Review of Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique
Reviewing the third edition of the Culture of Critique
I remember reading the first edition at around 2018 and getting half-convinced by it, though having my own criticisms. Along with it I have also read the other two parts of the series which are less known, namely: A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples and Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism.
The second book was always my favorite, as it confirmed many of my own assumptions about Jews and Judaism as a group strategy, while I liked the third book less because of its lesser reliance on quantitative data and its more narrative-like structure (though it is still better than the vast majority of sociological books on group conflict and analysis).
Nonetheless, in this article I will be reviewing it for the
who were kindly enough to provide me the material for the review.
The third edition differs from the previous ones in its emphasis on Jewish censorship practices following the 2023 Gaza genocide, which for obvious reasons did not exist in the previous editions and other minor corrections but the message remains the same.
The central thesis of the book is that Jewish evolutionary strategy explains much of the Jewish-coded cultural and structural movements designed to influence the wider society in ways that conform to specific Jewish interests. The movements are Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school (critical theory), Jews and immigration, Jews and Bolshevism, Neoconservatism and New York intellectuals and other Jewish movements such as Zionism and US-Israeli relations. As Kevin MacDonald proves in the text, these movements have created a strong cultural shift toward Jewish interests and cultural leftism, which he rightly regards as a conflict of interest.
That message is generally intuitively understood by people in our movement, however often times this intuitive understanding doesn’t rely on hard facts and logical assumptions combined with social identity theory or group conflict which can be applied to multiple occurrences like here:
Jewish competition had suppressed the formation of a native middle class in Eastern Europe. (This has also occurred throughout Southeast Asia, because of competition from the Overseas Chinese.) When Jews won the economic competition in early modern Poland, the result was that the great majority of Poles were reduced to the status of agricultural laborers supervised by Jewish estate managers in an economy in which trade, manufacturing, and artisanry were in large part controlled by Jews (PTSDA, Ch. 5). On the other hand, in most of Western Europe Jews had been expelled in the Middle Ages. As a result, when modernization occurred, it was accomplished with an indigenous middle class. If, as in Eastern Europe, Jews had won the economic competition in most of these professions, there would not have been a non-Jewish middle class in England. Whatever one imagines might have been the fortunes and character of England with predominantly Jewish artisans, merchants, and manufacturers, it seems reasonable to suppose that the Christian taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own future when they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of 116,346 pounds (worth over 85 million pounds as of 2017) in return for expelling two thousand Jews in 1290 (Mundill, 1998, pp. 249ff).
The rise of the Jews in the USSR came at the expense of the Germans as a middleman minority in Russia prior to the Revolution…
Although the replacement of Germans by Jews was well under way by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, a key consequence of the Revolution was furthering this replacement. The difference between the Jews and the Germans was that the Jews had a longstanding visceral antipathy, out of past historical grievances, both real and imagined, toward the people and culture they came to administer. Indeed, Russians on the nationalist right admired the Germans, at least up to World War I. For example, a statute of one nationalist organization, Michael the Archangel Russian People’s Union, expressed “particular trust in the German population of the Empire” (in Kellogg, 2005, p. 41), while its leader, Vladimir Purishkevich, accused the Jews of “irreconcilable hatred of Russia and everything Russian” (p. 37). Jews disliked the Christian religion of the vast majority of Russians because of the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and Christianity over the ages; Jews distrusted the peasants, who experienced a “fall from grace” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 140) with the intelligentsia after the numerous anti-Jewish pogroms, especially after 1880; and Jews blamed the Czar for not doing enough to keep the peasants in check and for imposing the various quotas on Jewish advancement that went into place, also beginning in the 1880s—quotas that slowed down but by no means halted Jewish overrepresentation in the universities and the professions. In this respect, the Germans were far more like the Overseas Chinese, in that they became an elite without having an aggressively hostile attitude toward the people and culture they ad ministered to and dominated economically. Thus when Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep sense of historic grievance. As a result, they became willing executioners of both the people and cultures they came to rule, including the Germans.
After the Revolution, not only were the Germans replaced, but also all establishment figures of the older order and their descendants were actively sup pressed. Jews have always shown a tendency to rise because of their natural abilities (e.g., high intelligence) and powerful ethnic networking, but here they also benefited from “antibourgeois” quotas in educational institutions and other forms of discrimination against the middle class and aristocratic ele ments of the old regime that would have provided more competition with Jews. In a letter intercepted by the secret police, the father of a student wrote that his son and their friends were about to be purged from the university because of their class origins: “[I]t’s clear that only the Jerusalem academics and the Communists, Party members generally, are going to stay” (Slezkine, 2004, p. 243).
It is especially sad that Westerners are completely unaware of the Jewish role as economic exploiters in Eastern Europe but remember the pogroms due to Jewish-generated knowledge that was passed into the Western public consciousness. People are aware of the commissars and the Jewish alliance with the communists, but for some reason they believe that the times of the Russian Empire were exclusively oppressive for Jews and not the other way around.
As one of the very few studies on this topic reports, pogroms in the Russian empire are not consistent with the scapegoat theory but are consistent with the economic interests. To quote directly from the study:
According to the 1897 census, 5.2 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire, out of whom 4.8 million resided in the Pale of Settlement. Jews were a minority constituting 11.3% of the total Pale population and dominated market intermediary professions. In particular, Jews constituted 84% of all traders of agricultural and non-agricultural goods, 92% of all grain traders, and 37% of all moneylenders. In addition, Jews were overrepresented in crafts (45% of all employed in this sector were Jews with tailor and cobbler being the two most popular Jewish occupations within this sector) and in transport (30% of people in transport services were Jews, mostly transporting people and small quantities of goods on horse-driven carts). These professions together absorbed 11% of total Pale’s employment. An agricultural worker (i.e. peasant) was the most popular occupation in the Pale. 70% of all economically active residents of the Pale were peasants. Only 0.6% of agricultural workers were Jews. Jews were present in every district—the second-tier administrative division of the Russian Empire, known as uezd—inside the Pale of Settlement.
Anyways, this is supposed to be a book review and so what I liked about the book is that it touches upon an often overlooked aspect of the Jewish Question which typically revolves around nepotism and high IQ. A particular Jewish personality which is that Jews [are prone to intense emotional experience of both positive and negative emotions which then make them especially aggressive and creative in achieving their group goals]. As Kevin MacDonald argues:
Among Jews there is a critical mass that is intensely committed to Jewish causes—a sort of 24/7, “pull out all the stops” commitment that produces in-stant, massive responses on Jewish issues. Jewish activism has a relentless, never-say-die quality. This intensity goes hand in hand with the “slippery slope” style of arguing: Jewish activism is an intense response because even the most trivial manifestation of anti-Jewish attitudes or behavior is seen as inevitably leading to mass murder of Jews if allowed to continue.
The five main traits that are characteristic of successful Jewish activism are ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, wealth and aggressiveness. The book does a great job at summarizing each of these aspects in various periods of Jewish history.
But most underrated is the unusually high psychological intensity, sometimes manifesting as an out-group aggression combined with an arrogant sense of moral superiority and messianic fervor can also be seen in the recent collective Jewish crashout over the Tucker Carlson x Nick Fuentes collaboration and attempt to control the Christian American population which is turning against them.
If you are thinking intensely about a certain goal or your identity, you are prone to do something in the advancement of said goal or identity. I believe that this is generally a good trait and is the opposite of the White individualistic liberals with no sense of identity.
Criticism of the book:
The book is often repetitive and sometimes unnecessarily long; the sections concerning public figures are very large and deserve to be written separately, as they employ a qualitative methodology, whereas the rest of the book employs a different one. Nathan Cofnas famously critiqued this approach for cherry picking and I can’t help myself but partially agree with him. A quantitative overview of Jewish activism as a whole would be better than an overview of the main force of Jewish activism at a particular time, though you can certainly make the case that it represents a fundamental aspect of Jewish evolutionary strategy, whereas Jewish activism at the periphery may not and is therefore worthy of being ignored.
Another aspect that I believe is missing from the book is the role of Jews in the media (both legacy and old media). So far we have Leather Apron Club’s count of Jewish guests on various popular podcasts, although his analysis is missing a qualitative component which is very much present in Kevin MacDonald’s analysis. The behavior and influence of Jewish public intellectuals, podcasters and political commentators like Ben Shapiro is a new venue of expressing Jewish evolutionary strategy which was less pronounced before.
There is also a Jewish guru phenomenon present throughout the book, such as with Trotsky, Boas, and Freud, which I don’t think applies today, given that Jewish ethnonarcissistic figures who are often regarded as leaders of the Jewish community such as Ben Shapiro, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ronald Lauder, and Jonathan Greenblatt don’t necessarily enjoy cult-like support from the Jewish community and are often controversial (less so for Ronald Lauder and Jonathan Greenblatt).
This is certainly an interesting development, although among the followers of Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, and others, they do enjoy cult-like support, but the support doesn’t come from the Jewish community at large; rather, it comes from a collection of committed followers, Jewish money, or those who may be viewed as pursuing a form of Jewish group strategy. A more typical example of Jewish group interests today manifests in the “good liberal Jews,” who pretend not to notice what is done in their name, downplay the significance of figures like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and instead shift the blame to Hamas or outright deny that the absolute majority of Jews either engage in or support war crimes and genocide.
Christian American Population Turning Against Them
The final message of the book is very much relevant to today’s political dynamics, in which Jewish activism is increasingly being seen as evil not just by the left but also by the right, and such a transformation occurred quickly as a result of advancements in communication technology, which created a form of competitive information market that did not previously exist with cable media.
If the 2024 election shows anything, it’s that the legacy mainstream media is distrusted more than ever and has been effectively replaced among wide swaths of voters, especially young voters, by alternative media, particularly podcasts and social media. Influential podcasters, such as Joe Rogan (a former liberal who supported Trump in 2024), have become increasingly conservative, and Tucker Carlson has pushed the boundaries of conservative thinking, such as with his interviews with historian/blogger Darryl Cooper questioning aspects of the sacrosanct World War II narrative (MacDonald, 2024a) and with Curt Mills touching on neoconservatism—essentially a Jewish intellectual and political movement (Ch. 4)—and America’s disastrous wars in the Middle East (MacDonald, 2025). Another former liberal, Elon Musk, has become a prominent supporter of Trump in the election and was active in attempting to end the power of the Democrat-leaning federal bureaucracy.
Nick Fuentes, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, and Candace Owens are other pundits worth mentioning and have a larger audience than Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Mark Levin, Douglas Murray, and other members of the pro-Israel and pro-Establishment side of the GOP.
The book ends with:
What is certain is that the ancient dialectic between Judaism and the West will continue into the foreseeable future. It will be ironic that, whatever anti Semitic rhetoric may be adopted by the leaders of these defensive movements, they will be constrained to emulate key elements of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Such strategic mimicry will, once again, lead to a “Judaization” of Western societies not only in the sense that their social organization will become more group-oriented but also in the sense that they will be more aware of themselves as a positively evaluated ingroup and more aware of other human groups as competing, negatively evaluated outgroups. In this sense, whether the decline of the European peoples continues unabated or is arrested, it will constitute yet another profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on the development of Western societies.