreements regarding “progressive” and “woke” boils down to context.

    https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/woke-conservatives/story?id=93051138

  240. Corvinus says:
    @AnotherDad

    “But productive responsible men–with republican governance–can figure out what “reforms” are actually positive (e.g. abolition of slavery) and which are not (e.g. prohibition, the ERA, women’s suffrage–ok we still have some work to do there).”

    The No True Scotsman Falkscy in action. So in your warped world, only a select few make the right decisions for the rest of society. This is why your ideology isn’t going anywhere, especially given your desire to strip white women from voting.

    “anti-Whitism”

    Which means different things to different people. So until you or the AG or Mr. Sailer can offer a cogent, detailed explanation of what it all entails, it remain a slogan.

    “Simply destroy minoritarianism–toss its adherents out of our societies”

    LOL. You’re not even willing to do what it takes to make that happen. It’s a pipe dream.

    • Replies: @Anon
    , @Mr. Anon
  241. res says:
    @Notfred

    Thanks. Looks like there was some discussion of that idea about 50 years ago.

    Were the Massachusetts Puritans Hebraic?
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/363556

    HEBRAIC FACETS OF NEW ENGLAND PURITANISM
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/44898228

    A fairly recent YouTube video (almost two hours, I did not watch, if anyone does please comment). Always interesting to observe (notice?) how the best documentation of Jewish influence seems to come from Jewish desire to take credit. Or bragging.
    Jewish Thought and Messianism in the Colonial Puritan Imagination: The Case of Judah Monis

    Jews made up less than one tenth of a percent of the population of late colonial America, but due to a Puritan obsession with the Hebrew Bible and an early idea of America as the new Promised Land, Jewish thought played a key role in American identity formation. At the same time, many Puritans hoped for the conversion of the Jews as an integral part of the end of times. In this conversation, we will explore the role of Judah Monis, a seminal figure who both brought Jewish thought to the American Protestant public and who acted as an ‘exemplar’ by converting to Christianity. Monis was the first Jew to receive an advanced degree in North America and the first full-time Hebrew instructor at Harvard.

    His Wikipedia page.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Monis

  242. res says:
    @Jack D

    Lies are always indefensible and telling them (rightfully) leaves you open to attack.

    Filing that one away for the future. I happen to agree with the sentiment.

  243. IHTG says:

    Wokeism is neither Protestant nor Jewish, but I do think it might be more similar to liberal post-Protestantism than to traditional Jewish-American leftism. The liberalism of the GW Bush era seemed much more Jewish in character to my mind.

  244. res says:
    @Jack D

    How does it feel to have gotten people killed with your cheap rhetoric?

    Bringing that during the Israel-Gaza conflagration seems like a questionable tactic.

  245. G. Poulin says:
    @Buzz Mohawk

    Not only would you not want to pop a Budweiser there, but don’t so much as hint that there is anything wrong with any of their products. While visiting relatives in Colorado, I toured the Coors brewery. At one point the tour guide starting waxing eloquent about their poorly selling clear malt beverage, and I blurted out something like “Are you still making that stuff?” They were not pleased.

    • Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
  246. Anonymous[417] • Disclaimer says:
    @Jack D

    Basically he listened to the guys here who keep saying that the Jews want to “drown the goyim”.

    Do you mean that he objected to mass immigration?

  247. Art Deco says:
    @Jack D

    Irving Kristol belonged to a discussion circle at City College ca. 1939 which included Trotskyists. The leading spirit was Seymour Martin Lipset, whose work was occasionally published in Commentary and The Public Interest a generation later. Which is to say that some of the people in that circle had adopted Trotskyism when they were late adolescents. The strand of thought they were promoting ca. 1985 did not have ‘Trotskyist roots’ because they’d all abandoned Trotskyism decades earlier. Kristol had founded The Public Interest in 1965 to publish skeptical critiques of social policy. Commentary was a publication devoted to Jewish life which had increasingly political content and a more-or-less starboard orientation after 1974. The other journal editors in that circle – Norman Podhoretz, Joseph Epstein, and Hilton Kramer – were never involved in any kind of unconventional political agitation. Neither, after 1942, was Kristol.
    ==
    Note, Kristol, Podhoretz, et al were not advocating anything which wasn’t mainstream in the Republican Party during the period running from 1977 to 1992. Joseph Sobran was peddling a set of eccentric perspectives, some of which had never been modal in starboard thought and some of which had evaporated 30 years earlier, and claiming his antagonists had ‘hijacked’ the ‘conservative movement’.

    • Replies: @SFG
  248. Anon[418] • Disclaimer says:
    @Corvinus

    “anti-Whitism”

    Which means different things to different people. So until you or the AG or Mr. Sailer can offer a cogent, detailed explanation of what it all entails

    What is the definition of “anti-Semitism”?

    • Replies: @Corvinus
  249. SFG says:
    @Art Deco

    I saw this somewhere. Wish I could remember where.

    “What happened to the Communist Party?”

    “The Trotskyists went into academia and the Stalinists went into real estate!”

    • Replies: @res
    , @Muggles
  250. @Ennui

    <Biden and Pelosi are Americanized, which is to say Protestants. They larp as Catholics.
    Yet another way to word it is that they are bought and blackmailed by jews.

  251. @Dennis Dale

    Breakfast at Tiffany’s

    It has every inversion imaginable.

    AnotherDad should broaden his focus to “inversion”. Plus, fewer syllables.

    • Replies: @Dennis Dale
  252. Bill P says:

    If the West’s predicament is really caused by “the Enlightenment”, then we’re just screwed. There will never be a consensus to chuck science and the fruits thereof and almost no one actually wants to be ruled by churchmen–of any stripe. (Yuck.)

    It isn’t that dismal. Science is here to stay, and can be reinvigorated by being put in it’s proper place, which is not as a guiding principle, but rather as subservient to the higher truths.

    There’s a reason science emerged from a culture that worships the Truth as God. It’s the same reason that science is stalling and devolving into scientism as our society slides into subjectivism and skepticism.

    • Agree: Ian M.
    • Replies: @res
  253. Erik L says:
    @Mr. Anon

    Must be nice to belong to an ethnic group that never did anything wrong

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

    • Replies: @Mr. Anon
  254. Bill P says:
    @Ian M.

    Ian, do you write elsewhere? I like your take on things and would be interested in seeing more of it.

    • Replies: @Ian M.
  255. res says:
    @SFG

    Thanks. Here is where I see it (harder to find than I expected). 2010 article by Murray Rothbard. At the end it states: “This article was first published in 1992, in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report.”
    https://mises.org/mises-daily/strategy-right

    As far as I’m concerned, the only Trotskyites were a handful of academics. By the way, there is a perceptive saying in left-wing circles in New York: that the Trotskyites all went into academia, and the Stalinists went into real estate. Perhaps that’s why the Trotskyites are running the world.

  256. res says:
    @Bill P

    There’s a reason science emerged from a culture that worships the Truth as God. It’s the same reason that science is stalling and devolving into scientism as our society slides into subjectivism and skepticism.

    Well put. Thanks.

  257. SFG says:
    @Jack D

    He was angry at HIAS, which was supporting illegal immigrants. Now I don’t get angry at child molestation and shoot random priests, but I am not a shooter.

  258. @LondonBob

    Maher’s mother was Jewish, and his father turned his back on Catholicism early in Bill’s life.

  259. Ian M. says:
    @Corvinus

    Of course any group or individual with a commitment to liberalism will have some conservative elements mixed in, if only because a completely thorough-going pure liberalism is impossible in principle. So I would not deny that the South appealed to various conservative sentiments such as tradition and hierarchy. As did the North, by the way: the maintenance of the Union and the preservation of her authority is nothing if not a conservative sentiment.

    Nonetheless, I maintain that the Southern fire-eaters were animated by a liberal spirit to a large degree: the ideology that informed their arguments would have been unrecognizable to a traditional European conservative, for example. And ‘states’ rights’, while today regarded as a conservative sentiment (but that is because today’s mainstream American conservatism is itself a part of the broader liberal tradition), is fundamentally a liberal idea, influenced by liberal thinkers such as Jefferson. The arguments for secession were not rooted in any sort of conservatism.

  260. @Stan Adams

    Supposedly, they have to tell you what they are doing. Burn the hive, just in case.

  261. Ian M. says:
    @Bill P

    Hi Bill P,

    Thank you, I’m glad you like what I’ve written.

    Unfortunately, the extent of my writing is mainly just comments such as these at a few blogs here and there. I think I would enjoy blogging and have toyed with the idea of starting my own blog (and have even drafted some things that I would post there should I ever go ahead with the idea), but have found it difficult to find the time to dedicate to it.

    • Replies: @Bill P
  262. Muggles says:
    @SFG

    I knew Rothbard quite well over a long time period.

    This excerpt is correct.

    In speeches or even in personal discussions about left-wing history he would make this point.

    I’m not sure if he claimed it was original to him, however. Probably not.

    Most of his uncles (so he told me) were actual members of the NYC Communist Party in the 20s-30s.

    His father wasn’t but his family history was very Left, but not very religious Jewish.

    He wasn’t a “Zionist” but figured Jewish Israel wasn’t going anywhere.

    It is a shame he didn’t live to today. What we are seeing is the fracturing of the left “Progressive” movment, which has been heavily Jewish, into currently (and perhaps temporary) pro and anti Gaza camps.

    Far fewer Jews will support the “I love Gaza” faction at the moment. They are particularly bothered by the tectonic shift in “anti Semiticism.” Formerly the central doctrine of far right “neo nazis” and legacy fringe Christians. And here on Unz, the “Jews control the world” conspiracy mongers.

    Now, however, the White led but AOC fronted “progressives” which included such fake combinations as “Islamic feminists” from Somalia, is overrun with Hamas loving Democrats who of course vilify Israel’s retaliation against terrorism.

    When the “progressives” start protesting in favor of non democratic Palestinian terrorist strongmen and their mafia “militias,”you know they’ve marched over a very tall cliff.

    The legacy result of the USSR’s pro Arabism versus the US’s pro Israel foreign policy has kept most of the Official Left in an uneasy position about Zionism. The Jews aren’t comfortable defending Israel but most won’t embrace retrograde Muslim cultural beliefs about gays, women, democracy, etc. Jews, along with feminists, gays and believers in actual democracy, can’t even move into Arab nations (or Iran) for fear of arrest and torture.

    Now, commie oriented political Jews (few but noisy) have to choose sides. Being Jewish, they know the pro Gazan Arabs won’t trust them, ever. Nor can they show up at Dearborn MI protest events.

    Thus the “progressive left” facade is crumbling. Even Biden is faulted for not controlling Netanyahu in this. Progressive Jews are in a hell of their own making. Oi vey!

    Even the few intelligent Woke Jews won’t drink the Hamas Kool-Aid. The 9/11 attack on NYC was largely aimed at them, after all.

    Rothbard would have written a hilarious take down of all of this, naming names, internal prog warfare in obscure commie blogs. And more “respectable” Woke organs like the NYT and NPR.

    “Heighten The Contradictions!” an old Left slogan, as Murray would write.

    Somewhere far above, I can hear Murray’s famous laughing cackle over all of this fun.

  263. @HA

    He was supposed to be something to look up to. Not quite Jesus, but something better than a poor man’s John Johnson. It has been a bit shocking, taking the boomer pill.

    And, not everyone likes to hear themselves talk all the time. You are into the latter sort of thing more than the former, obviously.

  264. Asking for a friend, ” where is the oldest synagogue in U.S.”?

    And when it comes the slave triangle with one point being New England, who owned the vast majority of distilleries and fabric factories?

    Jews were very involved. They have been perfecting their grift for 1000’s of years.

    One out of their playback is to have a goy be the visible part of the grift while jews hang the background pulling puppet strings.

  265. Mr. Anon says:
    @Corvinus

    The No True Scotsman Falkscy in action. So in your warped world, only a select few make the right decisions for the rest of society.

    A select few already do make the decisions – the wrong decisions – for the rest of society, you vacuous ninny.

    • Replies: @Corvinus
  266. S Johnson says:
    @Steve Sailer

    Trollope’s travel book “The West Indies and the Spanish Main” (1859) is preoccupied by themes of race, nature, and nurture. He argues against the Whig statesman Lord Brougham that Jamaican blacks shouldn’t be protected from competition by planters bringing in new immigrants. In the long run he advocates miscegenation in the hopes of creating a new Caribbean race uniquely adapted to its environment (seems to have had some success in producing baseball players): http://www.online-literature.com/anthony-trollope/the-west-indies/3/#google_vignette

    And now, just at this moment, philanthropy is again busy in England protecting the Jamaica negro. He is a man and a brother, and shall we not regard him? Certainly, my philanthropic friend, let us regard him well. He is a man; and, if you will, a brother; but he is the very idlest brother with which a hardworking workman was ever cursed, intent only on getting his mess of pottage without giving anything in return. His petitions about the labour market, my excellently-soft-hearted friend, and his desire to be protected from undue competition are—. Oh, my friend, I cannot tell you how utterly they are—gammon. He is now eating his yam without work, and in that privilege he is anxious to be maintained. And you, are you willing to assist him in his views?

    The negro slave was ill treated—ill treated, at any rate, in that he was a slave; and therefore, by that reaction which prevails in all human matters, it is now thought necessary to wrap him up in cotton and put him under a glass case. The wind must not blow on him too roughly, and the rose-leaves on which he sleeps should not be ruffled. He has been a slave; therefore now let him be a Sybarite. His father did an ample share of work; therefore let the son be made free from his portion in the primeval curse. The friends of the negro, if they do not actually use such arguments, endeavour to carry out such a theory.

  267. HA says:
    @Ian M.

    “When has Sailer talked much about Trump? On twitter? He doesn’t seem to do much of it on the blog.”

    I also don’t recall Sailer “pointing and sputtering about white nationalists and antisemites like one of the Oberlin students that he mocks”. Maybe he’s doing that only on articles and comments that I coincidentally happened to miss (though no links or supporting evidence was cited), or else, maybe Citizen of a Silly Country is just some creepy stalker type who managed to convince himself that he knows what Sailer needs and wants and thinks far better than Sailer ever could.

    I leave it to you to determine which of those is the more likely explanation.

    • Replies: @Ian M.
  268. @Mark G.

    Interesting. It seems like Americans have a way of idealizing not-so-ideal foreign countries. In my lifetime I’ve seen (in order) the USSR, Sweden, Japan and now China held up as such (dubious) models.

    Now listen up, men of unz: the country you really wish was your country is Israel. It’s run, quite unabashedly, to serve the interests of its majority population. It’s quite un-woke. It believes in borders. It has free speech (including on the Internet, thanks to the language barrier); if you could read the (largely unmoderated) comments at the end of news articles (remember comment sections??) your hair would stand on end.

    You know how in the US they’ll never let us forget Emmett Till or the Tulsa whatever? In Israel it’s the reverse; if an Arab kills a Jew *that* is the headline news, and many such victims “enjoy” widespread name recognition for years.

    Yes unfortunately, to get in on this metziyeh you’d have to be Jewish but I’m not encouraging any of you to convert (in fact I don’t even want you to convert). All I’m saying is that you could have all that in *your* country. Now go out and make it happen.

    • Replies: @JimDandy
  269. @Anonymous

    The Jews at the ADL had that rich boy scumbag John F. Kennedy put his name on a book that promoted mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and that piece of shit Scotch-Irish rodentine lout LBJ pushed through the 1965 Immigration Act and the plan was to attack the European Christian ancestral core of the USA by using mass immigration as a demographic weapon.

    IMMIGRATION MORATORIUM NOW

    DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS NOW

    Tweet from 2020:

  270. JimDandy says:
    @International Jew

    “Now listen up, men of unz: the country you really wish was your country is Israel. It’s run, quite unabashedly, to serve the interests of its majority population. It’s quite un-woke. It believes in borders.”

    LOL. Yeah, on OUR dime. Meanwhile U.S. Zionists push ALL things woke and open-borders for America. Nice try.

    • Replies: @Ennui
    , @International Jew
  271. “Now listen up, men of unz . . .”

    Please stop that. It’s a contagion! Unless you are a woman (and I have never gotten that vibe from your posts), then you, too, are a Man of Unz.

    • Replies: @Anogomous
    , @Dennis Dale
  272. Anogomous says:
    @deep anonymous

    The phrase you mention and the use of which you quite rightly castigate is internet code for “I am passively homosexually available and so so very desperate that I am resorting to using this silly homo code, but I really need it!” It’s this season’s (((three parentheses))). The subculture moves on on a regular basis, so expect change. ‘Member Trapper-Keepers? I ‘member.

  273. Dennis Dale says: • Website
    @deep anonymous

    “Men of Unz” is the septum piercing of Unz. It’s annoying but useful to know what vapidity is on the way.
    So keep at it, Men of Unz men.

    • Replies: @Anogomous
  274. Dennis Dale says: • Website
    @Whitey Whiteman III

    I confess I’ve never seen it. But I am aware of Mickey Rooney’s caricature of an Asian landlord. I can’t help thinking of the burgeoning anti-Chinese movement of the present–“Israel? Look, over there, a Chinaman!”

  275. Corvinus says:
    @Anon

    I see you are up to your old tricks again by changing the subject.

    Let’s stay on point. What does “anti-whitism” mean? Be specific.

  276. Corn says:
    @deep anonymous

    I believe upstart Newt Gingrich used that term to describe Bob Dole in the ‘80s or early’90s

    • Thanks: deep anonymous
  277. @Citizen of a Silly Country

    The real change is the change in Unz. Unz went from a refuge for writers with different interests to an anti-Semitic, pro-Putin website. Steve is not anti-Semitic and not pro-Putin, but the website hosting him became both after he started writing for it.

    • Agree: Frau Katze
  278. @Ian M.

    I am replying to applaud your post (site restrictions prevent me from just clicking Agree).

    • Thanks: Ian M.
  279. Mr. Anon says:
    @Erik L

    Must be nice to belong to an ethnic group that never did anything wrong.

    You got me. I am John D. Rockefeller.

    Really – white men are portrayed as never having done anything wrong? What cave have you been in for the last 50 years?

    Come now, which ethnic group is actually portrayed as “never having done anything wrong”.

  280. Anon[205] • Disclaimer says:
    @deep anonymous

    It was Allan Bloom who wrote The Closing of the American Mind.

    • Thanks: deep anonymous
  281. Corvinus says:
    @Mr. Anon

    The way that you yell at clouds, I’m surprised you haven’t had a nervous breakdown yet. But there’s still time, old man.

    • Replies: @Mr. Anon
  282. Ennui says:
    @Citizen of a Silly Country

    No, the problem is many commentators don’t want to talk about WHY or HOW such a minority was able to seize power. We can, and should, talk about how this minority uses the system to advance its goal. I think their actions and the political and cultural pathologies that empower them should be equally criticized.

    If you are only willing to criticize Jews, but not Puritans or Whigs or Southern hyper-capitalists, you are being dishonest.

  283. Ennui says:
    @JimDandy

    Blame Mike Johnson and Mike Rogers and the dimwits who voted for them. Blame the dimwits who send John Hagee money.

    • Replies: @JimDandy
  284. Ian M. says:
    @HA

    Indeed. It escaped my notice that Sailer had even mentioned white nationalists in his post, let alone point and sputter at them.

    But, I didn’t address those topics in my comment because the degree of engagement with the Jew-obsessives that can be tolerated by any one person is finite.

  285. Mr. Anon says:
    @Corvinus

    Clouds? Yes, you are – like a cloud – a rather vapourous lot of nothing, you yammering nitwit.

  286. Anonymous[388] • Disclaimer says:
    @Whitey Whiteman III

    What does the Infernal Boomer have to gain by admitting he sold the world.

    What do you mean by “sold the world”?

    • Replies: @Whitey Whiteman III
  287. Bill P says:
    @Ian M.

    Blogging, yeah, it’s much better than Twitter. You should do it. Dont bury the talent. So much garbage out there these days it’s practically a moral imperative to offer some quality thought now.

    • Replies: @Ian M.
  288. JimDandy says:
    @Ennui

    Those are some of the people I blame, yes.

  289. @JimDandy

    None of the things I mentioned — free speech, national solidarity, etc — cost money. So they have nothing to do with US financial assistance (which we might talk about some other time).

    As to your tiresome accusation: if the collapse of free speech and national solidarity were restricted to the US, you might have a sliver of a circumstantial case. But they’re just as strong in countries that have a negligible Jewish population — Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria. So look within: wokeness is a mental disease of post-Christian nations.

  290. @Ian M.

    Ian M:

    “I think to identify the Southern fire-eaters as the rightest ideological center of America is anachronistic, a consequence of our modern perspective and how we associate slavery with the right.”

    Slavery is rightfully associated with the Right. Granted, slavery is a very extreme version of Right-wing ideology, but a Leftist ideology, but definition, opposes discriminatory privileges that are written into law. In fact of all the many liberal principles, there is no higher than

    “The basis of all rights flows from the right of self-ownership.”

    That is a pretty big one. A really, really big one. By *definition* a state that allows the ownership of human beings by other human beings is anti-liberal. That is not even debatable;

    So, no, the Confederates were most definitely not liberals, and they were not fighting for liberal values.

    “But in reality, the ideological spirit that animated the Southern fire-eaters was quintessentially liberal: they conceived of themselves as the heirs of Jefferson (the most radical liberal of the major founders) and were anti-authority, pro-popular sovereignty, and supported radical individualism and what we today would regard as a very ‘leftist’ and ‘activist’ theory of jurisprudence. Their conception of property was also thoroughly modernist.”

    You clearly have no clue what liberalism is. While it’s true that liberalism is anti-hierarchical, you ironically miss the point that slavery is the ultimate hierarchy: one person *literally* owns the other, and the owned person does not have the freedom to terminate the contract.

    Also, by definition, a system that allows for slavery is not individualistic, since it denies the individuality of the person relagated to slavery.

    Liberalism is also not necessarily ultra-individualistic. You are confusing liberalism with libertarianism. They sound like synonyms, but are actually quite different.

    Liberalism recognizes the supreme value of individuals, and individul rights are put above political rights of the state, which is why, in a liberal country, you cannot vote into law a bill that removes individual rights from certain categories of people. HOWEVER(big however), liberalism emphasizes social egalitarianism, equality of opportunity and taxation on wealth.

    Saying that the mercantilistic, oligarchic, xenophobic nature of the southern states was “liberal” because it guaranteed individual rights, when those rights were reserved only for white males, is very, very, VERY wrong.

    “The Civil War was a war between two liberal factions: the egalitarian ideology of which the radical northern abolitionists were the paradigmatic representatives, versus the individualistic and anti-authority ideology of which the southern fire-eaters were the paradigmatic representatives.”

    By definition, the southern states believed in the authority of cotton oligarchs over everybody else. This is not anti-hierarchical when you have a small group of people sitting at the top of the hierarchy! And when all political rights were reserved only for them!

    So no, dude, you are pretty much wrong about everything. In fact, you managd to be wrong in more than one way. First, in your description of liberalism, and then in your assertion that southern states were not hierarchical, when the WHOLE POINT was them trying to enforce a hierarchical society.

    • Replies: @awry
    , @Ian M.
  291. @Mr. Anon

    Sure. Jews have been extremely influential in the U.S. for the last 50 or 75 or, perhaps, even 100 years.

    Look at the Harvard Corporation fellows in 2024: are there any WASP men? Out of 13, there are two gentile men: one (Finnegan) appears to be Irish, probably Catholic, and the other is a Canadian hockey player with some kind of Arabic name (Barakett). The woman with a British maiden name, Caldwell, is another Canadian.

    On the other hand, Jews appear to be past their peak as well during the Racial Reckoning.

    There were recently four blacks to three Jews out of 13 Harvard Fellows and now they are 3 to 3. Granted, Jews at present hold the two most important roles at Harvard: interim president and senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation in respect of the huge amount more Jews compared to blacks donate to Harvard.

    But isn’t that a trope that Jews are richer than blacks and are more philanthropic? How can you justify Jews running Harvard just based on the anti-Semitic and racist trope that Jews are vastly more philanthropic than blacks?

    But the United States of America is 248 years old and its first century including the Revolution and the Civil War were incredibly influential and Jews had negligible influence on the winning side. Granted, if the Confederates had won the Civil War, there would be numerous statues of Confederate utility infielder Judah P. Benjamin, who served as the Confederate Secretary of State, War, and Treasury.

    But they lost.

    My impression is that that Jews qua Jews had close to zero influence on the central event in American history, the Civil War. Instead, Jews in America in 1861 tended to side with their neighbors. So the two Jews who were serving in the U.S. Senate in 1861 (Judah P. Benjamin — D-Louisiana — and David Levy Yulee — D-Florida) sided with the Confederacy, but so did their neighbors, so few Americans held it against them as Jews.

    That seems reasonable.

  292. My father attended Harvard in the late 60’s. He told me that even the Republican WASPs were moderate liberals, and they supported Affirmative Action for African-Americans 100% when it was first intrduced. They also supported the right to burn the American Flag which was being done by the Vietnam War protesters.

    Despite being patriotic, they still supported the right to burn the American Flag becuse they ranked the right to freedom of speech and protest as more fundamental and important than respect for country. And many of these men had been officers in the war.

    And these were the most “conservative” of the New England WASPs. So, yes, social egalitarianism and individual rights are strong genetic/social characteristics of New England whites and whites from the northern part of the U.S in general.

    • Thanks: Hibernian
  293. My father attended Harvard in the late 60’s. He told me that even the Republican WASPs were moderate liberals, and they supported Affirmative Action for African-Americans 100% when it was first intrduced. They also supported the right to burn the American Flag which was being done by the Vietnam War protesters.

    Despite being patriotic, they still supported the right to burn the American Flag because they ranked the right to freedom of speech and protest as more fundamental and important than respect for country. And many of these men had been military officers in the war.

    And these were the most “conservative” of the New England WASPs. So, yes, social egalitarianism and individual rights are strong genetic/social characteristics of New England whites and whites from the northern part of the U.S in general.

    • Replies: @Anon
  294. @Prester John

    Turns out I was not quite right about the book. The title was correct, but I somehow confused two different authors, as someone pointed out in a subsequent comment. The author of The Closing of the American Mind was Allan Bloom, a Straussian political philosopher. (Not the other Bloom, a famous literary critic). Although I haven’t read the book since the early 1990s, I recall that, in a classic case of misdirection, it decried the influence of “Germans” on the subsequent development of American politics, but it turned out that those “Germans” were all from the notorious Frankfurt School.

  295. @Notfred

    This is what I came to post. “the Puritan side of the English Civil War of the 1640s” reminded me that Cromwell banned Christmas and dancing because they were too pagan and not Jewish enough, and of course, he let them back into England. The Puritans wanted to purify the Hebraic faith from Catholic, but really heathen, influence.

    I am aware that this isn’t exactly the kind of progressivism we’re talking about, but it was NAACP Joel Spingarn who demanded the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party seat black delegates: https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2020/03/30/the-progressive-party-and-the-negro-1912/

    • Replies: @Matra
  296. Braminid says:

    http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-boston-upper-class-circa-1950.html?m=1

    I’m sorry, Steve, but this is complete nonsense. The real Boston Brahmins were a conservative political and cultural group.

    Jews did not try to be like anyone else – Jews were like modern Indians, elite radicals with hatred for white Christians in the first place.

    Yes, some Protestant groups were politically to the left. And some were to the right. The Quakers were more left-wing, and the white southern elite were much more right-wing. But this does not mean that Protestants have ever been left-wing – statistically, since the 1960s, white Protestants have always been the most conservative group in the United States.

    • Replies: @Ennui
  297. SFG says:
    @Tono Bungay

    National Review is kind of a bad example because they took the neocon side of the neocon-paleo on split back in the 80s and wound up declining after the Iraq War in the 2000s. Even then they had been outstripped by the Weekly Standard (which since went under as it was more associated with the neocon clique). It’s hardly all that influential anymore, and probably hangs on because conservatives are, well, conservative and like old things.

    I don’t think there is a central organ for conservatism these days outside of Trump’s Truth Social account. Closest might be Fox News. For the MSM, you could look at the NYT, WaPo, and the WSJ. I suspect you will find something similar.

    • Replies: @Art Deco
  298. @International Jew

    “None of the things I mentioned — free speech, national solidarity, etc — cost money.”

    If, as they say, time is money, then in the US free speech or what’s left of it, and national solidarity cost an inordinate amount of money, in the Sisyphean uphill battle to preserve their shreds and remnants against the well-funded and non-stop Jewish onslaught against them.

    “As to your tiresome accusation: if the collapse of free speech and national solidarity were restricted to the US, you might have a sliver of a circumstantial case. But they’re just as strong in countries that have a negligible Jewish population”

    Says the guy calling himself INTERNATIONAL Jew. Which is a truth, not a joke, not a canard, not a trope or a libel or a meme, or any of the other nonsense words you use to deflect from reality. You either have zero self-awareness, or else Jews in their dotage and success are becoming incredibly lazy and incompetent deceivers, not nearly as sharp as your elders who successfully looted and destroyed America.

  299. @Steve Sailer

    “My impression is that that Jews qua Jews had close to zero influence on the central event in American history, the Civil War. Instead, Jews in America in 1861 tended to side with their neighbors.”

    Well, maybe true for Jews *in America*, but of course, Jews famously don’t respect or restrict themselves to national borders, do they. You seem to conveniently forget that at the time (and even to an extent to this very day) the beating heart of the international finance system was the City of London (not London itself, but the City), which of course was and is nothing but a vast hive of Jews.

    And if Jews controlled the international finance system — and they did — well, you know what they say about money and politics. Even trans-Atlantic politics. Even stuff about railroads and tariffs and the cotton trade, and financing enormous wars through debt.

    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
  300. Art Deco says:
    @SFG

    There was no ‘neo-con’ v. ‘palaeo-con’ split in the 1980s. National Review was the principal repository of starboard commentary for the general reader and part of the Republican mainstream. There were other publications, some starboard from their foundation, eg. Human Events and The American Spectator, some not (e.g. The Public Interest and Commentary).
    ==
    There was a small corps of dissenters assembled in the Rockford Institute. The Rockford Institute put out a couple of periodicals and held occasional conferences. There was no body of street-level Republicans and no body of elected officials promoting their perspective and they produced little in the way of research papers. They lost most of their foundation support in 1989. The closest they came to having some sort of popular analogue was the Buchanan campaign in 1996. Their principal activity over the years has been publishing Chronicles. Chronicles was founded by Leopold Tyrmand. His widow once said he’d have been disgusted with what Thos. Fleming did with his magazine.
    ==
    There was another corps of dissenters manifest in the Paul campaigns and the v. Mises Institute. I think Paul managed to win about 4% of the ballots cast in Republican primaries and caucuses during his two campaigns and persuaded three members of Congress to endorse him. The v. Mises Institute is in the business of promoting goldbuggery and neo-Confederate historiography. Boo yah.

    • Replies: @SFG
  301. @mc23

    I have an entire box of these things. They’re kind of bland – they taste like crunchy cardboard. But they grow on you. I munch on them sometimes while perusing the latest Happy Merchant memes on 4chan.

    My (non-Jewish) grandmother used to like them for some weird reason.

    One of my (non-Jewish) elderly relatives gets weekly deliveries of frozen “meals on wheels” from a Jewish charity. Last week she got a double delivery for Passover. They usually give her a bunch of little dinner rolls but this time they gave a box of matzos.

    When she tried one, she grimaced and asked, “Is this even food?”

    She happily surrendered the box to me.

    When I was a kid I had a classmate whose mother always made latkes (potato pancakes with sour cream) for everyone at Hanukkah time. They were really good. If Jack D could convince his wife to make latkes for the Men of Unz he’d convert us all into raging Zionists overnight. (That’s assuming that she’s a good cook.)

    My favorite diner (owned by a German-born mischling) shut down in October. The place was thriving as late as 2019. The Coronapocalypse dealt a crushing blow to the bottom line and then Bidenflation administered the coup de grâce.

    In 2019 you could get a delicious Reuben with a big mound of corned beef and a large pile of fries with a decent-sized cup of soup for $9.99. In 2023 the sandwich and fries (no soup) cost $19.99, and the quantity and quality had diminished considerably.

    He had a stable of employees who’d been working there for ten, fifteen, twenty years. Most of them left after the first lockdown, and then most of those who’d remained left after the second lockdown. The turnover had a negative effect on the service and the food.

    We were fairly lucky – there were only two restaurant lockdowns in Miami. In-person dining was banned when the entire country was shut down in March. It resumed the week before Memorial Day but was suspended again (due to a supposed surge in cases) after the Fourth of July. It resumed for good the week before Labor Day. But many fast-food restaurants kept their dining areas closed until 2021.

    • Replies: @deep anonymous
    , @J.Ross
    , @mc23
  302. awry says:
    @Peter Serelic

    They simply regarded Negroes an inferior race. Slavery was strictly confined to the Negro race.
    As the SCOTUS ruled in Dred Scott, they were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States”; more specifically, that African Americans were not entitled to “full liberty of speech … to hold public meetings … and to keep and carry arms” along with other constitutionally protected rights and privileges. Supporting the ruling Chief Justice Taney wrote that a “perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery”.
    American Whites were liberals in the 19th century sense, they just didn’t consider the slaves fully human. That’s not unprecedented at all, and not necessarily racial. Ancient Greeks and Romans considered their slaves not fully human too, despite the fact that those weren’t another race than their masters. Still, they were big on the rights of free men. Similarly they didn’t consider women equal to men, but that was also a human universal until the last century.
    The “right of self-ownership” of 19th century liberalism just didn’t include them, that’s all. That doesn’t mean they weren’t liberal in the contemporary sense.

    • Replies: @deep anonymous
  303. @Steve Sailer

    Hey, just say you like your biscuits buttered, buddy.

    That’s all we’re aksing. Seems reasonable.

  304. Anonymous[916] • Disclaimer says:
    @Anon 2

    There are many Christian atheists who still admire the Christian art of living, especially the forgiveness part.

    Jews don’t seem to practice forgiveness (of non-Jews, at least). Yet they are one of the wealthiest and most powerful and oldest ethnic groups.

  305. JimDandy says:
    @International Jew

    a negligible Jewish population

    LOL! You mean like in the U.S.?! Try again, fallacy boy. I hear you’re Jennifer Rubin’s favorite keyboard mensch.

    • Replies: @International Jew
  306. Anogomous says:
    @Dennis Dale

    It’s great to be on a ship with men and sail across the sea Oh!

    Chelsea didn’t tell me you’re a vet. Yeah, Navy. Submarine Corps. Ohh… Six-month tours under the polar icecap. Nothing to do but lift weights, shoot the bull… …and enjoy the company of other men. Six months with just men? Not just men. Young men. Hard men. And the hardest of them all was Edward Boynton, Seaman Third Class. And my best pal. 1966. We were in the Philippines for a week of R&R… …and we bought matching shirts.

  307. SFG says:
    @Art Deco

    I should have mentioned the neocons were in ascendancy from the 80s through the early 2010s (at least long enough to defeat Ron Paul), but wanted to avoid getting into that rabbit hole-Harry Jaffa and the NEA, the Paul campaign, NRORevolt, etc. I imagine everyone here’s mind is made up and, anyway, they (1) were in a different media environment where controlling key organizations like NR mattered much more and (2) lost.

    • Replies: @Art Deco
  308. @Ennui

    By maintaining identity, I meant ethnic cohesion. I wasn’t clear. George Washington’s letter to the Sephardi Jews of Rhode Island as an example. Set the wrong tone for the new country. Trad societies may tolerate ethnic or religious minorities, but they certain don’t celebrate them or given them public space to act out.

    See the context and letter here.

    I can’t help but notice how it is conditional, and how Jews have conspicuously failed in that; emphasis added:

    For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

    May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

    Some of the praise etc. is merely from the context of the “Warden” first sending Washington a letter on the occasion of visiting the town they lived in. Some of this I suspect is from the limits of worldliness of our Founding Fathers. Here I cite their investigations of Islam to try to understand what the hell was going on in the Mediterranean that eventually demanded a military response.

    (And see “Biden” characteristically fail in the same sort of “second most traditional thing for the US Navy to do” off Yemen. Then again they’ve continued with many of the same people Obama’s policy towards Iran, who they’d prefer become the regional hegemon, while they didn’t hide their hate of Saudi Arabia’s rulers.)

    But, yes, especially in 20/20 hindsight this was a blunder. And at least partly keeping with our host’s thesis, like this beginning of the paragraph which the above first quote ends:

    The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.

  309. res says:
    @Steve Sailer

    My impression is that that Jews qua Jews had close to zero influence on the central event in American history, the Civil War.

    Well, there was this.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)

  310. Mr. Anon says:
    @Steve Sailer

    So your argument boils down to:

    Sure, they are vastly influential now, but what have they ever done antebellum?

    A curious inversion of the usual formula, at least as it pertains to what’s going on today.

    I don’t see that Blacks are becoming an important group in terms of money and influence. If so, FOX news would be mistaken for a satellite office of the embassy of The Republic of Congo rather than the satellite office of the Israeli embassy*.

    If another group is to take it’s place alongside Jews – not supplant them by any means, but join them – it would be Indians (dot not feather variety)

    *Which it effectively is. FOX may as well include a Star of David in its logo. It would be more honest.

    • Replies: @deep anonymous
  311. Mr. Anon says:
    @Ennui

    In the rush to restate Alan Bloom’s BS theory, some of the usual suspects never engaged with Steve’s point about Oberlin.

    Maybe because it isn’t that important.

    How important is Oberlin? It doesn’t occupy the commanding heights of the Ivies or any of the Ivy-like big State Schools (Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.) Even ASU has probably graduated more prominent people than Oberlin has. I have only ever known two Oberlin grads – a German professor and a Soprano. Who has graduated from Oberlin? Lena Dunham? Ed Helms? Yeah – Stu from The Hangover is the grey eminence behind the Biden administration.

  312. Stogumber says:

    I agree with the Puritan-Calvinist hypothesis (Jacob Talmon saw Puritanism via Rousseau as the origin of modern Toalitarianism). On the other hand, the Calvinist-Jewish conflicts emrged mostly from the fact that both claimed to be the successors of the genuine (Mosaic) federation with God, so there was some consensus, even not acknowledged.
    The (self-)misunderstanding of Jews as Progressives seems a lot later. So many American Jews had sympathized with Bolshevism (indeed, Jewish libertarians like Frank Chodorov felt isolated), but had to give up party politics in the McCarthy era and then turned to more specialized and reputable causes like supporting Blacks or unions or Civil Rights (or whatever causes they could support without definitely betraying their Bolshevist past). That’s the time in which Jews really became the spearhead of Progressivism. In a way that has stopped already, with the start of the Neocons.

    • Replies: @Anon
  313. @Stan Adams

    “My favorite diner (owned by a German-born mischling) shut down in October. The place was thriving as late as 2019. The Coronapocalypse dealt a crushing blow to the bottom line and then Bidenflation administered the coup de grâce.”

    Stories like that make me sick to my stomach. The lockdowns destroyed small businesses across the country and no doubt in all the other countries that were either stupid enough or whose governments were evil enough to impose them. One of the lasting memories I have of the first lockdown was when churches were ordered closed. A small Black! church in Baltimore tried to defy the order. There was nothing threatening about it, it was not an insurrection. The pastor was interviewed on TV. He appeared to be a humble, soft-spoken, older gentleman. He calmly said that the First Amendment prohibited the local lockdown order. He was arrested, and I believe he was fined, but the story slipped out of the news (presumably because it did not fit the narrative). To this day I admire his calm, matter-of-fact statement of the truth and his willingness to stand up for it. It blows my mind how most churches went along with this travesty. Churches and small businesses NOT essential. Liquor stores and big-box retailers ESSENTIAL. Sez who.

    • Replies: @Stan Adams
  314. @anonymous

    Good Lord, how nuts are you? Or perhaps you are one of the many Jews online playing game?

    What Steve has done here is finally notice something that is EXTREMELY important. Pure blood Wealthy Anglo-Saxon ‘Protestants’ who identified as Anglican, Episcopalian, Unitarian, Universalist, Methodist, Deist, Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker, etc. were preaching and financially backing all forms of leftism. And they were doing so as the most elite of American elites because they had the blood ties to Puritan New Englanders.

    All countries with major WASP presence will have major bouts of self-righteous liberalism without every having even any Jews, because that is inherent in WASAP culture triply so the female forms.

    • Replies: @Richard B
    , @Hibernian
  315. @awry

    “Still, they were big on the rights of free men.”

    Along the same lines, the Magna Carta, one of the great documents in the liberal pantheon, claimed rights for “free men.”

    Rough translation from the Latin:

    “That no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his freehold, liberties or privileges, or outlawed, or exiled, or, in any manner, destroyed, or deprived of his life, liberty or property, but by the judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.”

  316. Ian M. says:
    @Bill P

    Thanks for the encouragement, Bill P, that may help motivate me to do it.

  317. Art Deco says:
    @SFG

    No you shouldn’t, because it’s nonsense on stilts.

  318. Ian M. says:
    @Peter Serelic

    First, in your description of liberalism, and then in your assertion that southern states were not hierarchical…

    I never asserted this, in fact I acknowledged that the South was hierarchical in my reply to Corvinus.

    I have no problem your arguing that slavery ought to be associated with the right, I wasn’t really disputing that: my point is that moderns tend to look at just that one feature, and conclude from that that the South must have been right-wing ideological extremists. But this is too simplistic and reductionist. As I mentioned in my reply to Corvinus, any liberal ideology will have conservative and right-wing elements mixed in. There is also the fact that while we can say that slavery is a ‘right-wing’ institution, underlying the Southern understanding of slavery was a more liberal, modernist conception of property as opposed to a more traditional conception.

    In fact of all the many liberal principles, there is no higher than

    “The basis of all rights flows from the right of self-ownership.”

    I wouldn’t say that this is the highest principle of liberalism, but rather perhaps the highest principle of a certain libertarian strand of liberalism associated with the likes of Murray Rothbard. John Locke, of course, might be said to have defended the self-ownership thesis, but for him this was a proxy: Locke famously denies that we own ourselves; rather God owns us, and we are merely His stewards.

    (The self-ownership thesis famously suffers from circularity unless stipulated to be axiomatic, but trying to claim that it is axiomatic comes with its own insuperable problems since it is not self-evident.)

    Liberalism recognizes the supreme value of individuals, and individul rights are put above political rights of the state…

    Indeed, but this cannot be done consistently, because liberalism is not coherent at bottom (but getting into that is a larger topic than I have time for at present). But the upshot is that all forms of liberalism will end up denying rights to some groups in the name of individual rights: certain groups are seen as obstacles to achieving full autonomy and equal individual rights, so these groups must be suppressed to some degree or another. We see this today in modern forms of liberalism, with its attitude towards those not yet born, and increasingly toward those with ‘white privilege’. It was present in earlier forms of liberalism as well, but the targets were different. Moreover, liberalism requires a hierarchical managerial class to ensure equal freedom for all, all while denying its own authority. This doesn’t remove authority and hierarchy, it just makes it sociopathic and unaccountable.

  319. J.Ross says:
    @International Jew

    Whenever we look at those countries we always find two things: one, a Jew alone, making ridiculous any talk about democratic values or population, and two, a governmental system much more streamlined that that of the USA, enabling the one Jew expert to dictate terms without any difficult to reach numbers. Europe is going into a multicultural mode, don’t you know. Pretty sure the Spanish parliament that Robocopped Israel out of its famous international show trials for non-Spanish war crimes was almost completely Gentile.

  320. Ian M. says:
    @Reg Cæsar

    “There are two types of nations: those that use the metric system and those who have put men on the moon.”

  321. J.Ross says:
    @Stan Adams

    Everything Matzoh done right at a good seafood restaurant like Florida’s Chart House is brilliant.

  322. @Dumbo

    Martin Luther was not a crypto Jew. He was a pure blood Saxon. And like his father, he tended toward seeing Saxons as ‘racialy’ superior to other Germanic tribes.

    • Replies: @tamberlint
  323. Anon[215] • Disclaimer says:
    @Stogumber

    That’s the time in which Jews really became the spearhead of Progressivism.

    It wasn’t “Progressivism”; it was anti-Whiteism.

  324. Ian M. says:
    @AnotherDad

    Egos desperate… to push their pet theories

    Physician, heal thyself.

  325. Ian M. says:
    @AnotherDad

    If the West’s predicament is really caused by “the Enlightenment”, then we’re just screwed. There will never be a consensus to chuck science and the fruits thereof and almost no one actually wants to be ruled by churchmen–of any stripe. (Yuck.)

    Indeed, we are screwed. Or rather, the problem is much deeper than most are willing to acknowledge, in part because acknowledging the full extent of the problem would implicate most of us to some degree. And people naturally will avoid thinking that might lead to such a conclusion. Also, because people find it too depressing to think about, as you do, so they would rather avoid thinking about it. But until it is so acknowledged, we’re screwed.

    To say that we need to chuck science if we give up on the Enlightenment is a strawman: it is the philosophy of the Enlightenment we need to reject, not scientific advancement. Besides, the Scientific Revolution began a century before the Enlightenment, so obviously we can have science without the Enlightenment since it’s been done before. Surely you know this, so why are you tying the two together?

    Ultimately, the Enlightenment must turn against science, too, since it demands that we conform our minds to objective reality, but the Enlightenment project is to liberate us from such demands:

    Did you really think the Enlightenment would spare you, science?

    Simply destroy minoritarianism–toss its adherents out of our societies–and we can keep the Enlightenment, republicanism and sane, prosperous, free nations.

    Of course, this is the hue and cry of liberalism’s right wing every generation: let’s just go back to an earlier version of nicer, tamer liberalism. The problem is that these earlier versions of liberalism are not stable: you can’t reject just one or two features of liberalism and expect it then to stay put. Any philosophical or political ideology will take on a life of its own and develop according to its internal logic. These things are larger than we are. Liberalism must be rejected at its root.

    I do find it ironic that the allegedly practical man of Northwestern European descent tends to be in reality the most impractical person when it comes to politics, precisely because he is unwilling to to do the intellectual work required to understand the problem and focuses instead on whatever particular symptom happens to be his bugbear.

  326. Richard B says:
    @Citizen of a Silly Country

    Great comment!

    Yeah. Either they got to him, or he got to himself. Whatever the case may be, his writing has become less intelligent and more dishonest. Of course, the two go together.

    But this one is the worst, so far.

    P.S.

    It matters less what the roots of progressivism are than what it has become.
    Does he actually think the word means the same thing now that it did then?

  327. Richard B says:
    @Jack D

    Lies are always indefensible and telling them (rightfully) leaves you open to attack.

    And if your group’s interest is in being placeed above criticism, then any criticism of your group will be attacked as a lie. That is what is “indefensible.” Obviously!

  328. @deep anonymous

    And then they announced that the George Floyd protests had no appreciable effect on the COVID infection rates. Thank God most Antifa thugs wore masks!

    The owner of the diner took it over in 1981 but the restaurant first opened in 1955. So the place was in continuous operation for nearly seventy years.

    After Hurricane Andrew, that restaurant was the very first business in the area to reopen. The entire electrical grid had been smashed wrecked and most people in the vicinity didn’t get their power back for three or four weeks. But two days after the storm a group of linemen knocked on the owner’s door and offered to give him enough juice to get the kitchen running if he’d provide them with a hot lunch. (He was more than happy to oblige.) Word got out that the place was open and pretty soon the owner and his brother were slinging hash for seemingly every construction/relief/rescue worker in a twenty-mile radius.

    (Years later he recounted the stories some of those guys had whispered about all the bodies that the government was hiding.)

    It was one of the first restaurants I ate at as a little kid. When I was in high school, kids would often skip their morning classes to eat breakfast there. It was the place where my grandmother had her last real “day out” right before she went into the nursing home. That was shortly before COVID.

    I spoke to her on the phone just as the lockdowns were beginning. It immediately became clear that she had no idea what was happening.

    She asked when I was coming to see her.

    “Not for a while,” I said. “There’s a very bad flu going around, so lots of people are staying home right now. You remember how sick I was a couple of months ago?” (I contracted some kind of virulent flu-like illness in January 2020. To this day I wonder if it was COVID.)

    “Oh, my,” she said. “Yes, I remember you told me you were sick. I guess everybody’s getting it now. You should definitely stay home. You know that I can’t afford to get sick.”

    My grandmother was a lifelong asthmatic. She weathered a number of life-threatening infections over the years. She was sick so often during my mother’s childhood that my mother came to prefer my grandfather’s cooking.

    She almost bled to death during the birth of my aunt. She had a classic near-death experience – seeing herself on the operating table, hearing the doctor say, “We’re losing her!”, seeing the light, feeling the compulsion to go toward the light, hearing a voice telling her to go back, going back, waking up in the hospital. She always told me that I should never have any fear of death, that when the time came I would know it was my time to go, and that I would know that I was going to a better place. She also spoke of her certainty that she would be reunited with my grandfather. She used to go on and on about all the things she’d see when she got to heaven.

    By the time Grandma died I doubt that she had more than a vague awareness that she had ever been married. (She had Alzheimer’s, you see.)

    They lifted the COVID restrictions on nursing-home visits just a couple of weeks before she died. When we finally got to see her my mother was pleased that she still remembered us. (I never doubted that she would.) The next time I saw her, she was in a coma. The next time after that, she was dead.

    My cousin has tried to kill herself multiple times over the years. One time she succeeded. I can’t remember if she slashed her wrists – her arms are covered with scars – or if she swallowed the contents of a bottle of sleeping pills. Anyway, she died. Clinically, she was dead. Somehow they brought her back.

    Afterward she said she didn’t see or hear anything – no vision of herself lying on the table, no bright light, no voice from the ether. She remembered passing out and then waking up in the hospital. She says I should never have any fear of death because it’s not unpleasant, aside from dealing with the pain of the injury that causes you die. It’s not enjoyable, either – it’s just nothing. It’s like shutting off a light switch. Everything just goes black and stays that way forever.

    My mother told me that when my grandfather was going through chemotherapy my grandmother confided in her that she’d never be able to cope with the level of pain that he was suffering.

    “If I ever get diagnosed with cancer, I’m going to kill myself,” she told my mother. “I can’t do it. I won’t.”

    Fortunately, Grandma never got cancer. But just about everybody else in her family – including two of her three children – did.

    (My mother didn’t but she’s a real mess in medical terms. She’s one of those hypochondriacs who really do have serious health issues. Of course, quite a few of them are self-inflicted, not that she’ll ever admit it. She’ll argue for hours on end that her obesity is caused entirely by her thyroid condition and has nothing to do with her abysmal eating habits. If it weren’t for the thyroid condition she’d be skin and bones.)

    My aunt is convinced that her cancer has returned. Her germaphobia has not served her well. She became a complete recluse during COVID – she literally has not gone *anywhere* since the pandemic. She stays holed up in her room for hours on end watching Court TV (of all things). She used to watch CNN 24/7 but they worked her up into such a frenzy about Trump that when she realized he might actually become president again she had to quit watching the news altogether. She says flatly that she’s prepared to die. She doesn’t believe in God anymore (if she ever did) but sometimes she prays that one morning she just won’t wake up.

    My mother is always moaning about her various health problems. I can’t recall a time when she wasn’t moaning about one health problem or another. But I also can’t recall a time when she could barely walk from one side of the house to the next.

    Sometimes I really hate all of these people. My grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my cousin – I’m tired of their decay and death and their bright lights and their dark abysses. And then sometimes I feel that I’m just as dead as the rest of them – I’m just a switching corpse and everything I do is just some pre-programmed autonomic response.

    My grandmother died with three grandchildren and only two great-grandchildren. Since then my other cousin has become a father, so now the Y (millennial) and A (post-2010) generations are of equal size.

    I suppose I’m as much to blame for that sad state of affairs as anybody. But it’s a sad commentary on the family Grandma raised.

    I know quite a few people who are around my age (late 30s) who don’t have kids who feel that things are so bad now and the prospects for the future are so bleak that bringing children into the world would be cruel. I refuse to subscribe to that belief. But I have to admit that I’m not feeling optimistic about our chances at this point.

    I still hope that Trump will win but I’m not hopeful that things will get much better if he does win. I’m absolutely certain that things will get much worse if Biden wins.

    tl;dr Never mind.

  329. @The Germ Theory of Disease

    The South’s grand strategy was to get the British ruling class to intervene militarily on the South’s side to get the cotton flowing to relieve unemployment in Manchester. To the extent that the City of London was terribly Jewish in 1861 (other than Lord Rothschild), once again we see Southerners assuming, probably with good reason, that Jews were on their side.

    But the Emancipation Proclamation galvanized the workers of Britain who came out in favor of the North. The British didn’t rescue the South.

    As I’ve been saying, the pro-Confederate anti-Semites are falling for Jewish retconning of Jewish history when it comes to the Civil War. Jews weren’t important abolitionists. They were mostly okay with slavery. They didn’t seem to worry about it much.

  330. @Steve Sailer

    Well here’s the thing: I’m no deep scholar of the Civil War, except to say that Lincoln had a moral and patriotic duty to figure out a way to prevent or avoid it, and why he didn’t, hmm… but I’m not Shelby Foote when it comes to these things.

    My only point is, you are being either deliberately or vacuously naive. When it came to questions about trade deals, railroads, war finance/debt, cotton prices, slave prices, tariffs, or anything at all to do with vast amounts of money changing hands multiple times, for whatever reason, to blithely say “Jews weren’t involved” is the height of ridiculousness.

    • Replies: @Steve Sailer
  331. @The Germ Theory of Disease

    Name names.

    The only Confederate cabinet officer who served throughout the war was Judah P. Benjamin, who was Jewish. The only other United States senator in 1861 who was Jewish was David Levy Yulee (D-FL), who sided with the Confederacy. The only event during the Civil War specifically involving Jews was U.S. Grant’s ban on Jewish cotton smugglers, which Lincoln quickly overrode.

    My impression is that Jews’ track record during America’s most important historical event, the Civil War, was fair to middling at best. Lots of Jews have since tried to retcon how they were actually very much opposed to slavery, but they, on the whole, weren’t. But lots of anti-Semites who are pro-Confederate, have since been snookered by left-wing Jews’ apologetics for their apologies for Jews’ poor performance on slavery.

    • Agree: Ennui
    • Replies: @Richard B
    , @Ennui
  332. @Mr. Anon

    “*Which it effectively is. FOX may as well include a Star of David in its logo. It would be more honest.”

    This. One of the reasons I cannot watch Fox News. Or any other TV news, for that matter. The brainwashing is relentless.

  333. Richard B says:
    @Steve Sailer

    My impression is that Jews’ track record during America’s most important historical event, the Civil War, was fair to middling at best.

    It would be interesting to know exactly why you think the Civil War was America’s most important historical event. Have you written about this before? Could you share a link?

    If it does qualify as America’s most important event it’s because of the consequences.

    The most important of which being that a broken country made possible the rise of Zionism, or more bluntly, Jewish Supremacy, which has caused us all so many problems.

    After all, what’s more relevant today, an entire country living under the iron paw of a destructive force like Jewish Supremacy, or someone’s interpretation of the Civil War?

    • Troll: Corvinus
  334. Matra says:
    @Hiram Hiramoto

    he let them back into England.

    That’s disputed. Incidentally, ‘they’ were already in England, though not officially.

  335. Ennui says:
    @Braminid

    John Brown got firearms shipped to him by Northern businessmen.

  336. Ennui says:
    @Steve Sailer

    Of course, some of this has to do with the different waves of Jewish immigration to the US. The Sephardi ancestors of Ms. Daisy of “Driving Ms. Daisy” were quite different from the Eastern European Jews who showed up later.

    GTofD talking about Shelby Foote is humorous and backs up Steve’s point when we consider Foote’s Jewish ancestry.

  337. Hibernian says:
    @Tono Bungay

    …it is a non-denominational magazine widely viewed as the main voice of American conservatism.

    Originally Catholic like its founder. The remnant of that tradition is carried on by Kathryn Jean Lopez and to a lesser extent a few others.

  338. Hibernian says:
    @Matra

    (WASP Harvard was well to the right of the country during FDR’s reign)</blockquote

    They were to the Right economically because they were rich. New England’s been to the Left socially since the early 19th century.

  339. Hibernian says:
    @Mike Jones' other brother Darryl

    Isn’t this about the fourth handle you’ve used, Darryl?

  340. Anon[306] • Disclaimer says:
    @Peter Serelic

    And these were the most “conservative” of the New England WASPs. So, yes, social egalitarianism and individual rights are strong genetic/social characteristics of New England whites and whites from the northern part of the U.S in general.

    Problem is, Jews aren’t big fans of social egalitarianism, or individual rights, or freedom of speech. Except situationally.

    • Troll: Corvinus
  341. Anon[213] • Disclaimer says:
    @Anonymous

    I wonder how many other “Cyphers” there are on Youtube and in corporate media and in the Deep State and Congress and academia, who decide to silence themselves and/or collaborate with the Jewish tyrants who rule over the West because they just want to eat their juicy steaks…

    There are a lot.

  342. mc23 says:
    @Stan Adams

    Always on the lookout for a good old fashion Jewish Deli. In Manhattan, I fondly remember one where a grandmother was doting on my blond haired brood. It made for a special trip.

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