Kevin B. MacDonald (born January 24, 1944) is an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB).
MacDonald is known for his promotion of a pseudoscientific antisemitic theory, most prominently within The Culture of Critique series, according to which Western Jews have tended to be politically liberal and involved in politically or sexually transgressive social, philosophical, and artistic movements because, he asserts, Jews have biologically evolved to undermine the societies in which they live.MacDonald to retire in the fall , daily49er.com, April 14, 2014; accessed August 16, 2015. In short, MacDonald argues that Jews have evolved to be highly ethnocentric and hostile to the interests of "white people", a racial category of which he considers Jewish people not to be a part. In an interview with Tablet magazine in 2020, MacDonald said: "Jews are just gonna destroy white power completely, and destroy America as a white country."
Some scholars describe the theory as analogous to older conspiracy theories about a Jewish plot to undermine European civilization. In 2008, the CSULB academic senate voted to disassociate itself from MacDonald's work.
MacDonald's theories have received support from antisemitic conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazi groups. He serves as editor of The Occidental Observer, which he says covers "white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West". He is described by the Anti-Defamation League as having "become a primary voice for anti-Semitism from far-right intellectuals" and by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "the neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic". He has been described as part of the alt-right movement. By 2010, MacDonald was one of the eight members of the board of directors of the newly founded American Third Position (known from 2013 as the American Freedom Party), an organization stating that it "exists to represent the political interests of White Americans".
Early years Kevin B. MacDonald was born on January 24, 1944, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to a Roman Catholic family. His father was a policeman and his mother was a secretary. He attended Catholic parochial schools and played basketball in high school. He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a philosophy major. MacDonald abandoned his Catholic faith during his time in college. He became involved in the anti-war movement, which brought him into contact with Jewish student activists.
Between 1970 and 1974, he worked towards becoming a jazz pianist, spending two years in Jamaica, where he taught high school.Interview with Kevin MacDonald By the late 1970s, he had left that career.
Professional background MacDonald is the author of seven books on evolutionary theory and child development and is the author or editor of over 30 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. In 1981, he earned a PhD in biobehavioral sciences from the University of Connecticut, where his adviser was Benson Ginsburg, a founder of modern behavioral genetics. His thesis was on the behavioral development of wolves and resulted in two publications.;
MacDonald completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Ross Parke in the psychology department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983. MacDonald and Parke's work there resulted in three publications.; ;
MacDonald joined the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSU-LB) in 1985, and became a full professor in 1995. He announced his retirement at the end of 2014.
MacDonald 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 editor of Population and Environment from 1999 to 2004, working with Virginia Abernethy, the previous editor, who he persuaded to join the editorial board, along with J. Philippe Rushton, both "intellectual allies" according to the SPLC. MacDonald has made occasional contributions to VDARE, a website focused on opposition to immigration to the United States and classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Work on ethnicity Judaism and Jewish culture
MacDonald wrote a trilogy of books purporting to analyze Judaism and secular Jewish culture from the perspective of evolutionary psychology: A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998). He labels Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy", one that he claims enhances the ability of Jews to outcompete 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 acknowledges that not all Jews in all circumstances display the traits he identifies."Understanding Jewish Influence III: Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement" , theoccidentalquarterly.com; retrieved 2007-09-04. Separation and Its Discontents contains a chapter entitled "National Socialism as an Anti-Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy". According to a summary of MacDonald's ideas by Heidi Beirich of the SPLC in 2007, MacDonald argues that Nazism emerged as a means of opposing, to use MacDonald's term, "Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy". He contends Jewish "group behavior" created understandable hatred for Jews. Thus in MacDonald's opinion, writes Beirich:
Reception Irving v Lipstadt libel trial (2000) MacDonald testified in the unsuccessful libel suit brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt; he was the only witness for Irving who spoke on his behalf willingly. Irving had told the judge that MacDonald would need to be on the witness stand for three days, but his testimony only lasted a few hours. Irving asked if MacDonald "perceived the Jewish community as working in a certain way in order to suppress a certain book" and MacDonald responded in the affirmative, asserting there were "several tactics the Jewish organizations have used." MacDonald was quoted as having said in the course of his testimony that he was an "agnostic" in regards to the Holocaust, though he denied the accuracy of the quote.Tony Ortega. "Cal State Long Beach faculty members are trying to force Professor Kevin MacDonald to publicly defend his controversial views on Judaism", csulb.edu; accessed August 15, 2015.
Deborah Lipstadt's lawyer Richard Rampton thought MacDonald's testimony on behalf of Irving was of so little help to Irving that he did not bother to cross-examine him. MacDonald later commented in an article for the Journal of Historical Review, published by the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denying organisation, that Lipstadt and Jewish groups were attempting to restrict access to Irving's work because it was against Jewish interests and agenda. On the Holocaust itself, MacDonald later said that "he ha[d] never doubted the Holocaust took place, but because he ha[d] not studied its history he describe[d] himself as an 'agnostic' on the subject."
Academic reception
At the time of its release, A People That Shall Dwell Alone received mixed reviews from scholars; his subsequent books were less well received.
John Tooby, the founder of MacDonald's field of evolutionary psychology, criticized MacDonald in an article for Salon in 2000. He wrote, "MacDonald's ideas—not just on Jews—violate fundamental principles of the field." Tooby posits that MacDonald is not an evolutionary psychologist.
MacDonald has been accused by some academics in Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization of employing racial "techniques of scapegoating [that] may have evolved in complexity from classical Nazi fascism, but the similarities are far from remote."
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, wrote that MacDonald's work fails "basic tests of scientific credibility." 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"."Slate Magazine Dialogue On: How To Deal With Fringe Academics" , Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara website; retrieved December 5, 2011."How To Deal With Fringe Academics" , Slate, February 11, 2000; retrieved December 5, 2011.
Reviewing MacDonald's Separation and Its Discontents in 2000 Zev Garber, Chair of Jewish Studies at Los Angeles Valley College, writes that MacDonald works from the assumption that the "dual Torah", meaning both the written and oral traditions of Judaism, is the blueprint of 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."Seth Garber. "Review: Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism"Milton Shain. "Kevin MacDonald and Antisemitism, Bowerdean Briefings", American Jewish Society Review. Vol. 25, No. 1. (2000–2001): pp. 159–61.
In 2001, David Lieberman, a Holocaust researcher at Brandeis University, wrote "Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald's Research Techniques", a paper in which he notes that one of MacDonald's sources, Jaff Schatz, objected to how MacDonald used his writings to further his premise that Jewish self-identity validates antisemitic 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.David Lieberman: Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald's Research Techniques. H-Antisemitism: Occasional Papers, January 29, 2001 (Internet Archive) Lieberman accused MacDonald of dishonestly using lines from the work of Holocaust denier David Irving. Citing Irving's Uprising, published in 1981 for the 25th anniversary of Hungary's failed anti-Communist revolution in 1956, MacDonald asserted in the Culture of Critique:
Lieberman, who said that MacDonald is not a historian, debunked those assertions, concluding that "the passage offers not a shred of evidence that, as MacDonald would have it, 'Jewish males enjoyed disproportionate sexual access to gentile females.'"Lieberman on Kevin MacDonald , h-net.msu.edu; accessed August 15, 2015.
Most academics have rejected MacDonald's views about Judaism and race as being unworthy of legitimization or serious attention. In a critique of MacDonald in the journal Human Nature in 2018, Nathan Cofnas argued that scholars should critically engage with MacDonald's work, in part due to its popularity among antisemites. Cofnas's conclusion was that MacDonald's work relied upon "misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts" and that the "evidence actually favors a simpler explanation of Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual movements involving Jewish high intelligence and geographic distribution."