A WASP “Jew”:
Harvard University’s Robert D. Putnam

3,555 words

A Jewish writer asks rhetorically, if a tad cutely: “Robert Putnam, who looks like he could have stepped off the Mayflower [also: he “resembles a Pilgrim”], who can trace his ancestors back to the witch trials in Old Salem [note the snide racial/religious slur], who has always seemed the epitome of the Harvard academic WASP, is Jewish?” (Putnam is a white social scientist who converted to Judaism after marrying a Jewess in 1963.)

A political science professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Putnam, 72, has been cited in white racialist circles because of his most famous book, Bowling Alone (2000), which revealed that the United States has experienced an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life over the past several decades.

The author, who claims race is a social construct, enthusiastically notes that “Political correctness actually worked” in destroying “anti-Semitism” after 1946, but—no surprise—is unperturbed that when he told his Reform congregation Jews are the most popular religious group among Americans, their retort was, “You’re wrong! They do hate us!” (Yes: “hate“—and they were referring to all the brownnosing whites!) For elites, “tolerance” is always a one-way street, obligatory only for whites and Christians.

To my mind, Putnam’s portrait does not present a classic WASP appearance. There is something “off” about his features, as if his half-century immersion in and identification with Judaism and Jewishness, and psychological and emotional antipathy to his own people, physically distorted and transformed his countenance, even as his sexual and reproductive choices biologically engendered non-Aryan children and grandchildren. But the slightly askew visage does not manifest itself in dynamic video footage.

Powerful Backers

In that 2010 talk, by the way, Putnam maintained, using the Industrial Revolution as an example, that in big social transformations (today, replacement migration) social costs occur upfront while the benefits come only later. The process is this: early costs are analyzed and reacted to by intelligent, competent, civic-minded academics, government officials, and Left-wing “activists” who carefully study what’s going on, mitigate the negatives (e.g., stigmatize and suppress white opposition), and maximize the positives, leading to progress in the end.

Putnam is very much the Establishment apparatchik. Indeed, he looks suspiciously like a spook-linked academic or, if not that, something akin to it that I have not seen before. At any rate, there’s more to him than meets the eye.

He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin (a New York real estate mogul, owner of the Empire State Building and other Manhattan properties) Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Harvard is probably America’s premier (de facto) Jewish university.

In the published version of his 2007 Skytte Prize Lecture (linked below), Putnam expressed thanks for generous financial support from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and more than three dozen community foundations.

Interviewer Brian Lamb of C-SPAN TV’s Booknotes cannily picked up on the shadowy, powerful backers of Putnam’s work. About 35 or 36 minutes into the 2000 interview it was revealed that the Trilateral Commission is among them, and that Putnam is a member. Lamb wondered what the Commission’s and big foundations’ interest is in backing Putnam’s work, and the academic resorted to some fancy footwork to evade the issue.

The 1995 “Bowling Alone” article that brought Putnam national attention, including an audience with President Bill Clinton at Camp David, appeared in the tiny, little-known Journal of Democracy, which had a circulation of “about 5 paid subscribers.” In reality, the journal is published by the secretive, neoconservative, government-funded, spy-connected National Endowment for Democracy.

Putnam served on the staff of the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. His capsule biography notes that he “consults widely with national leaders, including the last three American presidents, the last three British prime ministers, and the current French president. [Apparently they’re worried about something.] Putnam founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners [President Barack Obama is one of its 31 ‘participants’] to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.”

“Civic renewal” is here code for ethnic cleansing. Much about the entire “social capital” project is reminiscent of Communist intellectuals’ vision of the “New Soviet Man.” Indeed, it is essentially the same scheme in a new guise.

Race Zealot

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to “hunker down.” Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration. (Abstract from Putnam’s 2007 article “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture.” Emphases added.)

Putnam, like other replacement migration zealots, has adopted the shopworn “historical inevitability” mantle from Communism. He declares, “The most certain prediction that we can make about almost any modern [European] society is that it will be more diverse [non-white] a generation from now than it is today. This is true from Sweden to the United States and from New Zealand to Ireland.” He calls replacement migration “inevitable” and “desirable” (one reason being—yes—enrichment of the national cuisine). “Moreover, because immigrant groups typically have higher fertility rates than native-born groups, ethnic diversity in virtually all of these countries would still increase in the years ahead, even if all new immigration were somehow halted.” (Skytte Prize Lecture, pp. 137, 138, 140)

Note: the process of racial destruction will continue even if all immigration is halted. This necessitates repatriation, removal, or expulsion.

It is certainly true that large Aryan populations have been destroyed many times in the past through intermixture—in East Asia (the Tocharians), Persia, India, the Mediterranean Basin, Latin America, and elsewhere. As Putnam implicitly urges, current elites can achieve the same results in the same basic manner, destroying the last remnants of the white race in the process.

The problem with this argument is that genocide has been declared by Jews, Leftists, and government officials to be a literal crime against humanity. They should be prosecuted under their own laws. One might also ask: How would Jews respond if the social costs of contemporary racism were shifted from Aryans to themselves? How would Putnam react? We know the answer. They would squeal like stuck pigs, the “unstoppable” social transformation would grind to an immediate and permanent halt, and the lever would be jammed swiftly into reverse.

For, note well, the Jewish problem, the universal conflict between all Gentile races and Jews throughout history, could be solved once and for all by eradicating the Jews. Not by killing them, of course, but by destroying them as a social construct, exactly as Jewish race theorist Noel Ignatiev (favorably cited by Putnam along with some of that Communist’s Race Traitor colleagues) sanctimoniously says should be done to whites—creating social conditions such that Jews cannot expand or replace their population, practice their religion, or maintain their communities. As Putnam smugly notes, assuming without thinking about it that only whites will be harmed because that is the intent of policy and we are currently powerless: “Social distance depends in turn on social identity: our sense of who we are. Identity itself is socially constructed and can be socially de-constructed and re-constructed.” (Skytte Prize Lecture, p. 159) A different set of rulers could give Jews and communists a stiff dose of the same medicine. Not only would it be humane, it would be highly moral and socially beneficial. They say so themselves!

Some of Putnam’s findings indicate an uphill battle ahead for revolutionary opposition to genocide: “The United States Army today has become a relatively colour-blind institution. Systematic surveys have shown that the average American soldier has many closer inter-racial friendships than the average American civilian of the same age and social class. . . . Strict enforcement [against whites] of anti-discrimination and anti-defamation policies is a key part of the story.” (Skytte Prize Lecture, p. 161) On the other hand, “nothing guarantees that what gets done through networks will be socially beneficial [from the Establishment’s point of view]. Al Qaeda, for instance, is an excellent example of social capital, enabling its participants to accomplish goals they could not accomplish without that network.” (p. 138)

In recent years Putnam has engaged in a comprehensive examination of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His studies evince an unhealthy interest in remote, thinly-populated areas of the country with aged but still predominantly “white” (≥ 90%) populations that nevertheless contain exotic, pampered “minorities” collected from every corner of the earth. These pathetic remnants of America are considered too homogeneous by our “get rid of them now!” rulers.

The Boston intellectual’s conclusion, based on surveys of 30,000 people in the United States, is that more racial diversity is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. In other words, Putnam found that although distrust between races rises with diversity, distrust within populations rises as well.

Thus, destroying racial and cultural homogeneity has seriously alienated whites from one another: “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do. Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.” (Skytte Prize Lecture, pp. 148–49)

Charles Murray, who cited Bowling Alone in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (2012), noticed this discovery. “In the years after Bowling Alone appeared, Robert Putnam’s research led him to a disturbing finding: Ethnic diversity works against social trust within a community—not only trusting people of the other ethnicity, but against trusting even neighbors of one’s own ethnic group.” (p. 251)

Anyone old enough to have lived in White America knows this to be true.

Murray, a Beltway neoconservative employed by the American Enterprise Institute, is the same age as Putnam and holds similar views: “How is the corrosive effect of ethnic diversity on social capital to be reconciled with the reality of an increasingly diverse twenty-first century America? I personally am optimistic that the distrust that has accompanied ethnic diversity will diminish—that the generations [of whites] born in the last few decades” have been successfully socialized against honoring, safeguarding, or fighting to preserve their race. He acknowledges, however, that this is “still a hope, not a fact.” (p. 251)

Murray, like Putnam, is an extreme philo-Semite who married and bred outside his race. (He is Scots-Irish.) His first wife was an upper-class Thai, by whom he had two hybrid children. His second wife is a Left-wing East Coast college instructor from his Iowa hometown, by whom he had two more children. Murray and his second wife, who retains her maiden name, live in Maryland and attend a Quaker meeting in Virginia.

For a short, plain-language summary of Bowling Alone‘s findings read “Lonely Bowlers, Unite: Mend the Social Fabric; A Political Scientist Renews His Alarm At the Erosion of Community Ties” (New York Times, May 6, 2000). It provides important insight into a complaint so many white nationalists express: that we are only “keyboard warriors” (passive, active only on the Internet, not in “real life”). This is not specific to the movement; it is a giant social phenomenon affecting all whites that has materialized in recent decades. It is important to understand how, why, and even that this is occurring. We can’t simply rail against a brute fact like that and expect it to magically disappear. Things are not the same as they used to be.

Vicious, totalitarian repression of racially conscious whites by Jewish groups, the controlled media, academia, intelligence agencies, the police, prosecutors, judges, and Left-wing domestic terrorists does not help, either. Both white alienation, the coming apart at the social seams described by Putnam and Murray, and institutionalized racism and repression are huge albatrosses around our collective necks.

As neo-Marxist sociologist C. Wright Mills pointed out in The Power Elite (1956):

The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

An Overlooked Factor?

Putnam and his colleagues have been very careful to rule out explanations other than race for their findings because unalloyed cheerleading for immigration and multiracialism is required even when your only motive is to insure that the destructive process works properly.

Nevertheless, there is another contributor to political and some social anomie besides race. This is the anti-democratic nature of contemporary politics and the controlled media. Who takes them seriously? Everything is top-down and determined beforehand.

If a politically correct position isn’t adopted immediately (it usually is), it will be a year from now, or five years from now, or ten years from now. If it doesn’t win by vote it will be imposed by judges. If state courts don’t play ball, federal courts will. If it loses at one level it will be appealed to the next. If the courts reject it, statutes or executive orders will be resorted to. The bureaucracy and mass media can also be counted upon. If all else fails, laws will simply be ignored or violated, as in the case of immigration and antifa domestic terrorism. The EU and indeed every First World nation exhibits the same rigid, top-down structure.

Whether you agree or disagree with a particular position, just think about it. Abortion. Socialized medicine. Replacement migration (mass non-white immigration). Homosexuality and gay marriage. Feminism. Integration. Anti-white “civil rights” laws. “Affirmative action.” More violence on behalf of Jews in the Middle East. Anti-family policies. Ever-increasing curbs on speech, including yet-to-come (in America, but already enacted elsewhere) “hate speech” and “Holocaust denial” laws. You’d have to be a moron to harbor the slightest doubt about the ultimate outcome of any of these contentious issues.

So at least as far as politics and “democracy” are concerned, nonparticipation is highly rational. Why waste time with such nonsense? They’re going to get their way no matter what. The expression “You can’t fight city hall” was common even in a much more honest, fair, open, democratic, and decentralized America than has existed for a long, long time.

The next stage of social alienation will occur when people refuse even to respond to surveys—a practice I adopted a quarter-century ago despite my initial sympathy for and understanding of survey research because of my social science education.

Of course, it won’t matter. Everything will continue along its merry, predictable way. The National Security Agency (NSA) will supply rulers with a much more detailed and reliable picture of “public opinion” than survey research ever could.

Sleeping With the Enemy

Though born in Rochester, New York and raised a Methodist in Port Clinton, Ohio, Putnam’s background as described in the Jewish Daily Forward article quoted at the beginning suggests he is a member of the Boston Brahmin family of New England Putnams—part of America’s social aristocracy. One source explicitly identifies him as belonging to the family, though without citing any supporting evidence. It would explain in part why a Jewess married him. Jews genetically intertwine with aristocratic Gentiles, those with power, money, and status, including elusive lineage status. It is a function of the strange, utterly unique human ecological niche they occupy.

If he actually is descended from the New England Putnams, he is a blue blood academic similar to Harvard sociologist George C. Homans (an Adams), Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbia University historian Robert Livingston Schuyler, and some others.

Putnam met his wife while he was an undergraduate at Philadelphia’s Swarthmore College, a radical Left-wing Quaker institution that was “the greatest intellectual influence on my life.”

“Yes,” he boasted to the Forward reporter, “I am personally responsible for a minyan!” By this he meant that his two half-Jewish children were raised as Jews, married non-Jews (one of whom converted to Judaism), while all six quarter-Jewish grandchildren are being raised Jewish.

However, since Putnam attends a Reform synagogue in Lexington, Massachusetts (that’s Lexington of Lexington and Concord fame—God, how fast and far America has fallen!), and his children and grandchildren, members of America’s elite (which is Jewish, not white), will almost certainly identify with and support Jewish causes, it seems certain that most of their genes ultimately will not be incorporated into the Jewish population, which will reject them, but instead pollute our own rapidly muddying and diminishing gene pool.

Putnam’s synagogue’s website contains not a word about the Minutemen or the American Revolution, but does provide information about the Kolin Torah, a memorial to the “Six Million” that is read by the congregation on Yom Kippur and Yom Hashoah to commemorate the alleged attempt by whites to slaughter the Jews. In October 2013 a course is being offered about the “Jewish origins of Christianity,” emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus using the Judaizing Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2011) written by 50 Jews, not a single Christian, and taught by a professor from Boston University’s Department of Religion and the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. Also on tap is a “Brotherhood Breakfast” featuring a lecture about Israeli and American security in the Middle East. Ahavat tsiyon, “Love of Zion” (action in support of the State of Israel), is a “fundamental value” of Temple Isaiah. I guess all of the above is what is referred to as Constitutionally-mandated “separation of church and state.”

Both Robert Putnam and Charles Murray have apparently found solace and a sense of belonging denied their fellows by identifying deeply with non-white, even anti-white, Jews, just as others have embraced Negroes, Amerindians, and Muslims. It is a twisted, nihilistic way to adapt, but perhaps more realistic and natural for most lost souls than the daunting task of trying to construct communities out of a race in chaos in the teeth of fierce opposition from a viciously repressive anti-white state.

Endgame

After reading several of Putnam’s articles about social capital online and watching his 1-hour C-SPAN interview from 2000, I strongly believe much can be learned from his findings. There’s a reason why his work is famous. But it would require a great deal of time to analyze and evaluate ways to foster and construct new communities to replace those of the old order now irretrievably lost. The objective would be to selectively and creatively adapt information and ideas from his work that would be useful for our specific purposes, not to advance Putnam’s and his powerful backers’ goals.

Short-term, the result of Putnam’s energetic efforts will be more and more bowling alone and television watching by increasingly lonely and alienated whites as the world darkens around them and their population falls off a cliff. Long-term, absent revolutionary resistance, it means eradication. Meanwhile, Jews and their camp followers will be more and more secure, at ease, self-confident, prosperous, and successful.

Robert Putnam and many, many others are as deeply committed to philo-Semitic, anti-white policies as some of us are to pro-Aryan positions. Nothing anyone says, absent control of the mass media and the ability to dish out social rewards and punishments, will turn them from their path or evoke the slightest sympathy from them.

We know this because their Communist and fellow-traveling predecessors, whose direct heirs they are, committed the most horrible crimes without a twinge of conscience.

Supplemental Reading

Jane Eisner, “Robert Putnam Assays Religious Tolerance From a Unique Angle,” Jewish Daily Forward, November 10, 2010.

Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 65–78. This article had a big impact when it appeared and made Putnam famous. It evolved into his best-known book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). Curiously, he does not discuss (or even mention) race, ethnicity, or immigration in the article. Available free online.

Robert D. Putnam interview, “Bowling Alone,” Booknotes (C-SPAN TV, December 24, 2000) 1 hour. Quote: “Commercial entertainment television is really lethal for civic connection.” Available free online.

Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (June 2007): 137–74. Available free online.

Robert D. Putnam, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” The American Prospect (Winter 1996). This early social capital article touches briefly on race, but only in the black-white context. No mention is made of immigration or other races. Putnam dismisses race out-of-hand as a factor in the decline of social capital. Instead he identifies television as the major culprit. Available free online.

Mark K. Smith, “Robert Putnam, Social Capital and Civic Community,” The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education (2001, 2007). Detailed biography and references.