No Country for White Children, by Andrew Joyce - The Unz Review
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No Country for White Children
I’ve recently enjoyed an exchange of emails with a very intelligent and articulate former White Nationalist who is now dedicated to anti-natalism, the philosophy expounded by the Jewish South African philosopher David Benatar. Summed up, anti-natalism argues that life entails suffering...
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No Country for White Children
Andrew Joyce • December 10, 2021
• 3,800 Words • 175 Comments • Reply
I’ve recently enjoyed an exchange of emails with a very intelligent and articulate former White Nationalist who is now dedicated to anti-natalism, the philosophy expounded by the Jewish South African philosopher David Benatar. Summed up, anti-natalism argues that life entails suffering, sometimes terrible amounts of it, and therefore that non-existence is always better than living and dying. Benatar’s 2006 Oxford-published book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence is the influential key text of this growing movement. In the course of the book, Benatar advances the idea that humans should accept that procreation is inherently immoral because it involves creating sentient beings who will suffer and die. The text is thus a moral injunction against having children, and Benatar’s ideal scenario is one in which a barren mankind goes voluntarily extinct. In the course of the email exchange on these ideas, I raised a number of concerns with my correspondent about the logic, theory, and growth of anti-natalism, one of them being that, given the already problematic propensity among Whites to attach themselves to abstract moral concerns, and social fads based on guilt, there was likely to be a practical ethnic disparity in the adoption of anti-natalism at group level. In other words, I argued that anti-natalism, regardless of its philosophical merits or lack thereof (and quite apart from any consideration of Benatar’s intentions or ethnic origins), could contribute to the Culture of Sterility already prevalent in the West by providing yet more philosophical-cultural support for the demographic decline of Whites everywhere.
The minutiae of our broader debate of Benatar’s logic, and our shared rumination on existence and Being, isn’t worth covering here but, as our exchange narrowed in focus, two issues emerged which have relevance for this website. The first was whether life on earth was really a prize worth winning for Whites. The second was whether it was good to bring White children into an increasingly hostile world. My correspondent remains firmly in the camp that argues that life is most definitely not worth it, while I argued against Benatar and made the more optimistic case. This was a novel position for me given my longstanding appreciation of the deep pessimism of Schopenhauer and my general tendency to the “Black Pill” side of things. In this instance, however, I argued that, when it came to life, the game was indeed worth the candle. In fact, I believe that we should not only play the game of life, regardless of suffering, but play to win. I cannot say that I have arrived at this position rationally or logically. I can only say that the drive to life is firmly implanted in me, something that Benatar has argued is simply a trick of Nature. And yet, trick or not, I am a product of this earth, and not something alien to it and subjected to its whims. I am here. I exist. And I believe my best existence can be achieved with those most like me and especially, following in the thought of Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests, those related to me. In a sense I am on a boat in rough seas—I need those who will reliably grab an oar alongside me, rather than throw me overboard.
My own attitudes to anti-natalism aside, my correspondent is correct in highlighting the increasingly difficult, and almost impossible, position of White children. Despair in this regard is always within touching distance. Just this morning it was brought to my attention that the ADL has extended its considerable tentacles across the Atlantic, and will now be involved in a three-year project in England to provide “lessons and activities to schools and pupils to talk about difference and diversity, celebrate inclusion, and understand discrimination and its effects.” The project is part of a deal with Chelsea Football Club, owned by Russian-Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich, and will involve significant funding flowing from Chelsea to the ADL. In summary then, English fans are paying not only to see millionaires kick a ball for 90 minutes, but also for their children to be told they’re bigots by a gang of American Jews. That’s quite a deal. The interest of a body of New York Jews in English children is strange to say the least, especially when the ADL currently operates no such scheme in Israel where segregated education is still largely ongoing and, in the words of Israel’s own state comptroller, “racism and discrimination” are still prevalent in Israeli schools.
‘A Twig to be Straightened’: Jewish ‘Anti-Bias’ Research on White Children
I first wrote about the ADL’s strange and obsessive “interest” in White children in 2014, noting at that time their development of “Anti-Bias Lesson Plans and Resources for K-12 Educators.” The ADL program fit neatly into the broader history of Freudian attempts to portray anti-Semitism as a virulent mental pathology that careful education strategies could ‘inoculate’ against. That this process of “inoculation” has targeted White children and no others is an open secret. Although the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes are a form of disease with roots in childhood goes back to Freud, it has been prominent in Jewish activism for over a century and remains current today. Take, for example, the closing remarks from Abraham Foxman’s Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype, where parents and teachers are urged to “try to help the next generation grow up freer from the infection of intolerance. [emphasis added]” The goal, as Mr. Foxman himself once articulated, is to “make America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.” Theodore Isaac Rubin’s equally self-interested diatribe, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, describes anti-Jewish feeling as a “contagious, malignant disease,” and concludes by stating, “extremely active application of insight and education is necessary to check the disease. Checkmate and eradication is [sic] extremely difficult and probably only possible if applied to the very young before roots of the disease take hold. [emphasis added]” To Rubin, and his like-minded co-ethnics at the ADL, the solution to the problem of anti-Jewish feeling is one of “prophylaxis” and “approaches to children.” The ADL-sponsored tome Anti-Semitism in America (1979), concluded that “It is apparent that the schools are the most appropriate and potentially effective agent to carry out the instructional strategy just outlined.”[1]
The 1979 ADL study was itself following in the footsteps of a series of social engineering experiments carried out on White children over several decades by scores of Jewish psychiatrists and sociologists. Research into the racial attitudes of White children in America began as early as 1929, in Bruno Lasker’s Race Attitudes in Children (New York: H. Holt & Company). Lasker was a Hamburg-born Jew who moved first to England before arriving in the United States in 1914 where he established himself as a pro-immigration social worker. Lasker’s work was furthered in the 1930s by Eugene and Ruth Horowitz[2], whose work was highly influential on probably the most high-profile “child racism” test of the twentieth century — the “doll tests” of Black psychiatrists Kenneth and Mamie Clark that helped end segregation via Brown v. Board of Education. The “doll tests” didn’t just have a Jewish academic heritage; the research of the Clarks was funded by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the pair were closely connected to the Northside Center for Child Development which had a “mostly Jewish Board of Directors.”[3]
Research into the putative racism of White children was furthered in the 1960s by Donald Mosher,[4] but it was in the 1970s that an intensification took place, partly as a result of its blending with discoveries of the importance of television in shaping attitudes, and other social behavior ‘modification’ techniques. In 1972, for example, Bradley Greenberg was allowed access to 300 White children from Michigan to see if consistently watching Blacks on television could improve their attitude to “diversity.”[5] The development of Sesame Street, “a program that exposes young children to a variety of attractive black and Hispanic models,”[6] at the start of the decade owed much to the interventions and analyses of Jewish sociologists like Greenberg, as well as Gerry Bogatz,[7] Gerald Gorn,[8] Marvin Goldberg,[9] and Gordon Cantor.[10]
In a glowing walk down memory lane in Tablet, it’s made explicit that “idealistic urban Jews were integral to Sesame Street’s origins. … Its genesis was a 1966 dinner at Joan Ganz Cooney’s apartment, attended by Carnegie Corporation VP Lloyd Morrisett and NYC Channel 13’s program manager Louis Freedman.” As with many social experiments at the time, there was a blend of Jewish activism, government backing, and the financial support of Big Capital. In the case of Sesame Street,
These efforts to modify the behavior of White children via television were closely related to earlier Jewish efforts, in the 1950s and 1960s, to modify White racial attitudes. The most notable academics in the field of altering public opinion and White ingroup attitudes including Joseph Klapper, Bernard Berelson, Fritz Heider, Leo Bogart, Elihu Katz, Marie Jahoda, Joseph Gittler, Morris Rosenberg, Ernest Dichter, Walter Weiss, Nathan Glazer, Bernard J. Fine, Bruno Bettelheim, Wallace Mandell, Hertha Hertzog, Dororthy Blumenstock, Stanley Schachter, David Caplovitz, Walter Lippmann, Sol Ginsburg, Harry Alpert, Leon Festinger, Michael Gurevitch, Edward Shils, Eugene Gaier, Joseph Goldsen, Julius Schreiber, Daniel Levinson, Herbert Blumer, I. M. A. Myers, Irving Janis, Miriam Reimann, Edward Sapir, Solomon Asch, Gerald Wieder, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Morris Janowitz.
Someone once said that “when everyone thinks the same, conspiracy is unnecessary.” This is essentially the dynamic at work in this field of research, which was dominated by people from the same ethno-religious background, all of them bringing more or less the same anxieties, assumptions and enmities to their chosen field. The result was a very uniform approach among Jewish psychiatrists and sociologists to the “problem” of the White population, especially White children.
Following in the footsteps of many co-ethnics, in 1976 Irwin and Phylis Katz and their colleague Shirley Cohen moved away from the usefulness of television and into the testing of other “modification” techniques that specifically targeted White children. In one experiment, after gathering 80 White kindergarteners and fourth graders, attitudes to Blacks and the disabled were measured by, for example, confronting the youngsters with a Black man moving around a room in a wheelchair and observing their reactions.[11] Two years after this stunning leap forward for science, Phylis Katz returned to experimenting on White children with colleague Sue Rosenberg Zalk, in a project designed to achieve a “modification” of White children’s attitudes to race.[12] Katz justified the focus on children because, in White adults, “attitudes are relatively intransigent and much more difficult to change.” For Katz, to paraphrase the title of one of her essays, White children were a problematic and warped twig that emerged from a rotten tree and had to be “straightened.”[13]
Today, the same trend is very much in evidence. One of the more influential texts in the field is Louise Derman-Sparks’s 2011 What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. Derman-Sparks, who opened her speech to a multicultural conference in Berlin in 2010 with the statement that Germany’s shift to multiculturalism “has been especially moving and inspiring to me … as a Jewish woman,” adorns the cover of her book with the images of 14 White children gathered together above the distasteful title as if they’re criminal mugshots. The expressed intention of the book is to “pique the interest of Whites to examine themselves,” and it opens with reference to “many authors” who have published texts since the 1990s on how Whites perpetuate racism. The cited “many authors” includes Paul Kivel the Jewish author of Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice and founder of the (far from subtle) “Challenging Christian Hegemony Project.” Other examples of these “many authors” include Paula Rothenberg and her 2004 White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, Shirley Steinberg and her 2000 White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, and Tim Wise and his 2004 White Like Me. Although not mentioned by Derman-Sparks, one of the most influential academic texts in this field in recent years is developmental psychologist Lawrence Hirschfeld’s 1998 MIT-published Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds.
Derman-Sparks’s text is one of those truly vulgar texts that maintains a cheery air even as it portrays the innocent as sinister. How else are we to react to the ethnic paranoia inherent in complaints that White children aged between 3 and 4 in one class were perceived as “avoiding dark colors in their artwork”[14] and thus demonstrated a deep-seated racism imbibed from their parents since infancy? The revelation that these White children preferred to draw paintings with bright, cheerful colors was apparently so devastating that a team of anti-bias “educators” was brought in. Derman-Sparks lauds the team for “brainstorming” techniques to adapt the children’s behavior, including providing them with excesses of black and brown paper, providing them with black and brown toys, and creating “relaxation” spaces that were dark. When the children, who weren’t much older than toddlers, complained that the dark spaces were scaring them, they were told that darkness “wasn’t scary” and were made to simply endure it. The ideology behind this mental saturation in darkness was that “White children’s learning to be “White” is part of the maintenance of systemic racism.”[15]
The goal therefore, in all cases, is to prevent White children from adopting their natural racial identity. Derman-Sparks stresses her ambition to create not just generations of Whites who tolerate multiculturalism, but who become active warriors for “social justice.”
Getting the ADL Out of Schools
All of which is to say that Jewish activism in this area is intended to pervert the in-born natural affinity of White children for their own kind. Even Hirschfeld (199
admits thatThe aforementioned ‘anti-bias training,’ which has been developed over the course of the past century, is designed to overcome the natural instincts of White children and to deprive them of the knowledge structures, explanatory knowledge, and inferences that are essential to the protection of their interests. When these aspects of their development are done away with, and when they are instead brainwashed into becoming “social justice warriors” on behalf of foreign groups, White children are essentially turned upon themselves and their own people.
A promising sign in recent times, however, has been the backlash against the ADL’s involvement in education, which is in turn part of a broader realization of the harmful nature of Critical Race Theory and its encroachment at all levels of the education system. In July, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation initiated a “Get ADL Out of Schools” campaign after the ADL began state-wide measures that dictated that schools should “notify ADL when any incident of bias, bullying, discrimination or harassment occurs”—presumably so they could refer the offending youth to their “Center on Extremism” as soon as possible. The campaign is led in part by Stuart H. Hurlbert, Professor of Biology Emeritus, San Diego State University, who argues that “the Anti-Defamation League has inserted itself into American politics in a variety of ways over the decades primarily in the guise of a non-partisan, civil rights organization.” As part of his gathering of information revealing the true nature of the ADL, Hurlbert very helpfully directs readers to Kevin MacDonald’s work “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review.”
In August, California’s Newport-Mesa Unified School District voted to continue its relationship with the ADL, but “with modifications.” The school district was the victim of an ADL shakedown in March 2019, after it was revealed that some drunken students from Newport Harbor High School arranged cups in the shape of a swastika at an off-campus party. After the prank was made viral by a malcontent, the ADL swooped on the instance of “abhorrent anti-Semitic activity” and shamed the nervous school board into accepting a rapidly escalating series of contracts for anti-bias training for staff and students.
The minutes of the school boards meetings are publicly available, and contain the actual contracts with the ADL which run to the value of some $96,650 over a two-year period for anti-bias and pro-immigration training sessions. The shakedown started to come apart in August, when board members began to question the transparency and cost of their agreements with the ADL, as well as the content of ADL training courses. In response to parents objecting to the school district’s relationship with the ADL on the grounds that it was “bringing critical race theory into the classroom,” the school district “reviewed the proposed contract and recommended eliminating second-level anti-bias courses for school employees.” Unfortunately, the most damaging aspect of ADL ‘training”—their lessons for children—remain in place (at a cost of $27,800), prompting Anti-Defamation League Regional Director Peter Levi to gloat, “We have long believed education is the best antidote to hate and bias.”
More and more objections are being raised, however. Back in June, in Alabama, the Mountain Brook School Board severed ties with the ADL after a parent-led protest against Critical Race Theory being pushed into schools via the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” program. In a familiar pattern, Mountain Brook’s involvement with the ADL began with a teenage prank involving swastikas. A Jewish parent, Elizabeth Goldstein, then claimed that Mountain Brook needed ADL training, providing as supporting evidence the undoubtedly truthful statement: “As a child, as a Jewish child growing up in Mountain Brook, [when I was in second grade] a girl told me she could not play with me because I killed Jesus.”
The shakedown began, but on July 8 Mountain Brook Schools issued a statement in response to parent pressure, announcing that “Mountain Brook Schools will not be using “No Place for Hate” and will no longer be using the services of the Anti-Defamation League.” The ADL, rather than gracefully bowing out of the affair, attacked Mountain Brook Schools in an open letter, accusing the city of “many issues of antisemitism and hatred over the past several years.” Sinister motives were implied to lie behind the Board’s
The ADL could have just cut to the chase and said “A world where bigoted White children aren’t put through our Brainwashing Seminar® and Anti-Identity Institute® (and all for the bargain price of less than $100,000!) is a world in which we’re deeply terrified.”
• • •
We’ve come full circle. Is the ADL looking across the Atlantic because it’s being rebuffed in America? I doubt it. The group is international in origin and intent. It is simply expanding its modus operandi in accordance with its ideology—an ideology in respect to “child racism” in the West that has been a century in the making. This ideology dictates that the “twigs” must be snapped off from the White tree and reshaped. This ideology hasn’t required a conspiracy, only a tremendous similarity in thought and action over one hundred years. Defeating this pattern will require a similar uniformity of thought. White parents coming together to expel brainwashers is a great place to start.
