Interview with Kevin MacDonald

6,226 words

[1]Interviewer’s Foreword:

I have a lot of time for Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist and professor at California State University Long-Beach, author of seven books and over a hundred scholarly articles.

His trilogy [2] about Judaism constitutes not only a highly original treatment of the topic, with its pioneering theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, but it is also a refreshingly nuanced and intelligent study of a subject that is very difficult to write about: most who do in the West face fierce opposition and social and economic sanctions.

Much has been written about this brave academic and prolific author, but most of that, and even most of what he has written about himself, has focused almost exclusively on his intellectual background and current thinking on ethnic competition, immigration, twentieth century Jewish intellectual movements, and Leftist bias in Western academia. I wanted to find out more about the man behind the monster. What is it like to be the world’s most controversial professor? What is he like as a person? What about his pre-academic life? In this major interview, we discover many previously unknown facts about Professor MacDonald, we obtain something closer to a full-length portrait of the man, and are even treated to never-previously-seen photographic images from his past. Whether you are a friend or a foe, what follows will illuminate, enlighten, and entertain—and it will also shatter, without a doubt, some popular misconceptions.

You were born in 1944, and raised in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. How do you remember the America of your childhood and adolescence, and how does it compare with the America you know today? What were your favorite pastimes and activities?

The post-1960s dispensation is that the 1950s were a time of horrible oppression. In anti-White activist Tim Wise’s recent hate screed [3], he looks forward to the day when “there won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings.”

But the 1950s were a wonderful time to grow up in a small city (~40,000) in the Midwest. It was a stable, well-ordered community—perhaps boring in the end. (For some reason, I never thought I would end up living there.) But it provided a certain sense of security that I think is missing in most communities today. Divorce was unheard of, so none of the children I knew went through big family upheavals. It was a time of economic prosperity that gave everyone a sense of optimism about the future—doubtless most welcome to the generation who had gone through the Great Depression. Life seemed to be (and was) getting better and better.

[4]

America in the 1950s. Not so awful after all?

It has an all-White community where religious differences mattered, at least to some extent. I grew up Catholic and socialized mainly with other Catholics. There were various Protestant denominations and there were still ethnically Polish Catholic congregations that were separate from the other Catholic churches. I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. (They were more German than WASP.) But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

The old moral codes were still in place. None of the guys I knew in high school has sex even though they may have been dating for years.  The nuns and brothers made it very clear that not only was such behavior a mortal sin, it was also likely to lead to a very difficult life. In those days, sex meant pregnancy and that meant no education and no life. I wasn’t the only one who took that message to heart.

[5]

Kevin MacDonald (#42), playing basketball in the early 1960s.

For several of my childhood friends, their growing up in Oshkosh seems to be the high point of their life. They have many fond memories that they are eager to recount—the score of a basketball game between two small-town teams 50 years ago, the names of the opposing players, who scored how many points, and a complete description of the play at the end of the game that made all the difference. One asked me a while ago, “What’s going to happen if things keep going the way they are?”—concerned about a lot of the same things I am concerned about. But then he went back to watching the ballgame.

The conformity to multicultural dogmas is stifling, even by those who don’t care much about politics. Several are strident liberals of the sort that have never in their entire lives lived within miles of a non-White person, and never will. But they have entirely internalized the conventional moralisms of the day. They wear their moral posturing as a badge and a sign that they are intelligent and well-read. They read the New York Times and they have internalized the liberal narrative of the 20th century culminating in Obama’s presidency.

When I was a child in the 1970s it was quite normal for parents to leave their children alone to do whatever they liked, out of sight (and presumably out of mind as well, at least for a few hours). This is inconceivable today. Are there things you remember that used to be taken for granted in the America of yesteryear that are similarly inconceivable today?

We took a lot of things for granted. Racial homogeneity for one. The whole Fox River Valley was completely White when I was growing up. People noticed it when a Black person came up from Milwaukee to go fishing. There were maybe one or two Jewish families in town; nobody cared about it one way or the other. The only Mexicans were migrant workers who lived outside of town on the farms and left after the harvest.  We also took it for granted that moms and dads stayed married and that there was no need to worry about serious crime. People left their cars on the street with the keys in them. (I learned that wasn’t a good idea when I went away to Madison for school.)

How did you imagine the future in the 1950s? What did you imagine you would be doing in the then incredibly futuristic year 2000?

[6]

Kevin MacDonald in the early 1950s.

It’s hard to convey the optimism of the 1950s. That America was the greatest country in the world, the rightful heir of the British Empire. We had the greatest economy and it would keep getting better. We had the most powerful military, and even though there was a certain amount of scare-mongering about the Soviet Union, I don’t think many Americans had any doubt that we were militarily stronger that the USSR and that we were the good guys in international affairs (despite what I now realize was a powerful fifth column of leftist intellectuals who had already infiltrated the elite universities).  As Catholics we were constantly reminded of the oppression of the Church throughout Eastern Europe. Cardinal Mindszenty was a hero. And one of my high school teachers was a refugee from Communist Poland who hated communism with a passion, doubtless from personal experience.

When I was young, there were still globes with all the British colonies and indeed the sun never set on the Empire. I think there was a sort of implicit racial pride. I thought of myself as a member of a racial group that ran the world. After all, the British were a lot like us, and we were the heirs of the British Empire in terms of world hegemony. We were constantly exposed to photos of backward places in Asia and Africa. It was natural to think we were special.

[7]

The British Empire in 1897—still not at its apex.

I think that growing up in a stable, optimistic era has a certain disadvantage because I suspect that we tend to think it will always be that way. Without ever thinking about it, there was an assumption that things would just keep getting better. And for a long while they did. Pretty much everyone I grew up with did better economically than their parents. (Some demographic research shows that people use their parents standard of living as a barometer of how they are doing. We were all doing well by that standard.)

Recently I was viewing the King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. It had a time line on the wall showing the dynasties over 2000 years. I suppose that an Egyptian living in, say, 1200 BC would have thought it would just go on forever. But of course, it doesn’t.  It seems likely that we are on the cusp of some very interesting times. Quite simply, the White European world that was dominant in 1950 will simply abdicate to a brave new world dominated by other peoples, or we will find the confidence and political will to reestablish ourselves as a proud, confident civilization.

You are as much a man of letters as you are a man of science. A man of letters lives partly through the texts he reads. What were key books and authors that most impacted you during the early years? And what inspired you originally to major in philosophy?

I suppose I should be able to find some early inspirations, but there were none that lasted. I went through a Nietzsche period and a Freud period, but I think everyone did that at the time. I went into philosophy because I took a course or two and found I really liked it. I loved to engage in verbal argumentation. One rarely sees that in other areas. When I went into biology, I was struck at how non-argumentative people were. Philosophers love to argue. As undergrads and as graduate students we would go out and argue about philosophical issues. It was very hard to establish anything because of the reigning skepticism of philosophers—always trying to undermine any substantial statement at all.

[8]I loved the verbal sparring but at some point I felt I was in a verbal world that was completely unhinged from reality—much like the contemporary humanities where the real world need never impinge. It was then that I decided I didn’t want to be a philosopher and (after a couple of years wandering around trying to be a musician) I ended up reinventing myself as an evolutionary psychologist. There the clear inspirations were E. O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology (the book that started it all) and even more, Richard Alexander, whose Darwinism and Human Affairs remains an incredibly important work. Who’d have thought that issues like law, morality, and human culture generally could be discussed in natural sciences framework? The demise of both Wilson and Alexander as icons of evolutionary approaches to human affairs is a shame — one of the many examples where the imperium of very narrow, politically correct approaches to evolutionary psychology demolished everything in its path.

As a teenager during the late 1950s and early 1960s, you witnessed the birth of youth culture and subcultures. What were the prevailing attitudes at the time towards this phenomenon? What did you think of it at the time? And, looking back, what do you think of where it eventually led to, musically and sociologically?

The youth culture didn’t hit until the mid-1960s and I was already in college. I was quite hostile to it at first. I remember writing a pro-Viet Nam war article for the college newspaper and furtively dropping it off at the office. As a reporter for the newspaper I had never seen anything like the people who attended the meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee to End the War in Viet Nam in the Spring of 1965. Definitely not the people I grew up with. They were Jewish Red Diaper Babies who came from a long line of radicals—part of the radical Jewish subculture that became a chapter in The Culture of Critique. In general, in the early stages, students from Wisconsin were not much involved. It was seen as an “NYJ” (New York Jewish) thing, where NYJ definitely had a pejorative ring. I described a lot of what it was like in my VDARE article “Memories of Madison [9].”

As time went on, this originally very Jewish movement became very influential throughout the campus, so that at least by 1968 huge numbers of Wisconsin kids, me included, had become radicalized or at least quite removed from the values they grew up with. In my case, the transformation was definitely abetted by living with Jewish roommates and experiencing firsthand the radical Jewish sub-culture of the period—discussed in the VDARE article.

[10]

Kevin MacDonald (centre), aged 22, with his roommates at the University of Wisconsin, in January 1966.

Looking back, this era has had a huge influence because those young people had been substantially socialized into a worldview of the left. In my view, this conventional leftism has become entrenched among educated Whites and has made them helpless in the face of the transformations that are now occurring so rapidly—even when they know in their gut that something has gone dreadfully wrong. All the social science research shows major changes in attitudes in a liberal direction among educated people. The university was liberal before the 1960s, but it became much more radical at that time. This is when we began so see departments of ethnic studies and women’s studies that have transformed the academic culture so dramatically in recent decades into a bastion of the left. I discuss this in my TOQ article, “Why are professors liberals? [11].”

As an evolutionary psychologist, you will be at least sympathetic to the view that a person is born with a predisposition to a certain overall political orientation, and that he may or may not come to embrace it, implicitly or explicitly, in the course of his life, as a result of events. You began a  radical Leftist, yet it seems unlikely to me that you ever had Leftists instincts to begin with. Did you fall into the radical Leftist scene by accident? And, whatever the answer, how did your involvement with it begin? Was there ever a moment of scepsis, alarm, or discomfort in the back of your mind in the face of the heated rhetoric and radical iconoclasm the Left is known for?

Interesting question. I think I became a leftist because of the context I found myself in. I  did feel a bit like a fish out of water. When the 1960s started to heat up, I felt very uncomfortable with the left, as indicated by my pro-Viet Nam war newspaper article mentioned above. It wasn’t until I began living with my Jewish roommates that I was converted, but it was a conformity thing, an attempt to fit in. I think this happens a lot with non-Jews: They enter into a Jewish milieu were the people they are surrounded by have very strong opinions and are quite articulate. They are absolutely sure of themselves. When I got away from that environment, I became steadily more conservative.

There is evidence that basic liberal/conservative political attitudes are somewhat heritable. It’s interesting that my uncle, whom my mother always held up as a role model because he was a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, was very conservative and I naturally looked up to him. I used to go out to his house once in a while when I lived in Madison and felt a little dissonance because of my leftism and his very strongly held conservative attitudes. My mother was also very conservative—she was an antiabortion and anti-pornography activist.

[12]

Kevin MacDonald, becoming more conservative: from circa 1970 to circa 2000

The other thing I have noticed in reading a lot about Jews is that many Jews become more ethnocentric as they get older.  I suspect this is a normal developmental pattern. One of my favorite speculations is that perhaps it’s adaptive because as people get older they benefit more from taking a wider view of things beyond themselves and their immediate family. Older people think more about the long term, which is a collectivist mentality, whereas young people think more about the here and now, an individualist mentality. I encountered quite a few Jews who fit this pattern, Heinrich Heine, the German-Jewish poet for one.  In America, young Whites are the only White group inclined to vote Democrat and to hold liberal attitudes on a wide range of issues.   Most people seem to think that these people will always be liberal, but I don’t think so. They will get more conservative as they get older. That’s certainly what happened to me.

For a time, between 1966 and 1974, you pursued a career in music as a Jazz pianist. What attracted you to Jazz? What was your favourite type of Jazz? And what was your life like during those years? Did you travel? Did you play in a band? Did the band ever record? And do you still play the piano today?

Jazz was part of my surroundings as a college student. One of my Jewish roommates was a musician so then I met other people who were into it. One guy in particular (not Jewish), was a sort of natural contrarian—someone who didn’t fit into conventional patterns and hated middle class sensibility and conventional morality. His background was a Norwegian farm family from southern Wisconsin, but you can think of him in the long American tradition of free and unfettered radical individualism—what Eric Kaufmann [13] terms “libertarian anarchism” American tradition typified by people like Walt Whitman and Benjamin Tucker [14]. (I hear he is now a fishing guide in Montana.) He was absolutely committed to jazz and played the saxophone—like me, not well enough to make a living at it. But he really loved the music. And one thing about marijuana is that it makes music sound incredibly sensuous and compelling; it releases one’s aesthetic sense. Pot was definitely part of the scene, and when you are young you think it can just keep going on like this forever.

[15]

Kevin MacDonald the musician, playing the piano circa 1955-56.

I had played piano as a child but had never advanced very far and gave it up before high school. I took some lessons and practiced a lot, but never really got to a professional level where I could think about making a living at it in competition with people like Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. My tastes ran pretty much the gamut, from the be-bop of the 1940s, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, the Coltrane revolution (although I thought it got unmusical toward the end), and then people like Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock in the 1970s. I was in a band for a while when I lived in Connecticut and going to grad school at UConn. Just played gigs at local bars. I came to realize that it was not going to happen for me in music and gave it up. I played for some years after that just for my own enjoyment but eventually gave it up completely.

In life, you ultimately have to do what you are good at, and I really don’t think I had the talent to really make it in music. After the 1970s or so, I started listening much more to classical music which is what I enjoy now. Given my general perspective, it’s not surprising that I think of classical music as an incredible achievement of our people.

Eventually, you decided to pursue an academic career in science — in what was then known as sociobiology. How did you become interested in E. O. Wilson’s research? And why not astrophysics or aeronautics, after having seen the moon landings of 1969-1972?

In the end I became disenchanted with philosophy because it seemed like a prison of words with no methodology to really determine how the words interfaced with reality. I just had a natural interest in behavior, and realized I couldn’t begin to understand human behavior within the confines of philosophy. In the late 1960s I absorbed a psychoanalytic perspective (!) from my surroundings on the intellectual left in Madison. Part of the Zeitgeist of the 1960s was that middle class sexual mores were hopelessly repressive, a view that of course stemmed ultimately from Freud. Wilhelm Reich, the most radical of the Freudian left (he of the orgone boxes) was often discussed. There is an obvious sense in which indeed traditional culture in the West (and many other cultures, including Judaism), channeled sex into family relationships and producing children. But that became a lever by which to place the entire culture on the couch and to blame any and all social inadequacies of Western cultures on repression of sexuality (discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 of CofC). I adopted that basic frame of reference. You have to also realize that at the time behaviorism was the only other game in town, and that was obviously inadequate to deal in any deep way with behavior. Thank God for evolutionary psychology.

[16]

In Jamaica, 1972-1974, standing next to a 1959 Opel Rekord.

So after my two-year sojourn teaching high school math in Jamaica (another story), I managed to get into a Master’s program at the University of Connecticut in biology more or less by accident. Then I maneuvered into the Department of Biobehavioral Sciences in a program on wolf behavior for my Ph.D. This naturally led into reading Wilson’s Sociobiology [17] which had just come out in the mid-1970s. Perhaps the hostility of the left toward sociobiology, particularly by Jewish professors, was a formative event. I could see the ethnic angle up close and personal, and there was a huge dissonance between my own reading of the book and what I was seeing around me. The Committee Against Racism was active on campus. They held anti-sociobiology events and even harassed my thesis professor, Benson Ginsburg, even though he did not accept sociobiology. It was enough to have any association at all with biological views of human behavior. (Ginsburg was a behavior geneticist and expert on wolf behavior.) Then I read Richard Alexander’s Darwinism and Human Affairs [18], a great book on the interface between evolutionary biology and human culture. That pretty much put me on the path I later followed—taking culture seriously but never losing sight of the evolutionary implications of culture. Most obviously, Whites are being displaced because of triumph of the culture of the left and that means there are ongoing changes in gene frequencies in America and throughout the West as a result of the explosion of the non-White population. And that is evolution.

From being a philosopher, to being a musician, to being a scientist . . . these are big qualitative leaps. To some, on the surface, this may bring to mind multiple personality disorder. Even if this was the product of a quest, there must have been a fundamental organizing principle driving these choices.

[19]As described above, I realized that I could not understand human behavior using the tools of philosophy, so I went in the direction of psychology and evolution. I spent the four years from 1970–1974 as a dropout trying to be a musician, including living in a very foreign environment in Jamaica for two years. It took some time, but I did make the right choice in terms of my interests. Living in Jamaica also makes one aware that Black people really are very different. Despite having an ideological attitude that Whites should submerge themselves in the local culture, make friends with Blacks, etc., in the end it was obvious that all the Whites hung out together. There were never any interracial friendships and very little socializing across racial boundaries. I was also aware that my students were from the top level of Jamaican society. Most children did not attend high school. Those who did well could easily move up in the social hierarchy, but in general, they were very poor students. That probably had an influence on making me a race realist. You just keep going, changing your views as you go along on the basis of your experience and what you read.

During the 1980s your research centered on parent-child relationships, and you authored a number of books on the subject, plus innumerable essays and articles. What remains your favorite book from this era? What did you find most useful in the application of this research “in the field,” so to speak? Which one would you recommend to aspiring parents?

One of the things that fascinated me about behavior was playing with children—physical play like tickling and chasing. These are things that fathers do more of with children than mothers and there are clear parallels in the animal world. Most children love these games and there is a great deal of ecstatic laughter. At one time, I thought that this sort of play could be a powerful environmental influence on children’s personality—part of the environmentalist outlook that I started out with. I still think it has an influence, but I see it very differently now, as a very limited environmental influence on a particular personality system among several others. I think my best work in psychology is in the area of personality, and my writing on that topic has gotten better over the years. I see my early writing as having a lot of limitations. But that’s what progress in science is all about.

In 1990 you became interested in Judaism and embarked on what ended up being, 8 years later, your magnum opus, the famous trilogy on Judaism. I have the impression that you originally approached it simply as an interesting scientific problem, having written previously about the Spartans. What were your thoughts during the initial phase of the research. What were the initial reactions?

You are right to mention the Spartans. The last chapter of Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis [20] (1988) is on how cultures can shape child development. In the case of Sparta that meant a regimen of military training for ingroup altruism, but it was performed in an ethnic context: Sparta was a closed-off group genetically, and the soldiers produced by the society made Sparta a military power. So the culture was ultimately aimed at achieving evolutionary goals.

The parallel with Judaism is obvious.  Judaism in traditional societies was also a closed-off group related by blood kinship. They cooperated closely, thereby maximizing their advantage in competition with other groups. Jewish groups were able to enforce group goals on individuals by maintaining group discipline—enforcing Jewish monopolies, taxing community members, and punishing Jews who deviated from the group ethic of Judaism. The rest of it fell into place easily.

But again, fundamentally it’s a cultural perspective. If culture is able to regulate behavior within a group, then it is a short step to realize that there may be conflicts of interest over the construction of culture. Indeed, conflict over the construction of culture is basic to my theory of culture beginning with my early writings on monogamy (the first paper was published in 1983): Wealthy males and non-wealthy males have obvious conflicts of interest over whether monogamy or polygyny become culturally established, since wealthy males are able to control many females and support their children. The Culture of Critique [21] applied this idea to conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews over the construction of culture. Once again, however, even though the conflict is over the construction of culture, there are real evolutionary consequences to the conflict: The basic idea is that Jewish intellectual and political movements have resulted in a decline of White people in Europe and elsewhere.

1998 saw the publication of the remaining volumes in the trilogy — some 500,000 words and many hundreds of sources. By this time, having lived through Shockley, Wilson, et al, you must have known that you were effectively assembling a bomb that would explode upon publication — a bomb whose detonation would send a shockwave likely to flatten everything you had done to date and whose echo would reverberate for years to come, perhaps forever.

Well, I did realize that these books would produce hostility. But by the time I finished them, I was sophisticated enough to realize that they would be ignored by the intellectual establishment. In Chapter 6 of Separation and Its Discontents [22] I discuss the Jewish strategy of ignoring people and ideas that they don’t like. Making a big fuss is always a gamble for them because more people become aware of the ideas. Even the hostility provoked by the visit of the Southern Poverty Law Center to my university was localized and contained, never spilling into the larger mainstream media.

This cordon sanitaire that surrounds my work is the main reason that I have gotten into blogging [23] and writing commentaries on current events as well as continuing to review relevant scholarly work: I am able to put forward these ideas and to hone my arguments and ideas in a public forum on the Internet. (Thank God for the Internet!) The strategy is that gradually more and more people will get the message. I do think that the social tensions resulting from this assault on our people and culture will eventually get to the point that there will perforce be an audience for my work. It may seem odd to phrase it this way, but in a real sense all of us writing from a pro-White, pro-European perspective should be desperately trying to break through into the wider culture — to become famous and respected. If it doesn’t happen for any of us, then we have surely lost.

Following a Kafkian script, you ceased to be human sometime after 1998 and began a new life as a monster. When and how did you become aware that the metamorphosis had taken place? Give the readers a few illustrative examples from everyday life of what it is like for a normal, ordinary, law-abiding-citizen suddenly to become a monster, bearing in mind that the repercussions extend well beyond the university campus. How does a person cope with that? What were the different stages you went through, from the moment of discovery to the I remember moment of acceptance. What have you learnt from this experience and how has it changed you?

At the beginning of the Fall semester of 2006 everyone in the department got an email basically asking how a racist anti-Semite could be teaching there. A Jewish colleague who eventually became the leader of the local campaign against me called me at home and asked me about it. Beginning then and for the next 2½ years, there was the feeling of terror and anxiety in the pit of my stomach when school was in session.

I realize that it’s crazy for me to have felt that way—as a psychologist, I chalk it up to oversocialization. (Among other things, it means I am not a sociopath.) There is an obviously adaptive evolved urge to want to be liked and respected and a very strong urge not to be ostracized by the group. The SPLC and the faculty activists take full advantage of these proclivities.

Turning on the computer and opening my email was a traumatic act because there were often hostile messages — sometimes a dozen or more — on the faculty email list making a display of their allegiance to the multicultural Zeitgeist and congratulating each other on their wisdom and moral sensitivity (and condemning mine). Then I would spend the morning and sometimes the whole day answering the ones I thought would be seen as most damaging, ignoring the moral posturing.

I focused especially on the comments of the ringleaders, all of whom were Jews, from the departments of Jewish Studies, Anthropology, and Psychology. But perhaps the one that hurt the most was sent by a non-Jewish faculty member to me directly rather than to the whole College of Liberal Arts, so it wasn’t an attempt to simply gain favor. It simply said something like, “You should just do us all a favor and just resign. No one around here wants to hear your garbage.” When I looked back on it later, I imagined him dressed like his Puritan ancestors putting the moral reprobates in his parish in the stocks or branding an adulteress on the forehead with the scarlet A.

On campus I had strategies for minimal visibility, usually hiding out in my office with the lights out, working furiously on replies to the hostile emails, leaving only when class was in session so that there wouldn’t be many people walking around. In general, the students never brought up the issue, either in class or outside of class. The only exception was the first day of class in the Spring semester of 2010 when some radical students showed up trying to get students to drop my class because word had gotten out that I had become associated with the American Third Position. It was embarrassing and difficult, but they didn’t come back after the first day and the students didn’t seem to be affected much. Maybe one student was motivated to drop the class. (I wish more had dropped. The fewer students I have, the less work I have to do.) The good thing was that I was able to express my views in an op-ed in the student newspaper. It resulted in a lot of comments on the newspaper webpage, the great majority positive. And maybe, just maybe, a few White students may have seen the light despite the wall-to-wall propaganda they get every day in their classes.

But some people were friendly despite probably not agreeing with me. Not in public of course. But it was appreciated nonetheless.

The Left would no doubt like to imagine that you live in fear and shame. Yet, all indicators suggest that your pioneering research has caused your status to increase, and you are more famous today than you would have been had you not taken the plunge. So the process of metamorphosing from human to monster has also meant transitioning from mortal to immortal. What have been the positive consequences so far of having gone ahead with your most controversial research during the mid-1990s?

Well, they are right that I did live in fear and something like shame for quite a while. But it gets easier as time goes on. The student incursion into my class was the last gasp. So I came out of it stronger. I think it’s important not to let them think that I think they won the intellectual battle. The campaign to condemn me intellectually ended up with pressure on individual departments to issue statements against me and culminated in a resolution by the faculty senate. With the exception of the statement of the Department of History, they all lacked substance—often little more than moral posturing and statements of metaphysical awe for the benefits of diversity. I responded at length to the History Department’s statement, parts of which are clearly libelous because they include malicious disregard for fact (the claim that I had not read archival documentary literature in doing the research for my chapter on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy). It is a measure of the power of the left that one would be foolish indeed to pursue such a case in the legal arena.

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. . . Not to mention, immersing himself in restoration projects. Kevin MacDonald's 1958 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight. Why don't they make them like that anymore?

You are a university professor and a very prolific writer. In the past you combined teaching, researching, and writing, with editorial work, at times having edited two journals simultaneously (in fact, you are doing it now again). Plus you are now involved in a political party. At 67, it seems you run on atomic batteries. Where do you find such tremendous energy? And how do you manage to keep on top of things with so much going on simultaneously?

It may seem trite but I think the key for being productive is to do a bit every day. And I like most of what I do, so that makes it fun. I still really enjoy the feeling of putting out something I think is good. And with blogging and shorter articles, it’s easier to get that feeling rather than waiting for weeks and months to see an academic article published.

What do you see yourself doing in the next 5 years?

Just what I’m doing now. Writing and editing. Thinking about how to make a breakthrough into the mainstream. If it happens, change will be very fast.

Finally, how would you like to be remembered in 100 years?

It would be nice to be remembered as someone who made a contribution to turning around the culture of the West from the disastrous trends of recent decades. But that will only happen if we win.

Thank you Professor MacDonald for generously donating your time.

Source: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news110220110000.html [25]