Kevin B. MacDonald (born January 24, 1944) is an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). In 2008, the CSULB academic senate voted to disassociate itself from MacDonald's work.
MacDonald is known for his promotion of an antisemitic theory, most prominently within The Culture of Critique series, according to which Western Jews have tended to be politically liberal and involved in politically or sexually transgressive social, philosophical, and artistic movements, because Jews have biologically evolved to undermine the societies in which they live. In short, MacDonald argues that Jews have evolved to be highly ethnocentric, and hostile to the interests of white people. In an interview with Tablet magazine in 2020, MacDonald said: "Jews are just gonna destroy white power completely, and destroy America as a white country."
Scholars characterize MacDonald's theory as a tendentious form of circular reasoning, which assumes its conclusion to be true regardless of empirical evidence. The theory fails the basic test of any scientific theory, the criterion of falsifiability, because MacDonald refuses to provide or acknowledge any factual pattern of Jewish behavior that would tend to disprove his idea that Jews have evolved to be ethnocentric and anti-white. Other scholars in his field dismiss the theory as pseudoscience analogous to older conspiracy theories about a Jewish plot to undermine European civilization.
MacDonald's theories have received support from antisemitic conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazi groups. He serves as editor of The Occidental Observer, which he says covers "white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West". He is described by the Anti-Defamation League as having "become a primary voice for anti-Semitism from far-right intellectuals" and by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "the neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic". He has been described as part of the alt-right movement. By 2010, MacDonald was one of the eight members of the board of directors of the newly founded American Third Position (known from 2013 as the American Freedom Party), an organization stating that it "exists to represent the political interests of White Americans".
MacDonald claims a suite of traits he attributes to Jews, including higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentricism, have culturally evolved to enhance their ability to outcompete non-Jews for resources. MacDonald believes Jews have used this purported advantage to scheme to advance Jewish group interests and end potential antisemitism by either deliberately or inadvertently undermining the power of the European-derived Christian majorities in the Western world.
Early years
MacDonald was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin to a Roman Catholic family. His father was a policeman and his mother was a secretary. He attended Catholic parochial schools and played basketball in high school. He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a philosophy major and became involved in the anti-war movement, which brought him into contact with Jewish student activists.
Between 1970 and 1974, he worked towards becoming a jazz pianist, spending two years in Jamaica, where he taught high school. By the late 1970s, he had left that career.
Professional background
MacDonald is the author of seven books on evolutionary theory and child development and is the author or editor of over 30 academic articles in refereed journals. He received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1966, and M.S. in biology from the University of Connecticut in 1976. In 1981, he earned a PhD in biobehavioral sciences from the University of Connecticut, where his adviser was Benson Ginsburg, a founder of modern behavioral genetics. His thesis was on the behavioral development of wolves and resulted in two publications.
MacDonald completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Ross Parke in the psychology department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983. MacDonald and Parke's work there resulted in three publications.
MacDonald joined the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSU-LB) in 1985, and became a full professor in 1995. He announced his retirement at the end of 2014.