Milo Yiannopoulos and Stefan Molyneux Whitewash Richard Spencer's Racism

Stuart K. Hayashi


NOTE:  On February 18, 2017, I made some significant changes to this essay upon learning that in 2006, Milo Yiannopoulos had been walking around in public with Nazi paraphernalia.  This includes his wearing a Nazi Iron Cross necklace.  One might make the excuse that Milo Yiannopoulos had adopted the Nazi persona in his early twenties just to be "edgy," but that is still pathological and not to be encouraged.  I am sad to say that I have known people who, in their twenties, repeatedly "joked" about admiring Nazis or wishing they could have been Nazis.  Without exceptions all of these people had -- and still have -- self-hatred issues.  Even if we try to be charitable and try to assume that Yiannopoulos's Nazi persona from his twenties was just some poorly-though-out youthful indiscretion and not done out of malice, it's still a horribly unhealthy sign.  And that, as of this writing, Yiannopoulos is still whitewashing neo-Nazis such as Richard Spencer, indicates that the pathology is not "long passed."

In an earlier draft, I said that Yiannopoulos was "Alt Lite," meaning that he whitewashes white supremacists but does not go as far as saying that he is one of them himself.  Upon learning about Yiannopoulos actually going around praising Hitler and Naziism -- even allegedly in jest -- I have to revise that.  Yiannopoulos might not merely be alt-lite; he might be in the same category as Richard Spencer after all.

_____


No, Dummy, It's Not OK to Punch Richard Spencer Over His Racist Speech
Richard Spencer is the neo-Nazi who famously coined alt-right.  You may recall that in January, as Spencer was being recorded on video, some terribly misguided vigilante punched him as he was speaking.  For the record, that was wrong and the hooligan should face assault charges.  Spencer's propaganda is vicious -- indeed, evil -- but, as of this writing, it is still no more than speech.  No matter how evil someone is -- even if people acting on his advocacy does great harm -- violence against that person cannot be justified until and unless that person himself is behaving violently.

The reason is that even if someone advocates something truly evil, such as racism, through his speech, people are still free to avoid him or counter him by using their own speech to expose what is wrong with what he advocates.  Conversely, if someone is imposing his will through violence, then he is at the point where you cannot reason with him and you cannot simply avoid him; as long as someone chooses to act violently he can only be answered with force in kind.

One should not be "rationalist" about this and assume that I am saying that you cannot strike a violent party until and unless it has landed the first blow.  If a party demonstrates a long-term plan to enact violence upon you, you are right to call the police to apprehend that party prior to any blow being landed.  If, for example, someone like Charles Manson were plotting your murder, you would right to call police upon that party before any physical altercation broke out.

Richard Spencer indeed poses a threat to the republic in advocating his racism, but as long as that remains speech, the threat Spencer poses remains an indirect one.  On the contrary, when that vigilante punched him, that vigilante gave everyone probable cause to be concerned that that same vigilante might direct similar violence upon them; by throwing that punch, the vigilante made a concrete demonstration of how physically dangerous he is, and thus poses a more direct threat upon others.  Violence against those who advocate Richard Spencer's brand of neo-Nazism cannot be justified until there is concrete evidence that those neo-Nazis are planning an act of violence upon person or private property, or if one has proof that they are already engaging in such violence.  At that point, one is called upon to bring such evidence to the police (here is my explanation why a free republic requires that citizens leave retaliatory force to the police and do not become vigilantes).

The same principle applies to scheduled speeches that are supposedly to be delivered by Milo Yiannopoulos.  Yiannopoulos's sleazy antics did not justify the riots and vandalism at Berkeley; and those who riot out of purported protest against him are behaving as fascists.



Yes, Stefan Molyneux Fans, Richard Spencer Is a Neo-Nazi
Now that I have made that clear, it's important to acknowledge that Richard Spencer really is a neo-Nazi and that, to the extent that people swallow his propaganda, he indeed poses a danger.  As a matter of course, people act upon their beliefs.  If they believe what Richard Spencer espouses, they will ultimately call for governmental initiations of the use of force upon innocent people -- the likeliest innocent victims will be of dark-skinned "races."

In the very video where Richard Spencer gets punched, right before the fist lands on his face, he is in the middle of denying that he is a neo-Nazi.  "Neo-Nazis hate me," he insists.  Later on Twitter, however, he tweeted this out.  Under the guise of being tongue-in-cheek (as if a white member of an anti-immigration circle calling him- or herself a Nazi is sooo amusing), he is implicitly acknowledging the association of him with neo-Nazism:



If you want to see for yourself the sort of racism that Richard Spencer promotes, you can go to the white nationalist propaganda website he owns and operates, called Radix Journal. It has some mentions of Ayn Rand you might find interesting. One of them is a piece titled "Ayn Rand's Curious Bloodlust," which goes out of its way to denounce the Ayn Rand Institute and, of course, Jews in general. It bemoans, "Faith, racial pride and even loyalty to one’s family if it isn’t based on selfishness were also judged harshly by Rand." Interesting how it threw in "racial pride" between "faith" and "loyalty to one's family" as if it's equally uncontroversial, is it not?

You can also check out "What's Wrong with Libertarianism?" authored by Richard Spencer himself. In that piece, he heaps hostility upon Gary Johnson while, of course, praising Murray N. Rothbard, Hans Hermann Hoppe, and Lew Rockwell. More interesting than that, though, is what you find in the comments section from Spencer's alt-right fan base. "Albionic American" uses the triple-parentheses (((echo)))) for "Ayn Rand" at least twice, and proclaims the need to "restrict women's franchise and sexual freedom, and instead enforce a benevolent but strict patriarchy."



That is Richard Spencer and the ideological company he keeps.



Milo Yiannopoulos:  Open Scorn for the Left, Respect for Richard Spencer's Sleaziness
It is concerning that some people who call themselves Objectivists express admiration for Milo Yiannopoulos.  From the summer of 2015 to January 2016, I would have told you that I thought Yiannopoulos was not exactly in the alt-right, as being alt-right means going as far as Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux:  stating explicitly that different "races" have biologically innate behavioral differences and therefore the State must intervene to keep them apart.  I would have told you that instead Yiannopoulos is a leading figure in what is called the alt-lite:  people who do not state explicit agreement with the eugenics but go out of their way to provide a moral sanction to the alt-right, treating the alt-right as just another opinion and admonishing people to respect it as a legitimate hypothesis worthy of consideration and respect in a pluralistic republic.  While members of the alt-lite aren't the ones fervent enough to stick their necks out and say all the racist rhetoric bluntly, they remain fellow travelers who provide encouragement to the more explicit racists and reinforce their antics.

Yet, upon learning on February 18, 2017, that Yiannopoulos actually has a history, going back over ten years, of hinting to people of some sort of sympathy for Naziism, Yiannopoulos might not be just alt-lite; he might really be alt-right and in the same camp as Richard Spencer.

As "proof" of Yiannopoulos opposing the alt-right, some of his fans quote him saying, "White nationalism is not the answer" and his saying that he doesn't agree with how white nationalists are trying to counter the political Left's collectivism with their own. But this gesture is merely perfunctory on his part.  You can tell someone's real priorities by his actions.  Looking at Yiannopoulos's actions -- as I have done since the autumn of 2014, back when I was following the Gamergate controversy and when Yiannopoulos was then well-known only among those who knew about Gamergate -- allows one to see that while Yiannopoulos heaps nothing but disrespect upon anyone and anything he misconstrues as leftist (such as free-marketers who stand up for the transgendered), he presumes that the alt-right's racism must be paid respect and that its central tenets can only be, at worst, and as-of-yet-unproven hypothesis.

Yiannopoulos came out as the preeminent alt-lite apologist for the alt-right with the essay "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right," which Yiannopoulos's former friend Cathy Young accurately describes as "a whitewash, full of far-fetched arguments and misleading claims that consistently downplay this movement’s ugly bigotry." "Establishment Conservative's Guide" introduces Richard Spencer and the alt-right as follows:

There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence. . . .  The alternative right are a much smarter group of people -- which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.  . . .

The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2012, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.

 
Alongside other nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, AlternativeRight.com became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another. All of these websites have been accused of racism.

Note the question-begging presumptions that Yiannopoulos has in those paragraphs:  the large group of people who disagree with the alt-right's members -- which he misidentifies as "Left" -- "hates them so much" for no better reason than that the alt-right figures are "smarter."  If you compare Richard Spencer and his alt-right cronies to skinheads -- which makes sense, given that white supremacism, and their support for the idea of having a government separate "races" by force, are what the two categories share in common -- then Yiannopoulos is quick to dismiss you as behaving "idiotically."  By contrast, Yiannopoulos has no sharper barb for Spencer and his alt-right cronies than "All of these websites have been accused of racism," which is a far cry from Yiannopoulos admitting the obvious:  these websites "have been accused of racism" for a solid reason:  a reading of these websites demonstrates that these websites blatantly advocate racism.

After a quick and perfunctory admission, "Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots," he goes on to attempt to minimize this.  What Yiannopoulos would have us believe are the very few true racists and bigots in the alt-right "are the people that the alt-right’s opponents [merely] wish constituted the entire movement" (emphasis added). He disingenuously assures readers "there's just not very many" real racists in the alt-right, "no-one [in the alt-right, definitely not Richard Spencer] really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right."

Were it the case that it was unlikely for real racists to achieve anything in the alt-right, then it would have been unlikely for Richard Spencer to achieve anything in the alt-right. Yet Yiannopoulos already identified Richard Spencer as the alt-right's thought leader.

He gave a "speech" that simply amounted to the arbitrary sentence "Feminism is cancer." There was no equivalent "The alt-right cancer." He told one left-wing student, "Fuck your feelings." He did not say "fuck" to the feelings of Richard Spencer's ilk (and the racist pseudoscience promoted by Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux end up amounting to nothing more than a sprawling rationalization for their own feelings, those feelings being prejudices and unproductive hostility). The implication of Milo Yiannopoulos's public antics has consistently been that he regards Richard Spencer and the alt-right as having the moral high ground over anyone they consider "Left," including moderate Democrats and even Yiannopoulos's former friend, Reason magazine writer Cathy Young.

Yiannopoulos's apologia for Richard Spencer and the alt-right is not some new affectation he adopted to sell books.  It goes back at least as far as 2006, when he was in his early twenties.  Back then, Milo was calling himself "Milo Andreas Wagner." He wore a Nazi Iron Cross necklace out in public.

In 2009, Yiannopoulos uploaded this image -- supposedly "jokingly," of course.

I learned about those images from this blog post, which chronicles still other instances -- all taking place prior to 2014 -- of Yiannopoulos expressing some sort of anti-Semitism, often rationalizing that being Jewish precludes him from being anti-Jewish.

The main excuse for Yiannopoulos, naturally, is that all of these were mere "jokes" in crude taste. For an explanation as to why that excuse fails to mitigate concerns over the pathology of the crude "joker," read this blog post of mine.

Of course, if we find that Yiannopoulos is at least as favorable to white supremacism as Richard Spencer is, that would still not exonerate the Berkeley riots from moral condemnation. What I said about violence still applies: if Yiannopoulos has yet to initiate the use of actual physical violence, then those who rioted against him demonstrate themselves to be a greater direct physical threat to others than does Yiannopoulos himself.

Now, to the degree that Yiannopoulos is ambiguous about whether or not he realizes that Richard Spencer is a real racist -- and, remember, Yiannopoulos mendaciously asserts that real racists are rare in the alt-right -- that gives Yiannopoulos some weaselly wiggle room whereby he can maintain some plausible deniability about whether he condones Richard Spencer's propaganda specifically. But Stefan Molyneux -- with whom Yiannopoulos exchanged accolades in an online video interview -- is less ambiguous: Molyneux's apologia and whitewashing of Richard Spencer's racism advocacy is much more direct.

Stefan Molyneux's Excuses for Richard Spencer's "White Homeland" to Exclude Nonwhites
Since the autumn of 2015, Stefan Molyneux -- once most famous as the leader of a cult that was purportedly about anarchy -- has become most famous as an online apologist and propagandist for Donald Trump (it does not appear that the cult has disbanded, though). You might have seen my prior critiques of Molyneux's advocacy of eugenics, white supremacism, and government-enforced racial segregation. As an apologist for Trump, Molyneux has also found it necessary to make excuses for some of the unsavory characters who have been manipulating Trump (sometimes even Vladimir Putin). For that reason, Molyneux took it upon himself to make an entire video to rationalize, as purely justified, various disturbing behaviors on the part of Trump's chief strategist, former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon. To his credit, conservative commentator Glenn Beck has remained critical of Trump, Bannon, Breitbart News, and the alt-right. Beck pointed out that by catering to the alt-right, Steve Bannon and Breitbart News were elevating and reinforcing the white supremacist agenda of Richard Spencer. On this point, Molyneux decided that defending Steve Bannon against Glenn Beck naturally compelled him to defend Richard Spencer as well. The result is Molyneux delivering mind-bending rationalizations for Richard Spencer's racism.

First, Molyneux approvingly cites Richard Spencer's dishonest comparison of his own agenda to the establishment of Israel.   Richard Spencer says that his desire for purely white countries -- which block nonwhites from entry -- is simply to have an "ethno-state" that is to white Christians what Israel is to Jews, and therefore what he promotes is no more objectionable than is present-day Israel.  Molyneux announces that he shares in that evaluation completely.  As I've explained before, that comparison is misleading. More than a fifth of Israel's population is gentile; this includes Arabs.  Over 16 percent of Israel's population is Muslim.  According to Israeli law, these non-Jews are to be treated with the same rights and freedom as Jewish citizens. And, yes, as of this writing Israel is accepting orphaned child refugees from Syria.

Secondly, Molyneux resorts to pedantry to distract his audience from the fact that the general thrust of Glenn Beck's criticism of Richard Spencer remains correct.  Glenn Beck faults Richard Spencer for advocating that the State intrude upon people's private decisions on whether to have children or not; Beck is concerned about white supremacists calling for the compulsory sterilization of nonwhites. Molyneux replies that Richard Spencer is not calling for compulsory sterilization but is only advocating that tax money be spent to subsidize upper-middle-class whites to have more children, which means that Richard Spencer is benign and that governmental intrusion upon private families' choices is OK.  (And this same Stefan Molyneux still calls himself an anarchist.😑 )

Here is the essay of Richard Spencer's that Stefan Molyneux quotes and defends. Richard Spencer says,

We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration. We will need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have children [Spencer is demanding that the State do this 'incentivization,' and Molyneux approves] . . . .

Today, contraception and birth control are nothing less than a curse [when used by upper-middle-class white couples]! Those with the foresight to engage in 'family planning' [he means upper-middle-class white couples] are exactly the kind of responsible, intelligent people who should be reproducing. And increasingly, middle-class White families are so over-burdened with taxation and the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education that they don't feel they can afford children [you see? --S.H.]. This is not only a dysgenic catastrophe but a moral one as well. 

On the other hand, individuals with low innate intelligence or even criminal personalities [Spencer means blacks and Latinos] -- those who should be limiting their reproduction -- can't be bothered to purchase a condom.

Molyneux approvingly quotes Richard Spencer as saying that because nonwhites are out-competing the white population in terms of out-breeding whites, the solution is for Western governments to manipulate white citizens into having more children as a means of catching up to nonwhites and matching them (as if this is some contest).  Molyneux would then have his audience believe that this is not racist; this self-proclaimed anarchist does not even acknowledge how statist an intrusion that is. (This fretting over how white people in rich countries are not having enough children, in competition with nonwhites in poor countries, was started by the first eugenicists in the late 1800s, and this scare was revived in the 1990s. A moderate version of it is called "demographic winter" and the more fanatical version involves the alt-right screaming about "white genocide" in the West. For my deconstruction of this nonsense, read this post.)

Molyneux says of Richard Spencer, "He is making an argument based on facts. And you can agree or disagree." If you don't approve of this, "you would need to find arguments or counter-facts; Richard Spencer would be open to any counterfactual arguments that came his way [lie]." Molyneux's ultimate assessment of Spencer's white nationalism is, "It's not racism if you're pointing out empirical facts about ethnic differences. It's just facts. You hate facts, I guess, if you're on the Left [translation: by 'Left,' Molyneux means everyone who doesn't swallow his rhetoric on race]."


Below, you can watch the excerpt from Molyneux's Steve Bannon apologia that makes excuses for Richard Spencer:







Stefan Molyneux Floats Proposition That "This Battle Has Moved Beyond Words"; Richard Spencer Approves
Richard Spencer apparently recognizes an ideological ally when he sees one, as he has taken to retweeting Stefan Molyneux's propaganda.




This is one I find quite noteworthy:



That tweet contains an excerpt from the ending of Stefan Molyneux's video "Anti-Milo Yiannopoulos Rioters Burn UC Berkeley | True News," FDR Podcast 3581. The video purports to be about the riots of misguided people in Berkeley to shut down one of Milo Yiannopoulos's "speeches." Molyneux turns on the crocodile tears and talks as if the Berkeley rioters are representative of everyone in the country who disagrees with the racial fanaticism he preaches. The Americans who disagree with Stefan Molyneux's fanaticism and his calls for State-imposed racial segregation, by means of immigration bans based on IQ and race, number in the hundreds of millions, vastly outnumbering the Berkeley rioters. But Molyneux talks to his audience as if the Berkeley riot is the fundamental essence of the entire rest of the world, the big bad world that rejects his cultish doctrine. For that reason, between crocodile tears, Molyneux almost-whispers,

Maybe the time for arguments is passed. Maybe this battle has moved beyond words. Perhaps my job is over. Perhaps I have failed or the world has failed. Perhaps I am done. For ten years I've been saying '[That's] not an argument' [to anyone who disagrees, even when -- especially when -- they do give real counterarguments]. Tonight, perhaps, it has been made clear there are no more arguments to be made.

It would be great if, by that, Molyneux meant he was finally folding up this dishonest operation, taking all his propaganda off the Web, and finally making a living off of some work that is actually constructive and psychologically healthy. But Molyneux is not giving up. What, then, does he mean that "there are no more arguments to be made"? Since he is not giving up on trying to push his racial separatism, what is meant by "the time for arguments is passed" and "this battle has moved beyond words"? To what is he referring?

Ayn Rand -- the same Ayn Rand whom Stefan Molyneux's pal, Richard Spencer, despises -- gave some insight. The same Leonard Peikoff denounced in Radix Journal explains in The Ominous Parallels, "There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument -- or a bullet." Molyneux is floating the idea to his cult audience that his making persuasive appeals (that is, trying to convince people by reason that his racism is correct 😑) is no longer a viable option, and, therefore, if his cult audience is to have its way, it must have some other recourse. But what other recourse is left? Ayn Rand -- the one Richard Spencer reviles -- notes in "The Comprachicos," "When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements."

Molyneux is floating the proposition to his cult audience that maybe he should stop with trying to reason other people into, well, his thoroughly irrational racial segregationism. If Molyneux and his audience come to conclude that that is the case, then pushing their own agenda, their own cause, would require that they go through with that one other recourse. Richard Spencer retweeted that monologue because that is the exact direction that he would push the Molyneux cult toward. And should the day come when Richard Spencer and the Molyneux cult decide that "this battle has moved beyond words" and that they will fight with their fists, then, yes, you will be justified in punching them back.



Conclusion
Yes, Richard Spencer is a neo-Nazi. Yes, Milo Yiannopoulos has done his part to normalize Richard Spencer's bigotry and to demonstrate his own pathological obsession with Nazi iconography. And Stefan Molyneux has made an unambiguous apologia for that bigotry; one cannot pretend that Molyneux is "only joking" about this.

Stefan Molyneux's Mendacity in Denying the Diversity in Israel

Stuart K. Hayashi


This is a follow-up to the post "Stefan Molyneux Cites and Repeats Conspiracy Theories About Jews from a David Duke Acolyte."

Stefan Molyneux repeatedly pulls a dishonest trick.  He says that people should stop fretting about the burgeoning white nationalist movement in the United States and Western Europe, because it has a precedent in . . . Israel and Zionism.  He proclaims,

This is the basic fact [for] everybody who's shocked and appalled about the potential for white nationalism: OK, well, if you are opposed to white nationalism, then you must of course be enormously opposed to Israel, which is an ethno-state. If you are not opposed to, and criticizing, Israel for being an ethno-state, then shut up about white nationalism, because you are a racist, a coward, and a hypocrite.

To him, if alt-right leader Richard Spencer has his way and the United States becomes a "homeland" for white people that repels nonwhites from immigrating, that is no worse than what Israel already does.

Here is a 96-second video montage of Molyneux regurgitating Richard Spencer's propaganda.



Actually, the claims of Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux are false.  Israel is more diverse -- ethnically, racially, and religiously -- than Molyneux lets on.  According to the CIA World Factbook, no more than 77 percent of Israel's citizens are Jewish. Over 20 percent of Israel's citizens are non-Jewish; over 16 percent is Muslim.

In terms of ethnicity and race and religion, Israel is more diverse than Japan, Finland, and Norway.

And contrary to much propaganda from both the Left and the Right, the Israeli government's policy is that Arabs in Israel are to be treated as first-class citizens with the same rights as Jewish citizens. As the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise points out,

Arabs in Israel have equal voting rights; in fact, it is one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women may vote. Arabs in 2011 held 14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Israeli Arabs have also held various government posts, including one who served as Israel’s ambassador to Finland and the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. Oscar Abu Razaq was appointed Director General of the Ministry of Interior, the first Arab citizen to become chief executive of a key government ministry. Ariel Sharon’s original cabinet included the first Arab minister, Salah Tarif, a Druze who served as a minister without portfolio. An Arab is also a Supreme Court justice. . . .

Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official language in Israel. More than 300,000 Arab children attend Israeli schools. At the time of Israel’s founding, there was one Arab high school in the country. Today, there are hundreds of Arab schools.  

The sole legal distinction between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel is that the latter are not required to serve in the Israeli army. This is to spare Arab citizens the need to take up arms against their brethren. Nevertheless, Bedouins have served in paratroop units and other Arabs have volunteered for military duty.

This is not to deny the all too many instances of tensions between Jews and non-Jews within Israel. And there are many policies in all the aforementioned countries -- Israel, Japan, Finland, and Norway -- that I don't like. I don't approve of conscription in Israel or anywhere else.

 But the fact remains that if Stefan Molyneux got his way and the USA became a "homeland" exclusively for white gentiles, this would not be an emulation of Israel. Richard Spencer and supposed anarchist Stefan Molyneux would have it that statutory law in the United States discourage racial mingling; that Israel is intended to be a safe haven for Jews does not mean that Israel is all about statutory discrimination against Arabs.

Stefan Molyneux Cites and Repeats Conspiracy Theories About Jews from a David Duke Acolyte

Stuart K. Hayashi

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.