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American Pravda: Harvard, Racial Discrimination, and Holocaust Denial, by Ron Unz

25-6-2023 < UNZ 32 5791 words
 



Later this week the U.S. Supreme Court will release its verdict on the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, widely expected to severely curtail or possibly even ban the use of race in college admissions, perhaps one of the most momentous court rulings of recent decades. After a half-century of continual growth and expansion, America’s system of racial Affirmative Action may be facing a major legal threat to its survival.

Given the huge potential importance of that ruling, the media coverage over the last decade—and especially the last year—has been intense, ranging from numerous front-page stories in the New York Times to endless heated exchanges on Twitter and other social media venues.


Yet until earlier this month, an extremely important aspect of the story had been utterly ignored by virtually all our media outlets despite the potential impact it might have had on the court decision. I think this silence of “the dog that didn’t bark” demonstrates the true forces that govern our American media, determining what is revealed and what is concealed about important events.


Consider the notorious right-wing political activist David Duke. His last substantive political achievement was holding a seat in the Louisiana State Legislature during the 1989-1991 sessions and by his unsuccessful runs for U.S. Senate in 1990 and governor in 1991; he’s been almost entirely out of politics for most of the 31 years since then, reportedly living abroad during much of that time. Yet the media has maintained his public profile to such an extent that his name is still widely recognized, probably more so than other individuals who have enjoyed a hundred times his political success in recent decades. Our media creates our reality, and Duke is almost entirely a media creation.


Duke has always been a strong opponent of Affirmative Action, and let us suppose that his original research had been a crucial factor behind the current Harvard lawsuit now poised to strike it down. Our mainstream media and its huge corps of liberal, left-liberal, and leftist journalists fervently support the continued use of race in admissions decisions, and they surely would have highlighted Duke’s role from the very beginning, using his involvement as a brutally effective means of smearing and tainting the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.


Under such a media barrage, the case would quickly have become known as the “David Duke lawsuit” against Harvard, while giving massive attention to all his other controversial and outrageous ideological positions, ranging from racism to antisemitism to Holocaust Denial, thereby dramatically reshaping the atmospherics surrounding the lawsuit. Over the last five years, lower federal courts have repeatedly ruled in Harvard’s favor, upholding the long-standing legality of race-based Affirmative Action. Would the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have been willing to even take up a case that had become so heavily identified with Duke, a case that might have required them to overturn five decades of their own past decisions? I strongly suspect that such a David Duke case would have followed a legal trajectory very different from the one whose decision will be announced within the next few days.


Yet the true circumstances of the current lawsuit—as opposed to our media portrayal of it—are actually not so very different from that seemingly far-fetched scenario I have just outlined, as was finally revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, a leading British media outlet. Then on Friday, those explosively provocative headlines were repeated in an even longer article that ran in the Harvard Crimson:



Although I might take issue with a few points here and there in those two articles, the overwhelming majority of the facts they present are absolutely correct, as were their dramatic headlines. Yet my crucial role in the Harvard lawsuit and the exceptionally controversial nature of my stated positions on numerous other issues had previously remained obscure due to the deliberate omissions of the media and nearly all of its American journalists.


Indeed, I would even argue that the full range of my controversial views considerably exceeds those held by Duke, and if our reporters had chosen to cover and emphasize these over the last few years, our high court might have been very reluctant to hear the case, thereby preserving Affirmative Action. The story of why virtually every journalist in America chose to spend these years hiding such facts seems an enormously important one, well worth investigating, and I have my own suspicions.



The absurdity of this total lack of media coverage is easily demonstrated if we consider two of my own articles, one of them on the Harvard lawsuit and my role in the case and the other recounting and summarizing some of my exceptionally controversial views on other topics. Although they were both published on the same website just seven days apart in October 2018 and each attracted a great deal of readership and many hundreds of comments, not a single journalist in America was ever willing to report and connect them.


On October 22, 2018, I had discussed the start of the Harvard lawsuit and its origins:



This last week trial began in Boston federal court for the current lawsuit in which a collection of Asian-American organizations are charging Harvard University with racial discrimination in its college admissions policies. The New York Times, our national newspaper of record, has been providing almost daily coverage to developments in the case, with the stories sometimes reaching the front page.


Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy, and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my research in his column for the London Sunday Times.


Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions. But my more recent article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever published, before or since. After it appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in the media. Times columnist David Brooks soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated. Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.


Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later published an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.


There was also a considerable reaction from the academic community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof. Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast column entitled “The End of the American Dream.”


Moreover, I had also published an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself. Many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these serious financial charges.


Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers, Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged. Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes. But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.



Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it attracted vastly more attention than any other element.


For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence proved very difficult to ignore.


Among other things, I focused upon the publicly available statewide lists of National Merit Semifinalists (NMS), a group that constituted the highest-performing one-half percent of American high school seniors. By a fortunate coincidence, this fraction of the American student body was reasonably close in size to the total enrollment of students at the Ivy League schools together with similarly elite schools such as Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. The NMS dataset had previously been almost entirely ignored by researchers, but I found it provided a treasure-trove of useful empirical information.


Since Asian last names are extremely distinctive, I was able to estimate that Asians nationally constituted roughly 25-30% of this top academic group, a figure considerably larger than their enrollment at Harvard and other elite schools. This conclusion was supported by the even greater Asian dominance in more highly selective academic competitions such as the Math Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search, though the far smaller numbers involved reduced the statistical validity of these analyses.


But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As I wrote in my New York Times column…


This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph, demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.



It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single striking graph.




Just one week before that October 2018 article in which I had recapitulated the history of the Harvard lawsuit, I had also published an article responding to a critique by the ADL, a leading Jewish activist organization, taking the opportunity to enumerate my extremely controversial writings.



Given the fearsome reputation of the ADL and its notorious hair-trigger activists, there was a widespread belief that my small webzine would be completely annihilated when I first launched my recent series of controversial articles in early June by praising the works of historian David Irving, a figure long demonized by the ADL. Yet absolutely nothing happened.


During the next three months my subsequent articles directly challenged nearly every hot-button issue normally so fiercely defended by the ADL and its lackeys, so much so that a friendly journalist soon described me as the “Kamikaze from California.” Yet despite my 90,000 words of text and the 13,000 comments I had attracted, the continuing silence of the ADL was absolutely deafening. Meanwhile, my articles were read more than half a million times, with the following being a list of the most provocative pieces:



When divine wrath fails to smite the heretic and terrifying enforcers of official dogma seem to have suddenly lost their taste for battle, others gradually begin to take notice and may grow emboldened. Eventually leading pro-Russian and Libertarian websites such as Russia Insider and LewRockwell began republishing some of my most controversial American Pravda articles, thus bringing my factual claims to the attention of broader audiences. After the conclusion of my series, I began directly ridiculing my strangely timorous ADL opponents, publishing a short column entitled “Has the ADL Gone Into Hiding?” which led the redoubtable Paul Craig Roberts to describe me as “the bravest man I know.”


Apparently the combination of all these factors at long last grew too worrisome for the ADL, and stirring from their secret hiding place, its activists have now finally released a short and rather milquetoast response to my material, one which hardly much impresses me. A few days ago, they Tweeted out their column, together with a photo of their new nemesis…





I was equally unimpressed that they so hotly denounced me for substantially relying upon the writings of Israel Shahak, whom they characterized as viciously “anti-Semitic.” As I had repeatedly emphasized, my own total lack of Aramaic and Hebrew necessarily forces me to rely upon the research of others, and the late Prof. Shahak, an award-winning Israeli academic, certainly seemed a fine source to use. After all, famed linguist Noam Chomsky had lauded Shahak’s works for their “outstanding scholarship,” and several of our other most prominent public intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, and Gore Vidal had been similarly lavish in their praise. Furthermore, one of Shahak’s co-authors was Norton Mezvinsky, a prominent American academic specializing in Middle Eastern history, himself hardly an obscure figure given that both his brother and sister-in-law served in Congress and his nephew later married Chelsea Clinton. And as far as I’m aware almost none of Shahak’s explicit claims about the Talmud or traditional Judaism have ever been directly challenged, while the online availability of his first book allows those so interested to conveniently read it and decide for themselves.



The ADL similarly denounced me for taking seriously the theories of Ariel Toaff, another Israeli academic. But Prof. Toaff, son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, certainly ranks as one of the world’s leading scholarly authorities on Medieval Jewry, and working together with his graduate students and other colleagues, he had devoted many years of effort to the research study in question, drawing upon extensive primary and secondary sources produced in eight different languages. I found his 500 page book quite persuasive, as did Israeli journalist Israel Shamir, and I have seen no credible rebuttals.


Now the work of all these prominent academics and intellectuals may not necessarily be correct, and perhaps I am mistaken in accepting their factual claims. But I would need to see something far more weighty than a casual dismissal in a few paragraphs contained within an anonymous ADL column, whose author for all I know might have been some ignorant young intern.


Those glaring flaws aside, most of the ADL’s remaining catalogue of my numerous heretical positions seemed reasonably accurate, though obviously presented in a somewhat hostile and derogatory fashion and sorely lacking any links to my original pieces. But even this desultory listing of my mortal transgressions was woefully incomplete, with the ADL strangely failing to include mention of some of my most controversial claims.



For example, the authors excluded all reference to my discussion of the thoroughly documented Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s, which played such a crucial role in laying the basis for the State of Israel. And the ADL similarly avoided mentioning the nearly 20,000 words I had allocated to discussing the very considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad had played a central role in both the JFK Assassination and the 9/11 Attacks. Surely this must be one of the few times that the ADL has deliberately avoided leveling the charge of “conspiracy theorist” against an opponent whom they might have so easily slurred in that fashion. Perhaps they felt the evidence I provided was simply too strong for them to effectively challenge.



Both the Guardian and Harvard Crimson articles had highlighted the Holocaust so I should also note that my 2018 article on the Harvard lawsuit had included several exceptionally controversial paragraphs on exactly that subject:



Jannol’s account also contains a particularly intriguing element. Personal essays have become a crucial component of application packages to elite colleges, and these are considered especially effective if they provide strong evidence of hardships and victimhood. Given her extremely wealthy and privileged background, Jannol had originally considered focusing on her status as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, but ultimately decided against it because so many of her peers would be following exactly that same stratagem, explaining to Steinberg that “Everyone’s going to write about their Holocaust grandma.”


Over the last few decades, our news and entertainment industries have elevated Jewish suffering during World War II into the most horrific and monumental tragedy of the modern era, and it not impossible that a substantial fraction of the unfair Jewish advantage in elite admissions may derive from something as simple as the ability of the children of elite Jewish families to wrap themselves in the ultimate victimhood of Holocaust survivor status.


If so, this situation would be particularly ironic, given the considerable evidence that the Holocaust is substantially fraudulent, or even almost entirely so, merely a hoax promoted by heavily Jewish Hollywood, perhaps partially intended to conceal the inescapable reality that in per capita terms Jews worldwide were surely the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century.


Furthermore, during the years since 2018, I’ve greatly compounded my egregious heresies. I’ve published a long series of articles arguing that the global Covid epidemic that has killed twenty million people including more than a million Americans was very likely the result of a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran) and also suggesting that AIDS might not exist as a real disease, quite possibly merely amounting to a medical media hoax.




During the last five years any enterprising American journalist who read and reported my October 15 and October 22, 2018 articles could have produced a major blockbuster expose that might have rocked the Harvard lawsuit and perhaps derailed it in the courts, thereby winning the plaudits of his peers. But none did so and it was left to a British publication to finally break the story a couple of weeks ago, long after the justices had already finalized their ruling. Moreover, even after the Guardian broke the ice with a headline declaring that the Harvard lawsuit had been based upon the work of a “Holocaust denier” not a single American media outlet picked up on that lead and reported the story except for the student-journalists of the Harvard Crimson. What explains this near total silence from our entire media class?


I think the answer to this puzzle lies in the enormous influence of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, which in recent years has become a primary ideological gatekeeper to the Internet. My October 2018 article had revealed the extremely unsavory history and activities of that organization:



There is also a far more serious aspect to the situation. The choice of the ADL as the primary ideological overseer of America’s Internet may seem natural and appropriate to politically-ignorant Americans, a category that unfortunately includes the technology executives leading the companies involved. But this reflects the remarkable cowardice and dishonesty of the American media from which all these individuals derive their knowledge of our world. The true recent history of the ADL is a remarkably sordid and disreputable tale.


In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75% of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.


Not long afterward, an ACLU official who had previously held a high-ranking position with the ADL revealed in an interview that his organization had been the actual source of the highly controversial 1960s surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., which it had then provided to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. For many years Hoover had been furiously denounced in the national media headlines for his use of tapes and other secret information on King’s activities, but when a local San Francisco newspaper revealed that an ADL spying operation had actually been the source of all that sordid material, the bombshell revelation was totally ignored in the national media and only reported by fringe organizations, so that today almost no Americans are aware of that fact.


I know of no other private organization in American history that has been involved in even a sliver of such illegal domestic espionage activity, which appears to have been directed against almost all groups and prominent individuals—left, right, and center—suspected of being insufficiently aligned with Jewish and Israeli interests. Some of the illegal material found in the ADL’s possession even raised dark suspicions that it had played a role in domestic terrorist attacks and political assassinations directed against foreign leaders. I am no legal expert, but given the massive scale of such illegal ADL activities, I wonder whether a plausible case might have been made to prosecute the entire organization under RICO statutes and sentence all of its leaders to long prison terms.


Instead, the resulting government charges were quickly settled with merely a trivial fine and a legal slap on the wrist, demonstrating the near-total impunity provided by massive Jewish political power in modern American society.


In effect, the ADL seems to have long operated as a privatized version of our country’s secret political police, monitoring and enforcing its ideological doctrines on behalf of Jewish groups much as the Stasi did for the Communist rulers of East Germany. Given such a long history of criminal activity, allowing the ADL to extend its oversight to our largest Social Media platforms amounts to appointing the Mafia to supervise the FBI and the NSA, or taking a very large step towards implementing George Orwell’s ” Ministry of Truth” on behalf of Jewish interests.


In his 1981 memoirs, the far right Classics scholar Revilo P. Oliver characterized the ADL as “the formidable organization of Jewish cowboys who ride herd on their American cattle” and this seems a reasonably apt description to me.


Moreover, the bulk of that long article had recounted the origins of the ADL just over a century ago. The organization had been founded to protect Leo Frank, a notorious pedophile rapist and murderer, who attempted to secure his freedom by orchestrating the lynching of a couple of completely innocent black men, and I had summarized this shocking story earlier this year:



As a further example of the widely promoted but apparently fraudulent history, the Jewish writers who have overwhelmingly dominated accounts of the Frank case have frequently claimed that it sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan soon afterward, with the group of citizens responsible for Frank’s 1915 lynching supposedly serving as the inspiration for William Simmons’ reestablishment of that organization a couple of years later. But there seems no evidence for this. Indeed, Simmons strongly emphasized the philo-Semitic nature of his new organization, which attracted considerable Jewish membership.


The primary factor behind the rebirth of the KKK was almost certainly the 1917 release of D.W. Griffith’s overwhelmingly popular landmark film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan of the Reconstruction Era. Given that the American film industry was so overwhelmingly Jewish at the time and the film’s financial backers and leading Southern distributors came from that same background, it could be plausibly argued that the Jewish contribution to the creation of the 1920s Klan was a very crucial one, while the revenue from the film’s distribution throughout the South actually financed Samuel Goldwyn’s creation of MGM, Hollywood’s leading studio.


In their introduction, the NOI authors make the fascinating point that the larger historical meaning of the Frank case in American racial history has been entirely lost. Prior to that trial, it was unprecedented for Southern courts to allow black testimony against a white man, let alone against a wealthy man being tried on serious charges; but the horrific nature of the crime and Conley’s role as the sole witness required a break from that longstanding tradition. Thus, the authors not unreasonably argued that the Frank case may have been as important to the history of black progress in America as such landmark legal verdicts as Plessy v. Ferguson or Brown v. Board. But since almost the entire historical narrative has been produced by fervent Jewish advocates, these facts have been completely obscured and the case entirely misrepresented as an example of anti-Semitic persecution and public murder.


Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.


Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Board because of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.


These are the important consequences that derive from control of the narrative and the flow of information, which allows murderers to be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes, and over the decades, it eventually metastasized into a secret political police force not entirely dissimilar from the widely despised East German Stasi, but with its central goal seeming to be the maintenance of overwhelming Jewish control in a society that is 98% non-Jewish.


We should ask ourselves whether it is appropriate for an organization with such origins and such recent history to be granted enormous influence over the distribution of information across our Internet.



The lengthy 2018 article I’d published revealed those long-hidden truths about the activities and origins of the ADL, attracting considerable readership and more than 750 comments. Perhaps partly as a consequence, a few months later Amazon purged the scholarly book on the Leo Frank case that had so impressed me, ironically doing so during Black History Month. However, it’s still available for sale on the NOI website.



As I discussed late last year, the information I presented about the ADL was so potentially dangerous that the organization seems to have decided that enforcing absolute media silence was the safest policy:



After that initial exchange, the ADL apparently reconsidered its media strategy and concluded that discretion was the better part of valor, slinking back into hiding. Indeed, the highly counter-productive consequences of any challenge either to myself or to my publication became so obvious that they seem to have issued a general edict, forbidding any mention whatsoever in all the media outlets under their editorial influence. Their leadership rightly realized that although we might suffer from their attacks, by drawing much greater attention to our information, such actions might prove severely damaging or even fatal to their long-term interests.


The reality of this presumably ADL-enforced media blockade became apparent in 2020, when the SPLC and its journalistic allies launched a ferocious wave of coordinated attacks aimed at forcing the resignation of Stephen Miller, perhaps the most hated member of the Trump Administration, a drive that came just a few months before the presidential election. The central charge against Miller was that in his private emails he had promoted several controversial posts by blogger Steve Sailer, all of which had originally been published on our website.


Such attacks typically rely upon guilt by association, and the Sailer pieces in question had run on the same page as articles promoting Holocaust Denial and various other exceptionally controversial topics, so the connection was irrefutable. And if those other issues had been publicly linked to Miller, his political fall would have become certain. But the lengthy research report denouncing Miller and the pieces he had endorsed scrupulously avoided any mention of our website or the vastly more controversial material it contained, and as a consequence Miller managed to survive. Apparently maintaining the prohibition against any hint of our existence was far more important than claiming the political scalp of a top Trump advisor. To the ADL and its allies, we constituted a terrifying Lord Voldemort, and merely mentioning our name might result in their destruction.



I think this apparent ADL policy of enforced media silence probably explains why virtually the entire American journalistic community has spent the last five years avoiding any mention of my controversial involvement in the Harvard lawsuit, even if doing so might have derailed the case that now threatens to eliminate Affirmative Action in college admissions.


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