Executive Summary
Here is a 46-minute video montage demonstrating that Stefan Molyneux parrots and cites the anti-Semite conspiracy theories of Kevin MacDonald, praised as an ally by David Duke himself. The first 8 1/2 minutes allow Kevin MacDonald to explain his deranged conspiracy theories about Jews. From the 8:34 mark onward, the video flips back and forth between MacDonald and Molyneux. First it lets MacDonald explain more of his conspiracy theories. Then it switches to Molyneux repeating those same talking points about Jews, in general, engaging in shadowy plots against "white Christians." At the 18 minute, 12 second mark, Molyneux cites MacDonald by name.
Molyneux: Spreading Bigotry Against Jews, Too
I have previously written about Stefan Molyneux's citation of the Pioneer Fund's antiquated eugenicist pseudoscience to provide a scientific veneer for his bigoted pronouncements about blacks, Latinos, and Arabs. While listening to some of his podcasts I got a whiff of anti-Semitism about Molyneux as well, but the anti-Semitism was not as overt as the out-and-out hostility toward the aforementioned ethnic categories. Yet looking further into this I have discovered that my suspicions about the anti-Semitism are confirmed . . . and more virulent than I had anticipated. Molyneux parrots conspiracy theories about Jews most infamously propagated by retired Californian psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, a proven anti-Semite and close associate of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. As MacDonald wrote on his own website on July 1, 2016,
I have been appearing on the David Duke radio show as a regular guest, every two weeks or so, for quite a while. This was a difficult decision at first, but I am very comfortable with it. . . . After watching David Duke’s videos and reading his writings, I decided that I agree with the vast majority of what he is saying.And Molyneux cites MacDonald by name in disseminating this paranoid propaganda, as if MacDonald is a scrupulous academician and reliable source of information.
David Duke starts a Skype interview with MacDonald by introducing him as "my good friend and an incredible academic" -- no ironic pun intended with incredible. Unsurprisingly, MacDonald himself cites dubious sources, as in the case of MacDonald citing, as a credible source, J. Philippe Rushton, the known eugenicist and white supremacist who in his lifetime led the Pioneer Fund (one of the few remaining eugenics thinks-tanks in the USA). As you can see here, as of this writing David Duke has interviewed MacDonald over twenty times. Why does David Duke cherish MacDonald so much? It is because of MacDonald writing pseudo-scholarly works to provide the illusion of academic credibility for his conspiracy theories about Jews. The main video where Molyneux cites and repeats MacDonald, "The Truth About Immigration: What They Won't Tell You!," had been uploaded onto YouTube seven months prior to MacDonald becoming a regular guest on David Duke's podcast. Still, by that time -- July 2014 -- MacDonald had already been well-known for his propaganda against Jews.
First I will describe MacDonald's conspiracy theories. Once done with that, I will go over how Molyneux largely repeats them -- again, citing MacDonald by name -- and modifies them only slightly.
1. MacDonald insists both (a) communism and (b) the activist campaign for liberalizing immigration laws are conspiracies concocted by Jews. As of this writing, I haven't yet heard MacDonald say that the push for more open immigration is necessarily a communist conspiracy. Rather, MacDonald seems to be saying that initially Jews invented communism as a conspiracy but then, decades into it, lost interest in communism, despite remaining mostly on the political Left (he also derides the allegedly right-wing neo-conservatism of the Kristol family as a Jewish conspiracy). After having squeezed all they could get out of communism, MacDonald continues, Jews then cooked up a new conspiracy: lobbying for more open immigration into the United States and Western Europe.
2. MacDonald says that Jews advocating any ideological position is indeed a conspiracy because Jewish intellectuals who profess to believe sincerely in any political viewpoint are lying; they are masking their actual exploitative endgames. MacDonald says that a disproportionately large percentage of the early advocates of communism were Jewish, that a large portion of the advocates of open immigration are Jewish, and that the postwar advocates of neoconservatism are mostly Jewish. That evaluation is not very controversial. The Jerusalem Post quotes Yaron Brook making a similar observation about how various competing philosophic movements often have Jewish leaders. Indeed, Ayn Rand came from a Jewish family and so did many early students of the Objectivist philosophy. I won't be surprised if MacDonald says Objectivism is another Jewish conspiracy.
What is inflammatory is MacDonald's accusation concerning intent. MacDonald says that when a large number of Jewish intellectuals argue for any ideological viewpoint -- be it socialism, neo-conservatism, or libertarianism -- those Jewish intellectuals are, perforce, not sincere in agreeing with what they are saying. Rather, MacDonald continues, this is a ruse -- ruse is the exact word he employs -- to mask what Jews really want. Regardless of whether Jewish intellectuals are arguing for capitalism or socialism, says MacDonald, Jews are only trying to gain political and/or economic power for Jews at the expense of the gentiles around them, especially Christians of Western European descent. That is, if a Jewish intellectual argues for free trade, he does not genuinely believe that free trade will benefit gentiles; this is just a ploy whereby Jews can manipulate and exploit those gentiles. Likewise, MacDonald continues, if Jewish intellectuals argue that the U.S. federal government should liberalize immigration from Mexico, then the Jewish intellectuals are merely trying to manipulate Mexicans for their own ends, mostly to the material detriment of non-Hispanic gentiles.
3. MacDonald says Jews, communism, and the liberalization of immigration laws are all linked, since both communism and open immigration are Jewish conspiracies. Again, I don't know of MacDonald saying that open immigration is a communist conspiracy. He sounds like he is saying that communism was an earlier Jewish conspiracy and then, as Jews were losing interest in communism, they eased into the newer conspiracy that is immigration liberalization. As MacDonald puts it on the white nationalist website VDare (cited on Stormfront),
In my research on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy, I found that the organized Jewish community has been the most important force favoring unrestricted immigration to the U.S. In doing so, the various entities involved have consistently acted to further their own perceived collective interests—interests that are arguably in conflict with those of the majority of Americans.
4. MacDonald condemns the 1965 Hart-Celler Act as a left-wing elite Jewish globalist conspiracy. MacDonald talks first about the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and then the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. The Johnson-Reed Act established national quotas for immigration on bases that were explicitly eugenicist and explicitly racist. By MacDonald's own admission, the argument for the bill was that southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans were genetically, racially, and culturally inferior to the native-born majority of Americans at the time, who mostly descended from people of western and northern Europe. Of course, many of those Eastern Europeans blocked from immigrating were Jews. MacDonald says that there wasn't much good reason for native-born Americans to fear gentiles from Eastern Europe, but that they were indeed right to want to keep Eastern European Jews out of the USA.
The national origin quotas favored immigrants from Western Europe over those from Eastern Europe, allowing for a larger number of people from Great Britain to enter the USA than, say, those from Poland. However, MacDonald bemoans, this system was undermined by efforts of left-wing elitist Jewish (globalist) activists (elite is exactly the word he uses) who lobbied for a more liberalized system of immigration. According to MacDonald, left-wing (globalist) Jews wanted more "Third World immigration" (that is, immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America) coming into the USA because it would do more to make Western-European-descended Christians a minority. Moreover, continues MacDonald, left-wing (globalist) Jews could form a political "coalition" with activists from these other ethnic groups and then it would be more difficult for Western-European-descended Christians to gang up on them.
Then MacDonald wails that the (globalist) Jewish activists succeeded with the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which Ted Kennedy championed. MacDonald says that Ted Kennedy assured (racist) doubters that the bill was OK because it would not change the demographics of the country (that is, WASPs would maintain a majority). Then MacDonald points out that over the past half-century the demographics have indeed changed. MacDonald therefore insists that Ted Kennedy very consciously chose to lie, as it was his conscious intention to alter the racial makeup of the country, and that it was the globalist Jewish lobby that very decidedly put him up to it.
We are to believe from MacDonald that by removing the explicitly racist national origin quotas, the Hart-Celler Act made it easy for dark-skinned people from poor countries to enter the USA, opening the floodgates for a barbarian horde. In reality, MacDonald's characterization of the Hart-Celler Act as near-anarchic deregulation is misleading. The Hart-Celler Act created the present system, which says that to immigrate to the USA for the long term, you may do so to seek higher education (student visas), work (H-1B visas), or reunite with family members (family reunification visas). While the explicit national origin quotas are gone, there remain caps on the number of visas that can be issued per country. Since Mexico adjoins the continental USA, it is not surprising that 30 percent of visa applications come from Mexico. Yet no more than 7 percent of all visas issued annually can go to Mexican nationals.
If you are a Mexican who is a spouse or minor child of a permanent U.S. resident, you will have to wait an average 6 years to obtain a family reunification visa -- and that's one of the categories with one of the shorter waiting periods. If, as a Mexican, you are the sibling of a U.S. citizen, the estimated waiting time for a visa is 16 years (see the first page of this PDF). Moreover, H-1B work visas are accessible almost exclusively to persons who hold university degrees (as Melania Trump's case reminds us, a rare exception is made for fashion models). Since impoverished people in impoverished countries still mostly have to farm for their food, they rarely ever scrimp together the resources needed to obtain university educations. For that reason, contrary to MacDonald's disingenuous claims, the present system created by the Hart-Celler Act still stacks the deck against (dark-skinned) penurious people from the "Third World." The 1965 law did not unleash any type of mass migration.
In any case, MacDonald's points here are (a) the national origins regime from 1924 to 1965 was wonderful, (b) everything went to hell from 1965 onward when the Hart-Celler Act allowed for a barbarian horde of non-white people to flood into the USA, (c) this is the result of a left-wing elite Jewish globalist plot, and (d) this happened because Ted Kennedy let himself be a pawn of this left-wing elite Jewish globalist plot.
5. MacDonald condemns Jews (not particular individuals who happen to be Jewish, but Jews in general) as hypocrites. This is a favorite talking point of Stefan Molyneux and other anti-Semites, such as Ann Coulter (see here and here), and these anti-Semites apparently adopted it from MacDonald. The talking point is as follows: most Jews in Western Europe and the English-speaking countries argue for more liberalized immigration into the countries of their present residence (MacDonald doesn't want to admit that the United States is the home country of a Jewish-American). MacDonald (and then Molyneux after him) particularly takes offense at Jewish intellectuals who stand up for the rights of Mexicans to enter the USA peaceably and who have expressed revulsion at Donald Trump's proposal to build an enormous wall to keep them out. MacDonald says that Jews who argue for liberalizing immigration are hypocrites, because the state of Israel itself has border walls to keep out enemy troops from Hamas, and Israel itself has restrictive immigration laws.
That is whacking at a tremendous straw man. First, Israel remains officially at war against Hamas, Syria, and other adjoining states. A legitimate purpose of national borders is to repel military threats. By contrast, the United States is not in a state of war against Mexico, and undocumented Mexicans who enter the USA for work are not military threats. Even if a Mexican acted in consistency with the bigoted stereotypes -- even if that Mexican came to the USA fully intending to benefit from welfare and to put his children into taxpayer-funded government schools, that still would not be an act of war against the United States. The comparison between Israel's border walls against Hamas and Trump's proposed border wall against Mexico therefore fails.
Secondly, the Israel-policy-makes-Jews-all-hypocrites assertion fails to make a distinction between Jews and the Israeli government. It's sad that something so obvious has to be explicated: a Jew doesn't have to agree with every policy of the Israeli government. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute, originally from Israel, for instance, has mentioned that he is not happy about Israel's border walls.
I am not Jewish but, for what it's worth, should there come a day when military hostilities cease -- and that would be very good -- there won't be any worthwhile reason for Israel to maintain the border walls.
Anyhow, Stefan Molyneux "adapts" these same talking points from MacDonald, citing him by name, and the differences between Molyneux's version and MacDonald's are merely superficial.
1.-2. Molyneux agrees that communism is a conspiracy concocted by Jews. Says Molyneux,
Communism doesn't particularly come from the Greek, Roman, Western, Enlightenment tradition [true --S.H.]; it generally comes from Jewish tradition [highly misleading claim; communism, as with other forms of collectivism, is a systematized codification of collectivist traditions that go back to the days of hunter-gatherer clans, predating all these other cultures --S.H.]. Certainly, of course, the founders of communism were Jews [misleading; Karl Marx came from a Jewish family but denounced Jews as selfish capitalists --S.H.]. Jews were less than 2 percent of the Russian population but were more than 50 percent of the leaders of the Communist Party, and, of course, a lot of them were in charge of concentration camps and so on, later on under the Soviet regime [note Molyneux's conspicuous insistence on using the term "concentration camps" and saying that Jews ran them --S.H.].Whereas an important part of MacDonald's conspiracy theories is that he says that Jews are seldom sincere in expressing any political convictions, I have yet to hear Molyneux say that explicitly. Nonetheless, MacDonald's other accusations -- particularly about Jews obsessing over domination of gentiles -- remain crucial to Molyneux's accusations in the "Truth About Immigration" video. When you look at Molyneux's typed-up source notes, the reference for Molyneux's announcement that Jews ran concentration camps in the Soviet Union is none other than an essay by Kevin MacDonald called "Stalin's Willing Executioners: Jews As a Hostile Elite in the USSR," which is a review of a book by Yuri Slezkine titled The Jewish Century.
Molyneux cites Kevin MacDonald by name in his "Truth About Immigration: What They Won't Tell You" video when he says the Communist Party of the USA was all Jewish. He cites MacDonald twice in the typed-up source notes online, the links going to MacDonald here and here. No mention is made of MacDonald's well-earned reputation as a propagandist for anti-Semitism.
3. Molyneux, like MacDonald, says that Jews, communism, and immigration liberalization are all connected, though he does not phrase this exactly in the same way that MacDonald does. Molyneux is more roundabout in trying to put these together. We remember that Molyneux said that communism is predominantly Jewish. Then he says that immigration restriction from 1924 to 1965 was indeed wise and well-justified because Eastern Europeans were communist agents, and when such communist agents entered the USA, they would commit terrorism, espionage,and other acts of violence. Hence, says Molyneux, it was good for the U.S. federal government to ban from the United States any immigrant who might potentially be a communist agent. Since Molyneux said previously in the same video that communist agents were predominantly Jewish, the deductive conclusion the audience is to draw from this is that Molyneux believes that the U.S. federal government was right to block Jewish immigrants in particular.
This, he insists, "was a justified fear, given how rapidly communism had spread throughout the world." Unfortunately, he adds, there was "Jewish opposition" to legislation that very reasonably tried to ban Eastern European Jews who might turn out to be communist agents. But, Molynuex goes on, U.S. Congressman John Rankin laudably pushed back against these Jews.
In attempt to maintain some plausible deniability about whether he agrees fully with this opinion, Molyneux conspicuously employs the "passive voice" in proclaiming:
So there is this concern -- and the degree to which this is valid is certainly arguable -- there is this concern in the minds of a lot of Christian Americans, and this was of course the case in Germany[!!] as well, there was this concern that communism equals Judaism and when communists, a.k.a. Jews, get in power, then a lot of Christians are not long[-lived] for this world, so this is sort of what he [John Rankin] is talking about, and this is all vanished from history [bowdlerized and scrubbed by a politically-correct globalist cabal] and not because it's entirely false. Again, the degree of [Jewish] influence is arguable; we'll talk about more facts [sic] here, but I guess Christians aren't quite as good at telling stories [as allegedly conspiring Jews are].In this particular video, Molyneux does not repeat MacDonald precisely in proclaiming that Jews lobbied for the Hart-Celler Act primarily to undermine white gentile culture. However, like MacDonald, Molyneux does say that Jews favoring the Hart-Celler Act wanted to get more Jews in particular into the USA. Moreover, Molyneux does repeatedly state that a left-wing globalist conspiracy is pushing for liberalization of immigration in order to undermine white Christian culture in the West (not using the word Jew in that isolated context). And since Molyneux also says that left-wing people who argue for liberalizing immigration are predominantly Jewish, one is to deduce that Molyneux is intimating that this supposed left-wing elite globalist conspiracy to maintain power through "importing"dark-skinned immigrants from "the Third World" is indeed a conspiracy orchestrated by Jews. After conveying that he considers multiculturalism to be synonymous with immigration liberalization, Molyneux says, "Jews, through communism, promote multiculturalism -- and, of course, multiculturalism is promoted by non-Jews, of course [sic; the repetition of of course is Molyneux's] as well -- and this causes problems within the host countries," that is, countries receiving dark-skinned immigrants.
4. Starting here, Molyneux repeats all of MacDonald's favorite talking points about the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act's eugenicist quotas, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act supposedly opening up the USA to "Third World immigration," and of Ted Kennedy lying about demographic change on behalf of a globalist (Jewish) cabal.
5. Here Molyneux repeats the talking point about how any Jew who stands up for Mexican immigrants and against Donald Trump's proposed border wall is a hypocrite on account of Israeli policies.
Final Notes
Molyneux's denunciations of Jews go back more than a decade. On April 9, 2005, he said that
mental health has always been defined in social terms – a combination of sustained relationships and productive work. In other words, a popular Auschwitz guard with a long marriage is the very definition of mental health. Moral considerations do not form the basis of mental heath – a compliant Nazi is considered more ‘healthy’ than an outcast one. This form of ‘social ethics’ is largely due to the Jewish influence over psychology. It would be hard for a Jew to say that individual morality is more important than social acceptance, since to be ‘Jewish’ is to automatically place the authority of the group over the conscience of the individual – just as Christians, socialists, Muslims and soldiers do.MacDonald says "major anti-Jewish movements throughout history have been the result of real conflicts of interest. . . . I wrote a book called The Separation and Its Discontents. It deals with various anti-Semitic movements, anti-Jewish movements. All of them were deeply involved with Jewish domination [over non-Jews] of one kind or another."
Molyneux agrees that Israel is all about Jewish domination over Palestinians and Arabs of neighboring states:
What is often described as a civil war between Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine was, in fact, little more than an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Zionists. ...if the horrors committed by the Nazis continue to live on in the minds of the Jews, how can we expect the Palestinians to forget what was done to them? I'm not equating the Jews with the Nazis [obvious lie] but, from the standpoint of the victims, there are obvious similarities.It is not a mere suspicion that Molyneux is interested in disseminating anti-Semite propaganda. He repeats conspiracy theories about Jews, conspiracy theories transmitted by David Duke acolyte Kevin MacDonald, and Molyneux cites this same Kevin MacDonald repeatedly.
Again, here is the 46-minute montage where you can hear Stefan Molyneux and his anti-Semite conspiracy-theorist source speak for themselves.
UPDATE from Tuesday, November 22, 2016: Stefan Molyneux repeatedly makes the disingenuous claim that Richard Spencer's explicitly eugenicist white nationalism is no worse than Zionism. He says Israel is an "ethno-state" for excluding gentiles. What renders the claim so mendacious is that Israeli statutes are not about exiling gentiles, such as Arab Muslims, and Israel is more diverse than Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer would have people believe. See the follow-up posting refuting Molyneux over here.
