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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Time for current culture war item, reviving 20 years old controversies in much different world.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a Christian

Some feel it as betrayal, some as vindication, but all see it as big thing. But is it a thing of any importance?

Reading through the manifesto, it seems strange. First, it does not contain the word "Jesus", not even once. Neither the word "salvation".

So what it talks about?

Threats to precious Western democracy, freedom, rules based international order and Judeo-Christian tradition

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

historical facts as accurate as "Cleopatra was black"

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities.

and mid-life crisis. Permanent Middle Eastern crisis is child's play compared to eternally recurring middle life crisis.

Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

So why Christianity?

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy.

How is Christianity supposed to help in fighting "China, Russia and Iran" is left unclear. Of these coutries, Russia explicitly claims to fight for Christianity against Western Jewish Nazi homosexual Satanism.

How would AHA answer Putin, how would she prove that his interpretation of Christianity is wrong and her "Judo-Christian" faith is the true Christian tradition and true message of Jesus?

And for wokeism, Christianity hadn't proved not to be very effective in fighting it.

(and if you need Christianity do defeat something so absurd as wokeism, you already lost)

SENIOR: What would you like for your birthday, son?

JUNIOR: I want to chop off my dick, dad.

SENIOR: Do not do it, son!

JUNIOR: Why?

SENIOR: (long pause and head scratching) The Bible! The Bible forbids it, son!

JUNIOR: Where?

SENIOR: (fast and frantic searching through book) Wait, son! It must be here, somewhere!

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

Curious what exact church AHA joined. Churches that simultaneously reject wokeism and support "civilization war" against Axis of Evil, churches that fly Ukraine, Israeli and Taiwan flags but lack rainbow, trans and BLM flags tend to be rather thin of the ground.

I dislike people dancing around the issue.

There is a massive population of white Americans, mainly Evangelicals, who had been indoctrinated with this meaningless Judeo-Christian gibberish that just means "everything good in the world". Invoking «Judeo-Christian» is the master key to getting their cooperation in literally any matter: they'll automatically recall "everything good" (freedom, democracy, tradition, civilization, antiwoke, diversity, LGBT rights, Christ, Rapture, our Middle Eastern allies – doesn't matter, details of what counts as goodness will be prompted by the context of the Current Year, they don't really have stable moral doctrines) and associate it with you, then go and kill or die for whatever cause you propose… Or, at least, that seems to be the theory driving Republican politics (and politicking on Republican-coded but in actuality bipartisan issues). The problem is that these people were a little bit too successfully dunked upon in years where great power conflict seemed less probable, and warm bodies less needed, than in the near future. They've been somewhat jaded and demoralized and alienated and their demographic representation has simply shrunk. New Atheism has been complicit in this.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks).

Right on cue: now the problem isn't Whitey from Nebraska, it's unassimilable migration that is causing the Death Spiral of the West. These Jews adopting 2016 alt-right talking points for their immediate benefit aren't going to convince anyone.

Jews say things you disagree with: Perfidious, deceitful

Jews say things you agree with: trickery that won’t convince anyone

The irony (and I say this as someone who doesn’t like him) is that half the people clowning on Saad for saying hardcore white antisemitism still exists in the US are literally hardcore white antisemites such as yourself on dissident right Twitter. Saad says “yeah midwestern whites can still be antisemitic” and then some midwestern white American in the tweet replies says some implicit or explicit version of “this treacherous Jew is so wedded to his destructive leftism and hatred of whites that he doesn’t recognize that white antisemitism doesn’t even exist anymore”, which is an interesting way of disagreeing with him.

In the end, every donor cent that no longer goes to progressive causes is good for the American right. Getting upset about Jews turning against mass immigration because they have the temerity to acknowledge your own (real) contempt for them seems cheap. The only thing these dissident rightists would accept from Jews is crying, apologetic prostration along with maybe ritual suicide after tearfully admitting all the wrongs they have done to the Huwhite race.

Perfidious, deceitful

Gad Saad is unable to hide his contempt for ordinary white people, but in his next breath he's a stalwart defender of Western demographics. No he isn't, he's a Jewish ethnonationalist trying to give permission to White people to be racist towards Arabs on behalf of the war being fought by his tribe.

It's similar to the sentiment "Britain is finished if Jews no longer feel safe here". So Britain isn't finished when there are no more British, or when British are denied their identity and claim to particularity and self-advocacy. It's finished when Jews don't feel safe. When Gad Saad and Ben Shapiro start adopting these alt-right talking points, the Neocon grift is obvious.

I like Zach Snyder's film 300, but it's not lost on me that Hollywood producing such a sincerely fascist film took place at a moment time when many were beating the war-drum for America to go to war against the Persians. Fascism is a white interpretation of Socialism, and Neoconservatism is a Jewish interpretation of Fascism. The resurgence of 2003 neoconservatism with the assimilation of dissident right rhetoric is not something I agree with, even if they are able to say some things I agree with- no, I'm actually not falling for it and I can see clearly what they are doing. I strongly oppose the resurgence of 2003 neoconservatism. It's predictable they would try to steer the energy of the alt-right towards opposing their own enemies in endless Middle East conflict. But they won't allow that energy to be used to actually advoacte for white people.

Getting upset about Jews turning against mass immigration because they have the temerity to acknowledge your own (real) contempt for them seems cheap.

Jews are turning against mass immigration because they now perceive some parts of it to be against their own ethnic interests. So their (highly limited and far-too-late) turnaround is perfectly aligned with complaints about their behavior: they support what's in the interest of Jews, even at the expense of White people. When mass immigration is at the expense of White people but benefits Jews, they have no problem with it. Now they have a problem with it because of their war against the Arab world, and I'm supposed to pretend that this means their interests are now aligned with mine?

Nathan Cofnas is an example of a Jew engaging in some honest self-reflection (although he makes some dubious assumptions). Gad Saad and Ben Shapiro and others trying to make their religio-tribal war a matter of "Judeo-Christian civilization" hanging in the balance is perfidious and deceitful no matter how much alt-right window dressing they try to throw on top of it.

The irony (and I say this as someone who doesn’t like him) is that half the people clowning on Saad for saying hardcore white antisemitism still exists in the US are literally hardcore white antisemites such as yourself on dissident right Twitter.

Gad Saad felt compelled to dunk on the demographic that might be the most pro-Israel on the entire planet. Maybe it's Dissident Right Twitter's fault that Gad Saad hates the average White person from Arkansas. But Dissident Right twitter wasn't around for the 2003 Neoconservative era, where working class White Christians were helplessly manipulated into supporting Israel, and that didn't spare them from the ethnic contempt of Jews in academia, popular culture, and political policy. Their demographic decline has been celebrated.

When mass immigration is at the expense of White people but benefits Jews

How did the mass immigration of Muslims into Western Europe (or indeed Mexicans into the United States) benefit Jews? It is not enough to respond by citing Barbara Spectre or some other Jew saying that diversity keeps Jews safe or Tikkun Olam or something, I mean seriously, if you think it benefits me (a rich Jewish New York banker, the kind of person who matters in this thought experiment) then tell me how.

It seems rather more likely that Jews bought into the progressive, enlightenment, democratic narrative of universal progress upon which the United States was founded by gentile men. This is why there are also gentile whites of the kind who celebrate their own incoming minority status, for example, and indeed many of them.

I'm supposed to pretend that this means their interests are now aligned with mine?

Why do most white conservatives oppose mass immigration in practice? It’s not out of an esoteric quasi-spiritual reverence for Yamnaya ancestry or the legacy of Greece and Rome, or ethnic purity (and it mostly never was). It’s about the fact that they don’t want to live in a dirtier, poorer, more violent, culturally foreign society peopled largely by people who don’t like them (I don’t, for what it’s worth, think any large percentage American Jews ‘dislike’ whites).

That is the realization most anti-immigrant whites have had; that is what Saad seems to have had. His interests may or may not align with yours, certainly it’s unlikely they do on every issue. But if the issue is mass immigration from the Islamic world (which is by orders of magnitude the number one issue for the European right and Europe in general), then he and them would appear, on this issue, to want it to stop.

Well, as ever, the tragedy of Jewish assimilation is that we tried too hard and were too good at it. Too good at capitalism, too good at liberalism, too good at socialism. Jews took liberalism, fundamentally a gentile invention, too literally, bought into it too wholly, took its premises to their logical conclusions too honestly and too directly. I think of this often. Peter Singer, for better or worse, could only be Jewish; like Marx with Hegel, he is guilty only of extending a gentile ideology - that of Bentham and Mill - to its logical conclusions. It is no surprise that many of the ‘Jewish’ elites far rightists decry (along with many far right Jews like BAP and Moldbug) are only ‘half-Jewish’, because assimilation rates for secular Jews are at 70%+ and have been since at least the 1980s in the US, again in part it’s the extreme rate of Jewish assimilation that leads to such overrepresentation, because Jews had and have the temerity to get rich and then marry the existing elite rather than their own.

This is the grand irony of rightist antisemitism. The greatest charge is hypocrisy, that Jews do unto others (diversity, moral degeneracy etc) what they do not do unto themselves. In reality, precisely the opposite is true, far from cynically exploiting Western enlightenment ideas, (Ashkenazi) Jews tried too hard to implement them. They gleefully expropriated Jewish capitalists in Russia, gleefully embraced the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner et al (for all the kvetching about Jewish pornographers preying on innocent blonde girls, Jewish women are actually extremely overrepresented among female porn actresses (Casey Calvert, Abella Danger, Nina Hartley), it’s not as if they spared themselves sexual modernity), and gleefully promoted refugee rights, socialism and a generous peace with the Palestinians in Israel even after multiple humiliations (and were only, ultimately, rebuffed because they were demographically swamped by Sephardim, Mizrachim and 1/8 Jewish Soviet immigrants.

The problem, which I think we have always failed to understand, is that the gentile writers of the enlightenment were less revolutionary than they appear from their writings. They were thinking in the context of an established civilizational structure whose boundaries they wanted to test, but which they did not wholesale wish to upend - even if they wrote as such. Freed from the metaphorical and sometimes literal ghetto by this ideology, the mistake we made was thinking it was SO great that we should take these ideas of universalism, of rights, of equality, of peace, of personal and communal liberation to their logical conclusions. We didn’t understand that the gentiles, writing in the context of their own worldview, their own educations and faith and so on, did not mean that themselves.

I really think this is the tragedy of the Haskalah.