Guilt by Association for Elon Musk’s DOGE

Ron Unz on

Although Google Analytics and other standard third-party utilities show how much traffic my own articles on The Unz Review regularly receive, they fail to inform me exactly who is reading my work or how much influence these pieces may have. But every now and then a burst of external illumination suggests that at least some of my writings of the last dozen years have had a significant perhaps even transformative impact.

Along with everyone else, I’ve been reading the media accounts of Elon Musk’s DOGE project. In that controversial effort, small teams of youthful engineers had been granted access to some of the most important systems of the federal government, resulting in widespread public claims of the massive waste and corruption that they had allegedly found and prompting the prospect of huge cuts in those gigantic bureaucracies. For example, the $40 billion USAID seems likely to be almost completely gutted by the Trump Administration, with plans to cut its 10,000 person staff by 97%.

One of the more prominent DOGE investigators has been 25-year-old Gavin Kliger, a 2020 graduate of UC Berkeley with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who has been named a senior advisor to the Office of Personnel Management. His role at that agency and the IRS has been sufficiently important that the New York Times recently published a short article describing his activities.

These public attacks on enormous government agencies naturally inspired fierce counter-attacks by the many media outlets opposed to Musk’s project, and their journalists have sifted the background of those newly super-empowered twenty-somethings for controversial material.

Last week I’d noticed a sudden unexpected burst of new readership for “Our American Pravda,” an article that I had published a dozen years ago. This piece had eventually inspired my long series of a similar name.

I soon discovered that this new attention had resulted from a wave of attacks against Kliger, including a hit-piece by Mother Jones, a prominent left-liberal investigative publication:

In a since-deleted Substack post, an engineer working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote about his radicalization, noting a key influence was an essay by Ron Unz…

The Substack post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was written by DOGE engineer Gavin Kliger…

The post was published Friday and was still available online Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. ET. It was deleted on Sunday. In the post, Kliger credits Unz’s “Our American Pravda“—a 2013 essay published in The American Conservative that railed against what Unz claimed were systemic media failures—with beginning the engineer’s “political awakening.”

“Reading it was like putting on glasses for the first time,” writes Kliger, whose LinkedIn says he is a senior advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management. “The issue wasn’t just bias—it was that entire narratives, the ones we took for granted as truth, were carefully curated illusions.” (Mother Jonessaved a copy of Kliger’s Substack post before it was deleted.)

“Guilt by association” is a common media tactic employed to discredit political opponents. Someone else is somehow connected to the intended victim, and the argument is made that the massive iniquities of the former individual should carry over to the latter. The Mother Jones hit piece relied upon this doubtful approach.

After reporting Kliger’s declaration that he had been heavily influenced by my April 2013 article, most of the remaining text focused on some of the controversial or ultra-controversial pieces that I had written during the dozen years that followed, suggesting that these therefore tainted the young DOGE engineer. My lengthy American Pravda series runs well over 100 articles and nearly a million words, so the writers mined it for explosive quotations although Kliger claimed that he had remained unaware of that much larger body of work:

In an email to Mother Jones on Sunday, Kliger said he did not read the later “American Pravda” posts from Unz.“

I specifically referred to this 2013 article from The American Conservative, ‘Our American Pravda.’ Note the ‘Our’,” Kliger wrote. “I have neither referenced or read [the other work in the “‘American Pravda” series].” (The DOGE engineer also noted The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf recommended the 2013 Unz essay in a blog.)

As Kliger explained, a writer at the very respectable Atlantic had strongly recommended my article when it first appeared. But if the journalists attacking him had further investigated, they would have found that the same had also been true of prominent free market economist Tyler Cowen, noted author Eamonn Fingleton writing in Forbes, and various other very mainstream writers and public intellectuals. Influential libertarian historian Tom Woods had heavily excerpted my article and Alexander Cockburn’s leftist Counterpunch publication had republished it in its entirety, as had ZeroHedge.

So if Mother Jones saw fit to interrogate and condemn Kliger for my far more controversial subsequent writings, why should all those other individuals and publications have escaped similar criticism? Indeed, my 2013 article became one of the most widely read pieces in The American Conservative that year, and as far as I recall almost nobody at the time had criticized or condemned it.

This underscores the extreme unfairness of the Mother Jones attack against Kliger.

Furthermore, this barely scraped the surface of the absurdities of the “guilt by association” argument used to tarnish Musk’s young DOGE protege.

Given their investigation of my body of work, the Mother Jones writers must surely be aware that just a few months before that 2013 article I had also published “The Myth of American Meritocracy” in that same publication. This exceptionally long and detailed 26,000 word analysis had documented the huge biases and unfairness in the admissions systems of Harvard and our other most elite American colleges.

New York Times Columnist David Brooks soon ranked my piece as probably the best magazine article published in America that year, a verdict strongly secondedby a top editor at the Economist.

One of my central findings had been the very strong quantitative evidence that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools were practicing racial discrimination by surreptitiously maintaining Asian Quotas in their admissions policies, and this soon prompted the New York Times to organize an important symposium on that explosive topic in which I eagerly participated. The Yale Political Union and the Yale Law School invited me to give a couple of public lectures on that controversial conclusion and the rest of my Meritocracy analysis. A very long list of other writers and public intellectuals commented on my article, an overwhelming majority of them quite favorably, with their discussions appearing in Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and various other publications. These included such prominent public figures as Harvard Prof. Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria.

So if Mother Jones is now raking Kliger over the coals for admitting that he had been heavily influenced by one of my articles from April 2013, why should they not do the same with David Brooks, Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, the editors of the New York Times, and all the others who had highlighted and strongly promoted a far longer article from November 2012?

Furthermore, in 2016 I published my first print collection, The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, a 700 page volume containing both those articles and many others, and it attracted strongly favorable comments by some very distinguished academic scholars and journalists:

With high intelligence, common sense, and advanced statistical skills, presented transparently and accessibly, Ron Unz has for decades been addressing key issues in a rapidly changing America, enlightening us on the implications and effects of bilingual programs in American schools, clarifying the issues around crime and immigration so often distorted in political and popular discussion, placing the question of an increased minimum wage effectively on the national agenda, and addressing most provocatively the issue of affirmative action and admission to selective colleges and universities, revealing some aspects of this ever disputed question that have never been noted or discussed publicly before. He is one of our most valuable discussants and analysts of public issues.—Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology, Harvard University, and author of Beyond the Melting Pot.

Few people on the planet are smarter than Ron Unz or have more intellectual curiosity. This fascinating and provocative collection of essays explores a remarkable range of topics, many of them high profile, some of them arcane. Unz’s analysis is always serious and invariably challenges prevailing wisdoms, which is to say there are a lot of controversial arguments in this book. No one is likely to agree with every one of his conclusions, but we would be better off if there were more people like Ron Unz among us. —John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of The Israel Lobby.

Ron Unz is a brilliant essayist. His interests run from ancient history and black holes to contemporary issues like racial quotas and the minimum wage. He moves swiftly to the heart of a subject with cogent analysis and limpid argument. This collection of essays sparkles with unexpected gems ranging from critiques of the mainstream press to appreciation of dissenters from common wisdom such as General Bill Odom and Alexander Cockburn. In every paragraph of these essays the reader enjoys a penetrating intelligence at work. —Nicholas Wade, former writer and editor for The New York Times, and author of Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct, and A Troublesome Inheritance.

Over the past two decades as an original thinker and writer Ron Unz has tackled complex and significant subjects such as immigration, education, economics, race, and the press, pushing aside common assumptions. This book brings together in one volume these pieces from a variety of publications. Unlike other essayists on culture and politics, Unz shreds ideology and relies on statistical data to support his often groundbreaking ideas, such as his 2010 essay on “The Myth of Hispanic Crime.” And his 2014 efforts to put a $12 an hour minimum wage bill before California voters is an example of how the action of an individual can draw public attention to an issue he believes is necessary for the economic health of the Republic. Anyone reading this book will learn a great deal about America from an incisive writer and scholar who has peeled back layers of conventional wisdom to expose the truth on issues of prime importance today. —Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter and editor for The New York Times, whose story inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields.

Thus, Kliger seems to have had quite good company in his favorable reaction to my 2013 article, demonstrating that the attack against him on those grounds was entirely self-defeating.

The bulk of the Mother Jones article summarized my subsequent horrific ideological transgressions during the dozen years that followed, and apparently much of it was ultimately drawn from an ADL critique. But I was a bit surprised at how abbreviated and scanty their treatment seemed to be. For unknown reasons, many of my most explosive and incendiary claims had been left on the cutting-room floor.

I think the only time that the ADL has criticized my work was in an anonymous and rather milquetoast column published back in 2019, and in my far longer rebuttal I noted both its serious factual confusion and the rather strange reticence displayed in its accusations:

The ADL may boast an annual budget of $60 million and have many hundreds of full-time employees, but its research skills seem sorely lacking. I discovered that they opened their rebuke by denouncing me as a notorious “anti-immigrant activist.” This seems an extremely odd claim given that I have published perhaps a quarter-million words on that contentious topic over the last twenty-five years, nearly all of it online and fully searchable, and my views have never been characterized in that fashion. To cite just one example, my article “California and the End of White America” appeared as a 1999 cover-story in Commentary, the flagship publication of The American Jewish Committee, and surely anyone reading it would be greatly puzzled by the ADL’s description. Indeed, just a few years earlier, I had been a top featured speaker at the October 1994 pro-immigrant protest in downtown Los Angeles, a 70,000 strong political rally that was the largest such gathering in American history to that date.

Over the years, my political activities have been the subject of many thousands of articles in the mainstream media, including a half-dozen front-page stories in the New York Times, and these would provide a similar picture, as did the New Republic cover story chronicling my California successes. Moreover, my views on immigrants haven’t changed all that much over the years as demonstrated by my more recent articles such as “The Myth of Hispanic Crime,”“Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America” and “A Grand Bargain on Immigration?”Perhaps the intrepid ADL investigators should acquaint themselves with a powerful new technological tool called “Google.”

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.

American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words

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.

At the beginning of that long article I’d emphasized that the ADL’s notoriously hair-trigger reactions to any views it considered “anti-Semitic” had given it a fearsome reputation. Yet strangely enough, months of my writing and the very considerable readership it attracted had failed to draw any such response:

In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community.

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economistquickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.

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…

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 Insiderand 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.

The likely reasons that the ADL had been so extremely reluctant to challenge me soon became apparent in my long response, most of which focused on the true history of that very influential Jewish activist organization. The facts I reported were solidly established yet almost totally unknown to nearly all Americans, even including the most highly-educated ones. As I explained:

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 actually a 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.

However, probably even more damaging to the ADL was my lengthy exposition of its true 1913 origins, material that filled nearly two-thirds of my long essay. I explained that the ADL had been founded more than a century ago with the central goal of preventing a notorious Jewish child-rapist and murderer named Leo Frank from being justly punished for his brutal crimes. My closing paragraphs recounted the facts that I had carefully documented at considerable length:

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. Boardbecause 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.

Following my very forceful response, the ADL rather understandably went back into permanent hiding. That widely-feared organization has notably failed to challenge me during the half-dozen years that have followed, even as I added additional articles totaling more than a half-million words to my American Pravda series, many of these on topics very close to the ADL’s stated mission.

In 2023, Elon Musk famously tangled with the ADL, and Mike Whitney interviewed me about that powerful organization, allowing me to recapitulate much of that earlier material.

Kliger had mentioned the impact that my 2013 article had on his world view, and although I have demonstrated the ludicrous nature of the resulting guilt-by-association attacks against him, I was hardly surprised that these had been made. His political antagonists obviously regarded his connection to my own work as a major vulnerability and sought to exploit it in order to discredit him and the larger DOGE project that he represented. Fairness is not part of the rough-and-tumble of politics, and their smears may have inflicted some significant damage.

But given these facts there is a vastly more obvious and important example in which the media had scrupulously avoided any such approach, and thoughtful observers must surely have been puzzled by this remarkable case of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark.”

I have already explained that in late 2012 I published a very long and detailed quantitative analysis demonstrating the biased and discriminatory admissions practices of America’s most elite colleges, including powerful evidence that the Ivy League maintained what amounted to secret Asian Quotas. For many years, Asian-American families had held such suspicions, but I now provided something close to conclusive proof, and one of my graphs went viral, being widely discussed and republished elsewhere, including in the New York Times.

I’d always been a strong opponent of our system of Affirmative Action, and I soon published a short piece in National Review, arguing that my findings might be used to overturn decades of Supreme Court decisions allowing the use of racial preferences.

The following year, Students for Fair Admissions was founded and began to seek out Asian-American plaintiffs for a lawsuit charging Harvard University and other colleges with racial discrimination in their admissions practices. On a parallel track, a coalition of 64 different Asian-American organizations filed a 51-page complaintagainst Harvard University with the Office of Civil Rights, making similar charges and drawing heavily upon my own quantitative research.

Although I was not personally involved in either of those efforts, I followed the lawsuit in the media during the next decade as it slowly wound its way through our federal courts. I wished the plaintiffs well but was skeptical of their chances of success given that the justices of the Supreme Court had reaffirmed their support for Affirmative Action in all the previous challenges that had reached them.

These racial policies had now remained in place for nearly a half-century, and I had begun to view them as an enduring aspect of our society. Others, however, hoped that changes in the composition of the high court raised the possibility that a different verdict might be obtained this time round.

Meanwhile, I relaunched my American Pravda series in 2018 and soon began covering topics of an extremely controversial nature. At the time I had published my original 2012 Meritocracy article, I had been regarded as a fully mainstream figure, but my new research and writing now established me as one of the most controversial individuals found anywhere on the Internet.

That same year, the lawsuit of the Asian-American organizations against Harvard University finally reached federal district court in Boston, leading to a large flurry of media stories on the case and the possibility that it might finally strike down America’s entrenched system of Affirmative Action. A major article in the New York Times noted that my own research had been an important factor sparking the lawsuit, and Prof. Niall Ferguson mentioned the same thing in his column for the London Sunday Times.

Utilizing the discovery process, the plaintiffs had also uncovered that the publication of my 2012 article had prompted Harvard to undertake an internal review of my accusations, and this had confirmed that their admissions process indeed seemed to be discriminating against Asian applicants. At the time, the administrators had suppressed those embarrassing findings, but this report later became a powerful legal weapon for their opponents once the trial began.

I published a long article summarizing these new legal developments and recapitulating my original 2012 analysis:

As it happened, in the preceding four or five months I had published some of my most absolutely incendiary American Pravda articles. These had praised historian David Irving, suggested that Jews had historically murdered Christian children to use their blood in magic rituals, and noted that traditional Talmudic Jews regularly prayed to Satan. In other articles I described the Zionist-Nazi partnership that helped create the State of Israel, I argued that the Holocaust was largely a hoax, and I pointed to the strong evidence that the Israeli Mossad had played a central role in both the JFK Assassination and the 9/11 Attacks.

A couple of weeks before the Harvard trial began, the ADL bitterly denounced me for taking many of those positions, and I had responded by explaining that their own organization had been established to prevent the just punishment of a Jewish child-rapist and murderer.

Given this odd coincidence of timing, I would assume that word soon spread among all the journalists and activists that the legal case aimed at overturning a half-century of American Affirmative Action policies had substantially been based upon the research of an individual who had recently revealed his extraordinarily controversial views on a wide range of other subjects, an association that surely no one would easily forget. Yet absolutely no mention of this astonishing fact ever appeared in the media.

In 2019 the opponents of Affirmative Action lost in federal district court and in 2020, the First Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled against them, endorsing the American status quo on racial preferences. Therefore, the plaintiffs appealed that verdict to the Supreme Court, hoping that the justices would agree to hear their case.

During this same period, the defense of Affirmative Action became an enormously important political cause among liberal activists and organizations as well as their mainstream media allies, all of whom publicly pledged to do their utmost to prevent those longstanding racial policies from being overturned. Many of them feared that the recent changes in the composition of the Supreme Court might put those programs at considerable legal risk.

Given my exceptionally controversial views on other subjects, I began to wonder why the media had made such efforts to conceal my own significant role in the case. If they had instead emphasized and exaggerated my responsibility, they might have easily used guilt-by-association to severely damage the ongoing legal attack against Affirmative Action.

For obvious reasons, I avoided mentioning any of ideas as the case proceeded forward, but with the Supreme Court ruling about to be announced in June 2023, I finally broke my silence by publishing an article that raised this issue and framed it using a bold political analogy:

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…

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 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…

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.

Just as many had expected, the sweeping 6-to-3 vote of the Supreme Court dealt a huge body-blow to racial preferences in higher education and all other aspects of our society.

On the face of it, the total refusal of Affirmative Action supporters to utilize my name and my extremely radioactive views to derail the lawsuit challenging that cherished policy seems utterly inexplicable, and I would hope that some dilligent investigative journalists would determine the truth of what happened. But at the time I closed my article by offering my own speculative hypothesis:

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.

A few days ago I learned that a 25-year-old named Gavin Kliger had been radicalized by reading my original American Pravda article, and such an impact had been exactly its intended purpose. My entire American Pravda series has been crafted as a lethal ideological dagger aimed straight at the heart of the ruling political regime of the Western world. That body of work now includes well over 100 articles totaling nearly a million words of text.

Kliger’s awakening came to my attention when I read a short guilt-by-association hit-piece published in Mother Jones. But as a unintended byproduct of that unfair attack, thousands perhaps many thousands of new individuals have probably encountered my body of work for the first time, perhaps with fateful consequences.

I think this may help explain why the ADL and its allies might have willingly sacrificed Affirmative Action rather than risk bringing such dangerous information to wider public attention.

Since so much of my work has tended to focus on ultra-controversial topics, I have tried to always be ultra-careful in my analysis. As a consequence, I would still stand behind at least 99% of everything I have published over the last thirty-odd years. But if even just 10% or 15% of the material contained in my American Pravda articles were acknowledged as correct, the ideological impact upon our society would be revolutionary.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by a small Chinese media organization, and in one of those segments, now viewed more than a half-million times, I suggested that American society might indeed be on the cusp of just such a revolutionary situation.

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By Ron Unz

Published by Unz.com

 

 

Republished by The 21st Century

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com

 

 

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