Last night, I got this bulk email.
Dear Prof. Asher,
I have just learned that Philosophia about to publish an article by Kevin MacDonald, emeritus professor of sociology at CalState Long Beach, at doi: 10.1007/s11406-021-00439-y
MacDonald has long been outspoken in his conviction that Jews are driven to destroy the cultures of the countries they live in. He is a Holocaust denier. He argues that Jews should be subject to civil disabilities, proscriptions, and special high taxes. He openly supports white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations.
The paper you are publishing is as full of the falsehoods and bile as is everything else he has written. As part of the endeavor of philosophy and as part of the civilized world you as editor-in-chief ought immediately to retract it.
I have BCC’ed this email to every philosopher I know, and some other scholars, asking them to join in protesting this publication.
—Bennett Gilbert
————————————————————————————–
Bennett Gilbert
Assistant Professor in University Studies, History, and Philosophy
Portland State University
How bad could it be, I thought. I don’t respond to these mass calls for action without checking. So I did. I looked at the article in question.
Oh my god. That’s just the abstract. Every paragraph of the article is essentially, “The Jews are conspiring to steal our essence”, and the editors of Philosophia (“Philosophical Quarterly of Israel”) didn’t notice? Have they no reviewers? Do they just have a policy of allowing any old crap they find in their in-box to be published without criticism?
Apparently, Kevin MacDonald squats in his office, simmering in a constant state of hatred of Jews, convinced that they are running a massive conspiracy theory to destroy all non-Jews, and in particular, scrawling out long missives objecting to any criticisms of his past work, all dedicated to proving that The Jews run the world. What a horrible little man, and shame on Philosophia for publishing his bile, and extra shame to CalState Long Beach for allowing him to lie in the name of their university.
Here’s the editor of that journal.
If anyone is tempted to think that Philosophia is publishing this garbage (including previous garbage they published) because of a naive commitment to free speech, please remember that Asa Kasher, the EIC, is this Kasher here. pic.twitter.com/edDR8oKOFQ
— Sergio Tenenbaum (@sergioten) January 3, 2022
I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he was flattered by MacDonald’s claim that he and his co-religionists run the planet?
White supremacists of a feather flock together.
I note he is emeritus at Calstate Long Beach (retired 2014) and the university seems to have been trying to ease him out of the classroom earlier (he seems to have had tenure before things became obvious).
The sly conspiracy of the Jews is proven, apparently, by the fact that they sought to include non-Jews in their nefarious drive to end racism and white supremacy and keep the government secular. It takes a genius to parse such an insidious plot.
I’m amused that the paper is mostly dedicated to arguing with Nathan Cofnas, who himself has recently published in philosophy journals arguments for the viability of IQ differences between social groups and why we shouldn’t stifle that research on political correctness grounds and blah blah blah.
So lovely that philosophy journals are fighting grounds for different flavors of racists to yell at each other over which strand of racism is more academically defensible.
SPLC has a profile of him. It partly answers what I had wondered, but I still don’t get it. What can turn a boomer-age American into a raging paleo-anti-semite? He’s literally making the same claims the Nazis did.
Looking back at Swedish academia during the 1930s and 40s, we also had some awful specimen in high positions.
The difference is, it is no longer acceptable to shout “ze joos”.
-Society has plenty of suspicions against immigrants from muslim countries as morons cannot make the distiction between “people who loosely follow religious traditions” and “a crappy religion that disrespects human rights , and the people who follow it to the letter”. I hope to be part of changing that.
Jews? Admittedly, a nazi got hired at my old University but once it was revealed amid headlines in the press, that person did not stay long.
I suppose if you define “destroy” as “make lasting cultural contributions” …
I tried to join the conspiracy, but the casket full of Krugerrand coins never arrived, the cheap bastards!
@5
What’s not to get? There was a huge and loud pro-Nazi element in the United States prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor (including some incredibly famous people, like Walt Disney). They were still a huge segment of the population after the bombing and throughout America’s involvement in the war, but they smartly stayed quiet about it because nationalism. Those pro-Nazi Americans had kids and raised them on the exact same Nazi talking points that they subscribed to. That’s how some boomers grew up to be raging anti-Semites. Pretty straightforward, if you ask me.
kome@9 Maybe. He doesn’t seem to have picked up his antisemitism until the 1980s but that could have marked a return to the prejudices he had absorbed from his parents.
I can think of nothing more depressing than purging American culture of all its non-white influences. What’s left after that? Hee-Haw? (And I’m sure there’s a hidden zionist plot behind that too.)
Paul BC: “I can think of nothing more depressing than purging American culture of all its non-white influences. What’s left after that? Hee-Haw?”
Nope! The Banjo is of African origin. Hell, nearly all of American music can be viewed as the continual attempts of black Americans to find a beat to which white Americans can actually dance!
I expect the reason for publishing MacDonald’s paper is because he is arguing not just with Nathan Cofnas (as kome points out), but specifically with a paper by Cofnas in the Sept 2021 issue of their journal that really goes to town on MacDonald and his anti-semitism.
The Cofnas paper is itself terrible — not because of his justified criticism of MacDonald’s anti-semitism, but because he insists on “race-realist” arguments to explain the strength of Jewish influence in America. He paraphrases Pinker of course: “The origins of race denial, blank slatism, Noble Savage envy, and socialism go back centuries or even millennia (cf. Pinker 2002)” and uncritically accepts the conclusions of this godawful paper defending racist prejudice — and now the journal obviously feels it has to allow MacDonald to respond.
Frankly, Cofnas’s paper should never have been published in the first place and certainly not in a journal for a discipline incapable of assessing its claims about race and genetics. Having made that initial error, the editors are only compounding it by allowing MacDonald to respond with a full article that appears to be nothing more than a restating of the original tripe Cofnas was attacking. Surely there must be a point at which, even if a response is owed to an author, the editors can reject any that are below standard.
If anyone’s genuinely puzzled about why Asa Kasher would choose to publish this dreck, well… Violent and reactionary ethno-nationalist movements tend to work together pretty well, at least in the abstract (David Duke and Louis Farrakhan were great pen-pals, but I don’t think the Klan and NoI ever had a meet-and-greet, for instance.) Zionism is no exception to the trend, and there’s a dark undercurrent of Zionists actually supporting antisemitism under the logic that it might force Jews to emigrate to Israel, thus “validating” Zionism’s core theses.
Things are heating up in the philosophy world, at least one board member has now resigned
https://dailynous.com/2022/01/03/philosophy-journal-hosts-debate-on-jewish-influence/
I am glad some board members have integrity.
Erp@14–
Thanks for that link. It contains the world’s best comment. Scroll down to Simon May’s: “Now I know where to send my paper on hematology ethics in the matzos industry.”
Years ago, I was an active participant in the Usenet group talk.origins, a group PZ will remember. I no longer remember what inspired this, but as a result of discussion, I volunteered to interview Prof. MacDonald (I live very close to CSULB). For reasons I no longer remember, it ended up being a telephone interview.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that my talk with him confirmed everything anyone has heard or read about his being a Jew hater. During the interview he asked if I was a Jew, I confirmed that I was (I did not mention that I am also an atheist), and he clearly saw no reason to mitigate anything he said accordingly.
It is so unoriginal. The Japanese Happy Science Cult and the American Scientologists* are at least somewhat surprising in their choice of baddies.
*But Hubbard stole a lot of his stuff from that Lemuria nut, Mme Blavatsky.
Oops, I can feel the evil spirits trapped inside volcanoes are really influencing me to feel disdain for Kevin McDonald.