[16][17] Of his siblings, his older brother, Juan Ramón Duchesne Winter, has become a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Pittsburgh with a special interest in indigenous cultures.
[30][31][32][33][34][35] Duchesne challenges historians, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Roy Bin Wong, whose work posits Chinese economic and intellectual pre-eminence prior to 1800, and maintains that the culture of the West has always been "in a state of variance from the world" at least since classical antiquity, characterized by successive revolutions and continuous creativity in all fields of human endeavor.
[31][34][35][36] He traces the West's restlessness and creative spirit to what he considers to be the unique aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans, characterized by an ethos of heroic individualism, relatively weak kinship ties, war bands bound together by voluntary oaths of loyalty and fraternity, skilled horse-riding and the use of wheeled vehicles such as chariots.
Martin Hewson, politics and international studies professor at the University of Regina, points to The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as the leading book in what he describes as a trend toward "post-multicultural history".
"[39] Thomas D. Hall, although critical of the book in many respects and finding that it "gives a sense of pontificating from on high", concludes that "despite my stylistic critiques [it] shows a very wide range of scholarship and many deft syntheses.
[44] A review by Geetanjali Srikantan, a historian of India, is more critical than Elvin's, criticising his reliance on a non-representative set of secondary sources and pointing out that "non-Western theorists" are not analyzed in the text.
"[46] Kevin McDonald, an evolutionary psychologist and white supremacist known for his antisemitic conspiracy theories,[47][48][49] wrote a 22 page review in which he praised the book as "a brilliant work written by an exceptionally wide-ranging scholar and thinker.
[51] Gerald Russello, writing in The Dorchester Review, praised "Duchesne's marshalling of enormous amounts of data and his obviously wide reading...", asserting that "His thesis about the Indo-Europeans and the differences he perceives between the West and other cultures is based on solid historical and archeological research".
[52] In a review in the journal The European Legacy, right-wing academic Grant Havers wrote that Duchesne "brings to his study an erudition that is matched only by Marx, Spengler, and Voegelin.
"[54][55][56][57] Duchesne also criticizes some conservatives for advancing the idea that Western political identity is based on universal liberal democratic values that are true for all human beings.
[66] Duchesne claims, in his book Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017),[67] to support white identity politics, within the constitutional framework of Canadian multiculturalism.
"[77] In a May 26, 2014 blogpost, Duchesne criticized a motion of the Vancouver council to investigate discriminatory policies imposed on Chinese immigrants in the city before 1947[78] as an exercise in manipulating "white guilt",[79] claiming they have "the goal of taking Canada away from the Europeans and transforming the nation into a multicultural and multiracial society.
"[83] In a follow-up post, Duchesne responded by saying about Chinese Canadians: “We are thus talking about a very powerful demographic group that also happens to be very wealthy with deep ingrained connections to Communist China.
This group has been allowed to alter radically the formerly elegant, serene, community-oriented, British city of Vancouver, turning it into a loud, congested Asian city (still attractive only because of the architectural and institutional legacy of past white generations).”[84] His remarks prompted an op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail which stated that Professor Duchesne "glorifies scholarship and writing that fuels xenophobia and provides fodder for white supremacy.
[94][95] The group was the Montreal branch of the Daily Stormer Book Club, started by neo-Nazi Gabriel Sohier Chaput as part of his efforts to organize a network of white supremacists.
[96][97][98] Chaput was a frequent contributor to the far-right website The Daily Stormer under the pseudonym "Charles Zeiger," writing more than 800 articles for the site in the years 2016 and 2017, one of which, published in 2017, led to his criminal conviction in 2023 for the crime of wilful promotion of hatred.
The Faculty Association chose not to object to the holding of the event, responding instead by using it as an occasion to fundraise for university groups devoted to Indigenous, racialized, and international students.
[110][111] While visiting Vancouver to present the lecture, Duchesne courted controversy and publicity, walking around the university campus together with a camerawoman and challenging random passers-by to debate him on immigration, gay rights and the merits of a white ethnostate.
Some of the suspect content of the emails, falsely attributed to the two executive officers, was plagiarized from actual posts made by Ricardo Duchesne on his Council of European Canadians website.
[113][114] On October 9, 2019, Ricardo Duchesne and Mark Hecht spoke on the UBC-Vancouver campus at an event hosted by a group called UBC Students for Freedom of Expression.
The event, titled "Academic Freedom to Discuss the Impact of Immigrant Diversity", was met by dozens of protesters claiming that the university should not give a platform to far right hate speech.
[115] In May 2019, The University of New Brunswick announced that it would review further complaints related to Duchesne's public comments and views on race after it was reported that he had written blog posts alleging that immigration was part of a conspiracy to advance white genocide.
[5][123] Since then, he has continued his research and writing as an independent scholar, publishing articles on his Council of Euro-Canadians blog and in Kevin McDonald's white nationalist journal, The Occidental Quarterly.