Stefan Molyneux is an alt-right podcaster whose YouTube account, as of this writing, boasts over 870,000 subscribers. I have previously written of how he copies and specifically cites, by name, Kevin MacDonald — co-host to David Duke’s white supremacist podcast — in propagating conspiracy theories about Jews in general, specifically that a Jewish cabal has a long history of trying to undermine the United States and the rest of the West, first by founding the communist movement, and later by debating in favor of liberalizing immigration into the West from Africa and Central America. (The latter phenomenon of which David Duke, Kevin MacDonald, and Stefan Molyneux have all publicly condemned as necessarily bad.) But Molyneux’s propagandizing for racism was and is even worse than I understood.
Stefan Molyneux: Even More Antisemitic Than You Knew
The journalist Cathy Young directed me to her September 6, 2018 twitter conversation with Brandon Bahret. In that exchange, Bahret called attention to another aspect of Molyneux’s anti-Semitism in Molyneux’s video “Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants,” FreeDomain Radio podcast 3220 (given the alternate title, on the FDR website, “Migratory Patterns of Predatory Scientists”). For that episode, the caller into the show was a scientist from India taking residence in Germany. Because the caller initially thought of himself as sympathetic to Molyneux’s nationalism, he criticized Germans in general for fearing a resurgence of nationalism in their country, lest the horrors of the Nazi regime be repeated.
The caller says, “In Germany, it’s like the people . . .they . . . kind of . . . In Germany [ . . . ] people are kind of, like, after historically they had some bad kind of politics [Naziism], they always try to be good, so that they just never want to show them, like, [we] be proud Germany, [and say,] ‘We Germans are the highest in . . .’ blah blah blah and everything in this kind of...”
Molyneux then interrupts with a defense of antisemitism in 1920s and ‘30s Germany — a move that is shocking even for Molyneux.
At the 4 minute, 44 second mark, Molyneux tells the caller,
The [1920s and ‘30s] Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led communism. And Jewish-led communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia, and they [Germans] were afraid of the same thing, and there was this wild overreaction [the Holocaust], and all this kind of stuff. So I just ran over that briefly with that stuff. [*No pause between that, and this next thought:*] But with regards to immigration as a whole, I mean there’s this interesting question to ask if you’re in someone else’s country — and I’d like to get your answer to this. There’s an interesting question to ask if you’re in someone else’s country, which is to say, “How would I sell me being in this country, to the natives?” [Boldface added. —S.H.]For the remaining duration of the video, Molyneux berates the caller for being an immigrant and receiving taxpayer funding from a Western government.
Hear Molyneux Himself Say All This in This Video Montage
This video is 4 minutes, 17 seconds long.
From Stefan Molyneux’s Own Mouth: Molyneux Agreeing With the Nazis That They Were Only Defending Themselves From “Jewish-Led Communists” Who Started the Fight
Someone might want to be charitable and insist that Stefan Molyneux is merely talking about the Nazis’ delusion that Jews in general were communists, and that he does not agree with the Nazi delusion that Jews and communism deserve to be associated strongly with one another. But that’s not the case. In two other videos — uploaded months away from this one — Molyneux expresses agreement with the accusation.
In “The Truth About Immigration: What They Won’t Tell You,” at the 23 minute, 38 second mark, Molyneux proclaims,
Communism doesn’t particularly come from the Greek, Roman, Western, Enlightenment tradition; it generally comes from Jewish tradition. Certainly, of course, the founders of communism were Jews. Jews were less than two percent of the Russian population but were more than fifty 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.Molyneux’s claim that “more than fifty percent” of the leaders of the Communist Party in Russia were Jewish isn’t even accurate. A free-marketer named Jacob Levy pointed out to me that, out of the 19 members of the Central Committee elected by the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party from April 1920 to March 1921, only four were Jewish. That is less than a quarter of them. There is a whole Wikipedia entry on how this same insinuation that Molyneux propagates, which has been around for a century, amounts to an old “antisemitic canard.” University of Warsaw philosophy professor Stanislaw Krajewski points out,
Most Jews were never communist or pro-communist and most communists were never Jewish. Various minorities were over-represented among the communists. This was, by the way, a paradox because communists believed they represented the working masses, the national majority.
Most Jews did not support communism. Even in post-war Poland when the choice for Jews was limited (this is also true of Hungary) the majority of Jews were not pro-communist and they mostly left Poland.
Whose Side Is Molyneux on, Regarding World War II? Not the Holocaust’s Victims, Apparently
Molyneux also spread the same antisemitic innuendo in an oral back-and-forth in the video “Criticism: Are Libertarians Wrong About Immigration?” This time, the call comes from a self-described libertarian who, at the time of the video’s recording, sounded as if he was still overall a fan of Molyneux’s but who took exception with Molyneux’s preaching that there must be more armed federal agents obstructing, at gunpoint, immigration into the USA and the rest of the West from the poor countries. In defending immigration, the caller brings up the incident of Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis being denied safe harbor in the USA during the Holocaust. To the caller, that was a case study in the perils of denying entry to refugees in general.
This is how it plays out, starting at the 56 minute, 40 second mark:
* Molyneux: “If you shut down immigration, it would be a breather, and it would be far less taxes, and it might give white people more of an incentive to breed, rather than not have kids because they’re paying for everyone else’s.”
* Caller: “I mean, like, during the Holocaust, you know for instance, the Jews who were fleeing Nazi Germany were on the boat to Ellis Island, and FDR [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] sent them back, where they were killed. I mean I think that was pretty horrific, you know. The consequence of not having that immigration was that these people died and got killed. Right? So—
* Molyneux: [*Shrugs; unmoved*.] “[*Blandly*.] Yeah, so it’s really bad what Hitler did.”
* Caller: “Right. But FDR could have helped by allowing the Jews to have a safe haven, right?” [ . . . ]
* Molyneux: [*To deny that, Molyneux rambles on*.]
* Molyneux: [*This is now at the 58 minute, 40 second mark.*] “[Point] Number Two is that a lot of Jews in Europe in the 1930s were communist. Oh, by God, were there a lot of communists, and a lot of the communists were Jews. Maybe they [U.S. immigration authorities during World War II] couldn’t vet them [Jews on the MS St. Louis seeking refuge in the USA]. Maybe they [the Jews fleeing Hitler] didn’t have papers. Maybe they [U.S. immigration officials] were concerned that Hitler was fighting, right, it was Naziism versus Bolshevism, right? The communists and Nazis were fighting tooth and nail in the streets in Germany.
“And, of course, a lot of Jews, as I’ve talked about before, a lot of Jews were instrumental in the founding of communism, in the spread of communism. Jews were — what? — two percent of the Russian population but forty percent of the communists, and so on. And so, there were a lot of Jews who were instrumental in the founding of communism. [Italics are emphases from Molyneux; emphases by me are in boldface. —S.H.]
“This was a very strong anticommunist time in America, and communists were infiltrating the U.S. government considerably. I mean, this ‘McCarthyism’ hysteria, and so on? There was real foundation for it [widespread fear of immigrant communists infiltrating the USA]. There were hundreds of Soviet spies all riddled throughout the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, particularly in the embassies out in China, which is one of the reasons why massive segments of the world population were lost to communism in China, ‘cause there were huge riddles of communists throughout the place.
“So I don’t know the history, but I think that would be a bit of a security concern [*sarcasm in Molyneux’s tone, implying that the words are an understatement of the dangers from Jewish immigrants*]. So [*shrugs*] you’d have to ask FDR if you could, but I don’t know [*smug smile*], maybe the factors exist [justifying denial of the Jews aboard the MS St. Louis into the USA] and maybe they don’t, but there were some [valid national] security concerns about [Jewish] intellectuals fleeing Germany, because a lot of them weren’t, like, freedom fighters who didn’t like Naziism. A lot of them were like, ‘Damn, we didn’t win with communism. We communists didn’t win, so let’s go flee to America.’ [*Sarcastic again*:] Well, I don’t know that you want a bunch of communists coming into America. You know, it didn’t do America a lot of good during the Cold War.” [Italics are emphases from Molyneux; emphases by me are in boldface.
—S.H.]
Conclusion
When Stefan Molyneux said that Nazis thought that Jews in general were communist, it is the case that he has publicly voiced agreement with that belief on other occasions in relatively close proximity, time-wise. He proclaims that Germans in the 1920s and ‘30s were correct to be afraid of Jews in general for this reason, and that the Nazis were merely retaliating, in self-defense, against the “Jewish-led” communists whom Molyneux presumes to be the party that incited the mutual hostilities between Nazis and Jews. As for the brutalization and extermination of six million Jews in concentration camps, all that Molyneux could say of it was that it was an “overreaction” on the Nazis’ part. With that out of the way, Molyneux quickly moved on to his routine derogation against nonwhites from the developing countries.
UPDATE from October 29, 2018
The day before I first uploaded this blog post, an assailant went on a shooting rampage at a Pittsburgh synagogue. It was horrible, but that is not what initially motivated me to write out this blog post; I planned the blog post independently of that. On October 28, 2018, the same day I uploaded this blog post, Stefan Molyneux uploaded onto YouTube a video he titled “The Truth About the Pittsburgh Massacre,” where, after everything he has said over the past decade, he feigns sympathy for Jews. He spends time in the video’s first half on a tirade where he laments that when Jews marry gentiles, that is a “dilution” of purity and a “silent Holocaust.” From the 25:00 to 28:00 mark, he says he was influenced by Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Walter Block — all Jewish — so he doesn’t spread bigoted attitudes about Jews. He hasn’t retracted his comments from 2016 where he said blocking immigration from Jews 79 years ago was a morally proper measure to counter “Jewish-led communism.” In this video, he talks as if he never said any of that.
At the end, he says something interesting: that he absolutely condemns the thought of anyone using violence against other people for disagreeing with his opinions on politics or religion. I find that interesting as, for the past couple of years, Molyneux has argued publicly that violent force should be used against particular ethnic groups for the reason that most people from those ethnic groups disagree with Molyneux about politics and religion. That Molyneux has indeed publicly advocated violent force against such people, and for such reasons, is something for which I provide evidence in this follow-up blog post.
