Note: We have a cornucopia of new content this week. The Taki post is about our new moral imperative to love strangers over our friends and family. Then there is the Sunday podcast up behind the green door. There is a bonus post up this morning on the cult sci-fi move The Matrix. This has gone out to Buy Me A Beer patrons as well.

Almost twenty years ago, John Derbyshire reviewed Kevin MacDonald’s book Culture of Critique for American Conservative. It has one of the best headlines ever written for a right-wing publication. The review itself was not favorable to MacDonald’s theory on Jewish evolutionary strategy, so it has been condemned by anti-Semites, which is a shame because it offers an important insight. For some, the “Jew thing” is a debilitating neurosis that cripples the victim’s ability to reason.

An example of this was on display Saturday night when Jared Taylor debated E. Michael Jones on the question of race. Specifically, the topic was “is race real and does it matter?” Taylor was on the side of race realism and Jones was supposed to be on the side of race denialism. It did not quite work out that way as Jones quickly shifted the conversation away from race to his own theories about the Jews. E. Michael Jones has a very serious case of the Jew thing.

The format was for each man to give a 20-minute opening presentation and then they would take turns responding to one another. Taylor was in the affirmative, so he went first and put on a near perfect presentation explaining the biological reality of race and the societal implications of racial differences. Even for those very familiar with the human sciences, it was an entertaining and informative presentation. It is the sort of thing you can send around to people curious the topic.

Jones opened up with a strange story about daylight savings time in Indiana in order to establish what he calls categories of the mind. These are definitions we invent that have no relation to physical reality. It appears he was trying to reformulate the logical positivists tripartite classification of knowledge. There are things that are tautologically true, things that are true because of an agreed upon set of logical rules and then things that are cognitively meaningless.

Jones reformulates it to be things that are categories of the mind and things he thinks ought to be important. For example, race, regardless of the biological realty behind it, is a category of the mind. It matters only because we think about it, like daylight savings time or the time of day. Catholic dogma, on the other hand, matters whether we think of it or not, so we ought to think about it. Of course, anything that Jones does not like is declared a category of the mind and he dismisses it.

There is an argument that much of what gets put into the category of race is contextual, a result of history and culture. This is the basis of biological denialism on the Left, where they claim differences in the races and sexes are cultural artifacts. The problem with this is that it conflates two related, but cognitively different things. Biological race, in this case, is different from social concepts of race. By conflating the two, biology is made to disappear in the fog of social criticism regarding race.

This was the game Jones was playing. He made a lot of noise about how race is used to harm white societies, so he agued race must be ignored. Here he commits a second logical fallacy. Even if discussions of race are engineered to harm white interests, it does not logically follow that white people should deny the reality of race. This is where the Jew thing begins to pop. Jones asserts that Jews invented the concept of race to harm white people, so the Jew thing requires him to oppose race.

After the opening statements, the second hour was mostly Jones ranting and raving about Jews, even dropping some epithets along the way. Whenever the moderator would return the conversation to the topic, Jones would go off on a rant about how the Jews were the great enemy and we must pretend race is not real in order to defend the white race from Jews. Along the way he conceded everything Taylor said about the reality of race, but Jones kept insisting it should not matter.

In all the noise and distraction what became clear is that Jones knows very little about race or race realism. He also made bizarre claims about the subject. For example, he claimed race was introduced in America by Jews. He also claimed the ancients had no concept of race. This is left-wing nonsense that has no basis in fact. His comments about intelligence revealed he knows nothing about the topic. His claims were the sorts of things that work on stupid people who share his beliefs.

This is the tragedy of the Jew thing. Once the victim is afflicted with it, they can think of nothing other than the subject of their obsession. The debate was supposed to be about race, but Jones kept trying to make it about Jews. Not just about Jews in the racial context either. Like a dog returning to his vomit, Jones kept returning to his pet theory that Judaism is a conspiracy against the world. Not Jews, as according Jones race is not real, but Judaism, which is like a magic spell that he fights alone.

Of course, Jones has his fans. That is the other side of the Jew thing. People with it will overlook anything in those who supply them with content. His mad hatter act is lost on his fans, who only hear the J-word when he speaks. You get the sense that those with the Jew thing will become physically ill if they are not constantly hearing anti-Semitic material, so they need it constantly pipped into their brains. As a result a bellowing crackpot like Jones gets their full attention.

There are people who have reasoned critiques of Jews in Western societies. There are lots of Jews who have addressed the issue. It is a legitimate question, but one gets the sense that the mission of E. Michael Jones is to make it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on the topic. After all, who would want to be lumped in with a mad man who screams at the Passover display at the local grocery store? Jones manages to give bigotry a bad name, which is quite accomplishment.

All of that said, Jones has a point that he may not understand or simply not care to discuss and that is the reality of race is insufficient on its own. If being right about the facts of life mattered, this world would not exist. The radicals would have been routed a long time ago. Public discourse in all human society is about morality. Who are we and what defines us is what matters. Repeating the facts of biology can only matter if they have an impact on the morality of the people.

This has always been the failing of the Right. They have always assumed that once they proved their case, the other side would have no choice but to throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. This is not reality. Unless one can connect biological reality with morality, they exist in two separate domains. The race realists have yet to attempt this connection. This should be where the militant Christians step into the breech, but people like Jones make that difficult.

Finally, Jones made a big issue of Taylor’s unwillingness to address the question of Jews within the context of race realism. This is a fair point, but Jones then asserted it was because Taylor is part of the global Jewish conspiracy. This is where you cannot help but wonder if Jones does this to avoid defending his position. It is a distraction to deflect attention from his faulty logic to something else. This could have been an interesting gambit, but the Jew thing got the better of him.

The fact is, race realism makes a lot of sense when comparing Africans with all other human groups. Africans are the great outlier in the human family. It starts to break down when you compare other groups. East Asian are different from Europeans, but they bring none of the social pathology of Africans. What is the argument against mixing Asians with Europeans? What about West Asians and Europeans? This is a valid line off attack on the race realist position.

In the end, the debate is worth watching, if only for Taylor’s opening. It is a pity that Jones is not a more honest and balanced person, as it would be interesting to see someone approach this topic from traditional Christian ethics. If we are ever going to make the leap from facts to values, this is a debate that needs to be had. Otherwise, biological reality will remain ignored, even as we careen into the abyss. Maybe this debate will inspire someone to ponder the subject.

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