Rachel Maddow on Jim Russell

Jim Russell, who is the Republican candidate for New York’s 18th Congressional District, is busy combating accusations about his association with The Occidental Quarterly. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s take is a classic example of the power of the media to create an alternate reality where facts don’t matter and where simply stating Russell’s opinions is enough to create mild amusement in her audience benumbed by decades of leftist propaganda. No need to note that Russell is a scholar who has a Ph. D. and has written a book published by Oxford University Press on how Christianity was influenced by German culture during the early Middle Ages. No need for any informed scholarly opinions on his statements in the article in question. If that well-informed anthropologist and psychologist Rachel Maddow thinks something is outlandish, then it must be outlandish. End of story.

Maddow starts by labeling TOQ a “White supremicist journal” —shorthand for not having to deal with the ideas presented there and not being sensitive to the obvious difference between White supremacy and White advocacy. Does she think that it is always illegitimate for any ethnic group to seek to advance its interests? If so, then she should come out publicly against the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza.

She then puts up on the screen this quote from the article:

While liberals and universalists constantly yammer about “bringing us together” and “diversity is our strength,” it may be suggested that the biological function of human language and culture is just the opposite, that is, to keep discrete groups apart.

What an absolutely outrageous idea! Maddow, being Jewish by descent,* could not possibly be expected to grasp the concept of a culture that erects barriers between itself and the surrounding society—as Diaspora Judaism has done for its entire history and as Israel has now taken to the point of building walls between themselves and the Palestinians, providing separate roads and neighborhoods—in short, apartheid.

Contemporary mainstream evolutionary theories of culture highlight the  importance of badges of group membership, such as language and modes of dress that function to define ingroups and outgroups, and psychologists are well aware that there is a powerful evolutionary psychology of social identity that responds to these cues by making people in ingroups have exaggerated negative attitudes toward outgroups and exaggerated positive attitudes toward their ingroup.

She then highlights Russell’s quoting “old racist arguments” from T. S. Eliot:

The population should be homogeneous…. What is even more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and culture combine to make a large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

As noted here repeatedly, multiculturalism has huge costs, especially for the majority ethnic group in terms of social cohesion, social isolation, and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods like government-sponsored health care— with no discernible benefits apart from ethnic restaurants. Yet if there has been one overriding goal of Jewish intellectual and political activism in the US and other Western societies over the last century, it has been to legitimize multiculturalism and pathologize any sense that the  traditional people of these societies have any interests in maintaining their demographic predominance and their culture.

Maddow then goes after Russell’s expressed concern about the effects of the media on imprinting children with images of other races because they may affect later mating preferences. Notice that Russell expresses himself quite tentatively: “One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact.” But in fact, there is quite a bit of research that has come out since Russell wrote his article indicating just that. For example, this is a quote from an academic article of mine:

Research on human infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However, racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005). (p. 1022)

The reality is that social psychology provides strong support for the idea that exposure of babies to other races would make them favor their own race less. And Russell is certainly correct that the media is doing its best to aid this process. However, the good news is that the media does not really have access to infants, or at least much less access than it does to older children and adults. The research seems to indicate that babies learn who their people are by seeing family members–resulting in hysteria over “racist babies.” One can anticipate government programs that force White babies to be exposed to non-Whites (but exempt non-Whites from this process).

Maddow then goes off on Russell’s accusation that the media promotes miscegenation in films directed at adolescents and pre-adolescents and his claim that parents have “a natural obligation as essential as providing food and shelter to instill in their  children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.” Again, research supports the idea that media images could indeed overcome our natural liking for people like ourselves (programmed in infancy; see above) and lead people to be more open to miscegenation—especially in impressionable and conformist-minded children who are led to think that such behavior is “cool” and the sort of thing popular, attractive teenagers do. Several prominent social psychologists have argued that constant repetition by media images–especially if they are seen as coming from elite, mainstream sources–can overcome predispositions to be attracted to our own people.

One would think that Maddow would be well aware that her people have had very strong socialization pressures for marrying within the group which has led to very strong genetic commonality among long-separated Jewish groups. Urgings by Jewish religious and secular authorities (e.g., Alan Dershowitz, Elliott Abrams) to marry other Jews are commonplace. But when Russell makes similar suggestions, he is labeled a racist and a kook.

Her piece is a good example of how the media is focused on changing the behavior  of one group and one group only: White Christians.

*According to WikiAnswers, Maddow was raised Catholic, with an Irish mother and Russian father. She asserted she is “distantly Jewish.” See also here.