While certain strains within the Alt Right have explicit pretensions to being an intellectual movement, much of the movement remains mired in paranoid insularity and anti-intellectual purity-spiraling. This paranoia was on full display when I was banned from the reddit subreddit r/altright for posting a critical comment to an upcoming “Ask Me Anything” feature with Dr. Kevin MacDonald. The comment, in its entirety, is the following:
Dr. MacDonald,
First, I’d like to express my thanks as Jew for your devotion to serious discussion of the Jewish question. Too many of my people would like to pretend that it is not a serious question, but doing so prevents them from understanding themselves and their place in the world. No matter who one is or what one believes, one must admit that your work on Jewish issues has kept the flame of serious investigation of the Jewish question alive.
As I understand, it is your position that, over the course of the diaspora, Jews have developed a set of characteristics that have allowed them to preserve their unique cultural and genetic existence as a population while avoiding persecution from host nations. These characteristics include: high verbal intelligence, strong in-group favoring biases, high endogamy, and a predilection toward manipulating the political, cultural and intellectual apparatuses of their host nation in such a way as to prevent their host nation from organizing against them.
Is this synopsis of your view correct? If so, I have the following questions for you:
1) To what extent, do you think, is the presence of this set of characteristics among Jews determined by their genetic inheritance? In your opinion, do particular genotypes exist in the Jewish population that dispose those who possess them to subversive and critical behavior? If so, what kind of cognitive mechanisms might these genotypes code for, on the implementation level? And how could such sophisticated cognitive mechanisms have evolved in hardly 1000 years? It would seem ridiculous to suggest that Jews evolved a particular cognitive mechanism or set of mechanisms that disposes them to identify non-Jewish political organizations and seek to obtain control of those organizations without appearing to be Jewish. The conceptual sophistication of such a mechanism would surely be far too great for that mechanism to have evolved in such a short time. Or do you think that a set of various more innocuous cognitive traits can do the explanatory work?
2) It would seem to me that there is a wealth of evidence from Jewish demographics and history that disconfirms your view. For example, the existence, success and continued appeal of Zionism, which rejects assimilation and even the continuation of the diaspora, would appear to confute the claim that Jews have evolved an evolutionary strategy that relies on living among host nations. If nearly 50% of the world’s Jews have decided to leave their host nations within the past 120 years, how can it be plausible that Jewish evolutionary strategy is geared toward the creation of favorable conditions for Jews in host nations? For another example, take the present-day rate of intermarriage among American Jews, which is an astounding 58%. How could a population that evolved such strong endogamous and in-group favoring characteristics come to marry out of their tribe at a rate such that within 3 generations, their tribe will practically cease to exist?
I am sure that all these questions would merit a rather lengthy response, so feel free to respond to as many or few as you like.
In part, I re-post the comment here in the hopes that it will find its way to Dr. MacDonald, whose answers I am eager to hear. But I post it also to show how the paranoia and insularity of the Alt Right serve only to hamstring the movement. For while any political movement must take care to defend its figures and ideas against their opponents, it is in the interests of all burgeoning movements to promote serious discussion of their ideas. For critiques of an idea invite interest in the idea from those who had not previously considered it, and give adherents of that idea the opportunity to articulate and defend their positions to the public. In brief: a critique of an idea is a kind of serious discussion of that idea, and after being consigned to the hated and ridiculed fringes of American public discourse for so long, the Alt Right ought to jump at the opportunity to have its views discussed seriously.
The policy of banning skeptical outsiders from the Alt Right amounts to a policy of intellectual self-ghettoization, the end result of which will be a movement like the Flat Earth Society, in which everybody agrees but about which nobody cares. And the Alt Right is too important to go the way of the Flat Earth Society.
Alt Zionism 
On your last point, you make a category error. The altright sub-reddit is not a forum for publicly debating our position; it is a place for members of the altright to assemble and discuss our ideas with those whites who are recently or almost red-pilled. As a Jew incapable of being altright, your challenge was seen as an unwelcome intrusion by one of our greatest enemies. Would you expect a new Zionist forum to allow admitted members of Stormfront to post “honest questions” challenging their invited guests?
As to your questions for MacDonald, if you’re Ashkenazi, I’m sure you’re smart enough to find his contact details and ask him directly. However, before you do that, I wonder if you could tell us why you think “such sophisticated cognitive mechanisms” only had 1,000 years to evolve. Surely Jewish genes have been evolving those traits since before the exodus. After all, from the Jews perspective, Lot’s was a success story.
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I’m glad you mentioned Stormfront, because if you’d like your forum to be a forum only for those who already agree with you, then your forum is going to be just like Stormfront: a place where, as I’ve said, everyone agrees, and about which nobody cares.
As for your second question: I stipulate that the evolution of Ashkenazim into the distinct population that they are today took about 1,000 years for the simple reason that population genetics and history place the common ancestry of Ashkenazim around 1,000 years ago. In any event, even if I granted MacDonald 2,000 years with which to explain the evolution of those characteristics that he ascribes to the Ashkenazim, such a short length of time would almost certainly not be enough to support a genetic-deterministic explanation for those characteristics.
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I’m not sure the alt-right is really a movement rather than for the most part an inchoate pool of highly dissatisfied people, and, more recently, useful and most welcome bogeyman for professional anti-racists.
This would explain why there’s no interest in fine-tuning an ideology.
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Fair enough, I guess. But surely we can agree that it’s in the interest of an inchoate pol of people to become a clear ideological movement.
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MacDonald wrote about the diaspora exogamy (and broader assimilation) thing in his book Separation and its Discontents, I believe. (I haven’t read the entire book yet, I just looked up the specific passage because I had the same question you raise in the post.) He made what I found to be a rather unconvincing argument that secular Ashkenazim are out-marrying and assimilating and generally seemingly becoming harder to distinguish from gentiles as a clever ruse to /seem/ as if they’re becoming gentiles, when in reality it’s actually a plot to decrease anti-Semitism by destroying Jewish ethno-cultural identity. MacDonald argues that they’re doing this as sacrificial pawns in concert with the very traditionalist (insular, natalist, religious, repressive gender roles, etc.) Orthodox/Haredi Jews: the secular Jews acquire political/economic/cultural power while the traditionalist ones have lots of babies. I find this again unconvincing, because the logical outcome of the process given enough time is for secular Jews to disappear as a group, and with them the distinctive influence MacDonald believes Jews exercise over American life, thus leaving the socially isolated Haredi bereft of “Jewish power”. If Jews really were pursuing the power-maximizing strategy MacDonald imputes them to be, I think this would be a really dumb way to go about it. It would make much more sense to combine the adaptive aspects of traditional society with those of modern society in one group rather than bifurcating into two groups with mutually exclusive strategies. (I.e. Jews marry other Jews, retain religion/culture and have lots of babies that the women stay home looking after, while adapting superficial language, dress, etc. folkways of host society and succeeding in mainstream educational/political/economic/cultural life.) IIRC, Glazer wrote in Beyond the Melting Pot that NYC Jews of the 1910s had a very high fertility rate, like 6 or 7 births per woman. If Jews had actually wanted to collectively maximize their influence in American society, I think they would have maintained rapid population growth the 1960s instead of letting their women learn feminism and enter the workforce and both their men and women to marry gentiles. (Also, rather than being /pro/-immigration, I think the optimal strategy would have been to be /anti/-immigration, or at least anti-skilled immigration, as high-IQ Chinese, Korean, Indian, etc. immigrants are visibly “competing” with Jews in education, finance and business areas where the tribe was once more dominant. If, say, Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to go around doing stuff that was Good For The Jews as per MacDonald’s theories, he wouldn’t have married a gentile to have hapa babies and be lobbying for non-Jewish highly educated immigrants.)
If 58% of white marriages were to non-whites, the alt-right would no doubt completely lose whatever is left of its collective shit and try to go around organizing right-wing death squads to prevent this utter race suicide from progressing a single marriage further. (Given how laughably it overreacts to the currently very small/moderate demographic “threat” to whites in presently majority white societies.) If you were to suggest that whites marrying non-whites at such a rate was /maximizing/ the influence of the huWhite race in society, you would be laughed and/or tarred and feathered out of town. Yet Jews actually /do/ have such an outmarriage rate, and the alt-right unironically proclaims that they are seeking to maximize their influence as a group.
In addition to the very good questions raised in this post, I’d add one (at the very least) one more: if you don’t look too closely and choose your evidence selectively, you can sort of understand the alt-right’s argument about Jewish influence as pertains to America. (Though obviously I think upon sustained examination it’s wrong even for America.) But the U.S. has by the far the largest, in absolute and proportionate terms, Jewish population of any non-Israel country. (And the Jewish populations of countries like France are very different in a variety of respects from U.S./Canada, I believe.) So why do countries with historically and currently minuscule Jewish populations like Sweden or the U.K. experience the same phenomena (immigration, feminism, gay rights, etc.—“muh cuckoldry”) that the alt-right ascribes to Jews in America? Surely /Eastern/ Europe, with its historically much larger Jewish populations, who supposedly crushed the gentiles via the USSR’s Judeo-Bolshevism for nearly a century, should be /more/ cucked than Western, Southern or Northern Europe? And yet of course in real life its the other way around. (And this is even leaving aside the question of /why/ Jews would want to “destabilize” or “destroy” countries they don’t and have never lived in in any considerable numbers.) This makes sense if you think about Israel: the U.S. supports Israel fervently, and European countries don’t/are critical of it. (Though alt-right approved Geert Wilders is a huge fan!) This isn’t surprising, given the U.S.’s large, well-entrenched and politically active Jewish population which has obvious reasons to support Israel. But if the alt-right is correct that the machinations of the Jews are responsible for the stuff they don’t like in the West as a whole, why aren’t the European countries comparably pro-Israel the way they’re comparably pro-immigration or whatever? If you can explain the nature of complex human societies with more sophistication than “the juice!1!1!!” you can explain this; if you can’t, it’s pretty confusing if you stop to think about it.
Also, if you ever want to have an exchange about the JQ or any other political issue, please hit me up. I’m a college student with no friends capable of sophisticated discussion of political issues, esoteric or not, who is also in a weird “a plague on both your houses” ideological space.
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Excellent comment. MacDonald’s supposed explanation for intermarriage is ridiculous, since it ascribes to Jews an absolutely horrendous evolutionary strategy (namely, evolutionary suicide) that could never have been selected for in any environment. Even if we stipulate that it were selected for, it’s almost impossible to tell a story about how it was selected. Are we supposed to believe that Jews have some gene or genes that codes for a cognitive mechanism that makes some of them marry out of their tribe to divert attention from the others who remain within the tribe and attempt to manipulate the host population in a manner that supports those who marry out of the tribe? Never mind that this gene would rapidly disappear as exogamy reduced the numbers of the tribe possessing it to zero; if this gene existed it would be a gene that coded for grand strategy on the genetic level, which is ridiculous. We might as well believe that some mutation among early 20th century Americans coded for a cognitive mechanism that disposed Americans to make deals with oil-rich nations to buy oil for cheap and resell it on the world market.
Now, one might think that what’s causing Jews to marry out isn’t a genetic disposition to divert attention from the activities of their racially-pure brethren, but a political/cultural strategy to do so. But this explanation would rely on some kind of autistic conspiracy theory on which Jews are coordinating outmarriage rates in some central bureau and then organizing marriages.
So, to sum up, MacDonald’s proposed explanation on the evolutionary level – that Jews are marrying out to disguise their activities – itself requires an explanation on the implementation level. And there is just no plausible way to explain how one might implement a desire to outmarry in order to disguise the activities of one’s coracialists.
As for your last paragraph, that’s another good point.
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I agree that the comment should not have been banned as it is serious and respectful while disagreeing with McDonald.
The general tendency of Reddit however is self-ghettoization for everyone, all subreddits devolve into circlejerks, which is why I personally don’t like it as a platform. What aggravates this tendency are the vast amount of people who do not want to be serious and only want to antagonize their opponents, and who flood the subreddit in spam wars akin to those waged on the anonymous chans like 4chan and 8chan. This is what happened in the beginning of Reddit and, unlike chans, Reddit is not anonymous, so the natural reaction after a period of inter-board struggle sessions between the shills was for admins to start banning anyone exhibiting even the slightest hint of disagreement because as the bans grew, the shills became more sophisticated in their “bait.” Thus as a general policy moderation at Reddit is extremely zealous. I was banned from alt-right for merely asking Richard Spencer in his ama about twitter tactics we could use in the meme war, which was considered “brigading”.
about McDonald, I too am skeptical about a 1000 year evolutionary leap that would preconfigure Jewish individuals towards “subversion” on a genetic level. I follow Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt’s explanations of the “subversion” strategy of what I guess you could call those “classically” Jewish individuals who meet up at the ADL, those “Larry Davids” and what not. Nietzsche calls this a revolution in morality by slaves and blames Jews for inventing Christianity. Carl Schmitt implicitly considers Judaism the origin of “neutralization”. The source lies in the historical essence of Judaism rather than the biological gene, or at least if they felt it had a biological trace they didn’t explicitly say anything about it, at least Schmitt. Nietzsche of course goes at length to discuss race, but for Nietzsche race a force larger than the mere organism, though that undoubtedly is part of the configuration.
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Interesting. This all sounds very obscure to me, as most continental philosophy does, so I’m not sure what to make of it. Is the claim that the Jewish religion naturally disposes its adherents to a kind of universalist political thinking that rules out nationalism, etc.?
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Two points on your McDonald quotes
(1) Yes an important genetic variation making Ashkenazim distinct could occur in 1,000 years. Unlike when I was at college, the consensus is that human evolution is not only happening now but actually occurring quite fast. The distinctness of the Ashkenazim genotypes is specifically quoted in this context as is the development of lactose tolerance. I am not sure how comfortable McDonald is with this, by the way, since his thesis as stated relies on all Jewish groups being the same genetically; Ashkenazim, Sephardi and so on. Paul Gottfried has written on the topic that — from a sociological rather genetic basis — Jewish phenotypes actually seem fairly different
(2) Agree that McDonald’s thesis that intermarriage is a way to strengthen Jewish power is a stretch to say the least. Apart from the fact that it doesn’t make any sense, how exactly does the signaling work. How do I as an organism know that I am being good for the Jews when I marry a Shiksa. This kind of thing makes more sense for ants or bees than humans. And that is really the problem with sociobiology as a whole; it has limited explanatory power.
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