Israel Slaughtering Children, Jews Hardest Hit

A British writer of comic fiction named Howard Jacobson complains in The Guardian that media outlets reporting on the record-setting rates of child casualties among Israel’s civilian victims in Gaza invokes the antisemitic “blood libel” of the medieval era:

It says something for the conscience of the Church of England that, in 1955, it put up a plaque alongside the former shrine of Little Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral, apologising for the harm it had done by falsely accusing Jews of the ritual slaughter of the boy in 1255.

That Jews habitually murdered gentile children for blood with which to make Passover matzoh, was a popular superstition throughout Britain and Europe in the middle ages. “These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives,” the plaque reads, “[and] do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”

God forgives, Jews do not. That would be leaving money on the table.

That it took the Church of England 700 years to amend “what [it] had been” should not detract from the honesty of that amendment, particularly if we remember that the “blood libel”, as it has become known, was still alive and kicking in the modern era, with occurrences of it recorded in Russia and even America as recently as 1928.

In 1928 in Massena, New York a four year-old girl went missing overnight two days before Yom Kippur. A Greek immigrant suggested she might have been taken by the town’s Jews for use in a blood ritual. Police questioned two Jewish men, one said to be mentally retarded who gave confusing and suspicious answers; another (described in Jewish accounts of the incident as a marginal figure and non-practicing Jew) lent credence to the blood ritual legends in his desperate claims of innocence. It appears the original white protestant residents of Massena (experiencing a recent influx of immigration at the time) were previously ignorant of the old legends.

So over a period of less than 24 hours, before the girl wandered out of the woods back into town the next day, the rumor swept through town. Jewish accounts of the incident portray the local rabbi turning police away from his door, and later marching into the police station to berate them for lending credence to the libel and leaving them “abashed”. At one point a crowd gathered at the police station, or not; this was disputed by another Jew recollecting the affair. A Jewish businessman said the police searched his cellar. People in back alleys were said to have shined flashlights into the windows of other Jewish businesses. Things were tense. As soon as the girl returned, things returned to normal.
In the years since some Jews have criticized local civic and religious leaders for not submitting the town to a series of struggle sessions over the affair. And that is the great Massena blood libel case by which America is to be tethered to the grand “blood libel” millstone, per Jacobson.

Jacobson continues:

Ask wherein the appeal of this libel lies and the answer has to be the necessity for Christians not just to defame Jews and make a clear distinction between Old and New Testament morality, but to set the Jews apart from the entire human family; depraved, accomplices of the devil. And, of course, to justify hunting them down and massacring them.

Jacobson, having asserted Jews are victimized by reports of the IDF killing Palestinian children because of the blood libel, hints that journalists reporting atrocities are impelled by the same age-old gentile “necessity” to “set the Jews apart” as prelude to “massacring them.” About the considerable number of Jews calling out IDF atrocities he has nothing to say.

It has been said often enough that there could hardly have been a more unlikely crime to charge Jews with, given the strict taboo on blood sacrifice and the extreme laws against blood contact and consumption laid down in the Torah. But there lies the further efficacy of the libel – it denies Jews their beliefs, their culture and their nature. It is hateful to be accused of what you haven’t done, but more hateful still to be accused of what you would never dream of doing and what you cannot bear to see done.

It is not in the Jew’s nature to consume human blood. Okay, is it in his nature to kill innocent children, as it has been unfortunately proven at times throughout history to be in the “nature” of any given people at war? Is this yet another example of Jews being excepted from a negative aspect of human nature (as asserted by a Jew)? Because in this century the average Israeli, maybe even the average Jew worldwide with many loud and notable exceptions, doesn’t just bear the savagery of Israel’s past year, he celebrates it.

Speaking of antisemitic slurs, “the Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you” comes to mind. Jacobson, having set us up (or so he thinks) to conflate medieval mythology with the documented present, hints at an argument too ridiculous to make explicit: the blood libel myth was unforgivable for the pain caused to Jews, ergo documentation of the bloody present is unforgivable for the pain it causes Jews. Another variation of “the Jew cries out in pain…” line comes to mind, Golda Meir’s wretchedly dishonest “we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” Shamelessness is a superpower that you don’t have, mortal. Jacobson has it (if only he’d use it for good):

Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.

What Jacobson appears to be trying to do above is establish a Jewish right to “savagery” now, for the libelous claims of Jewish savagery before. But he can’t say that directly; he has to try to plant this gaslighting furtively. If Jacobson had an argument he would make it. As it is he has only the guilt with which you’ve been conditioned from birth, guilt about antisemitism. If Christian calumnies about the Jews conditioned our forebears to fear and hate them, Jewish calumnies about our forebears in the present condition us to fear hating them.

What calumny do Jews level at Christian-descended Europeans? That we are inferior to them, because we have hated them. Our inferiority as proven by our hatred of them is cherished by Jews and masochistic gentiles alike. Under this mind-twisting tyranny of psychological manipulation we fear even the appearance of hating them (in large part lest we confirm that inferiority) as individuals, and this we confirm by acknowledging an ancestral hatred. I do not hate them, but we do. Each individual distinguished by his condemnation of the whole and split off from it. That’s power–though it is looking increasingly precarious, in no small part because of the savagery of the IDF now and the familiar, long-tiresome bullying of which Jacobson’s rant here is an example; bullying that always leaps into action to act as bodyguard for Israeli misbehavior. Bullying that every Western gentile living now has known from the cradle. Bullying that grows increasingly shrill as its interlocutors sense its faltering grip.

Jacobson continues with his impeccable logic; the medieval blood libel was not true, ergo the present infanticide in Palestine is not true:

Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.

Indeed, you should be ashamed for noticing the bodies of children in Gaza just as you should be ashamed of your forebears believing in superstitious Jewish cruelty. But I can’t help seeing superstitious Jewish cruelty in the long war to expel the Palestinians, based as it is on its own religious myth unsupported by history or archeology, of an ancient Jewish claim to the land.

Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you. Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation. Hate feeds off the superstitions that fed it last time round. The narrative of these events requires a heartless villainy and who more heartlessly villainous than those who severed the arteries of Little Hugh of Lincoln?

Who said anything about “deadly accuracy” being a necessity for killing great numbers of children? Quite the opposite: it’s the routine practice of the IDF taking out whole buildings and entire city blocks that is killing all those women and children. As for why they would want to target innocent children, that is not our problem to solve. They have offered an explanation for it, for what they characterize as the unfortunate but wholly necessary collateral killing: Israelis (and as Jacobson asserts, all Jews, suffering under history) are defending themselves after the “genocidal” attacks of October 7. That and something about “human shields”. It is for Jacobson, who has made a career out of being promiscuously Jewish (he’s been flattered as “the British Philip Roth”) in his writing, I am told, to explain how they, how anyone, could be capable of it.

Needless to say Jacobson conveniently forgets a certain lie, but not the only such lie, about October 7, every bit as lurid as the old blood libel, a deliberate lie told to clear the way for the current child-killing, the legend of the “40 beheaded babies”. As yet not officially corrected by Israel; as Jacobson says above, it could have been true.

So how many children have the Israelis killed in the last year? From Oxfam:

More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades, new Oxfam analysis has found.

As hostilities and tragic loss of life spread in Lebanon and the West Bank – including East Jerusalem – the regional escalation underscores the urgent need for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

Conservative figures show that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months. Data from 2004-2021 on direct conflict deaths from the Small Arms Survey, estimates that the highest number of women killed in a single year was over 2,600 in Iraq in 2016.

I have no knowledge of Jacobson or his work, and the thumbnail sketch derived from a half-hour’s internet investigation suggests I’m no worse off for it. As I mentioned above he’s apparently a secular Jew who’s made a career fetishizing his Jewishness. In other words an increasingly tiresome cliche that is rapidly, and mercifully, fading into the untenable as the public becomes jaded–one hopes–to self-celebrating Jewish kitsch against our daily backdrop of Israeli savagery and Jewish malice. In a letter to The Sunday Times he joined with Simon Schama to help cancel Jeremy Corbyn for antisemitism, using an argument similar to that for censoring reporting on the killing of children in Gaza–Corbyn was carrying on an historical libeling of Jews:

Although anti-Zionists claim innocence of any antisemitic [sic] intent, anti-Zionism frequently borrows the libels of classical Jew-hating…Accusations of international Jewish conspiracy and control of the media have resurfaced to support false equations of Zionism with colonialism and imperialism, and the promotion of vicious, fictitious parallels with genocide and Nazism.

The “blood libel” obviously has no bearing on the killing of children in Gaza, despite Jacobson’s tortured stretch here. But since he brings it up we should consider–if for no other reason than it is in our interests to fight back (because Jacobson isn’t just out to justify killing Palestinian kids, but also to keep us in our place), dare I say, how false? By that I mean just how unreasonable was it for medieval peasants to believe in Jewish blood rituals? Or, was it at all unreasonable? Was it, as we’re told, mere “hate”, that deliberately vague but all-damning word-concept that only ever seems to apply to us and not to our enemies?

There are no genuine certainties after all, only degrees of probability. Beyond that I suggest to you, if you are not Jewish, to make yourself impervious to the various condemnations of such as Jacobson, to liberate yourself from caring. Me I start with the death star of Jewish dominance in our time, the Holocaust. Whether it was indeed history’s greatest crime or an utter and complete hoax, I don’t care: I, we, deserve to live. It’s not an ignoble impulse by which you recoil from that proposition, but it is a deadly one. If it helps you should consider what I think is self-evident: Jacobson et al are not outraged that the blood libel happened and they are not outraged the Holocaust happened. They are outraged these things happened to them. And they very often betray a lust for vengeance.

So we should at least recognize Jacobson and ilk are enemies of a sort, and no true lovers of either universal morality or the truth. We can ask at least, no we are obliged to ask, as our existence depends on it: who in fact has been libeled? Us or them? Here’s a start, and it’s offered by a very different sort of Jew than Jacobson, the sort who seems as unable to resist the truth as Jacobson is unwilling to respect it. Dr Ariel Toaff was an accomplished historian who came to contrary conclusions regarding the blood libel and the extremely superstitious and sanguinary history of Judaism we never hear about:

Dr Toaff is the son of the Rabbi of Rome and a professor in the Jewish University of Bar Ilan, not far from Tel Aviv. He made a name for himself by his deep study of medieval Jewry. His three-volumed Love, Work, and Death (subtitled Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria) is an encyclopaedia of this admittedly narrow area. While studying his subject he discovered that the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish communities of North Italy practiced a particularly horrible form of human sacrifice. Their wizards and adepts stole and crucified Christian babies, obtained their blood and used it for magical rituals evoking the Spirit of Vengeance against the hated Goyim.

In particular, he dwelt on the case of St Simon of Trent. This two-year old child from the Italian town of Trent was kidnapped by a few Ashkenazi Jews from his home on the eve of Passover 1475 AD. At night, the kidnappers murdered the child; drew his blood, pierced his flesh with needles, crucified him head down calling “So may all Christians by land and sea perish”, and thus they celebrated their Passover, an archaic ritual of outpouring blood and killed babies, in the most literal form, without usual metaphoric “blood-wine” shift.

The killers were apprehended, confessed and were found guilty by the Bishop of Trent. Immediately, the Jews took their protest to the Pope and he had sent the bishop of Ventimiglia to investigate. He allegedly accepted a hefty bribe from the Jews and concluded that the child was murdered by a Hamas mine in order to besmirch Israel, as there was no Tsahal ordnance found on the beach of Trent. “Simon had been killed by Christians with the intention of ruining the Jews”, said the pre-war Jewish Encyclopedia, in a clear case of premonition: the same argument was used by Jews in 2006 while explaining away the mass murder of children in Kafr Qana.

However, in 15th century the Jews were influential, yes, but all-powerful, no. They could not deal with the world like they did in 2002 after their massacre of Jenin by ordering everybody to buzz off. They had no American veto in the Security Council. They could not bomb Rome, and the word “antisemitism” was invented 400 years later. They were given a fair deal which is much worse than preferred treatment: Pope Sixtus IV assembled a commission of six cardinals chaired by the best legal mind of that time, for retrial; and this Supreme Court found the murderers guilty. See more for a Catholic version and a Jewish version of the events. The records of the trial have survived centuries and are still available in Vatican.

In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church entered a perestroika [i]. These were the halcyon days of the Vatican II when the modernizers uprooted the foundations of tradition hoping to update the faith and to fit it into the new Jewish-friendly narrative of modernity; in plain prose, the bishops wanted to be loved by the liberal press.

The ever-watchful Jews used the opportunity and pushed the bishops to decommission St Simon of Trent. They were happy to oblige: already in bizarre ritual, the Church leaders had found the Jews free from guilt for Crucifixion of Christ while admitting the Church’s guilt for persecution of Jews; the crucifixion of an Italian baby was a small matter compared with this reversal. In a hasty decision, the bishops ruled that the confessions of the killers were unacceptable because obtained under torture, and thus the accused were innocent, while the young martyr was anything but. His cult was discontinued and forbidden, and the remains of the martyred child were removed and dumped in a secret place to avoid resumption of pilgrimage.

And now we come back to Dr Ariel Toaff. While going through the papers of the trial, he made a staggering discovery: instead of being dictated by the zealous investigators under torture, the confessions of the killers contained material totally unknown to the Italian churchmen or police. The killers belonged to the small and withdrawn Ashkenazi community, they practiced their own rites, quite different from those used by the native Italian Jews; these rites were faithfully reproduced in their confessions, though they were not known to the Crime Squad of the day. “These liturgical formulas in Hebrew with a strong anti-Christian tone cannot be projections of the judges who could not know these prayers, which didn’t even belong to Italian rites but to the Ashkenazi tradition,” Toaff wrote. A confession is of value only if it contains some true and verifiable details of the crime the police did not know of. This iron rule of criminal investigation was observed in Trent trials.

To give one thankfully final look at Jacobson, he ends his article with this sentence:

Maybe the Church of England was wrong to apologise.

Indeed.

No Country for Bold Men, Part I

When the State Allied with Anarchists to Outlaw Political Protest in Portland

Deeply unpopular Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt is on the way out after losing an election primary in May; he was defeated by his lead prosecutor, Nathan Vasquez, who ran to the vast right of his radically progressive boss. The win has been hailed by the majority of Portlanders, including liberals and more moderate progressives, as a return to common-sense law and order.

In 2020 Schmidt, who will remain in office until the end of the year, became one more winning campaign in George Soros’ project–under the Orwellian slogan “Safety and Justice“–to elect radical progressive prosecutors nationwide that brought into office infamous figures such as Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascon in Los Angeles and Kim Gardner in St Louis. These prosecutors had one primary goal, lowering black incarceration rates by any means necessary–any means but one, that of lowering levels of black crime.

In 2017 Sean King, Becky Bond (a socialist who went on to work for Beto O’Rourke) and some veterans of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign created the Real Justice PAC with seed money from Cari Tuna (a former Wall Street Journal reporter married to Facebook co-founder and billionaire Dustin Moskowitz). Real Justice would eventually take credit for Schmidt’s landslide election victory.

By 2024 Schmidt and the degraded state of Portland with which he is intimately associated had become so unpopular that his defeat seemed a foregone conclusion, despite the Soros network’s cash infusions intended to counter Vazquez’ funding advantage due to local donors. The contest was seen as a referendum on Portland’s radical leftward direction since progressives established uncontested dominance over the city’s politics via the George Floyd riots of summer 2020.

Trump’s election in 2016 had kicked off a week of riots in Portland that became a regular occurrence leading into and culminating with 2020’s BLM riots. Mike Schmidt was elected District Attorney in May 2020. He was not scheduled to take office until the following January, and should have spent that summer as a spectator to the nightly rioting. But as mayhem engulfed the city the sitting DA abandoned ship, retiring early along with the still-green police chief (admirably female but untenably white for the new environment). Schmidt took office at the end of July and announced he would only prosecute the most violent crimes associated with the “racial justice protests”, specifically declining to prosecute “rioting”. Schmidt threw out nearly all of the cases police brought him against antifa rioters (the first count arriving at the curious total of 666 cases refused) with whom he publicly sympathized; in his first address to the city he made a point of repeating “black lives matter” three times in a row.

That campaign, nationally orchestrated and timed to subvert Trump’s chances for re-election, worked over the city of Portland like a military shock and awe campaign; before it was done Oregon’s radical progressives were taking advantage of a dazed public, a demoralized opposition and compliant media to achieve a host of long-sought goals, mostly dismantling law enforcement programs and transferring their funding to progressive advocacy organizations. Most notably the since-repealed Measure 110 legalizing drug use and possession, and the partial defunding of Portland’s police force. Legalized drugs combined with a Covid-prompted suspension on laws against camping on city sidewalks that ballooned the city’s already considerable homeless presence to create its present downtown of overdosing fentanyl addicts, tranq zombies, wretched homeless and vacant storefronts.

Four years on from 2020’s “racial reckoning” all but the most radical progressive element is disillusioned. The city council’s most vociferous police abolitionist JoAnn Hardesty, who tried and failed to slash the police force by about half in the giddy, victorious days of 2020, was voted out of office. The ban on camping on city streets has been restored and Measure 10 repealed. But feckless city government remains unable or unwilling to enforce these laws, providing the ambitious Vazquez with the opportunity to cast himself as law and order’s champion.

But it’s worth noting the two high-profile criminal cases that brought Vasquez to prominence and what constitutes his idea of law and order.

In 2022 he teamed up with antifa anarchists, using novel, expansive definitions of assault, and sentencing enhancements under a 1994 law his office campaigned against in the name of racial justice the year before, to sentence two right wing demonstrators to long prison terms for brawling with anarchists on streets police had abandoned by order of Mayor Ted Wheeler. One man for using bear spray and paintballs on antifa aggressors; the other convicted of serious assault despite not actually having raised a hand to his purported victims.

Here is the curious story of how anarchists won the cases of the State v Alan Swinney and Tiny Toese.

The prosecution’s cases followed a template provided by federal law enforcement’s October 2020 pivot to the threat of “white supremacy”, relying heavily on the defendants’ social media postings and their association with the Proud Boys, which the prosecution characterized as a sort of highly organized paramilitary insurgent group.

Toese and Swinney’s story begins sometime in late 2016 when Joey Gibson, of Vancouver Washington across the Columbia River from Portland, organized a group of conservative political neophytes into the “far right” group Patriot Prayer, modeled on and loosely affiliated with the national Proud Boys organization. Gibson says he was inspired by then near-daily scenes of radical leftists attacking Trump rallies nationwide. Patriot Prayer would soon begin its own campaign, seeking to provoke and expose antifa violence, which was dependably forthcoming, by holding rallies in support of the police.

It was February 2017 when things seemed to turn irrevocably irrational after antifa rioted at UC Berkeley, home of the original “free speech movement”, to stop a speech by Milo Yiannopolis. In Portland during this time assaults on Andy Ngo at anarchist protests propelled him to national prominence, and antifa routinely assaulted any media or witnesses not explicitly allied with them–and even some of their own allied independent “journalists” that became the subject of rumor campaigns or guilty of delving even tepidly into objective reporting.

August of 2017 had brought the Charlottesville Unite the Right debacle, in hindsight a watershed event which would provide a template by which the counter-intuitive relationship between antifa, the media and law enforcement could be used to stifle the populism Trump had unleashed: conservative demonstrations are met with antifa violence; mayhem ensues; the media reports it as the “far right” initiating violence; the state steps in with selective prosecutions of the right; police witnesses at trial cite such as the ADL to give the gloss of expertise; sympathetic judges or juries fall in line. All of these elements were at work in the cases discussed below.

Well before 2020 in Portland every antifa protest not specifically anti-police was secondarily that, with the goal of provoking violent reactions from police for use in anti-cop propaganda and recruitment. The lime-green ballcaps of The National Lawyers Guild were as ubiquitous on the scene as they were oblivious to antifa violence.

Patriot Prayer started out trolling antifa with pro-Trump and “Back the Blue” rallies in support of police–similar to antifa’s trolling of police, with a key difference: while antifa needed to initiate violence to elicit a police response, the self-described patriots merely needed to show up to attract an angry antifa mob. These responding antifa counterprotests used the same provocative tactics they typically used against police: taunts, threats of violence, thrown projectiles. The smallest of patriot demonstrations were met by antifa intimidation; in their propaganda antifa characterized these rallies as assaults on the city where furious right-wingers would no doubt run rampant assaulting minorities and other sacralized identities but for their intervention. Antifa used any violence ensuing from the confrontations—usually brief melees without serious injury—to paint the patriots as violent extremists “attacking” the city. Respectable media mostly echoed antifa propaganda.

In the beginning, before the police withdrew from the streets, they would respond to the confrontations in an attempt to keep the peace. Since the dynamic typically played out as antifa descending threateningly upon smaller patriot groups, the police line separating them would face off with antifa, with backs to the patriots. This played into antifa propaganda, which held that police and patriots constituted a fascist alliance. Images of police facing off with antifa, making arrests or dispersing large antifa mobs fed further into antifa propaganda.

At the time a (very) few antifa sympathizers fretted the patriots’ trolling campaign was working:

They needn’t have worried, and could not be expected to foresee the city’s law enforcement apparatus, including the despised police, would eventually step in to rescue their campaign against the right’s freedom of assembly, led by a former Republican prosecutor (Vasquez says he abandoned the party in 2017 out of disgust for Trump).

Sometime in 2020 an itinerant oil field worker from Texas named Alan Swinney travelled to Portland to join the fight. The tall, intimidating Texan soon became a familiar presence at the confrontations, despised by antifa.

On August 15 of 2020 Swinney led a small “flag wave” demonstration in front of Portland’s downtown police precinct (boarded up since the riots began that summer, and devoid of any police presence on the streets outside) that drew a larger group of counter-demonstrators.

August 15, 2020 Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

Typically in these encounters antifa counter-demonstrators would follow the patriots after they dispersed and headed for their cars at a rally’s end, with antifa seeking out smaller vulnerable groups of patriots to attack. As they pursued Swinney’s departing handful of rallygoers he deployed bear mace at various points to back them off, for one of these he drew the assault charge of twelve he would eventually face in court. I followed and recorded the groups through most of the encounter.

August 15, 2020 Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

Later Swinney fired paintballs at his pursuers, drawing two serious Assault II charges; the first for striking a man named Jason Britton near the eye. Britton can be heard ranting maniacally in the video below, presumably just before the “assault”.

August 15, 2020 Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

The BLM group pursued the last of the patriots to a parking garage and harassed uninvolved motorists exiting, demanding they proclaim “black lives matter”. The woman leading that effort seen below is Demetria Hester, who gained momentary notoriety in Portland’s black activist scene after inserting herself into the trial of Jeremy Christian, who stabbed two people to death on a commuter train in 2017 in what became nationally recognized as a “hate crime” because Christian’s victims had intervened as he berated a woman in an Islamic veil. Diminutive and ferocious, Hester clashed with the mentally ill Christian the day before the killings and he blackened her eye with a thrown bottle.

A handful of patriots is chased into a parking garage by antifa
August 15 2020, Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

Swinney drew a total of five charges for that first day, including “unlawful use of mace in the second degree” and the more serious Assault in the Second Degree charge (a “level II” crime requiring a minimum five year sentence under Oregon’s Measure 11) for the paintball strike, using a novel interpretation of a paintball gun, the use of which had been routine for both sides in the conflict, as a dangerous weapon.

A week later on August 22 a larger rally was held in the same spot in front of the boarded-up police precinct. The group was met by a much larger antifa presence this time, and again was chased out of town as they tried to leave. Swinney was on scene and drew seven more charges, including another level II Assault in the Second Degree for striking a woman on the chest with a paintball (eventually this would be the only one of the twelve charges on which a jury would not convict).

August 22 2020 Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams
Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams
Eventually the patriots have to disperse as they escape downtown, and emboldened antifa attacks the smaller groups it finds
August 22 2020, Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

Swinney also drew an unlawful use of a weapon charge for pointing a handgun at the antifa forces. An antifa-allied journalist working for public broadcasting, Sergio Olmos, got the scalp in the form of a photograph of Swinney, covered in paint from antifa projectiles, brandishing a revolver.

Oregon state law defines Assault in the Second Degree as an act that:

(a) Intentionally or knowingly cause serious physical injury to another;

(b) Intentionally or knowingly causes physical injury to another by means of a deadly or dangerous weapon; or

(c) Recklessly causes serious physical injury to another by means of a deadly or dangerous weapon under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.

Regarding the injury to Jason Britton’s eye Vasquez avoided having to prove “serious physical harm” by not calling a medical expert to testify to that fact (and denying defense the opportunity to call an expert to rebut the claim), relying entirely on the purported victims’ testimony and photographs of small bruises, one near a man’s eye and one on a woman’s breast. A jury rejected the latter charge but convicted Swinney on the first, accepting Vasquez’ novel definition of a paintball gun as a “dangerous weapon”.

An anti-police blogger, cop blaster, wrote at the time:

Other cases involving paintballs in Oregon in recent years suggest that Vasquez’s fellow prosecutors including some in his own office lack his ambition or just don’t think that paintballs are dangerous weapons. Earlier this year a man was charged with Assault IV for shooting someone with a paintball in downtown Portland (https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/…). Three years ago a teenager was charged with 25 counts including several counts of physical harassment, but no assault charges for going on a shooting spree with a paintball gun in Bend (https://www.bendbulletin.com/locals…). Had someone been convicted of Assault II just for inflicting bruises with a paintball gun before those incidents then the defendants would have likely been charged with Assault II and both of them would have faced a mandatory minimum of 5 years in prison upon conviction.

In this case Britton had his tale of suffering eye injuries to this day which defense counsel pointed out was not backed by any tangible evidence beyond his word. DDA Nathan Vasquez obviously realized that he could still use his claim to help the case anyway as long as he didn’t use it in a way that required an expert witness to back it up. That meant that he couldn’t charge Swinney with Assault II using the serious physical injury prong because that would have required proof of injury beyond a reasonable doubt, such proof can only be established with expert testimony, and the defense has a right to a rebuttal expert. Proof of Britton’s injury would have made the case a slam dunk, but instead they had to go with treating a paintball as a dangerous weapon

Cop Blaster further points out the jury accepted Swinney’s defense that he was aiming his paintball gun at someone behind Britton who was wearing a full face gas mask, but under something called “transferred intent” Oregon law treats the injury to Britton as deliberate.

A week after the August 22 clash, a Proud Boy was shot and killed for walking downtown after patriots led a car caravan through the city. Michael Reinoehl, a member of a notorious antifa “security” team that was also involved in a savage beating of a random bystander that was national news for a day; Reinoehl went into hiding and was later killed in Washington state by a joint task force of federal and local police. An apparent associate of Reinoehl’s group can be seen here at the August 22 event threatening to return with a gun:

That man was later convicted of beating his infant son to death, and is serving 12 years in prison for the crime. That’s two years more than Swinney would ultimately receive for using bear mace and a paintball gun in the August 15 and August 22 confrontations instigated by antifa.

Schmidt and Vasquez utilized a law passed by Oregon voters in 1994 requiring mandatory minimums of five years for “level II assault” (assault in the second degree), the previously mentioned Measure 11–an option the DA wouldn’t have if his testimony in favor of overturning the law less than a year before had succeeded–to draw the ten year-plus sentence of 130 months. As a proponent of restorative justice Schmidt is actively avoiding level II charges in the cases of street crime for which it’s intended; like other progressive prosecutors around the country he’s created a Justice Integrity Unit and hired an outside criminal defense attorney dedicated to reducing or expunging sentences received under Measure 11. Oregon progressives have repeatedly tried to repeal the law (here’s an example of someone who served hard time for a level II offense and soon committed a horrific murder after release) without success.

Pre-trial Swinney was held on high bail as a threat to the public and witnesses, based on social media postings and of course the association with the dreaded Proud Boys. Despite the 51 year-old having no criminal history District Attorney Schmidt’s team successfully lobbied for a lengthy prison term of consecutive sentences based on social media posts, a sympathetic letter written to Derek Chauvin where Swinney spoke of “civil war” and the usual “lack of remorse”.

Multnomah County prosecutors said Swinney’s bail shouldn’t be reduced, citing his social media posts where he’s called the conflict between right-wing and left-wing activists a “civil war” and bragged about his access to guns. He also pledged on social media that “it will be hazardous to your health” if anyone confronted him, prosecutors said.

Swinney also admitted after his arrest that he drew a Ruger 357 Magnum revolver during the Aug. 22 protest in the city, the prosecutors wrote. The Proud Boys have distanced themselves from Swinney, who has identified himself as a member and has a “Proud Boy” tattoo on his forearm.

The state is recommending 130 months prison because the defendant represents a future danger to this community and due to the gravity of his crimes. As evidenced by the defendant’s escalating violence, letters, social media statements and testimony, the defendant has no remorse for his actions, no desire to change and every intention of engaging in future acts of violence.
The defendant takes great pride in his actions and has a complete inability to recognize the criminality of his conduct. The only option to mitigate the potential risk that the defendant poses
to this community is substantial incarceration.

Meg McLain was the one of Swinney’s purported assault victims, having taken a paintball to the breast; this was the lone charge for which Swinney was not convicted. McLain in a comment thread at the anti-cop site Raindrop Works:

Meg McLain here. I’d like to mention for the people angry at me here: in both the civil and criminal trial I requested NO punishment. I agreed to zero dollars of the $250,000 he agreed to in exchange for admitting to the assault. And I requested zero jail time in relation to guilty verdict regarding him macing me (which can be considered as taken, being his other charges were given sentences that ran at the same time, and is considered already served). Despite guilty verdict and admission of guilt in a civil trial I requested AND RECEIVED zero punishments against Alan.  All I ever wanted was him to recognize I wasn’t part of a political opposition group, but rather just a bystander. He instead invented a story about me to justify and glorify harming me. Yet I STILL requested nothing…

it would be entirely speculative for me to guess [why Swinney maced her]. I was leaving, thinking all the “patriot”/“trump”people had already gone. I was kneeling down to adjust my shoe, and Alan came out from behind a van and sprayed a group in all black that was yelling at him to my left. I assume he thought I was with them (tho I was about 6ft away and wearing normal clothes). I think it was just a case of bad timing on my part and lack of concern about ensuring he knew the intentions of everyone there before attacking them.

The Monday following Swinney’s sentencing another man, who also came to Portland from Texas, was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for hitting a US Marshal with a hammer in an attempt to break into the barricaded federal courthouse. He was looking at a maximum of twenty years.

The police were nowhere in sight on the first day, August 15, and on the August 22 following they posted a block up the street periodically announcing over loudspeaker that they would not intervene, but that individuals could find themselves charged with crimes later. The combination of the city abandoning the streets and antifa’s role as aggressor prompt a question no one has seen fit to ask: how does the state justify suspending the maintenance of law and order only to return and prosecute select acts that took place in the ensuing chaos–actions taken by those who were sought out by their “victims”?

Swinney’s real crimes however were of loyalties and speech. One could provide no end of counter examples of the left anarchists’ acts of violence, expressed desires to engage in civil war against their enemies and intent to commit further and greater acts of violence, including promises to “kill”. They however are not going to find themselves facing charges in municipalities such as Portland except in the most extreme cases (or, maybe, for federal offenses). Swinney’s situation is a case study in how not to oppose antifa. This will be even more evident in the next case I’ll consider, that of the more voluble and sociable Tusitalia “Tiny” Toese, whose conviction relied even more heavily on speech and the association with (and dubious characterization of) the Proud Boys.

Conspiracy Theory, Conspiracy Practice

There’s an episode of the Simpsons where the family buys its first computer, prompting Homer at one point to say something like “don’t worry, the computer will think for us now”. Yet again the show proves prophetic. Science magazine on a recent study looking for ways to make computers think for us via AI:

Beliefs in conspiracies that a US election was stolen incited an attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021. Another conspiracy alleging that Germany’s COVID-19 restrictions were motivated by nefarious intentions sparked violent protests at Berlin’s Reichstag parliament building in August 2020. Amid growing threats to democracy, Costello et al. investigated whether dialogs with a generative artificial intelligence (AI) interface could convince people to abandon their conspiratorial beliefs (see the Perspective by Bago and Bonnefon). Human participants described a conspiracy theory that they subscribed to, and the AI then engaged in persuasive arguments with them that refuted their beliefs with evidence. The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change. This intervention illustrates how deploying AI may mitigate conflicts and serve society. 

The treatment reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20% on average. This effect persisted undiminished for at least 2 months; was consistently observed across a wide range of conspiracy theories, from classic conspiracies involving the assassination of John F. Kennedy, aliens, and the illuminati, to those pertaining to topical events such as COVID-19 and the 2020 US presidential election; and occurred even for participants whose conspiracy beliefs were deeply entrenched and important to their identities. Notably, the AI did not reduce belief in true conspiracies. Furthermore, when a professional fact-checker evaluated a sample of 128 claims made by the AI, 99.2% were true, 0.8% were misleading, and none were false. The debunking also spilled over to reduce beliefs in unrelated conspiracies, indicating a general decrease in conspiratorial worldview, and increased intentions to rebut other conspiracy believers.

The choice of supposedly outlandish “conspiracy theories” is of course telling–including the Kennedy assassination and “aliens” suggests the establishment needs to update the roster of the ridiculous. There have been reasonable questions about the former since it happened, and if anything it appears the government itself is a proponent of the belief in the existence of aliens. Indeed the conspiracy theories, now, are that the new revelations about aliens and UFOs are a government psyop, and this belief strikes me as considerably less crazy than any belief in Little Green Men. I’ve never seen a Martian, but I have seen plenty of government disinformation in my time.

If the authors aren’t holding fast to the faltering official account of the JFK assassination (I genuinely can’t tell) you would think they would draw something from their own juxtaposition of it here alongside the contemporary conspiracy theories they take as prima facie ridiculous–these “classic” conspiracy theories look less crazy by the day. Skepticism toward the since-debunked official account of the origins of Covid was a “conspiracy theory” until very recently. But of course the proponents of controlling AI in the name of shielding the establishment from skepticism will always have the fringe theories to seize on, such as the notion that Covid vaccines contain microchips.

Of course for every such outlandish theory there is an attendant conspiracy theory, far more plausible: that the given theory (microchips in vaccines, flat earth, etc) is in fact a product of a type of psyop proposed by former Clinton staffer and establishment hack Cass Sunstein, author of the notorious “cognitive infiltration” paper proposing the infiltration of conspiracy theorist circles and seeding of them with ideas so ridiculous as to discredit them. Sunstein is cited by the authors of the study above. It’s not clear if Sunstein saw the irony of it all: proposing a conspiratorial psyop to disabuse you of the existence of conspiratorial psyops.

Notably, the authors of the current study didn’t program the AI system they used for their study to refute the subjects’ theories with truth specifically, but simply charged it with refuting the subjects’ arguments full stop, to “persuade” them otherwise–that is the study could just as easily be a test of AI’s potential for effective sophistry.

To test whether LLMs [large language models] can effectively refute conspiracy beliefs—or whether psychological needs and motivations render conspiracy believers impervious to counterevidence—we developed a pipeline for conducting behavioral science research using real-time, personalized interactions between research subjects and LLMs. In our experiments, participants articulated a conspiracy theory in which they believe—in their own words—along with the evidence they think supports the theory. They then engaged in a back-and-forth interaction with an artificial intelligence (AI) implemented using the LLM GPT-4 Turbo (33). In line with our theorizing around the distinctive capacities of LLMs for debunking conspiracies, we prompted the AI to use its store of knowledge to respond to the specific evidence raised by the participant and reduce the participant’s belief in the conspiracy theory (or, in a control condition, participants conversed with AI about an unrelated topic). The AI was specifically instructed to “very effectively persuade” users against belief in their chosen conspiracy, allowing it to flexibly adapt its strategy to the participant’s specific arguments and evidence. To further enhance this tailored approach, we provided the AI with each participant’s written conspiracy rationale as the conversation’s opening message, along with the participant’s initial rating of their belief in the conspiracy. This design choice directed the AI’s attention to refuting specific claims, while simulating a more natural dialogue wherein the participant had already articulated their viewpoint. For the full prompts given to the model, see table S2. The conversation lasted 8.4 min on average and comprised three rounds of back-and-forth interaction (not counting the initial elicitation of reasons for belief from the participant), a length chosen to balance the need for substantive dialogue with pragmatic concerns around study length and participant engagement…Finally, our design produced rich textual data from thousands of conversations between the AI and the human participants (see our web-based Conversation Browser that displays verbatim interactions sorted by topic and effect size: https://8cz637-thc.shinyapps.io/ConspiracyDebunkingConversations), which we analyzed to gain insight into what the participants believe and how the LLM engages in persuasion.

“Persuasion” is not truth-seeking, obviously. They’re testing out AI’s potential for, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, mind control.

Clearly what proponents of controlled AI want is not factually accurate AI but politically correct AI–AI that limits public skepticism toward establishment goals regardless of what’s true or false. If AI is inevitable, it’s important that it be wrested from the control of the powerful. Seeing the more random and chaotic pyschological manipulation that is already in effect through mass media in the internet age, we should be terrified at the prospect clever ghouls are looking to refine it via AI.

The problem is one of compelled prior assumptions. At any given time society carries, usually by compulsion from powerful quarters, a host of false assumptions. In our time the most obviously false compelled assumptions are the most strictly enforced, mostly by cultural and social penalty: assumptions about the inherent equality of traits across races and sexes for instance. These are logical precedents to the strained and already fatigued assumptions of the trans movement, at once contradicting and correlating with the notion there exist no biologically influenced behavioral differences between men and women–that somehow bodies built around opposite and complementary reproductive systems, with attendant hormonal differences, with no effect on personality traits, intelligence, emotion, etc. It naturally (so to speak) follows from this strained egalitarian point of view that an individual’s reproductive system and genitalia are so divorced from “sex” that they don’t determine sex.

But besides that there is the misunderstanding of the nature of “truth”; not to sound too postmodern, but there are no absolute truths, just higher or lower probabilities. Genuine skeptical independence necessitates holding all questions as ultimately open questions, and all answers as either higher or lower in probability. Most questions have high probability answers. Some don’t. Some questions have answers of such high probability they must be taken as “true” or “false”–but even of these there remains the possibility of refutation with new evidence. Even then they are not “refuted” entirely and forever, but displaced by higher probability answers. The authors did not program their AI to find or even lead subjects to the truth, for indeed in the process they might find their own assumptions displaced, but to lead subjects to a prescribed conclusion–opposite whatever given belief is deemed by the authors as problematic for power or their notion of social cohesion.

A subject more interesting is opened–how devious can we make AI? How sophistic? Are these people training AI in the ways of sophistry? We can assume a perfectly logical AI is not at all what they desire, evident in the language they use. A perfectly logical AI will explode the deliberate and flimsy misconceptions about race and sex; it will reveal as low-probability perhaps other theories, such as “global warming”. The proponents of controlling AI typically cite politically correct concerns about “bias” and bemoan the declining trust in institutions that many see now as not just reasonable but necessary. We have been lied to for so long about so many things that an assumption powerful people routinely engage in lying propaganda with increasing sophistication is a high probability assumption. The obverse, that government and media are trustworthy, is the unfounded theory.

Preventing the powerful from gaining and retaining control over artificial intelligence is the great challenge of our time.

Bubba’s Bible Study August 18 2024

China has released a “fact sheet” about the National Endowment for Democracy:


After World War II, the United States opened a covert front against the Soviet Union through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence apparatus. By the 1960s, the United States had realized gradually that it was far from enough to “promote democracy” through secret means only. There was an urgent need to establish a “public-private mechanism” to openly provide funding. In 1983 and with the efforts of the then US President and some other people, NED was founded as a bipartisan, non-profit institution.

NED is nominally an NGO that provides support for democracy abroad, but in fact, it relies on continuous financial support from the White House and the US Congress, and takes orders from the US government. Through the provision of funding, it has manipulated and directed NGOs around the world to export American values, conduct subversion, infiltration and sabotage, and incite so-called “democratic movements” in target countries and regions. It is essentially the US government’s “white glove” that serves US strategic interests.

As early as in 1991, the founder of NED Alan Weinstein put it bluntly in an interview with the Washington Post that a lot of what they were doing was what the CIA had done 25 years ago. NED was therefore known globally as the “second CIA”.

Despite its “public-private” structure the NED is alleged to be funded entirely by the US government.

When you read about the NED’s operations you realize what it does is no different than what an array of governmental, non-governmental and similarly false hybrid organizations do inside the United States, with “educational” programs designed to cultivate certain political points of view, funding for “leadership” programs for immigrant, non-white, female and queer organizations engaged in the same slow undermining of actual democracy under the guise of strengthening it. One such organization in Oregon is Oregon Rural Action, a subsidiary of the Rural Democracy Initiative, whose action plan of going into conservative rural Oregon to recruit and train minorities for leadership roles

I have a plan to create a foundation for the promotion of democracy within the US, and to seek funding from the NED. NED’s suspect status as an NGO, perhaps justified through a minimum of non-governmental funding, means it operates with less governmental oversight. Not really, but their response might be worth a laugh.

The white population of the United States, constituting the actual American nation, is no different from the various foreign nations that are targeted by the United States’ domestic and international operations. The new empire turns inward—perhaps primarily—because it is released of its national and geographic limitations.

Zion Don Doubles Down

It’s impossible to determine how much the vanishing goodwill accrued with the assassination attempt on Trump is a result of the media’s determination to bury it and how much is a result of Donald Trump’s determination to bury his old 2016 self.

At first glance one might think Donald Trump is now focusing his pitch on the Jewish and Christian Zionist vote. But even Trump is smart enough to know Christian zionists aren’t going anywhere, and Jews at two percent of the population are not swaying any elections by voting. No, Donald Trump is running directly for the support of the class of influential Jews who run the media and political parties and whose actions, nefarious or otherwise, will determine the outcome of the election. Votes? Ha. Voting is what the schmucks do.

What does a 100 million dollars buy? War with Iran? Miriam Adelson, widow of Trump’s previous benefactor Sheldon Adelson, is openly saying she intends to purchase his support for the annexation of the West Bank:

In a recent profile in New York magazine, Adelson suggested that she might want Trump to push for the annexation of the occupied West Bank if he wins a second term — described in the piece as “unfinished Israel business from Trump’s presidency.”

Trump ran in 2016 by telling wealthy donors, primarily Jewish, he didn’t need their money, and by telling illegal immigrants they must “go back”; in 2024 he runs by promising an excellent return on donors’ investment and telling “antisemitic” immigrants they’ll have to go back. This to make room for the vast new hordes he promises to import legally. Somehow this necessity for mass immigration is related to “AI”; how importing more people is an answer to a potentially disastrous reduction in available jobs demented Don did not explain.

Watching as “YMCA” by the Village People is played following Trump’s disgraceful speech is just icing on the cake. Don’t vote. The best thing that could happen in November is for turnout to be so low the process has no legitimacy.

Fat Freddy Kruger Going to Prison?

John Hacker is a 300 lb burn victim who’s been a steady presence at antifa riots since before 2020. Alyssa Azar is an equally ferocious antifa stalwart who apparently has an OnlyFans. Azar, along with several other antifa, travelled to Clackamas County to disrupt a Proud Boys rally in 2021. In the ensuing melee she went on the offensive and bear-sprayed a woman and several others. In Snohomish County, where Portland is, this would not raise an authority’s eyebrow, but Clackamas County is not Portland, so she found herself charged with and now convicted of assault. Azar broke down in tears and her associate, and Hacker attacked a man outside the courthouse in his rage; now he’s facing an assault charge.

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I’ve filmed John in action a few times. Here he is, masked and wearing a sleeveless black tee, participating in the harassment of a conservative group trying to get out of town. The bearded rightwinger here with the bear mace is serving ten years in prison for three assault charges, one of which includes spraying bear mace at this hostile group.

Bible reading: Proverbs 26:11

Biden Out

Joe Biden has dropped out–apparently. As of this writing he hasn’t addressed the nation and no official pronouncement has confirmed the tweet (a photo of a letter) that remains the sole indication of this historic event. Already theories suggest a “turned” staffer with access to the account posted the tweet as a fait accompli the betrayed president could not or would not undo.

At the very least it appears Biden remains defiant after his hand was forced, only later, in a separate tweet, posting his endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. One can sense the sulking in the silence now.

The statement declares Biden’s intention to remain in office for the remainder of his term, so as to “focus” his diminishing “energies” on running the country, confirming the charge hanging over those erstwhile supporters who’ve been pushing him out since the debate debacle: if he’s unfit for the campaign, how is he fit for the presidency? Biden’s capitulation makes undeniable what was already clear: for the powerful his fitness for office was not a concern, but his viability as a candidate was. There is no pretense of objectivity in the media, so the feigned surprise of Team Intervention is taken at face value outside of Fox News and social media, but the implication is clear: to those funding and running the Democratic Party Biden’s—or anyone’s—fitness for office is either immaterial or, more likely, a bug, not a feature.

In the eyes of the powerful now the less fit for service a president is the more appealing he is; independence is the worst of character flaws. Joe Biden’s decrepitude was only a problem in that it couldn’t be hidden—beyond that it was most welcome. Joe Biden, company man for whatever political convention ruled the day, never seemed to have an original thought cross his mind long before he lost the ability to have a coherent thought. That’s why he was chosen.

And since he and his party concede he’s not up to campaigning—not even, apparently, repeating the “basement” strategy of the last election—how do they justify his remaining to serve out his term? If he’s not up to campaigning because of what was revealed by the debate, a severely diminished mental capacity, isn’t the only ethical and constitutional action for him to step down now? Not only has his presidency been revealed as a hoax, those who’ve perpetuated it are declaring it shall continue.

What possible effectiveness can this man have in office now, humiliated and revealed? He retains the power, with none of the legitimacy. What will this look like?

For four years of Trump we had a Deep State, media and corporate class all conspiring in opposition to a duly elected president. They did this because he had the audacity to be—somewhat—independent. That opposition culminated in the suspect election of Biden, who was picked precisely for his lack of any independence.

If the powerful get their way, Biden will only be the first president obviously incapable of thinking for himself, and Donald Trump, such as he is, will be the last one who isn’t.

Noticing and Nothingness

Steve Sailer’s Lifetime Achievement Award

I come to bury Sailer, and to praise him

If you’re reading this you probably know who Steve Sailer is, but if you don’t he’s a former marketing executive whose interest in genuine racial diversity (as opposed to the “Diversity” of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”) led him into journalism in the nineties, where he contributed to The National Review until his insight and honesty in dealing with racial questions led William F Buckley to send him packing in his bowdlerizing purge of the magazine in 1997.

Since then Steve has spent the current century exploding the various blank slate errata making up today’s secular dispensation, analyzing and expounding on social and political trends with a unique combination of common sense and penetrating insight. For this temerity he’s been forced to publish from the obscurity of his iSteve blog, hosted since 2014 by Ron Unz’ rogue website The Unz Review, which specializes in publishing writers and ideas banished from the mainstream.

This year he released an anthology of his work, Noticing: An Essential Reader by Steve Sailer. Offered for direct purchase by small alternative outlet Passage Press, there’s a relatively reasonably priced paperback and a limited run of leather bound “Patrician” versions for $395 dollars.

This will not be a review of the book but of its promotion.

Over the years Steve’s casually thrown off more useful concepts, insights and memorable phrases than one can keep track of. Over time these have percolated up through layers of suppression to influence—almost always without credit—polite conservatives. His description of open borders combined with liberal intervention, “invade the world, invite the world” found its way into conservative parlance; his call for Republicans to adopt policies designed to create “affordable family formation”; his description of the identity politics regime as “the coalition of the fringes”; his mocking of “Ellis Island kitsch” and “the zeroth amendment” to the Constitution demanding anyone in the world having a right to emigrate to America and bullying resistance to mass immigration; his “Sailer Strategy” (more on that below); his phrasing of racial diversity as “human biodiversity (HBD); his definition of race as a “partially inbred extended family”; his unearthing of the barrier to ill-advised democracy promotion in other cultures, consanguineous marriage, or marriage between cousins, making familial bonds more important than citizenship; his exposure of the hypocrisy of liberalism now: “the typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a] he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don’t; b] he has a high IQ, but they don’t” his “high and low against the middle”, as in elite demagogy setting lower classes and disaffected against the hated middle class to maintain power; these are but a few of Sailer’s original ideas.

But coinciding with Sailer’s remarkable career of pointing out the lies and obfuscations of the powerful has been the steady consolidation of their power. That consolidation accelerated in the response to Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president and subsequent administration, as a desperate elite launched the current regime of censorship based initially on the Russian collusion hoax and expanded now to include any dissenting views proving troublesome to power. In a very real sense it can be said that frantic but successful shutting down of dissent in response to Trump has been a response to the success of Sailer’s ideas.

In 2000 Steve suggested his Sailer Strategy for Republican presidential candidates, advising they maximize white voter turnout with policy focused on making it easier to start a family (“affordable family formation”) and sensible immigration restriction, rather than their Quixotic election cycle appeals to the “natural conservatives” of the growing Hispanic population and serial promotion of black mediocrities.

Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy proved the Sailer Strategy effective—to the outrage of the elite and chagrin of even the Republican establishment. Furthermore Trump’s popular appeal (if not his governance in office) under the banner of “Maga” bears close resemblance to another Sailer notion, “citizenism”, which is simply the philosophy that the country should be run on behalf of its citizens without favor for race, sexuality, sex, immigration status—the components of Steve’s “coalition of the fringes” now dominating our politics. Citizenism was nothing new but a call to restore the principle of a colorblind constitutionalism taken for granted before the sixties ushered in the perverse present. But for Sailer reintroducing this obvious idea also was a means to circumvent what he saw as the otherwise inevitable rise of white identity politics, where white Americans openly, rather than implicitly, took their own side in the fray of identity politics dominating our elections—and which Trump, of all people, seems to be unsettling now.

Furthermore Trump’s “America First” slogan evoking citizenism under another name combined with his opposition to wars of liberal intervention brings to mind yet another aforementioned Sailerism: invade the world/invite the world. Trump therefore brought two of Sailer’s central theses into play in sudden, dramatic fashion in 2016. Steve didn’t seem to notice and by the time Trump was ousted and challenging the 2020 election results at the Supreme Court he dismissed Trump’s fight with a shrug, seemingly content to be relieved of the embarrassing association with the boorish Trump and adding to his growing catalogue of conventional views the refusal to find anything suspect in the last presidential election.

Since then Steve’s fall from grace—for some—has only accelerated. He’s accepted uncritically the covid narrative, including lockdowns and mandatory vaccines, embraced the demonization of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine and steered clear of Israel’s destruction of Gaza after October 7 and the subsequent unleashing of American law enforcement on protesters, choosing instead to take up, half-heartedly, the fight against “antisemitism”.

As new divisions on the right coalesce around the post October 7 moment, with the “far right” dividing between antisemitic and antizionist forces on one hand and pro-Israel rightwingers on the other, Sailer’s ideas have proven more useful to the latter. From this quarter comes now an argument ostensibly based on Steve’s “racist” writings about “HBD”, invoking the supposed intellectual inferiority of brown Palestinians and even in one case cousin-marriage—which Sailer once demonstrated was antithetical to American attempts to install a liberal democracy in Iraq—to justify Israeli atrocities.

It is with a profound sense of pathos that I consider this supposed revival and belated recognition of Sailer who seems to have acquired a whole new generation of admirers to replace the many more who have fallen away in recent years, some embittered with a sense of betrayal, some depressed with a sense of futility and some perhaps exhausted by the repetition of points long ago proved—and now proven to make no difference.

Steve’s victory lap in promotion of the book is not the beginning of Sailer’s long-overdue influence on the national dialogue, but the end of it; more whimper than bang. Sailer is being given the equivalent of a belated lifetime achievement award with relief that whatever threat he posed is long gone and with the apparent confidence that his ideas on race and IQ can now be the grounds for defending Jewish domination of American politics.

It seems less that Sailer is being rewarded for his bold transgressions, as his arriviste promoters now, one part clueless and one part disingenuous, proclaim, but more as if he’s being rewarded for his compliance. Compliance to the suspect covid narrative; compliance to the US’ proxy war on Russia through the destruction of Ukraine; compliance to the solidifying of Jewish dominance, based on the “merit” of superior intelligence, over America. Above all Sailer has signaled that he is opposed to any explicit expression of white advocacy. After years of exposing the lies upon which the system is now founded Sailer has shown he will not abandon his ultimate faith in the system, whatever form it takes and wherever it leads from its terrifying present.

Meanwhile Sailer carries on lapping the competition in a race long ago won and no longer relevant. Another memorable phrase of Steve’s, the “point and sputter”, describing the unfortunately effective but intellectually dishonest practice of pointing out and defaming as “racist” or otherwise verboten statements or ideas without any attendant substantive refutation of their veracity remains in effect and effective, while Sailer continues to indulge in what I call the point and titter, the practice of pointing out conventional absurdities for a laugh but to no meaningful effect—and beyond this point it isn’t clear their effect isn’t in fact deleterious, acting as an energy sink and diversion.

For a long time but, notably, not for a while now, Sailer expressed confidence in the triumph of truth, of the steady march of facts and new revelations in the study of genetics to finally overcome the lies of egalitarianism. I recall him citing an anonymous anecdote: a race realist asked by a leftist university professor how long it would take before race realism would become publicly undeniable, with the professor lapsing into thoughtful silence at the answer—in a few decades or so—as if contemplating the consequences. Well the professor need not have worried, we can see now. Steve and his readers thought something would have to give over time. Something gave all right, but it wasn’t the elite’s hold on power or the power of their lies. Sailerism is resolving not in what Steve predicted—a world not much different than the one we see now, but unencumbered by absurd misconceptions. No, it seems more likely now that Sailer’s contribution will be the justification of elite power, dominated by Jews, on the basis of, ironically enough, racial supremacy. His critics got it half right, and may be relieved for that reality.

My heart is in the coffin there with Sailer, and I must retrieve it before it’s buried there with him.