The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, African Borders, and a New Book

Links for March 2025

You may have noticed I’ve been publishing fewer pieces lately. It’s not because I’ve gotten lazy or there isn’t much to talk about. Rather, I’m now working on a new book.

You may be asking yourself what happened to the one on Elite Human Capital? Well, nobody wanted to publish that one, and a friend in the industry convinced me that going the self-publish route was actually a bad signal if I wanted to write popular books in the future. Moreover, I became convinced by critics who said that the term was too confusing.

As he’s become a dominant political force, I’ve realized that I have an Elon Musk problem. He exhibits in extreme form all of the worst traits of Low Human Capital, but one has to admit he is smart and economically productive. So explaining to people that I have a definition of Elite Human Capital that excludes Elon Musk – or more precisely, that he is the antithesis of – became too difficult. This isn’t to say that the underlying idea here is wrong. We need a framework to understand the fact that he, and others on the right, lie all the time and have a deep hostility toward truth seeking and open dialogue, and this forms a cultural that contrasts with what the ones we find among the mainstream media and other elite institutions.

For the book I’m writing now, I’ve gotten a major publisher. The ideas I will present are going to be related to those that were going to be in the EHC book, but the topic is distinct and the ideas will be presented in ways that make more intuitive sense to people. As for the term Elite Human Capital, I’m going to stop fighting against what the marketplace of ideas is telling me and start to use it in a more intuitive sense, to refer to smart people. Musk is therefore EHC, though most EHC is, thank God, not like him and in fact disgusted by the role he plays in our political and social life.

I’m unsure how to think about when to talk more about the book. I have an outline, but it feels too soon to go into what it will be about. I’m aiming to publish some time in the first half of 2026, and you will obviously hear more about it as the release date approaches.

What all this mean for this Substack is that I’ll have much less time to write articles from now until the rest of the year. There’s a direct tradeoff, as time and mental energy put towards new essays delay when I can finish the book. So I definitely will not be keeping up the pace of 2-4 articles a week that has been the norm. I’ll probably be cutting back to one article a week, or perhaps even one every two weeks. Even though there will be fewer essays, I may paywall a higher percentage of them in order to still be giving paid subscribers enough unique content. It depends on how I feel about any particular piece. I’ll probably continue to do livestreams and podcasts at about the same rate, since those don’t take a lot of time. I also hope to publish works from lesser known writers that I think deserve more exposure.

And of course, I’ll continue doing the links, as I am here.

Some recent podcast appearances: interview with Anna Gát, and a stream where Substack CEO Chris Bests hosted me and Katherine Dee. I’ve previously shared my recent Vox interview, but for those who didn’t listen here’s a transcript, attached to an article about my role in popularizing the idea of a relationship between civil rights law and wokeness.

1. John Hodgson was a British journalist who traveled with anti-Bolshevik forces, and a decade later published a book about it called With Denikin’s Armies: Being a Description of the Cossack Counter-Revolution in South Russia, 1918-1920. Here’s an article that takes excerpts from the book on how the White Army saw Jews and a few other topics. No surprise: they were not fans. A lot of detail here on how virulent and irrational a lot of the antisemitism was. Part of that was the result of Russian society not having built a native class of intellectuals and leaders under the stifling influence of the aristocracy. Hodgson’s prediction that maybe the Bolsheviks wouldn’t be so bad as rulers didn’t hold up though, to say the least.

2. Relatedly, a reader passes on this 2022 article on "Judeo-Bolshevism." Honestly, I had read a lot about the connections between Jews and Bolshevism from my racism days, Kevin Mac Donald and such, and although I no longer blamed contemporary Jews or thought it had contemporary relevance, I took it for granted that the underlying facts were true.

This is a comprehensive piece that shows although Jews were overrepresented among the communist elite in many ways, the same is true for other minorities. And Jews weren't the worst offenders; Latvians and Lithuanians are much more blameworthy! Moreover, Jews did not vote for socialist parties when they had the chance, and as a relatively well off group disproportionately suffered due to policies aimed at dispossessing the upper classes.

Good read for anyone who is interested in this period of history, or wants to detox from far right ideas.

3. In his conversation with Tyler, NYT science reporter Carl Zimmer is completely stumped by a question asking about his most non-mainstream scientific views.

ZIMMER: [sighs] The thing is, when I am writing about science itself, in terms of the scientific findings that are coming out every day, and I tell people about them, they’ll say, “What? That is crazy.” I’ll just be like, “I’m just telling you about what scientists are discovering about our world.” If I describe what whale scientists are discovering about how whales communicate, I’m not going wildly beyond what they’re finding and their theories, but to most people, that’s crazy that whales can hear each other across oceans and can change their songs.

COWEN: But that’s mainstream now, right?

ZIMMER: Yes.

COWEN: You’re just endorsing the mainstream, and I would agree with that. I think whales might be smarter than humans. That’s a non-mainstream view I have. What are your non-mainstream views?

ZIMMER: It’s interesting that I’m drawing a blank on that, simply because I am just so dazzled by so much that I learn about in terms of the scientific world. The scientific mainstream can be quite mind-blowing to everybody else. If I just say offhand, “Oh yes, there are billions of microbes in that cloud you see in the sky,” people say, “You’re crazy.” I’ll be like, “I’m not crazy.” So, I am a scientifically mainstream sort of person, I guess, and to everybody else, I seem a little crazy.

This way of thinking is completely foreign to me. He researches a vast range of issues. I can't get into a topic without having some skepticism about what I'm reading. For Zimmer, nothing comes to mind? This is an incredible degree of conformity of thought, and probably insightful into the kind of person who has a successful career at the NYT.

Maybe there's a benefit to this. You don't want every science reporter at the NYT coming up with his own theories about virology or plate tectonics and working them into articles. Think of the Roganspehre as the other end of this spectrum, where every doofus finds it easy to conclude that the experts are obviously wrong about everything after watching a YouTube video. You'll probably go less wrong just blindly trusting the experts. But realize that this is what people in established institutions are inclined to do, and adjust your judgments of what they're saying accordingly.