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Notes -
Clark Kent Did Not Assimilate
The Dissident Right Inquisition on Twitter/X is ongoing, whereby certain factions of the DR, mostly surrounding the orbit of Bronze Age Pervert, are accused of being crypto-Jewish, owing to their willingness to be super edgy on every aspect of cultural consensus under the sun except that one question. They will criticize everything except Jewish power and Zionist influence. The fact that a growing number of them have actually turned out to be secretly Jewish puts wind in the sails because that sort of behavior is predicted by DR critique of Jewish behavior: the Clark Kent metaphor of deceptively presenting one identity to the outside world while secretly maintaining a different one under the surface.
Steve Sailer got caught in the crossfire here. In our recent discussion on this Twitter spat, I would have put Steve Sailer as an "execption" to the rule that an edgy DR figure who counter-signals the JQ is probably secretly Jewish himself, but now I increasingly believe Sailer is another instance of this model generalizing after all. Last week, after some token Holocaust worship and virtue signaling against anti-semitism on Twitter, Sailer abandoned his typical methodological thoroughness in an article placing the blame for Wokeness solely at the feet of white Protestants and Quakers (!). This position is not new, it is identical to what (Jewish) DR figures like BAP and Curtis Yarvin have been saying for a long time, and @2rafa has advocated for this position as well:
The key piece of evidence relied on by Sailer is an analysis of The 100 Most Influential Americans by The Atlantic. Finding only 7 Jews among that list, Sailer concludes that Peng is correct and Jewish association with wokeness is merely an effect of their assimilation with Protestant values.
Keith Woods wrote an excellent response to this article, pointing out the the biggest problem with Sailer's methodology: the question at hand is the cause for the radical change in trajectory of American progressivism in the 20th century. "Progressivism" in America at the turn of the century denoted not just immigration restriction, but demographic reversal, as well as HBD and eugenics. This all changed with the growth of Jewish influence in the 20th century. If you tried to create a "top 100 most influential list" related to this sharp diversion in American progressivism you would walk away from vastly different conclusions than those drawn by Sailer and Peng.
What's the motive?
Jewish participation in these cultural upheavals is not challenged by Sailer, or 2rafa, etc. Rather the most import question surrounds the motive for Jewish support, and even creation, of these counter-cultural movements. Sailer cites Peng briefly, but there's no actual evidence presented that Jewish participation in these cultural movements was motivated by a desire to assimilate to Protestant culture and values. On the other hand, Keith presents very strong evidence that the academic and cultural movements most closely associated with these upheavals throughout the 20th century were motivated by a retention of a Jewish identity and a hostility towards Protestant culture and values.
Keith presents strong evidence that the anthropological movements in the 20th century which enforced HBD denial as dogma, deriving from the Boasian school of anthropology, were motivated by his Jewish identification and opposition to antisemitism:
Associating the radical departure from HBD to race denial in the early 20th century to Protestantism also does not make sense given the fact HBD was invented within White protestant culture, and the eugenics movement was also invented there and more advanced than anywhere else in the world. The United States, Germany, Scandanavia all had comparable eugenics programs and the Nazis were not even an outlier in that regard. It's impossible not to Notice that the battlelines between HBD and race denial in the 20th century largely broke between Protestant Darwinists (Madison Grant, E.O Wilson, Charles Murray, Samuel Morton, James Watson, etc.) and Immigrant Jews (Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Eric Turkeimer, etc.). Madison Grant also remarked that Jewish influenced was mobilized against HBD as early as 1921:
Keith does a good job establishing that the motivations of the Boasian School of Anthropology and the Frankfurt school of academics were not motivated by a desire to assimilate to white Protestant culture, but rather by their Jewish identification and deep-seated desire to wage culture war on White Protestant culture.
But I want to talk about two more:
Was Sigmund Freud motivated by a desire to assimilate to White Protestant Culture? This is from Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique:
If we were to create a Top 100 Influential list regarding, specifically, the radical shift in American culture Freud would certainly make this list along with the other examples discussed, and likewise another example for the intellectual motivation being driven by Jewish identity and a bitter hostility to White American culture. Not an attempt to assimilate to Protestant-Quaker cultural values.
Captain America - American as Apple Pie?
One blind spot in MacDonald's work is the comic-book pantheon: hugely influential on American culture, identity, and values. Looking barely beneath the surface reveals the very same psychology: less overtly malicious, but no less salient.
After all, someone ignorant would perceive Captain America as an Ayran hero. But when I watch this scene from Captain America (2011) I perceive something very different from the rest of the laity. I perceive the significance of the Jewish immigrant-inventor, Abraham Erskine, injecting Steve Rogers with the Serum that empowers him to fight the Nazis. The meaning of the myth does not point to a Jewish attempt to assimilate to Protestant values, it portrays a Jewish self-conceived role of transformation of American values. In the case of Captain America, the Jewish Immigrant lectures the audience before literally injecting the Aryan with a serum to transform him into the "Superior Man" so he goes to fight other White people. The Jewish writers are metaphorically depicting Culture War with Gentiles through these symbols.
Superman is one of many others which clearly fits in with this category, with heroic symbols and combat being a metaphor for Jewish Culture War being waged on white Gentiles.
Clark Kent is not a Jewish assimilation fantasy, he's a Jewish supremacist fantasy.
Clark Kent adopts an alter-ego in his daily interactions with humans by changing his name from Kal-El, meaning "Voice of God" in Hebrew, to the Gentile name Clark Kent. He changes his appearance, puts on a suit, goes to work as a media reporter (!) with everyone else none the wiser to his true identity.
But when Clark Kent tears open the shirt, he affirms that underneath the disguise he was always Superman. He holds sentimental feelings towards humanity as his adopted family, but in his heart of hearts he is a diasporan son of Krypton and he will never be them- he is a superior being and he must protect them and guide them.
This is extremely sophisticated storytelling. It provides perceptive Jewish audiences with a sense of identity, and yes superiority, it is a myth that tells them they cannot assimilate even if they change their name and appearance such that nobody around them knows who they truly are, they will always be Kryptonian underneath the surface. At the same time, there is compelling content for Gentile audiences that internalize the Ethos espoused by the ass-kicking superhero.
The dynamic described above was consciously created and self-aware. This is from a former principal writer of the Superman series from 1971 through 1986:
What's interesting here is that Clark Kent is Methodist but Superman is Jewish. This points to a very different dynamic of non-assimilation, and there's an interesting parallel to be made with certain DR edgelords who are Nietzschean on the surface and then crypto-Jewish underneath. These characters are metaphors for things that are real.
The psychology embedded metaphorically in the comic book canon points towards the exact same dynamic which motivated other intellectual movements: Jews retain their identity, if only in cryptic form, and self-conceive as saviors directing the values of humanity.
Conclusion
I'm not one to let Christianity off the hook, I also believe it is necessary but not sufficient to describe the cultural trajectory of 20th century America. But to say that Jews only contributed to it by force of their desire to assimilate is just so preposterous and contradicted by an enormous body of evidence of all forms that I find it hard to believe someone of Sailer's caliber falls victim to it. When Sailer sees someone say something like "IQ is just a measure of how good you are at taking tests, nothing important" that's how I feel seeing Sailer, BAP, Yarvin, 2rafa all say something so implausible like Jewish contributions to 20th century intellectual movements were motivated by their intense desire to assimilate to White American Protestant values.
These people are obviously motivated by their own Jewish identities, and it's correct for the Gentile DR to be inherently suspicious of the crypto-Jewish DR. It is a real problem that these people are unable and unwilling to see an incredibly obvious pattern, psychology, and symbolic coherency underlying these 20th century intellectual movements, it's not simply a prejudice.
Boasian Anthropology, the Frankfurt School, Freud and psychoanalysis, comic book myth creation, in none of those cases is the cultural influence of those movements motivated by an attempt to assimilate to a Protestant/Quaker ethos. In all cases, the individuals involved directly perceived themselves as Jews outside- even above and superior than, White Gentile culture and they all perceived their role as engaging in Culture War against White American values to direct them towards a way they perceived to beneficial for Jews.
How implausible is this actually?
For several thousand years Jews lived in a relative state of internal exile in dozens of host societies that spanned almost the entirety of the old world, from Portugal to India. In those societies they performed a variety of functions. At times they were treated well, at others poorly. In some cases and at some times they became influential and respected figures, in others they were reviled, expelled or killed. Through much of this period assimilation was relatively rare. The Jews kept their customs, and often moved rather than assimilated. They did not - the occasional cult aside - attempt to resettle (let alone conquer) their ancestral homeland, and instead believed that it would be delivered to them by providence during or after the coming of their messiah. They were embittered, in many cases, by their treatment at the hands of gentile populations, but this almost never spurred them to take up arms; the religious perspective, in most of these cases, was that this treatment was a test and/or punishment of God.
While there were Jewish figures of note in this era, as Murray notes in Human Accomplishment Jews were not hugely overrepresented in intellectual achievements for the vast majority of this period. What intellectual talent the Jewish race possessed, if any, was locked away in rabbinical studies, in interpretation of the Talmud, or in activities performed for gentile authorities, like accounting. Nevertheless, the economic niches by which this population provided for itself served to effect a curious and rare process of genetic selection that resulted in a population perhaps one standard deviation more intelligent than the average of the surrounding gentile communities.
In the 18th century, European society began to change. While one Jew, Spinoza in Amsterdam, had some minor impact on this development, it was otherwise an almost entirely gentile movement, itself the product of a series of intellectual and religious movements set off by the reformation or, even earlier, the Renaissance. The ideas of universality, the equality of man, and a kind of eschatological vision of civilizational progress that would one day be turned into the foundation for our own sociopolitical culture. True, the European civilization of the time was very different to our own, and still involved many of the decidedly non-universalist ideas around identity of the age. But the seeds were sown.
It is hardly surprising that Jews embraced these ideas in large numbers, since they meant for them the opportunity to take, increasingly, part in the wider societies in which they found themselves. This much is not disputed by antisemitic dissident rightists (I think), but they argue that for Jews this was an underhanded deal, an attempt to have their cake and eat it, to preserve particularity for themselves but to end it for others. I disagree. Many, in increasing numbers, bought into it wholeheartedly.
Indeed the alternative to your argument, that Jews engaged in these movements as part of an insidious plan to destroy their host civilizations in service of an ancient hatred and/or fear is equally implausible. Extremely high, sometimes exceeding 70%+ intermarriage rates for secular Jews (which almost all the relevant figures were) in the US and Soviet Union speak to a sincere desire for assimilation or at least a fading of strong ethnic identity. Strong tribal loyalty demands, at the least, endogamy. Secular Jews eschewed this in ever increasing numbers. At the height of the British Empire, many of the most elite Jewish families, most prominently the Rothschilds, intermarried to the extent that the younger generations are now neither religiously nor culturally Jewish. The same is increasingly true in the US, where many of the most prominent Jews, from Mark Zuckerberg to Anthony Blinken, have gentile wives and so will not raise Jewish children. This is not the behavior of a people trying to preserve the in-group at all costs; tribal loyalty begins and ends at the point of continuation; the Jews who do practice high-fecundity endogamy are deeply culturally and politically detached from those in positions of power in Western societies.
The basic explanation for the ideology of Jewish progressives and leftists is that most have genuinely bought into the ideas they preach. That is why many of them are increasingly hostile towards the actual, extant Jewish ethnostate, despite tribal loyalty being very hard to break (see nth-generation Turkish Germans, Irish Americans during the Troubles and so on). Of course hypocrisy is always present, as it is in every people. But that is not enough to claim that their views are not motivated by a sincere belief in the same universal trend towards equality and liberty that motivated many of the gentile writers of the enlightenment and its successor movements.
I don’t mean to persuade you, I respect your posting on this topic enough to know I’m not going to convince you of anything. Still, given you mentioned me, I felt I should restate my point for anyone reading.
The reason it is implausible is because there is a bunch of documentation proving the resentment and antipathy these intellectual figures had towards the culture and values in question, the very same they were consciously challenging with their work. They did not like them, they did not want to associate with them. None of them claimed that they were motivated by an adoption of 18th century liberalism, but all of them were influenced by their Jewish identification and concern over issues like anti-Semitism.
Franz Boas, the Frankfurt school, they were all motivated by opposition to German National Socialism and HBD/race ideology (well, except for that one race ideology...)
Freud is one of the most stark examples, where he just outright says he perceives his work as waging war on Gentiles. But Jewish comic book writers defining "Americanism" as fighting Nazis with the creation of their heroes are engaging in the same behavior. Literally none of them were motivated by 18th century liberal ideas, and they were all motivated by their Jewish identity which they retained even as atheists.
I think you're thinking in too blurry terms here. There is a documented heavy and ongoing debate among the Jewish diaspora as to how much they should integrate into their respective cultures.
Consider the case of modern French politician Eric Zemmour, a tribesman himself, who loves to quote Clermond-Tonnerre's phrase: "Everything must be refused of the Jews as a nation, everything must be tolerated of the Jews as individuals" as he exhorts typical assimilationist talking points.
One may make infinite criticisms of the man, but there is little reason to think he, as a person, despises ethnic French people, especially as he is one of their few defenders on specifically ethnic grounds. You don't write that many books about how shameful their purported demise is if you have a shred of antipathy for them.
Now sure, people like that were probably few and far between in American comic book writer rooms. But were they really insignificant to the degree that you can brush off the debate and put all Jews under a single banner altogether? Especially under the cold war? I think that's far from established.
And it seems especially facile to be this broad when we're talking about the far rights' own particular Jews.
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