Mein Kampf and Torah walk into a podcast…

Talking about Mein Kampf again on Luke Ford’s Torah Talk Live.

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I’m only a third of the way through it. I will be adding to the notes below.

It’s not poorly written overall, as you’re led to believe, and the melodramatic flourishes are only there in traces. It’s as much political analysis as autobiography so far.
His assessment of the political situation in interwar Europe describes it as strikingly like our own. The analysis reads at points like a historical hoax that’s too on-the-nose in writing the complaints of the present into the past, like a Protocols of the Elders of Zion
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An early part of the book is a long exposition on becoming “woke”. Hitler writes that to the extent he thought of antisemitism he saw it as religious bigotry. He writes tersely:

“Then I came to Vienna.”

Probably the most quoted part of the book follows–callow young Hitler is confronted by the outward display of Jewish identity when he sees a man in caftan and side-locks on the streets of Vienna:

Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: is this a German?

Once Hitler stopped seeing Jews as Germans of another religion but as a separate, self-aware ethnicity the die was cast. Still, he writes that he remained resistant until, among other things, he considered the politics of Zionism

To outward appearances it seemed as if only one group of Jews championed this movement, while the great majority disapproved of it, or even repudiated it.

Similar to what many express in our day, Hitler saw relenting on the Jewish question as a sort of last hurdle on the road to “woke”

My ideas about anti-Semitism changed also in the course of time, but that was the change which I found most difficult. It cost me a greater internal conflict with myself, and it was only after a struggle between reason and sentiment…

The pro-semitic Viennese press, the equivalent of our “mainstream media”, was superior to the antisemitic press, drawing talent and respectability in like fashion (leaving aside ours having lost so much credibility recently).

A young man with intellectual aspirations took that as evidence of its veracity, as compared to the flaky antisemitic press of Hitler’s time. Then as now the poz drew the talent, and even Hitler claims to have initially associated antisemitism with envy in the fashion of a present-day Jordan Peterson:

Generally speaking these anti-Semitic newspapers did not belong to the first rank–and so I regarded them more as the products of jealousy and envy rather than the expression of a sincere, though wrong-headed, feeling.

He begins to see Jews as having separate interests when considering the question of Zionism. Most Jews were not Zionists. But he was struck by the fact the question for the Jewish community regarded whether Zionism was good for the Jews as they related to the gentiles, primarily in how it looked:

For that part of Jewry which was styled Liberal did not disown the Zionists as if they were not members of their race but rather as brother Jews who publicly professed their faith in an unpractical way, so as to create a danger for Jewry itself.

He writes of investigating and discovering the Jewish dominance of the Viennese press (I cannot confirm, obviously, but it too sounds depressingly familiar across time), and in some of the more colorful passages of finding Jews at the productive font of what he saw as the decadent culture of Vienna and the Hapsburg Empire he despised for its treatment of Austrian Germans.

Prostitution on the streets scandalized him, and identifying it with Jews may have been the single most radicalizing element of his conversion to antisemite:

A cold shiver ran down my spine when I first ascertained that it was the same kind of cold-blooded, thick- skinned and shameless Jew who showed his consummate skill in conducting that revolting exploitation of the dregs of the big city. Then I became fired with wrath.

The “thick-skinned” phrase strikes me as suggesting Hitler sees the same difference in psychological make-up between Jew and European gentiles that I suspect: a greater psychological toughness in the face of sexual liberation. Combine that with in-group cohesion preventing the exploitation of co-ethnic women, and one needs identify no particular malice or conspiracy in the Jewish exploitation of gentile women that continues so horribly today.

Of course it doesn’t matter. The Jewish question is not a moral question but an existential one. It always was for the Jews; Hitler decided it was one for the Gentiles.

Hitler briefly worked as a construction laborer, where he says he refused to join the union, saying he didn’t know enough to make an informed decision. His decision against it cites a recurring theme, his distaste for the common man he understood so well politically

During those fourteen days I came to know my fellow workmen better, and no power in the world could have moved me to join…

He studies and then engages in debate with his Marxist fellow workmen claiming, perhaps unsurprisingly, to have had to flee finally or be thrown off a roof.

Everything was disparaged–the nation, because it was held to be an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working masses; the authority of the law, because that was a means of holding down the proletariat; religion, as a means of doping the people, so as to exploit them afterwards; morality, as a badge of stupid and sheepish docility. There was nothing that they did not drag in the mud.

Plus ca change. Was this Marxist process of critiquing and taking down Western civilization at least delayed, first by Hitler and then by capitalist, pre-poz America winning and acquiring influence over Western Europe, before morphing into multiculturalism and gaining its present advantage in a long rebound?
Hitler’s language regarding the Marxist threat is extreme: he sees in it the very end of humanity, not just of Western culture.

Having been exposed to street Marxism he says he set about reading everything he could on the subject. He describes something like our “high/low against the middle” politics of today, at least in the aspect of post-modern theorists at one end and the disaffected at the other:

The theoretical literature was intended for the simpletons of the soi-distant intellectuals belonging to the middle and naturally upper classes. The newspaper propaganda was intended for the masses.

The Bolsheviks had to radicalize a homogenous but impoverished working class. In the prosperity after World War II that working class in the West became prosperous. Now that it is racially diverse, identity and inequality are the means of radicalizing the post-proletariat.
If Hitler is to be believed leftist academic theory hasn’t changed significantly:

 Its flamboyant sentences, its obscure and incomprehensible phrases, pretended to contain great thoughts, but they were devoid of thought, and meaningless. 

One would have to be a decadent Bohemian in one of our modern cities in order to feel at home in that labyrinth of mental aberration, so that he might discover ‘intimate experiences’ amid the stinking fumes of this literary Dadism. 

These writers were obviously counting on the proverbial humility of a certain section of our people, who believe that a person who is incomprehensible must be profoundly wise. 

As somebody wrote recently of the present state of critical theory: one has to be very high IQ to rationalize or very low IQ to believe in something so abstruse and illogical.

Hitler accuses the Social Democrats of tactics we would recognize–recognizable are the typical response he reports to them. See if you can spot Conservative Inc here:

…opening, at a given signal, a veritable drum-fire of lies and calumnies against the man whome they believed to be the most redoubtable of their adversaries, until the nerves of the latter gave way and they sacrificed the man who was attacked, simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace. 

But the hope proved always to be a foolish one, for they were never left in peace. The same tactics are repeated again, until the fear of these mad dogs exercises, through suggestion, a paralyzing effect on their victims. 

more notes to come

link text

Mein Kampf, Marginalization and Living with Mom

Talking to Luke Ford about today’s Washington Post profile of a young unemployed alt righter and his mother’s shame, among other things.

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Luke will be interviewing Paul Nehlen this Sunday afternoon (not on Torah Talk).

From the Post article:

The mother and son were sitting in the living room, arguing about Ellen DeGeneres again.

“She definitely helps push the degeneracy. Didn’t she have that cross-dressing little boy on?” Kam Musser, 21, said of one of her recent guests. “That little boy in makeup.”

“He’s a makeup artist,” said his mother, Kirsten, 48, correcting him. “What’s wrong with that? . . . He does a beautiful job.”

“I don’t think putting makeup on little boys is very kosher.”

“He’s not hurting anybody or himself.”

“Okay,” he said, rolling his eyes. “He does what he does; I do what I do.”

What Kam was doing, and what he wasn’t, had come to dominate so much in their lives. He was two years out of high school now, and he didn’t have a job, or a car, or a place of his own, or much money beyond what his mother gave him — nothing at all to occupy his time except a computer that had carried him to the most extreme parts of the Internet, and to beliefs that no one in his family could understand. 

In the year since the 2016 presidential election, Kam had gone from supporting white supremacists, to joining a neo-Nazi group, to shouting “white lives matter” at a rally, to standing beside Richard Spencer outside the White House, to increasingly tense conversations with his mother and grandmother, both of whom were beginning to fear that what they had once thought was just a phase was quickly becoming his life.

How did this happen?

Breech Born Boy

God awoke mid-dream
Thus I was born
An aborted scheme
This man you scorn

Purring Satan let slip
In sleeping God’s ear:
“Make his breast a crypt
For a heart of pure fear

“Let the cold inside chill him
When ambition will arise
Let dread always fill him
At any shock or surprise

“Let his ardor be frigid
And his passions be dull
Let his habits be rigid
His disgust always full!”

God tossed in his slumber
Frighted Devil withdrew
Now cursing the blunder
Of a plot not seen through

“The blueprint’s unfinished
And I had such a plan!
Now he’s all the cold fish
And no part the man!”

He carried me away
His evidence to hide
When I brayed he panicked
And cast me aside

And thus I was found
By a mother’s good grace
She bore me away sound
To this safe place

So I endure, down here on Earth
Poorly adapted, forever unsure
Not without hope, not without mirth
Turning in circles, a creature impure!

self portrait, March 2013

Contextual Whiteness

Having assembled its unruly horde of increasingly ill-allied resentments, the Narrative doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind:

Harvard University had only just announced its next president before he came under attack — not for anything he did, but for who he is. That is, in the eyes of his critics, at least, a “white male.” The New York Times greeted the selection with a news article reporting in its second paragraph that, in selecting Lawrence Bacow earlier this month, the search committee had missed “an opportunity for Harvard to choose a leader who would reflect the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.”

Get that? The most prestigious newspaper in America told the most prestigious university in America it just blew the opportunity to hire its president based on one hoax and one hysteria.

But this is Harvard, and can’t be run by a token hire, no matter how much the institution pushes the practice on others.

No longer did Wall Street or Pierce and Pierce mean Protestant Good Family. There were plenty of Irishmen, Greeks and Slavs. The fact that not one of the eighty members of the bond department was black or female didn’t bother him. Why should it? It didn’t bother Lipowitz, who took the position that the bond trading floor at Pierce and Pierce was no place for symbolic gestures.
–Bonfire of the Vanities

Money is at stake after all.
But there’s a narrative wrinkle. Problematic intersectionality. The new president, predictably, is Jewish. The former editor of the Harvard Crimson goes on:

Such intense reaction tells two newsworthy stories: a negative tale about the politics of race and gender on campus and a positive one about America and its Jews.

I know this Ivy grad is my better, but the naivete is adorable. Somebody owns “the politics of race and gender on campus”–a thoroughly negative development of decades now–and it isn’t “white people”. Parentheses, not quotation marks.

American Jewry is faced with a choice whether to emphasize its identity as non-white and cast its lot in finally with the furious fringe or continue to absorb some of its wrath as white people. Either way, antisemitism is sure to increase.

Had those critics bothered to look beyond appearances, they might see someone who introduced himself to the university in a YouTube video as the son of two Jewish refugees. His mother was an Auschwitz survivor and his father was an immigrant from Minsk. As the grandson of a Jewish immigrant from Minsk myself, I’ve got experience with this issue. Personally, when the racial record-keepers ask me to check a box, I don’t go with “white,” but put “other” and write in “Jew.”

Other with a capital O? Critical race theory holds white privilege to be perpetuated by white skin and appearance–“bodies”. A consistent reading of it would hold that Jews do in fact benefit from white privilege and are white in every meaningful way. Critical race theory is largely Jewish, of course.
So it shouldn’t be that Jews individually or as a group get to opt out of responsibility for their “whiteness”, after having benefited more than anyone else thereby (applying disparate impact logic to their remarkable wealth and success).

So the only way for a Jew or Jews to slip out from under the boot they’ve created with anti-white theory is to invoke the Holocaust, yet again, like a junkie seeking out a vein.

Vox Pox

Vox is laying off:

“Layoff talk started a month ago. Company is worried about future growth patterns — which is just jargon for the fact they over-hired in video even when they claimed they weren’t doing that exact thing during the big pivot of ’15-16,” the [anonymous Vox] staffer said.

Up until recently I watched few videos online, and few from such as Vox. The few I’ve seen haven’t impressed me. I recall one vox-plaining “scientific racism”. You haven’t been affronted until a millennial girl explains to you who Blumenbach was in up-talk.

Mainstream outlets continue to struggle to capture a share of the increasing interest in online video that may or not be there, at least in the way they imagine–seeing the soy boy editor deliver the platitudes in person maybe isn’t so compelling after all. The kind of eyeball herding they seek requires the viral or visceral

Overall, we are cautious about the long-term dynamics for video news in particular. Although there has been a significant growth in online video, much of this has been in social networks and around softer news and lifestyle content (or premium drama and sports on demand), not news. 

Video that adds drama and immediacy is now valued and expected by consumers on news websites, but only up to a point and in certain circumstances, with both young and old still valuing the control and flexibility of text. Although we are likely to see considerable innovation in both formats and production over the next few years, it is hard to see video replacing text in terms of the range of stories and the depth of comment and analysis traditionally generated by publishers. The high commercial returns currently available around video are unlikely to last if, as expected, more investment and more automated systems lead to a substantial increase in the supply of content, thus driving down advertising rates.

The smaller but more dynamic market for commentary and analysis feels like it belongs to the alt right naturally as a semi-Samizdat. Unfortunately for the alt right, what’s driving video are digital formats, as offered by Google and Facebook. It seems only a matter of time before they Shut It Down.

Follow the Money

The revolution will have to be monetized.

Diversity is monetized because corporate America sees the growing non-white population as the future. Once the demographic shift in the US was set in motion, business had no choice but to pursue the new non-white consumer dollar. Its long-term planning necessarily became modeled on that population shift. It became invested. And advertising became propaganda for diversity.

Leaving aside the cultural and political forces that brought us here, American business is invested in the diverse future because that’s where the consumers will be.

It gladly cooperates with government social engineering, which is itself massively monetized, and its advertising, in appealing directly to minorities over declining and taken-for-granted whites, over-represents them wildly. This poz propaganda (pozprop?) thus reinforces the confidence of the non-white consumers and further demoralizes whites.

Corporate America is invested in diversity because of demographics. But all profit really needs is demographic increase, not replacement. All of this came to mind while watching this from Frame Game Radio:

Regardless of how it got there, Disney remains invested in the diverse new order because that’s where the money is. It won’t be detached from it unless there’s money elsewhere. White identity and reproduction need to be monetized at some point soon for white Americans to rehabilitate themselves as a people.

Recently Team Diversity was alarmed by new projections deferring that Glorious Moment when white America loses majority status by five whole years. A demographic shift accomplished overnight by historical standards–and they’re angry and alarmed at this speed bump. Trump is deliberately trying to raise the percentage of the white population!

It wasn’t good for morale. On the other hand, it’s good (if not huge) for the morale of beleaguered whites. Ten years would be even better.  Right now, most whites remain conditioned against explicit racial awareness, and prohibited from speaking in favor of it. But that’s changing along with the increasing intensity of anti-white culture that’s found a focus point in the “Resistance”,  itself aroused by the stirrings of white identity that is Trump, which, following the hate spiral back in time, was really produced by long years of anti-white propaganda culminating in the disaster for whites and racial comity in general that was Barack Obama.

Team Diversity points out correctly it matters little because whites aren’t having babies and non-whites are. Right now white Americans who aren’t utterly de-sensitized see the projected future before them–as represented by film, television and advertising–as non-white. It’s made to seem inevitable. But white cultural identity is taking shape, and it’s only a matter of time before someone realizes there’s a dollar to be made there.

Implicitly white artists are emerging (against their own wishes), and at least one recent project, Justin Timberlake’s “Man of the Woods”, appears as, at least, an unashamed celebration of rural white origins.

“Man of the Woods” was panned by critics and called out as problematic by the usual sources, but is proving popular. There’s a cultural market out there business is afraid to go after. Diversity remains monetized, but all of a sudden there’s…this. Money that has to be left on the table. Whatever the case, Justin Timberlake and any like him need to be encouraged in this direction.

Combining a cultural shift with sensible policies that at least do not subsidize non-white birthrates, would at the very least push that day of demographic reckoning wherein whites slip into a despised plurality farther still into the future. It’s worth it just to see the look on their faces.

Who knows, before long, with rehabilitated white birthrates and depressed non-white birthrates, we might even be talking about a demographic shift back. If you will it, it is not a dream, as the man said.

Let the demographic bomb pass through the nation like a pig through a python. You may say I’m a dreamer…