Trump’s Irish-Americans “Without Hearts”

Just as some have speculated that the experience of slavery lingers in the psyche of the descendants of slaves, the Irish Famine, the result of the British genocidal policy against the Irish, has affected the generations of the Irish that followed, and Jews are suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of the Holocaust. Dissolving into Whiteness has provided both with an escape chute.  It was when James Baldwin wrote in Dan Watt’s The Liberator that Jews had become White Christians that he was abandoned by his sponsors. His novel, Tell Me How Long The Train Has Been Gone, severed these ties, permanently. Many American Jews weren’t the only group to abandon their heritage for a bland Whiteness.

In connection with my new novel, Conjugating Hindi, I studied the British Occupation of India, which led to the murder and starvation of millions of people. I discovered that Churchill helped to faminize these millions by exporting their rice to the British and Australians. This was the Churchill who had contempt for both Indians and the Irish, yet “White nationalist” Steve Bannon and other Irish Americans sit in the Oval Office where Churchill’s bust is on display. This is how it would look if former president Barack Obama had a bust of Jefferson Davis on display in the Oval Office.

President Trump’s mother, a domestic, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was Scottish, who, like the Irish, were exploited by other Whites. She arrived in the United States in 1929, yet Trump wants to expel Hispanics from the  American West where the have dwelled for hundreds of years. Of course, going Churchillian, or Anglo represents an improvement in status for Trump, Bannon, Mick Mulvaney, Paul Ryan and other members of the president’s Irish mafia. As with the Blacks who are profiled by Professor Houston Baker Jr. in his The Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era and Professor Martin Kilson, author of Transformation of the African American  Intelligentsia, 1880-2012–both American Book Awards winners–, White ethnics, who were members of ethnic groups that were formerly regarded as “garbage,” have earned status from the establishment by attributing the low station of the less fortunate among their group to their personal behavior as J. D. Vance does in his book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

Despite two scandals exposed by WikiLeaks, and his principal sponsor questioning his morals, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remains the designated leader of Black Intellection. One of the reasons for his rise has been his insistence that the plight of the Black underclass is attributable to their personal behavior. He goes after “35 year old grandmothers living in the projects,” and commented that the election of a Black president would not end substance abuse among Black Americans, when most all of the heroin and meth seems to be located in White states like Maine. This is one of the reasons for a rise in mortality rates among Whites.

“Two years ago, two married Princeton professors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, released an alarming study, showing that white middle-aged Americans were suddenly dying much more frequently than in the past. The results were surprisingly given that mortality rates for the U.S. population had in general been falling since 1900. The authors partly blamed what they called ‘deaths of despair’—deaths from alcohol and drug poisoning, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease…”

J.D. Vance, a Scots Irishman, goes Gates one further. He even exhibits tough love by refusing to aid his mother whom he finds has become homeless.

“J.D. visits his mother in Middletown. At his time in the story, she is homeless but sleeping in a decrepit hotel. J.D. contemplates his mother’s situation, his situation, and his Christian faith. He also thinks about the parent-child relationship, even though he remained emotionally detached from his mother. He decides not to help her financially.”

Another Scots Irish writer, the powerful and influential Charles Murray, abandoned the less fortunate among his group by coasting along on the old canard and tabloid academic hustle that Whites are smarter than Blacks, a leftover from the French Enlightenment. His “research” was gussied up with graphs and statistics. It was financed by the Pioneer Fund, a foundation established by a Hitler admirer. His own ethnic group, the Scots Irish, are the “crackers,” and the “White trash” group of the South. While he was entertaining the Establishment and providing them with ammunition with warnings about the Africanization of American culture like the intellectual court jester he is, signs of the deterioration of his own group, the Scots Irish was evident when The Bell Curve was published. The Scots Irish have been pitted against Blacks by management, politicians and the media since both groups encountered each other. All of the founders of the Klan were Scots Irish. Daniel Rosenberg in his New Orleans Dockworkers, Race, Labor, and Unionism 1892-1923, writes that the interracial general strike that brought New Orleans to its knees in Oct of 1907 was formed because the “whites” in this case were southern Europeans and not Celts like Murray, and Vance.

The clique surrounding the president are like Representative Paul Ryan, an Irish American who wants to strip millions of their health care, and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Budget office, who sees “Meals on Wheels” as a luxury and wishes to end Medicaid and SSI, even though it might hurt Trump supporters, the White working class, who are made chumps of again. Ryan’s a disciple of Charles Murray, whose values are reflected in the president’s budget, which, if passed, would leave 23 million people without health insurance. Paul Ryan is also an Ayn Rand fan. She was a Russian Jew who was influenced by the Nazi philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, in whose home in the Swiss Alps I lived in 2015. Nietzsche was a groupie of the ruling class and blames Jews for advocating that the poor have equal status with those who are referred to in this country as “the job creators,” the radical egalitarianism that is despised by the Neo-Nazi clique surrounding the president in the White House. He writes: “It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation…saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!”

Charles Murray calls the American version of the European ruling class “the creative minority,” the rich, whom he scolds for accepting the Africanization of American culture instead of opposing it. “When Tipper Gore, the wife of senator and later vice president Al Gore, attacked the incontestable violence and misogyny of rock and rap lyrics, why was she so roundly scolded by so many of her social and political peers? Why were four-letter words, which formerly were seen by the upper-middle class as déclassé, appearing in glossy upscale magazines? How had ‘the hooker’ look, become a fashion trend among nice girls from the suburbs?”

Paul Ryan is also removed from his origins. He said that the Irish came to the United States because they couldn’t grow potatoes. Even I know that the British played a role. Tony Blair even apologized. “In 1997, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, belatedly acknowledged that the all-powerful British government had ‘stood by’ while the Irish people starved in the years after 1845.” As the poet Speranza, Oscar Wilde’s mother, put it: “Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing/They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.”

Steve Bannon an Irish American who is the president’s chief of staff, in his Vatican speech cites the Victorian Period as the pinnacle of the West’s achievement. The Irish famine occurred during the Victorian period!! What an example of self-loathing! Bannon believes that he has better quality genes than Blacks. Someone should direct him to the cartoons in the old Harper’s Weekly, in which the Irish were depicted with simian features.

Irish senator, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, calls him and the other Irish Americans surrounding the president, “Irishmen without hearts.” He writes:

“What we’re really conscious of, and what I’m really conscious of, is that quite a number of Irish-Americans surround Trump ― Bannon, Conway, Pence, Spicer, Flynn, Kelly ― these are all Irish-Americans, these are all Irish names ― Ryan,” Ó Ríordáin said, referring to top Trump administration officials and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). These are all people that in my judgment have completely forgotten their family history, because the Irish story is one that has been replicated now by other people… We were once the people who came to America as refugees. We were viewed by the British as being terrorists. We were people who suffered sectarian discrimination in the United Kingdom and [in the U.S.] as well.”

Paul Ryan doesn’t know this. He is far more dangerous than the president, a nihilist. Ryan has a philosophy. He and other Irish Americans of humble origin–he wants to end Social Security even though at one time he was a recipient of funds from this program–can always be relied upon to serve as enforcers for the “creative minority,” the rich. When John Quincy Adams was deemed too soft on Native Americans, they brought in a Celtic thug, Andrew Jackson. Donald Trump followed President Obama who was considered feminine. Notice the number of Irish names, whether they be the police or the prosecutors, who refuse to indict the police, who are connected to the killing of unarmed Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. And what has the loyalty to the “creative minority,” in the name of racial solidarity, gotten millions of Celtic Americans? The “creative minority” stashes trillions in offshore accounts instead of creating jobs within the United States and their hirelings in Congress eliminate social programs that benefit whites the most.

Another writer who has influenced those who have the ear of the president is Raymond Bernard Cattell, a pro-eugenics theorist who was almost awarded a prize by the American Psychological Association until he was exposed by the Anti-Defamation League. Cattell’s theory of the nonviolent extermination of undesirables, Genthanasia, is the guiding philosophy of this administration or as Richard Spencer, a member of the Alt Right put it, non-violent ethnic cleansings. This explains Katrina, Flint, the removal of funds for the treatment of lead poisoning, the indirect murder of Black prisoners whose symptoms are not treated, or are even ridiculed by prison authorities, the arrest of thousands of Black school children and the threat from Ayn Rand and Murray follower Paul Ryan to end health services to millions. Colonel Jeff Sessions wants to bring back mandatory minimum sentencing. A Celt who was so eager to receive Anglo acceptance came up with the expression, “benign neglect” as the policy toward Blacks embraced by the Nixon administration. With the current administration, with its nest of Neo Nazis,their attitude might be called benign extermination. The reason that Trump voters are in a tizzy is because they’ve suddenly discovered that the Affordable Care Act benefits them the most. Politicians and the media had been promoting it as a Black giveaway program.

Since the Black experience is under occupation by people–novelists, script writers, television punditry, theater producers–who have never been racially profiled, or experienced redlining and their Black surrogates, whose ideology is exposed in Professors Baker and Kilson’s books, Black, Brown and Native Americans are obligated to open up spaces where their opinions can be voiced. “Dysfunctional” White ethnics need their own Bakers and Kilsons, who will challenge those who have betrayed them in order to court favor with “the creative minority.”

Ishmael Reed’s border crossing novel, “Conjugating Hindi,” will be published by the Dalkey Archives Press, a recipient of the National Book Award for publishing. His most recent articles have been published in Haaretz and El Pais,

Ishmael Reed copyright 2017 ©

Ishmael Reed’s latest play is “The Conductor.”