Talk:Kevin MacDonald (evolutionary psychologist)

VDare

Trying to understand the objection to calling a spade a spade and saying VDare is no longer in operation. There is no doubt about this - the VDare website says that, and no new entries have been made on the site since 2024. The founder has talked about how VDare has been "murdered" by the government. Unobjectionably reliable secondary sources, like Newsweek, can be cite for the proposition. The suspension is by definition indefinite, since no date to reopen has been set or discussed. The secondary sources do not mention MacDonald, but that is not needed to establish the shut down. Do we really need a source to establish MacDonald is no longer contributing to a website after it has closed down? Bob Gollum (talk) 10:20, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

The VDare website still exists, and MacDonald's contributions are still there. It has not closed down yet, and the website uses its purported 'suspension' as an excuse to beg for donations for their legal fees. None of this has any direct connection to MacDonald unless reliable sources make that connection. Mentioning this here on this article is both premature and also undue. Wait until either sources explain the connection to MacDonald or until this is provably more than just a PR stunt.

Further, do not edit war. Grayfell (talk) 18:21, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Problem is, the article as it was before suggested that MacDonald was still making ongoing contributions to the site. He isn't; any contributions he has made that are on the site are, for obvious reasons, pre-2024. The old posts are still up, but no new ones have been added since the shut-down in 2024.

I wasn't trying to get into an edit war; each revision I made to the article was addressing your specific objections, adding references when you felt the existing ones were insufficient, changing the wording to phrases that you suggested. Bob Gollum (talk) 23:52, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Your stated intentions are mostly irrelevant. You repeatedly restored your preferred version without consensus, which is edit warring.

I have restored the status quo and adjusted the wording for brevity and to address this concern. If readers need more information about VDARE, they can read the Wikipedia article. If reliable sources report how VDARE's suspension is connected to MacDonald, we could summarize those sources as appropriate. If the website fully shuts down (which has not happened yet) but no sources report on it, Talk:VDARE would be the place to discuss it. For this article, a simple change in tense would be sufficient. Grayfell (talk) 22:10, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Categories

Wondering about the categories this article is labelled with. The article has nothing to do with conservatism; MacDonald is not a conservative. It has a lot to do with antisemitism, but little to do iwth Jewish history. Bob Gollum (talk) 10:25, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I see that the categories I mentioned are only on this talk page, and not on the article page itself. The categories here should be amended accordingly. Bob Gollum (talk) 04:30, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

The categories on this talk page have been added via Wikiprojects. The 'conservatism' categories here are used to organize articles within Wikipedia:WikiProject Conservatism, not for general search purposes. Broadly speaking, the alt-right overlaps with paleoconservatism, and MacDonald has been directly involved with the paleoconservative American Freedom Party, so this categorization and inclusion in this project seems completely reasonable. Grayfell (talk) 22:27, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

"Broadly speaking, the alt-right overlaps with paleoconservatism"!!!!

Not sure about that - nobody calls themselves paleoconservative, so it is a vague category, but according to standard descriptions it includes christian values and regional values, and American nationalism. The alt-right, to the extet it even exists anymore, did not stand for any of those things and is a far more radical kind of movement.

Hard to know what MacDonald stands for - he is defined more by what he hates than by what he believes in. Bob Gollum (talk) 00:44, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

The connections between the alt-right and paleoconservatism are explained and sourced at the alt-right article, but I mentioned that entirely for your convenience. Whether or not MacDonald 'calls himself' paleoconservative is mostly irrelevant to this discussion, since Wikipedia isn't a platform for public relations.

These categories are applied by the project template, not through specific stand-alone edits. If you wish to discuss whether or not this article falls under Wikipedia:WikiProject_Conservatism, do so directly. I suggest the project's talk page for that. If you wish to discuss the categorization of the article, I suggest starting a new discussion. Grayfell (talk) 01:53, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Various Issues

A general issue with this article is that it acts as an extension of The Culture of Critique series, even duplicating entire passages from that article. It makes one question why there are two articles when so much of the content is identical. The lead especially is quite long and spends a lot of time on The Culture of Critique specifically and problematically relies on primary sources and original research:

"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."

This rather interpretive passage directly cites the primary sources of Nathan Cofnas' (a race realist, repudiated elsewhere on this site) work and Daniel Kriegman's, which constitutes WP:OR. Since we're citing Cofnas directly, one could reasonably contend that it would be appropriate to cite MacDonald directly (which ironically occurs later in this article), which I'm sure some prominent editors here would take issue with.

The Works on ethnicity section also only references his work on Judaism, and does not mentions his works on, for example, ancient Sparta or European individualism. Either the section title should be changed, or his other works on ethnicity should be mentioned. Further, the following passage on Judaism cites MacDonald's website directly, which does not meet the standard of a reliable secondary source:

He labels Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy", one that he claims enhances the ability of Jews to outcompete non-Jews for resources. Using the term "Jewish ethnocentrism", he argues that Judaism fosters in Jews a series of marked genetic traits, including above-average verbal intelligence and a strong tendency toward collectivist behavior, as manifested in a series of influential intellectual movements. MacDonald acknowledges that not all Jews in all circumstances display the traits he identifies. Separation and Its Discontents contains a chapter entitled "National Socialism as an Anti-Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy".

Finally, the Academic Response section is severely, even comically bloated, not only literally copying text from the The Culture of Critique series article, but also proportionally dominating the article.

Is this article meant to describe MacDonald and his reputation? Or that of The Culture of Critique? If the former, then most of the The Culture of Critique material should be confined to that article. If the latter, well we already have an article devoted to that. If both, then it makes no sense to have two articles. ~2026-35959-42 (talk) 21:48, 19 June 2026 (UTC)