If you're out of the loop on the not-so-thinly-veiled neo-Nazism of the National Policy Institute, you can see the recent heiling of Herr Drumpf (in the original German) here. At the same conference, Richard Spencer provides apologetics for "locker room talk" and Kevin MacDonald can't help butting in with some biotroofs to an al-Jazeera reporter who looks totally unprepared for an NPI conference.

MacDonald is not scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of Flintstones-level evo psych, he is the gunk on the underside. In fact, even Steven Pinker hates him. A professor of psychology at CSU Long Beach, he is best known for his Culture of Critique series, a five-book series made of anti-Semitism. More recently, he went full neo-Nazi by joining the American Third Position Party.

In this instance, however, MacDonald is drawing his biotroofs from mainstream/Santa Barbara school literature. That women are naturally attracted to wealth and power is a central tenet of David Buss' Sexual Strategies Theory (SST) (Buss and Schmitt 1993). One of the most heavily cited is Buss' 1989 study on human mate preferences. Despite its flaws, this study is far more measured than the claims Buss has made in the popular media. In fact, a number of other factors rank above wealth. The study itself seems to be interpretable in just about any way you want if you squint hard enough. Eagly and Wood 1999 view the results as a result of structural inequality and Buller (2005) claims it is evidence of homogamy. Harris 2003 views the claims of SST about sexual jealousy are artifacts of forced-choice questionnaires.

Survey methodology is actually the least of the problems here. The assumptions of SST don't comport with biology or anthropology. The cheap sperm/expensive egg hypothesis (referencing Bateman's fruit fly experiments) is frequently raised as in Buss 1989 and much other SST literature, but it is never questioned whether it actually applies to humans. Brown et al 2009 argue that this is not the case across the entire species.

On the foundations of bad biology, SST layers on bad anthropology. Cheap sperm/expensive eggs are said to underlie the sexual division of labor, which is a rehash of Man the Hunter. I know John Tooby was a student of Irven DeVore (co-editor of the Man the Hunter volume with Richard B. Lee) and Buss had some kind of communications with DeVore as well, so this isn't too surprising. Needless to say, this idea is archaic within anthropology. Or to paraphrase MacDonald, "it's textbook anthropology 101." It is an oversimplification due to the fact that the division of labor is often not hard and fast in hunter-gatherer societies and is heavily dependent on local factors such as ecology, technology, etc. See Panter-Brick 2002 for an overview. The main trend is that men tend to hunt big game -- the conflation that is frequently made is between big and small game. Women frequently hunt small game. There are also some exceptions to the big game rule, such as the Agta (Goodman et al 1985).

SST also requires a misreading of HG politics by assuming that wealth, or often the more vague label of "resources," is privately owned and provisioned -- he who procures the calories rules the world. This is not necessarily the case as those who butcher and process food may hold control over it. Women may also engage in other labor that is required for subsistence or hunting itself such as lithic production (Gero 1991. Even Buss 1989 refers to this fact in order to handwave away the exception of the Zulu as noisy cultural variation. The second obvious problem in terms of political organization is that it takes some form of material or hereditary inequality as given, which is not true of all HG societies. People with political ambitions for power are viewed negatively in egalitarian societies with social leveling mechanisms (Boehm 1993). Additionally, power is not necessarily held at all times. Seasonality can affect political structure, where, for instance, there might be a stratified or hierarchical structure when different societies come together at certain seasonal points that revert to egalitarianism for the rest of the year, or vice versa (Wengrow and Graeber 2015).

Or, the tl;dr version: SST is biologically and anthropologically illiterate and MacDonald is talking out his ass -- which is unsurprising coming from a literal neo-Nazi.