David Duke Boasts Academic Achievements, His Claims Similar to Anti-Semitic Psychology Professor Kevin MacDonald

Former Klansman David Duke has made much of his academic credentials of late. On his website, he repeatedly refers to himself as "Dr." David Duke, a reference to the supposed Ph.D. he "earned" in 2005 at an anti-Semitic Ukrainian institution described as a "diploma mill" by the State Department. Around the white supremacist world, excited accolades to Duke's scholarship abound.

As the closest thing the radical right has to an intellectual today, Duke claims to uphold the high standards of academia. His website brims with criticisms of plagiarism — although they come, naturally, in the form of repeated attacks on civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who is characterized as a "world-class plagiarist." Plagiarism, Duke's site adds piously, is "theft," a rip-off that the site suggests amounts to "a serious felony."

Which brings us to Duke's last book.

When Duke published his self-proclaimed "world-wide Bestseller" Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question in 2002, he promised that the book's "amazing documentary evidence" would challenge "your most cherished beliefs" about who is threatening the existence of "European-Americans." Duke's thesis was simple: Jews oppose all ethnic solidarity other than their own and "they consistently oppose all organizations seeking to preserve the interests and heritage of Europeans." In a nutshell, Jews undermine the white race.

In an attempt to present the book as the product of sober academic research instead of rank anti-Semitism, Duke tells readers on the book's promotional Web page that the tome derives its "real power" from referencing "major sources." Duke encourages his readers to go to the materials he cites "and check them out for yourself."

Kevin MacDonald Photo by David Sprague

Good advice. But a careful consideration of Duke's sources finds something interesting. It turns out that many of Duke's citations of academic works are exactly the same, down to the placement of brackets, dates and periods, as those that appear in the works of Kevin MacDonald, an anti-Semitic professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), who has long written dire tomes about how Jews threaten Western civilization.

Even Duke's basic thesis — that Jews work as an unthinking cabal to undermine white power — is a restatement of MacDonald's ideas. MacDonald's trilogy on "the Jews" — A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1994), The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998) and Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998) — made that argument more than a decade ago. Using more scientific language than Duke while peddling the same anti-Semitism, MacDonald maintains that Jews, who have typically been in the minority in countries around the world, are driven by an evolutionary strategy that makes them push for liberal policies, like immigration and diversity, with the intent of weakening the power of the majority that rules them. In other words, Jews work to undermine Christian, white societies in order to make them less threatening for themselves.

An analysis of Duke's citations finds a remarkable overlap between his book and MacDonald's trilogy. Duke cites around 200 academic works in Jewish Supremacism, of which 130 match sources cited by MacDonald. The footnotes reflect a similar overlap. In all, 232 of Duke's footnotes are exactly or nearly the same as references cited in MacDonald's works. More than 80% of the last 50 footnotes in Duke's book directly match citations from MacDonald's books, down to the specific reference volume and page numbers. In another instance, on just one page of Duke's book, there are five citations that all match verbatim citations found on four pages in MacDonald's Separation and Its Discontents. In that case, Duke's book, using MacDonald's sources, takes an argument MacDonald made in four pages and shortens it down to one.

The similarities go deeper, with whole sections of Duke's book mimicking parts of MacDonald's tomes. For example, Duke's final chapter is titled "Jewish Evolutionary Strategy," which is very similar to the chapter in A People That Shall Dwell Alone labeled "Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy." Duke also has a chapter on U.S. immigration policy called, "The Jewish Led Invasion." In MacDonald's The Culture of Critique, there is a similar chapter titled "Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy."

The latest book by former Klan leader David Duke overlaps remarkably with earlier books written by academic and fellow anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald.

It's not that surprising, given their anti-Semitic views, that both MacDonald and Duke would reference Henry Ford's early 1920s anti-Semitic classic, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, which is extremely popular in neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic circles. But many of the academic works that show up in Duke's book seem to be sources that only a highly trained specialist in digging for dirt on the Jews — like Kevin MacDonald — would know about. Take for example Duke's footnote 628, a citation that originally appeared in A People That Shall Dwell Alone. It references a 1986 article on "Affinities Between Contemporary And Skeletal Jewish and Non-Jewish Groups Based on Tooth Morphology." The article reports on the results of an examination of skeletal remains based on "19 dental morphological variables" that uses "smallest space analysis and cluster analysis." Who would have thought Duke was up on dental archaeology?

Or consider Duke's citation of two hard-to-find, centuries-old Spanish histories, Historia Social, Política y Religiosa de los Judíos de España y Portugal (1875-76) and Historia de España y Su Influencia en la Historia Universal (1918-1936), both of which are cited by MacDonald in Separation and Its Discontents. Duke uses these sources to argue that Jews supported the Muslim invasion of Spain during the Inquisition. MacDonald makes the same argument, using the same sources, in Separation and Its Discontents.

It's unclear if MacDonald — who, according to Duke's longtime assistant Jamie Kelso, had a "business meeting" with Duke in 2006 — assisted Duke with Jewish Supremacism or if Duke simply lifted the citations on his own. E-mail requests for comment from both men went unanswered. Whatever the circumstances, it seems rather ungrateful on Duke's part that he only cites MacDonald directly three times. And Duke doesn't even get the title of one of MacDonald's books right, calling his 1994 volume A People That Shall Dwell Apart instead of A People That Shall Dwell Alone.

Whatever the circumstances, MacDonald might be perfectly content to have his theories mashed into a CliffsNotes version by Duke. Over the course of the last few years, MacDonald has become increasingly more radical, earning him the condemnation of many of his peers, as several departments at CSULB, including his own, have published statements disavowing MacDonald's work and distancing themselves from him. MacDonald now largely confines himself to publishing his work in white supremacist journals such as The Occidental Quarterly and he increasingly advocates for white rights. He was even awarded $10,000 in 2004 by The Occidental Quarterly for his work on the Jews.

Duke, meanwhile, continues to boast of his "Ph.D" — his website, for instance, is now headlined, "The Official Website of Representative David Duke, PhD," although he hasn't been a Louisiana state representative for 17 years. As to the Ph.D., well, what Duke actually got at the Ukraine's Interregional Academy of Personnel Management is a "Kandidat Nauk" degree, which ranks below a full doctorate. It was awarded to Duke for a thesis entitled, "Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism" and was the second degree given Duke by the university, which had earlier handed the former Klan boss an honorary degree.