Before this lengthy demolition of one of the granite pillars for Alt-Right Jew hatred begins, I just want to put it in my own hierarchy of antisemitism:
- Islamic Jew hatred – every survey of Muslim public opinion finds high levels of virulent Jew hatred all over the place. There are 1.5 billion (or more) Muslims, so more Jew haters are Muslim than anything else; you can find Minister Farrakhan in this bunch along with every major Islamic terrorist organisation and all their sympathizers;
- Left wing Jew hatred – the modern left has moved towards hating Israel as it “intersectionally” idolizes the “poor, oppressed” Palestinian. This side actually fights to destroy Israel with BDS, European NGO’s and much more;
- Low level Christian and other residual bigotry still left over from centuries of the Catholic doctrine that Jews killed Jesus, this does appear to be on the wane;
- The classic neo-Nazis, far-right, Alt-Right who will be discussed here. Nobody knows how many these are, but judging by the fact that David Duke has 1/10th the following of Minister Farrakhan on Twitter, you can be sure this isn’t a big crowd no matter how many frog memes they make on social media or how much air time CNN gives them.
If you want to understand the Alt-Right’s Jew hatred (antisemitism – a term I prefer not to use) you cannot look to the mainstream media. They are completely useless. They’re worse than useless: if you rely on organizations like the once useful Anti Defamation League (ADL) or the Southern Poverty Law Center, you will be maliciously misinformed. Both those organisations have been completely co-opted by the far-left in recent years and are not to be trusted.
Having said that I’ll give you the ADL’s definition of the Alt-Right:
What is the Alt Right?
The alt right (short for “alternative right”) is a segment of the white supremacist movement consisting of a loose network of racists and anti-Semites who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of politics that embrace implicit or explicit racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist ideology. Many seek to re-inject such bigoted ideas into the conservative movement in the United States. The alt right skews younger than other far right groups, and is very active online, using racist memes and message forums on 4chan, 8chan and certain corners of Reddit.
Now I’m going to tell you part of how they come to hold Jew-hating views and how they justify holding those views: the so-called “red pill” realizations that Jews are the primary problem of the world.
Central to their world is one man: Kevin MacDonald, his theories, part of the field of “Evolutionary Psychology”, presented in a scientific format, and most widely distributed in one book: The Culture of Critique. This looks like science, and devoted followers of leading Alt-Right figures and sites like Richard Spencer, David Duke, Mark Collet, Stormfront, Red Ice and many others all treat this work with almost the reverence of a Koran or a Bible. I dare say Winston Churchill might have described Culture of Critique thusly:
“Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message. The main thesis.. is simple.” from The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill describing Mein Kampf.
My quick summary of MacDonald’s book is that it takes the broad conclusions of the Russian Czarist forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and attempts to find evolutionary reasons within Judaism that would compel Jews to act in the way they are described as acting in a forged document. It is an invented pseudo-scientific justification to continue believing a thoroughly debunked piece of 19th Century “Fake News”.
For 20 years this book has festered, mutated and evolved. It is certainly persuasive but it is also easy to pull apart and destroy academically. It is so obviously “an antisemitic book” that for 20 years it has been largely ignored. But not by the Alt-Right, white supremacists and Neo-Nazis. Some years ago John Derbyshire wrote a fair review of it (it was he who explicitly called it an antisemitic book) but this was in a prose style rather than a scientific refutation.
Finally, a researcher in the field of Evolutionary Psychology has taken Culture of Critique and given it a decent scientific critique: Nathan Cofnas, from Oxford University. You can read the whole thing yourself but I’ve pulled out some highlights which I also put out in a Twitter thread.
The paper’s Abstract is pretty much a spoiler for the content and ends with this (all bold highlighting is mine):
Abstract
Examination of MacDonald’s argument suggests that he relies on systematically misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts. It is argued here that the evidence favors what is termed the “default hypothesis”: Because of their above-average intelligence and concentration in influential urban areas, Jews in recent history have been overrepresented in all major intellectual and political movements, including conservative movements, that were not overtly anti-Semitic.
Cofnas ends his discussion on why MacDonald’s work merited academic examination (because remember, nobody has done this for 20 years) with the following:
Do MacDonald’s Theories Merit Scholarly Attention?
The conclusion, however, will be that the argument of The Culture of Critique is built on misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts. The evidence actually favors a simpler explanation of Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual movements involving Jewish high intelligence and geographic distribution.
Now to some of the individual demolitions. As an Alt-Right, white nationalist, you must have a staggeringly low opinion of your own interest group (this united White identity that somehow spans all of the English-speaking peoples, but then includes European nations who’ve all fought wars with each other for millennia). You must assume EVERY SINGLE TIME a Jew and a non-Jew work together, the Jew manages to secretly coerce the non-Jew.
The Same Behavior Is Interpreted Differently When Exhibited by Jews or Gentiles
A common pattern throughout The Culture of Critique is that the same behavior is given a different interpretation depending on whether it is performed by Jews or gentiles. For example, when gentiles assume leadership positions in radical movements (e.g., John Dewey, Carl Jung), it is because “gentiles have . . . been actively recruited to the movements . . . and given highly visible roles . . . in order to lessen the appearance that the movements are indeed Jewish-dominated or aimed only at narrow Jewish sectarian interests” (1988a:4). MacDonald calls this phenomenon “a major theme” of his book. Another explanation he gives for gentile involvement in radical politics is that “once Jews have attained intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that gentiles would be attracted to Jewish intellectuals as members of a socially dominant and prestigious group and as dispensers of valued resources” (1988a:3).
Of course, it is possible that in all these cases where Jews and gentiles were both involved in radical politics, the Jews were acting as ethnic activists while the gentiles were being manipulated. But this theory requires strong positive evidence to be credible. As shall be argued, MacDonald never provides such evidence.
That creation of a pan-national, united White identity (i.e. something that the Jews are working to suppress) is an ongoing problem. You have to be absolutely clueless on European history to think that “European White identity” was ever something cohesive in order to believe that Jews showed up and disturbed the happy peace.
Hundreds of Years of Gentile Radicalism Are Ignored
The reader of The Culture of Critique who has no knowledge of history is led to believe that European society was traditionally marked by “hierarchic harmony” (1988a:315) and naive, happy acceptance of traditional religion, institutions, and family relations. Then, after the Enlightenment, Jews emerged from the ghettos and commenced what was to be a 300-year war on the foundations of European culture. MacDonald ignores a long history of radical and critical gentile thought from the ancient Greek philosophers to Rousseau to the Social Gospel Movement to French existentialism to Bill Ayers to Peggy McIntosh and countless other examples.
Once again, in order to believe MacDonald’s hypothesis, you have to believe that any intellectual movement (of the left which you don’t like) which contains any number of Jews in any positions (either the leaders or the students) will automatically be subverted toward nebulous and undefined “Jewish interests” and / or the overriding goal of simply make life worse for the “white Europeans”. It all smacks of very low self-esteem to believe that White Europeans are always so easy to corrupt.
Boasian Anthropology, Environmentalism, and Opposition to the Study of Race Differences
So, contrary to what is suggested in The Culture of Critique, the tradition of critiquing Western civilization by comparing it unfavorably to traditional cultures was neither developed nor made popular by Jews. But even if he was not its inventor, could it be that Boas promoted the Rousseauian view of “romantic primitivism” to advance Jewish interests? It is true that many of Boas’s students were Jews (e.g., Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier)—not particularly surprising given the high concentration of Jews at Columbia University at the time. But the most effective and indefatigable “Boasians” were not Jewish. MacDonald (1988a:26) notes that the students of Boas who “achieved the greatest public renown” were the gentiles Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He expounds: “As in several other prominent historical cases . . ., gentiles became the publicly visible spokespersons for a movement dominated by Jews.” According to MacDonald (1988a:27), Boas “strenuously promoted and cited” Benedict and Mead as part of a ruse to hide the fact that the whole movement was designed to promote Jewish interests.
The theme of Jews and non-Jews working on (bad) science together crops up a lot. It is always explained by the Jews controlling the non-Jews for the same nebulous and poorly described “Jewish benefit”.
But MacDonald does not supply any compelling reasons to think that Benedict and Mead were under the control of Boas. Even if we accept that Boas’s commitment to Jewish interests biased his science and made him critique Western society and promote environmentalist, culture-based explanations of human behavior, both Benedict and Mead were strong-willed, charismatic iconoclasts who seemed to be self-directed. Although MacDonald sees them as puppets of Boas, another possibility is that Benedict, Mead, and Boas were leaders of a somewhat misguided scientific movement, with Boas being technically the “teacher” because he happened to be a few years older, and Mead being the most influential. Criticizing Boas’s scientific standards, MacDonald says that he “completely accepted” Mead’s conclusions derived from a few months of fieldwork in Samoa and “uncritically allowed Ruth Benedict to distort his own data on the Kwakiutl” (1988a:28). But, taking MacDonald’s description of the facts at face value, this suggests that Mead and Benedict were, at least in these cases, taking the initiative to distort science for ideological ends. Perhaps it was the Jewish Boas who made them do this. Or perhaps, in the absence of compelling evidence to suggest otherwise, both Jews and gentiles occupied leadership roles in this movement in anthropology.
According to The Culture of Critique, Boasian anthropology was only the first Jewish salvo against hereditarianism and the study of race. A major theme in the book is that Jews were responsible for tabooing research on race differences, particularly in intelligence. MacDonald ignores the fact that influential gentiles have been well represented among environmentalists studying race differences in intelligence, and Jews have been clearly overrepresented among prominent hereditarians.
There is another vitally important work for the Alt-Right: The Bell Curve by Hernstein and Murray. This book is the basis for scientific claims that there is a measurable spread in average IQ for different races. Whilst this thesis is said to be controversial, it rest on pretty solid science even if you don’t like what it says. The issue the Alt-Right have is that they believe attempts to suppress this entire field of study are a Jewish conspiracy! For a sane discussion on the Bell Curve theory you can listen to Sam Harris talking to Charles Murray (one of its authors).
The central problem here is that Hernstein is a Jew!
MacDonald (1988a:314) approvingly cites Ryan’s (1994:11) speculations on the psychology of the authors of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994):
Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department, while Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up—a world in which the local mechanic didn’t care two cents whether he was or wasn’t brighter than the local math teacher.
(Incidentally, Ryan’s article was published in the New York Review of Books—a journal that MacDonald repeatedly identifies as being an organ of Jewish interests.) This illustrates a blatant double standard applied to Jews and gentiles by MacDonald. The Jewish Richard Herrnstein, then head of the psychology department at Harvard, was the most prominent academic defender of hereditarianism regarding race differences in intelligence since WWII. Instead of accepting that Herrnstein is an example that does not support his thesis, MacDonald spins the facts by implying that Herrnstein supported the theory of race differences in intelligence because it would promote his ethnic interests. In contrast, the gentile Murray is portrayed as having no such sinister motivations—only a wish, in MacDonald’s words, for “a society with harmony among the social classes and with social controls on extreme individualism among the elite” (1988a:314).
I’ll end Part One by restating Cofnas’s conclusion:
The conclusion, however, will be that the argument of The Culture of Critique is built on misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts. The evidence actually favors a simpler explanation of Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual movements involving Jewish high intelligence and geographic distribution.
