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Notes -
KMac is unusual even for far right academics in that he thinks the enlightenment was a good thing and (in the case of the Scottish Enlightenment obviously) Scotland’s great contribution to the world (this was the subject of some of his early work before he started writing only of Jews). He is to some extent the epitome of the ‘racist liberal’ epithet sometimes levied at the erstwhile alt right by neoreactionaries, although in recent years he’s become somewhat more trad, perhaps under the influence of writers he’s hired for TOO.
Since the enlightenment was a primarily gentile project (Spinoza, whose role is often overstated, aside), this puts him in a bind because the traditional tradcath argument (repurposed by Strauss and then later by Moldbug, along with Deneen and others) essentially says that there’s a pretty linear trajectory from the enlightenment to the present, and that while Jews embraced modernity for obvious reasons, they didn’t invent it as part of a ‘group evolutionary strategy’. So MacDonald really has to stick with this argument that It Was A Good Thing Actually, but the juice corrupted/twisted/manipulated/etc society in a way that results in all the things he doesn’t like about modernity.
In a way, MacDonald’s ideology has led him down this dead-end route to extreme antisemitism, it can’t accommodate any alternative explanations.
I’ve met Jewish reactionaries at NYU in the early 2010s, sure. Maybe not exactly with this guy’s ideas, idk.
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