{"id":42702,"date":"2018-03-16T03:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T07:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42702"},"modified":"2018-03-15T11:26:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T15:26:09","slug":"anti-semitism-and-the-alt-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/16\/anti-semitism-and-the-alt-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-semitism and the alt-right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/quillette.com\/2018\/03\/15\/alt-right-gets-wrong-jews\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Jonathan Anomaly and Nathan Cofnas<\/a> discuss the widespread anti-semitism of the various groups we generally lump together as &#8220;alt-right&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For many on the alt-right, every grievance is, at root, about Jews. Andrew Anglin, host of the most popular alt-right\/neo-Nazi website, explains: \u201cthe only thing in our movement that really matters [is] anti-Semitism.\u201d If only the Jews were gone, he argues, the white race, freed from bondage, would immediately overcome all of its problems. Where does this attitude come from?<\/p>\n<p>Jews are a conspicuous people, small in number but large in footprint. As Mark Twain wrote in 1899:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race\u2026.Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk\u2026.What is the secret of his immortality?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For many people throughout history, the answer to Twain\u2019s question was simple: Jews conspire among themselves to dominate and disadvantage gentiles. This answer fell out of fashion, at least in polite society, after World War II. Since the 1990s, however, the conspiratorial account of Jewish prominence has taken on a new, more meretricious form in the work of (now retired) California State University, Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald, known affectionately among alt-righters as \u201cKMac.\u201d According to Richard Spencer, the inventor of the term \u201calt-right\u201d and unofficial leader of the movement: \u201cThere is no man on the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald.\u201d And: \u201cKMac\u2026may be the most essential man in our movement in terms of thought leader[ship].\u201d To understand the alt-right\u2019s anti-Semitism, we must understand MacDonald\u2019s ideas, particularly as outlined in his most influential book, <em>The Culture of Critique<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>According to MacDonald, Judaism is a \u201cgroup evolutionary strategy.\u201d Jews possess both genetic and cultural adaptations (including, on the genetic side, high IQ and ethnocentrism) that allow them to develop successful intellectual movements that undermine gentile society and promote their own group continuity. \u201cJewish intellectual movements,\u201d MacDonald argues, are led by charismatic figures analogous to rabbis. They attack white nationalism while promoting Jewish nationalism, and use pseudoscience to \u201cpathologize\u201d anti-Semitism, which in reality is a justified response to \u201cJewish aggression.\u201d According to MacDonald, Jewish intellectual movements include Freudianism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and multiculturalism. These movements, MacDonald claims, taught white gentiles to reject ethnocentrism and accept high levels of nonwhite immigration to their countries while tolerating <em>Jewish<\/em> ethnocentrism and racially restrictive immigration policies in Israel.<\/p>\n<p>MacDonald\u2019s theory and the anti-Semitism of many on the alt-right are largely reactions to the perceived liberalism of Jews. One of us (Cofnas) has just published <a href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1007\/s12110-018-9310-x\/fulltext.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">an academic paper that examines MacDonald\u2019s most influential book<\/a>, <em>The Culture of Critique<\/em>, and finds that it is chock full of misrepresented sources, cherry-picked facts, and egregious distortions of history. MacDonald and the alt-righters are, nevertheless, correct that many liberal leaders over the last hundred years have been Jewish. We\u2019d like to offer an explanation for this phenomenon, as well as determine whether Jewish liberalism is the <em>cause<\/em> or the <em>result<\/em> of anti-Semitism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jonathan Anomaly and Nathan Cofnas discuss the widespread anti-semitism of the various groups we generally lump together as &#8220;alt-right&#8221;: For many on the alt-right, every grievance is, at root, about Jews. Andrew Anglin, host of the most popular alt-right\/neo-Nazi website, explains: \u201cthe only thing in our movement that really matters [is] anti-Semitism.\u201d If only the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53],"tags":[1079,304,39],"class_list":["post-42702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","tag-altright","tag-antisemitism","tag-junkscience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b6K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42703,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42702\/revisions\/42703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}