I generally like Orange Coast and its freelancer, longtime Los Angeles Times OC correspondent David Haldane, but I about spit out my Maker's after reading his latest profile for the glossy rag on noted Long Beach State professor/white supremacist Kevin Macdonald, who has received infamy among neo-Nazis for work claiming that Jews are trying to undermine “Western” (aka gabacho) civilization. Not only did Haldane unnecessarily try to give it a personal spin–a Jew interviewing an anti-Semite! My uncle was racist against goys, so maybe Macdonald has a point–but it tried to portray MacDonald as a sad, persecuted man worthy of our pity when he's anything but. And it mischaracterized a couple of key points that would make it a bit less sympathetic to Orange Coast's hoity-toity readership.
]
For one, Haldane claims that the Ol' Pendejo Perfessor didn't really become loathed at Long Beach St. until a blistering 2007 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Actually, the credit for exposing MacDonald to the world goes to Weekly pal Tony Ortega, who wrote about MacDonald for the late New Times Los Angeles back in 2000; all the SPLC story did was up the heat on MacDonald for a national audience.
Haldane also characterizes MacDonald's political party, the American Third Position, as an “activist organization,” which is like calling the SS a block watch group. As the Weekly exposed way back in 2010, the American TP is little more than a Ponzi scheme whose former treasurer was a former felon. Haldane at least lets chair William Johnson blather about how the American TP “promote[s] white interests” and how they have “no official position on Jews,” but Haldane fails to cite him as the author of the Pace Amendment, an 1980s effort that sought to deny American citizenship to Jews and non-whites–then deport them.
Finally, Haldane tries to pass MacDonald off as a serious academic by noting he “edits two academic journals.” One of them, The Occidental Quarterly, is little more than a quack rag obsessed with anything and everything white supremacist, up to and including using bad Assassin's Creed-esque graphics in a blog post explaining its raison d'etre–not exactly Langson Library material. I'm not sure which is the other one, but I suspect it doesn't even qualify for the stacks of the Pollak Library, you know?
At the end, Haldane tries to normalize MacDonald as harmless, and puts the blame on all of us for being racist. He doesn't note the glee MacDonald has exhibited for his work over the years. Do neo-Nazis need a shoulder to cry on, too? Only if said shoulder is hurling toward the weenie.
Read Orange Coast's story here. And then spit out your Maker's or whatever you drink as a morning pick-me-up.
Email: ga*******@oc******.com. Twitter: @gustavoarellano.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
