Kevin B. MacDonald

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Kevin Macdonald
Born	(1944-01-24) January 24, 1944 Oshkosh, Wisconsin, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Wisconsin–Madison (B.A.) University of Connecticut (M.Sc.) University of Connecticut (Ph.D)
Occupation	Professor of Psychology at California State University
Notable work(s)	The Culture of Critique series

Kevin B. MacDonald (born January 24, 1944) is a professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), best known for his use of evolutionary theory to support his claim that Judaism is a "group evolutionary strategy."

MacDonald's most controversial claim is that a suite of traits that he attributes to Jews, including higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentricism, have eugenically and culturally evolved to enhance the ability of Jews to out-compete non-Jews for resources. MacDonald believes this advantage has been used by a number of Jews to advance Jewish group interests and end potential antisemitism by either deliberately or inadvertently undermining the power and self-confidence of the European-derived majorities in the Western world.^[1]^[2]^[3]

The university's psychology department, as well as the Cal State Long Beach academic senate, have formally dissociated themselves from his work.^[4]^[5] The academic senate described his views as antisemitic and white ethnocentric.^[5]

Early years

MacDonald is of German and Scottish ancestry.^[6] He was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and raised in a traditional Roman Catholic family.^[7] His father was a policeman and his mother was a secretary. He went to parochial schools and played basketball in high school. He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison and became an activist in the anti-war movement.^[7] During this period, he perceived the East Coast Jewish origins of the majority of the movement there (Culture of Critique, p. 104), which motivated his interest in Jewish intellectual movements.

MacDonald became a philosophy major and abandoned leftist radicalism.^[7] Between 1970 and 1974 he embarked on a career as a jazz pianist, spending two years in Jamaica, where he taught high school.^[8] By the late 1970s he had left this career in favor of academia.^[7] While in graduate school, he became attracted to E. O. Wilson's theory of sociobiology.^[7]

Professional background

MacDonald is the author of seven books on evolutionary theory and child development and is the author or editor of over thirty academic articles in refereed journals. He received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1966, and M.S. in biology from the University of Connecticut in 1976. He earned a Ph.D. in 1981 (Biobehavioral Sciences) from the University of Connecticut where he studied under Professor Benson E. Ginsburg, one of the founders and leaders of modern behavior genetics, as his advisor. His thesis was on the behavioral development of wolves and resulted in two publications: MacDonald, K. B., and Ginsburg, B. E. (1981). "Induction of normal behavior in wolves with restricted rearing." Behavioral and Neural Biology, 33, 133-162; MacDonald, K. B. (1983). "Development and stability of personality characteristics in prepubertal wolves." Journal of Comparative Psychology, 97, 99-106, 1983.

He completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Ross Parke at the psychology department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983. His work there concerned rough and tumble play in children (he had two small boys at home at the time as well) and resulted in three publications:

MacDonald, K. B., & Parke, R. D. (1984). "Bridging the gap: Parent-child play interactions and peer interactive competence." Child Development, 55, 1265-1277;
MacDonald, K. B., & Parke, R. D. (1986). "Parent-child physical play: The effects of sex and age of children and parents." Sex Roles, 15, 367-378, 1986;
MacDonald, K. B. (1987). "Parent-child physical play with rejected, neglected and popular boys." Developmental Psychology, 23, 705-711.

He has been with the Department of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach since 1985 and as a full professor since 1995.

He served as Secretary-Archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and was elected as a member of the executive board from 1995 to 2001. He was an editor of Population and Environment and is an associate editor of the journal Sexuality & Culture. He serves on the Advisory Board of The Occidental Quarterly, a journal that has been described by Max Blumenthal on the website of liberal magazine The American Prospect as "the premier voice of the white-nationalist movement",^[9] and makes occasional contributions to VDARE.com, an immigration reductionist webzine. Peter Brimelow of VDARE denies it being a white nationalist webzine, but acknowledges having white nationalist writers amongst its contributors.^[10] Brimelow does not list MacDonald as one of these.^[10]

Work

Theory of Judaism as a "Group Evolutionary Strategy"

Main article: The Culture of Critique series

MacDonald is best known for his trilogy that analyzes Judaism and Jewish culture from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, comprising A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998). He proposes that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy to enhance the ability of Jews to out-compete non-Jews for resources. Using the term Jewish ethnocentrism, he argues that Judaism fosters in Jews a series of marked genetic traits, including above-average verbal intelligence and a strong tendency toward collectivist behavior, as manifested in a series of influential intellectual movements. MacDonald repeatedly emphasizes that he does not argue that all Jews in all circumstances display the traits he identifies; for example, his Understanding Jewish Influence argues that neoconservatism is a Jewish intellectual movement, while in the 2000 US Presidential Election about 80% of the Jewish vote went to Vice President Al Gore, who was campaigning against George W. Bush whose campaign was heavily staffed with and influenced by neoconservatives.

On Jews and immigration policies

MacDonald says that "the organized Jewish community" has been the single most important and powerful group in favor of unrestricted immigration to the United States, and that the community has been acting in its "own perceived collective interests," regardless of whether these are in conflict with the interests of other Americans.^[11]

MacDonald's main thesis centers on the period preceding the 1965 Immigration Act when strict, country-of-origin based quotas existed, mostly favoring immigration from Europe. According to MacDonald, while most of the ethnic communities in that period were somewhat active in trying to affect the increase of immigration quotas from their own countries of origin (i.e., the Irish for immigration from Ireland, Greeks for immigration from Greece, etc.), only the Jewish community activists were requesting (and ultimately obtained in 1965) the dismantling of country-of-origin quotas and an increase in immigration across the board.^{[citation needed]} This policy shift benefited primarily non-European immigration and had a profound impact on the U.S. demographics in the following decades.^{[citation needed]} MacDonald says that Jews opposed immigration quotas because a diverse America was safer for Jews.^[11]

Neoconservatism

MacDonald published a series of three articles in The Occidental Quarterly on the alleged similarities between neoconservatism and several other influential intellectual and political movements that he claims are Jewish-dominated. He argues that "Taken as a whole, neoconservatism is an excellent illustration of the key traits behind the success of Jewish activism: ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness."^[3] His general conclusions are that neoconservatism fits into a general pattern of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual and political activism. Since Leo Strauss, a philosophy professor, taught several of the putative founders of the neoconservatism movement, MacDonald concludes he is a central figure in the neoconservative movement and sees him as "the quintessential rabbinical guru with devoted disciples".^[12]

MacDonald contends that, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism, neoconservatism uses arguments that appeal to non-Jews, rather than appealing explicitly to Jewish interests. MacDonald argues that non-Jewish neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Donald Rumsfeld are examples of an ability to recruit prominent non-Jews while nevertheless preserving a Jewish core and an intense commitment to Jewish interests: "it makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble the people they are trying to convince."^[12] He considers it significant that neoconservatism's supposed commitment to mass immigration is uncharacteristic of past conservative thought and is identical to liberal Jewish opinion.

Other ethnic groups

MacDonald has also worked on other ethnic groups living in diaspora, such as Overseas Chinese people and Assyrians.^[13]

Reception

Academic criticism

MacDonald has a webpage devoted to replies to his critics.

Laurence Loeb described A People That Shall Dwell Alone as a "tour-de-force" and a "watershed contribution to the understanding of Judaism and Jewish life" based on a "cautious, careful assembling of evidence."^[14] MacDonald's first work received positive reviews from scholars including Hans Eysenck,^[15] John Hartung,^[16] Harmon Holcomb,^[17] Richard Lynn,^[18] and Roger D. Masters.^[19] However, a number of other responses, especially after publication of the second and third books of MacDonald's trilogy, were more negative.

John Tooby, the founder of MacDonald's field of evolutionary psychology, criticized MacDonald in an article for Salon.com in 2000. He wrote, "MacDonald's ideas — not just on Jews — violate fundamental principles of the field." Tooby said MacDonald is not an evolutionary psychologist, and advocates models incorporating "group-selection theory", a generally discredited view of natural selection.^[20]

MacDonald has also been accused of employing scapegoating techniques that resemble classical Nazism.^[21] Steven Pinker, while acknowledging that he had "not plowed through MacDonald's trilogy and therefore run the complementary risks of being unfair to his arguments, and of not refuting them resoundingly enough to distance them from my own views on evolutionary psychology", states that MacDonald's theses are unable to pass the threshold of attention-worthiness or peer-approval, and contain a "consistently invidious portrayal of Jews, couched in value-laden, disparaging language."^[22] Reviewing MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Sander Gilman describes MacDonald's argument about a Jewish group evolutionary strategy as a "bizarre" one which "recasts all of the hoary old myths about Jewish psychological difference and its presumed link to Jewish superior intelligence in contemporary sociobiological garb."^[23] Eugen Schoenfeld states the book contains "sloppy scholarship" and that MacDonald's comparison of Jewish collectivism during the biblical period with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English individualism "indicates a total ignorance of the impact of industrialization on Western societies."^[24]

John Hartung, an anesthetist at first interested in his work, said MacDonald's The Culture of Critique was "quite disturbing, seriously misinformed about evolutionary genetics, and suffering from a huge blind spot about the nature of Christianity."^[25]

MacDonald has particularly been accused by other academics of academic fraud, saying that he has promoted anti-Semitic propaganda under the guise of what he says is a legitimate and academic search for truth.^[26] He has also been accused of misrepresenting the sources he uses in that regard. Fenris State University professor Dr. Barry Mehler cited for example a quote from a 1969 dissertation by Sheldon Morris Neuringer titled American Jewry and United States immigration policy, 1881-1953 where MacDonald surmised that when Neuringer noted Jewish opposition in 1921 and 1924 to the anti-immigration legislation at the time was due more to it having the “taint of discrimination and anti-Semitism” as opposed to how it would limit Jewish immigration, MacDonald wrote, “…Jewish opposition to the 1921 and 1924 legislation was motivated less by a desire for higher levels of Jewish immigration than by opposition to the implicit theory that America should be dominated by individuals with northern and western European ancestry.” “It seems to me Mr. MacDonald is misrepresenting Mr. Neuringer in this case and I posted my query hoping that a historian familiar with the literature might have a judgment on MacDonald's use of the historical data,” Mehler wrote, citing other examples.^[27]

Reviewing MacDonald's Separation and Its Discontents in 2000, Zev Garber writes that MacDonald works from the assumption that the dual Torah is the blueprint of the eventual Jewish dominion over the world, and that he sees contemporary antisemitism, the Holocaust, and attacks against Israel as "provoked by Jews themselves." Garber concludes that MacDonald's "rambling who-is-who-isn't roundup of Jews responsible for the 'Jewish Problem' borders on the irrational and is conducive to misrepresentation."^[28]

In 2001, David Lieberman, a Holocaust researcher at Brandeis University, wrote a paper entitled Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald's Research Techniques, where he noted how one of MacDonald’s sources, author Jaff Schatz, objected to how MacDonald used his writings to further his premise that Jewish self-identity validates anti-Semitic sentiments and actions. “At issue, however, is not the quality of Schatz's research, but MacDonald's use of it, a discussion that relies less on topical expertise than on a willingness to conduct close comparative readings," Lieberman wrote.^[29]

Lieberman has also written that MacDonald even dishonestly made up lines from the work of British Holocaust denier David Irving. Citing Irving's Uprising which was published in 1981 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hungary's failed anti-Communist revolution in 1956, MacDonald asserted in the Culture of Critique, "The domination of the Hungarian communist Jewish bureaucracy thus appears to have had overtones of sexual and reproductive domination of gentiles in which Jewish males were able to have disproportionate sexual access to gentile females." Lieberman, who also noted that MacDonald is not a historian, debunked those assertions, concluding, "(T)he passage offers not a shred of evidence that, as MacDonald would have it, "Jewish males enjoyed disproportionate sexual access to gentile females."^[30]

Criticism by the ADL and the SPLC

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an institute that monitors neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, has said of MacDonald that "he put the anti-Semitism under the guise of scholarly work... Kevin MacDonald’s work is nothing but gussied-up anti-Semitism. At base it says that Jews are out to get us through their agenda ... His work is bandied about by just about every neo-Nazi group in America."^[31]

The Anti-Defamation League has included MacDonald in its list of American extremists, Extremism in America, and written a report^[32] on MacDonald's views and ties. According to the ADL, MacDonald's views on Jews mimic those of anti-Semites from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Responses to MacDonald's critics

Overall

MacDonald has written that his critics have not judged his work on its merits, but instead believe "the subject is taboo and discussing it should be forbidden."^[33] Similarly, Frank Salter,^[34] an opponent of multiracialism, has argued that much criticism of MacDonald is rooted in "ignorance of his scholarship and a confounding of political and scientific issues." In 2010, MacDonald accepted a position as one of the eight members of the board of directors of the American Freedom Party.^[35]

Southern Poverty Law Center

MacDonald claims on his website that he has been the target of a campaign against him by the Southern Poverty Law Center^[36] and others. MacDonald holds, among other complaints, that the SPLC's publicity on MacDonald such as "The Thirteen Scariest People in America"^[37] and "Promoting Hate—California Professor is Font of Anti-Semitism,"^[38] contain severe misrepresentations and distortions of his work. Heidi Beirich, the author of the reports, had traveled to California State University–Long Beach to interview students, faculty, and administrators about MacDonald.

Among the claims MacDonald takes issue with is Beirich's claim in her report for the SPLC that he "suggest[s] that colleges restrict Jewish admission and Jews be heavily taxed 'to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth.'" In his rebuttal, MacDonald reproduces the full passage as follows:

Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would entail a high level of discrimination against individual Jews for admission to universities or access to employment opportunities and even entail a large taxation on Jews to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth, since at present Jews are vastly overrepresented among the wealthy and the successful in the United States.

MacDonald claims that he was simply discussing a hypothetical ethnic spoils system. He writes, "There is a big difference between advocating something and discussing this as a grim likelihood. I am discussing the possible consequences of a hypothetical ethnicity-based spoils system."^[36]

Beirich also claimed that MacDonald blames the deaths of "millions of people" on "the failure of Jewish assimilation into European societies." In his rebuttal, MacDonald argues that he is contending that inter-group competition is at the root of anti-Semitism and bloody conflicts between Jews and non-Jews throughout history: "I think that my critics essentially want me to assert that Jewish behavior is utterly irrelevant to anti-Semitism, and I cannot accept that point of view. I am hardly alone in supposing that Jewish behavior—very often Jewish success—must be taken into account in any adequate theory of anti-Semitism."^[36]

MacDonald summarized what he considered the prospect of a fair representation by the SPLC's Beirich: "Given Ms Beirich's poor record in accurately portraying my writings, I had no confidence that she would conduct and report on an interview with me in a non-biased way. Nevertheless, I offered to be interviewed by her if she would answer my concerns about her previous writing about me. She has not responded to this offer." MacDonald specifically names six points he demands Beirich address before he offers her an interview, in a series of emails between himself and her, published on his website.^[36]

CSULB comments

MacDonald has been highly critical of the SPLC's investigation of him, including the November 2006 visit to CSULB's campus by the SPLC's Beirich. Shortly after the visit, the University issued a statement supporting MacDonald's academic freedom. Beirich acknowledges that the university supports MacDonald "unequivocally". In reply to Beirich, University spokeswoman Toni Beron replied, "The university will support MacDonald's academic freedom and freedom of speech." In response to this controversy, MacDonald was initially pressured to post a disclaimer on his website stating "nothing on this website should be interpreted to suggest that I condone white racial superiority, genocide, Nazism, or Holocaust denial. I advocate none of these and strongly dissociate myself and my work from groups that do. Nor should my opinions be used to support discrimination against Jews or any other group."^[39] He has since removed that disclaimer. In addition, the Psychology Department on December 4, and 6th, issued three statements: a "Statement on Academic Freedom and Responsibility in Research",^[40] a "Statement on Diversity",^[41] and a "Statement on Misuse of Psychologists' Work".^[42]

Toni Beron, a spokeswoman for CSULB, said that at least two classes a year taught by all professors—including MacDonald—have student evaluations, and that some of the questions on those evaluations are open-ended, allowing students to raise any issue. "Nothing has come through" to suggest bias in class, she said. "We don't see it."^[43]

Jonathan Knight, who handles academic freedom issues for the American Association of University Professors said that if there are no indications that MacDonald shares his views in class, "I don't see a basis for an investigation" into what goes on in his courses.^[43]

CSULB dissociates from MacDonald's views

In late 2007 the Cal State Long Beach Psychology Department began the process of formally dissociating itself from MacDonald's views on Judaism, which in some cases are "used by publications considered to publicize neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology."^[4] The department's move to dissociate followed a discussion of MacDonald's December forum presentation at meeting of the department's advisory committee that concerned his ethics and methodologies.^[4] Late in 2006, a report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center after an on-campus investigation labeled his work antisemitic and neo-Nazi propaganda, and described increasing concern about Macdonald's views by CSULB faculty members (see above).^[4] In an e-mail sent to the college's Daily Forty-Niner newspaper, MacDonald noted that he had already pledged not to teach about race differences in intelligence as a requirement for teaching his psychology class, and expressed that he was "not happy" about the dissociation. The newspaper also reported that in the e-mail, MacDonald confirmed that his books contained what the paper described as "his claims that the Jewish race was having a negative effect on Western civilization."^[4]

In an April 28, 2008 statement, the CSULB anthropology department noted that it had no wish to interfere with MacDonald's First Amendment rights. However, it noted in the statement that "we have the right, if not the obligation, to denounce his writings on race, ethnicity and intelligence that promote intolerance, as not only inaccurate, but as professionally irresponsible and morally untenable."^[44]

Affiliation

A 2006 article in The Nation magazine reports that MacDonald's 2004 Understanding Jewish Influence: A Study in Ethnic Activism "has turned MacDonald into a celebrity within white nationalist and neo-Nazi circles."^[45] Writing in the Journal of Church and State, Professor George Michael noted that MacDonald's work "has been well received by those in the racialist right, as it amounts to a theoretically sophisticated justification for anti-Semitism," and that on the far right MacDonald "has attained a near reverential status and is generally considered beyond reproach".^[7]

A colleague of MacDonald's, Martin Fiebert^[46] criticized MacDonald for being cited by white supremacist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi organizations.^[47] The Southern Poverty Law Center criticized MacDonald for holding panels and working with Virginia Abernethy, a self-described "white separatist" and member of the white nationalist organization Council of Conservative Citizens which has described blacks as "a retrograde subspecies of humanity" among other things.^[48] The SPLC also criticized MacDonald for publishing in, and receiving a $10,000 grant from, the "white supremacist" publication The Occidental Quarterly.^[48] MacDonald is now a member of the publication's Editorial Advisory Board as well as the main contributor to its website and editor of its blog. In October 2004, he accepted the Jack London Literary Prize from The Occidental Quarterly, using the award ceremony as an occasion to argue for the need for a "white ethnostate" to maintain high racial birthrates. In his acceptance speech, he stated, "The best way to preserve ethnic interests is to defend an ethnostate—a nation that is explicitly intended to preserve the ethnic interests of its citizens." According to MacDonald, one of the functions of such a state would be to exclude non-European immigrants who are attracted to the state by its wealth and prosperity. At the conclusion of his speech, he remarked:

The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own displacement is the ultimate foolishness—an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions.^[49]

MacDonald testified in defense of convicted Holocaust denier David Irving, where he alleged that the suppression of Irving's work was "an example of Jewish tactics for combating anti-Semitism."^[48]^[50] MacDonald was quoted as saying he was an "agnostic" in regards to the Holocaust, though he denied the accuracy of the quote.^[48]^[51] MacDonald's testimony caused a backlash among his colleagues.

Max Blumenthal writes that MacDonald has an extensive following among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.^[52] Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has praised MacDonald's work on his website.^[48]^[53] When MacDonald won his award from The Occidental Quarterly, the ceremony was attended by: David Duke; Don Black, the founder of white supremacist site Stormfront; Jamie Kelso, a senior moderator at Stormfront; and the head of the neo-Nazi National Vanguard, Kevin Alfred Strom.^[48] In 2005, Kelso told The Occidental Report that he was meeting up with MacDonald to conduct business.^[48] MacDonald is also featured in the Stormfront member Brian Jost's anti-immigration film The Line in the Sand, where he "blam[ed] Jews for destroying America by supporting immigration from developing countries."^[48]

Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center told the Los Angeles Times, "Not since Hitler's Mein Kampf have anti-Semites had such a comprehensive reference guide to what's 'wrong with Jews.' His work is widely advertised and touted on white supremacist websites and sold by neo-Nazi outfits like National Vanguard Books, which considers them 'the most important books of the last 100 years.'"^[47]

In January 2010, MacDonald began acting as director of the newly founded political party American Third Position, which declares America a white Christian nation and advocates for limiting "non-white" immigration into the United States. A statement on their website reads, "If current demographic trends persist, European-Americans will become a minority in America in only a few decades time. The American Third Position will not allow this to happen. To safeguard our identity and culture, and to secure an American future for our people, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration."^[54] James Edwards, who has interviewed MacDonald on his radio show The Political Cesspool, serves on the American Third Position Party's Board of Directors.

Books and monographs