Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen has grown closer to white nationalist leaders and thinkers in recent months. Image by Twitter

By Sam Kestenbaum December 27, 2017

Paul Nehlen, the Republican politician seeking to unseat Speaker of the House Paul Ryan from Congress in 2018, has been increasingly flirting with the online “alt-right” by posting memes and appearing on white nationalist podcasts. On Tuesday night, he proudly shared one of the books currently on his shelf: a title by an author known as the “neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic.”

“The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements” is the best known book by Kevin MacDonald, a retired professor of psychology widely praised in white nationalist circles for his writing about Jews and perceived Jewish power.

MacDonald, the editor of the “white identity” website The Occidental Observer, advances boilerplate white nationalist claims about Jews, seeing them as controlling and manipulating American institutions for their own ends. His work draws on his psychology background, and he casts Jewish behavior as a type of self-preservation “group evolutionary strategy.”

MacDonald is part of the academic-styled sphere of the broader white nationalist movement and has collaborated with “alt-right” figureheads like Richard Spencer.

To read more about Paul Nehlen, go here and here.

Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

$36 $500

$120 $180 Other amount