There is an overabundance of the use of the words “we,” “us,” and “our” in the following polemic. Whites in America have been discouraged from describing themselves with these terms in discussions about race, because we have been discouraged from having a collective identity. In defiance of that convention, I have used the terms often in this essay.

I will begin by stating that America’s Europeans — Europeans everywhere — are experiencing massive displacement by swelling non-White populations, a shift that threatens to make our political and cultural landscapes unrecognizable in the near future. As this happens, public discourse has been reinvented to accommodate the visible changes in our societies. Let us start by examining just a few examples:

• Demands for redistributions of wealth are now increasingly presented as being reasonable and inevitable; the imported poor must be fed and subsidized.
• The historical narratives of Western nations are increasingly rewritten to include non-Whites, even if the rewrites are historically inaccurate.
• The rare acts of violence committed by Whites against non-Whites are extensively examined for any hints that they are “hate crimes,” while vastly more numerous incidences of violence by non-Whites against Whites are generally dismissed being merely criminal in intent.
• Institutional discrimination against non-Whites is intensely denounced as being unthinkable, while the legalized discrimination routinely directed at Whites in job hires, promotions, and college placements is either ignored or applauded as necessary.

Ironically, all of these things, and similar convolutions of logic and justice, now occur while great to-do is made about a need for “colorblindness,” or the need for “equality under the law,” or “understanding.” As our societies are enthusiastically deconstructed and reinvented, one of the most perpetual refrains that we now hear is the insistence that Whites search within themselves for tolerance by tapping into their sense of the common humanity that they share with all other human beings, and especially human beings of color.

As appealing as this sounds, if we are to examine humankind’s “common humanity,” it may be important that we include in our examination a thorough appraisal of the vast destruction that we humans have repeatedly inflicted on our own species, other species, and the natural environment. We should perhaps intellectually embrace the reality that placing multiple and very different groups in previously homogeneous areas — like the U.S., Canada, Germany, or Australia — greatly increases the potential for intergroup conflict, overpopulation, political upheaval, resource depletion, environmental devastation, and a host of other problems. And let us least of all forego an examination of the potential for this kind of demographic change to rapidly submerge the original populations of those countries. Are the odds of perpetual conflict and collateral devastation not exceedingly high? If they are, is it not exceedingly foolhardy to take these risks?

Fundamentally, it’s because the people who are engineering this transformation and a great many of their followers hate White people far more than they worry about the downsides of multiculturalism. Most of us, whatever our political persuasion, do not look into another man’s face without seeing therein a fellow human being. But seeing a shared humanity in another person’s face requires reciprocity. We are not receiving reciprocity when other individuals and groups condemn us for wanting the historical and cultural and racial continuity of our own lineages and societies to endure into the future. We are not guilty of any sin merely by virtue of having a racial or cultural or religious identity that we desire to perpetuate — just as no other group is guilty for having these things and wanting to perpetuate them. We also are not receiving reciprocity when we are forced to demand the same rights of association or freedom from discrimination that other groups around us consider to be their entitlement. And it again follows that we are guilty of no moral misdeed when we make appeals that the same standards of morality and civic engagement apply to our group — especially when we can see very clearly that they do not. Read more

In the 1952 American presidential election, Republican Dwight Eisenhower ran against Democrat Adlai Stevenson.  Eisenhower was a five-star general in the army and Stevenson was the governor of Illinois.   I’m so old I was in grade school back then and my teacher Miss Kelly, who was big for Stevenson—as I think about it, this may not have been altogether appropriate—put me up to standing on a corner in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota handing out Stevenson campaign literature to anybody who would take it.

My dad was a barber in the basement of the Saint Francis Hotel a block away, and I took a break from my political duties to pay him a visit.  After saying hello to Dad in his satiny smock and watching a haircut, I gathered up my pile of Stevenson flyers and went up the stairs to the lobby of the hotel and the front door with the idea of getting back to work.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw a banner saying there was a meeting of the Minnesota Republican Party going on in the Saint Francis.  There were a few cardboard posters propped up with sticks with pictures of what must have been party luminaries.  About twenty men—all men in those years—stood talking to one another; I supposed they were party members between meetings.   Making my way head-down through them on my way to the front door and the street, I stumbled and out spewed, it seemed like ten feet, all my Stevenson flyers with his picture on them.  I was mortified and a bit scared—the barber’s kid, a collage of Stevenson faces on the lobby floor, and the Republicans in their suits looking eight feet tall to me who had stopped what they were doing to take in what had just happened.  As it turned out, they couldn’t have been nicer.  They all smiled and helped me gather up the flyers and wished me well and I went on my way.   I’ve never forgotten that moment.

Maybe I’ve taken too long to get to what I want to say here, but the purpose of recounting this memory was to establish the context for the general observation that I think I’ve lived through a marked downturn in American politics: from Dwight David Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson—grown-ups, serious men, men of real substance, both of them—to Donald Trump and Beto O’Rourke.   Eisenhower and Stevenson had discrete comb overs, but neither of them had what looked like a lemon meringue dessert sitting on his head, and neither of them talked about the size of his member on the campaign trail.  And Beto?  Is he the one with REO Speedwagon on his mixtape?  President Beto?  Really?  Eisenhower had been the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II and president of Columbia University.   What exactly has Beto done that’s so great?

To get to the specific topic of this writing: a story, or I guess it’s a joke, my dad told me perhaps a few too many times when I was growing up.  It had to do with a president from the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge.  Coolidge wasn’t the most outgoing person in the world and he wasn’t known for his loquaciousness.  The way the story/joke Dad told me went, a little boy, nine or so, went up to President Coolidge and said, “My dad bet me a nickel that you wouldn’t say three words to me.”  After a pause, Coolidge looked at the tyke and said, “You lose.”

Calvin Coolidge.  Born in 1872, died in 1933.   Republican.   Elected vice-president in 1920.   Became president in 1923 upon the death of president Warren G. Harding.  Elected president in 1924.  Declined to run for a second full term as president in 1928.¹

Calvin Coolidge

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Kevin B. MacDonald is an American psychologist. A retired professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), he is best known for writings that characterize Jewish behavior as a “group evolutionary strategy.”

 Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to employ the locution “Judeo-Bolsheviks” to designate the 1917’s revolutionaries in Russia. Yet one seldom speaks of “Judeo-Libertarians,” even though the main intellectual leaders of libertarianism (or free-marketism) in the twentieth century were Jews: let one think of Milton Friedman, Israel Kirzner, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, or Ludwig von Mises. How do you explain it?

Kevin B. MacDonald: CofC stands or falls depending on whether I have adequately described certain specific intellectual and political movements as Jewish. In doing so, I focused on movements that were or are influential and provide evidence of their influence. In describing these movements, I focus on the main figures, discuss their Jewish identities and their concern with specific Jewish issues, such as combatting anti-Semitism. I discuss the dynamics of these movements—the authoritarian atmosphere, the guru phenomenon, ethnic networking, and non-Jews who participate in the movement. I am not attempting to discuss all well-known Jewish intellectuals if they are not part of these movements. Thus, I never claim that Marx was part of a specifically Jewish intellectual/political movement, since he died long before the rise of the Jewish left in the twentieth century which is the focus of CofC. Milton Friedman was a well-known Jewish intellectual, but he may not fit into any of the movements I discuss, and I have never investigated the nature of his Jewish identity (or lack of it) or how he sees Jewish interests. He may well be a neoconservative, a Jewish movement whose members were quite critical of communism for entirely Jewish reasons (e.g., anti-Jewish attitudes of the USSR government ; Soviet and now Russian positions on foreign policy regarding the Middle East (see “Neoconservatism as a  Jewish Movement”). Or one could point to a Jewish supporter of the populist positions of President Trump, but the existence of such a person does not make populism a Jewish movement or erase the effective opposition of the New York Intellectuals to American populism in prior decades as discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 of CofC.

1. Individual influential Jews or a separate influential Jewish intellectual movement may be critical of a specific Jewish intellectual movement that I discuss, as Friedman was critical of communism — a movement that attracted many Jews, especially after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, as discussed in Chapter 3 of CofC and in my reviews of Slezkine and Weingarten. Another example is the split beginning in the 1930s between the Stalinist left, which is the topic of Chapter 3, and the Trotskyist left which is a topic of Chapter 6 and “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” comes to mind. It is possible that opposition to the Israel Lobby may also be reasonably analyzed as a Jewish movement. I have not attempted this, although I have noted in several places that criticism of Israel is increasing among Jews and non-Jews. But in order to establish that critics of Israel constitute a Jewish movement, one would have to pursue the program presented in CofC: discuss whether participants have a Jewish identity and whether they see their activities as furthering Jewish interests as well as explore the dynamics of these movements—whether there is any evidence for an authoritarian atmosphere, the guru phenomenon, ethnic networking, and the status of non-Jews who participate in the movement.

This project would thus go well beyond the “default hypothesis” of Jewish IQ as explaining Jewish involvement in intellectual movements. Such situations may be analogized to arguments between different factions in the Knesset—both dominated by Jews but with different perceptions of Jewish interests.

1. I am therefore not attempting to develop a general theory of Jewish viewpoint diversity. I am studying certain specific intellectual and political movements that I attempt to establish as influential. I am not trying to develop a theory of why each Jew or most Jews believe what they do—a much more ambitious project. Thus, for example, I have no interest in describing or explaining the diversity of Jewish attitudes on affirmative action— an interesting question, but not relevant to the thesis of CofC which is that certain specific Jewish movements have the features I describe and that they have been influential. Nevertheless, as discussed below, at particular times and places, there is often substantial consensus within the Jewish community on particular issues, e.g., immigration and refugee policy, Israel, and church-state relations.
2. My writing in CofC is restricted to the movements discussed therein— movements that I have argued have been influential in the twentieth century and whose influence often extends into the present. In addition to these movements, it may well be the case that I have left out individual influential Jews, such as Milton Friedman whose attitudes would seem to be typical of Jewish neoconservatives.

This response is based on my Second Reply to Nathan Cofnas, posted in 2018. Read more