Luke Ford

Nathan Cofnas writes June 3, 2019:

Jean-François (“JF”) Gariépy has produced an error-ridden critique of my paper on Kevin MacDonald.

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As everyone reading this presumably knows, MacDonald claims that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.” In The Culture of Critique (CofC) he argues that several major political and intellectual movements in the twentieth century were designed by Jews pursuing this strategy. In his words: “Jewish-dominated intellectual movements were a critical factor (necessary condition) for the triumph of the intellectual left in late twentieth-century Western societies….[I]ndividuals who strongly identified as Jews have been the main motivating force behind several highly influential intellectual movements that have simultaneously subjected gentile culture to radical criticism and allowed for the continuity of Jewish identification” (CofC, pp. 17, 213).

I reject MacDonald’s theory and propose the “default hypothesis” to explain Jewish overrepresentation in liberal movements: “Because of Jewish intelligence and geography—particularly intelligence—Jews are likely to be overrepresented in any intellectual movement or activity that is not overtly anti-Semitic.” According to the default hypothesis, Jews are overrepresented in liberal movements for essentially the same reason they are overrepresented in all not overtly anti-Semitic intellectual activities such as physics, chess, chemistry, and the leadership of intellectual movements that violently oppose the movements discussed in CofC.

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JF’s critique is based on what he calls the “metaphor of the bees and the flowers” (6:59). According to the metaphor, a scientist proposes a theory about the evolutionary relationship between bees and flowers. The theory is that bees gather honey from flowers. In his words:

Imagine a beehive with bees. And the bees are going to the flowers, they get some sugar, and they come back to the beehive, and they do this again and again and again. And by doing this they are carrying the seeds of the flowers, thus allowing these flowers who cannot walk, who cannot displace themselves and cannot really throw their seeds to the other flowers. The bees by going from flower to flower they are getting sugar that allows them to reproduce as bees which favors further bees that are further attracted by flowers. But the flowers have an interest in this system, and it is that the bees carry their seed for them—the pollen. (7:17)

The bees are [a] reproductive entity, they are acting in their own interest, and they get sugar from this whole thing and it’s good for them. And the flowers are evolving essentially to manipulate the bees, and they are evolving to show all of these colors which allows the bees to reach them and they even evolve to produce the sugar….The flower is essentially evolving to give sugar to the bees in exchange for a service. (8:31)

My theory is this is an evolutionary system, there is a pairing, and these bees are evolving for their own interest, the flowers are evolving for their own interest, and it leads to a cooperative or combined relationship. (9:47)

In the metaphor the bees are Jews, the flowers gentiles. MacDonald is the one who claims that bees collect honey. I (Cofnas) am a critic with six “bad arguments” (described below) against the theory.

The “metaphor of the bees” is so astonishingly not analogous to MacDonald’s theory of Judaism that I wonder whether JF has much of a grasp of the logic of MacDonald’s theory at all. It’s possible that he has imposed some of his own views about evolution onto MacDonald. In any case, it is inevitable that an analysis emanating from this confused metaphor will miss the mark.

How is the metaphor of the bees not analogous to MacDonald’s theory? Bees and flowers have evolved a mutualistic relationship—that is, a relationship in which both species benefit from their interactions, or even require each other for their survival. Flowers rely on bees for their reproduction, and to this end they evolved to produce sugar (nectar) to reward bees for their pollination services. Bees, on the other hand, rely on the flower’s payment (the nectar) for their food. But in MacDonald’s theory the relationship between Jews and gentiles is nothing like this. Gentiles do not rely on Jews for reproduction or anything essential to their survival, nor have gentiles evolved anything analogous to nectar—a reward that they bestow on Jews to induce Jews to behave in ways that benefit them. The behavior that MacDonald attributes to Jews in CofC is decidedly parasitic, not mutualistic: Jews harm gentiles for their own evolutionary benefit.

In other words, in MacDonald’s theory there are two populations: one has evolved to take advantage of the other in certain ways, while the other has evolved certain defenses (“anti-Semitism”). If you want to use a bee metaphor, you could say that there are two populations of bees. You might have a theory that one bee population behaves in a systematically different way from the other one because of a group evolutionary strategy. The critic says that they behavior differently for a simpler reason such as the bee populations differ in size or flying speed. However, making a bee metaphor that’s truly analogous to MacDonald’s theory wouldn’t be very helpful because it’s easier to just describe MacDonald’s theory and determine whether the evidence favors it or the alternative (the default hypothesis).

As noted above, JF lists six “bad arguments” that the critic might use to attack the theory that bees collect honey from flowers. Here they are:

1 – I found a bee that’s doing other stuff than pollinizing flowers.

2 – The bees are actually attracted to flowers because of a network of neurons that makes them good at extracting sugar from the flowers.

3 – You’ve not shown with positive evidence that the bees are attracted to flowers because they are bees.

4 – Sometimes, I found bees that were bringing back uneatable food from the flowers, and even stuff that could be poisonous to the bee hive.

5 – I found some bees that are passing through an intermediary to collect the sugar from the flowers.

6 – It’s not the bees
that are responsible for this system, it’s the flowers!

JF is right that these are all bad arguments against the theory that bees collect honey. But because MacDonald’s theory is not analogous to the bees-collect-honey theory, arguments that are bad in the case of the bee theory won’t (in their analogous form) necessarily be bad—or bad for the same reasons—when applied to MacDonald’s theory. If I try to explain why each of JF’s arguments against the bee theory is different from my arguments against MacDonald’s theory I’m worried that I will add another layer of confusion onto the confusion that has already been produced by JF’s flawed metaphor. To make this comprehensible, I’ll try to translate the six “bad arguments” into arguments you could make against MacDonald’s theory in CofC:

1 – I found a Jew who isn’t participating in a Jewish intellectual movement.

2 – The reason Jews participate in Jewish intellectual movements is because they have certain psychological traits.

3 – You didn’t prove that Jews are evolutionarily unique.

4 – Sometimes Jews attempt to promote their ethnic interests but fail due to a miscalculation.

5 – I found a Jew who advances a Jewish intellectual movement by manipulating gentile intellectuals to advance the movement.

6 – These movements were created by gentiles, not Jews.

It turns out that some of these arguments might actually be good arguments—or at least they could be part of a package of good arguments against MacDonald.

Leaving aside JF’s confusing bee metaphor, let’s think about this using common sense. We have two competing theories: (a) the default hypothesis and (b) MacDonald’s group-evolutionary-strategy hypothesis. We have observable data that everyone agrees on: Jews are overrepresented in virtually all (not overtly anti-Semitic) intellectual activities, including liberal intellectual movements. MacDonald himself accepts something like the default hypothesis to explain Jewish overrepresentation in cognitively demanding activities that have no relevance for Jewish group interests (chess, physics, etc.). As I pointed out in another paper, the default hypothesis is objectively more parsimonious than MacDonald’s theory because it is included in MacDonald’s theory. MacDonald wants to supplement the default hypothesis with a complicated theory about Jews being genetically and culturally adapted to benefit themselves by undermining gentile society.

Of course, the fact that MacDonald’s theory is more complicated than the default hypothesis doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Sometimes complicated, less parsimonious theories are true. But MacDonald needs to provide evidence that his group-evolutionary-strategy theory explains some phenomena that can’t be explained by the simpler alternative. He needs to show that Jewish behavior deviates systematically from what would be expected given their higher average IQ and the fact that, because of anti-Semitism, Jews are discouraged or even barred from participating in certain activities.

Suppose we examine the movements discussed in CofC and we find (a) many of them were created by gentiles, (b) there was significant gentile participation, and (c) Jews were equally overrepresented among the leadership of opposing movements. These kinds of discoveries would count heavily against MacDonald’s theory and in favor of the default hypothesis. And this is what I document in my paper. But when I criticize MacDonald by pointing out (a), (b), and (c), JF says that I am making “bad arguments” #6, #5, and #4, respectively. But it is JF who is making a mistake based on his bad metaphor.

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I point out that in CofC “the same behavior is interpreted differently when exhibited by Jews or gentiles.” For example, Jews are said to participate in liberal movements because they are pursuing a group evolutionary strategy, but if gentiles who participate in the same movements it is because (in MacDonald’s words) “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” (CofC, p. 3). Interestingly, JF accepts that MacDonald interprets the same behavior differently depending on whether it’s performed by a Jew or a gentile. JF says:

So here Nathan is committing the bad argument #6, “It’s not the bees that are responsible for this system, it’s the flowers!” Or, as he frames it, you’re not treating the bees and the flowers equally in your analysis. Your interpretation of stuff when you take it from the perspective of the flower differs from that of the bee. Because the bee, you talk about its wings and the fact that it’s interested in sugar, and when you look at the flower you are interested in whether it grows, whether it shows color, like yellow colors to attract the bee. Why are you treating the bees and the flowers differently? The answer is this book is not about the internal dynamics of gentile society and of their political evolution. This book is about understanding the role of the Jews in the evolutionary system that gentile societies are. That’s it. And in that scenario, yes, the Jews’ contribution to a political act would be assessed differently whether the action and the idea comes from the Jews pushing the idea, or whether there is an idea that is being pushed onto a gentile intellectual and the gentile intellectual takes it forward. It requires a sense in the analysis because we’re analyzing a system with two components, and we’re really interested in one of the components, and whether it can be stated that they have an evolutionary strategy. So the argument here is invalid. (54:22)

To try to stick with JF’s confusing metaphor, it would be like if we observed flowers flying into beehives to retrieve honey. Then JF would say that you shouldn’t talk about that because we’re focused on bees and as long as we observe bees gathering honey then the original story about the symbiotic relationship between bees and flowers is supported. Well, I guess we shouldn’t tie ourselves in knots trying to stick with the bees-and-the-flowers metaphor. So let’s just use common sense: If you see Jews and gentiles acting in the same ways, you can’t just ignore the gentiles and say that the behavior of the Jews supports the theory that Jews behave in special ways.

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I write the following: “MacDonald says that ‘there is broad Jewish consensus [in the US] on such issues as Israel’ (CofC, p. 305). Nowhere in the book does he acknowledge that a great deal of Jewish involvement in politics across time and place has been decidedly opposed to narrow Jewish interests, including Israel.” I point out that many leading anti-Israel activists are Jews. JF read this passage and commented as follows:

There is nothing in Culture of Critique that affirms that all Jews will support Israel, or that it is systematically expected that a Jew would side with Israel. To the contrary, this book presents potentially the diaspora of Jews as having separate evolutionary histories from those in Israel. And so you cannot necessarily expect ethnocentricity to extend across borders. (58.16)

JF is contradicting the passage that he himself read out loud. As quoted above, MacDonald says in CofC that “there is broad Jewish consensus [in the US] on such issues as Israel.” Of course he doesn’t say that “all Jews will support Israel,” but clearly he thinks that there is some sort of systematic support for Israel, which is part of the group evolutionary strategy. JF’s claim that CofC “presents potentially the diaspora of Jews as having separate evolutionary histories from those in Israel” is made up and has nothing to do with anything that MacDonald has ever said.

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I write: “MacDonald paints a picture of Jews as hypocrites who impose liberalism on gentiles and adopt nationalism for themselves, but he ignores the fact that many of the most influential Jews seem to promote liberalism and multiculturalism for both gentiles and Jews.” JF says:

Here we have two types of bad arguments. First, Nathan Cofnas is saying, look I found Jews that seem to be having ideas that are contradictory to Jewish interests….Nathan’s argument is of the form #1, “I found a bee that’s doing other stuff than pollinizing flowers.” Finding a Jew that does not do the same thing as other Jews is just a proof of diversity within the Jewish population. It doesn’t change the fact that the observed contribution of the original Jew is observed—that it was a Jew who started psychoanalysis, and it was Jews that have then pushed psychoanalysis throughout academia. That is the only statement of Kevin MacDonald and therefore it is an invalid argument. (59.36)

And he also mentions some Jews who could have been adopting positions that are contrary to their people’s interests….This argument is of the form #4, “Sometimes, I found bees that were bringing back uneatable food from the flowers, and even stuff that could be poisonous to the bee hive.” Yes, you could have found a bee that has committed an error—an evolutionary error. But it doesn’t change that the system between the beehive and the flowers exists. The other bees are not committing this error. They are effectively working and gathering the sugar….So the argument by Cofnas is invalid. (1:01:30)

JF is missing the point. A central argument in my paper is that MacDonald’s own examples of Jews who support his thesis are actually counterexamples. Let’s remind ourselves of what MacDonald’s thesis is: “[I]ndividuals who strongly identified as Jews have been the main motivating force behind several highly influential intellectual movements that have simultaneously subjected gentile culture to radical criticism and allowed for the continuity of Jewish identification” (CofC, p. 213). In my paper, I look at the alleged examples of “strongly identified” Jews who “simultaneously subjected gentile culture to radical criticism [but] allowed for the continuity of Jewish identification.” I find that, in virtually all cases, these Jews hold Jews and gentiles to the same standards. In other words, there is no evidence that they are attempting to undermine gentile culture while promoting Jewish separatism and group continuity. The liberal Jews that feature in CofC who promoted liberalism and multiculturalism promoted exactly the same things in the Jewish community and in Israel. (In a later paper I document how liberal and reform Jews aggressively promote and celebrate interracial marriage within the Jewish community.)

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I note that when Jews fail to support overtly anti-Semitic movements, MacDonald interprets this as evidence of extreme Jewish ethnocentrism. JF says:

This argument is of the form [#6], “It’s not the bees that are responsible for this system, it’s the flowers!” Nathan Cofnas is saying, it’s not the Jews that didn’t join nationalist movements, it’s the nationalist movements that have expelled the Jews by being anti-Semitic. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. It’s a system, it evolves, and the bee is there, the flower is there. The nationalist movement is there, the Jews are there and they’re not entering the movement. (1:03:38)

MacDonald’s theory is that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy. It is a theory about how Jewish behavior reflects that strategy. In cases where Jewish behavior is determined by an outside force, this tells us nothing about whether Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy.

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I observe that MacDonald never acknowledges evidence that counts against his theory. I wrote the following passage, which JF read out loud: “For example, [MacDonald] claims several times that Jews are opposed to affirmative action because it is against their ethnic interests (CofC, pp. 101, 105, n. 16, 308, 313, 315; see also pp. 240–241). He says that affirmative action policies ‘would clearly preclude free competition between Jews and gentiles’ (p. 101) and, elsewhere, that they ‘would necessarily discriminate against Jews’ (p. 315). In a parenthetical, he notes that when an anti-affirmative action measure was put on the ballot in California, Jews voted for it ‘in markedly lower percentages’ than other white groups (p. 311). That is, Jews voted to support affirmative action. His explanation for this is that ‘because of their competitive advantage’ among whites, ‘Jews may perceive themselves as benefiting from policies designed to dilute the power of the European-derived group as a whole on the assumption that they would not suffer any appreciable effect.’ Again, he shows a facile tendency to spin an apparent disconfirmation of his theory as actually a verification of it.” JF responds:

To affirm that there are facts that refute his hypothesis you need to have characterized his hypothesis correctly, and you haven’t. And if you understand Kevin MacDonald’s hypothesis properly, or if you were honest—I don’t know if he [Cofnas] doesn’t understand it or if he’s dishonest about it—but in any case if you were to know how to represent properly his hypothesis you would understand that the fact that any individual would behave differently or even that an entire group of Jews would be led to affirmative action or not affirmative action is not important. What matters is what happens. And so the argument in this case is of the form [#1] “I found a bee that’s doing other stuff than pollinizing flowers.” Well the question is, are there still bees that are pollinizing flowers?—then my evolutionary theory is true. And the question about Jews is, are there Jews contributing to these intellectual and political movements? Doesn’t matter if there are other Jews doing other things. The question is, have they acted in line with some of these political movements? That’s all you need really to demonstrate a Jewish involvement in some action. (1:18:32)

MacDonald includes “opposition to quotas and affirmative action” in a list of “specifically Jewish group interests.” When it turns out that the majority of Jews support affirmative action, MacDonald doesn’t give JF’s answer that it is “not important.” Rather, MacDonald says that Jews support affirmative action as part of the group evolutionary strategy. This seems to support my original statement that MacDonald “shows a facile tendency to spin an apparent disconfirmation of his theory as actually a verification of it.”

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In my paper I point out that MacDonald ignores centuries of gentile radicalism, making it seem like radicalism is a Jewish phenomenon. JF says:

Absolutely invalid argument: I can find radical and critical gentiles and they’ve been ignored. That is an argument of the form [#6] “It’s not the bees that are responsible for this system, it’s the flowers!” This book is not about gentiles. I’m sure Kevin MacDonald has his own views about gentile dynamics in politics, and I’m sure there is lots of richness and we could write 15 books about it. But that is a book about Jewish involvement in politics and intellectual movements, it’s not a book about gentile involvement as long as it doesn’t include the contribution of Jews. It’s a book about Jewish involvement. (1:21:55)

But if we refuse to notice that gentiles are prone to developing exactly the same sort of radical movements as Jews, then we are refusing to notice evidence that supports the default hypothesis. Jewish behavior does not reflect a special group evolutionary strategy. Rather, both Jewish and gentiles engage in similar behaviors.

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In the second chapter of CofC, MacDonald goes on at length about how Boasian anthropologists promoted “romantic primitivism.” According to this idea, “primitive” cultures were “free of negatively perceived traits that were attributed to Western culture” (CofC, pp. 28–29). As I noted, MacDonald’s discussion implies that the Boasians were the first people to romanticize primitive cultures as “idyllic.” The reality, I said, is that “by Boas’s time this had been a major theme among many gentile intellectuals for more than 150 years.” It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who popularized the romantic image of “savages” in the eighteenth century, and those ideas played an important role in the French Revolution and subsequent Western thought. So when MacDonald blames Boas (a Jew) for promoting romantic primitivism without mentioning the history of this idea among gentiles he is giving us a distorted picture of history. JF responds:

Here’s what Cofnas is attempting to do here. He makes a straw man of Kevin MacDonald when he [Cofnas] says, “This passage and others throughout the chapter suggest that Boasians were the first to romanticize primitive cultures as ‘idyllic.’” There is not a part of this chapter where I have the perception that Kevin MacDonald was claiming that Boas was the first to claim that the past was great….I did not see a single sentence that leads me to believe this. This is a straw man. And then even if it wasn’t a straw man it is an argument of the form #6, “It’s not the bees that are responsible for this system, it’s the flowers!” It doesn’t matter if there were intellectual precedents to Boas. The question is if Boas exists, and if he has made the contribution that he has made. If Boas introduced some ideas in Western civilization, even if he was not the original introducer the mere fact that he pushed them forward is enough to justify calling his intellectual movement a movement that has been significantly influenced by Jews. That’s all you need. (1:25:26)

To JF, it “doesn’t matter” that Jewish intellectuals promote the same ideology as gentile intellectuals. But this is what the default hypothesis would lead us to expect.

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According to CofC, “Freud conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture” (p. 117). The so-called “New York Intellectuals” supposedly used Freudianism to attack the philosophical and institutional foundations of Western culture.

To illustrate Freud’s influence via the New York Intellectuals, MacDonald notes that of the top 21 American intellectuals according to peer ratings in the 1970s, 15 were Jewish (and most were New York Intellectuals). 11 of these 15, he says, were “significantly influenced by Freudian theory at some point in their careers,” and 10 of those 11 held “liberal or radical political beliefs at some period of their career” (CofC, p. 141).

So it is MacDonald himself who calls attention to these Jews as examples to support his theory. In his own words: “Of these [15 Jewish intellectuals], only Noam Chomsky could possibly be regarded as someone whose writings were not highly influenced by his Jewish identity and specifically Jewish interests. The findings taken together indicate that the American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests and that psychoanalysis has been an important tool in advancing these interests” (CofC, p. 154, n. 15).

I provide a detailed analysis of these Jews in my paper, but here is my conclusion: “Even if it is true that 11/15 of these intellectuals were influenced by Freud ‘at some point in their careers,’ virtually none of them comes close to conforming to MacDonald’s paradigm of a Jewish radical. Only one—Podhoretz—could be accused of hypocritically advocating different immigration policies for the US and Israel, though he was/is not a liberal and Freudianism played no meaningful role in his thinking. On the other hand, we clearly find that several people on the list—a list cited by MacDonald himself to support his thesis—are serious counterexamples to the theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. We find on this list possibly the world’s leading critic of Israel (Chomsky), a liberal who advocates the same immigration policies for the US and Israel (Marcuse), a leading advocate of traditional Western values (Bellow), and several others who, to varying degrees, were opposed or indifferent to Israel and Jewish interests.”

JF responds:

That is an absolute straw-man attack. Cofnas is not answering to the actual criteria that was actually quoted. The question is “were they significantly influenced by Freudian theory” and “were they liberal or radical in their political beliefs at some period of their career.” You just described to me they were all liberal. That’s why they take the cause of the Palestinians at heart. Kevin MacDonald never said that this is a list of Israel-supporting individuals. He said they were liberal or radical and they were significantly influenced by Freud. So we are still in the argument of the form [#1], “I found a bee that’s doing other stuff than polinizing flowers.”…But also we are in an argument of the form [#4], “Sometimes, I found bees that were bringing back uneatable food from the flowers, and even stuff that could be poisonous to the bee hive.”…Sometimes animals can be wrong in evolution. (1:34:39)

JF is forgetting what MacDonald himself said. MacDonald’s point wasn’t just that these Jews were influenced by Freud and were liberal at some point in their careers. He said that, of the 15 Jewish intellectuals, “only Noam Chomsky could possibly be regarded as someone whose writings were not highly influenced by his Jewish identity and specifically Jewish interests. The findings taken together indicate that the American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests.” MacDonald wants to draw the conclusion that all but one of these Jewish intellectuals was motivated by Jewish interests and therefore the whole “American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests.” To justify this claim it is not enough to show that they were influenced by Freud or were liberal at some point in their career.

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In my paper I quote the claim in CofC that Freud’s book, Moses and Monotheism, “contains several assertions that anti-Semitism is fundamentally a pathological gentile reaction to Jewish ethnical superiority” (CofC, p. 120). I say that there is no such assertions on the pages of Moses and Monotheism that MacDonald cited. JF read the passage in Moses and Monotheism where Freud writes: “I venture to assert that the jealousy which the Jews evoked in other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, favourite child of God and the Father has not yet been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption.” JF responds:

I reject this paragraph [in Cofnas’s paper] because I find evidence in Moses and Monotheism that Freud believed that the Jewish people was chosen and was the first child of God. (1:54:48)

This is an insane interpretation of Freud by JF. Clearly, Freud is not endorsing the idea of Jewish superiority, but saying that the Jews’ claim about their own superiority or specialness triggered a negative reaction in gentiles.

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MacDonald says that “the agenda of the Frankfurt School” was to facilitate “radical individualism…among gentiles while retaining a powerful sense of group cohesion among Jews (CofC, p. 215). “[T]he central agenda of The Authoritarian Personality“—a book written by Frankfurt School theorists—”is to pathologize gentile group strategies while nevertheless leaving open the possibility of Judaism as a minority group strategy” (CofC, p. 172). I wrote: “The main problem with MacDonald’s argument is that he interprets criticism of nationalism in gentile groups to indicate approval of Jewish nationalism as long as the latter is not explicitly condemned. He never cites positive evidence that representatives of the Frankfurt School approved of Jewish nationalism, and he ignores evidence that they in fact disapproved of it.” JF says:

[MacDonald isn’t] saying that people contradict themselves, that Jews contradict themselves when they talk of gentile nationalism versus Jewish nationalism. He’s saying they’re pathologizing gentile nationalism and they’re ignoring Israel nationalism. So that’s a very different threshold for demonstration. (1:56:25)

JF doesn’t bother reading the evidence I provide that MacDonald “ignores evidence” that representatives of the Frankfurt School disapproved of Jewish nationalism. Leaving that aside, MacDonald makes very strong claims. He says: “the agenda of the Frankfurt School” was to facilitate “radical individualism…among gentiles while retaining a powerful sense of group cohesion among Jews.” “[T]he central agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is to pathologize gentile group strategies while nevertheless leaving open the possibility of Judaism as a minority group strategy.” In order for these claims to be credible, MacDonald should be able to provide at least a single statement—or a single piece of any sort of evidence. But there is no evidence. And again, JF ignores the evidence I provide that Frankfurt School theorists disapproved of Jewish nationalism and were not concerned with Jewish interests.

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I point out that MacDonald atrociously misinterprets a passage in The Authoritarian Personality to illustrate how the book is anti-gentile. (Incidentally, the author of the passage was a gentile.) I won’t quote the text in question and the explanation of how it’s misinterpreted, but this is all spelled out on page 147 of my paper. In short, MacDonald falsely makes it sound like the passage is characterizing Christianity in a negative way, when it is exactly the opposite. The passage even explicitly identifies the values promoted by the Frankfurt School with Christianity. JF comments:

This was a segment in which Kevin MacDonald makes an interpretation of the book. And his interpretation is that this segment affects Christian societies more. Cofnas says on the other hand no I think that he’s talking about both Christians and Jews, and essentially the statement was an entire authoritarian statement. I will say I don’t have a strong position on this—[it] changes nothing. Whether the authors of the book are undermining authority within the Christian world or if they’re doing it across the Christian and the Jewish world would be an argument of the form [#4], “Sometimes, I found bees that were bringing back uneatable food from the flowers, and even stuff that could be poisonous to the bee hive.” (2:06:12)

JF seems to have just misread everything here.

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I write: “According to MacDonald (CofC, p. 54), Marx held that ‘Judaism, freed from the principle of greed, would continue to exist in the transformed society after the revolution (Katz 1986, p. 113).’ However, page 113 of Katz (1986) makes no reference or allusion of any kind to Marx or his ideas. In regard to Marx’s views on Jewish peoplehood, Katz (1986, p. 122) cites only his view that (in Katz’s words) ‘Jews qua Jews would become liberated from their Judaism to take up their place as human beings in the socialist society of the future.’” JF says:

Cofnas complains that he cannot find this quote but maybe it’s on another page, but I will trust Kevin MacDonald to have properly cited Katz. Maybe you have a different edition of the book. You know, you need to do some research before claiming—it’s like, I cannot find it on page 113, well, have you looked in the back of the page? Have you read the entire book to make sure that it wasn’t there? It sounds intellectually cheap when you’re down to this, when you’re down to: Kevin MacDonald said that it was on page 113. I’ve looked at page 113 and it’s not there. It’s like, can you consider the possibility that you may have a different fucking edition of the book. If you want to come out with this and be credible you have to tell me, I’ve gone through the entire book and I’ve purchased 5 different editions of the book and in no place did I find this. It’s like, come on, give me something Nathan. (2:09:15)

To begin, MacDonald himself has admitted that he got this wrong. In his first reply to me, MacDonald writes: “I admit the citation to Jacob Katz is screwed up and am investigating.” JF’s rant about my scholarly practices is extremely sloppy. If he read the passage in my paper more carefully, he would notice that I did “do some research.” I located the place in Katz’s book where he talks about Marx’s views on Jewish peoplehood—and it says exactly the opposite of the quote that MacDonald falsely attributes to him. Also, in the sentence in my paper that immediately precedes my discussion of the Katz quote, I provide a direct quote from Marx about how being Jewish would become “impossible” if the “possibility of huckstering” were taken away in a socialist society. It seems that JF is guilty of the sloppiness that he attributes to me. (It’s also curious that JF, despite his academic background, doesn’t know that I was able to check the same edition of the book that MacDonald referred to, since this information is supplied in CofC‘s bibliography.)

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JF refers to

the claim of more ethnocentricity in Jews [which is] very well supported. (2:35:17)

He cites survey data purporting to show that Jews—who have the highest intermarriage rate of any religious group in the US—are particularly committed to marrying within their group. The studies supposedly showing high levels of ethnocentrism among Jews are complete bunk, as I have explained in another paper.

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Luke Ford has collected numerous examples of JF talking out of his ass in this video. Consider one especially ridiculous example. JF says:

[MacDonald’s] first goal is not to mention hypocrisy of the Jewish people. I control F’ed it and I don’t find statements related to hypocrisy and I read it too and I don’t know what [Cofnas] is talking about.

Luke Ford lists eight quotes from CofC describing Jewish hypocrisy. One of these quotes even appears in my paper!: “The irony (hypocrisy?) is that Fromm and the other members of the Frankfurt School, as individuals who strongly identified with a highly collectivist group (Judaism), advocated radical individualism for the society as a whole” (CofC, p. 142).

Nathan Cofnas responds to JF’s critique.

On May 26, 2018, JF Gariepy hosted Kevin MacDonald in a show titled, “The Standing Critique.”

JF says about Kevin’s book The Culture of Critique (40:20): “The Cofnas Critique passes beside the track from your book.. The Jewish people are a connected unit like any people on earth… This is true for all animals. The Jewish people have been traveling a lot… When you look at any environment and living beings, you wonder how did the environment change the evolution of the genetic line. How did certain characteristics get selected? Your book seeks to understand what are the characteristics of Jewish people that have allowed them to survive a complex history.”

The Cofnas Critique and its subject have nothing to do with the above. The Cofnas Critique analyzes Kevin MacDonald’s book The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements.

Kevin says (42:00): “[Richard] Dawkins has never signed on to group selection of any kind.”

Without possessing the slightest understanding of either the book The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements or the Cofnas Critique, JF Gariepy proclaims to the world that a critique he doesn’t understand (by Kevin MacDonald) stands tall after another critique (this one by Nathan Cofnas) which JF also doesn’t understand.

If JF is this reckless in his public pronouncements about topics he doesn’t understand, I don’t know how anyone can take him seriously again.

Stephen James writes in my chat: “When JF says he has “read” a book, he is speaking of his claimed method of “diagonal speed reading”, in which one does not read any of the actual words.”

From a comment to my Youtube analysis below: “JF knows what he’s doing. Playing to his fan club.”

JF (46:35): “That’s a point that came in the Cofnas critique. Since Jews have a higher IQ, this explains Jewish over-representation. Period. We don’t want to hear anything else.”

Kevin: “Exactly.”

JF: “This is where the Cofnas critique passes beside your book. Your book remains true.”

Nowhere will you find Nathan Cofnas argue that IQ explains everything about Jewish over-representation and nowhere does Cofnas say he doesn’t want to hear about any other explanation. JF has clearly either not read the Cofnas critique or he is deliberately lying about the Cofnas critique.

Here is what Nathan wrote: “Whatever the cause, high Jewish IQ presumably plays a role in Jewish overrepresentation in cognitively demanding activities.”

Jean-Francois Gariépy says in my chat May 28, 2018 (about 22:00): “​My intended point was not to say Cofnas said he doesn’t care about anything else than IQ, my point was that his critique only makes sense if that was an accepted assumption.”

Kevin (47:10): “Jordan Peterson cited Cofnas and he had some other data I responded to… Jews do have a high IQ but that cannot explain their over-representation in the media and other jobs at the higher end of our economy. There are so many more non-Jews… Take the 130 IQ level. There are four or five times as many non-Jews. If you look at any IQ of 145, it is about equal between Jews and non-Jews. But what we see is massive Jewish over-representation in the media, university…”

Kevin (57:00): “So the Jews dominated the whole economy because they squeezed everyone else out. You saw a high rate of increase in the Jewish population. So much so that they overshot their niche… They started to see high levels of poverty. There were no more niches in the merchant middleman thing. You had massive Jewish poverty at the end of the 19th Century and that led to all of the problems that ended up in the modern world. Jews were unhappy in Eastern Europe… There is group selection. It doesn’t happen in all groups. We white people aren’t good at this, we’re individualist, we’re less ethno-centric.”

Jewish poverty led to all the problems of the modern world?

Jordan Peterson wrote:

The players of identity politics on the far right continue ever-so-pathologically to beat the anti-Semitic drum, pointing to the over-representation of Jews in positions of authority, competence and influence (including revolutionary movements). I’m called upon–sometimes publicly, sometimes on social media platforms–to comment on such matters, and criticized when I hesitate to do so (although God only knows why I would hesitate 🙂

So let’s take apart the far-right claims:

First, psychologically speaking: why do the reactionary conspiracy theorists even bother? This is a straightforward matter. If you’re misguided enough to play identity politics, whether on the left or the right, then you require a victim (in the right-wing case, European culture or some variant) and a perpetrator (Jews). Otherwise you can’t play the game (a YouTube video I made explicating the rules can be found here). Once you determine to play, however, you benefit in a number of ways. You can claim responsibility for the accomplishments of your group you feel racially/ethnically akin to without actually having to accomplish anything yourself. That’s convenient. You can identify with the hypothetical victimization of that group and feel sorry for yourself and pleased at your compassion simultaneously. Another unearned victory. You simplify your world radically, as well. All the problems you face now have a cause, and a single one, so you can dispense with the unpleasant difficulty of thinking things through in detail. Bonus. Furthermore, and most reprehensibly: you now have someone to hate (and, what’s worse, with a good conscience) so your unrecognized resentment and cowardly and incompetent failure to deal with the world forthrightly can find a target, and you can feel morally superior in your consequent persecution (see Germany, Nazi for further evidence and information).

Second, in what manner (if any) are such claims true? Well, Jews are genuinely over-represented in positions of authority, competence and influence. New York Jews, in particular, snap up a disproportionate number of Nobel prizes (see this Times of Israel article), and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities, where they, along with Asians, tend to be discriminated against (see this Newsweek article). It’s possible that we should be happy about this, rather than annoyed: is the fact that smart people are working hard for our mutual advancement really something to feel upset? What, exactly, is the preferable alternative? In any case, the radical/identity-politics right wingers regard such accomplishment as evidence of a conspiracy. It hardly needs to be said that although conspiracies do occasionally occur, conspiracy theories are the lowest form of intellectual enterprise. Is there another, more credible explanation? Yes. Three well-documented factors in fact appear to be at play:

a) The significantly higher than average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (see this article in the Economist for a credible layman’s analysis; for a scientific take (one of many) see Gregory Cochran’s work: abstract and full paper). Consider that IQ is the most powerful single determinant of long-term socioeconomic success and influence (my lab has published on this issue). Consider also that the effect of a mean or average difference in IQ is dramatically increased at the tails of the distribution, so that a 10-15 point difference produces increasingly large inequalities in group representation in proportion to the degree that a given job requires higher general cognitive ability. This means that proportional Jewish over-representation increases as the demand for IQ increases. Simply put: if a very complex job or role requires an IQ of 145, three standard deviations above the mean and characteristic of less than one percent of the general population, then a group with a higher average IQ will be exceptionally over-represented in such enterprises.

b) The relationship between IQ and Big Five trait Openness to Experience. Openness to Experience is one of the five cardinal personality traits (Wikipedia will fill you in rapidly if you need more info). Openness to Experience has often been considered the reflection of general cognitive ability or intelligence in personality. It’s what you are referring to when you describe someone as thoughtful, smart, artistic or philosophical. People with high IQs tend overwhelmingly to be higher in trait Openness to Experience (particularly in the Openness to Experience aspect of Intellect (Dr. Colin DeYoung’s lab spearheaded a paper on this issue).

c) The relationship between Openness to Experience and political liberalism: Political affiliation is importantly associated with personality. Conservatives/right-wingers tend to be high in Conscientiousness (particularly in the Conscientiousness aspect of Orderliness) and low in Openness to Experience while liberals/left-wingers tend to have the reverse pattern (low Conscientiousness (particularly aspect Orderliness) and high Openness to Experience. The story is somewhat more complicated than that (which we also reviewed), but that covers the basics.

So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ. The effect of this group difference (approximately the difference between the typical high school student and the typical state college student) is magnified for occupations/interests that require high general cognitive ability. Equal over-representation may also occur in political movements associated with the left, because high IQ is associated with Openness to Experience, which is in turn associated with liberal/left-leaning political proclivities.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in any occupations/interests for reasons other than intelligence and the associated effects of intelligence on personality and political belief. Thus, no conspiratorial claims based on ethnic identity need to be given credence.

Readers interested in such issues may also be interested in a broader recent critique of the idea of Jewish conspiracy: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory

Update April 24 2018: A recent critic attempted to take my argument apart arithmetically:

He stated: Different ethnic groups act in a nepotistic manner at differing levels. Some do so more than others.

Your argument is essentially that identity politics does matter not. But it does to Jews, who’s religion and ethnic identity are especially important to them. They even base their whole identity around their victimization in the past by gentiles (Romen Empire, Christians, the Holocaust). Yet, you’re trying to tell us those who play into identity politics are losers? That’s the first problem I’m seeing because even Jews don’t believe that.

Second, if Jews are high IQ, and that means they are more likely to be in positions of power, that would explain their prevalence. Yet, there are VASTLY more white gentiles that have equal or higher IQs than your average Jews. We can do simple math to prove this. If there are 6 million Jews in the United States with an average IQ of 115 (so 3 million are 115+) and there are 200+ million white gentiles with an average IQ of 105 IQ (so roughly 30% are 115+ IQ). So 200 million x .30 gives us 60,000,000 whites with an IQ of 115+. So, we would think, if all things being equal, then that whites would proportionally represented in positions of power commensurate with their IQ and numbers. Jews should, according to the idea that IQ leads to representation in positions of power, should be 5% or so of millionaires (3 million Jews / 60 million gentiles at 115+). But this is not the case. Jews make up a disproportionate number of millionaires and billionaires (40% according to Forbes) according to the IQ theory Jordan B. Peterson is utilizing.

What explains this? Ethnic nepotism, i.e. identity politics. Jews priviliege others Jews with access to power, money, and positions to perpetuate Jewish influence in America.

Yet, Jordan Peterson is telling us there is no idea of Jewish power in America. That’s simply not true when we all know the world runs on money, and no one knows this better than the Jews. That’s why our foreign policy has been about securing Israel’s security. That’s why our politicians get money from AIPAC. Why we send billions to Isarel every year. Why our relationship with the Muslim world has declined because of this one-sided affair.

Here’s my response:

Your cutoff for high IQ is far too low. Try 145 (the figure I cite for serious intellectual advantage) and see how that works. That’s three standard deviations above the general population of mean of 100, not the 115 (one standard deviation) you used. One standard deviation above the average is helpful — it puts you in college — but it’s nothing compared to three standard deviations (in part because of the operation of the Pareto principle).

Three standard deviations advantage for the general population puts an individual at 99.9%. That’s .001 of the population, so .001 X 200,000,000 (using your figures) = 200,000 “white gentiles” with an IQ of 145 or more.

Two standard deviations advantage for the Jewish population (with an estimated mean IQ of 115) means an IQ above 97.7% of the Jewish population. That’s .023 of the population, so .023 X 6.000,000 = 138,000

138,000/(200,000+138,000) = 138,000/338,000 = 40.8% of the 145+ IQ population is Jewish. And you said “40% of millionaires and billionaires are Jewish.”

Isn’t it something how those figures dovetail?

JF says to Kevin (52:48): “I’m an extreme Dawkins fan in terms of the selfish gene and interpreting group selection… Your theory would benefit from abandoning… the concept of group selection…instead of gene selection.”

Group selection is the foundation of Kevin’s evolutionary Jewish analysis. JF titles this show, “The Standing Critique”, thus stating that Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique trilogy stands after the Nathan Cofnas analysis, but JF now wants Kevin to abandon the essence of his theory — that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy. So JF simultaneously proclaims that Kevin’s group evolutionary strategy critique of Judaism is not diminished by Cofnas while on the same show urging Kevin to abandon the group evolutionary strategy critique.

Jean-Francois Gariépy says in my chat May 28, 2018 (about 22:20): “​But you are right about the group selection aspect; I disagree however that it is foundational. I say his MacDonald’s work remains valid even if we get rid of that aspect.”

You clearly don’t understand anything about Kevin MacDonald’s thesis that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy.

On May 26, 2018, JF said to Kevin (36:14): “Before I was aware you existed, I was myself the target of lots of harassment by mainstream media and extremist Jewish group, this was my first contact with the idea that Jews had interests against me… They were all Jews who attacked me.”

In his conclusion to The Culture of Critique (COC), Kevin writes: “The greatest mistake of the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements described in this volume is that they have attempted to establish the moral superiority of societies that embody a preconceived moral ideal (compatible with the continuation of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy) rather than advocate social structures based on the ethical possibilities of naturally occurring types. In the twentieth century many millions of people have been killed in the attempt to establish Marxist societies based on the ideal of complete economic and social leveling, and many more millions of people have been killed as a result of the failure of Jewish assimilation into European societies.”

That is the upshot of Kevin MacDonald’s Jewish trilogy — that Jews staying Jewish have been the cause of modernity’s problems.

I told Cofnas that I don’t remember much evolutionary analysis in Kevin’s book The Culture of Critique. Cofnas replied: “I don’t think there’s a lot of explicit evolutionary analysis, but I guess the analysis is implicitly evolutionary because the point is that these movements are promoting Jewish reproductive success–they’re the outcome of the group evolutionary strategy. (“Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.”) If he left out the word “evolutionary” it might sound like the point of the book is just to document a sociological phenomenon.”

On May 31, 2019, JF did this show:

JF (00:55): “It all started with a tweet 12 hours ago.”

I would be willing to appear on @JFGariepy‘s show. But I’m not appearing on any live streams in the immediate future because radical leftists are harassing me and I don’t want to attract more attention at this moment.

— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) May 31, 2019

Will be available when you choose the path of freedom rather than pandering to bullies.

— J.-François 🐭 Gariépy (@JFGariepy) May 31, 2019

I second that, Nathan. I repeat my invitation to come on The Jolly Heretic.

— Edward Dutton (@jollyheretic) May 31, 2019

Radical (and even some not-so-radical) leftists say that by engaging with @TOOEdit and the alt-right I “legitimize” their ideas and accept their premises. RationalWiki, for example, says that I am “quasi-alt-right.” https://t.co/VRKHUcs3Qe

— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) May 31, 2019

JF: “I am surprised that [Cofnas] lacked the balls to counter this [leftist] strategy. Poor Nathan. He has been sterilized by the Left. He has decided to bend the knee in front of his bullies. I thought maybe I could help his situation. If I made a very aggressive video against him and call him out, and I say your review of Kevin MacDonald is trash, you need to come to defend it, he will have an excuse to come on.”

“I have reread The Culture of Critique today. What a book! It is so visionary. I recommend it to everyone. I believe it was written in 1990.”

It was published in 1998 and written in 1996-1997.

JF: “I don’t [believe in group selection]. I realize the debate is semantic. Group selection is just another way to view gene selection. There are no contradictions between what the group selectors are saying and what people like Richard Dawkins and I are saying…”

Perusing this Wikipedia entry on group selection, it does not appear that the debate is semantic. The debate seems real to me.

JF (6:50): “Kevin MacDonald’s reply to Nathan Cofnas is sufficient and totally satisfying. I will just try to frame stuff with a metaphor today, the metaphor of the bees [Jews] and the flowers [non-Jews]. I want you to imagine a bee hive. The bees are going to the flowers to get some sugar and come back to the bee hive and they do this again and again. By doing this, they are carrying the seeds of the flowers plus allowing these flowers who cannot walk and cannot displace themselves and cannot throw their seeds to the other flower, the bees by going from flower to flower are getting sugar which allows them to reproduce as bees… and the flowers have an interest in this system, that the bees carry their seed for them, the pollen.

“So Kevin MacDonald’s statement about the Jews and European or gentile civilization is as if I were to say that I see an evolutionary system in this. The bees are reproductive entities. They act in their own interest. They get sugar and it is good for them. The flowers are evolving to manipulate the bees and to produce the sugar in exchange for a service.”

This is a lousy metaphor. Bees and flowers are separate species. Jews and non-Jews are not separate species. The interactions between Jews and non-Jews are nothing like this theory and JF’s arbitrary list of six bad arguments against bees and flowers having a symbiotic relationship (nobody denies this) are hardly a basis for refuting the Cofnas Critique. They are a basis, however, for JF Gariepy to live in delusion untouched by any challenges to his worldview.

JF: “The statement about Kevin MacDonald is a statement about reproductive systems.”

This is not the topic of Kevin’s book The Culture of Critique and thus has nothing to do with the Cofnas critique. And yet JF spins a whole show out of a theory that has zero to do with the titled topic, “A Review of Nathan Cofnas.”

JF is either trolling or deliberately acting in bad faith. Either way, I don’t see how he retains any credibility with people who care about the truth.

JF: “Here are six bad arguments you could counter my theory with. 1. I found a bee that’s doing other stuff than polinizing flowers. 2. The bees are actually attracted to flowers because of a network of neurons that makes them good at extracting the sugar from flowers. 3. You’ve not shown with positive evidence that the bees are attracted to flowers because they are bees. 4. Sometimes, I found that the bees were bringing back uneatable food from the flowers, and even stuff that could be poisonous to the bee hive. 5. I found some bees that are passing through an intermediary to collect the sugar from the flowers. 6. It’s not the bees that are responsible for this system, it is the flowers!”

Nathan Cofnas concluded his recent speech:

MacDonald After Many Rounds:

Preface to CofC: ‘Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies where they reside because of two qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: High intelligence (including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth) and the ability to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive groups.’

August 2018: ‘I make no assumptions about Jewish genetics or “cultural adaptations”.’

JF (16:10): “I don’t attribute guilt in this system. I perceive an exchange of services.”

(18:00) “Ask yourself — what is happening in factual reality vs what you think… The six arguments can be thrown in the trash.”

“There is not a single argument [in the Cofnas critique] that does not fall in one of my six categories. We are going to read it word by word.”

JF proceeds to read less than 15% of the Cofnas paper.

JF: “Kevin MacDonald was saying that there are Jewish people and non-Jewish people and they interact. The Jewish people did something to get the sugar out of the flowers… We can observe that in reality and Cofnas is there with his six arguments… We are going to go through the Nathan Cofnas critique and identify errors.”

Unfortunately, JF is not able to identify a single error of face or logic.

Nathan Cofnas tweets June 1, 2019:

James Flynn published in the Mankind Quarterly and no one called for him to be punished. Guilt-by-association arguments tend to be used very selectively.

Cathy Young is very concerned about what associations are “ok” or “not ok.” In my view, this kind of preoccupation is extremely unproductive. You don’t promote knowledge of the holocaust by refusing to engage with deniers—in fact you do the opposite.

As a result of my critique of Kevin MacDonald, some people completely changed their opinion of his work, others modified their views—he himself backed away from some of his claims. Can’t hope for more than that. But some leftists blamed me for “legitimizing” him by engaging him.

Because I engaged with alt-righters and people who took MacDonald seriously, *I* have been accused of being “alt-right.” When you Google me, one of the first things that comes up is a RationalWiki (i.e. fake Wikipedia) page that says I’m “quasi-alt-right.”

The concern for “purity” and avoiding associations with “bad” people poisons the chance for people to find common ground and correct each other’s errors.

Dozens of people have sent me (sometimes emotional) messages to say that they accepted MacDonald’s theory bc they never saw it rebutted, but changed their minds bc of my paper & the subsequent debate. I assume that for every person who contacted me there were many who didn’t.

Like my other association that you deemed “obviously deplorable”: https://t.co/UHlTH9ijjt

And the tweet before that one implies I’m guilty by association since I cited @Steve_Sailer despite “knowing better.” (I cited his work on Jewish pundits in 1 of my critiques of MacDonald.)

— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) June 1, 2019

It almost never happens that people immediately change their deeply held beliefs in response to a rational argument. But if you have a good argument you should let it be known—you can sway ppl a little bit, change the intellectual climate, reach ppl who are still open-minded etc.

Cathy Young is very concerned about what associations are “ok” or “not ok.” In my view, this kind of preoccupation is extremely unproductive. You don’t promote knowledge of the holocaust by refusing to engage with deniers—in fact you do the opposite.

The concern for “purity” and avoiding associations with “bad” people poisons the chance for people to find common ground and correct each other’s errors.

In my paper I cite prominent academics who have endorsed MacDonald’s theories. There are plenty of academics who agree with him, or at least take his ideas seriously, but won’t say so publicly.

LOLing at science you don’t understand doesn’t refute it. Mainstream medicine already practices various forms of “eugenics.” And work in genetics shows that “race” has a genetic basis (see, e.g., David Reich’s recent book), so there is plenty of “race science” going on.

JF (36:00): “Do Jews push for liberal values? For the destruction of traditional values in Christian society?”

“When I read Culture of Critique today, I was stunned because we live in the nightmare that Kevin MacDonald had seen in 1990… I live in the hell caused by these movements. Blocking the authority of father in the family. Blocking the transmission of Christian values. Did these things happen? Did Kevin MacDonald make a good case that these intellectual movements happened?”

“If you want to see how the army of the US has been slave to Israeli interests since the 1940s… Even Richard Dawkins couldn’t help himself.”

Dawkins said: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told — religious Jews anyway — than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolize American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”

JF (41:40): “Science does not respond to social pressure. The only question is whether it is true or not.”

People respond to social pressure and science can only be done by people.

“Cofnas attempts to create a false alternative [with the Default hypothesis] because when you present an alternative, you have to make sure that your alternative is mutually exclusive with the thing you are trying to debunk.”

Why? Who says? One explanation — the Default Hypothesis — is simple and easy to understand and has powerful explanatory and predictive value. The Kevin MacDonald alternative — Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy — is complex, has little or no explanatory value, and no predictive value, and JF, incidentally, regards it as false since he rejects group selection.

JF: “The problem is that what he calls the Default Hypothesis is included in the Kevin MacDonald hypothesis.”

Nathan Cofnas wrote April 18, 2018:

I proposed the “default hypothesis” to explain Jewish overrepresentation. The fact that Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ of around 110 is well established. (Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending make a strong case that this is due to selection on Jews during the Middle Ages for the ability to make a living in white-collar occupations.) According to the default hypothesis, Jews tend to be overrepresented in all intellectual, political, and scientific movements that are not overtly anti-Semitic primarily because of their high IQ, secondarily because they are located in major urban centers where all the action happens. Being the leader of an intellectual movement is cognitively demanding, so Jews, as a relatively intelligent, urban-based population, will produce more leaders. Because many right-wing movements in the twentieth century have been overtly anti-Semitic, Jewish political involvement has skewed left, but Jews are still overrepresented among the leaders of all sorts of non-overtly anti-Semitic right-wing movements.

The default hypothesis and MacDonald’s Judaism-as-a-group-evolutionary-strategy theory make very different predictions. If the former is correct, Jews should also be overrepresented in the leadership of opposing movements. If the latter is correct, Jews should tend to cluster around those movements that actually support Jewish ethnic interests. I carefully examined The Culture of Critique to see whether MacDonald’s evidence is more consistent with his or with the default hypothesis.

As I studied The Culture of Critique, it became clear that there were serious problems with MacDonald’s scholarship. When I checked his references, I often found that there was nothing in the original source to support his claims. When he identified movements as being controlled by Jews, there were often plenty of gentiles in leadership positions as well, and sometimes they seemed even more influential than the Jews. MacDonald explained this by saying that the gentiles had been recruited in order to conceal the fact that the movement itself was dominated by Jews. But with the exception of Carl Jung and psychoanalysis, there was virtually never any evidence for this. When I looked at MacDonald’s examples of leaders of Jewish intellectual movements, I found that the majority of them did not come close to conforming to his paradigm of a Jewish activist who promotes chaos and multiculturalism for gentiles while promoting the opposite for Jews. Almost all the Jews MacDonald says advocated multiculturalism in order to subvert gentiles advocated multiculturalism for Jews and Israel, too—there was no evidence that they were anything more than consistent leftists.

He made almost no mention of radical, gentile-led movements that had all the properties he associated with Jewish movements, and which were the real “intellectual ancestors of current leftist intellectual and political movements.” Rousseau, the intellectual leaders of the French Revolution, the French existentialists, the Italian anarchists—these gentiles are all ignored in The Culture of Critique, and the reader gets the absurd impression that Europeans lived in happy “hierarchic harmony” for thousands of years until the Jews came along.

Most significantly, I found that Jews were clearly overrepresented in the leadership of violently opposing political movements—a fact that favors the default hypothesis. Although Jews have been overrepresented among prominent blank-slatists and anti-hereditarians (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Ashley Montagu), they have also been some of the most prominent defenders of the concept of human nature and hereditarianism (e.g., Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Hans Eysenck, Richard Herrnstein). Many of the most important supporters of Israel are obviously Jewish, but some of the biggest critics of Israel are also Jewish (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Judith Butler). Many Jews have promoted the “words are violence” argument to restrict free speech. But the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)—the most influential organization that defends free speech—was founded by two Jews (Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate).

Psychoanalysis was led by Jews, but its most important opponents were Jews (e.g., Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Aaron Beck). Many leading opponents of white nationalism are Jewish. But at the first conference of the one major non-anti-Semitic white nationalist organization—American Renaissance—in 1994, four-out-of-ten of the invited speakers were Jews (including an orthodox rabbi). Jews are leading socialists, but also leading libertarians (Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, etc.). And so it is with just about every movement discussed in The Culture of Critique.

I published these observations in the journal Human Nature. MacDonald released a response to me, in which—although he won’t admit it—he changed his theory. He now says that it doesn’t matter if Jews are on the opposite side of every issue, it only matters which side has more influence. He writes: “the important question…is not counting heads…but in determining where the influence lies.” Therefore, even though some of the most important leaders of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are Jews, it doesn’t matter because the BDS movement hasn’t been successful. But whether a political movement is ultimately successful is to a large extent a matter of luck. If, as far as we can tell, Jews are just about equally likely to be leaders in all non-overtly anti-Semitic movements, this obviously favors the default hypothesis.

MacDonald also now says that if Jews support opposing movements, it is because the Jewish community has “important diversity of viewpoint” concerning what is in the best interests of Jews. But he never explains why Jews do not tend to disproportionately back those movements that really do support Jewish interests. In The Culture of Critique he repeatedly indicates that Israel is of central importance to Jewish ethnic interests. He now says that the fact that many Jews viciously oppose Israel presents no challenge for his theory because anti-Israel Jews are acting on what they perceive to be their ethnic interests. He has very little evidence to support this claim besides his unsupported assumption that everything Jews do must be motivated by their drive to promote Jewish interests.

There are many other facts that seem to clearly contradict the predictions of MacDonald’s theory, though he attempts to spin them as actually supporting evidence. For example, I pointed out that the Jews who participated in liberal movements—namely, the secular ones—have an intermarriage rate upwards of seventy percent. This would seem to cast doubt on the claim that they are engaged in a “group evolutionary strategy.” MacDonald responded that the high intermarriage rate is part of the strategy because

“intermarriage and conversion have benefits for the Jewish community…, including the advantages of marrying into prominent non-Jewish familiars, such as the families of presidents Trump and Clinton….Some authors have suggested that relatively high rates of intermarriage, low fertility, and the various levels of Jewish identification in the modern Western societies are highly functional for Judaism because they serve as a bridge to the surrounding culture because of family ties with non-Jews.”

This is, as philosophers of science say, not exactly an “inference to the best explanation.” Rather, as Imre Lakatos said, weakening one’s theory in the face of difficulties but without making new risky predictions is a sign of “methodological degeneration.”

JF (46:30): “If you want to weigh between two hypotheses, there needs to be a test that makes one false and one true.”

JF then argues against Cofnas’s Default Hypothesis by appealing to Bad Argument #2 in his bizarre bee-flower metaphor.

JF: “You haven’t explained why Jews have higher IQ.”

That is irrelevant to assessing the Cofnas Critique.

JF: “Argument invalid with regard to the Default Hypothesis and I have explained why.”

Really? Where?

JF moves on to the section of the Cofnas Critique called “Overview of Some Problems with the Arguments in The Culture of Critique.”

JF: “All of these arguments are poisoning the well.”

What is the logical fallacy of poisoning the well? “To commit a preemptive ad hominem attack against an opponent. That is, to prime the audience with adverse information about the opponent from the start, in an attempt to make your claim more acceptable or discount the credibility of your opponent’s claim.”

In the entire Cofnas Critique, there are zero ad hominem attacks on Kevin MacDonald.

JF is just making up stuff as he goes along. That’s the sort of thing that intellectuals do when their income depends upon not understanding something.

JF: “He warns the reader that there are many other errors but I cannot mention them in such a short article.”

Kevin’s book The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements contains 544 pages while the Cofnas Critique contains a space limitation of 20,000 words.

JF (58:48) explains why so many Jews don’t support Israel: “You cannot expect ethnocentricity to extend across borders… This behavior may or may not comport to support for Israel.”

If Jews don’t support the Jewish state, they do not support Jewish interests. You can’t claim to care about French interests and be opposed to the existence of the French state. MacDonald claims there is broad agreement in American Jewry about Israel. This is false. Only a minority of American Jews care much about Israel.

JF (59:45): “Nathan Cofnas says that he’s found Jews who hold ideas contradictory to Jewish interests.”

No. Cofnas points out that examples Kevin MacDonald cites of Jews who seek multiculturalism for gentiles and cohesion for Jews are actually counter-examples to his theory. Jewish intellectuals who push multiculturalism for non-Jews generally push the same policies for Jews and vice versa.

JF: “You can’t say Noam Chomsky has interests not in line with the Jews.”

In 2004, Chomsky said: “It ends up that about 90% of the land [in Israel] is reserved for people of Jewish race, religion and origin. If 90% of the land in the United States were reserved for people of white, Christian race, religion and origin, I’d be opposed. So would the ADL. We should accept universal values.”

That doesn’t sound in line with Jewish interests to me.

JF repeatedly objects to Cofnas’s skepticism of Kevin’s charges of crypsis.

Here is every reference to crypsis in the Cofnas Critique:

* Many twentieth-century Jews ostensibly abandoned their Jewish identity and sought to assimilate. MacDonald points out that these Jews often did not support gentile nationalist movements—which he acknowledges were anti-Semitic—and he argues that this is evidence that these Jews were insincere in their desire to assimilate and were actually engaging in “Jewish crypsis” (his term).

*MacDonald (1998a:240) approvingly cites Jay’s (1973:32) statement on the Frankfurt School: “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities.” MacDonald sees this denial as “crypsis”—members of the Frankfurt School “conceal[ed] their Jewish identities . . . [and] engage[d] in massive self-deception.” Jewish intellectual movements “typically [occur] in an atmosphere of Jewish crypsis or semi-crypsis in the sense that the Jewish political agenda [is] not an aspect of the theory and the theories themselves [have] no overt Jewish content” (1988a:241).

Nowhere does Cofnas ever suggest that Jews never engage in crypsis. In fact, everybody engages in crypsis at times. For example, if you go to a Dodger game, you do well to hide your support of the San Francisco Giants if you want to diminish your chances of getting beaten up. We all tend to hide identities when they could get us into trouble.

JF (1:08:40): “If we were at the peak of western civilization, this shit would not get published. Someone would throw it in the trash and tell you how bad you are. [The Cofnas Critique] is entirely anti-PhD culture, anti-knowledge.”

Nathan Cofnas writes: “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.”

JF (1:21:10): “Not an argument.”

In COC, MacDonald refers 15 times to “hierarchic harmony” as the natural state of Western civilization when it is not bothered by Jewish activism. That seems relevant to me. If your book is focused on the destructive nature of one variable (Jewish intellectual movements), then the degree of destructiveness of this variable seems important.

Cofnas wrote: “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.”

JF: “If Boas pushed ideas forward, it is enough to call his intellectual movement significantly influenced by Jews. That’s all you need.”

Nathan Cofnas writes in his critique:

Let’s consider first Freud’s influence via the New York Intellectuals. MacDonald notes that of the top 21 American intellectuals according to peer ratings in the 1970s (Kadushin 1974), 15 were Jewish (and most were New York Intellectuals). Eleven of these 15, he says, were “‘significantly influenced by Freudian theory at some point in their careers,’” and 10 of those 11 held “liberal or radical political beliefs at some period of their career” (MacDonald 1998a:141, quoting/citing Torrey 1992:185). The implication is that these influential Jewish intellectuals promoted Freudianism to undermine gentile culture and advance their ethnic interests. But MacDonald leaves out some crucial information.

The 15 Jews among the top 21 intellectuals were (1) Daniel Bell, (2) Chomsky, (3) Irving Howe, (4) Norman Mailer, (5) Robert Silvers, (6) Susan Sontag, (7) Lionel Trilling, (8) Hannah Arendt, (9) Saul Bellow, (10) Paul Goodman, (11) Richard Hofstadter (Jewish father), (12) Irving Kristol, (13) Herbert Marcuse, (14) Norman Podhoretz, and (15) David Riesman. A closer look shows that only two or three of these cases support MacDonald’s thesis, and several are clear counterexamples. First off, five of these intellectuals are, by MacDonald’s criteria, unambiguously anti-Israel and therefore opposed to Jewish interests. Chomsky was (and still is) arguably the world’s leading critic of Israel. Mailer tended to sympathize with the Palestinians (Theodoracopulos 2015). When Sontag accepted the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, she used the occasion to condemn Israel (Cockburn 2001). Marcuse (who will be discussed in more detail below) advocated the return of Arab refugees to Israel, ending Jewish control of the country (Marcuse 2005:181). Arendt was the student, promoter, and lover (in a romantic sense) of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. She was best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 1963), in which she argued that Israeli laws were comparable to the Nazi Nuremberg laws and that holocaust-orchestrator Eichmann had been given a “show trial” and was not a particularly bad person (just that he was prompted to do bad things by circumstances beyond his control—though she faults him for not being brave enough to protest). In 1948, Arendt (along with Einstein, Sidney Hook, and 24 other prominent Jews) signed a letter to the New York Times which described the political party of Menachem Begin as “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Shatz 2004:65).

Another intellectual on the list, Saul Bellow, was a conservative who opposed feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Bellow urged Allan Bloom, another Jewish academic at the University of Chicago, to write The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom 1987), one of the most influential pro-traditionalist academic books in the past few decades (Ahmed and Grossman 2007).

It is ironic that MacDonald casts Robert Silvers as a part of a nefarious Jewish Freudian movement. In the paragraph immediately following the one in which he introduces this list of 15 Jewish intellectuals, MacDonald writes:
The link between psychoanalysis and the political left, as well as the critical role of Jewish-controlled media in the propagation of psychoanalysis, can be seen in the recent uproar [over] Frederick Crews’s critiques of the culture of psychoanalysis. The original articles were published in the New York Review of Books . . . (1988a:141).

Silvers is the longtime editor of the New York Review of Books, and one of the 11 whom MacDonald identifies as being influenced by Freud.1
Bell, Hofstadter, and Riesman were liberals, though not particularly extreme, not known for promoting Freud, and not seriously involved in Jewish causes. (Bell 1962:16 described his perspective as “anti-ideological, but not conservative,” and he criticized utopian schemes such as Marxism as well as aspects of the prevailing social order.) Trilling may have been a nominal Marxist in the 1930s (D. Sidorsky, personal communication), though he evinced little interest in Jewish causes and his ethnic awareness seemed to be triggered mainly when he faced anti-Semitism. Goodman had no apparent interest in his fellow Jews, though he identified as an anarchist, so by MacDonald’s criteria might be considered an enemy of gentile culture. Howe was a liberal who supported as well as criticized Israel. That leaves the neoconservatives Kristol and Podhoretz. Kristol and Podhoretz became decidedly anti-liberal, though later in their careers they openly and aggressively supported Israel, Jewish interests, and, in Podhoretz’s case, unfettered immigration to the US.

The naive reader of The Culture of Critique would think that 11 of 15 top Jewish intellectuals were using Freudianism to attack the traditions of gentile culture while promoting separatism for Jews in the US and in Israel. MacDonald makes this conclusion fairly explicit:
Of these [15 Jewish intellectuals], only Noam Chomsky could possibly be regarded as someone whose writings were not highly influenced by his Jewish identity and specifically Jewish interests. The findings taken together indicate that the American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests and that psychoanalysis has been an important tool in advancing these interests (1988a:154, n. 15—partially quoted earlier).

But the evidence reviewed above suggests that this is a serious distortion of the facts. Even if it is true that 11/15 of these intellectuals were influenced by Freud “at some point in their careers,” virtually none of them comes close to conforming to MacDonald’s paradigm of a Jewish radical. Only one—Podhoretz—could be accused of hypocritically advocating different immigration policies for the US and Israel, though he was/is not a liberal and Freudianism played no meaningful role in his thinking. On the other hand, we clearly find that several people on the list—a list cited by MacDonald himself to support his thesis—are serious counterexamples to the theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. We find on this list possibly the world’s leading critic of Israel (Chomsky), a liberal who advocates the same immigration policies for the US and Israel (Marcuse), a leading advocate of traditional Western values (Bellow), and several others who, to varying degrees, were opposed or indifferent to Israel and Jewish interests.
MacDonald brings voluminous evidence that Freud strongly identified as a Jew. Based on numerous sources, he argues that Freud was unconditionally committed to promoting Jewish interests, that he “pathologized” anti-Semitism, and that he attacked gentile culture because he saw it as a threat to Jews (1988a:146). MacDonald emphasizes numerous times throughout the book that “scientist-activists” like Freud developed theories to show that “Jewish behavior [is] irrelevant to anti-Semitism” (1988a:17; see also 142, 146). He claims that Moses and Monotheism “contains several assertions that anti-Semitism is fundamentally a pathological gentile reaction to Jewish ethical superiority,” citing Freud (1967:114–17) (MacDonald 1998a:120). However, while pages 114–17 of this edition of Moses and Monotheism do discuss anti-Semitism, there is nothing about ethics/morality at all, let alone the ethical superiority of Jews or Judaism. (MacDonald did not respond to an email asking what he was referring to.)

Although Freud certainly did have a Jewish identity—if only because he was continually reminded of it by anti-Semites—MacDonald does not tell the full story. Consider the following incident (not described in The Culture of Critique). In 1929, Jews attempted to erect a partition screen to separate men and women at the Western Wall. In response, Arabs killed 29 Jews in Hebron, which led to riots in which 120 Jews and 87 Arabs were killed. A representative of the Zionist organization Keren Hayesod asked Freud to sign a petition condemning the Arabs for initiating the violence. Freud refused to sign, explaining that the Jews were partly responsible for inviting violence on themselves: “I concede with sorrow that the unrealistic fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust” (Freud 2004). This episode undermines MacDonald’s caricature of Freud as a monomaniacal activist dedicated to excusing Jewish behavior and pathologizing anti-Semitism.

JF (1:34:48): “That is an absolute strawman by Cofnas… They were all liberal…”

False. JF can’t read with comprehension.

Nathan Cofnas writes: “Another intellectual on the list, Saul Bellow, was a conservative who opposed feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Bellow urged Allan Bloom, another Jewish academic at the University of Chicago, to write The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom 1987), one of the most influential pro-traditionalist academic books in the past few decades…”

JF (1:40:00) demonstrates his low reading comprehension of both Nathan Cofnas and Kevin MacDonald by propounding the falsehood that MacDonald called Allan Bloom a liberal. Kevin never mentioned the guy in his whole book.

JF: “Kevin MacDonald said they were liberals or radicals and that they had pushed Freud at some time… That is all that is needed for Kevin MacDonald’s claim. To say that they don’t fit the radical is to attack a straw man… Did they contribute to the spreading of a Jewish idea and were they Jewish themselves?”

So what did Cofnas write here?

The naive reader of The Culture of Critique would think that 11 of 15 top Jewish intellectuals were using Freudianism to attack the traditions of gentile culture while promoting separatism for Jews in the US and in Israel. MacDonald makes this conclusion fairly explicit:

“Of these [15 Jewish intellectuals], only Noam Chomsky could possibly be regarded as someone whose writings were not highly influenced by his Jewish identity and specifically Jewish interests. The findings taken together indicate that the American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests and that psychoanalysis has been an important tool in advancing these interests (1988a:154, n. 15—partially quoted earlier).”

But the evidence reviewed above suggests that this is a serious distortion of the facts. Even if it is true that 11/15 of these intellectuals were influenced by Freud “at some point in their careers,” virtually none of them comes close to conforming to MacDonald’s paradigm of a Jewish radical. Only one—Podhoretz—could be accused of hypocritically advocating different immigration policies for the US and Israel, though he was/is not a liberal and Freudianism played no meaningful role in his thinking. On the other hand, we clearly find that several people on the list—a list cited by MacDonald himself to support his thesis—are serious counterexamples to the theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. We find on this list possibly the world’s leading critic of Israel (Chomsky), a liberal who advocates the same immigration policies for the US and Israel (Marcuse), a leading advocate of traditional Western values (Bellow), and several others who, to varying degrees, were opposed or indifferent to Israel and Jewish interests.

JF Gariepy lacks basic reading comprehension. The essence of MacDonald’s critique here is “the American intellectual scene has been significantly dominated by specifically Jewish interests and that psychoanalysis has been an important tool in advancing these interests.” It’s not enough that they were Jewish and spreading a Jewish idea, according to Kevin, but that they were doing so to perpetuate Jewish interests for Jewish reasons at the expense of non-Jewish cohesion.

Cofnas wrote: “Based on numerous sources, [Kevin] argues that Freud was unconditionally committed to promoting Jewish interests…”

JF: “I Control F this quote and I did not find this quote. I don’t know where Cofnas found ‘unconditionally.'”

Cofnas did not present a quote. His sentence does not contain quote marks. Surely JF understands the difference between a quote and a summary? Apparently not.

Nathan Cofnas wrote: “He claims that Moses and Monotheism “contains several assertions that anti-Semitism is fundamentally a pathological gentile reaction to Jewish ethical superiority,” citing Freud (1967:114–17) (MacDonald 1998a:120). However, while pages 114–17 of this edition of Moses and Monotheism do discuss anti-Semitism, there is nothing about ethics/morality at all, let alone the ethical superiority of Jews or Judaism. (MacDonald did not respond to an email asking what he was referring to.)”

JF: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

If a scholar does not cite sources correctly and does not answer inquiries on the matter, that diminishes the scholar’s credibility.

JF reads aloud from Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism: “Not all accusations with which antisemitism pursues the descendants of the Jewish people are based on such good foundations. There must, of course, be more than one reason for a phenomenon of such intensity and lasting strength as the popular hatred of Jews. A whole series of reasons can be divined: some of them, which need no interpretation, arise from obvious considerations; others lie deeper and spring from secret sources, which one would regard as the specific motives. In the first group the most fallacious is the reproach of their being foreigners… The first is that in many respects they are different from their “hosts.” Not fundamentally so, since they are not a foreign Asiatic race as their enemies maintain but mostly consist of the remnants of Mediterranean peoples and inherit their culture. Yet they are different although sometimes it is hard to define in what respects especially from the Nordic peoples, and racial intolerance finds stronger expression strange to say in regard to small differences than to fundamental ones… The deeper motives of antisemitism have their roots in times long past; they come from the unconscious and I am quite prepared to hear that what I am going to say will at first appear incredible. I venture to assert that the jealousy which the Jews evoked in the other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, favourite child of God the Father has not yet been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption. Furthermore, among the customs through which the Jews marked off their aloof position, that of circumcision made a disagreeable, uncanny impression on others. The explanation probably is that it reminds them of the dreaded castration idea and of things in their primaeval past which they would fain forget. Then there is lastly the most recent motive of the series. We must not forget that all the peoples who now excel in the practice of anti-semitism became Christians only in relatively recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody compulsion. One might say, they all are “badly christened”; under the thin veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were, barbarically polytheistic.”

JF (1:52:35): “If you tell me, if Cofnas tells me, that this segment does not illustrate a clear idea in Freud’s mind that Jews are superior morally and ethically and that they are superior to other people, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

JF, there is nothing in this passage that shows that Freud believes that Jews are superior morally and ethically and that they are superior to other people. You read 14, often lengthy, sentences from Freud’s convoluted writing and you have what exactly?

JF: “He says that the Jews are first born, favorite child of God.”

No, JF, he says that Jews have claimed this status. Freud was an atheist.

JF: “He says that people become anti-semitic because they are jealous of different things including circumcision and for not being chosen by God.”

Freud suggests there are many possible reasons for why people become anti-semitic. He never says non-Jews are jealous of Jews for having circumcision.

JF: “I reject this paragraph because I find evidence in Moses and Monotheism that Freud believed that the Jewish people were chosen and the first child of God.”

Freud never said Jews were chosen and the first child of God. He said that Jews have held these faith statements. JF once again displays a lack of reading comprehension.

Nathan Cofnas wrote:

Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique is titled “The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances.” It focuses on the alleged hypocrisy of members of the Frankfurt School in advocating for collectivism among Jews in both Israel and the diaspora, and pathologizing any feelings of group allegiance in white gentiles. MacDonald sees the Frankfurt School as having influenced the field of psychology particularly through the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950), a book published as part of a series called Studies in Prejudice. He concludes that “the agenda of the Frankfurt School” was to facilitate “radical individualism . . . among gentiles while retaining a powerful sense of group cohesion among Jews” (1988a:215). “[T]he central agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is to pathologize gentile group strategies while nevertheless leaving open the possibility of Judaism as a minority group strategy” (1988a:172). The Frankfurt School influenced the humanities through the development of “critical theory.”

The main problem with MacDonald’s argument is that he interprets criticism of nationalism in gentile groups to indicate approval of Jewish nationalism as long as the latter is not explicitly condemned. He never cites positive evidence that representatives of the Frankfurt School approved of Jewish nationalism, and he ignores evidence that they in fact disapproved of it. Leaving aside the question of the scholarly merits of the Frankfurt School or The Authoritarian Personality, there is no positive evidence that members of the Frankfurt School were hypocrites who condemned collectivism in gentiles and promoted it for Jews.

In his critique of The Authoritarian Personality, MacDonald emphasizes “the double standard in which gentile behavior inferred from high scores on the F-scale or the Ethnocentrism Scales is viewed as an indication of psychopathology, whereas precisely the same behavior is central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy” (1988a:168). But nowhere does he present evidence that Adorno et al. approved of this behavior in Jews, which is what would be necessary for them to have a “double standard.” MacDonald just assumes that they approve of this behavior because they were Jewish. Regarding the claim in The Authoritarian Personality that anti-Semitism is associated with a strong in-group ideology, MacDonald comments that “the implication is that strong ingroup ideologies should be reserved for Jews and are dangerous in others” (1988a:170). But nowhere is this actually stated in The Authoritarian Personality. It seems the “implication” is strong in MacDonald’s mind because of the nefarious motives he attributes to the Jewish authors. This does not count as evidence.

JF: “His [Kevin’s] first goal is not to mention hypocrisy of the Jewish people. I control F’ed it and I don’t find statements related to hypocrisy and I read it too and I don’t know what he [Cofnas] is talking about.”

I searched The Culture of Critique (2013 Kindle edition) for mentions of “hypocri” and I found it used many times. Either JF was unable to perform this elementary function as he claimed or he lied about it.

* The reaction of Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is particularly interesting because it illustrates the power of moral revulsion combined with hypocrisy that had enveloped any public discussion of Jewish interests. (Pg. 22)

* Jewish ethnocentrism is ultimately simple traditional human ethnocentrism, although it is certainly among the more extreme varieties. But what is so fascinating is the cloak of intellectual support for Jewish ethnocentrism, the complexity and intellectual sophistication of the rationalizations for it—some of which are reviewed in Separation and Its Discontents (Chs. 6–8), and the rather awesome hypocrisy of it, given Jewish opposition to ethnocentrism among Europeans. (Pg. 42)

* I could perhaps even ignore the towering hypocrisy of Jewish ethnocentrism coinciding as it does with Jewish activism against the ethnocentrism of non-Jewish Europeans. But the long-term effects of immigration will be essentially irreversible barring some enormous cataclysm. (Pg. 73)

* Moreover, although mild forms of Jewish anti-Semitism and rebellion against parental hypocrisy did occur among Jewish New Left radicals, the predominant pattern was a continuity with parental ideology… (Pg. 155)

* As in the case of radical intellectual circles dominated by Jews (see Ch. 3), “The feeling of Jewish superiority alienated many non-Jews within the movement and encouraged many outside the movement to dismiss as hypocritical the humanitarian claims of the psychoanalysts” (Klein 1981, 143)—a comment suggesting self-deception among psychoanalysts regarding their motives. (Pg. 220)

* Coincident with Wittels’s belief in the mission of psychoanalysis was a positive Jewish self-identity; he described the convert Jew as characterized by the “psychological disability of hypocrisy” (Klein 1981, 139). (Pg. 222)

* Love was therefore viewed by Freud as an invention of the alien gentile culture and thus morally suspect. Its true hypocritical nature as a veneer for and really only a sublimation of the sexual instinct would be unmasked by psychoanalysis. (Pg. 232)

* As indicated in Chapter 5, radical individualism among gentiles is an excellent prescription for the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive group. The irony (hypocrisy?) is that Fromm and the other members of the Frankfurt School, as individuals who strongly identified with a highly collectivist group (Judaism), advocated radical individualism for the society as a whole. (Pg. 249)

JF reads from Culture of Critique: “Thus humans are portrayed as naturally opposed to the conformity demanded by a highly cohesive society. As indicated below, a consistent theme of The Authoritarian Personality is the idea that gentile participation in cohesive groups with high levels of social conformity is pathological, whereas similar behavior of Jews with respect to the group cohesiveness characteristic of Judaism is ignored.”

JF: “Kevin is saying that gentiles are being treated with a double standard…”

“I have found evidence that these [Jewish] authors do not criticize ethnocentrism on the side of Jews. The book The Authoritarian Personality was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee Social Studies Series. Here you have Jewish authors funded by an ethnocentric Jewish committee and they end up finding that gentile identity is pathological… I can’t believe that Cofnas is claiming that these guys are not identitarians.”

Just because a committee in your ethnic group funds your book does not make you an identitarian. Neither JF nor Kevin MacDonald presents evidence that members of the Frankfurt School supported Jewish nationalism.

Theodore Adorno wrote in his book Dialectic of Enlightenment: “If thought is liberated from domination and if violence is abolished, the long absent idea is liable to develop that Jews too are human beings. This development would represent the step out of an anti-Semitic society which drives Jews and others to madness, and into the human society. This step would also fulfil the Fascist lie, but in contradicting it: the Jewish question would prove in fact to be the turning point of history. By overcoming that sickness of the mind which thrives on the ground of self-assertion untainted by reflective thought, mankind would develop from a set of opposing races to the species which, even as nature, is more than mere nature. Individual and social emancipation from domination is the countermovement to false projection, and no Jew would then resemble the senseless evil visited upon him as upon all persecuted beings, be they animals or men.”

JF: “This guy is engaging in Jewish identity politics… To say that these guys are not Jewish identitarians, Jewish nationalists, is ludicrous.”

There’s nothing in the Adorno quote that smacks of Jewish identity politics. JF again demonstrates his lack of reading comprehension.

JF: “These people are treating Jews and gentiles as different. They are engaging in identity politics.”

Where? Michael Lowy writes in 2015:

…Max Horkheimer, Theodor Wisegrund Adorno (whose Jewish father converted to Protestantism, while his mother was Catholic), Henryk Grossmann, and Friedrich Pollock had little interest for Judaism…

Adorno, who didn’t consider himself as a Jew at that moment, believed he could remain in Nazi Germany and was disposed, as he wrote a friend in 1934, to do so “regardless of cost.” Soon afterward, he was forced to go into exile. Horkheimer, who had emigrated to the United States, wrote a piece in 1938, “The Jews and Europe,” which contains some valuable insights on fascism but has a vulgar economistic approach to the Jewish question. According to Horkheimer—supported by Adorno—the economic basis of anti-Semitism is the dying out of the sphere of circulation and the increasing superfluity of trade in the age of monopoly capitalism! This is a double nonsense: How can capitalism exist without circulation and trade, and what has this to do with Nazi anti-Semitism?

Nathan Cofnas wrote: “According to MacDonald (1998a:54), Marx held that “Judaism, freed from the principle of greed, would continue to exist in the transformed society after the revolution (Katz 1986:113).” However, page 113 of Katz (1986) makes no reference or allusion of any kind to Marx or his ideas. In regard to Marx’s views on Jewish peoplehood, Katz (1986:122) cites only his view that (in Katz’s words) “Jews qua Jews would become liberated from their Judaism to take up their place as human beings in the socialist society of the future.””

JF: “I will trust that Kevin MacDonald properly cited Katz… Have you read the entire book?”

If you cite a page in a book to support your point and there is nothing on that page to support your point, and when you are asked about it via email and you do not reply, your credibility as a scholar and a man is diminished.

JF: “It sounds intellectually cheap when you are down to this.”

It sounds like normative academic practice to me to call out a scholar for inaccurate footnotes.

Nathan Cofnas comments in JF’s chat: “​Kevin MacDonald admitted he made a mistake about Katz.”

JF Gariepy clearly did not understand the Cofnas-MacDonald debates. At the same time, he has no compunction about pronouncing on things he doesn’t understand.

Nathan Cofnas wrote: “According to The Culture of Critique, “[the Jewish Horace] Kallen’s idea of cultural pluralism as a model for the United States was popularized among gentile intellectuals by John Dewey . . ., who in turn was promoted by Jewish intellectuals” (1988a:250). MacDonald points out that the editors of Partisan Review “published work by Dewey and called him ‘America’s leading philosopher’” and Dewey’s student, Sidney Hook, “was also unsparing in his praise of Dewey, terming him ‘the intellectual leader of the liberal community in the United States’” (1988a:250). Notice that, earlier, MacDonald argued that Margaret Mead was a puppet of her less-famous Jewish teacher, Boas. Here he argues that Dewey was being manipulated by his less famous, albeit Jewish, student, Sidney Hook. What is the reason why Dewey’s actions should be attributed to Jews?”

JF: “Kevin does not make this attribution of manipulative intent. That is a lie. Kevin MacDonald is looking — can I find a Jewish contributor to this work? If yes, then it is a Jewish work to some proportion. It is the goal of the book to identify Jews in intellectual and political movements.”

So I did a Control F search for “manip” through Culture of Critique (2013 Kindle edition) and I found many results:

* An important theme of Separation and Its Discontents (hereafter SAID) was the manipulation of ideology in the service of rationalizing specific forms of Judaism, interpreting history, and combating anti-Semitism. (Pg. 79)

* Even Berthold Auerbach (b. 1812), the exemplar of the assimilated Jewish intellectual, “manipulate[d] elements of the majority culture in a way peculiar to the German-Jewish minority” (Sorkin 1985, 107). (Pg. 88)

* This cultural manipulation in the service of group interests was a common theme of antiSemitic writings. (Pg. 88)

* This elite should pursue its vision of the common good but must reach out to others using deception and manipulation to achieve its goals. (Pg. 342)

* I am merely adding to the leftist critique the idea that Strauss crafted his vision of an aristocratic elite manipulating the masses as a Jewish survival strategy. (Pg. 343)

* A solution is to advocate democracy and the trappings of traditional religious culture, but managed by an elite able to manipulate the masses via control of the media and academic discourse. Jews have a long history as an elite in Western societies, so it is not in the least surprising that Strauss would advocate an ideal society in which Jews would be a central component of the elite. In my view, this is Strauss’s esoteric message. The exoteric message is the universalist veneer promulgated by Strauss’s disciples—a common enough pattern among Jewish intellectual and political movements. (Pg. 343)

* But without the esoteric message that the proposition nation must be managed and manipulated by a covert, Jewish-dominated elite, such an ideology is inherently unstable and cannot be guaranteed to meet the long-term interests of Jews. (Pg. 344)

* They form an elite that is deeply involved in deception, manipulation and espionage on issues related to Israel and the war in Iraq. (Pg. 344)

* It is tempting to link the actions of the OSP under Shulsky with Strauss’s idea of a “noble lie” carried out by the elite to manipulate the masses, but one doesn’t really need Strauss to understand the importance of lying in order to manipulate public opinion on behalf of Israel. (Pg. 358)

* It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or Jewish group interests were involved, and they could not develop a specific rationale for Judaism acceptable within a post-Enlightenment intellectual context. (Pg. 398)

* This phenomenon is an excellent example of the incompatibility of Judaism with Western forms of social organization, which results in a recurrent gap between Jewish behavior vis-à-vis its own group strategy and Jewish attempts to manipulate Western societies to conform to Jewish group interests. (Pg. 513)

* The implication is that Western societies are subject to invasion by non
Western cultures able to manipulate Western tendencies toward reciprocity, egalitarianism, and close affectional relationships in a manner that results in maladaptive behavior for the European-derived peoples who remain at the core of all Western societies. (*Pg. 520)

* It is this intellectual tradition that has been effectively manipulated by Jewish intellectual activists, such as Israel Zangwill and Oscar Handlin, who have emphasized that in developing immigration policy Western principles of morality and fair play make it impossible to discriminate against any ethnic group or any individual. (Pg. 520)

Contrary to JF’s assertions, Jewish manipulation of gentiles is a central and explicit theme in Kevin MacDonald’s book Culture of Critique (2013 Kindle edition).

JF (2:19:30): “This book is about Jews, it is not about gentiles…”

Non-Jews are an essential part of the story of these 20th Century intellectual movements.

Nathan Cofnas wrote: “MacDonald repeatedly cites Grant complaining that Jews opposed his (Grant’s) ideas. But in opposing the theory of Nordic superiority, Jews were effectively promoting, not undermining, white unity. Of course, many “Boasian” Jews argued that there were no differences between any races, but in the early twentieth century they were advocating immigration from all white countries whereas their opponents wanted to restrict immigration from non-Nordic white countries such as Italy and Poland.”

JF (2:22:00: “Cofnas says, see, the Jews are for white unity. Are you that fucking stupid?”

Not what he said.

JF (2:24:23): “Do we have the Derrida part? I can’t find it.”

That’s because it is not in the Cofnas Critique. That’s something you would have known if you had read the Cofnas Critique.

JF: “I remember what was said about Derrida even though I can’t find it anymore.”

You remember something that doesn’t exist? Congratulations.

JF: “Nathan Cofnas was questioning Derrida’s double-standard attribution.”

Nope.

JF: “[Derrida] seemed to be some kind of Jewish identitarian.”

Nope.

JF: “And he seemed to be engaging in crypsis.”

We all engage in crypsis when it suits us (such as when public knowledge about one of our identities might cause us harm).

JF: “Cofnas says there is no demonstration in the Culture of Critique that Jews engage in hiding their status as Jews.”

Cofnas says no such thing. You just made that up, JF.

Nathan Cofnas says in JF’s chat:

There’s nothing about Derrida in my paper.

Where do I challenge “crypsis”? Obviously Jews change their names an pose as gentiles. ​Can you cite the statement in my paper about crypsis that you are refuting?

Well, if you’re comparing two populations of bees, you should probably look at the behavior of both populations.

JF (2:35:20): “The claim of more ethnocentricity by Jews is very well supported by these articles.”

And yet most Jews in the United States marry non-Jews. Doesn’t sound ethnocentric to me.

JF (2:38:00): “The approach of Culture of Critique is limited to were there Jews involved in this movement. Yes or no.”

“Design is intentional language. Kevin MacDonald does not talk like that.”

So I searched Culture of Critique (2013 Kindle edition) for “intent” and found many relevant results:

* For Jews intent on influencing the wider society, overt Jewish group identity and overtly stated Jewish interests could only detract from the ability of these movements to influence their intended targets. (Pg. 95)

* Moreover, many Jewish members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appear to have been intent on establishing a form of secular Judaism rather than ending Jewish group continuity. (Pg. 130)

* Psychoanalysis has proved to be a veritable treasure trove of ideas for those intent on developing radical critiques of Western culture. (Pg. 246)

* Although there is little reason to suppose that the battle for sexual freedom so central to psychoanalysis had the intention of benefiting the average resource compethatition ability of Jews vis-à-vis gentiles, the psychoanalytic intellectual war on gentile culture may indeed have resulted in an increased competitive advantage for Jews beyond merely lessening the theoretical importance of the Jew-gentile distinction and providing a “scientific” rationale for pathologizing anti-Semitism. (Pg. 258)

* Adorno’s philosophical style is virtually impenetrable. See Karl Popper’s (1984) humorous (and valid) dissection of the vacuity and pretentiousness of Adorno’s language. Piccone (1993) proposes that Adorno’s difficult prose was necessary to camouflage his revolutionary intent. (Pg. 584)

These examples show that Kevin MacDonald is clear in his book Culture of Critique that in his view much of Jewish subversion of gentiles is intentional. Somehow JF missed this. Sad. My Soundcloud response. Part Two.