I suppose I should cut P. J. O’Rourke some slack. Like him, I was once on the hippie-dippy left during the 60s, and I know it’s hard to get over that. But there are limits. His “She said what?” in the Weekly Standard is an important reminder of how far there is to go to have intelligent discussion of Jewish issues in the mainstream media. O’Rourke, who, it must be stipulated, is a very entertaining writer, wants to call himself a conservative. The sad reality is that he is just the sort of cuckservative who is welcome at The Weekly Standard. As James Fulford points out at VDARE, he has Utopian ideas on race, maintaining that Haitians immigrants are just as acceptable as the Irish — or perhaps even more so if they had to struggle to get here, because, after all, being aggressive enough to get here illegally means that you would be crime free, have a high IQ, and not be assertive about demanding free stuff paid for by previous waves of White immigrants. Or maybe not.

The main point of this is to discuss O’Rourke’s ideas on Jews and anti-Semitism, but a few preliminaries are in order. He thinks that because the Indians got here first, that Europeans have no right to defend their conquest:

She’s from Connecticut and is very upset about immigrants. I am willing to lend a sympathetic ear to people from Connecticut who are very upset about immigrants, if they have a tribal casino.

But why stop at Native Americans? What about the tsunami of migrants entering European homelands? Would nativism and nationalism by native Europeans be okay? But the same attitudes and forces welcoming the displacement of Europeans in the US are resulting in the displacement of Europeans from lands they have dominated for thousands of years. And we hear the same charges of “racism” and “Nazism” thrown at opponents of immigration in both Europe and the U.S. Focusing on the tribal casinos ignores the problems facing European societies everywhere.

This kind of White self-flagellation is completely unknown elsewhere on the planet. Do the Bantu peoples of Africa worry about the ethics of displacing other African peoples as they spread far and wide from their homeland in Central Africa? How about the Han Chinese who displaced other peoples as they spread throughout what is now China? Or the Arab conquests in the name of Islam? Should these people have no right to control their borders in the present world because of their original sin of conquest? And what year should we pick as the magical time when everyone had, like the Native Americans according to O’Rourke, settled lands that they were entitled to forever because of some cosmic moral principle?

O’Rourke’s article on Ann Coulter exhibits some conventional attitudes on Jews and anti-Semitism that show quite clearly that being an entertaining writer doesn’t imply deep thinking about Jewish issues. In fact, I would venture to say that his thinking about Jewish issues is about as deep as his thinking about race.

O’Rourke is offended by Ann Coulter’s faux pas in calling attention to Jewish influence.

What Ann Coulter tweeted was: Cruz, Huckabee Rubio all mentioned ISRAEL in their response to: “What will AMERICA look like after you are president.” And How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States? Not anywhere near as many as there would and should be if FDR hadn’t been as much of a jerk about immigration as you are, Ann, you etiolated bean sprout butt trumpet.

O’Rourke is signaling that he has completely internalized the decontextualized view of US immigration history that is constantly promoted by Jewish activists. I discussed this recently elsewhere, so suffice it to say here that Americans viewed Jewish immigration from the standpoint of their legitimate economic and social interests.

O’Rourke’s deep thinking on Israel is entirely in sync with The Weekly Standard:

As to why Israel is important, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ikh bin a Ishral.’ ” And I mean it, even if, pope-kissing Mick that I am, my Yiddish is maybe sketchy.

Israel as a moral paragon?? Despite his stating that Native Americans have a legitimate gripe about immigration, there is no consideration of the moral status of Israel as an ethnostate that has displaced the Palestinians from lands they dominated for centuries and now oppresses them in ways that pretty much the entire rest of the world finds unconscionable. Or perhaps PJ would like the argument that g-d gave Israel to the Jews, so therefore they have a right to displace the Palestinians? Do they get the entire area from the Nile to the Euphrates as promised in Genesis? Again, what year should we pick as the magical time when everyone had settled lands that they were entitled to forever because of some cosmic moral principle?

And what about Israel’s refusal to take in non-Jewish immigrants, including refugees from Africa or Syria that Jewish organizations are so eager to import into Europe? Why isn’t that a moral issue for O’Rourke if he really thinks the US should welcome all comers? Is it okay for Jewish organizations in the US and elsewhere throughout the West to be gung-ho for massive non-White immigration but to never criticize Israel for wanting to remain a Jewish ethnostate? If Israel must be a Jewish state, what is so wrong about the US considering itself a European nation that intends to remain European? (The U.S. was 90% White in 1960 — i.e., more European than Israel is Jewish now.)

But now we come to the real reason why this column had to be written: O’Rourke’s deep thinking about anti-Semitism:

But, first, my contempt is moral. Antisemitism is evil. Per se, as you lawyers like to put it. For the sake of argument, let us “stipulate” that you are not per se an antisemite. Instead of saying that’s true, let us stipulate it with all the snarky lawyer freight that “stipulating” carries. Being so stipulated, you are damn rude. One does not say, “f—ing Jews.” One does not say “f—ing blacks” or “f—ing Latinos” or even “f—ing relentlessly self-promoting Presbyterian white women from New Canaan.” Manners are the small change of morality. You, Ann, are nickel and diming yourself. And may all the coins in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin land on you and squash you flat. (Scrooge, by the way, is not a Jew, he’s a duck.)

Okay, it was rude, and it may even be true that Ann had one glass of wine too many when she wrote it. But shouldn’t you be able to get really angry if you believe on the basis of a whole lot of evidence, that Israel and its fifth column have hijacked American foreign policy to the tune of several disastrous and horribly expensive (in terms of blood and treasure) wars against Israel’s enemies with the big one against Iran only a matter of time if the Lobby gets its way? The pandering of Huckabee, Cruz, and Rubio (with the money of Sheldon Adelson and the rest of the Republican Jewish Coalition lurking in the background) is absolutely inexcusable. Why be polite about it? It’s American politics at its f—ing worst: caving in to a powerful, wealthy special interest lobby whose interests are not at all the same as the interests of America — a conflict of interest that has already had horrendous consequences for the U.S.

Second, my contempt is religious. The Jews found our God, hiding in plain sight, while the rest of us were praying to “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” And what thanks do the Jews get? They get this wisecrack from William Norman Ewer, early-20th-century Brit journalist (and Commie): How odd of God

To choose the Jews. To which there’s an anonymous capping reply that I would like to second: Not odd, you sod

The Jews chose God.

Has PJ even read the Old Testament? If you think that the god of the Old Testament has any positive qualities whatever, I’m afraid you just haven’t read it — which is typical of “pope-kissing Micks” like PJ. Growing up Catholic, I was completely unfamiliar with the Old Testament except for a few passages that fit with Christianity, like from the Psalms. In fact, the Old Testament is a genocidalist wet dream, complete with slaughtering and enslaving non-Israelites, punishing and ostracizing those who marry people who can’t trace their blood lines to racially pure Israelites, extreme ethnonationalism, separation from and a sense of superiority to all other peoples, and a glorification of moral particularlism where there are quite different moral standards depending on whether you are a Jew or not — a form of collectivism and the complete opposite of Christianity and Western moral universalism. The Jews did indeed choose god, and they chose a god that exactly suits their ethnic interests. Given Pope Francis’s recent statements on immigration, would that Christians had done the same!

Third, it’s political. There is a vein of antisemitism in conservatism. You’re mining it. I trust the claim you’ve staked will pan out with you getting a smack in the pan. [Say what??] Antisemitism is almost an original sin of “classical liberalism.” It is present at the birth of the Enlightenment, with Voltaire who, in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, under the entry for Tolerance, of all places, calls Jews “the most intolerant and cruel nation of all antiquity.” Voltaire! Even he who all but invented liberty and saved us from that ur-leftist fool Rousseau.

Right. Voltaire had read the Old Testament and was quite aware of the bloody Jewish history in the ancient world — a history that in no way can be understood as Jews being passive victims of non-Jewish irrational hatred. Enlightenment thinkers wanted everyone to become citizens in nations dedicated to principles of freedom and liberty, and to do so, they had to shed their ancient superstitions and group (collectivist) loyalties. Jews should be citizens but not form a state within a state. However, for Jews the ancient superstitions coincided with their ethnic interests, and even when they gave up the religious veneer, they retained a fierce group loyalty (hyper-ethnocentrism by any other name — a form of collectivism that PJ claims to abhor) which has repeatedly resulted in conflicts of interest with surrounding societies (see, e.g., comments on the Israel Lobby above).

And 200 years later it was still there. In the effort to expel antisemites from conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. had to pause in his war against collectivism’s barbarian hordes and sever ties with the man he had endorsed for president, Pat Buchanan, and stifle his old friend and National Review senior editor Joe Sobran. (Joe, whom you, Ann, have called “the G. K. Chesterton of our time”​—​a two-edged compliment in this context, viz. Chesterton’s essay “The Problem of Zionism.”)

But of course, Cuckley wasn’t battling all forms of collectivism. Jews themselves are arch-collectivists — the deep meaning, after all, behind Jewish moral particularism that is so apparent throughout Jewish history. It’s just that quite a few Jews (including the Frankfurt School mentioned below) discovered that it’s good for the Jews if non-Jews are individualists.

Cuckley did indeed purge from mainstream conservatism people who were critical of Jews, including Joe Sobran whose criticisms, so far as I can see, were entirely rational. And the same goes for Pat Buchanan who has, at great personal cost, called attention not only to the role of the Israel Lobby in promoting disastrous wars in the Middle East, but has called attention to impending death of the West — neither of which PJ’s neocon buddies at The Weekly Standard care to discuss.

In fact, Joe was quite aware of exactly the issue that has gotten Coulter in trouble — the fact that one can’t call attention to Jewish power or influence without suffering the consequences:

It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish establishment is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief measure of its power: its ability to impose its own taboos while tearing down the taboos of others—you might almost say its prerogative of offending. You can read articles in Jewish-controlled publications from the Times to Commentary blaming Christianity for the Holocaust or accusing Pope Pius XII of indifference, but don’t look for articles in any major publication that wants to stay in business examining the Jewish role in Communism and liberalism, however temperately.[1]

One might wonder about the wisdom of Cuckley’s purge given that Conservatism, Inc. is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Israel Lobby which, come to think of it, was exactly Coulter’s point. Could it be that O’Rourke exemplifies what G. K. Chesterton called “the silly and craven fear” of even mentioning Jews as an identifiable group. Chesterton’s example from “The Problem of Zionism” is classic:

The substance of this [i.e., Chesterton’s] heresy was exceedingly simple. It consisted entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to them as Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I remember one newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East End complained of the food regulations, because their religion forbade them to eat pork.

So we might ask PJ: What exactly is so wrong with the thinking of Sobran and Chesterton that Ann Coulter should avoid mentioning them?

The rest of O’Rourke’s article deals with his admiration for Jews for saving him from a life of being a dumb goy — a fate worse than death presumably. It should be read in its entirety, but the gist is that “I owe my life as something other than a complete nebbish to Jews.” O’Rourke revels in indulging in invidious ethnic stereotyping of fellow Whites in the Toledo of his youth, but Jews were superior: “The Jewish kids were the only kids who considered it cool to be smart. And so did their parents.”

And thank God—specifically YHWH—for the few, the very few, the chosen if you will, people in Toledo who tried [to be smart]. Who tried to cheer the Freedom Riders, tried to debate the ideas of Herman Kahn, tried to get to Chicago to see Lenny Bruce at the Gate of Horn, tried to read Herbert Marcuse and Eric Hoffer, and tried to dig Thelonious Monk.

And there’s the nub of the problem. Thanking Jews for Herbert Marcuse is like Russians thanking the Georgians for Stalin. Marcuse was a card-carrying member of the Frankfurt School and its ideology that identifying as a White person with interests as Whites is a form of psychopathology — but at the same time entirely exempting Jews from a similar indictment against a collective ethnic identification. As a psychoanalytically influenced leftist, he was entirely in the mainstream of Jewish intellectuals that deposed the racially conscious, Darwin-influenced White elites that had been dominant up through the 1920s and were an important part of the intellectual context for passage of the immigration restriction act of 1924.

And even if in the end, you come to think that Marcuse was a false prophet, as O’Rourke presumably does, the fact is that he and the Frankfurt School have had an enormous evil influence which is not at all due to the empirical basis or rationality of their ideas but to the Jewish intellectual and media infrastructure that promoted them. Nobody would have been discussing him at all, except that he was promoted by this infrastructure to a position of prominence in academia and popular culture. No one should ever have to discuss Marcuse except perhaps to point out the vileness and intellectual bankruptcy of his ideas. I rather doubt it was an accident that Marcuse’s wife Ricky Marcuse was a pioneering “Whiteness Studies” activist who, as Andrew Joyce notes, “simultaneously [acted] against White identity while boosting Jewish interests.” The same could be said about Marcuse, except that his anti-White activism was less explicit. But given his reputation and influence as a New Left guru, Marcuse’s influence was far deadlier.

The problem is that when you get caught up in a world where Jewish intellectuals define the parameters of acceptable discourse — from Marcuse’s far left to the neoconservative right — you are going to find that in the end (with vanishingly few individual exceptions and certainly not including any influential group of Jews that I am aware of), none of them really have your interests at heart. Where there are disagreements, it’s just that they have different perceptions of Jewish interests — like debates in the Knesset — and make alliances with different groups of non-Jews. Hence the need in The Culture of Critique to establish that all of the gurus who dominated the various Jewish intellectual movements had strong identities as Jews and saw their work as advancing their perception of Jewish interests (here, pp. i-iii).

And that’s exactly the world O’Rourke finds himself in, taking positions on race and Israel that are near and dear to an influential community of Jews under Bill Kristol’s guruship at the Weekly Standard — Jews who, like those discussed in The Culture of Critique — have strong Jewish identities and a sense of pursuing specifically Jewish interests. And entirely missing from those interests is a concern for the legitimate interests of the traditional people and cultures of America, including pope-kissing Micks, in not becoming a minority in the United States.

By taking these positions, he can feel good about himself because deep down he believes that Jews define moral legitimacy and intellectual sophistication, so when he throws his lot in with the neocons, he is on solid ground and immune to any serious criticism. Deep down, he still feels intellectually inferior to his Jewish friends and colleagues, just as he felt inferior to his Jewish classmates while growing up in Toledo. He yearns to be accepted by them, and he thinks that his personal experience as a kid is a great basis for a theory of Judaism. So when he frames his ideas, he makes sure that they are palatable to at least some significant group of mainstream Jews. Can’t go wrong there. Money in the bank.

PJ is the Rube mentioned in this quote I used in The Culture of Critique (here, p. 3).

[Jewish literary critic Leslie] Fiedler goes on to say that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels . . . the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”

Fiedler wrote this in 1948. It’s a lot worse now.

As PJ said (unfairly) about Ms. Coulter, “kids are, and kids do.” But you’re pushing 70, so there’s no excuse. Stop being a nebbish. Grow up and show some intellectual self-confidence. Stop being a cuckservative who thinks it’s an honor to be published in The Weekly Standard. Your interests as a pope-kissing Mick are not at all the same as theirs.

[1] Sobran, J. (1995). The Jewish establishment. Sobran’s (September):4–5, 4.