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Historian Richard Weikart weighs in on Darwinian anti-Semitism in Poland

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Dr. Richard Weikart

It hit our radar last week but we couldn’t offer a lot of background; we could only say that the incident in Poland didn’t sound like fake news.

According to Weikart (right), unfortunately, it is not fake news. White nationalists use Darwinism and evolutionary psychology to promote their perspective. He offers some background:

Indeed the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, an emeritus professor at California State University, Long Beach, has published a trilogy of scholarly books that purportedly explains the behavior of Jews and anti-Semites as evolutionary strategies in the Darwinian struggle for existence. MacDonald is a member of the white nationalist or alt-right movement, and he is widely cited by other white nationalists. Darwinian racism and evolutionary psychology are both de rigueur among white nationalists today.

MacDonald is so committed to Darwinian explanations for human behavior, in fact, that he has popularized (at least among fellow white nationalists) the claim that opposition to Darwinism is a Jewish plot to subvert the white race. When the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed came out over a decade ago, MacDonald explained that Ben Stein participated in order to further the interests of the Jews.

Richard Weikart, “Darwinism, Jews, and White Nationalists” at Evolution News and Science Today

Weikart is working on a book on the Darwinian racism of white nationalists. We’ll stay posted.

Kevin MacDonald? See also: Evolutionary Psychology: A Promising New Strategy For Anti-Semites?

and

Richard Weikart On The Anti-Semitic Burst In Evolutionary Psychology

See also: A Polish MP says Darwinian natural selection accounts for anti-Semitic pogroms But then many have argued that there is hardly anything natural selection can’t do. One would be glad to hear that this is fake news but the history of popular cultural Darwinism means that it could well be genuine. Remember eugenics. Meantime, Korwin-Mikke has said other things consistent with this view.

Comments
Only evidence can do that, seversky. That means your innuendo is meaningless until you can make a case against him that no one can refute. And you can't do that.ET
March 8, 2020
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It seems probable that a scholar like Weikart has at least a passing familiarity with argumentum ad consequentiam so do we assume that his zeal for anti-Darwinian advocacy has overridden his integrity as an historian?Seversky
March 8, 2020
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